Overview

Since the late 1960s, Peter Downsbrough (b. 1940) has been an important figure in contemporary art, associated with such major international art movements as minimal art, conceptual art, and visual poetry. His artistic work embraces an equally wide range of media: sculpture, architecture, books, film, and photography. This book provides, for the first time, a profound insight into Downsbrough's diverse and complex use of photography within his artistic work over the last 40 years. A substantial essay by Alexander Streitberger discusses the artist's photographic work-which includes single prints, series, postcards, collages, and books-within its aesthetic and historical context. Streitberger relates Downsbrough's work to fundamental issues of photographic practice and discourse such as the photograph as document, the representation of urban space, space-time relations, collage as an aesthetic and political means of expression, the relationship between still and moving image, and the context of presentation.The rich image material-some of which has never been published before-is arranged by the artist himself in order to create a fertile exchange between the topics of the text and his own intervention. Concluding with an exclusive interview with the artist, this book offers a genuine dialogue between artistic practice and theoretical reflection.

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9789058678720

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Reviews

<p> Presenting many unpublished photographs, Shifting Places gives occasion to consider this especially important category of the Peter Downsbrough's work. Some of the most beautiful images convey a sense of uncanny formalization, whereby the obviously deliberate framing of some particular element, such as the central zip of a center pole of a sunlit New York subway car (typically inferable as a row of several) allows, in a 1978 image, for seemingly fortuitous alignments of shadows, and compensations, more than contrived compositional balance, in the different distributions of elements, left and right. I love the resultant sense of unforced order, and so would Kant! -Joseph Masheck, Brooklyn Rail (February 2012)

Presenting many unpublished photographs, Shifting Places gives occasion to consider this especially important category of the Peter Downsbrough's work. Some of the most beautiful images convey a sense of uncanny formalization, whereby the obviously deliberate framing of some particular element, such as the central zip of a center pole of a sunlit New York subway car (typically inferable as a row of several) allows, in a 1978 image, for seemingly fortuitous alignments of shadows, and compensations, more than contrived compositional balance, in the different distributions of elements, left and right. I love the resultant sense of unforced order, and so would Kant! Joseph Masheck, Brooklyn Rail (February 2012)

<p> Presenting many unpublished photographs, Shifting Places gives occasion to consider this especially important category of the Peter Downsbrough's work. Some of the most beautiful images convey a sense of uncanny formalization, whereby the obviously deliberate framing of some particular element, such as the central zip of a center pole of a sunlit New York subway car (typically inferable as a row of several) allows, in a 1978 image, for seemingly fortuitous alignments of shadows, and compensations, more than contrived compositional balance, in the different distributions of elements, left and right. I love the resultant sense of unforced order, and so would Kant! Joseph Masheck, Brooklyn Rail (February 2012)

Author Information

Alexander Streitberger is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the Universite Catholique de Louvain (UCL) and director of the Lieven Gevaert Centre for Photography.

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