Britt Salvesen – författare

How film emerged in 19th-century Paris amid an array of social, political, artistic and technological innovations—with works by the Lumiere brothers, Mélies, Chéret and morePublished with Los Angeles County Museum of Art.City of Cinema traces film’s evolution from an obscure entertainment to the most powerful art form of the 20th century. Placing cinema in the context of 19th-century Parisian visual culture, this book brings together posters, paintings, studio and documentary photography, and film stills that evoke Paris as a site of consumption, demonstrate early cinema’s relationship with technology and the fine arts, and highlight local and global spaces of film production. It also examines the aspects of 19th-century visual culture that gave rise to cinema as a quintessentially modern medium with an eager audience. Aligning with French beliefs that the nation’s culture would be democratized through consumption, cinema reinforced a set of assumptions about French cultural and political authority and disseminated these ideas to the rest of the world.Presented here are images of and from the street by Jean Béraud, Charles Marville, Jules Chéret and Auguste and Louis Lumière; the technological experimentation of Loïe Fuller, Émile Reynaud and Georges Méliès; and the plein-air observations of Camille Pissarro and the staged artifice of Jean-Leon Gerome—all of which can be considered alongside the prototype film studios of Georges Méliès, Gaumont and Pathé.At the dawn of the 20th century, cinema is as much, if not more, a way of appropriating the world. Through arresting images and incisive texts, this book examines the origins of cinema and its position as a global medium.

An essential primer on the history of Photoshop and other tools of digital image manipulation, from the 1970s through to the current dayPublished with Los Angeles County Museum of Art.This timely volume, Digital Witness, examines the impact of Photoshop and other tools of digital manipulation, tracing simultaneous developments in photography, graphic design and visual effects over roughly five decades.Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, advances in computer science and engineering made it possible to design, build and run raster graphics programs, while developments in graphical user interfaces allowed artists and designers to directly create and edit images. At the same time, these nascent technologies led to concerns about authorship, automation and the viability of the businesses that supported various creative industries. During the 1990s, following the release of Photoshop, image-editing software rose to widespread use in multiple fields. As digitally altered imagery has permeated popular culture, aesthetic and ethical debates have played out in mass media, politics, advertising and even the judicial system.Examining the relationship between software development and artistic practice, Digital Witness explores how artists and engineers responded to each others’ innovations. Each new version of Photoshop allowed for increasingly sophisticated edits, from tracing intricate paths to layers to editable type. Some artists found creative potential in these advances, taking analog art forms such as collage to digitally enabled extremes. Others resisted the growing dependence on mainstream commercial software, developing open-source alternatives.Published in conjunction with the landmark PST ART exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, this substantial, image-packed volume includes Q&As with noted visual artists, filmmakers and designers such as Copper Frances Giloth, Raqi Syed and April Greiman.

A long-overdue monograph dedicated to Cowin’s genre-bending photographic narratives from the past half centuryPublished with Los Angeles County Museum of Art.This is the first monograph on the Los Angeles–based artist Eileen Cowin (born 1947). Known for her photography, video and mixed-media installations, Cowin has explored romance and rivalry, the personal and the political, and the monotony and mystery of daily life, for more than 50 years. Often blurring the distinctions between nonfiction and fiction, memory and experience, Cowin draws on the language of mass media and art history to shape her photographic narratives. She is associated with the experimental ethos of Southern California photo-based art, continuously challenging the boundaries of various mediums of expression by infusing photographic images with elements from cinema, literature, poetry and painting. This volume surveys the artist’s work with experimental photographic processes, Polaroids, inkjet prints and videos across a half century and features scholarly essays by curators as well as a special text contribution from novelist Louise Erdrich.