Image Text Ithaca – förlag

A loving and powerful photobook following the lineage of one Black family, interrogating the semiotics of family portraiture

This profoundly moving and visually ravishing photobook, the first major monograph by American photographer Nydia Blas (born 1981), is an exploration of one Ithaca-based Black family and its community across many generations. The book is also a formally rigorous examination of the taxonomy and syntax of family portraiture.Blas’ contemporary works are integrated with selections from her historical family albums in order to tell an extended intergenerational story, and to bring forward the evolving and recurring nature of the portrait photograph throughout the medium’s history. Deploying doubling, repetition and more subtle echoing and mirroring, Love, You Came from Greatness builds a powerful line of feeling and thought across generations and photographic tropes and styles. It features an illustrated discussion among Blas, curator Kate Addleman-Frankel and Cornell art historian Cheryl Finley. The volume concludes with the republication of bell hooks’ seminal 1995 essay "In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life," a deeply personal text that expands on crucial themes of family, photography, and Black identity and community.

Foretelling a cataclysmic global pandemic and economic and climate collapse, Shelley's dystopian vision of the 21st century is re-envisioned by contemporary artists and writers

Conceived and edited by Meg Onli, the Nancy and Fred Poses Curator at the Whitney Museum of Art, The Last Man is a radical reissue of Mary Shelley's apocalyptic 1826 novel on the eve of its 200th anniversary. A dystopian tale of emotional, social, political and planetary devastation set in the 21st century, Shelley's text is reframed through the visual and textual commentary by artists and writers from the Image Text MFA program at Cornell University. Shelley's profoundly relevant reflections on the corruption and vanity of power, and our blindness to the terrible transience of human desire and ambition, are here amplified, annotated and translated into fragments of our troubled present by the artists' contemporary interventions.Artists include: Maddy Bremner, Nelis Franken, Catherine Gans, Danielle Garcia Tubo, Maxwell Harvey-Sampson, Sara Minsky, Marié Nobematsu-Le Gassic, Monica Regan, David Richards, Crystal Lamar, Genevieve Sachs, Yonatan Schechner, Kamaria Shepherd, Christopher Stiegler.