One of the most important and influential artists working with photography during the twentieth century, Aaron Siskind is being celebrated on the occasion of his 100th birthday with the publication of this elegant and comprehensive monograph, bringing together both well-known and never-before-published images. Siskind's prolific career spanned six decades and left its mark on both photography and painting.

In 1932, at age twenty-nine, Siskind began his career as a photographer and spent the next nine years under the auspices of the New York Photo League, working on social documentary photography. Around 1940, Siskind made a shift toward abstraction and entered an art world populated by painters and sculptors. During the course of the decade, Siskind began to explore a vision that depended on the shallow plane, and utilized delicate, minimal designs. "For the first time in my life subject matter, as such, had ceased to be of primary importance," Siskind explained. "Instead I found myself involved in the relationships of these objects, so much so that the pictures turned out to be deeply moving and personal experiences." The photograph had become the object.

Siskind's style of gesture and nuance, a new form of visual calligraphy, dominated his work for the next forty years, and ran parallel to the developments of his colleagues, the abstract expressionists. Siskind was not only a critical figure in modern photography, but also influenced the work of painters of that period, including Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline, and Robert Rauschenberg. Aaron Siskind 100, book and exhibition, honors the legacy of this legendary artist through six decades of an incredible photographic journey.

Aaron Siskind was born in New York City in 1903. His first major exhibition was in 1949 at the Charles Egan Gallery, New York, and he was the only photographer invited to participate in the famed Ninth Street Show of abstract expressionist painters, which included Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Jack Tworkov. His first book, Aaron Siskind Photographs, with an introduction by respected art critic Harold Rosenberg, was published with the help of Kline and other artists who provided financial support. Siskind's work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; the Cleveland Art Museum; The Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; the Canadian Center for Architecture, Quebec; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Rhode Island School of Design Art Museum, Providence; and the Fogg Art Museum, Boston, among others. Siskind died in Rhode Island in 1991.

Perhaps Nabokov prefigured Attracted to Light in his fictional four-volume set called "The Butterflies and Moths of the Russian Empire" in "Father's Butterflies": "the illustrations are still more perfect-the downy, velvety texture, the blurry translucence of various families of moths are rendered so delicately you would be afraid to run your finger across the paper?"

A sumptuously over-sized and exquisitely produced book, Attracted to Light showcases the Starns' extensive conceptual portrait series of the nocturnal moths' mysterious journey and the seeming gravitational force that light has over them, "captured" in photographs and filmic video footage.

"Light necessitates darkness, the shadow created by anything physical. But black is not only the lack of light-it is also the complete absorption of light. The void and reservoir of what we want, what we need; light is power, it is knowledge. When we look into the deep, velvety black eyes of moths we see both emptiness and (the absorption of) light. No one understands why moths are attracted to light. It's neither to mate nor to eat: many moths don't eat at all; some don't even have mouths. Like butterflies, moths are almost as light as air, but they're the poor stupid cousins. Choosing to live their lives at night, flying from nowhere towards the end of their lives-fragile dusty wings in tatters. A moth will bounce across a ceiling, orbit a lamp, fly into a flame or self-immolate like a Buddhist monk."
—Mike & Doug Starn

Mike & Doug Starn, identical twins born in 1961, achieved recognition as part of a group of artists in the 1980s making conceptual use of photography. Working collaboratively in the territory between photography, video, installation, sculpture, and painting, the Starns have had numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums internationally, with further retrospectives in Japan, Europe, and Australia. The recipients of numerous awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts Grants (1987 and 1995), The International Center for Photography Infinity Award for Fine Art Photography, and the Eastman Kodak Fine Art Photography Award, the Starns' works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; and The Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan; among many others. The Starns live and work in New York City.

"These 'guests' are spooks for our time, a New Age vision of the body as energy that is also a specter of nuclear fusion."
—Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle

Known for his silhouettes made using a pinhole camera, Christopher Bucklow's first monograph, Guest, collects for the first time many works from the "Guest" and "Tetrarchs" series. It also documents his earlier photographic work and video images made within the Canopic Fusion Reactor—a pinhole camera the size of a building, built in St. Ives in Cornwall, England, for the total eclipse of the sun, visible there in 1999.

"[Bucklow's photographs] create the impression of presences that seem both three-dimensional and immaterial-more like auras than physical objects. I am reminded of photographs taken a century ago featuring see-through presences that purported to be wraiths or spirits. Bucklow doesn't make any such claims: but the fact that the head is usually the lightest part of the image suggests that he is trying to portray something other than the body-intelligence, awareness, the spirit; call it what you will." —Sarah Kent, Time Out London

Christopher Bucklow was made Artist in Residence at The British Museum, London in 2003. Bucklow's work can be seen in various collections including the Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He is currently Artist in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust in the English Lake District. Bucklow lives in Frome, England.

Maria Morris Hambourg is Head of the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Hambourg has written on Eugène Atget and curated large-scale photography retrospectives including "A Waking Dream" in 1993. She lives in New York.

David Alan Mellor has written extensively on Francis Bacon and contemporary art. His book, The Sixties (Philip Wilson, 1997), accompanied a major survey exhibition at the Barbican gallery, London. Mellor is professor of the History of Art at the University of Sussex. He lives in Brighton, England.

Early in the morning, before breakfast and the beginning of the workday, photographer Jem Southam takes to the countryside of southwest England, visiting and revisiting the hills and dales of Bristol, Cornwall, Devon, and Somerset.

His lyrical photographs of these places, taken in series over long periods of time, chart the subtle evolution of this picturesque countryside as it has been transformed by both natural processes and human intervention. Ostensibly topographic and descriptive, each achieves a greater power thanks to an allegorical language that draws on our collective imagination.

Landscape Stories is the first comprehensive collection of Southam's work, drawn from three completed series: "The Pond at Upton Pyne." "The Red River," and "Rockfalls, Rivermouths, and Ponds," along with several smaller groups of pictures from series still in the making. Southam's brief narratives about each site—together with essays by Gerry Badger and Andy Grundberg, which examine Southam's work from European and American perspectives, respectively—create a rich context for viewing these remarkable, large-format photographs.

Jem Southam was born in Bristol in 1950. He currently resides with his family in Exeter and is the Head of Design: Photography Department at the Exeter School of Art and Design. Aside from The Shape of Time, Southam has produced other series of works, most recently, The Raft of Carrots (1992), small scale works which have been described as "a catalogue of chance encounters," and The Red River (1982-1987), which depicts the hard-scrapple legacy of mining in Cornwall and reflects on the mythology constructed around the perception of landscape.

Gerry Badger is a photographer, architect, and photographic critic. He has written extensively for the photographic press, and has curated a number of exhibitions, including The Photographer as Printmaker (1980) for the Arts Council of Great Britain, and Through the Looking Glass: Postwar British Photography (1989) for the Barbican Arts Centre, London. He has just completed (with Martin Parr) Volume One of The Photobook: A History, and written the text to a major monograph on the Berlin work of John Gossage, Berlin in the Time of the Wall.

Andy Grundberg is a writer, curator, teacher, and arts consultant whose work of the last 25 years has been focused on elucidating photography's crucial roles in art and visual culture. Grundberg's writings have appeared in the New York Times, as well as a number of other publications including ArtForum, Art in America, American Photo as well as Metropolitan Home and British Vogue. He has also written for a number of art books including Mike and Doug Starn, a survey of the artists' collaborative photo works and Alexey Brodovitch, a monograph on the graphic designer.

"There is frame; but frame does not exist."
—Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting

What do paintings signify in an age of photographs? How do photographs modify the visual language of paintings? Richard Misrach's Pictures of Paintings showcases photographs of select museum masterpieces by Thomas Eakins, Gericault, Anthony Van Dyck, Frederick Remington, William Adolphe Bourgereau, Martin Johnson Heade, Orazio Riminaldi, Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, among others. Working primarily in the art museums of the American West, along with The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, he photographed details of paintings not unlike those normally found in art historical texts, but to a different end. Misrach attempts to reexamine these details, not so much as a guide to the artist's style or technique, but as a means of understanding a lexicon of cultural values, among them race, gender, religion, and power. By collapsing the barriers between the traditional practice of documentation and the recent strategies of appropriation art, these photographs raise important questions regarding representation itself. Pictures of Paintings marks the first comprehensive compilation of this significant body of work.

"When I was working on this canto I thought it reflected a collision between two primary practices of photography: appropriation art like Sherrie Levine's and the documentary tradition like Walker Evans'...well, actually with a slight nod to Evans."
—Richard Misrach

Richard Misrach was born in Los Angeles in 1949 and received a BA in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. His photographs have been widely exhibited and published, and are in the collections of over fifty major institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, all in NY; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Los Angeles County of Museum of Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Musee d'Art Moderne, Paris. Selections from his series, "Desert Cantos," have appeared in several award-winning monographs, among them Desert Cantos (University of New Mexico Press, 1987), Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), Violent Legacies (Aperture, 1992), Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach (Bulfinch, 1996), The Sky Book (Arena Editions, 2000), and the recently published Richard Misrach: Golden Gate (Arena Editions, 2001). Misrach is the recipient of four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the PEN Literary Award, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, among others, and most recently the 2002 German Kulturpreis for lifetime achievement in photography.

Weston Naef has been Curator of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum since 1984, and the author of several books related to the exhibitions, among them Era of Exploration (Little Brown), The Collection of Alfred Stieglitz (Oxford University Press), and The Truthful Lens (with Lucien Goldschmidt, University of Virginia Press). He is also the general editor of the "In Focus" series of monographs.

Navjotika Kumar received her Masters Degree in Art History from the University of Notre Dame and Cornell University, where she is currently working on her doctorate with Hal Foster.

Wave Music by photographer Clifford Ross, opens with explosive images of stormy seas and skies—photographs taken on the edge of hurricanes. This series presents gorgeous, formalist slices of nature at her most tempestuous and romantic. As Wave Music progresses, however, the focus tightens with increasing obsession on the processes and materials of the photographic medium. The "Hurricane" series is followed by "Horizons," classically composed images of sky and quiet surf, and finally, by images of pure photographic grain. The "Grain" pictures are pure abstractions-tonal fields of grey. Each "Grain" image echoes the tones seen in the previous two series and addresses the very stuff of black-and-white photography itself. In Wave Music, Clifford Ross provides an incredible, heuristic journey, from the ecstatic formalism of ocean waves to the abstract sublime of pure light. Underlying each of the series and providing a unifying thread, are shifting elements of gesture, composition, and tone. Each of the images is exquisitely reproduced in tritone.

Clifford Ross was born in 1952. He began his career as a painter, graduating from Yale University with a BA in Art and Art History in 1974. His work has been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the International Center of Photography, among other institutions. His images are in numerous collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Ross is represented by the Sonnabend Gallery, New York.

In John Baldessari's new book, Yours in Food, the founding member of the conceptual art movement explores America at the table, savoring the nuances of breaking bread in carefully composed vignettes appropriated from video and film.

Reflections on food and eating specially commissioned from a smorgasbord of contemporary writers on culture and the arts, from novelist David Eggers to musician David Byrne, offer up the perfect accompaniment to Baldessari's work. Paired with his images, these humorous, insightful, and, in some cases, bizarre meditations investigate one of the most fundamental and telling of all human experiences.

A visual and intellectual feast, Yours in Food is sure to entertain and delight readers of fiction, art history, and cultural criticism and all lovers of food.

John Baldessari is one of the most influential American artists to emerge since the mid-1960s. His droll and ironic composite photocollages, installations, and videotapes have shed new light on the nature of perception, meaning, and interpretation.