Rebecca Bengal

In her collection Strange Hours, the writer Rebecca Bengal considers over a century of photography that has defined our relationship to the medium. Through generous and in-depth essays, profiles, reviews, and interviews, Bengal contemplates photography’s narrative power, from the radical intimacy of Nan Goldin’s New York demimonde to Justine Kurland’s pictures of rebel girls on the open road. Bengal brings us closer to several pioneering artists and the personal, political, and poetic stories that surround their photographs. She travels with Alec Soth in Minneapolis, searching for the houses where Prince once lived, and revisits Chauncey Hare’s 1979 protest against the Museum of Modern Art. She speaks with Dawoud Bey about his evocative early portraits in Brooklyn and explores Diana Markosian’s cinematic take on her family’s immigration to the US. Throughout Strange Hours, Bengal’s prose is attentive to the alchemy of experience, chance, and pioneering vision that has always pushed photography’s potential for unforgettable storytelling.

Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists

Strange Hours

Ian Penman

RaMell Ross

"Paul Graham curates a subtle thesis and revitalising manifesto for photography. The dynamic and diverse work gathered here advocates an unashamed, but not uncomplicated, dedication to the brilliant tangle of reality. Without being tempted by the artifice of the studio or the restrictive demands of conventional documentary, these artists tell open-ended stories that shift, warp, and branch, attuned unfailingly to life-as-it-is. Included are Gregory Halpern's Californian waking dream ZZYZX; Vanessa Winship's peripatetic exercise in empathy she dances on Jackson; the human assemblages of Curran Hatleberg's Lost Coast; Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa's rich and multitudinous One Wall a Web; the mortality-tinged America of Richard Choi's What Remains; RaMell Ross' visionary documentary work South County; the collaborative project Index G by Emanuele Bruti & Piergiorgio Casotti; and Kristine Potter's disorientating exploration of the American landscape and masculinity in Manifest. All these works are brought together in harmony and enlightening dissonance, as Graham teases out a new photographic form"--Publisher's description.

Rebecca Bengal

Books

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