Alex Yudzon: A Room for the Night

I think of “social geography” as a term to describe my photographic work and methodology…The photographs that I produce question traditional and clichéd notions of landscape, our place within it, and the collective roles and responsibilities in how and why we shape it the way we do.

— Victoria Sambunaris

Her first book in over ten years, Victoria Sambunaris: Transformation of a Landscape shares the nuance and majesty of the artist’s practice in a large-scale book format. Each year, Sambunaris structures her life around a photographic journey traversing the American landscape. Equipped with a 5×7-inch field camera, film, a video camera, and research material, she crosses the country alone by car for several months. Her large-scale photographs capture the continuing transformation of the American landscape with specific attention given to expanding political, technological, and industrial interventions.

Part of her ongoing, twenty-year series Taxonomy of a Landscape, this book encompasses the past decade of work, including collected ephemera that form the essential and incidental elements of her practice as a photographer and researcher. Also featured are archival documentation of experiences and observations on the road, such as snapshots, maps, road logs, journals, geology and history books, mineral specimens, and artifacts. This title follows her first book with Radius, Taxonomy of a Landscape.

Browse upcoming events with the artist here.

While success for an artist is often measured by their ability to focus full-time on creating art, this book attests to the way day jobs can spur creative growth by providing artists with unexpected materials and methods…or a predictable paycheck that enables unpredictable ideas.
— Veronica Roberts

Of all the jobs I’ve had, my favorite day and night job is being an artist.
— Howardena Pindell

Day Jobs examines the overlooked impact of day jobs on the visual arts. Success for artists is often measured by their ability to quit a day job and focus full time on their practice. Yet these jobs can often spur creative growth by providing artists with new materials and methods, hands-on knowledge of a specific industry that becomes an area of artistic investigation, or a predictable paycheck and structure that enable unpredictable ideas.

The book comprises thirty-nine chapters, one for each included artist, with images of their work, commissioned essays, and interviews. Included are creative pioneers such as Larry Bell, Mark Bradford, Tishan Hsu, Howardena Pindell, and Julia Scher, who offer firsthand accounts of how their day jobs—as a frame shop technician, hair stylist, word processor, museum employee, and security systems installer, respectively—altered their artistic trajectories in surprisingly profound ways.

By examining the impact of day jobs on artists, Day Jobs seeks to demystify artistic production and overturn the romanticized concept of the artist sequestered in their studio, waiting for inspiration to strike. Conceived as a corrective to traditional art historical narratives, this book encourages us to more openly acknowledge the precarious and generative ways that economic and creative pursuits are intertwined.

Core’s work is a triumph of multi-level trompe l’oeil — trumping the eye by turning a painting that aspires to lifelikeness into a photograph that aspires to painting.

— Howard Chua-Eoan, TIME

In 2007, Sharon Core came across the work of the early nineteenth-century American still life painter Raphaelle Peale. Peale’s still lifes of fruit, cakes, and vegetables are characterized by an uncanny lifelikeness, a strange animation of natures mortes, an American austerity, and a sense of non-identity, a giving over of a signature hand of the artist in favor of a minute replication of reality. 

Core began a series of photographs titled Early American, in part due to an affinity with Peale’s work, and also because of her interest in examining the ideas surrounding illusionism and trompe l’oeil, and their relationship with photography. Core studied Peale’s paintings intensively through reproductions and tried to replicate as best as possible the lighting, subject matter, and compositional tendencies. 

Core recounts, “I researched and collected period porcelain and glass and grew, from heirloom seeds, varieties of fruits and vegetables in existence in the early 19th century. Through these efforts I hoped to achieve a mirroring of Peale’s painstaking painting process, and the themes that lie under their surfaces.” Much of the meaning of the photographs lies in the gaps between the originals and copies. These differences in time, place, and technologies point towards themes of cultural memory, nostalgia and loss, and ask questions about our perception of the American past.

Photographs by Alex Webb & Rebecca Norris Webb
Essay by Pico Iyer

Softbound with printed slipcase
10 x 11.25 inches
144 pages / 70 color images
ISBN: 9781942185376

Trade $60
Now Rare: $150
Signed copies no longer available.

Limited edition of this book available HERE