Could the monochrome figure as meaningfully for photography as it does for painting? Is it destined to be a perversion? An exception that proves the rule? A returning repression or disavowal? If these questions do not exactly ground Liz Deschenes’s work, they do hover around it, coming to the fore on the page with a different emphasis from the way they do in the space of exhibition, not least because of the different ways surface is experienced.
— DAVID CAMPANY
This monograph focuses on the last eleven years of artwork by Liz Deschenes, a photographer who, according to curator and critic Matthew Witkovsky, “In the best modernist tradition, pushes against the basic terms by which photography is conventionally defined: instantaneity, veracity, fixity, or reproducibility.” Deschenes uses, among other processes, durational photogram exposure to create unique, shifting surfaces that function as sculptural or architectural—rather than photographic—objects. Some of these photograms remain unframed and oxidize over time, further problematizing the role of the photograph as fixed image on surface. Instead, purged of representational content, the photograph, in Deschenes’s practice, functions as an object that records how it has been, and continues to be, acted upon.
Works 2015–2026 includes newly commissioned texts by Lauren O’Neill Butler, David Campany, Ines Dahn, Eva Respini, and Phil Taylor, as well as a conversation between Deschenes and writer Nick Flynn.
Could the monochrome figure as meaningfully for photography as it does for painting? Is it destined to be a perversion? An exception that proves the rule? A returning repression or disavowal? If these questions do not exactly ground Liz Deschenes’s work, they do hover around it, coming to the fore on the page with a different emphasis from the way they do in the space of exhibition, not least because of the different ways surface is experienced.
— DAVID CAMPANY
This monograph focuses on the last eleven years of artwork by Liz Deschenes, a photographer who, according to curator and critic Matthew Witkovsky, “In the best modernist tradition, pushes against the basic terms by which photography is conventionally defined: instantaneity, veracity, fixity, or reproducibility.” Deschenes uses, among other processes, durational photogram exposure to create unique, shifting surfaces that function as sculptural or architectural—rather than photographic—objects. Some of these photograms remain unframed and oxidize over time, further problematizing the role of the photograph as fixed image on surface. Instead, purged of representational content, the photograph, in Deschenes’s practice, functions as an object that records how it has been, and continues to be, acted upon.
Works 2015–2026 includes newly commissioned texts by Lauren O’Neill Butler, David Campany, Ines Dahn, Eva Respini, and Phil Taylor, as well as a conversation between Deschenes and writer Nick Flynn.
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