Research Catalog

Title

Amir Zaki : building and becoming.

Author

Zaki, Amir, 1974-

Publication

Los Angeles, CA : X Artists' Books : DoppleHouse Press, 2022.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

• Peipon, Corrina
• Michaels, Walter Benn
• Ashton, Jennifer, 1964-

Description

1 volume (various pagings) : illustrations (chiefly color); 30 x 26 cm

Summary

Amir Zaki has created a sculptural monograph with no singular entry or exit. The book is a double gatefold, having three spines, which opens to a full width of roughly 40 inches. The erstwhile skateboarder brings multiple series into focus for this book, including rocks, carvings, suspended landscapes, and hyper-realist California beach architecture, which like his skateparks (also included), are uncannily quiet and devoid of people. An interview with curator and arts writer Corrina Peipon brings Zaki's history and concerns about photography and technology to the fore. "I am interested in the attraction and repulsion that a photograph which depicts something familiar and unfamiliar, initially welcoming yet somewhat alienating, can elicit in a viewer and me. I am looking for a kind of strangeness within the commonplace. Ultimately, I use digital technology as a means to an end. I am trying to make photographs that manifest the world I desire." From the essay by literary critics Walter Benn Michaels and Jennifer Ashton, we gain insight into Zaki's manipulation of space through "evenness," which is accomplished by creating a perfectly technically focused object: "The point is not that the pictures overcome physical limits, but that they violate the logic of our eyesight." Referencing the history of landscape and modern photography in California (Edward Weston, Ansel Adams), Michaels and Ashton show that Zaki's insistence on marrying technology seamlessly with this tradition results in continuity, an "addition through subtraction" of the third dimension.

Alternative Title

Building and becoming

Subject

• Zaki, Amir, 1974-
• Zaki, Amir, 1974- > Interviews
• Photography, Artistic
• Landscape photography
• Environment (Art)
• Photographie artistique
• Photographie de paysages
• art photography

Genre/Form

Interviews.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN

• 1954600011
• 9781954600010

LCCN

99991253669

OCLC

• on1267384940
• 1267384940
• SCSB-14284479

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries