Long before social media created a surfeit of globally interconnected images, the art world opened its previously narrow confines to include the true diversity of image production. Image Making chronicles Shelley Rice’s skillful navigation of two pivotal moments in this transformation: the pluralism of New York in the 1970s and the global outreach of digital networks in the 2010s.
Image Making is indispensable reading for anyone interested in contemporary art, the role of criticism, and the deep interdependence of images and social, cultural, and political forces.
Pages: 244 pages
Book dimensions: 5.5 x .6 x 8.5 in
Pub date: October 1, 2024
978-1-962572-82-8 (paperback)
978-1-962572-83-5 (ebook)
“While gathering her critical essays for Image Making, Shelley Rice recognized that ‘intelligence, curiosity, and respect’ were her mainstays as she built a global view of art. Her perspectives were and are still uniquely fresh and insightful.”
—Anne Tucker, curator and essayist
“I remember reading Parisian Views over twenty years ago and immediately being struck by Shelley Rice’s beautiful prose and thought-provoking insights. I had been thinking about the photographers she engaged—Marville, Le Secq, Baldus, and Le Gray, and wondering why I found their works so dear and familiar. Little did I know, until reading Rice’s book, that her book was as much about nineteenth-century Paris as it was about Beirut and many twentieth-century cities that were in the midst of massive social, cultural, architectural, and economic transformation. From that moment on, I knew that I would follow her time and again, down her various rabbit holes. And she did not disappoint as she opened doors to various known and unknown artistic, historical, and critical universes.”
—Walid Raad, artist and Professor of Photography, Bard College
“Shelley Rice is an incisive, sagacious, and unafraid observer of the field of photography. Although she got in fights with some prominent artists, she remained unafraid. Over forty years, her scope expanded from the downtown New York scene to the international stage. Image Making: Essays on Visual Culture (1978–2018) is an essential survey of our visual world.”
—Martha Wilson, artist and Founding Director Emerita of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.
“The photo criticism of Shelley Rice evolved in the space that was once called New Journalism and is now a venerable and still exciting, hybrid place of the objective (for want of a better word) and the personal. In Image Making: Essays on Visual Culture, 1978–2018, Rice’s wide-ranging observations about the art of creating photographs and its relationship to her own life are vivid, original, and profound.”
—Kenneth E. Silver, Silver Professor of Art History Emeritus, New York University
“A joy to read. Each essay is a force field, a graven memory, philosophy as fresh as day. Reading this book is like walking through a portal, a different one, time after time; an adventure in high seriousness.”
—Alexander Nemerov, author of Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York
“In these essays, written over several decades, Shelley Rice virtually invented photography criticism as we know it today. Her witty, incisive, erudite, and yet plain spoken critical texts from the 1970s utterly destroyed the poetic mythologies then surrounding photography. Today, those collected writings—about photography and women, sexualities, globalism, violence, race—read like prophecies of the urgent political issues we now confront daily. This book lands with perfect timing!”
—Brian Wallis, Executive Director, Center for Photography at Woodstock
“Shelley Rice’s brilliant essays on image making tell it like it is in forty years of commentary from the art world or worlds. An integral voice in the course that finally anointed photography as an art form, her erudite and readable prose is global in scope and critical in the best sense. Rice is an important ally to artists while holding them to high standards, political and aesthetic, opening herself to the art, and growing and changing (her words) in the process.”
—Lucy R. Lippard, activist, curator, and the author/editor of Partial Recall: Photographs of Native North Americans
“While books such as Parisian Views and Inverted Odysseys (both 1999) established Shelley Rice’s reputation as a ground-breaking historian of photography, her direct engagement with the medium as a critic and her sustained bursts of writing about the many other forms that visual culture takes may be less known. This book remedies that loss, in spades. Her ‘Image Making’ columns in the Soho Weekly News during the 1970s, collected here, are a vivid, highly personal, yet critically acute snapshot of a decisive moment in photo history—the widespread use of photography as a leading medium for contemporary art—in the work of artists such as Barbara Kruger and Robert Mapplethorpe. Rice insisted on holding these works to moral, as well as aesthetic, account, stirring controversy in the process. Forty years later, her blogs for the Jeu de Paume, Paris, immerse us in practices of artmaking and curating that were emerging from all over the world and remaking worlds in the process. She encounters the work of pivotal artists such as Juan Downey, Cindy Sherman, Ana Mendieta, Duane Michals, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, and Walid Raad, and exhibitions such as Okwui Enwezor’s La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity, and Kara Walker’s staging of Bellini’s Norma, with the attention, respect, and love, they deserve.”
—Terry Smith, Andrew W. Mellon Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory, University of Pittsburgh
“Image Making is a testament to Shelley Rice’s enduring influence and the vital role she plays in shaping how we see and understand the world. It offers a guiding light for those of us navigating the complexities of visual expression. I first encountered Shelley’s work as a student and since then my thinking about images has never been the same. It is exciting to see this culmination of her decades of work in one place where current and future scholars can access it.”
—Hank Willis Thomas