Victor Burgin: On Paper Curated by David Campany Richard Saltoun Gallery 111 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 6RY, 31 October – 6 December 2013 Victor Burgin first came to prominence in the late 1960s as an originator of Conceptual Art, when … Continue reading
A conversation with Stephen Shore covering 45 years of his career… in 45 minutes. http://friezefoundation.org/talks With thanks to Jennifer Higgie and Christy Lange of Frieze magazine. A much longer conversation between Stephen Shore and David Campany is published in the … Continue reading
Lee Friedlander, Peter Exline, Spokane, Washington, 1970. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery. What happens when a virtuoso photographer enters a domestic situation? Ordinary events may be lifted suddenly into another realm. Here is a photograph by Lee Friedlander. It was taken in … Continue reading
Tomorrow’s Headlines Are Today’s Fish and Chip Papers David Campany interviewed by Duncan Wooldridge for Either/And website. Duncan Wooldridge: In your essay ‘Safety in Numbness: Some Remarks on Late Photography’, you wrote about how the contemporary photographic document had … Continue reading
Jacques Tati’s Playtime and Photography by David Campany. First published Aperture no. 212, Fall 2013. Playtime (1967) is the great labor of love crafted over three years by the maverick French filmmaker Jacques Tati. It was shot in 70mm on a … Continue reading
I worked with Mark Neville to curate his exhibition Deeds Not Words at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, August 2nd – September 29th, 2013. Mark Neville works at the intersection of art and documentary. His films and photographs are disseminated in unique … Continue reading
Xavier Ribas’ series Sundays (1994-1997) began as a response to the corporate image projected by the city of Barcelona around the time of the 1992 Olympics. That image was not just a matter of ‘official photography and television’. Significant parts … Continue reading
Stephanie Schwartz (SS): In the opening pages of your book Walker Evans: The Magazine Work, you propose “another Walker Evans.” Who is this Evans? David Campany (DC): Well, Walker Evans (1903–1975) is famous, perhaps one of the most well-known photographers … Continue reading
‘Seams and Interruptions. Surrealism and Photography.’ David Campany and John Stezaker in conversation. First published in Frieze Masters magazine, no.2, 2013 David Campany: André Breton once defined a surrealist image as one in which two conceptions of reality co-exist. Susan … Continue reading
Published on the occasion of Mac Adams: Crimes of Perception, works from 1970′s. Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York, June 2013 One Let’s embrace the hybrid character of photography. In Mac Adams’ pictures you will find allusions to detective stories and … Continue reading
Marianne Wex: Let’s Take Back Our Space, 1979 by David Campany The German artist Marianne Wex started out as a painter before producing her photographic project Let’s Take Back Our Space, one of the great unsung works of 1970s feminist history and … Continue reading
From his conceptual art of the 1960s to his present computer generated works, Victor Burgin has explored the virtual nature of all images and words. David Campany: The departure point for your latest video projection, Mirror Lake (2013), is … Continue reading
A review of Oranges on Fire, a survey of the work of Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel (Published by Walther König, 2012) Finally we have a book that surveys one of the most interesting artistic collaborations of the post-war era. … Continue reading
William Klein and David Campany in conversation at the Museum of Art & Design, New York. March 13, 2013. A conversation spanning William Klein’s sixty-year career, taking in abstract painting under Fernand Léger in Paris; early exhibitions in Milan; shooting fashion … Continue reading
Few photographs have had anything like the impact or enduring fascination of Edward Muybridge’s studies of human and animal locomotion, made in the 1870s and 1880s. They changed things forever and have come to symbolise modernity’s seismic and irreversible … Continue reading
The artist Daniel Blaufuks’ book Works on Memory contains a long exchange between Blaufuks and David Campany on the subject of history, memory, technology and photography. Size: 115 x 178 mm / Illustration: 92 b&w / Binding: Softback 152 pages / Text: English / Publication date: … Continue reading
All American: Five Photographic Books about the USA A short text by David Campany Modern America has been a project, an experiment. As such, its self-image is a matter of some importance. The critic Van Wyck Brooks once wrote of … Continue reading
‘Brighton’ is a very short text written for a four publication set produced by Preston is My Paris as the outcome of the FIND project at Brighton Photo Fringe 2012. An assembled archive of 192 images is split over the … Continue reading
A publicity photo for Lust for Life, Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 biopic of Vincent van Gogh. A Los Angeles art teacher supplied the production with copies of canvases in various states of completion. Playing Vincent, Kirk Douglas poses at the easel, … Continue reading
‘Literature’, Susan Sontag once said, ‘is writing one wishes to reread’. Artworks, one might extend, are images or objects or performances one wishes to re-view. Early in his long career, 1973 to be exact, the artist-writer Victor Burgin offered a … Continue reading
Too much, too little An essay first published in the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize catalogue, 2012. One salutary consequence of the rise of photography in and as art has been the acceptance of common ground between ‘photographers’ and those ‘working … Continue reading
Here are two very different publicity stills from two very different films: Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), which I watch often, and Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967), which I saw only once and will probably never see again. … Continue reading
A short foreword written by David Campany for Juliet Hacking’s book Photography: the Whole Story. Strictly speaking, the whole story of photography would be an account of every photograph ever taken and every response to it, from that tentative handful made … Continue reading
Precedented Photography By David Campany. First published in Aperture n.206, Spring 2012. Photography’s rambling, unsystematic past is becoming increasingly available to us—not least the history of illustrated printed matter, which is now easily uploaded, accessed and bought via the Internet, and … Continue reading
An essay on some of Walker Evans’ photo essays for Fortune magazine.
David Campany contributes three entries to David Evans’s fine neo-Bataillean anthology Critical Dictionary (Black Dog Publishing, 2011). Bed, 1995
Photography from Page to Wall The development of vanguard photography from the 1960s to the 1980s involved, among other things, a profound shift from the printed page to the gallery wall as the site for which its images were to … Continue reading
Traces and Pictures by David Campany Looked at as a whole the works gathered together here cover one of the richest and most complex periods in the development of photographic art. The collection of Zellweger Luwa AG begins with key … Continue reading
Essay by David Campany, plus a conversation with John Stezaker Softcover 27 x 21 cm / 10.6 x 8.3 inches 144 pages / 63 colour illustrations ISBN: 978 1 905464 41 8
The Lens, the Shutter and the Light Sensitive Surface What gives rise to the wish or the need to define something? It usually happens when we are attracted to it, or when we find it threatening, or when it is … Continue reading
Lee Cluderay (née Marjorie Powell, 1900), the daughter of a British naval officer of low rank, was raised by her American mother in Port Glasgow, Scotland. Little is known of her early life. A compulsive thief by the age of … Continue reading
I co-founded and co-edit PA magazine with Cristina Bechtler. For each issue we invite an artist to select and sequence their own work over as many spreads as they need. They then choose a second artist who is invited to … Continue reading
What to Photograph? I recall the very first project I gave to my students on my very first day as a photography tutor. If they learned a tenth as much about photography as I did from it, I’d consider it … Continue reading
The ‘Sinister’ Photograph: Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s Parábola óptica, 1931 by David Campany It is said that towards the end of her life Marilyn Monroe began to veto many of the portrait photos taken of her. Increasingly troubled by her own … Continue reading
Drink the wine, discard the bottle, then drink something else. A short text commissioned for the first issue of the journal Philosophy of Photography, 2010 A couple of years ago I was at a seminar that was intended to … Continue reading
Mr. Eggleston, have we met before? by David Campany A response to 21st Century, photographs by William Eggleston at Victoria Miro Gallery, London, 15 January – 27 February 2010. First published in Source n. 61, 2010. Michael Almereyda’s recent documentary … Continue reading
Let’s look at the facts. A man in a dark suit in a dark alleyway holds a divining rod. A woman stands on a gridded mat, her fingers wired for some kind of monitoring. A girl’s head and arms poke … Continue reading
Jack Kerouac On the Road, by Ed Ruscha. Published by Steidl with Gagosian Gallery, October 2009. Limited edition of 350 copies, 35 APs and 5 PPs. £6250 / $10,000 / Euro 6800. Mirror, Signal, Oeuvre Is it dangerous for an … Continue reading
The Scene of Photography and the Future of its Illusion By David Campany. First published in Photoworks no. 14, 2010 When Tate Modern presented the huge survey show Street & Studio back in 2008, a single striking point seemed … Continue reading
Yesterday’s everyday and the Depiction of Work by David Campany Commissioned for the book The Everyday, edited by Sergio Mah, PhotoEspana, Madrid 2009. A few years ago I was invited to give a talk at Central Saint Martin’s School of … Continue reading
© Rinko Kawauchi Releasing the Shutter and Drinking Tea It is tempting in these narcissistic times to assume that ‘the personal’ is a realm of experience entirely distinct from social or collective life. But the boundaries are … Continue reading
In 1924 the German pacifist-anarchist Ernst Friedrich published an illustrated polemic titled War Against War. It was a picture book that gathered together images of war and its effects that had been censored, suppressed or were never intended for public … Continue reading
The first of the Errata Editions reissues of classic photography books is Atget: Photographe de Paris, first published in 1930. The reissue includes an early version of the essay ‘Eugène Atget’s Intelligent Documents’, by David Campany. Let us begin with some facts. Eugène … Continue reading
I co-founded and co-edit PA magazine with Cristina Bechtler. For each issue we invite an artist to select and sequence their own work over as many spreads as they need. They then choose a second artist who is invited to do the … Continue reading
Between Cinephilia and Cineclasm A short essay on the work of Jason Dee, commissioned by Stills Gallery, 2009. Jason Dee makes formally elegant, perfectly realised short films that play as loops in gallery spaces. They are sophisticated, knowing, seductive, profound, … Continue reading
William Klein’s lasting legacy to photography will be his four city books: New York (1956), Rome (1959), Tokyo and Moscow (both 1964). New York in particular is regularly lauded as one of the great photographic achievements of the last century. … Continue reading
‘…page after page…’ By David Campany for C Magazine, 2009 It is fairly clear even to those only remotely interested in the matter that cinema and photography have had a rich and strange relationship right from the beginnings of cinema … Continue reading
That Obscure Object of Photography My title comes from Luis Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), a film about a man chasing a woman who is played by two different actresses. The man doesn’t seem to notice the switch … Continue reading
Is there any photograph more hybrid, less aesthetically pure than the film still? It has its admirers but there are few of them among the guardians of photography. The film still is something of an orphan. But of course orphans … Continue reading
The photographic art of Thomas Ruff makes very particular demands of us and offers very particular kinds of pleasure, both aesthetic and intellectual. His work seems cold and dispassionate, willful, searching and perverse but at times surprisingly beautiful. Whether he … Continue reading
Comparatively little attention has been paid to photographically illustrated books for children. They hardly appear in the histories of photography or children’s literature. This seems like an oversight. There have been thousands published, the earliest appearing in the first decades … Continue reading
Motion Pictures An essay on the films of artist Mark Lewis. Mark Lewis’ single take film North Circular (2000) begins as a fixed shot of an empty car park. In the distance is a derelict Modernist office block. After two … Continue reading
In 2008 I curated Current History, a large show of Hannah Collins’s photographs and film installations. It debuted at Obra Social Fundación “la Caixa” Barcelona, traveling to “La Caixa” Madrid; ARTIUM, Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporaneo, Vitoria-Gasteiz; and then to the Museo de Arte de la … Continue reading
PA magazine was co-founded by David Campany and Cristina Bechtler. For each issue an artist is invited to select and sequence their own work over as many spreads as they need. They then choose a second artist who is invited to … Continue reading
David takes part in three episodes.
David Campany: Edgar, your work baffles me in the most pleasurable way. I suspect it has this effect on you too. Edgar Martins: I like to convoke different strategies in my work. For a while I thought I would be a … Continue reading
Essay coming soon.
‘The Career of a Photographer, the Career of a Photograph – Bill Brandt’s Art of the Document’ First published in the Tate Liverpool exhibition catalogue Making History: Art and documentary in Britain from 1929-Now, 2006. Photographs are highly mobile images. Made at … Continue reading
The End. An essay on Simon Patterson’s ‘Black List’ by David Campany How does a film come to an end? It may be more complicated than we might presume. Think of a typical experience in your local cinema. The average … Continue reading
Chris Coekin discusses his book Knock Three Times with David Campany DC Whenever photography is autobiographical, there seem to be two histories in play – the photographer’s history and the history of their subject matter. It complicates the question of … Continue reading
‘Photography and the Wind’. First published in Photoworks magazine, Spring/Summer 2006 There is a song by Robert Wyatt titled The Sight of the Wind. Backed by whispered sucking and blowing sounds he sings of a lazy afternoon by a … Continue reading
Once More for Stills First published in Christoph Schifferli, ed., Paper Dreams: the lost art of Hollywood stills photography, Steidl, 2006. Almost every film production has a stills photographer. Stills provide the movie with everything from working descriptions of interiors and … Continue reading
Posing, Acting and Photography by David Campany First published in Joanna Lowry and David Green, eds., Stillness and Time, Brighton, Photoworks, 2006 A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is … Continue reading
The Red House by David Campany Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin have photographed marks and drawings made on the walls of a fading pink building now known as the Red House. Situated on the slope of a hill in the … Continue reading
August Strindberg, Self-portrait, Gersau, Switzerland, 1886 ‘Art, Science and Speculation: August Strindberg’s photographics’ by David Campany. First published in the TATE Modern catalogue August Strindberg: Painter, Photographer, Writer, 2006 August Strindberg developed an interest in photography in his boyhood in … Continue reading
In William Henry Fox Talbot’s early treatise on photography The Pencil of Nature there is a humble image of a piece fabric. Talbot placed black lace directly on to sensitised paper and exposed it to the sun. The lace appears … Continue reading
Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp: Dust Breeding 1920 David Campany It’s my dream. A world where all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust. Clov in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame Photographs sometimes … Continue reading
DAVID CAMPANY: Much of your work seems to be based very much on process, particularly more recent work such as the Kurdistan project and ‘Encounters with the Dani’. Obviously work has to surface, one way or another, but do you have … Continue reading
Thomas shot the fresh asphalt, looking just long enough to frame it. He slid back in behind the wheel and caught me laying flat. He knew right there I was avoiding the camera. We drove off across the black square, … Continue reading
Martin Parr is perhaps the most visible and distinctive figure working in photography today. Never one to confine himself, he moves tirelessly between photo shoots, curating, writing, collecting, editing, publishing and promoting. Each and every project is conceived with his … Continue reading
“Almost the same thing”: Some thoughts on the collector-photographer. First published in the Tate Modern exhibition catalogue Cruel and Tender: the Real in the Twentieth Century Photograph, 2003 by David Campany Near the end of his working life Walker Evans was … Continue reading
The encounter between two disciplines doesn’t take place when one begins to reflect on another, but when one discipline realises that it has to resolve, for itself and by its own means, a problem similar to one confronted by the … Continue reading
An essay on Dan Graham’s 1966 magazine piece Homes for America and its canonisation in post-conceptual art history. (Really). Text coming when I find it. In the meantime, here are three iterations of Dan Graham’s piece:
Why Don’t We Walk Along The River? Rut Blees Luxemburg and David Campany in conversation David: It’s Saturday night and we’re at the foot of Hungerford Bridge in Central London. Rut, you are preparing an image of the underside of … Continue reading
‘Art Photographed. Some Notes on Painting and the Book’ is an essay commissioned for the exhibition catalogue Postcards on Photography. Painting and Reproduction, edited by Naomi Salaman and Ronnie Simpson, Cambridge Darkroom 1998. Essay coming here soon (once I find … Continue reading
‘Auto-interview’, transcript vol. 2, no 1. 1996
Article of the public billboard work of AVI (David Campany & Gavin Jack) by Naomi Salaman