Matthew Pillsbury: City Stages - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1597112372 ISBN 13: 9781597112376

Publisher: Aperture, 2013

Synopsis

Matthew Pillsbury: City Stages offers a paean to the craft and visionary potential of large- format, black-and-white photography as well as to the vibrancy of the cultural landscape at a transitional momenta moment in which our very relationship to that landscape is increas - ingly mediated by omnipresent screens. Over the past decade, Pillsbury has built several extensive bodies of workScreen Lives, Hours, and City Stagesthat deal with different facets of contemporary metropolitan life and the passage of time. Working with black-and-white 8-by-10 film and long exposures, Pillsbury captures a range of psychologically charged experiences in the urban environment, from isolationtuned into the omnipresent screens of our tablets, laptops, televisions, and phonesto crowded museums, parades, cathedrals, and even protests. Working primarily in New York but with forays to Paris, London, Venice, and other sites, the precise and concrete rendering of cityscapes, iconic landmarks, and interior spaces in his images provides a stage-like setting for the performance of human activity. Thanks to the extended exposuressome as long as an hourthe actions of both individuals and crowds are blurred and transformed into pure gesture and energy. As writer Karl E. Johnson comments on the work, For Pillsbury, the act of seeing appears to double as a performance, if no more than the performance of life enacted in various spaces and timeframes. This monograph gathers for the first time selections from all three bodies of work, and spans ten years of the artists output.

About this title

Review:

The city that emerges from Matthew Pillsbury's photographs of New York -- collected in a new book, "City Stages," to be published by Aperture in October -- is a ghost town: not an empty ghost town of deserted streets, but a much more literal phantom world in which human figures are captured, in almost spectral fashion, walking through public spaces, their bodies blurred by long exposures. "A lot of photography is about asserting a presence," said Mr. Pillsbury, 39, who was raised in Paris but moved to New York City in the early 1990s. "These photographs are more about the evanescence of our lives and show human beings as fleeting essences that are moving through a landscape."--Alan Feuer "The New York Times Online "

About the Author:

Matthew Pillsbury received his BA in fine art from Yale University in 1995 and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2004. His work has been exhibited internationally and is widely held in private and museum collections, including the Sir Elton John Photography Collection, Museum of Modern Art, and Guggenheim Museum, all in New York; Musee du Louvre, Paris; and Tate Modern, London. In 2007, Pillsbury won the prestigious Fondation HSBC pour la Photographie award. His work is represented by Bonni Benrubi, New York; Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta; and Douglas Udell Gallery, Vancouver. Mark Kingwell is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto.

About this edition

• Publisher: Aperture
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1597112372
• ISBN 13: 9781597112376
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 132