Adam Fuss

Amazon.com
This beautiful book is a rare combination: the most exquisite art paired with an essay of equal value. Adam Fuss's hauntingly mysterious photos, made without cameras through a variety of direct means, began to receive a good deal of critical attention around 1990 (when the artist was not yet 30). Eugenia Parry is a learned, experienced, prizewinning author of essays on French calotypes, Joel-Peter Witkin, the monotypes of Edgar Degas, and other subjects. In the same way that Fuss's photographs transcend the natural world while being profoundly enveloped in it, Parry's writing is nuanced and poetic, yet extremely informative. Her long, satisfyingly rich essay here delineates Fuss's childhood, his family life, his earliest impulses toward image-making, his love-hate relationship with cameras, and his working methods, and gently suggests connections between Fuss's experiences and his aesthetic. She incorporates Sufi hymns, English poetry, and a number of pungent quotes from the artist to create a short biography that should stand as a model for evoking the process, internal as well as external, of becoming an artist. The 57 plates of Fuss's lovely, enigmatic images of light, water, birds, babies, tangled roots, sunflowers, children, and stained glass windows are printed on thick white paper. This quiet, perfect book is already a classic. --Peggy Moorman

From Library Journal
Fuss has created some of the most exquisite photography of the last two decades. By laying objects directly on photosensitive materials he bypasses the mechanism of the camera and places greater emphasis on process?both bringing the artist closer to his work and sacrificing some of his control. Utilizing this photogram technique pioneered by Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy, his works are nonetheless innovative and singular. Taking rabbit entrails, sunflowers, or stained glass windows as the raw materials, the 57 plates reproduced here range from pure abstractions to representational works, from subdued pastel-hued monochromes to multicolored iridescent images, but they are always beautiful. Art historian Parry contributes a cogent essay focusing on the rich metaphors and allusions in the works. An exquisitely produced book from a new small press specializing in photography, this first substantial monograph on Fuss is recommended for all collections with an interest in contemporary photography or history of photography.?Eric Bryant, "Library Journal"Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Andy Grundberg
The most impressive of the 57 exquisitely reproduced pictures in this survey of his work to date are simple compositions: monochromatic or nearly so, they seem like distant views of the cosmos. At the same time they are reminiscent of postwar abstract painting, which gives them the sense of being at once a commentary on the possibility of spirituality in art and an example of it.

Book Description
Adam Fuss has emerged as one of the bold and truly creative artists utilizing photography today. Fuss's photograms clearly break from those of his predecessors--Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy, and Talbot--and while striking a chord of homage, his images redefine what we see in photography, both viscerally and intellectually. At a moment when digital technology permeates all areas of visual culture, Fuss remains aggressively anachronistic--an artist whose photograms interrogate photography's lens-based identity. Like an 18th-century experimenter, Fuss utilizes organic and raw materials in an unusual approach, revealing spiritual and emotional process. Laying those materials atop the photographic paper for hours, and even days, Fuss causes colorization to be recorded with a stroboscopic flash. Live snakes, the entrails of rabbits, eggs, sperm, flowers, and stained glass circumscribe the vital, often mysterious energies emitted from these pictures. Photogram was the first monograph ever published on the artist's work; it is available now, again, to make further contributions to discussions of photography's past, its current possibilities, and the question of its future. Essay by Rainer Crone. Clothbound, 9 x 11 in./128 pgs / 53 color and 10 b & w.


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Adam Fuss was born in London in 1961, the son of a Polish Jew and an Australian model. Fuss's childhood was spent back and forth between England and Australia, his family's situation subject to the poor health of his father, who died in 1968. Later on, after his schooling ended, Fuss traveled to Alaska on a small inheritance. Returning to Australia in 1980, he apprenticed in the darkroom of the Ogilvy & Mathers advertising agency, but left that post for New York just two years later. Paying his way as a waiter and later in the imaging rooms of an auction house, he took up a pinhole camera and later began making photograms. Since the mid-90s, his work has been included in some of the world's most important collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, in New York, where Fuss continues to live and work.


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