Walead Beshty

Spanning from the late 19th century to the present with images produced for scientific and artistic contexts, Picture Industry includes the work of more than 70 artists and practitioners. An essential anthology of historical and theoretical texts, it reflects upon transformations in the production and distribution of photographic images as realized through its varied constructions of the corporeal, from its origin as a scientific tool and a means of cultural investigation to its phenomenological effects on the viewer. It complexifies traditional accounts of the medium, drawing on its application within science and the humanities to contemporary art. Rather than attempting a definitive history, the publication posits an alternative approach to the myriad questions and debates associated with representation, presenting its technological history as inextricable from the social history of media.

Picture Industry brings together essays by, among others, Giorgio Agamben, Cory Arcangel, Ariella Azoulay, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Ericka Beckman, Walter Benjamin, Georges Didi-Huberman, Harun Farocki, Morgan Fisher, Vilém Flusser, Coco Fusco, Tristan Garcia, Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, Mark Godfrey, Dan Graham, Friedrich A. Kittler, Boris Mikhailov, Craig Owens, Erwin Panofsky, Seth Price, Siegfried Kracauer, Rosalind Krauss, Etienne-Jules Marey, Martha Rosler, Hito Steyerl, William Henry Fox Talbot, Gilles de la Tourette and Alan Turing.

Published with LUMA and CCS Bard on the occasion of the exhibition Picture Industry, LUMA, Arles, October 12, 2018–January 6, 2019.