Samaras : the photographs of Lucas Samaras / essay by Ben Lifson

New York, N.Y. : Aperture Foundation (1987), 1987. First Edition. Hardback. Fine cloth copy in an equally fine dw. Particularly and surprisingly well-preserved; tight, bright, clean and especially sharp-cornered. Literally as new and still in the publisher's protective shrink-wrap.; 8vo 8"" - 9"" tall; 183 pages; Description: 183 p. : chiefly ill. (chiefly col.) ; 25 x 32 cm. Notes: Bibliography: p. 180-182. Subjects: Samaras, Lucas (1936-) --Photography, Artistic. Summary: Photographer, painter, sculptor, Lucas Samaras is one of the most influential and provocative artists of our time. Once again available to readers, this long out-of-print volume presents a thorough compilation of Samara's photographic work, beginning with his earliest ""Auto-Polaroids.""This exhaustive body of work paved the way for a generation of contemporary photo-artists, expanding the expressive possibilities of the medium. Using Polaroid materials, large, sometimes life-sized formats, manipulated imagery, and composites, Samaras helped forge a vocabulary employed by artists and photographers throughout the eighties. In his most profound achievement, he adopted one of photography's basic genres, portraiture, and used it as a basis for an inquiry into the self, which remains unmatched in its intensity and boundless in its ramifications.Photography critic Ben Lifson provides a trenchant critique and history of Samaras's work. ""Samaras split himself into model, actor, director, audience, and critic,"" Lifson writes. ""To each of these roles he brought a skilled artist's hand an an eye deeply informed by the historical traditions and motifs of art and by the vernacular and popular traditions of photography. He became a rare figure in American art, not an artist who occasionally uses photography for tactical reasons . . . but an artist who made photography central to his aesthetic campaign.""