The Book Of Leah is another installment in a series of photography books by American artist LG Williams. The Book Of [Your Name Here] series, originating in January 2015, is an artistic re-examination of the "miracle" of the daguerreotype photograph, in which the artist reaches back to the origins of photography. On August 19, 1839 the French Academy of Sciences announced the invention of the daguerreotype by the scene painter and physicist Louis-Jaques-Mande Daguerre (1787-1851). Word of the discovery spread swiftly, and the daguerreotype photography enjoyed great popularity until the 1850s, especially in America where the process was free from patent restrictions.
While there was great demand for portraits captured by the "miracle" of photography, early daguerreotype technology had its shortcomings. The necessarily long exposure times that were required to capture an image, fifteen minutes on average under bright lights, led to necessarily inevitable lacunae in representing the subject. The resulting single image daguerreotypes are de facto composites of the lapsed long exposure time, but not, as was purported, scientifically captured replicas of both time and image.
This publication and series presents an opportunity for Williams to provide an artistic, political, and social perspective on the missing truths, images, and loss of time that occurred during the age of Daguerre. In other words, each book from this single-portrait-series consists of hundreds of continuous images during a fifteen-minute stretch of time, or just about as many images as the artist could take as fast as possible using his out-dated FujiFilm FinePix Z70 3-MP Digital Camera. From this historical perspective, Williams' series points to the limitations of daguerreotype photography with the seemingly limitless possibilities of contemporary analogue-image capture and production.
About the Author: LG Williams received his M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis nearly twenty years after the school's most famous graduate Bruce Nauman. He has showed at various national and international venues, among them The Internet Pavilion of La Biennale Di Venezia 2011, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, di Rosa Art Preserve, Klaipedos Kultury Komunikacijy Centras, Ludwig Forum fur Internationale Kunst, Super Window Project, Gloria Maria Gallery, Lance Fung Gallery, Steven Wirtz Gallery, and Gallery Subversive, Cologne Art Fair, Artissima, LISTE, Art-O-Rama, and ARCO. A major European exhibition, LG Williams / The Estate of LG Williams, Anthology: 1985-2012, was organized in 2012 by Baron Osuna (Super Window Project) for Gloria Maria Gallery in Milan; the catalogue essay was written by Dr. Thomas Frangenberg, University of Leicester. An heir to West Coast and Beat Generation art, LG Williams is one of the youngest member of the Rat Bastard Protective Association, whose membership includes Bruce Connor, Wally Hedrick, Jay DeFeo, Joan Brown, and Manuel Neri. Williams has taught at the University of California-Davis, University of Southern California, California College of the Arts, Arizona State University and the University of Hawaii. In March 2009 Cengage Learning / Wadsworth published Williams's Drawing Upon Art: A Workbook for Gardner's Art Through the Ages -- an innovative pedagogical tool designed to facilitate learning art history through drawing.
More information can be found at www.lgwilliams.com
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