In the 1960s and 1970s, the artist Ed Ruscha created a series of small photo-conceptual artist's books, among them Twentysix Gas Stations, Various Small Fires, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Thirtyfour Parking Lots, Real Estate Opportunities, and A Few Palm Trees. Featuring mundane subjects photographed prosaically, with idiosyncratically deadpan titles, these “small books” were sought after, collected, and loved by Ruscha's fans and fellow artists. Over the past thirty years, close to 100 other sm

This book, and the exhibition it was published for, takes inspiration from the work of cultural theorist Professor Stuart Hall and his ground-breaking essay Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973). Reproduced here in full, Hall encourages readers to think about how meaning is constructed, how it is systematically distorted by audience reception and how it can be detached and drained of its original intent. The Unfinished Conversation: Encoding / Decoding shows us how history agi

A disputed land between India and Pakistan since 1947, Kashmir is today one of the most militarized zones in the world. Soon after gaining independence from the British Empire, the two countries fought a war over Kashmir until the end of 1948. In the same year, the United Nations Security Council adopted the Resolution 47, urging the preparation of a plebiscite in order to let the Kashmiri people decide whether to join India or Pakistan. No such ple

‘O Post Mio is a photographic work lasted eight years during which Francesca Leonardi followed the life of Claudia who, together with her daughters, occupied a house in the Saracen Park. Saracen park is located in the Coppola Village, in Castel volturno, near Naples. In the 1960s, when it was built to destroy a rich Mediterranean pine forest, it was the largest illegal urban agglomeration in Europe Claudia’s life resembles t

In the early 1970s, Lew Thomas set out to disrupt photography in San Francisco. Tired of the mystical thinking and emotionalism that had underscored Bay Area photography since the 1940s, Thomas pursued a photographic practice grounded in ideas gleaned from conceptual art and Structuralist philosophy. A cohort of other photographers, including Donna-Lee Phillips and Hal Fischer, embraced Thomas’ mission, joining him in what became known as the Photography and Language movement, named after a boo