Picture Library 2022
BFA Photography and Video presents Picture Library, a virtual exhibition of the class of 2022’s Senior Books, and accompanying materials, including the texts and artist books that have inspired their work. Organized in collaboration with the SVA Library, the exhibition will be on view online from Monday, September 19 through Friday, October 14, 2022.
In celebration of the photography book and the books created by SVA’s BFA Photography and Video Department’s graduating class of 2021, our department has invited alumni to pair their own books, made at the end of their senior year, with renowned books culled from SVA’s library, which have inspired their practice in some way. The selection of library books are as diverse as the books that our recent graduates have created, reminding us of the invaluable resource that libraries provide to ensure an education not just in art and in history but specifically in books of photographs. In the age of the Internet, smartphones, and information-on-demand, photography books continue to carry a distinctive value in their physicality, their edits, and their sequences.
The book has been a vehicle for the circulation of photographic images since the medium’s invention, and it’s impossible to talk about photography’s history without discussing books. This includes the first self-published photography book Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843) by Anna Atkins as well as the first commercially published photographically illustrated book The Pencil of Nature (1844) by William Henry Fox Talbot. The list of memorable photography books is long and as varied as the photographers you might find on it, often including classics like Walker Evans’ American Photographs (1938), Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958), Eikoh Hosoe’s Barakei (1985), Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), and Deborah Willis’ Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present (2002). In viewing the books from the class of 2021 in tandem with the books that have inspired them, we encourage you to think about the past’s relationship to the future, particularly as you consider the history of the photography book and our recent graduates' contributions to the continuum of the medium as it operates in this important format.
– Joseph Maida, BFA Photography and Video Chair
Alumni from the class of 2022 featured in this exhibition are Zoe Bergeron, Jiaming Deng, Emilee Espinal, Ariana Gaila, Gabrielle Ghzala LaGuerre, Isabelle Grybow, Yiwei Lu, Ashley McLean, Abby Patterson, Raymond Roggero, Maizy Shepherd, Kiara Terrero, Yenan Tu, Andrew Womack, Jianwei Wu, Wenyi Xu, and Madge Yang. Their work is inspired by celebrated artists, including Lewis Baltz, Tanyth Berkeley, Elinor Carucci, Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, Tracey Emin, Anna Gaskell, David Hilliard, Nam June Paik, Susan Meiselas, Walid Raad, Stephen Shore, Larry Sultan, Peter van Agtmael, Tillie Walden, Karlheinz Weinberger, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Huang Yongping.
