Adam Fuss

by Eugenia Parry

Adam Fuss has emerged as one of the bold and truly creative artists utilizing photography today. Fuss's photograms clearly break from those of his predecessors, Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy, and Talbot, and while striking a chord of homage, the images redefine how and what we see in pictures, viscerally and intellectually. Like an eighteenth-century experimenter, Fuss utilizes organic and raw materials in an unusual approach, revealing spiritual and emotional process. Live snakes, the entrails of rabbits, eggs, cow liver, sperm, flowers, and stained glass circumscribe the vital, often mysterious energies emitted from these pictures. This book, the first major monograph of the artist's work to date, has been widely acclaimed as one of the finest art books of 1997. The reprint appears in conjunction with the artist's mid-career retrospective at the Fotomuseum, Winterthur, Switzerland.

Genres: Photography

144 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Zefyr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fuss tried things with the tools of photography that are so brilliant it makes me want to spit. Some of his images leave me thinking about breathing. Five stars for that.

I'd have liked if the images from given series were grouped together and with information immediately local to them, rather than Parry's starting essay (which frankly I found myself skimming as it kept running so abstract as to feel more about her interest in Fuss than about Fuss himself) at the front and referencing the prints grouped seemingly randomly in the back. I kept having to flip forward and backward for no apparent reason.