MOCA Store Presents George Baker’s Lateness and Longing: On the Afterlife of Photography
Conversation and Book Signing

Join the MOCA Store for an exciting evening celebrating George Baker's latest book, Lateness and Longing: On the Afterlife of Photography (University of Chicago Press, 2023). The evening will feature a lively conversation with Baker and artists Sharon Lockhart and Tacita Dean.

Beginning in the 1990s, a series of major artists imagined the expansion of photography, intensifying its ideas and effects while abandoning many of its former medium constraints. Simultaneous with this development in contemporary art, however, photography was moving toward total digitalization.

Lateness and Longing presents the first account of a generation of artists—focused on the work of Zoe Leonard, Tacita Dean, Sharon Lockhart, and Moyra Davey—who have collectively transformed the practice of photography, using analogue technologies in a dissident way and radicalizing signifiers of older models of feminist art. All these artists have resisted the transition to the digital in their work. Instead—in what amounts to a series of feminist polemics—they return to earlier, incomplete, or unrealized moments in photography’s history, gravitating toward the analogue basis of photographic mediums. Their work announces that photography has become—not obsolete—but “late,” opened up by the potentially critical forces of anachronism.

Through a strategy of return—of refusing to let go—the work of these artists proposes an afterlife and survival of the photographic in contemporary art, a formal lateness wherein photography finds its way forward through resistance to the contemporary itself.

George Baker is Professor of Art History at UCLA and an editor of October Magazine. His prior books include The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (MIT, 2007), the edited anthology Paul Chan: Selected Writings (Schaulager, 2014), Dive Bar Architect: On the Work of D.E. May (LAXART Books, 2018), and a collection of his essays on photography, translated into Ukrainian, entitled Photography’s Expanded Field (IST Publishing, 2018).

Sharon Lockhart is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. In a diverse practice that includes installation, photography, film, painting, and sculpture, Lockhart creates complex interactions between the various media and forms she employs. Her challenging, visually compelling, and socially engaged work investigates choreography, visuality, labor, rituals of daily life, and the way those rituals are played out in space and time. Known for her collaborations that unfold over a long span of time, she works closely with her subjects to understand and depict their worlds.

Tacita Dean is a British European artist whose work is characterized by a sense of history, time, and place, light quality, and the essence of film itself. Born in Canterbury, she lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles, where she was the Artist in Residence at the Getty Research Institute from 2014 to 2015. In 2011, Dean produced the renowned work FILM, as part of the Unilever Series at Tate Modern; shown in the Turbine Hall, the work marked the beginning of their campaign to preserve photochemical film (www.savefilm.org).