Amir Zaki, Building and Becoming

Hyperrealist photographer Amir Zaki's new monograph covers 20+ years of photographic work, following his widely reviewed book California Concrete: A Landscape of Skateparks. Includes an essay and interview.

A double gatefold sculptural monograph with no singular entry or exit and three spines, Amir Zaki, Building + Becoming opens to a full width of roughly 40 inches and brings multiple series into focus: suspended landscapes, rocks, carvings, and hyper-realist California beach architecture, which like his skateparks (also included), are uncannily quiet and devoid of people. "I am looking for a kind of strangeness within the commonplace ... where something familiar and unfamiliar is initially welcoming yet alienating, using digital technology as a means to an end."

Literary critics Walter Benn Michaels and Jennifer Ashton discuss Zaki's manipulation of space through evenness, which is accomplished by creating a perfectly technically focused object: "The point is not that the pictures overcome physical limits, but that they violate the logic of our eyesight." Referencing the history of landscape and modern photography in California (Edward Weston, Ansel Adams), Michaels and Ashton show that Zaki's insistence on marrying technology seamlessly with this tradition results in continuity, an "addition through subtraction" of the third-dimension.

Zaki has been interviewed for NPR online and featured or reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Los Angeles Times, Seattle Times, as well as having been interviewed in Dezeen, Wallpaper, The New Order, Elle Decor, Hypebeast, GUP Magazine, and Aramco World. His last book, California Concrete is in the top 50 in Skateboarding books and top 150 in Individual Photographer books on Amazon.

Author: Amir Zaki
Publisher: Doppelhouse Press
Published: 04/26/2022
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 4.80lbs
Size: 11.80h x 10.30w x 1.40d
ISBN: 9781954600010

About the Author

Walter Benn Michaels is an American literary theorist and author whose areas of research include American literature (particularly 19th-century to 20th-century), Critical Theory, identity politics, and visual arts. He is the author of several books, most recently The Beauty of a Social Problem; Photography, Autonomy and Political Economy (University of Chicago, 2015). Michaels has produced works connecting postmodernism, neoliberal capitalism, and socioeconomic inequality. Two of his best-known books are Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995) and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (2004)--the latter being adopted from his 2001 essay of the same name.

Jennifer Ashton is Professor of English at University of Illinois Chicago whose research and teaching focuses on poetics and the history of poetry, with a particular emphasis on modern and contemporary American poetry. Her book publications include From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge UP 2005) and an edited volume, The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945 (Cambridge UP 2013). Her articles and essays have appeared in ELH, ALH, Modernism/Modernity, MLN, Interval(le)s, Chicago Review, and numerous edited collections. She is also a founding member of the editorial collective of the arts and politics journal, nonsite.org. She is currently completing a book on the aesthetics and politics of very recent experimental poetry in the United States.

Corrina Peipon is an artist, writer, and curator who lives in Los Angeles.