JTF (just the facts): Published in 2024 by Gato Negro Ediciones (no publisher link, book link here). Paperback, 33.1 x 23.5 cm, 40 pages, with 40 black-and-white reproductions. In an edition of 30 copies. (Cover and spread shots below.)
Comments/Context: One of the lessons I have often heard art school professors try to impart to their photography students is one about the possibilities of mystery in a picture. Many photographs are essentially literal, in that we can quickly understand everything that they are trying to communicate in not much more than a single glance. But if a photographer can intentionally side step that straightforward obviousness, and leave some open (or uncertain) space for potential reactions and interpretations by the viewer, then the image can offer a richer and more complex sense of engagement, one without answers so much as questions.
And while this element of mystery is often a crucial activator for a body of work, as a critic, I generally take it as my responsibility to actually know the backstory to the artist and images I am writing about (when I can), even if the artist has presented his or her work in a more open ended manner. This way, I can do my best to consider (and take into account) the artist’s intention, rather than simply relying on my own arm’s length experience of the pictures, and therefore hopefully communicate a more nuanced analysis of what’s visually (and conceptually) going on.
The artist Alice Zukofsky has entirely frustrated my best intentions to understand her work, in a way that was initially annoying, but has now evolved into something more pleasingly mystifying. I first came across her work a handful of years ago, in the form of her 2019 photobook Him, published by Gato Negro Ediciones in Mexico City. I bought a copy of the photobook, and it sat on my desk for months as I wrestled with it. The only official explanation provided about the book was that it was a “chronicle of a long night”; no summary statement, no artist background, no website link, no nothing, just an engrossingly tactile Risograph-printed black-and-white book. I reached out to the publisher, but never heard back. Inside, it was one unidentified close up enlargement of texture after another – maybe some round cigarette butts seen end on, or some pills, or some fragments of sculptural reliefs, or some meshed screen pixelization images with fingerprints, or any number of grassy wispy woven scratched cracked and splotched things, some perhaps microscopic. The title seemed to refer to a man or a relationship of some kind, but there were no people in this book that I could see, unless there was skin or hair enlarged to the point that I couldn’t identify it. Ultimately, I was so stumped by Him that I gave up and shelved it; a few years later, Stanford art history professor Kim Beil gamely waded into the mystery of Him (her 2022 review is here), but she didn’t fare much better than I did in terms of getting underneath its glorious surfaces.
On a recent wander through Printed Matter here in New York, I came across a new publication by Zukofsky titled Sunset, and I felt compelled to try once again to make sense of this artist and her work. Sunset is once again lushly Riso-printed, once again published by Gato Negro (with no information or book link available on their website), and once again minimally captioned – this time the provided description is “objects, skin, microscopic entities”. A quick Internet search surfaces essentially nothing new about Zukofsky aside from links to her books and an Instagram page in Finnish (here). So we’ve got a Mexican publisher, a Finnish Instagram page, and a new photobook with at least one image of a Los Angeles manhole cover, a bunch of close ups of elegantly textural smashed stuff on concrete sidewalks, a few microscopic enlargements, and a title referencing a sunset, with only a few clouds seemingly present. Perhaps these are things found on a walk down Sunset Boulevard?
But then I stopped myself – clearly all this desperate clue gathering wasn’t what the artist intended, whoever she is. Zukofsky has deliberately made her work somewhat opaque and undefined, and so I should honor that aesthetic impulse by letting go of the instinct to puzzle out some connective backstory. By mixing microscopic images with more conventionally enlarged compositions, she has intentionally made scale a more elusive measure, in many cases pushing recognizability toward abstraction. And regardless of whether we can name any one subject as a crumpled face mask, a dried fruit, a leafy frond, or a smartphone with a cracked screen, Zukofsky has consistently made texture the primary visual variable in her photographs. The Risograph printing of the photobook further amplifies this choice, leading to a visual experience that feels like a parade of eloquently rough surfaces.
The closest visual parallel to what Zukofsky seems to be doing can be found in Irving Penn’s late “Underfoot” series of sidewalk discoveries like chewing gum and matchbooks, but there are connections to be made to various other intriguing projects from the past, all centered on texture as a visual variable: Aaron Siskind’s peeling posters and graffitied walls, Stephen Gill’s sculpturally crumpled betting slips and toilet paper, and Frederick Sommer’s desiccated desert animals all feel like faint echoes. Zukofsky travels many of these same aesthetic roads – there’s even an image of the remnants of a flattened rat that feels like an urban relative of Sommer’s jackrabbit – but she finds a way to make each idea her own, particularly when the tonal subtleties are washed into intricate crispness.
Some of Zukofsky’s scarred and scraped surfaces drift toward crusty all over abstraction, with slivers of shadow adding dark contrasts to otherwise sun-blasted monochromes. She then intermingles strands of stretchy gum and arcs of cracked tile with sinuous (and sometimes gooey-looking) microscopic images of skin and other less identifiable subjects, balancing the dryness of her road subjects with more organic finds. Her visual world is stained, flattened, pock-marked, and dirty, but that doesn’t mean it’s not quietly allusive and beautiful in its own way.
Zukofsky’s Sunset is hard to pin down, but it’s also a powerful reminder not to overthink my engagement with photography. Her photobooks ask us to engage them with openness, offering cropped down photographic textures as a subject in and of themselves. In the end, this doesn’t mean I’m not still somewhat curious about Zukofsky and her larger artistic story, but I’ve settled down just a bit. I’ve let go of restlessly searching for “right” answers and have instead embraced the concept of reveling in smartly crafted visual experiences that are altogether more undefined.
Collector’s POV: Alice Zukofsky does not appear to have consistent gallery representation at this time, nor do there seem to be obvious ways for collectors to reach out to her, so purchasing her photobooks may be the best option for those collectors that want to follow this mysterious trail further.
