Monographs and Artist's Books
New Catalog by the George Eastman Museum
with text by William T. Green and Keith F. Davis
This publication accompanies a retrospective exhibition at the George Eastman Museum (February 5-June 20, 2021), which spans Carl Chiarenza's career, beginning with early photographs the artist made as an undergraduate student at Rochester Institute of Technology in the 1950s and concluding with a large selection of his most recent work in collage. The illustrated catalogue, with essays by William T. Green and Keith F. Davis, provides readers an opportunity to follow the continuities and ruptures in Chiarenza's artistic journey as his career enters its seventh decade.
New Monograph by LensWork
with text by Bill Johnson
65 images, 72 pages
Book dimensions: 9" wide by 8" tall
In this volume, we are delighted to bring attention to Carl Chiarenza’s important 1988 monograph, Landscapes of the Mind. This museum-quality hardbound is now an expensive collectible that is difficult to find. Chiarenza’s images, however, are still as captivating and mesmerizing as they were in his 1988 publication. If you’ve not seen his book, perhaps the images in this LensWork Monograph will explain why we are so motivated to introduce Chiarenza to those who might not be acquainted with his creative vision — which, by the way, continues. Many of the images in this LensWork Monograph are new, and demonstrate Chiarenza’s evolving vision and his ongoing explorations of landscapes of his mind.
This catalog is available for $20.00 from The Anderson Gallery, University at Buffalo, 1 Martha Jackson Place, Buffalo, NY 14214
This catalog explores how Chiarenza's images from the 1960s and 70s present a vocabulary of abstraction that would be further developed in his ongoing series of photographed collages,
started in the 1979, constructed from scrap materials, as well as his move from working primarily with single photographs to the production of sequential
images in order to expand on concepts of photographic time and space.
Author: Robert Hirsch
David R Godine, Boston, 2008. 128 pp. 6 x 7-1/4"
In the pages of this small-format book, we see displayed the fruits of an entire career... a testament to an artist of extraordinary power, intelligence, and imagination who asks the view to move, "from with the accessible and familiar to the realm of the unknown."
Author: Elizabeth Schlatter
Nazraeli Press, Portland, 2006. 84 pp., 18 tipped-in duotone reproductions, 10 x 13"
This artist's book, Chiarenza's senior thesis of a half-century ago, explores the theoretical verbal/visual world of words and pictures through practice. This facsimile edition is limited to 250 copies, made possible by a grant from the Joy of Giving Something.
Author: Carl Chiarenza
Peace Warriors of Two Thousand and Three
Nazraeli Press, Portland, 2005. 40 pp., 24 duotone reproductions, 14 x 17"
Photographs made in 2003 as a response to the Iraq war. Coming out of Chiarenza's sense of impotence and frustration at world events, these collages shed their abstraction and do indeed resemble warriors, but these are warriors for peace. An original print adorns the cover.
Author: Carl Chiarenza
Lodima Press, Revere, PA, 2005. 24 pp., 10 duotone reproductions, 9-1/2 x 8-1⁄2"
The photographs featured here were made especially for this book—a continuation of Chiarenza's examination of the metaphorical possibilities of photography. "What is here cannot be said... calm, harmonious retreats. Silent, yet swollen with sound."
Author: Gabriella Chiarenza
Nazraeli Press, Portland, 2002. 96 pp., 80 duotone and four-color reproductions, 12 x 12"
Evocations is Chiarenza's second major monograph. Bringing together a selection of 80 of the artist's most important photographs from the mid 1980s to 2000, this beautiful volume documents Chiarenza's prolific artistic output over almost two decades.
Author: Robert Koch
David R Godine, Boston, 1988. 160 pp., 97 tritone reproductions, 11-3/4 x 11-3/4"
In his first major monograph, beautifully printed in tritone, offset lithography, the work of Carl Chiarenza is finally given its proper light. Known for his writing and teaching at Boston University and the University of Rochester, Chiarenza had up to 1988 rarely published his work. This collection of nearly one-hundred images spans three decades, from 1958 to 1986.
Authors: Estelle Jussim, Charles Millard, Carl Chiarenza
Other Books
Little Brown & Company, Boston, 1982. 283 pages; 74 duo-toned b & w plates plus 198 text illustrations; 9.5 x 11.25 inches.
An important biography and critical survey of Siskind's work. Chiarenza wrote the original text of this book as his PhD at Harvard University in the late 1960s, the first dissertation to be written about a living photographer.
Photographs by Aaron Siskind; text by Carl Chiarenza; foreword by James L. Enyeart.
Nazraeli Press, Portland, 2005. Hardcover, 5 1/2 x 7 1/4, 16 pages, 1 duotone plate, 1 original photograph.
The title of Stu Levy’s One Picture Book is also an anagram of the book’s subject, Carl Chiarenza. Levy’s “Grid Portraits” – in which multiple photographs of his subject, taken from various perspectives and distances, are combined to create one portrait – have been exhibited widely and are featured in many important collections throughout the United States. Cranial Czar, Eh? folds out map-like from its hardbound case. Very limited quantity.