Musician/performer, filmmaker, and photographer, Tav Falco guides us through the home towns and gravel roads of America s deep South, the backwoods spiritual sanctuary that he knows so well. AN ICONOGRAPHY OF CHANCE is a psycho-iconography in pictures, with a captioned intertext of the urban specters, rural fables and visual cliches that have made the gothic South a netherworld of dreams and a necropolis of terrors. Roadside icons in Arkansas, Louisana, Mississippi, and Tennessee evoke more than indexed/nuanced signs and meanings; they are infused with emotion, and through Falco s lens become living, breathing images. Whether overtly or discreetly conjured, these images resonate with the undercurrent of sentiment, of betrayal, of lost causes in which the photographer's pictures are soaked. The secret eye of Falco is drawn to that which was overlooked, thrown out and rejected by established norms of perception, whilst his decorticated compositional framing reveals the sadness and nakedness of America forlorn, adrift, and distracted with colliding identities. In Falco's hands the camera excavates an Orphic vision of the American South, penetrating like no other in his stated mission to agitate the dark waters of the unconscious. "

Photography has a unique relationship to chance. Anyone who has wielded a camera has taken a picture ruined by an ill-timed blink or enhanced by an unexpected gesture or expression. Although this proneness to chance may amuse the casual photographer, Robin Kelsey points out that historically it has been a mixed blessing for those seeking to make photographic art. On the one hand, it has weakened the bond between maker and picture, calling into question what a photograph can be said to say. On the other hand, it has given photography an extraordinary capacity to represent the unpredictable dynamism of modern life. By delving into these matters, Photography and the Art of Chance transforms our understanding of photography and the work of some of its most brilliant practitioners. The effort to make photographic art has involved a call and response across generations. From the introduction of photography in 1839 to the end of the analog era, practitioners such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, Frederick Sommer, and John Baldessari built upon and critiqued one another’s work in their struggle to reconcile aesthetic aspiration and mechanical process. The root problem was the technology’s indifference, its insistence on giving a bucket the same attention as a bishop and capturing whatever wandered before the lens. Could such an automatic mechanism accommodate imagination? Could it make art? Photography and the Art of Chance reveals how daring innovators expanded the aesthetic limits of photography to create art for a modern world.

As anyone who has wielded a camera knows, photography has a unique relationship to chance. It also represents a struggle to reconcile aesthetic aspiration with a mechanical process. Robin Kelsey reveals how daring innovators expanded the aesthetic limits of photography in order to create art for a modern world.

Chicanismo, the idea of what it means to be Chicano, was born in the 1970s, when grassroots activists, academics, and artists joined forces in the civil rights movimiento that spread new ideas about Mexican American history and identity. The community murals those artists painted in the barrios of East Los Angeles were a powerful part of that cultural vitality, and these artworks have been an important feature of LA culture ever since. This book offers detailed analyses of individual East LA murals, sets them in social context, and explains how they were produced. The authors, leading experts on mural art, use a distinctive methodology, analyzing the art from aesthetic, political, and cultural perspectives to show how murals and graffiti reflected and influenced the Chicano civil rights movement. This publication is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Furthermore, a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.