Michael Hampton

The following commentary was written about three books by Richard Long from the late 1970s: “Throughout these publications, the photographs are definitive records of moments within a landscape, whether of a single geometric form made with material from the particular terrain, or a composed view of a landscape from within the duration of a journey. Where a sculptural form has been introduced into the landscape, this will occupy a central, foregrounded position within the image. The language is di…

In Unshelfmarked: Reconceiving the artists’ book, Michael Hampton vets the medium’s history, postulating a new timeline that challenges the orthodox view of the artists’ book as a form largely peculiar to the twentieth century. Post-Deweyed, these works form an entirely new corpus, showcasing the artists’ book not as a by-product of the book per se, but both its antecedent and post-digital flowering, many salient twentieth-century features proleptically flickering here and there through time, it…