Amy Blakemore ─ Photographs 1988-2008

Amy Blakemore (b. 1958) is renowned for her deceptively simple photographs of friends, family, and local landscapes. Her images, featured here for the first time in book form, evoke fleeting aspects of personality and memory and have been shown in numerous exhibitions, including the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Blakemore has worked for the past twenty years with low-tech, medium-format Diana cameras known for flaws that produce a flattened perspective, color shifts, vignetting, and blurriness. Blakemore manipulates these flaws to capture the way memory simultaneously records and distorts visual information, creating photographs that are familiar and mysterious—both documents of the present and suggestions of times past. Presenting some forty works that range from Blakemore’s black-and-white images of the mid-1980s and color photographs in the 1990s to her recent focus on the figure, the book brings together images that seem to record casual, spontaneous moments but also hint at a larger narrative.