Artist and Author: Amir Zaki
Essay by Jennifer Ashton and Walter Benn Michaels
Interview by Corrina Peipon
Design and Typography by Chris Svensson

Gold medal recipient for 2022 PubWest Book Design Awards in the photography category

10.6 x 9.8 inches, 272 pages, hardcover

Published in 2022

ISBN: 9781954600010

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Co-published with DoppelHouse Press, Amir Zaki’s Building + Becoming brings together 272 pages of full color work by the Orange County, CA–based hyperrealist photographer, accompanied by an interview with curator and writer Corrina Peipon and an essay co-authored by critics Jennifer Ashton and Walter Benn Michaels.

Building + Becoming is a sculptural monograph, designed as a double gatefold which opens to a full width of roughly forty inches, allowing the reader to explore both sets of images and texts in different combinations. The multiple series by Zaki captured within these sets address, respectively, the built and the natural, including rocks, carvings, suspended landscapes, and manipulated California beach architecture. Like his skateparks these environments are uncannily quiet and devoid of people.

Corrina Peipon’s interview with Zaki explores the artist’s personal history and concerns about photography and technology. “I am interested in the attraction and repulsion that a photograph which depicts something familiar and unfamiliar, initially welcoming yet somewhat alienating, can elicit in a viewer and me. I am looking for a kind of strangeness within the commonplace. Ultimately, I use digital technology as a means to an end. I am trying to make photographs that manifest the world I desire.”

Jennifer Ashton and Walter Benn Michaels’ essay offers insight into Zaki’s manipulation of space through "evenness," which is accomplished by creating a perfectly technically focused object: “The point is not that the pictures overcome physical limits, but that they violate the logic of our eyesight.” Referencing the history of landscape and modern photography in California, Michaels and Ashton show that Zaki’s insistence on marrying technology seamlessly with this tradition results in continuity, an “addition through subtraction” of the third-dimension.

Amir Zaki received his MFA from UCLA in 1999 and has been regularly exhibiting nationally and internationally since. Zaki has had over 30 solo exhibitions at institutions and galleries and has been included in over 50 group exhibitions in significant venues including The California Biennial: 2006 at the Orange County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Western Bridge in Seattle, the California Museum of Photography, Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Nevada Museum of Art. He has published three prior monographs and has been featured in Phaidon’s survey Vitamin Ph as well as the anthology Both Sides of Sunset: Photographing Los Angeles.

Jennifer Ashton is Professor of English at University of Illinois Chicago whose research and teaching focuses on poetics and the history of poetry, with a particular emphasis on modern and contemporary American poetry.

Walter Benn Michaels is an American literary theorist and author whose areas of research include American literature (particularly 19th-century to 20th-century), Critical Theory, identity politics, and visual arts.

Corrina Peipon is an artist, writer, and curator working as an independent consultant in Los Angeles. Peipon has previously held roles as director of The Pit in Glendale, CA, and Honor Fraser gallery in Los Angeles, CA, and as assistant curator of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, CA.

DoppelHouse Press is a character-driven publisher that focuses on memoir, art, architecture, design, and music, often encompassing histories of migration and diaspora. Their mission is to bring together a plurality of voices to examine the dynamics between socio-political forces and aesthetic forms.

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