About Time
Gail Rebhan
MACK
English
Text by Sally Stein.
Softcover
144 pages
225 x 254 mm
2023
ISBN 9781913620929
The roots of this book lie in the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY, where Sally Stein and Gail Rebhan met in the 1980s, discovering their shared interests in feminism and critical modes of thinking and seeing – especially those that involved shades of the comic. They stayed in touch over the course of the intervening decades, Stein pursuing teaching and writing about the history of photography while Rebhan pursued teaching and image-making in various formats, with increasing recourse to text as an integral part of her graphic statements. When Rebhan was invited to show a retrospective at the American University Museum, she invited Stein to serve as guest curator.
Led by Stein’s insightful and often humorous commentary, this book charts Rebhan’s unique artistic and political progressions, from early works using serial snapshot photographs to track the repetitive actions of domestic life through to wider-reaching studies of gentrification and inequality her home city of Washington, DC. The publication culminates with her most recent series, which examines the ways her own body bears the marks of time that women especially have learned to fear. Among the incisive, inquisitive, and politically engaged work in this collection, Rebhan’s consistent rejection of photography’s affiliation with stillness and silence in favour of sequence and transformation reveals time itself as the artist’s perennial muse.
(source: https://www.mackbooks.us/products/gail-rebhan-about-time-br-sally-stein-ed)
About the Artist
Gail Rebhan is a Washington, D.C. based photographer and Professor Emerita of Photography at Northern Virginia Community College. She has an M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts and an undergraduate degree from Antioch College. Integral to her various bodies of work is an interest in time and change. She often constructs a conceptual framework that uses sequencing or grids. Much of her art is autobiographical, using her family and herself as emblematic of middle-class, American family. Central to her concerns is an examination of gender, race, and generational roles. With humour, she points out inconsistencies, faults, and problematic behaviour from a social, cultural, and emotional point-of-view.
gailrebhan.com
(source: https://gailrebhan.com/about/)
About the Artist
Dr. Sally Stein, Professor Emerita, Department of Art History, UC Irvine, is an independent scholar based in Los Angeles who continues to research and write about 20thcentury photography in the U.S. and its relation to broader questions of culture and society. She has written about New Deal FSA photographers—particularly Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano—as well as the contested image of FDR. She also has written numerous essays about popular mass media – Ladies Home Journal, Life and Look – along with continuing her study of the various aspects of the rise of color photography. The interrelated topics she most often engages concern the multiple effects of documentary imagery, the politics of gender, and the status and meaning of black and white and color imagery on our perceptions, beliefs, even actions asconsumers and citizens.
sallystein.com
(source: https://www.sallystein.com/)
About the Publisher
MACK is an independent art and photography publishing house based in London. Mack works with established and emerging artists, writers and curators, and cultural institutions, releasing between 20-25 books per year. The publisher was founded in 2010 in London by Michael Mack.
mackbooks.co.uk
(source: https://mackbooks.co.uk/pages/about-u)
