A Handful of Dust
David Campany
MACK
Co-Published with LeBal
Softcover
232 pages
220 x 240 mm
2015
ISBN 9781910164389
A Handful of Dust is David Campany’s speculative history of the last century, and a visual journey through some of its unlikeliest imagery. Let’s suppose the modern era begins in October of 1922. A little French avant-garde journal publishes a photograph of a sheet of glass covered in dust. The photographer is Man Ray, the glass is by Marcel Duchamp. At first they called it a view from an aeroplane. Then they called it Dust Breeding. It’s abstract, it’s realist. It’s an artwork, it’s a document. It’s revolting and compelling. Cameras must be kept away from dust but they find it highly photogenic. At the same time, a little English journal publishes TS Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
And what if dust is really the key to the intervening years? Why do we dislike it? Is it cosmic? We are stardust, after all. Is it domestic? Inevitable and unruly, dust is the enemy of the modern order, its repressed other, its nemesis. But it has a story to tell from the other side.
Campany’s connections range far and wide, from aerial reconnaisance and the American dustbowl to Mussolini’s final car journey and the wars in Iraq. A Handful of Dust will accompany Campany’s exhibition of the same name, curated for Le Bal, Paris (16 October 2015 – 17 January 2016), with works by Man Ray, John Divola, Sophie Ristelhueber, Mona Kuhn, Gerhard Richter, Xavier Ribas, Nick Waplington, Jeff Wall and many others, alongside anonymous press photos, postcards, magazine spreads and movies.
About the Artist
David Campany is a London based writer, curator, and artist. He writes about documentary, photojournalism, art, cinema, fashion, archives, and architecture. He has published essays on many artists and photographers including, Paul Graham, Chris Killip, Edgar Martins and John Stezaker. His books include Walker Evans: the magazine work (2013), Art and Photography (2003), Photography and Cinema (2008), and The Open Road: photographic road trips in America (forthcoming in 2014). Campany writes regularly for Aperture, Frieze, TATE, Source, and Photoworks. In 2010 he co-curated Anonymes: Unnamed America in Photography and Film at Le Bal (Paris). In 2012 he won the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Writing.
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.
