Quitting Your Day Job: Chauncey Hare’s Photographic Work
Robert Slifkin
MACK
English
Softcover, with flaps
242 pages
140 × 220 mm
2022
ISBN 9781913620073
Quitting Your Day Job: Chauncey Hare’s Photographic Work is the first critical biography of the American photographer Chauncey Hare (1934–2019). Although Hare experienced a significant, if fleeting, degree of professional success, including a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1977, an Aperture monograph, and three Guggenheim fellowships, his work has not received the critical attention it deserves and his extraordinary life story remains obscure. This lack of recognition has much to do with Hare’s fanatical aversion to the commercial realms of the art world even at the height of his professional success. Perhaps his most overt declaration of aesthetic disavowal was his ultimate decision to renounce his identity as an artist in 1985 and pursue a career as a clinical therapist specialising in ‘work abuse’. Hare would subsequently donate his entire archive to the Bancroft Library at the University of California with the provision that any reproduction of his work must include a caption that states that the photograph was created ‘to protest and warn against the growing domination of working people by multinational corporations and their elite owners and managers.’
Quitting Your Day Job considers the vexed relation between art and politics that defined Hare’s career, drawing upon largely unexamined archival materials, new interviews and analysing Hare’s brilliant and moving photographs alongside the prolix and oftentimes bathetic prefaces he wrote for the three collections of his photographs. The book presents a wide-ranging critical account of Hare’s life and art, suggesting the ways in which his work continues to resonate with contemporary concerns about the reach of corporations into everyday life, documentary photography’s longstanding complicity with the politics of liberal guilt, and art’s vexed relation to elite channels of power.
(source: https://www.setantabooks.com/products/quitting-your-day-job-chauncey-hares-photographic-work)
About the Artist
Chauncey Hare 1934-2019, does not define himself as a photographer, but instead an engineer, a family therapist and, above all, a protester. He spent only a short period of his life making photographs. Frustrated by the photo art world, he photographed only intermittently to 1985, when he stopped making photographs altogether. In 2000, distrusting art museums, Hare donated all his photographs and negatives to The Bencroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. He and his wife Judith Wyatt are co-authors of the denial-breaking clinical handbook Work Abuse: How to Recognize It and Survive It (1997). As a licensed family therapist Hare now helps working people – in person, on the phone, and on the internet – minimise the abuse they suffer as workers in their corporate and government jobs.
(source: https://www.cafelehmitz-photobooks.com/en/hare-chauncey/)
About the Author
Robert Slifkin is associate professor of fine arts at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. He is the author of Out of Time: Philip Guston and the Refiguration of Postwar American Art. He lives in New York City.
(source: https://books.google.ie/books/about/The_New_Monuments_and_the_End_of_Man.html?id=m8iXDwAAQBAJ&source=kp_author_description&redir_esc=y)
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-us)
