Dennis Tedlock Book Signing for An Archaeology of Architecture
Where: photo-eye Bookstore, 370 Garcia Street, Santa Fe, NM
When: Friday, July 26th, 5-7pm
Contact: Melanie McWhorter
Phone: 505.988.5152 x112
Email: melanie@photoeye.com
Please join photo-eye for a book signing for An Archaeology of Architecture published by University of New Mexico Press with photographs and text by Dennis Tedlock. The book signing will be held in photo-eye Bookstore, 370 Garcia Street, Santa Fe on Friday, July 26th from 5-7pm.
"Walter Benjamin took a radical view of the relationship between writing and photography. He quoted László Moholy-Nagy as having said that 'it is not the person who is ignorant of writing but the one who is ignorant of photography who will be the illiterate of the future,' but then he posed this question: 'Mustn't the photographer who is unable to read his own pictures be no less deemed an illiterate?' He saw photography as a form of inscription, and he urged writers to take up cameras.
"To write toward the historical and ethnographic understanding of a photograph means looking beyond the moment at which it was taken, reaching into the multiplicity of its pasts. In the process, the writer gives the photograph what Benjamin called an 'afterlife,' a life that follows the moment at which the camera brought previous life to an apparent standstill. This is the reverse of documentary photography. The images, instead of being subordinated to a preconceived narrative, are the source of narrative.
"The way is now open for what I call photowriting, the processing of photographs and words by the same person running software on the same equipment. Among the possibilities are montages like the ones I offer here, in which the texts and images complement one another. I hope my reader-viewer will look back and forth across each double-page spread, seeing more in the picture than the words can tell and reading more in the words than the picture can show." - Dennis Tedlock on An Archaeology of Architecture
Dennis Tedlock was raised in Albuquerque and Taos. He studied with Cochiti artist Joe Herrera and, at University of New Mexico, with artists Kenneth M. Adams and Elaine de Kooning, as well as with art historian Bainbridge Bunting. He received his PhD in Anthropology from Tulane University. He worked as a draftsman and photographer for the kiva murals at Pottery Mound, and has done field research at Zuni Pueblo and among the Mayans of Guatemala. Currently he teaches in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo; he has also taught at Brooklyn College, Yale, The New School, Wesleyan, and Boston University. He was co-editor-in-chief of the American Anthropologist and has contributed to many publications as graphic designer, writer, translator, and/or photographer. His books include Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians; Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life; and 2000 Years of Mayan Literature. His current art project, combining texts and photographs, is the source of his newest book, An Archaeology of Architecture, published by University of New Mexico Press in 2013. He has exhibited this work at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, the James Gallery in the CUNY Graduate Center, and the Meridian Gallery in San Francisco. Tedlock has received grants and fellowships from NIMH, NEA, NEH, the Fulbright Commission, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Harvard's Dumbarton Oaks museum and library in Washington, D.C., and the School of American Research in Santa Fe.
The photo-eye Bookstore is located at 370 Garcia Street, Santa Fe, NM and is open Monday through Friday, 10am to 6pm.