Piotr Uklanski: The Joy of Photography

Piotr Uklanski’s The Joy of Photography series is named after a Kodak handbook for amateur photographers that has equipped generations of enthusiasts with the techniques necessary in their quest for the perfect shot. However, in the age of the digital camera, the practices advocated in the Kodak manual are now rarely deployed. «The guy who buys a special filter in order to better photograph the sunset has disappeared,» laments Uklanski. For this project, adopting this near-obsolete manual as a guide, Uklanski set out on a hunt to redeem its ideas and its perspectives. Exceptionally colorful and coolly artistic, the 50 photographs collected in this book flirt with abstraction, frequently eluding easy comprehension. This volume is the first complete presentation of Uklanski’s nostalgic homage.\nThe New York-based conceptual artist Piotr Uklanski was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1968. He has had solo exhibitions at Gavin Brown’s enterprise and at The Museum of Modern Art’s project space in New York.\n\nPiotr Uklanski was born in Warsaw, in 1968, and lives in New York and Paris. His projects have been exhibited in group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Manifesta 2, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, P.S.1, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York’s Sculpture Garden. He also took a picture of curator Alison M. Gingeras for the advertisement/project Totally my ass (Piotr Uklanski’s Untitled (GingerAss)), which appeared in the September 2003 issue of ArtForum.\nGeoffrey Batchen, an Australian cultural critic, currently teaches the history of photography at CUNY Graduate Center in New York. His latest book is Each Wild Idea: Writing Photography History and an exhibition he is curating on photography and memory will open at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in March 2004.