Untitled (After Cinema)

This book, the first in the Slought Books Emerging Artists Series, joins photographs by Stefan Abrams with texts by Edward O'Neill, Mary Ann Doane, and Aaron Levy."It is tempting to wonder about the archival fate of Abrams's series, beyond the issue of its mutability, in an era which believes itself to be after photography, after cinema, after television. It is even more tempting, but difficult, to imagine how these photographs will age, since they speak so clearly to our present, a present haunted by the media-annihilating possibilities of the digital. But, we can deal only with our "now," a now in which the photographs are an eloquent testimonial to the crucial imbrication of temporality, memory, and history in the technologies of representation we think we know." -- Mary Ann Doane "If the power of Abrams's images does not depend upon our memories of the films whose single frames they mobilize, it is because rather than something being remembered in Abrams's series--like one remembers the steps of a dance--something is being interrogated as a memory, as something that will not live again in our bodies: cinema and photography as they were and may never be again." -- Edward R. O'Neill