<p>More than just a history or a biography, Clark Worswick's ArtMachine: A Reinvention of Photography, 1959-1999 is an “insiders” view of the photography world. It has been written by a practicing photographer, who was also the founding photography curator of the oldest museum in America, and who became an important collector of photography.In his introduction to this book, the author wrote, “I began taking photographs and tried to learn the history of a neglected, beaten down, battered medium few people took seriously in the art world. I wandered a world barren of respect during decades of struggle for photography.” “In 1959, on the planet earth, there was not a single dealer who represented a single photographer's work, because photography was not an art.”This is also a book about love and dangerous travel, and the heroic reinvention of photography in the art world. To date, few books have appeared on the texts of a working photographer’s life immersed in projects that cross years, then decades. ArtMachine: A Reinvention of Photography is the story of the long war for photography’s acceptance during the last decades of the 20th century. It was also a historic moment, and a time never to be repeated, when you could buy fabulous pictures that no one anywhere ... knew anything about. Clark Worswick (1940-) was born in Berkeley, California. Abandoning America when he was eighteen years old, for years he travelled between India and Europe. Staying in Maharajas’ palaces, or in indigent pilgrims’ shelters he took photographs, and collected Indian antiquities. In the first wave of young westerners to pass though the Iranian and Afghan deserts, his first book of dangerous travel, The Orchid House: Art Smuggling and Appointments in India and Afghanistan, recounted seldom described travels in far Asia.Art Machine: A Reinvention of Photography, 1959-1999 is the second volume of his memoirs. The book deals with photography’s acceptance, as one of the most dynamic and important adjuncts, in an increasingly international art world. During 1959 he began collecting 19th century photographs in Calcutta. He later became the First Research Fellow in Film and Photography at Harvard University. His exhibitions and books on 19th century photography of India, China, Japan and the Middle East have identified scores of non-European artists working in the medium.Books he has done have been named "Best of the Year" by: The NY Times, The London Times, The Washington Post, The Sunday Times, Newsweek and Time Magazine.</p>

ArtMachine: A Reinvention of Photography, 1959-1999

Arts & Photography

Worswick, Clark

Photography & Video

Midnight LLC

<p>During the 1960s, India came into its own as . . . the place to be. In Istanbul, Tehran, and Kabul, the fabulous freaks gathered for their final push to India. Once there, a whole new world awaited . . . Like the subject of Downton Abbey this book is also a journey into a life and British Empire that has vanished. It was a period of 564 Indian princes, of gigantic palaces, of British armies and native kingdoms, set in a landscape that has disappeared along with a vanished epoch, now inhabited by ghosts. In India, for ten dollars you could live perfectly well for a month. In India dope was even cheaper than food. In India in 1968, the Beatles were meditating in Rishikesh. In India, hundreds of thousands of young firangi had made the long journey from Europe across the deserts of the Middle East to reach the Himalaya. In India, 36,000 miles of the cheapest third-class trains in the world carried travelers anywhere they wanted over an entire subcontinent. In India, hotels cost four cents a night. In India, you dropped out. In India, you could get lost . . .For a brief fifteen-year period (1959-1973), Far Asia was open to foreigners. The difficult three-day crossing of the Afghan Dasht-i-Margo, "the Desert of Death," would become, for those who made it, a memory of one of greatest travel epochs of the twentieth century. Now, however, these overland journeys of the 1960s are as distant from today as the travels of Marco Polo in the thirteenth century. In the twenty-first century, Far Asia has changed completely, along with whole landscapes which have been subsumed by newly created mega cities.The Orchid House: Art Smuggling and Appointments in India and Afghanistan is a rare first-hand account by one of the first “world travelers” of a new generation to reach India at the very end of the British Raj. The book is also about finding art, collecting art, and smuggling art by a man who was amongst the first of a new generation of collectors of Indian art. In Bombay, thousand-year-old Indian art objects could be bought for a few dollars literally on the street pavements.Author’s statement:"In 1959 I was eighteen years old. I travelled to Afghanistan and India, because this was as far away from America as I could get and still be on the planet earth. From San Francisco it was a twenty-seven day ocean trip across the Pacific to Yokohama. In Japan you could take a thirty-four day fourth class deck passage on a dilapidated French ship to Hong Kong. Crossing the hot southern oceans you reached Saigon, Singapore, Colombo, and finally India. In 1959 buying Indian art was not a criminal activity, but taking art out of India was. In 1959 I became an art criminal. My crime was moving my art across international borders.</p>

The Orchid House Art Smuggling and Appointments in India and Afghanistan

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ArtMachine: A Reinvention of Photography, 1959-1999

The Orchid House Art Smuggling and Appointments in India and Afghanistan