Stills

This slim, haunting volume gathers for the first time the complete Stills, Sarah Charlesworth's 1980 series of fourteen large-scale photographs depicting anonymous figures caught mid-fall or mid-jump from buildings, images she appropriated and re-photographed from newspaper wire sources.

Charlesworth printed the images at over six feet tall, a scale that turns a fraction-of-a-second news photograph into a suspended, almost architectural event. Seven of the fourteen were shown in 1980 at her dealer's apartment; the remaining seven were not printed until 2012, when Charlesworth made a unique artist's proof edition from her original negatives for the Art Institute of Chicago. This book, with an essay by curator Matthew S. Witkovsky and a foreword by Douglas Druick, is the first time the full series has been reproduced or exhibited together.

Charlesworth (1947-2013) was a central figure of the Pictures Generation alongside Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman, using appropriated mass-media imagery to interrogate representation, spectacle, and the photographic image itself. Stills remains one of the starkest and most direct works of that circle.