Ordinary Pictures

This catalogue is the first critical anthology to trace how contemporary art has grappled with the generic, mass-produced image. It accompanied one of the more ambitious photography surveys the Walker Art Center has mounted this decade.

The book is organized around the stock photograph as both commodity and cultural symptom. It gathers conceptual and picture-based work by roughly 40 artists working since the 1960s. Among them: John Baldessari, Sarah Charlesworth, Anne Collier, Robert Heinecken, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Stephen Shore, and Wolfgang Tillmans. Four essays anchor the volume. Eric Crosby contributes the title essay. Lane Relyea writes on the shift from picture reading to information handling. Thomas Beard contributes "Recommended Practices." Eva Respini closes the volume with a dictionary-format piece on ordinary pictures in the internet age. The design departs from a conventional catalogue layout: reproductions of the same works repeat across spreads, echoing stock-photo licensing sheets and undercutting the aura of the singular artwork. A flexidisc bound into the volume adds an audio component.

Eric Crosby curated the exhibition, on view in the Walker's Target and Friedman Galleries from February 27 through October 9, 2016. It sits within his broader curatorial focus on photography, conceptual art, and the circulation of images across commercial and institutional systems.