The Light of Coincidence: The Photographs of Kenneth Josephson

The Light of Coincidence is the first career-spanning monograph on Kenneth Josephson (b. 1932), one of the pioneers of conceptual photography in postwar America.

The book gathers work across Josephson's major series, including his best-known Images within Images photographs. It also includes his studies of chance, illusion and the photograph as a made object rather than a passive record. Text by Lynne Warren traces his development from his early studies under Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan at Chicago's Institute of Design through his own long teaching career. A foreword by Gerry Badger situates the work within the wider history of conceptual photography. The University of Texas Press published the 344-page hardcover in 2016.

Josephson taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1967 to 1997 and was a founding member of the Society for Photographic Education. Since the early 1960s, when documentary photography dominated institutional taste, he treated the photograph itself as subject matter. He built images that fold copies, mirrors and multiple exposures into the frame to question what a photograph actually shows. That body of work made him a formative influence on later generations of conceptually minded photographers.