The Eternal Substitute

The Eternal Substitute is the fullest account yet of an artist who treats the history of photography as raw material rather than backdrop.

The 228-page hardcover gathers roughly a decade and a half of Oppenheim's work. It spans her documents of art looted or destroyed under the Nazi regime, a botanical survey of trees rendered through camera-less exposure, and a speculative portrait of the Luxembourgish-American photographer Edward Steichen. It was published to accompany Monsieur Steichen, her solo exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg, co-produced with Lët'z Arles and Rencontres d'Arles and curated by Bettina Steinbrügge. The book carries essays from that circle of curators alongside earlier writing on her practice.

Oppenheim works at the edges of the photographic process itself. She remakes negatives as photograms and sun prints, reverses positive and negative, and pairs found or archival images with the specific conditions under which a picture was first made. Earlier bodies of work, including Spine (MOCA Cleveland, 2017) and Billowing (Argobooks, 2013), pursued the same method on other archives. She is represented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery and The Approach, and her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Guggenheim, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.