Speaking in Pairs : Facing a Portrait

Portraits allow immortality. This book asks: Who gets to be pictured and seen? Who may tell their story? Such evidence of being present, alive, can increase visibility or hasten our demise. Speaking in Pairs seeks to offer navigational references across time and geography, between works and the practitioners making, or pondering, them. It considers art's historical and contemporary response to oppression and crisis, and offers representation to those impacted by extraordinary events. Contributions from Elisabeth Biondi, Noelle Théard, Susan Meiselas, Camilo Vergara, Hans Haacke, Dennis Adams, Michael Lobel, Elisabeth Sussman, Hanna Schygulla, Thomas Lang, Florian Feiner, Francesca Esmay, Olaf Peters, Tess Hamilton, Paul Messier, Stanley Burns, Liz Burns, Peter Cohen, Benjamin Hett, Marvin Heiferman and others. More than eighty contributors—artists, historians, lawyers, doctors, writers, curators, and more—come together for this conversation, which presents works, books, posters, and ephemera to visually illuminate the connections between vernacular photography and art, nobody and somebody, the personal and public. An array of viewpoints blurs the lines between artists, curators, and other subjects, and between non-fiction and fiction.