BOOK REVIEWS BY REBECCA HACKEMANN

These reviews are published either on the back of the book or on academic websites through choice reviews.

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Humanities
Art & Architecture - Architecture

59-3393

NA1997

MARC

Review Written by Rebecca Hackemann

The Women who changed architecture, ed. by Jan Cigliano Haertman. Princeton Architectural, 2022. 336p bibl index ISBN 9781616898717, $50.00.

This volume charts the biographies and career trajectories of 121 women architects, starting in the 1850s, and presents examples of groundbreaking work. Women have expanded architecture as a field, weaving together new forms of working and engaging with different populations, media, and sites. But though women have been working as architects for more than 100 years, they have been absent when it comes to awards and industry accolades. Traditionally, women architects were relegated to drafting in large architecture firms or designing interiors, kitchens, public housing, and landscapes and gardens. The book traces some of the shifting frames of this struggle over many generations. These women designed large bold projects and lived long, productive, and complex lives. Just like their male colleagues, they taught and wrote and engaged in other professions (e.g., photography). The book's co-publisher, the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, asks that readers use the book not as a chronology per se but rather as a framework for understanding generational shifts of power. As such, it serves as an extensive catalog of women architects that is far more exhaustive than other recent, similarly themed books. One cannot help but be encouraged and inspired by the vivid professional and personal life stories. Summing Up: Highly recommended. -- R. Hackemann, Kansas State University

Choice Vol. 59, Issue 12
Aug 2022

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Humanities
Art & Architecture

60-2498

N470

CIP

Review Written by Rebecca Hackemann

Shaked, Nizan. Museums and wealth: the politics of contemporary art collections. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 288p bibl index ISBN 9781350045750, $90.00; ISBN 9781350045767 pbk, $29.95; ISBN 9781350045774 ebook, $26.95.

This book is a treasure trove of revelatory, detailed information on capitalist systems in the museum world. The amount of material Shaked (California State Univ., Long Beach) brings together is unrivaled by any other volume to date. She offers critical analyses of various interconnected factions in the art world, exposing economic strategies employed by museums and collectors as well as the financialization of art. Drawing on Marxist theory and case studies of artworks and museums, the author describes conflicts of interest within museums and problematizes the legal and administrative use of a categorical public within public/private partnerships. She also charts intermediate and long-term changes aimed at distributing wealth and funds in egalitarian ways. Mandatory for those interested in art history, art administration, and fine art, Shaked's book is relevant for anyone even remotely involved in the art world—museum studies in particular. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. -- R. Hackemann, Kansas State University

Choice Vol. 60, Issue 9
May 2023

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Humanities
Art & Architecture - Photography

60-3417

TR139

CIP

Review Written by Rebecca Hackemann

A World history of women photographers, ed. by Luce Lebart and Marie Robert; tr. by Ruth Taylor and Bethany Wright. Thames & Hudson, 2022. 504p bibl index ISBN 9780500025413, $85.00.

This long-overdue book covers photographers and work that even experts on the subject will have missed. Including women photographers from 1949 to the present, Lebart and Robert attempt to redress the imbalance of male-dominated photography history. The introduction reviews previous histories of women photographers from various countries and backgrounds. Each page of this book provides a surprise. Especially thrilling are never-before-seen images of war and the workplace, in which photographers Käte Buchler and Olive Edis show women in male professions. Even in the 19th and early 20th centuries, female photographers abounded, working full time for newspapers and science organizations, as architecture photographers, and as portraitists. The book also reveals the professional roles women played in other spheres of society and in a variety of professions reaching back into the early 1900s, challenging the stereotype that women worked only in the home. The book is organized chronologically by year of birth, and the text provides information about each photographer. Spanning both technique and conceptual concerns, the book provides a deep understanding of the inner workings of the artists as photographers and their motivations and opinions about photography itself. A must-have for anyone interested in photography, especially for scholars interested in the history of photography. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. -- R. Hackemann, Kansas State University

Choice Vol. 60, Issue 12
Aug 2023

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Humanities
Art & Architecture

61-1824

NX180

MARC

Review Written by Rebecca Hackemann

The new public art: collectivity and activism in Mexico since the 1980s, ed. by Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra. Texas, 2023. 304p bibl index ISBN 9781477327623, $45.00; ISBN 9781477328859 ebook, contact publisher for price.

The essays in this collection provide some interesting examples of socially engaged/activist works and indoor museum works from Mexico. The essays examine topics as disparate as the Mexican drug wars and earthquakes, and some of the contributors offer long personal memories thereof, told in first person. However, contrary to what the title professes to cover ("new public art"), the majority of examples do not appear to fall into the commonly accepted definition of public art, namely, that it be at the very least outdoors and/or a socially engaged collective project. In fact, some essays look at gallery installations. In addition the essays offer little to no contextualization of recent literature and theory on the topic of public art—for example, relational aesthetics or the social turn that might allow one to place these works in a broader theoretical context. That said, artwork discussed, which ranges from indoor sculptures to collectively embroidered handkerchiefs, emanates from Mexico and the diaspora, so in that one sense The New Public Art is valuable for giving less-known artists greater (and well deserved) exposure. Summing Up: Optional. Professionals; general readers. -- R. Hackemann, Kansas State University

Choice Vol. 61, Issue 7
Mar 2024

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Humanities
Art & Architecture - Photography

62-0300

TR184

MARC

Review Written by Rebecca Hackemann

Citizens of photography: the camera and the political imagination, ed. by Christopher Pinney. Duke, 2023. 369p bibl index ISBN 9781478020004, $109.95; ISBN 9781478020769 pbk, $29.95; ISBN 9781478093619 ebook, contact publisher for price.

Various authors in this collection present case studies on "World Systems Photography," a concept that requires further development yet seems to exist mainly as a counterpoint to dominant, Western photographic history and theory. The authors, whose styles vary greatly, describe and analyze vernacular photographic practices and social photographic phenomena, such as the photographic studio as the site for identity transformation in small towns in India. The book untangles and references the shooting, editing, and social processes and impacts of photography through the lens of various political and social events in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Greece, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Nepal, and India, to name a few. For example, readers experience the relationship villagers have to vernacular photography within their communities. The introduction has 11 chapters, not listed in the chapter index, that seem to be disconnected and underdeveloped in their argumentation, yet interesting nevertheless due to the unusual examples. Each chapter contains four to seven subchapters. However, for the careful reader, untold stories of unknown photographers and cultural tropes emerge that reveal worlds of photographic and ethnographic practice from many countries often ignored by Anglo-American historians. How do other cultures use photography? This volume answers this question and analyzes the results. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers through faculty. -- R. Hackemann, Kansas State University

Choice Vol. 62, Issue 2
Oct 2024

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Humanities
Art & Architecture - Fine Arts

62-1854

N7630

MARC

Review written by Rebecca Hackemann

Judah, Hettie. Acts of creation: on art and motherhood. Thames & Hudson, 2024. 272p bibl index ISBN 9780500027868, $39.95.

Acts of Creation contains analysis and contextualization of a variety of well-known examples of artists' works whose subject matter engage the theme of motherhood. This includes the depiction of mother and child through time in art, the politicization of childbearing, and the myth of the mother and child as archetype across art history dating as far back as 6000 BC. The pregnant body is explored, as are a slew of contemporary works, including multimedia, photography, painting, and film, by artists such as Renee Cox, Louise Bourgeois, and Gunvor Nelson. Another chapter analyzes mother’s work such as invisible maintenance work, as well as the artist as mother and the "monsterous" child. The book, which sits between an art book and a literary work, accompanies the exhibition at Hayward Gallery’s Southbank Center and includes handsome matte color illustrations. Some might argue, however, that it is spread too thin by including such a vast time period, omitting seminal artists such as Katharina Bosse and Joe Spence, whose work engages this subject; other works are all too familiar. Yet they are placed in a unique theoretical and critical context, presenting a complicated and complex artistic feminist perspective on a much ignored subject in art and the history of labor. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals. -- R. Hackemann, Kansas State University

Choice Vol. 62, Issue 8
April 2025

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Humanities
Art & Architecture - Fine Arts

62-1856

N6480

MARC

Review written by Rebecca Hackemann

Scanlan, Suzanne M. Esther Pressoir: A modern woman's painter. Lund Humphries, 2024. 152p bibl index ISBN 9781848226005, $44.99.

In Esther Pressoir, Scanlan (Rhode Island School of Design) tells the stunning, untold story of a woman painter’s life and oeuvre, and it will interest many readers today. The book features many unseen reproductions of her portraits of women, a topic the book focuses on. The work is brilliantly interwoven with her fascinating life story. Her brief marriage, life in the closet, her time in Paris drawing portraits of those women she met, and bicycling around Europe while drawing are only a few of the highlights. Pressoir is another painter whose work has been left out of the story of art history. Her work deserves to be studied more and added to the history of art as it is retold in new editions. Summing Up: Recommended. Undergraduates through faculty. -- R. Hackemann, Kansas State University

Choice Vol. 62, Issue 8
April 2025

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Humanities
Philosophy

62-2915

BH221

MARC

Review written by Rebecca Hackemann

Stone, Alison. Women on philosophy of art: Britain 1770–1900. Oxford, 2024. 304p bibl index ISBN 9780198917977, $105.00; ISBN 9780198918004 ebook, contact publisher for price.

In this volume, Stone (Lancaster Univ., UK) presents a study of the dissemination methods and interrelationships of women philosophers in the long 19th century in Britain. Not only does it outline the various unusual methods of disseminating such theories but it also catalogues and analyzes the actual work of previously overlooked writers, dating from the Enlightenment to early modernism, who wrote mostly in the many journals at the time. Often writing under pseudonyms, topics include genius, gender, art and religion, beauty, and literary criticism in what is described as a “pre specialist public sphere,” before disciplinary boundaries were firmly set (p. 291). This book is a great study of the literary landscape as well as of actual philosophies developed by many overlooked female writers in Great Britain. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty. -- R. Hackemann, Kansas State University

Choice Vol. 62, Issue 12
Aug 2025

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INTRODUCTION to book written by Rebecca Hackemann

Indifferent West, on Daniel Mirers photographs, 2025

Clothbound Hardcover with Dust Jacket

Published by Fort Amsterdam Press

200 pages & 107 images

ISBN: 979-8-218-80214-1

A salient visual investigation into the mythology, commercialisation and environmental disruption of the Western landscape.

Edited by Jorge Daniel Torres de Veneciano  and designed by James Wawrzewski , the book brings together text and image in an exploration of signs, symbols, and irony in the contemporary landscape. It features:

• An introduction by historian Rebecca Hackemann

• An extended interview with the artist by curator Winke Wiegersma

• Short interpretive essays by scholar Jorge Daniel Torres de Veneciano

                       Indifferent West, which refers to the title of the series and the book,may be described as a retrospective exhibition and book, showing more than 120 photographs taken by the artist-photographer Daniel Mirer between 1998 and 2025. The photographs in this extensive volume were taken in over 30 years of periodic road trips in the Southwest of the United States. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Indifferent West at Elliott Gallery, Amsterdam, in the Fall of 2025, this book invites readers to delve into Daniel Mirer's ironic world of dystopian landscapes, stamped with surreal elements and remnants of architecture, industry, and human habitation. It has been my pleasure to get to know Mirer’s work over several decades and to travel with him on occasion and watch him work, stopping the car every few minutes and walking off, up a hill or into a vista, to craft an image of what strikes his eye. Having grown up in New York City’s Bronx neighborhoods in the 1970s, as Mirer has, the desert would be perhaps the furthest and most different kind of place one can imagine for a young photographer to visit. I shared his fascination with the desert, as someone who grew up in Germany and England, perhaps the furthest one could imagine from a hot desert. The idea of the road and its cultural production is one that many photographers have taken on throughout the history of photography.The road trip in American culture is a right of passage for many youth. “Being on the was a great counter cultural act - [that] going on a roadtrip was a way of separating yourself from the risk-averse masses, with their daily commutes and sanitized routines - and yet at the same time, [that] spending time on the road is something you needed to have done to have the true experience of America.” (McWilliams Brandt, pg. xii). Stories like Easy Rider, The Electric Koolaid Acid Test and Thelma and Louise and so many more films and books enforced the mythologies about the roadtrip. It is also a right of passage for families - squashed into a car, with a three month summer holiday, many families took and still take to the road as a cheap holiday. To Europeans this seems odd uncomfortable and expensive  - but in the past and even today - driving is less expensive than flying or going by train with low gas prices and a landscape and a journey that is the destination. Women of course had to cook on these journeys, usually at camp sites or in caravans and campers. But these journeys bring families together and also in-between allow time to dream, meditate, think and read books, so I am told by American friends who share these memories. As a European immigrant to this country I have discovered that the true adventure of the road trip is also had by retired Americans, who receive a free National Parks pass at age 65, allowing them to visit the 63 national parks and 100;s of state parks free of charge. While in Europe you might receive a rail pass in retirement in America you receive your pension and this Parks Pass. The result is 1000’s of American in their RV’s traveling for months on end. Remember this country is so large that one can decide to drive to where ti is warm - in the winter they drive south to Florida, New Mexico, California and Arizona. A true visual adventure however can now only be found if you do not take the main interstate highways which are quite monotonous One must take the byways named as such as they often run along the high ways “by” the highway (just like the buildings, they were not destroyed but left to decay in the hot sun). Here the speed limit is 55 or 60 allowing you to look at the landscape more easily while driving. This is exactly what Mirer does, discovering the lost vestiges of past roadside attractions before the highways were built. In the countryside of the Southwest and beyond, with the dramatically different spacial architecture of the land - in other words, there is so much space - buildings are rarely torn down. It is not uncommon to find 3 generations of gas stations within 50 feet of each other. The new building is simply build nearby and the other is left to decay away in the baking hot sun. In some cases the byways are so underutilized there is only a 60 year old gas station to be found and no new one to replace it, leaving it at times hazardous to travel on these roads with no services or utilities.. One might argue that the roads themselves have been left to decay just as the old facilities have. With no cell reception or GPS, one has to go prepared, making such “original” road trips, perhaps counter cultural again?

Mirer explores the Southwest of the United States via the American byways for what they can offer visually and conceptually. On a derelict byway one can feel as if one might be the last human being on earth. In peculiar ways it is soothing, as all the distractions, voices and noise of everyday life fall away leaving the mind very focused. As such the desert frees the mind of an artist to focus, to wander, to get lost in the surroundings.

Photographs, according to the photographer Martin Parr, are best contemplated and studied in book form. The book allows us to immerse ourselves in images, while seated comfortably, in the quiet of a private space. It invites us to travel to a different world—a world of the desert, in our case, the derelict, the surreal and the world of photography itself, seen through the lens of Daniel Mirer’s vision.

The book additionally includes an extensive interview with the artist, conducted by Winke Wiegersma, Curator at the magazine Foam (Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam), and an essay by Jorge Daniel Torres de Veneciano, Scholar in Residence at Hofstra University in New York. In his eloquent essay, Torres de Veneciano weaves together visual influences from Weston and McCauley to ideologies of colonialism and climate change, and the politics of water—all related to Mirer’s images, which document a changing yet ever surreal region that never ceases to fascinate us all. Both Wiegersma and Torres de Veneciano also go into greater depth on Mirer’s practice as an artist who uses photography, as well as his thought processes and  conceptual methodologies. Their contributions serve to further elucidate Mirer’s oeuvre, which has long been under-recognized and deserving of a retrospective review. The exhibition at Elliott Gallery, alongside this book, is a stunning start.

Indifferent West will inspire both novices in the photographic arts and experts in the history of photography. The 120 images have been thematically organized and edited by Mirer and Torres de Veneciano. The pilgrimage to such Southwestern states as California, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Kansas is one that many photographers have undertaken at one time or another, especially those, like me, who have lived in large crowded places, be they in Europe, New York City, or “da Bronx,” where Mirer was born and grew up. Encountering the desert landscape after city living, being confronted with the nothingness, the nowhereness, stillness and beauty is a special kind of experience that leaves one feeling as if one might be the last human left on earth, an experience one can only describe with difficulty if one has not encountered it. As Mirer notes in the interview with Wiegersma in this volume, “Coming from a metropolis of vertical space, the horizontal broadness and endlessness of the West dwarfed my ego. You become insignificant.” Following in Baudrillard’s footsteps, in his literary quest to America in 1970 (as Torres de Veneciano points out in his essay), Mirer first travelled to the Los Angeles area from New York, via car, to attend graduate school, always with his potted cacti in the back seat.

The experience of the desert is memorable for anyone who encounters it for the first time. One is fully aware of the romanticism and idealized histories imposed on this landscape by films and media. One is also aware of the complexities of the spatial perception and reality. Mirer notes in his interview, “These hyperreal and romanticised depictions are indifferent to the various forms of economic, human, and environmental exploitation that the land and its Native inhabitants have been subjected to throughout history.” This book will allow you to revisit Mirer’s version of what he sees and imagines there in this surreal void, yet culturally and historically vibrant space.

In the artist’s photographic imagery we encounter cacti (of course!), unused old canyon mines, desert ponds and ancient American cars, as well as empty swimming pools in the middle of nowhere, strange surreal road signs, old closed cafes, roadside attractions from another time, all decayed by decades in the Southwestern sun. The images are grouped together across timelines, which enables the viewer to identify themes across time, with images spanning several decades. While some images seem almost impossible to fathom, others seem carefully constructed. They seem crafted, in fact, to juxtapose a depiction of the collective imaginary of the Southwest with the reality of it—as fantasy of the Southwest. For example in the image entitled “Mount Whitney, Lone Pine, California,” the painting on the side of the motel looks like a perfect replica of the background landscape of said hotel, leaving the hotel to seem like an imposter, a joke with it’s little snow pile in front of it. Yet in “Pure American, San Jose Cemetery, Albuquerque, New Mexico” a local graveyard is juxtaposed with a billboard advertisement for guns, reminding us of the harsh realities of life in America. The graveyard itself appears ad hoc, ancient, not very well maintained. The weather is not idyllic but cloudy, and the image sits in contrast to the well-known idyllic desert landscapes we have come to know so well in American color photography. Likewise “Apache Motel and Cowboys Bar, Nevada” shows both racial appropriation by a motel advertisement using an image of a Native American and a pipeline with a dirt stream in front of it. The stream makes one think of pollution; it is something many photographers who are interested in the sublime in nature, might crop out. An historical link might be made to the famous Ansel Adams image, in which he cropped out the famous pipeline, in favor of a beautified sublime, painterly landscape with a black horse miniaturized in the foreground, Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California, 1944.

In the image titled “Calico Real Estate, Stagecoach NV” (date??) we see depicted a derelict real estate agency - its dilapidated state and the sign advertising new real estate presents an innate irony as it is embedded in the overgrown landscape that frames it - one imagines in a decade it might completely disappear under foliage. In other images, the juxtapositions are political, exposing inherent contradictions in American culture, such as the intense opposition to abortion in many rural areas, insisting on any life to keep living, and the simultaneous insistence, embedded in the constitution, that anyone can have a gun. These topics are often embedded in signage old and new by the road - for example “Pregnant? Worries? Arizona (date??). In “Pure American, San Jose Cemetery” we see a banner advertisement with a machine gun on it juxtaposed with a cemetery. It is as if Mirer is re-presenting America’s idea of itself back on itself to question it once again in the image, exposing inherent contradictions that need to be photographed to be re-contemplated and re-seen. Themes such as prostitution, abortion, alcohol, guns and cacti emerge within the signage on these byways. Simultaneously,  these photographs and others like them, have created their own new mythologies within the world of photographic history. Finding such gems as dilapidated buildings, cars left in the desert are motifs that have been much loved by many. The large scale of his prints allow the viewer to immerse herself into the landscape the way renaissance paintings do, filling the field of vision. If you have been on an “off the beaten path” roadtrip, you will also know that it can be harsh, devastatingly hot and hazardous, which makes experiencing the large scale photographic images even more pleasurable.

Another theme that emerges for me in these images consists of using the photographic frame to group humorous elements. In many of the photographs (and also ones not shown in the book), we see bizarre groupings of outside or inside infrastructural objects such as drinking fountains, plastic cacti and or benches, that appear to have their own personalities. One might image, as in “Red Clay Building and Fountain” (date??) that the driving fountain, cactus and toilet sign are having a meeting and deciding where to place themselves. We see a similarly surreal and ironic juxtaposition  of usually insignificant architectural appendages in  “Cactus Street Corner, Arizona” - the street bollards, giant cactus street pole and door appear as characters in their own story, grouped together by the photographic frame as main elements, to be looked at as main characters within the landscape. The viewer’s eye is directed away to the building’s architecture (which the framing might suggest) but rather to these usually unnoticed banal and superfluous utilitarian objects that are part of urban geographies and urban infrastructure,  designed to be unnoticed. Yet here they present themselves as the main characters at last. In “Alien Cathouse, Nevada” (date?) A tire inflation machine and water machine for cleaning cars is juxtaposed with the brothel advert for the Alien Cathouse - apparently pointing to meeting all the needs of a certain type of traveller. Together the framing of these elements reveals the banal in urban architecture, taking the photographer Louis Baltz as inspiration to color and beyond to a more ironic realm.

Devoid of direct human presence, and in conclusion, Daniel Mirer’s imagery offers a unique perspective and eye for surreal detail, which are evident throughout this body of work. It offers viewers a deeper understanding of the complex relationship and interplay between various cultural aspects of America, between different cultures, human civilization in the desert environment, and the phantasy of the American road, all imposed on this landscape, yet revealing other pragmatic truths regarding environmental concerns, water, tribal nations media representations. With ample nods to new topographics and other prominent genres in the history of Western American landscape photography since 1970, the result is a rare treat of color photography that presents both analog and digital photography of the Southwest region from 1998 to 2025.

Rebecca Hackemann,  2024

Palm Springs, CA