SHOWCALLER by Talia Chetrit

Mack Books, 2019 First edition, 138 pp., 8 1/2" X 11 1/2", Softcover

Fine

Showcaller is the first book exploring the work of emerging artist Talia Chetrit. It brings together a broad range of her work made between 1994 and 2018 and is linked to a retrospective museum exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in early 2018. The title Showcaller is a theatrical term which references the performative aspects of Chetrit’s work, the power dynamic between subject and photographer, and, ultimately, between the photographer and her audience.

The earliest works included were made when Chetrit was a teenager and she adroitly collapses and shuffles images from across 24 years and neutralizes the space between family portraits, teenage friends, intimate sex pictures, self-portraits, staged murder pictures, still-lives, and street photographs, to name just a few of the subjects and genres her work adopts. Regardless of the subject matter or the technique with which the image is made, her focus lies on researching and unveiling the basic social, conceptual, and technical conditions of the genre of photography. Her work is imbued with a desire to control the physical and historical limitations of the camera, to trace its manipulative potential, and to question the relationship between photographer and subject.