Hyperrealist photographer Amir Zaki's new monograph covers 20+ years
of photographic work, following his widely reviewed book California
Concrete: A Landscape of Skateparks. Includes an essay and interview.
A double gatefold sculptural monograph with no singular entry or exit
and three spines, Amir Zaki, Building + Becoming opens to a full width
of roughly 40 inches and brings multiple series into focus: suspended
landscapes, rocks, carvings, and hyper-realist California beach
architecture, which like his skateparks (also included), are uncannily
quiet and devoid of people. "I am looking for a kind of strangeness
within the commonplace ... where something familiar and unfamiliar is
initially welcoming yet alienating, using digital technology as a means
to an end."
Literary critics Walter Benn Michaels and Jennifer Ashton discuss Zaki's
manipulation of space through evenness, which is accomplished by
creating a perfectly technically focused object: "The point is not that
the pictures overcome physical limits, but that they violate the logic
of our eyesight." Referencing the history of landscape and modern
photography in California (Edward Weston, Ansel Adams), Michaels and
Ashton show that Zaki's insistence on marrying technology seamlessly
with this tradition results in continuity, an "addition through
subtraction" of the third-dimension.
Zaki has been interviewed for NPR online and featured or reviewed in the
New York Times, Art in America, Los Angeles Times, Seattle
Times, as well as having been interviewed in Dezeen, Wallpaper,
The New Order, Elle Decor, Hypebeast, GUP Magazine, and Aramco
World. His last book, California Concrete is in the top 50 in
Skateboarding books and top 150 in Individual Photographer books on
Amazon.
