Hardcover with original cloth backdrop tip-in and printed edges
140 pages, 73 plates
8.25 x 10.5 in / 209.55 x 266.7 mm
Edition of 748
ISBN 978-1-942953-84-5
TBW Books is pleased to announce the publication of California Anonymous: 1976–1978, a new monograph by artist Ken Light.
In the mid-1970s, a young Ken Light set up a hand-painted canvas backdrop on street corners and in vacant storefronts across California in Stockton, Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Fairfax, inviting passersby to have their portrait made. In return, each subject received a Polaroid of themselves. The resulting photographs, made between 1976 and 1978, are the product of a photographer growing into a new instrument—a Hasselblad, a camera that gave the images a luminous, large-format quality unlike anything in his previous documentary practice.
What Light assembled over those two years is an extraordinary cast of characters that would be impossible to replicate today: a beauty queen, a mechanic, neighborhood kids, a taxi driver, the young and the old, the straight-laced and the remnants of a fading counterculture. Brought together by a simple canvas stage, they reflect a California in transition—different cultures, different values, an undiscriminating view. Light's backdrop welcomed everyone equally, lifting each subject into the frame and preserving them there, specific and irreplaceable.
The book is also a memento of the early part of a remarkable career. Original notes from the start of the project are included, offering a rare glimpse of an artist beginning to inhabit his medium and find his voice—exploring that unique and charged relationship between subject and photographer, made all the more deliberate by the formality of the large-format camera and backdrop.
Each copy of this book contains a four-by-four-inch square cut from that original canvas—the very backdrop Light painted with a sponge mop and carried with him throughout the making of the series.