By Rebecca Morse
128 pages, hardcover, $49.95
Published by DelMonico Books and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
delmonicobooks.com

From its inception, the advertising industry understood that a picture was worth a thousand words: first, to illustrate product, and then—more pervasively—to illicit desire. For decades, strong lines divided commercial photography that manipulated and fine art photography that critiqued that manipulation. But with the advent of social media, online art viewing and digital magazines, those lines have blurred, dissolving the distinctions: content, forms and methods of production all overlap. Rebecca Morse, curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), explores this evolution in Objects of Desire: Photography and the Language of Advertising, a companion book to the museum’s exhibition of the same name, charting the history of commercial imagemaking and creative artistry over the last half century. Using important exhibitions from the ’70s and ’80s as a springboard to talk about recent changes, Morse examines formal qualities, content and systems of production, plus sites and methods of display—including images largely from LACMA’s more-than 20,000-piece photography collection—to illustrate each example. The book contains essays on or interviews with 32 art photographers, including Victor Burgin, Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, plus discourse with Adbusters: Journal of the Mental Environment, Dis and Toiletpaper magazine. The book’s title was inspired by photographer Sarah Charlesworth’s 1980s series of the same name—her first-ever fine art photography to be done in color. Charlesworth would no doubt be amazed that photographers today have the freedom to create art that is the object of desire itself, not just what’s in the picture. —Monica Kass Rogers