Ebook: The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy

Bertolt Brecht once worried that our sympathy for the victims of a social problem can make the problem's 'beauty and attraction' invisible. In this work, Walter Benn Michaels explores the effort to overcome this difficulty through a study of several contemporary artist-photographers whose work speaks to questions of political economy. Although he discusses well known figures like Walker Evans and Jeff Wall, Michaels's focus is on a group of younger artists, including Viktoria Binschtok, Phil Chang, Liz Deschenes, and Arthur Ou.