Jan Dibbets, The Photographic Work

Dutchman Jan Dibbets (b. 1941) is one of the principal artists to have introduced photography into the plastic arts. Beginning in 1967, he embarked on a long-range project that, as we advance into the twenty-first century, he seems not to have abandoned: the pictorializing of photography. At a time when photography has massively invaded contemporary art institutions-not without generating confusion and excess-it is possible to lose track of how radical Dibbets’s approach was. This radicalism has nothing to do with modernist overkill. Dibbets did not merely go further than others; he went elsewhere. This books covers almost fifty years of his photographic oeuvre.