MARGET
LONG
Mathew Brady’s Skylight
Artist Books
Hunting Blinds
Nature Valley
Film + Video
MARGET
Mathew Brady’s Skylight
Artist Books
Hunting Blinds
Nature Valley
Film + Video
Rearranging Canon Balls, 2012
In 1873, Brady was forced into involuntary bankruptcy, losing his entire negative collection to his creditors—lawyers, suppliers, and even his own studio staff. Nearly 140 years later, Annie Leibovitz came close to defaulting on a $24 million loan, risking the loss of her negatives and future image rights to the Art Capital Group, self-proclaimed “bankers to the art world.”
Long’s grid of photomontages combines archival materials from Brady’s bankruptcy papers at the National Archives, newspaper clippings, Brady Studio photographs, fragments from iconic Leibovitz images, and photographs Long made in a shuttered commercial portrait studio in Hudson, New York.
The works ask: what are the ties between photographic culture and debt? Between representation and speculation? And how are images—and those who make them—caught in cycles of value, exhaustion, and risk?
This work was published in Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, November/December Issue, 2012. [PDF]