BRUCE NAUMAN, SOL LEWITT, JOHN BALDESSARI, ANNETTE MESSAGER, BOYD WEBB ET AL. | Artist and Camera, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1980

Exhibition catalogue published by the Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1980, with an introduction by Miranda Strickland-Constable. Softcover, square format, 22.5 × 21 cm, 60 pages, illustrated throughout in black and white. ISBN 0-7287-0259-2.

Artist and Camera was a national touring exhibition that brought together eighteen artists — Bruce Nauman, Sol LeWitt, John Baldessari, Annette Messager, Boyd Webb, Christian Boltanski, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Victor Burgin, John Hilliard, Joseph Kosuth, Richard Long, Jan Dibbets, Gilbert & George, William Wegman, Stephen Willats, Mac Adams, Tim Head and Simon Read — around a question that now feels almost ordinary: what happens when artists use photography without necessarily becoming photographers? Organised by Tim Harvey, the exhibition toured from the Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield, through Stoke-on-Trent and Durham to Cartwright Hall, Bradford, placing Conceptual and photographic practice within the regional public-gallery system.

The cover, by Boyd Webb, immediately establishes the problem. A man kneels on bare floorboards beneath a suspended mattress, reaching toward a suitcase inside a deliberately constructed room. The photograph reads somewhere between performance, sculpture, staged fiction and documentation — exactly the territory the exhibition was attempting to define.

The catalogue is more than a sequence of plates. Sol LeWitt's section reprints his landmark 1967 Artforum text Paragraphs on Conceptual Art beside photographic studies of geometric structures; the camera appears not as his medium but as another instrument through which an idea can move. The Bruce Nauman pages return to early photographic actions — Eating My Words, Bound to Fail, Feet of Clay, Coffee Spilled Because the Cup Was Too Hot, Waxing Hot, Finger Touch with Mirrors, Self Portrait as a Fountain — accompanied by writing drawn from Jane Livingston's 1972 LACMA catalogue. Mac Adams contributes work from The Mysteries, staged photographic sequences that operate like crime-scene evidence without a resolved crime. Annette Messager places appropriated, cut and recombined imagery beside her own writing on familiar images, fiction and reality. The remaining sections range across Baldessari, Boltanski, the Bechers, Burgin, Hilliard, Kosuth, Long, Dibbets, Gilbert & George, Wegman and Willats — not because they shared a photographic style, but because each had found a different use for the camera.

The title Artist and Camera is precise in its positioning. This is not a survey of contemporary photography. It is an exhibition about photography becoming one of contemporary art's operating systems: document, sequence, typology, proposition, narrative device, performance record and means of testing how images construct meaning. Twenty-three years later, the Walker Art Center's The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960–1982 would historicise substantially the same territory. In 2003, "artists using photography" could be presented as a history. In 1980, Artist and Camera was still circulating the question.

Condition: Good overall. Front wrapper comparatively clean; rear wrapper with substantial staining, toning and surface marking consistent with age and storage. Minor edge wear and occasional internal handling marks. Text and plates remain strong throughout.