Back on the Shelf

Filter Photo is pleased to present, Back on the Shelf, a photo book exhibition, juried by artist and co-founder of SKYLARK Editions, Paul D’Amato. 

"The photo book has been inseparable from the evolution of photography itself.  Since the invention of the camera, books on photography have accompanied every technical, stylistic, and conceptual iteration of the medium. We can trace this from Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature in 1844, to the latest addition to Photo-Eye Books or, for that matter, to the books on display here at Filter Space. The book is both a celebration of photography’s reproducibility and a refutation of the preciousness of one of kind objects. And, just as photography is the most democratic of all art forms, the book is the perfect vehicle for making photography available to as many people as possible. 

We all own books and they’re all different. The way a book functions, including its binding and structure, can vary as widely as the kind of work contained within it. This show is a celebration of all that. Each book here, in its own way, has a conceptual integrity that is clear from the title to the binding, paper, image quality and text, to the final end-sheet. The result, on display in this exhibition, is a testament to how varied and alive the visual book still is in the face of all things digital and remote."

—Paul D'Amato

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Featured Artists

Garth & Pierre Amundson-Gour

Sandra Bacchi

Sophie Barbasch

Barbara Ciurej & Lindsay Lochman

Troy Colby

Hellen Colman

Pamela Connolly

Shannon Davis

Sarah Eckstine

Dana Fritz

Henry Horenstein

Joseph Hud

Evan Hume

Dia Jade

Daniel Kariko

Victor Kataev

Erinn Kathryn

Sadie Lookabaugh

Holly Lynton

Sara Macel

Alessandro Mallamaci

Stacy Mehrfar

Laila Nahar*

Bob Newman**

David Obermeyer

Brian O'Neill

Jordan Putt*

David Ricci

Heather Evans Smith

Kira Trinh

Jeffrey Wolin

Torrance York

**Juror's Choice

*Honorable Mention

About the Juror

Paul D'Amato (American, 1956- ) was born in Boston where he attended Boston Latin School at the height of racial unrest, civil rights, and bussing. He moved to Oregon to attend Reed College and claims to have learned as much from traveling cross-country four times a year—often by hitch-hiking and hopping freight trains—as he did in class. After receiving an MFA from Yale School of Art, he moved to Chicago where he discovered the communities of Pilsen and Little Village. The pictures and writing D'Amato produced there over the next fourteen years were made into the book, Barrio.

His most recent book of images made in the African-American community on the west side, entitled Here/Still/Now, was awarded the Lucie Foundation Book Prize in 2018. He has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, and a Rockefeller Foundation Grant to Bellagio, Italy and his work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago among many others.

In 2016, D’Amato co-founded SKYLARK EDITIONS and has been the co-editor and publisher of an eclectic range of photography books. SKYLARK EDITIONS is a non-profit publishing project that provides a platform for the creation and distribution of innovative photo books by emerging and established artists.

This exhibition was partially sponsored by The Illinois Arts Council Agency.

Exhibition Dates: February 3rd - March 31st, 2023

Location: Filter Space | 1821 W Hubbard St, Suite 207