"Lateness and Longing explores the ongoing nostalgia and cultural longing for traditional photography--the kind that captures a fleeting moment in somebody's life in emulsion and lives on long after that person is gone. With digital innovations, many scholars are apt to declare traditional photography "dead," not just in terms of the documentary and emotional functions it has served but in its materiality as well. But the analog has never gone away, Baker argues, rooted as it is in our understanding of time, history, home, mortality. This book examines the renewed curiosity about the material photograph through the work of four contemporary artists, all women: Tacita Dean, Moyra Davey, Zoe Leonard, and Sharon Lockhart. Baker draws on their practices to build a meditation on photography and its kin as aesthetic instruments for reflection, loss, nostalgia, desire, history, and "lateness.""--

George Baker is professor of art history at UCLA, and an editor of October magazine. His recent books include The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris, the edited anthology Paul Chan: Selected Writings, and Dive Bar Architect: On the Work of D. E. May.