Zoe Strauss: 10 Years

Hardcover
270 pages, 11 x 10 ¼ in.
250 color + 15 b/w illus.
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2012
ISBN 9780876332337

With little formal training as a photographer or an artist, Zoe Strauss (born 1970) founded the Philadelphia Public Art Project in 1995 with the aim of exhibiting art in nontraditional venues. Five years later, she began using photography as the most direct means of representing her chosen subjects.

Zoe Strauss: 10 Years offers a midcareer assessment of Strauss’s achievement to date, and the first full account of her celebrated ten-year project, beginning in 2001, to exhibit her photographs under an elevated section of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia.

Strauss’s troubling and sometimes touching images focus primarily on American working-class experience, to convey what she calls “an epic narrative that reflects the beauty and struggle of everyday life.” Generously illustrated, this book includes nearly two hundred photographs—135 of them published here for the first time—along with images that document her I-95 exhibitions. With critical essays by curator Peter Barberie and photography historian Sally Stein, plus a text by the artist herself, a bibliography, and a chronology, this is the most definitive publication to date about this important young artist.

Peter Barberie is the Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Sally Stein is professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine. Zoe Strauss is an artist from Philadelphia.