Created as a poetic and visual journey, Touchless Automatic Wonder spans twenty-five years and four continents. These striking photographs capture “found text”: the sometimes mysterious, occasionally humorous, often cryptic presence of words in the everyday landscape. In Koch’s lyrical sequencing, the images reveal obscure and eccentric voices in their various and distinctive roles on the daily stage of the world around us. This intriguing approach at the intersection of language, image, and the social landscape will appeal to readers interested in contemporary art and photography, popular culture, and conceptual concerns both literary and visual.
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“Lewis Koch takes the weird world and makes it look real.”—Barbara Crane, artist/photographer and professor emerita, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
“Absolutely brilliant! A real trip down Memory Lane, Lover’s Lane, Tornado Alley, the Valley of the Dolls, Clowntown, Garages of the Damned, Flanders Fields, the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Buddha Pest, Can’t Stop Now, Be Still, Get Well, Go to Hell, Hill and Dale, and Dullsville. Koch’s camera eye is like a fist that punches the daylights out of the nightmares we call life. His word pictures are the ransom note we write to death.”—Michael William Doyle, author of Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 70s
About the Author
Lewis Koch is an artist whose work draws upon aspects of photography, text, sculpture, video, and assemblage. His work has been shown in sites from garages to museums with solo exhibitions in New York, London, Brussels, Seoul, Toronto, Los Angeles, and Chicago. His photographs are in permanent collections throughout the United States and Europe, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Maison Européenne de la Photographie–Paris, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art–Chicago. As artist-in-residence at Copenhagen’s Fotografisk Center in 2001, Koch created the Web project Touchless Automatic Wonder, which was the precedent for this book.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonder of wonder,
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This review is from: Touchless Automatic Wonder: Found Text Photographs from the Real World (Hardcover)
I have owned Lewis Koch's book, Touchless Automatic Wonder, for about a month and have looked at it many times. It is slowly revealing new gems to me, adding more each time I review the pages. That's what really good poetry does and I think this book is a very rich poem. Mr. Koch has engaged and firmly grasped nothing less than the wonder of existence, the wonder of wonder. I see the book not so much about seeing in the optical sense, but about an inner seeing, a seeing beyond the physical realm that we experience every day, seeing into a spiritual realm and asking the big question: "Who are we and what is our responsibility".
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonder What It's About?,
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This review is from: Touchless Automatic Wonder: Found Text Photographs from the Real World (Hardcover)
"I like seeing things and I like words. There is something revelatory about the two together, an almost pentecostal feeling of seeing in tongues," writes Madison, Wisconsin-based photographer, Lewis Koch, in the introduction to his photobook Touchless Automatic Wonder (2009).
Seeing in tongues -- an incisive metaphor for this carefully considered sequence of seventy-nine images redacted from photographs made on four continents over a period of twenty-five years. Right-brain and left-brain rub against each other, sparking enigmatic word-in-image productions, leaving us, well, wondering. Many of the images in Koch's book could be generally described by the phrase "things fall apart," so prevalent is the theme of entropy. Small town Vietnam war memorial, Wisconsin, USA (1990) is startling in that a list of names on a war memorial have been permitted to be reduced to state of utter dishevelment. Soldiers' names, the memory of their sacrifice, are given the same kind of indifference they were subjected to by their government in the first place. In summary, Koch takes the "garbage" of our everyday life, the fragments of surviving stuff scattered about, and takes responsibility for it, in a visual sense. He's a bricoleur making intelligent pictorial concatenations of our cultural leftovers, conferring different meanings and possible functions on these fragments and pieces, permitting us the pleasure of joining him in wondering about all that stuff out there. This new photobook will be a welcome companion on your bookshelf next to those classics, Evans's American Photographs and Frank's The Americans. James Hugunin, Professor of Art History, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
5.0 out of 5 stars
I feel frustrated, and re-think about text media,
By Duncan Wong (EyesCoffee.com from Hong Kong) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Touchless Automatic Wonder: Found Text Photographs from the Real World (Hardcover)
I feel a bit frustrated in writing a review for the book, Touchless Automatic Wonder - Found Text Photographs From The Real World, by Lewis Koch. It is because text media is believed to be one of the most 'accurate' media in humankind. Say, for a piece of music or a movie, as the last resort, we will go back to read a review that is written as text, hoping to find the ultimate answer out of that media. On text, Lewis succeeded in the process to deconstruct, and then reconstruct, and rediscover new value and meaning via images, and simply let it speak for itself. Now I am doing the opposite thing.
Because of its 'accurate' nature, we are sometimes still treating text media like myth. To some extent, we limit our sense. Follow the flow, you will feel enjoyable and fruitful in reading the images thoughout the book. One evening, holding the book on hand, and I puzzled. I saw the title, and I saw the cover photo, that is a huge finger sign hanging, the ground covered with snow, and some shops or houses in the background. My heart was beating, and I smiled because I felt like I was peeking into the memory of Lewis. A very inspiring reading experience. An amazing book.
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