Blind Spot & Photo-Based Art, Inc.
orders@blindspot.com
Our Mission
Blind Spot creates unique opportunities for living artists to present significant new photographic work. We provide unmediated platforms where their vision can be expressed without compromise, free of commercial content or editorialization. We slow the pace of absorption and deepen the relationship between a work of art and its audience in order to counter the frenetic proliferation of disposable images that dominates our culture.
Blind Spot Magazine
Blind Spot is a semi-annual art journal that publishes unseen work by living photographers. In Blind Spot, images are given primacy and published collaboratively rather than curatorially, unaccompanied by introductory, biographical or explanatory text. Blind Spot is not about photography, our content is photography. Blind Spot bridges the gap between emerging and established artists, and creates a new context where each can benefit from the company of the other. By publishing accomplished artists on an intimate scale, we strive to enrich and provide direction to our culture. Since its launch in 1993, Blind Spot has featured over 300 living photographers including Uta Barth, Gregory Crewdson, Tim Davis, Rineke Dijkstra, Adam Fuss, and Vik Muniz, many of whom have gained critical and audience acclaim through their exposure in the magazine.
Features are often designed in collaboration with the artists and always showcase new or previously unpublished work. Generally at least one of the six to eight photographers showcased in each issue is an emerging talent. This collaboration of editors, writers and individual artists transforms each issue of Blind Spot into a work of art in its own right.
Blind Spot's minimal editorial content often provides readers with a glimpse of a yet-to-be-published essay or narrative excerpt by one of today's most respected authors. Writers including Joyce Carol Oates, Dave Eggers, Paul Auster and Jonathan Franzen are regular contributors to the magazine.
Utne Reader cited Blind Spot for its design excellence: "The designers of this semiannual journal have created an understated juxtaposition of text and outstanding photography worthy of repeated examination." An archive of the past fifteen years of Blind Spot will be available, in late 2017.
Photo-Based Art, Inc.
In 2004, Blind Spot's founder and publisher Kim Zorn Caputo (1952-2004) established Photo-Based Art (PBA) as an umbrella organization for Blind Spot and its related activities. Kim incorporated PBA as a 501(c)(3) non-profit to ensure the continuation of the magazine that she created 11 years earlier.
Blind Spot Editions
Blind Spot Editions was launched in tandem with the inaugural edition of the magazine in order to offer audiences the opportunity to own a piece of signed, limited edition fine art at an affordable price, and to give artists the opportunity to expose their work to a larger audience. Edition content generally coincides with work presented in each issue. Artists who have created editions include John Baldessari, Edward Burtynsky, Mitch Epstein, Justine Kurland, Richard Misrach, Vik Muniz, and James Welling. To see available Blind Spot Editions, click here.
Blind Spot Books
Blind Spot Books was launched in 2002 with the publication of Richard Misrach's Pictures of Paintings. With eight titles in circulation, each Blind Spot Book lets audiences examine a previously unexplored body of work by an artist who has contributed significantly to contemporary photography.
Blind Spot Events
Blind Spot has been producing public events since its inception: issue-release shows, traveling exhibitions, artists' talks, panel discussions, and more unconventional events like treasure hunts have all served to publicize both magazine and artists. In November of 2007 we produced the day-long "Collapsing Images Forum" as part of the "LIVE at the NYPL" series at the New York Public Library. The conference was comprised of a talk between filmmaker/photographer Jerry Schatzberg and artist Jack Pierson, and two panel discussions: one on the confluence of art and commerce in visual culture, and the other on the idea of truth in fine-art photography that has the trappings (if not always the values) of documentary work. For more information on upcoming events, check our Facebook page.