Artists Zoe Leonard, Tacita Dean, Sharon Lockhart, and Moyra Davey persist in exploring obsolete modes of analog photography and film. Lateness and Longing: On the Afterlife of Photography examines these artists’ use of bygone objects and histories to elaborate on a new model of photography in the present, one tied to a politics of lateness and anachronism. This book aims to turn photography’s “lateness” to critical task, producing a new reading of a strain of contemporary art.

George Baker is the author of The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (MIT Press, 2007), James Coleman: Drei Filmarbeiten (Sprengel Museum, 2002), and Gerard Byrne: Books, Magazines, and Newspapers (Lukas & Sternberg, 2003). A New York- and Paris-based critic for Artforum magazine throughout the 1990s, he also works as an editor for the journal October and its publishing imprint October Books. He has received fellowships from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the Getty Research Institute. He is an associate professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, where, since 2003, he teaches modern and contemporary art and the history of photography.