Jan Dibbets: The Photographic Work

Dutchman Jan Dibbets (b. 1941) is one of the principal artists to have introduced photography into the plastic arts. Beginning in 1967, he embarked on a long-range project that, as we advance into the twenty-first century, he seems not to have abandoned: the "pictorializing" of photography. At a time when photography has massively invaded contemporary art institutions—not without generating confusion and excess—it is possible to lose track of how radical Dibbets's approach was. This radicalism has nothing to do with modernist overkill. Dibbets did not merely go further than others; he went elsewhere. This books covers almost fifty years of his photographic oeuvre.