The Stillness of Hajj Ishmael: Maxime Du Camp’s 1850 Photographic Encounters, iUniverse, 2010.
“Ballerini’s cross-textual approach is crucial to our understanding of photography’s role in relation to both visual and textual means of representation. Her choice of Du Camp is also key in that it shifts to the focus from art to the commonplace. We see nineteenth-century France and the Orient through the eyes of Du Camp, his work ‘a larger-than-life example of the bourgeoisie itself and its reactions to change at home and to the foreign abroad’ (p.xviii).” Keri Yousif, Visual Resources, Vol.xxvii, No.4, December 2011, 388.
The Unforgotten
Stories in the Unforgotten, ranging from a novella to flash narratives of merely a paragraph, are populated by a variety of characters. Among them: Luisa, a beloved childhood servant in Peru, who disappears inexplicably. A child writes that her mom has a lover, a grownup word for boyfriend. Gertrude, whose lifelong collection of sophisticated words fades into dementia. Charles, a grandfather in a white nightgown and bobbing nightcap, chases a bull away from his wife’s beloved rose garden. A mother tells her child a story of a joyous snail with a will to live. Adrianna, now a grandmother, reminiscences about a college year in Paris with her best friend who later committed suicide. Henry, working in a research lab, befriends a rat he names Eloise.
Sequence(con)Sequence: (Sub)Versions of Photography in the 80s, Editor and contributor. Aperture, 1989.
Responding to the visual onslaught of our times, this book presents nineteen leading contemporary photographers whose work explores the multifaceted viewpoints of our information culture. The images, reproduced in full color, are joined by three essays. Julia Ballerini describes ways in which the works eschew traditional linear narrative while William S. Wilson and Lori Zippay view them in the contexts of other media––particularly literature and video.
Carolee Schneemann: Recent Work, Documentext, 1983
A response to Carolee Schneemann’s work of the ‘80s. A groundbreaking performance and multidisiplinary artist, her paintings, collages, films and videos since the 1960s have shattered taboos. As in all her work, that of this decade explores and explodes assumptions of the acceptable, the heroic and the trivial, the personal and the political, the cultural and the organic.
Pontormo's Diary, Collaboration with Rosemary Mayer and Richard Milazzo. Out of London Press, 1982
This publication reproduces the manuscript of the Diary along with its first English translation. Written in the two years before his death in 1556, Pontormo records his diet, the weather, and his deteriorating health along with references to the bodies he was painting in the church of San Lorenzo, his last fresco cycle never to be completed and since destroyed. “Thursday the arm and at night I had an omelet.” Thirty-two color plates reproduce sculptures, watercolors, and hand-bound books from 1970 to 1981 by Rosemary Mayer, metamorphoses of Pontormo’s painted whorling bodies. “Unheard of things happen. Expect them,” she writes in her introduction. Julia Ballerini and Richard Milazzo’s essays respond to the passages within each artist and from one to the other.