Amir Zaki, Building and Becoming

Hyperrealist photographer Amir Zaki’s new monograph covers 20+ years of photographic work, following his widely reviewed book California Concrete: A Landscape of Skateparks. Includes an essay and interview.

A double gatefold sculptural monograph with no singular entry or exit and three spines, Amir Zaki, Building + Becoming opens to a full width of roughly 40 inches and brings multiple series into focus: suspended landscapes, rocks, carvings, and hyper-realist California beach architecture, which like his skateparks (also included), are uncannily quiet and devoid of people. I am looking for a kind of strangeness within the commonplace … where something familiar and unfamiliar is initially welcoming yet alienating, using digital technology as a means to an end.

Literary critics Walter Benn Michaels and Jennifer Ashton discuss Zaki’s manipulation of space through evenness, which is accomplished by creating a perfectly technically focused object: The point is not that the pictures overcome physical limits, but that they violate the logic of our eyesight. Referencing the history of landscape and modern photography in California (Edward Weston, Ansel Adams), Michaels and Ashton show that Zaki’s insistence on marrying technology seamlessly with this tradition results in continuity, an addition through subtraction of the third-dimension.
Zaki has been interviewed for NPR online and featured or reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Los Angeles Times, Seattle Times, as well as having been interviewed in Dezeen, Wallpaper, The New Order, Elle Decor, Hypebeast, GUP Magazine, and Aramco World. His last book, California Concrete is in the top 50 in Skateboarding books and top 150 in Individual Photographer books on Amazon.