Retroactive Books

TAKING SIDES A new artists book of text and image by Karl Baden Photos & text; 105 pp; 9"h x 6"w; wraps, 1st printing of 100 copies + 18 A.P & H.C. TAKING SIDES is both a personal document and real-time account of Boston's bout with Neo-Nazis and white nationalists on August 19, 2017. Photographed in a period of four and a half hours, it is an event-based observation on the supreme importance and perils of First Amendment free speech . From the book description: "TAKING SIDES begins in 1977, and a remembrance of the infamous attempt by Neo Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois (At the time, Baden was living in Chicago, only a few miles away), then jumps 40 years ahead, to the rally and counter-protest on Boston's Common, and ends the next day, at the same location, with an unexpected and sobering encounter. Everything comes at a cost." Price: $40 USD + $8 shipping To purchase copies: email badenk@gmail.com Sample Pag

Thermograph Published 2017, in conjunction with a one-person exhibition  at Miller Yezerski Gallery, Boston MA Softcover, 32 pages Afterward by Richard Audobon Price: $12 USD plus shipping To purchase copies:  email badenk@gmail.com From the exhibition essay: In 2016, Karl Baden unearthed a series of photographs he made in 1976, bringing to light another dimension of the many approaches characteristic of his work.  Thermographs 1976 is a series of vintage, black-and-white photographs that have maintained, if not increased, their mystery and vitality over the past four decades. Baden applied analog photo-manipulation techniques in-camera, to create images that verge on the abstract and ethereal, before such alterations became popularized and simplified through digital means. Through  tonal manipulation and selective 'halation'-- creating a glowing halo in the highlight areas, the resulting work subverts conventional notions

T he Americans by Car 180 pages, Softcover Publication Date: 2016 A book of photographs and a conceptually-based study in influence,  The Americans by Car contains 83 color photographs   taken by Karl Baden from inside automobiles. With  Robert Frank's classic,  The Americans, (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Lee Friedlander's America by Car )   in mind,   Baden decided that  no new photographs would be made for the book; instead,  he combed his archive of images and  came   up with   83 color photographs he had already taken, primarily from his car,  between 2006 and 2016,  each having some correspondence to a picture from The Americans . Baden's photos follow the exact sequence of the 83 images in the 1958 Grove Press edition of Frank's Americans . The book contains a Jack Kerouac forward, and an afterward  by Robertson Leigh. Each copy signed and numbered. Price:   $45 USD plus shipping. To purchase copies:  email badenk@gmai