Zoe Strauss: 10 Years

Edited by Peter Barberie
With essays by Peter Barberie, Sally Stein, and Zoe Strauss

With little formal training as a photographer or an artist, Zoe Strauss (born 1970) founded the Philadelphia Public Art Project in 1995 with the aim of exhibiting art in nontraditional venues. Five years later, she began using photography as the most direct means of representing her chosen subjects. Zoe Strauss: 10 Years offers a midcareer assessment of Strauss’s achievement to date, and the first full account of her celebrated ten-year project, beginning in 2001, to exhibit her photographs under an elevated section of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia.

Strauss’s troubling and sometimes touching images focus primarily on American working-class experience, to convey what she calls “an epic narrative that reflects the beauty and struggle of everyday life.” Generously illustrated, this book includes nearly 200 photographs—135 of them published here for the first time—along with images that document her I-95 exhibitions. With critical essays by curator Peter Barberie and photography historian Sally Stein, plus a text by the artist herself, a bibliography, and a chronology, this is the most definitive publication to date about this important young artist.

About the Authors
Peter Barberie is the Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He is also the author of Looking at Atget and Dreaming in Black and White: Photography at the Julien Levy Gallery (with Katherine Ware), both published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Sally Stein is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine. Zoe Strauss is an artist from Philadelphia. In 2006 she participated in the Whitney Biennial, and in 2008 she published her first book, America. Her work has also been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; the New Orleans Museum of Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; and she has shown internationally in Bogota, Brighton, Copenhagen, Madrid, Prague, and Utrecht.