Stallings has written essays for numerous contemporary art exhibitions, has edited several books, and has been a columnist for print and online journals. He writes about artists who are highly engaged with their political, social, and ecological environment. His personal essays often take a What If? speculative perspective.
SELECTED CONTRIBUTIONS TO BOOKS
Chronologically ordered beginning with most recent
REACHING FOR THE LIGHT: DANIEL HAWKINS’ WILD WEST DREAM OF A DESERT LIGHTHOUSE
Forthcoming in book on project, Spring 2023
Since its inaugural lighting, the Desert Lighthouse has provided nearly uninterrupted illumination to a complex area of California’s High Desert. Located on the edge of the PG&E Hexavelant Chromium environmental disaster, Desert Lighthouse has become a beacon of hope for locals who have faced decades of turmoil.
Out in San Bernardino County’s high desert, north of Los Angeles, a dream stands fifty feet tall on a barren hill, purchased by Daniel Hawkins in 2011, surrounded by creosote and fortified with a chain-link fence. It is built with a steel frame interior, covered by translucent polycarbonate paneling, giving it a unique glow when lit from inside. Nearby, there is a Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) natural gas processing plant - and the ghost town of Hinkley, once bustling with four-thousand people, is now down to an estimated three hundred. The mysterious light on the hill hovering over the outskirts of town, installed five years ago, is Daniel Hawkins’ incongruous and strange Desert Lighthouse.
A BURNT ORANGE SKY: PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
From the book
IN THE SUNSHINE OF NEGLECT: DEFINING PHOTOGRAPHS AND RADICAL EXPERIMENTS IN INLAND SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, 1950 TO THE PRESENT
Inland Southern California is a region of 4.5 million people, but it is also a periphery. Established photographic artists and rising experimentalists have long used the area as a laboratory. The visions of these artists—experimental, hard-eyed, and imaginative—influenced the course of contemporary art and photography. In the Sunshine of Neglect is the first exhibition to survey this remarkable history.
Inlandia Press, 2018, hardcover, 274 pages, heavily illustrated, EAN/UPS:
9781732403222
Exhibition accompanied by the book
In the Sunshine of Neglect reinforces what the New Topographics artists emphasized, and intuited as more honest, which is the inseparability of humans and nature. We are part of and affect nature simultaneously. The built and managed landscape is nature in the Anthropocene. Instead of images of sublime landscapes that aim to transcend time and place, the human interaction with the landscape takes its place in the foreground. Instead of lava emerging from the core of the earth, spreading over the planet, as it did millions of years ago, we have Kaiser Steel spilling its blazing, metal contents, and we have wildfire. Beauty and harmony can be found still, but there is more for photographers to consider since the Anthropocene’s demarcation in 1945 by a radiated mushroom cloud.
—Tyler Stallings, excerpt from essay
MEXICO AT THE HOUR OF COMBAT: SABINO OSUNA'S PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION
The Mexican Revolution, the first major revolution of the twentieth century, intertwined with photography attracted worldwide attention. Its visual documentation was made possible by Sabino Osuna who played a crucial role in not only photographing the different phases of the Mexican Revolution, but he also captured portraits of prominent persons involved in it. The focus of this volume is Osuna’s special collection, 427 images, currently held in Special Collections in the Rivera Library of the University of California, Riverside. The book includes essays about Osuna and his photographs by Peter Briscoe, Ronald Chilcote, Carlos Cortès, Georg Gugelberger, Eliud Martinez, and Tyler Stallings.
Laguna Wilderness Press, 2012, hardcover, 120 pages, 103 photographs, ISBN: 978097284481
The Sabino Osuna Collection is powerful testimony to the incidents of the armed struggle in the Valley of Mexico, the epicenter of political change, but, more important, it narrates the daily affairs of the different social classes in and around Mexico City. This is what makes the book so powerful; there is an eerie appeal in the images of all these men and women going about their daily lives while their world was about to change irreversibly.
—Exequiel Ezcurra, Director, UC MEXUS
BACKYARD OASIS: THE SWIMMING POOL IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA PHOTOGRAPHY, 1945-1982
Southern California's pool culture is the subject of this unique and luscious collection of photographs that explore the parallel evolution of an iconic symbol and an artistic genre. Since the end of World War II, Southern California's backyard pools-those blue-green oases in an otherwise often arid landscape-have symbolized any number of American ideals: optimism, wealth, consumerism, escape, physical beauty, and the triumph of man over nature. Simultaneously, the field of photography developed as a transformative method for recording the human condition. This exhibition catalog celebrates the nexus of these two phenomena in a one-of-a-kind collection that features more than two hundred works by more than forty postwar artists and photographers. It presents works by photographers and artists including Bill Anderson, John Baldessari, Ruth Bernhard, David Hockney, Herb Ritts, Ed Ruscha, Julius Shulman, and Larry Sultan. Thematically grouped into topics ranging from the rise of celebrity culture, suburbia and dystopia, avant-garde architectural landscape design, and the cult of the body, these images offer a reich study of the cultural connotations of the swimming pool. six insightful essays provide a comprehensive overview of the development of the swimming pool and its attendant aesthetic and social culture. Essays by Robert Atkins , Dick Hebdige , Tyler Stallings , Robert Stearns , Jennifer A. Watts , and Daniell Cornell (Editor).
Delmonico Books/Prestel, 2012, hardcover, heavily illustrated, 256 pages, ISBN-10: 3791351761, ISBN-13: 978-3791351766
This project envisions the pool not just as a source of recreation and sybaritic pleasure but as a fraught symbol that quivers with meaning and foreboding…
—New York Times
THE GREAT PICTURE: MAKING THE WORLD’S LARGEST PHOTOGRAPH
The Great Picture is a history-making gelatin silver photograph three stories high by eleven stories wide. The image was made using a shuttered southern California F-18 jet hanger transformed into an enormous camera obscura—the largest camera ever made. Six accomplished photographers—Jerry Burchfield, Mark Chamberlain, Jacques Garnier, Rob Johnson, Douglas McCulloh, and Clayton Spada—known as The Legacy Project, aided by 400 artists, experts, and volunteers, transformed an abandoned southern California F-18 jet hangar, located at the Marine Corps Air Station El Toro (MCAS El Toro) in Orange County, into the largest camera ever made and then proceeded to produce the world’s largest photograph, The Great Picture. The image is an enormous panoramic landscape of the California desert beyond the air station, which isdestined to become the heart of the Orange County Great Park. Essays by Lucy R. Lippard, Tyler Stallings, Dawn Hassett.
Hudson Hills Press, 2011, hardcover with special slip cover, 196 pages, heavily illustrated, ISBN: 9781555953737
Exhibition accompanied by the book
KTLA-TV News, documenting exhibition installation of The Great Picture
Guinness World Records: World’s Largest Photographic Negative
The Great Picture is the world’s largest photograph produced by the world’s largest camera. It is also the world’s largest statement, literally and metaphorically, about the role that photography plays in our society.
—Tyler Stallings, from the book