Touchless Automatic Wonder: Found Text Photographs from the Real World

Created as a poetic and visual journey, Touchless Automatic Wonder spans twenty-five years and four continents. These striking photographs capture “found text”: the sometimes mysterious, occasionally humorous, often cryptic presence of words in the everyday landscape. In Koch’s lyrical sequencing, the images reveal obscure and eccentric voices in their various and distinctive roles on the daily stage of the world around us. This intriguing approach at the intersection of language, image, and the social landscape will appeal to readers interested in contemporary art and photography, popular culture, and conceptual concerns both literary and visual.
 

Lewis Koch is an artist whose work draws upon aspects of photography, text, sculpture, video, and assemblage. His work has been shown in sites from garages to museums with solo exhibitions in New York, London, Brussels, Seoul, Toronto, Los Angeles, and Chicago. His photographs are in permanent collections throughout the United States and Europe, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Maison Européenne de la Photographie–Paris, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art–Chicago. As artist-in-residence at Copenhagen’s Fotografisk Center in 2001, Koch created the Web project Touchless Automatic Wonder, which was the precedent for this book.