Samaras, Lucas. Samaras. The Photographs of Lucas Samaras by Ben Lifson.

Aperture, 1987. Fine hardcover in black cloth with near fine protected dust jacket that has a minor evidence of use.  Includes chronology, list of public collections, and bibliography. Features work by Samaras from 1969 to 1986, including work with Polaroid cameras up to 20 x 24 inches.  12.5 X 9.7 X 0.8 inches. 183 pages. Photographer, painter, sculptor, Lucas Samaras is one of the most influential and provocative artists of our time. Once again available to readers, this long out-of-print volume presents a thorough compilation of Samara's photographic work, beginning with his earliest "Auto-Polaroids."

This exhaustive body of work paved the way for a generation of contemporary photo-artists, expanding the expressive possibilities of the medium. Using Polaroid materials, large--sometimes life-sized--formats, manipulated imagery, and composites, Samaras helped forge a vocabulary employed by artists and photographers throughout the eighties. In his most profound achievement, he adopted one of photography's basic genres--portraiture--and used it as a basis for an inquiry into the self, which remains unmatched in its intensity and boundless in its ramifications. Photography critic Ben Lifson provides a trenchant critique and history of Samaras's work. "Samaras split himself into model, actor, director, audience, and critic," Lifson writes. "To each of these roles he brought a skilled artist's hand and an eye deeply informed by the historical traditions and motifs of art and by the vernacular and popular traditions of photography. He became a rare figure in American art, not an artist who occasionally uses photography for tactical reasons . . . but an artist who made photography central to his aesthetic campaign."

Lucas Samaras (1936–2024) was a Greek-born American multidisciplinary artist renowned for his boundary-pushing explorations of self-portraiture, body image, and psychological identity. Immigrating to the United States in 1948, he studied art at Rutgers University under Allan Kaprow and George Segal, becoming deeply involved in early "Happenings" and the New York avant-garde scene. Samaras built a diverse body of work spanning sculpture, assemblage, painting, and immersive installation—most notably his room-sized mirrored environments—but achieved widespread acclaim for his pioneering photographic manipulations. In his famous 1970s Photo Transformations series, he manipulated the wet emulsion of SX-70 Polaroid film before it dried, smearing and distorting his own image into surreal, painterly self-portraits that prefigured digital photo manipulation and established him as a singular figure in postwar American art.