Donigan Cumming - Lot with 2 books: The Stage & Pretty Ribbons - 1996-2014

You're bidding on a lot with 2 books by Donigan Cumming. Both books are new in seal.

Donigan Cumming addresses themes of the body, taboos of representation, social engagement and photographic truth. He uses photography, text, sound, video, collage, animation, drawing and painting in artworks, installations, projections and books. Cumming locates his work in a created community formed in the early 1980s, allowing him to explore the social and ethical implications of participant observation.

Since 1986, when his first major cycle, Reality and Motive in Documentary Photography was launched in New York and Paris, theorists and curators have engaged with his oeuvre in catalogues essays, book chapters and articles. His monographs and artists’ books include The Stage (Maquam, 1991; Errata, 2014), Pretty Ribbons (Stemmle, 1996), and Donigan Cumming (Dazibao/VU, 2012). A box set of prints, Even as the Falcon Plummets, appeared in 2022. Recent book works include Falcon’s Guide (2023) and Primer (2025). His production is explored in Vidéographe’s online compendium Body-to-Body: The Works of Donigan Cumming (2020). Public collections include the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Maison européenne de la photographie, Photo Elysée, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Museum of Modern Art. Cumming is a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.


Donigan Cumming – The Stage
Publisher: Errata Editions, 2014
Hardcover, 240 pages, English
Size: 25×18.5cm
New in seal

Donigan Cumming’s The Stage is one of the most challenging photobooks published in the last century. Collaborating with his subjects to explore a kind of psychological portraiture, Cumming created a theatre of domestic and institutional interiors peopled by the strange and eccentric. Books on Books #19 presents an in-depth study of this remarkable and little known Canadian photobook with an essay by Robert Enright called The Overwhelming Quotidian: Donigan Cumming and The Stage.


Donigan Cumming – Pretty Ribbons
Publisher: Edition Stemmle, 1996
Hardcover, 131 pages, English
Siz: 28×24.7cm
New in seal

Contemporary public morals place strong taboos on the subjects of the ageing body and physical intimacy. Cumming breaks both taboos in his photography. Maintaining the balance between touching dignity and the fascination of the grotesque, Donigan Cumming gives shape to an essential reality in stunningly powerful pictures full of inner and outward beauty.