Lyle Ashton Harris: Blow Up is the first retrospective monograph of one of today’s most important and groundbreaking artists. Harris’s photography has for the last twenty years played a major role in defining key trends in contemporary art and has helped to shape ongoing discourses about self-portraiture and performance.

Designed by the award-winning COMA, Blow Up features full-color reproductions of works from throughout Harris’s entire career as well as several significant new texts about the artist. Works reproduced in this eye-catching publication include Harris’s “white face” self-portraits of the late 1980s, his collage-based work of the mid-1990s, his Polaroid self-portraits in various guises in the early 2000s, his large-scale “Blow Up” collages of the last few years, and his vibrant recent photographs made in Ghana.

Contributors include art historians and curators Cassandra Coblentz, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, and Susan Krane. Noted philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah discusses Harris’s work in the context of a penetrating commentary about contemporary Ghana. A revealing conversation between Harris and artist/scholar Senam Okudzeto is also included.

Lyle Ashton Harris: Blow Up is published in collaboration with the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art on the occasion of Harris's retrospective at Scottsdale MoCA, February 8 – May 27, 2008.

The exhibition will travel to the UB Art Gallery, Center for the Arts, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York (September 4 – October 18, 2008) and the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans (April – July 2009). Additional venues are under consideration.