Slippages: Photographs by Linda Cummings

Edited by Kathy Battista. Introduction by Linda Cummings
Texts by Nancy Princenthal, Kathy Battista, Elise Morrison and Emna Zghal

The images of the decade-long performance based photographic project

Slippages is a landmark publication of photographs by American artist Linda Cummings. The book showcases over 60 high-quality duotone images spanning the decade from 1992 to 2003 and the last vestiges of analog photography. Cummings’ compositions toss expectation to the wind, transposing gender dynamics with a sleight of hand. The images convey Cummings’ innovative approach to photographic narra­tive through actions performed and photographed by the artist on-site, in locations as varied as steel mills, coal mines, churches, hospitals and stadiums, many long since disappeared. The photographs express the artist’s defiance, exuberance and anxiety amidst the upheavals of a declining industrial age and dawning of the digital era.

Cummings’ thought-provoking photographs are complemented with an introduction and four essays that extrapolate ideas from Cummings’s photographs and consider how social controversies of the last decade of the 20th century resurface today as the rights of bodily autonomy and gender identity continue to be challenged.

• The book presents Linda Cummings’ unique approach to photography and per­formance art.
• Cummings’ evocative compositions challenge gender norms and societal expecta­tions, providing an original exploration of identity, defiance, and the cultural tensions of the late 20th century.
• All the photographs were taken on-site with an analog 35-mm manual film camera and printed by hand in a darkroom, with no manipulation post-capture.

From editor Kathy Battista: “Linda Cummings’ photographic series (1992 – 2002) was a feminist response to debates—waging then and unimaginably now—over emancipation of the female body, human rights, and legislation. Created during the last vestiges of analogue culture, her images capture fleeting moments of resistance, symbolizing how even small actions can represent a broader struggle against limitation and a celebration of personal autonomy. Like water wearing at a rock over time, each fling of the slip has a ripple effect, building up into a decisive shift.”

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“Linda Cummings’ Slippages, best described as a long-term project, rather than a series of discrete images, has transformed an object of feminine underwear –a slip — to what might be literally described as a floating signifier. Moving ghost-like through air, propelled by wind, it hovers over industrial ruins, landscapes, stadiums, even hospital operating rooms. The multiple meanings and uses of the word slip — noun or verb—become in Cummings’ moody, elegiac black and white analogue photographs a powerful, allusive and haunting metaphor of femininity as it disrupts or counters the spaces of masculinity, monumentality and the ruins of industrialization.”

— Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Art Critic, Curator and Author, Photography after Photography: Gender, Genre, History

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“Slippages is spot-on. The photographs are magnificent — suggestive, humorous, heart-breaking, beautiful. They sing, shout, whisper and everything in between while suggesting the entire spectrum of female experience.”

— Ellen Schwartz Harris, Former Executive Director, Aperture

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“Slippages is a lovely book in this time of horrendous slipups!”

— Lucy Lippard, Distinguished Critic, Author, Activist and Curator

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“In Slippages, every photograph is both record and a reckoning. Linda Cummings guides us through vanishing landscapes and forgotten structures, capturing the quiet and steady drift from the grounded analog world to today’s digital abstraction. The book is a remarkable collection and commentary about change and it takes us on an odyssey of feeling both unmoored and as a witness. It’s as if we are that traveling slip in the wind— experiencing the ethereal feeling of remembrance and hope, even if it’s only in the pause.”

— S. Yin Ho, MD, MBA, author of Rushing Headlong, Health It’s Legacy & The Path To Responsible AI (2025)

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“The most hauntingly beautiful images among these call to mind ethereal spirits in flight, not unlike the illusions of a spiritualist trickster…”

— Lisa Kereszi, MFA 2000, Senior Critic, Assistant Director of Graduate Studies in Photography, YALE SCHOOL OF ART

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“Slippages will evoke sheer awe in photography geeks. The rest of us, also in awe, are wondering how it is possible as we approach the second quarter of the 21st Century, that the catalyst for this collection still plagues our collective consciences today. In response, we the observers, are called to DO: make the toss; contemplate the power of the toss; and respond to it with our own vital energy. The book is silent, but shouts volumes.”

— Alice Anne Schwab, Executive Director, Susquehanna Art Museum at The Marty and Tom Philips Family  Art Center, Harrisburg, PA