James Hugunin is emeritus faculty from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago where he taught art history and contemporary theory for over 35 years. He founded two art journals: the much-praised L. A. art journal The Dumb Ox (1976) and U-Turn (1982). In 1983, he won the Reva and David Logan Award for Distinguished New Writing in Photography.
Besides his extensive critical writings, since 2012 he’s authored several books of award-winning experimental fiction drawing upon his background in conceptual art, artist books, and critical theory. He refers to this mode of writing as “ludicakadroman,” a playful species of “autotheory,” theory-in-action. A form of unstable and playful memoir, “life-thinking,” where the memory of lived experience is only one material among that of theory, artworks, and literary texts which are referenced. These take the form of scripto-visual, episodic texts.
He is the author of Wreck & Ruin: Photography, Temporality, and World (Dis)order (2013) and Writing Pictures: Case Studies in Photographic Criticism 1983- 2012 (2013), as well as the novels Elder Physics: The Wrong of Time: Stories from an Elder Home (2013), Something is Crook in Middlebrook (2012), Tar Spackled Banner (2014), Case X (2015), Afterimage: Critical Essays on Photography (2016), Q_A: An Auto-Interview (2017), Finding Mememo: A Book in Search of an Author (2019) and Picky Hunting: A Journal of the Plague Year (2021), all published by JEF Books (The Journal of Experimental Fiction).
Hugunin was elected a a member of the Society of Midland Authors in 2016. He now resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico with his psychoanalyst wife, Marianne.
