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"Photography, Artistic History."
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How Photography Became Contemporary Art
When Andy Grundberg landed in New York in the early 1970s as a
budding writer, photography was at the margins of the contemporary
art world. By 1991, when he left his post as critic for the New
York Times , photography was at the vital center of artistic
debate. Grundberg writes eloquently and authoritatively about
photography's \"boom years,\" chronicling the medium's increasing
role within the most important art movements of the time, from
Earth Art and Conceptual Art to performance and video. He also
traces photography's embrace by museums and galleries, as well as
its politicization in the culture wars of the 80s and 90s.
Grundberg reflects on the landmark exhibitions that defined the
moment and his encounters with the work of leading
photographers-many of whom he knew personally-including Gordon
Matta-Clark, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Mapplethorpe. He navigates
crucial themes such as photography's relationship to theory as well
as feminism and artists of color. Part memoir and part history,
this perspective by one of the period's leading critics ultimately
tells a larger story about the crucial decades of the 70s and 80s
through the medium of photography.
eBook
The paradox of photography
The Paradox of Photography analyzes the discourse on photography by four of the most important modern French poets and theorists (Baudelaire, Breton, Barthes and Valéry). It stresses in particular the importance of this visual language for the development of both new forms of narrative and original critical studies on issues of representation in art. It also reflects upon the integration of photography within the domain of technical modernity while emphasizing its aesthetic identity stemming from the Western tradition of figurative painting.
eBook
Photography as fiction
From as early as 1839, artists began exploring photography's enormous potential for storytelling and often went to great lengths to create pictures for the camera. Here, a short introductory essay summarizes the history of staged photography, highlighting key debates on the medium's blunt factuality and its capacity for deception.
Book
Seduced by Modernity
Mary O'Connor and Katherine Tweedie tell the story of a dedicated artist in difficult circumstances whose working life spanned a Victorian upbringing in Hamilton, Ontario, and the witnessing of the first Soviet Five-Year Plan. The authors use feminist and historical questions as well as close readings of the photographs to relate Watkins' work to questions of gender, modernity, and visual culture. Watkins' modernism, which involved experimentation and a radical focus on form, transgressed boundaries of conventional, high-art subject matter. Her focus was daily life and her photographs, whether an exploration of the objects in her New York kitchen or the public and industrial spaces of Glasgow, Paris, Cologne, Moscow, and Leningrad in the 1930s, strike a balance between abstraction and an evocation of the everyday, offering a unique gendered perspective on modernism and modernity.
eBook
Photography today : a history of contemporary photography
A lively and accessible survey of photography as art since the 1960s, exploring how, in the hands of some of the world's greatest photographic artists, it has developed into a respected and versatile artistic medium.
Book
Photography
Photography: History and Theory introduces students to both the history of photography and critical theory.
From its inception in the nineteenth century, photography has instigated a series of theoretical debates. In this new text, Jae Emerling therefore argues that the most insightful way to approach the histories of photography is to address simultaneously the key events of photographic history alongside the theoretical discourse that accompanied them.
While the nineteenth century is discussed, the central focus of the text is on modern and contemporary photographic theory. Particular attention is paid to key thinkers, such as Baudelaire, Barthes and Sontag. In addition, the centrality of photography to contemporary art practice is addressed through the theoretical work of Allan Sekula, John Tagg, Rosalind Krauss, and Vilém Flusser. The text also includes readings of many canonical photographers and exhibitions including: Atget, Brassai, August Sander, Walker Evans, The Family of Man, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Cindy Sherman, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sebastaio Salgado, Jeff Wall, and others.
In addition, Emerling provides close readings of key passages from some major theoretical texts. These glosses come between the chapters and serve as a conceptual line that connects them. Glosses include:
Roland Barthes, \"The Rhetoric of the Image\" (1964)
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (2002)
Michel Foucault on the archive (1969)
Walter Benjamin, \"Little History of Photography\" (1931)
Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983)
A substantial glossary of critical terms and names, as well as an extensive bibliography, make this the ideal book for courses on the history and theory of photography.
eBook
A history of pictures : from the cave to the computer screen
The making of pictures has a history going back perhaps 100,000 years to an African shell used as a paint palette. Two-thirds of it is irrevocably lost, since the earliest images known to us are from about 40,000 years ago. But what a 40,000 years, explored here by David Hockney and Martin Gayford in a brilliantly original book. They privilege no medium, or period, or style, but instead, in 16 chapters, discuss how and why pictures have been made, and insistently link 'art' to human skills and human needs. Each chapter addresses an important question: What happens when we try to express reality in two dimensions? Why is the 'Mona Lisa' beautiful and why are shadows so rarely found in Chinese, Japanese and Persian painting? Why are optical projections always going to be more beautiful than HD television can ever be? How have the makers of images depicted movement? What makes marks on a flat surface interesting? Energized by two lifetimes of looking at pictures, combined with a great artist's 70-year experience of experimentation as he makes them, this profoundly moving and enlightening volume will be the art book of the decade.
Book
Rodney Graham, Phonokinetoscope
An examination of the complex and subtle world on display in Rodney Graham's film of an LSD-inflected bicycle ride.Rodney Graham's Phonokinetoscope (2001) is a five-minute 16mm film loop in which the artist is seen riding his Fischer Original bicycle through Berlin's Tiergarten while taking LSD, to the soundtrack of a fifteen-minute song (written and performed by Graham) recorded on a vinyl LP. The turntable drives the projection of the film; the film starts when the needle is placed on the record and stops when the needle is taken off. Graham's ride evokes the Swiss scientist Albert Hoffman's famous 1943 bicycle ride home after an experimental dose of LSD as well as Paul Newman's backward-facing ride in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; the accompanying music presents a thicket of riffs and borrowings. As the images and visual details repeat in the film's endless loop, the artist's Phonokinetoscope refers to a surprising number of works of art and literature, displaying a world rich with subtle meaning.In this illustrated study of Phonokinetoscope, Shep Steiner describes the work as marking Graham's transition into a new medium. Steiner positions Graham's practice in relation to postminimalist practice and that of other artists including Dan Graham, but especially, Ian Wallace and Jeff Wall; considers Graham's rhetoric of playfulness; and finally, beyond the web of references, argues for a notion of allegory and memory theater keyed to the durational work yet satisfying the aesthetic standards of static art. Phonokinetoscope, Steiner argues, looks back to Graham's earlier works focusing on the notion of protocinema and forward to his later musical preoccupations.
eBook