Criticism & Essays Books - Page 12

Photography's Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes

Lyle Rexer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Excellent Coffee Table Book 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 19 people found this review helpful.

Beautifuly constructed book with alot of really nice images. Certainly anyone could appreciate this book. My only complaint is that in the opening/introductory chapters, there is alot of unused space and few images until you get past that.

Editorial Review:

Photography's Antiquarian Avant-Garde charts the full-blown rebellion of contemporary photographers against the advent of digital photography and their reversion to photographic methods used in the nineteenth century. These photographers seek to reengage the physical facts of photography, its material and processes, by turning to the history of photography for metaphors, technical information, and visual inspiration. The artists in this volume are from all over the world and use a wide array of photographic processes. Among the artists and processes featured are Chuck Close's daguerreotypes, Sally Mann's collodion prints, Jayne Hinds Bidaut's photogram tintypes, Shirine Sharif's photograms, Gabor Kerekes's carbon dichromates, and Laurent Millet's toned silver prints. For these artists, these steps into the past are a way to reimagine and redirect not only the photographic object, but also the act of photography itself.

Jeff Wall: Photographs

Peter Burger, Achim Hochd rfer, Homay King, Fred Orton, Kaja Silverman, Friedrich Tietjen

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A Beautiful yet Too Short Opus 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

While living in New York City for the first semsester of my junior year in art school, I was assigned to take a look at a gallery exhibition of Jeff Wall. I had never heard of him before, and when I saw the huge Duratrans pieces, I was floored. I instantly loved Wall's aesthetic and historical sensibilities. I ordered this book over the other two available because it was the most recently published. The essays are wonderfully insightful, and I'm glad they were included. I have only one complaint about this otherwise marvelous book-- there are less than 40 plates altogether. Of course I knew this when I bought it, but Wall's work is of the kind where one simply wants to see more.

By far my favorite plates are the ones that could be categorized as "near-documentary". They are seemingly real, spontaneous compositions-- yet when one does a double-take, it's obvious that it was set up entirely. Jeff Wall is alone in his mastery of this genre.

Obviously, the length of the book isn't something that I should take any stars off of. So it gets a 5-star rating. I suppose I'll have to purchase another Wall book now!

Editorial Review:

Unlike recent publications on Wall's work, this volume treats his oeuvre from a profoundly theoretical angle, inviting scholars to contribute to an understanding of the multi-layered character of his art and to focus on aspects that have up until now received little attention: Wall's reaction to the avant-garde discussion of the 1970s, his position within post-conceptual photography, his occupation with questions of film and film theory, his interest in popular iconography and his highly complex way of working. Published to accompany the noted exhibition at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna, this essay collection also specifically concentrates on Wall's close link to the tradition of documentary photography and to photographers like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. Relevant to any discussion of contemporary photography, the book includes essays by Peter Brger, Homay King, Kaja Silverman, Fred Orton, and others.

Art Photography Now

Wolfgang Tillmans

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Editorial Review:

In the previous century, photography helped shape art; in the current one, it has begun to dominate it. Not only are major international museums and galleries mounting blockbuster exhibitions, but art photographers are also being celebrated as contemporary masters and their work commands unprecedented prices. This indispensable survey presents the work of 76 of the most important and best-known art photographers in the world: Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Sophie Calle, Wolfgang Tillmans, Nan Goldin, Martin Parr, Allan Sekula, Boris Mikhailov, Inez van Lamsweerde, Stephen Meisel, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Sam Taylor-Wood, and many more are featured in its pages. Susan Bright, former Curator of Photographs at London's National Portrait Gallery, has organized the book into seven sections--City, Portrait, Document, Object, Landscape, Fashion, and Narrative--and provides an introductory essay for each. Along with each photographer's works, presented in sequence within those divisions, Bright's commentaries provide context and depth, and quotations from the artists themselves offer valuable insights into the motivation, inspiration, and intentions behind the work. Following in the tradition of Photography Past/Forward: Aperture at 50 and the Photography Speaks series, this volume will become an essential resource for curators, collectors, scholars, practitioners, and anyone who wants comprehensive, up-to-date exposure to the state of the medium today.

Museum Watching

Elliott Erwitt

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

When he's not on assignment, the indefatigable Elliott Erwitt often takes his camera and heads for a museum, where, he says, finding interesting and amusing subjects to photograph is "like shooting fish in a barrel." He proves his point with this wide-ranging collection of images from the last 45 years that look at lookers from Cambodia and Japan to New York and Paris. There are countless characteristically mischievous moments here: a middle-aged couple pores over the Clouet painting of two topless women--one the king's mistress preparing for her bath and the other her sister, tweaking her nipple. In a snapshot on the facing page, a soldier fondles the bronze breast of a goddess in an Italian piazza. In the Prado gallery, where the clothed and the nude Majas of Goya are installed side by side, the former is studied by a lone female and the latter obscured by a crowd of male admirers. There are multiple shots of the marmoreal buttocks of countless shapely sculptures flanked by passersby whose glances speak volumes about the hallowed halls of high art.

But there are always other, more somber moments in any Erwitt collection. Here, such pictures include a shot of the bleak railway tracks that led inexorably through the gates of Auschwitz and the bins there of thousands of pairs of eyeglasses that were never worn again. In Cambodia, Erwitt finds quiet beauty in the jungle-bound ruins of the temple of Angkor Wat, but he also visits the present, in the form of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, where photographs of thousands of slaughtered Cambodian citizens pack the walls, from floor to ceiling.

As always, Erwitt's ultimate subject is the human condition, captured with gentleness, intelligence, and compassion, this time in a context that narrows his scope a bit, but not much. --Peggy Moorman

The History of Photography: An Overview

Alma Davenport

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Editorial Review:

In 1839, the French government announced a major scientific breakthrough: one Louis Daguerre had created a lasting image on a metal plate. Even the wily inventor--who wanted to patent the process before the government stepped in and decided to offer it free to one and all--could not have imagined how his discovery would change and shape the world. Alma Davenport discusses photography as a political and sociological tool in this comprehensive study, and shows how it has altered our lives. She traces its development from calotypes (William Talbot perfected photographic paper even before the Daguerreotype) to tintypes to hand-held cameras and early color experiments, and introduces us to the masters of art and documentary photography.

A History of Photography

Jean-Claude Lemagny, Andre Rouille

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Disappearing Witness: Change in Twentieth-Century American Photography

Gretchen Garner

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Editorial Review:

American photographers documented and defined the twentieth century in a remarkable array of images, the style and content of which evolved dramatically over the course of the century. In Disappearing Witness, photographer and art historian Gretchen Garner chronicles this transformation, from the introduction of the 35-millimeter camera in the 1920s to the digital photography of today. Accompanied by over 125 key works in the history of photography -- fine-art, documentary, and editorial -- her thoughtful and enlightening discussion traces American photography's aesthetic, commercial, and technological changes, as the medium's primary role of spontaneous witness gradually gave way to contrived arrangement and artistic invention.

Garner discusses direct witness as the dominant paradigm for American photographers from the 1920s to the 1960s. During these decades, photographers saw their medium primarily as a vehicle for truthful description and sometimes as a weapon against social injustice. In the 1960s, however, photographic practice and its cultural significance shifted to reflect more personal, idiosyncratic, and staged visions of reality -- a trend, Garner notes, that has intensified with digital photography. The major portion of the book is devoted to post-1960s work, exploring how the changes have affected portraiture, documentary, landscape, still life, fashion, and the new genre of self-imagery. In documenting this transformation in American photography, Disappearing Witness forcefully rethinks the history of photography itself.

Photography Speaks II: 76 Photographers on Their Art

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Editorial Review:

This collection of pictures, which spans 150 years and ranges from daguerreotypes to digital images, is a follow-up to an acclaimed 1989 volume. Johnson draws from a variety of sources--including interviews, letters and obscure publications--to assemble an anecdotal history of photography; he largely eschews big names in favor of strong images. Pioneer landscape photographer Thomas Roche talks about his working methods; Gertrude Kasebier, who encouraged women to pursue photography, discusses the medium as an art form. The most surprising inclusions are Thomas Eakins and surrealist Rene Magritte, both better known as painters.

Isabella Rossellini: Looking At Me: On Pictures and Photographs

Peter Lindbergh, Bruce Weber, Kurt Markus, Wim Wenders

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Editorial Review:

Self-reflection by celebrities tends to be fraught with unmentionable difficulties. Not, though, when the star in question is the ever intelligent, self-aware, articulate, and magnificent Isabella Rossellini. For years, a wall in the entrance of Rossellini's apartment has been covered in pictures taken of her by different photographers. Looking at the "Me Wall," Rossellini writes that she never really saw herself; instead she "saw the photographer's work, their ideas, and our collaboration in capturing fantasies." Looking at Me gathers together Rossellini's private collection of portraits taken of herself by some of the world's leading photographers, including Eve Arnold, Richard Avedon, Michel Comte, Patrick Demarchelier, Fabrizio Ferri, Horst P. Horst, Brigitte Lacombe, Annie Leibovitz, Peter Lindbergh, Robert Mapplethorpe, Steven Meisel, Irving Penn, Herb Ritts, Paolo Roversi, Ellen von Unwerth, and Bruce Weber, as well as filmmakers David Lynch and Wim Wenders. Rossellini invites us to join her as she looks at her favorite portraits, privileging us with her witty, humorous, and self-ironical comments. She traces her career, in photographs, from boxing reporter in Muhammad Ali's training camp to highly successful model, from actress in some of Hollywood's more controversial films to head of her own cosmetic line, Manifesto. Mixed in with these public images are pictures of Rossellini in private, with her children, her dog Macaroni, and her pig Spanky. Irresistibly charming, intelligent yet whimsical, Looking At Me proves the perfect complement to Rossellini herself.

The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation

Blake Stimson

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Editorial Review:

The old dream of social belonging and political sovereignty—the dream of nation—was fraught with anxiety and contradiction for many artists and intellectuals in the 1950s. On the one hand, memories of the Second World War remained vivid and the chauvinism that had enabled it threatened to return with the growing tensions of the Cold War. On the other hand, the need to bind together into a new global identity—into a world nation or "family of man"—seemed ever more pressing as a bulwark against the rapidly expanding threat of a nuclear World War III.

The Pivot of the World looks at an exceptional effort to work out that geopolitical tension by cultural means as developed in three hugely ambitious photographic projects: The Family of Man exhibition that opened in 1955 and traveled the world for the next decade; Robert Frank's influential book The Americans, photographed in 1955-1956 and first published in 1958; and Bernd and Hilla Becher's typological record of industrial architecture, begun in 1957 and continuing today. Each of these projects worked to release the dream of nation—of belonging and sovereignty—from its old civic trappings through the medium of photography's serial form, in the experience of one photograph followed by another and another and another, so that all seem at once intimately connected and at the same time autonomous and distinct. Innovations in the serial composition of photographic form could open new possibilities for social form while the modern desire for political belonging could be made cosmopolitan, could be globalized—but in the most human of ways. This epic sense of purpose lasted only for a moment—it had already passed by the beginning of the 1960s—but it bears particular interest for any historical understanding of the contest over globalization that continues to hold such great consequence for us now.