Criticism & Essays Books - Page 5

Rediscovering Jacob Riis: The Reformer, His Journalism, and His Photographs

Bonnie Yochelson, Daniel Czitrom

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A provocative new illustrated history of the famed early chronicler of New York's immigrant poor, seen here as an opportunistic, camera-toting social reformer whose legacy lives on.

"I don't remember my mother or my aunts and uncles talking of their father as a photographer....In his letters—I have read most of them—he never mentions a camera."—J. Riis Owre (grandson of Jacob Riis)

More than ninety years after his death, Jacob Riis maintains a stubbornly persistent hold on the American imagination. Remembered as a pioneering photographer, he was the first to document the state of New York's slums, publicizing in haunting photographs the plight of the urban poor at the height of European immigration to the city. But Riis confessed to being "no good at all as a photographer" and in recent years has been disparaged for racist views and political opportunism.

In Rediscovering Jacob Riis, Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom address the complex legacy of the pioneering social reformer. In a work of highly original scholarship, they reclaim Riis from the art camp, relocating him in the field of social and cultural history. Their provocative new book reveals Riis to be an inspired self-promoter who, although neither an original thinker nor a serious photographer, nevertheless framed the discussion of urban poverty in terms still relevant today.

Extensively illustrated with Riis's images, Rediscovering Jacob Riis is revisionist history at its best, as appealing to photographers, journalists, and social historians as it is to the general reader.

An Uncertain Grace

Eduardo Galeano, Fred Ritchin

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Editorial Review:

From a Brazilian mine where 50,000 mud-covered men haul heavy bags of dirt up and down slippery ladders in search of a stray nugget of gold, to a former lake in western Africa now swallowed by the encroaching desert, where emaciated, starving people walk over its surface of sand, photographer Sebastião Salgado explores the live of the planet's often ignored people with a critical eye and an empathetic heart.

Photography: A Cultural History (Trade Version)

Mary Warner Marien

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

excellent resource! 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 12 people found this review helpful.

i had to buy this for class, and for once it isn't a "textbook" ! finally an art textbook that doubles as a coffee table book, and one you can read. very good text - easy, and not too "academic." highly recommend.

Editorial Review:

Providing a new perspective on many of the old stories in the history of photography, Mary Warner Marien's book is a provocative and informative read. She shows how the medium developed in various historical, economic, political, and cultural settings worldwide, and discusses the many uses to which photography has been put-from art to vernacular, documentary to photojournalism, and science to advertising.

Incorporating new research not covered in any other survey, Marien thoughtfully explores ideas generated by and about photography in each period, and examines photography's key role in contemporary art and today's increasing use of digital photography. With a panoply of arresting images by famous photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, August Sander, and Margaret Bourke-White-as well as many unusual and seldom-seen pictures-the book is as enticing to look at as its original ideas are stimulating to consider.

Towards a Philosophy of Photography

Vilem Flusser, Vil¿m Flusser

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 2.0 of 5

Not my bag 2 out of 5 stars.
0 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This is another of those books that either goes over my head or somewhere else off target. While not especially verbose, for this sort of material, I just can't get excited about detailed discussion of stuff that does not really seem relevant to either making or appreciating photography, or any other art form, for that matter. Not of practical use to photographers.

Editorial Review:

Media philosopher Vilém Flusser proposed a revolutionary new way of thinking about photography. An analysis of the medium in terms of aesthetics, science and politics provided him with new ways of understanding both the cultural crises of the past and the new social forms nascent within them. Flusser showed how the transformation of textual into visual culture (from the linearity of history into the two-dimensionality of magic) and of industrial into post-industrial society (from work into leisure) went hand in hand, and how photography allows us to read and interpret these changes with particular clarity.

American Photography and the American Dream (Cultural Studies of the United States)

James Guimond

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Editorial Review:

James Guimond's powerful study reveals how documentary photographers have expressed or contested the idea of the American Dream throughout the twentieth century. In Guimond's formulation issues like growth, equality, and national identity came under the rubric of the Dream as it has been used to measure how well the nation is living up to its social and political ideals.

A pathbreaking book, American Photography and the American Dream examines the most important photographers and developments in the documentary genre during this century. It encompasses the reform-era images of Francis Benjamin Johnston and Lewis Hine; the work of Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange during both the 1930s and 1940s after the FSA photography unit broke up; the American-Way-of-Life pictures published by Life, Look, and the United States Information Agency during the 1940s and 1950s; the iconoclastic images of William Klein, Diane Arbus, and Robert Frank; and the work of four photographers of the 1970s and 1980s: Bill Owens, Chauncey Hare, Susan Meiselas, and Michael Williamson.

Guimond pays close attention to the specific historical circumstances in which the pictures were made, to the roles the photographers played in making their images, to their intentions, stated and unstated, and to the original contexts in which the images were published or exhibited. These images, he shows, are not merely pictures on museum walls but revelations that can help us understand how we as Americans have seen ourselves, one another, and the world around us.

God Is at Eye Level: Photography as a Healing Art

Jan Phillips

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Inspired but limiting... 3 out of 5 stars.
11 of 13 people found this review helpful.

Although the photographs and quotes are inspiring, I found the directives to be less than constructive. One directive suggests that you "take a deep breath and then THROW AWAY all photographs you have taken that are out of focus or too light or too dark". What? I was so dissappointed in that conventional criticism. The impression I got was that there is a very specific "right vs. wrong" way to 'spiritual photography'. If the book is based loosely on methods of Art Therapy, or rather, Photographic Arts Therapy, it seems to have missed the mark. Photography in my opinion, should be more about the creative process and creating visual communication rather than making a technically-sound, conventional-looking photograph. Very disappointing.

Editorial Review:

Amateurs and professionals alike can discover photography's power to soothe and mend the broken wing of the spirit. With personal stories, commentary, and practical exercises, Jan Phillips helps us see how images can give shape to our half-articulated feelings, shed light on our inner darkness, and reveal our deepest, truest self.

Another Way of Telling

John Berger

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

John Berger does it again! 3 out of 5 stars.
5 of 50 people found this review helpful.

Berger's theories in this book are very complex but he supports his ideas well. The novel is structured in a very opinionated way. I feel that if he had been less critical about other artists then the book would have been more engaging. Berger is over-confident in his abilities of perception. He tries to engage the reader to deep in his thoughts. It makes it more confusing. Another strange book to read of his is Ways of Seeing. It has a good meaning however I don't like the unpleasent images. John Berger is a very "weird" & unique author.

Editorial Review:

Photographs don't lie--or do they? Two of our most thoughtful and eloquent interrogators of the visual examine the ambiguities of what is seemingly our most straightforward art form. ANOTHER WAY OF TELLING explores the tension between the photographer and the photographed, between picture and viewer, and between the filmed moment and memories it resembles.

Photo Icons I (1827-1926) (Icons)

Hans-Michael Koetzle

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Editorial Review:

The stories behind history's most extraordinary photographs (TASCHEN's 25th anniversary special edition) Photographs have a strange and powerful way of shaping the way we see the world and influencing our perceptions of reality. To demonstrate the unique and profound influence on culture and society that photographs have, Photo Icons puts the most important landmarks in the history of photography under the microscope. Each chapter of this special edition focuses on a single image which is described and analyzed in detail, in aesthetic, historical, and artistic contexts. The book begins with the very first permanent images (Nic?phore Ni?pce's 1827 eight-hour-exposure rooftop picture and Louis Daguerre's famous 1839 street scene) and takes the reader up through the present day, via the avant-garde photography of the 1920s and works such as Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother (1936), Robert Doisneau's Kiss in Front of City Hall (1950), and Martin Parr's 'New European photography.'

Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography

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Editorial Review:

In Still Moving noted artists, filmmakers, art historians, and film scholars explore the boundary between cinema and photography. The interconnectedness of the two media has emerged as a critical concern for scholars in the field of cinema studies responding to new media technologies, and for those in the field of art history confronting the ubiquity of film, video, and the projected image in contemporary art practice. Engaging still, moving, and ambiguous images from a wide range of geographical spaces and historical moments, the contributors to this volume address issues of indexicality, medium specificity, and hybridity as they examine how cinema and photography have developed and defined themselves through and against one another.

Foregrounding the productive tension between stasis and motion, two terms inherent to cinema and to photography, the contributors trace the shifting contours of the encounter between still and moving images across the realms of narrative and avant-garde film, photography, and installation art. Still Moving suggests that art historians and film scholars must rethink their disciplinary objects and boundaries, and that the question of medium specificity is a necessarily interdisciplinary question. From a variety of perspectives, the contributors take up that challenge, offering new ways to think about what contemporary visual practice is and what it will become.

Contributors: George Baker, Rebecca Baron, Karen Beckman, Raymond Bellour, Zoe Beloff,Timothy Corrigan, Nancy Davenport, Atom Egoyan, Rita Gonzalez, Tom Gunning, Louis Kaplan,
Jean Ma, Janet Sarbanes, Juan A. Suárez

Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews

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Editorial Review:

Throughout his career, the influential art photographer Jeff Wall has written periodically on a variety of subjects--from the work of his Vancouver colleagues, to the art of such diverse figures as Edouard Manet, On Kawara, and Dan Graham, to the important role of photography in Conceptual art. Wall's own work takes center stage in the many interviews he has granted over the past two decades. Both the essays and the interviews are indispensable to the study of Wall's work, which will be the subject of a major American traveling retrospective, with stops in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, throughout 2007. Thanks to Wall's wide-ranging curiosity, nimble mind, and articulate voice, the texts are also of considerable interest outside of the context of his own oeuvre. This generous selection of 14 essays and 23 interviews from the past 25 years is the first collection of Wall's texts to be published in English, and as such, is an instant collector's item. This affordable volume also includes 120 black-and-white illustrations for reference purposes.