Beauty in photography : essays in defense of traditional values by
The eight essays in Beauty in Photography provide a critical appreciation of photography by one of its foremost proponents. The result is a rare book of criticism, alive to the pleasure and mysteries of true exploration.
The Dusseldorf School of Photography by
The German photographic movement commonly known as the Dusseldorf School of Photography has become synonymous with artistic excellence and innovation. It began in the mid-1970s at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, under the instruction of the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, known for their comparative grids of mundane industrial buildings captured with an objective and clinical eye. This school has not only birthed some of today's most important and successful photographers, but has also had a fundamental and lasting influence on the history of the medium. The Dusseldorf School of Photography presents over 160 images in a spectacular overview of the breadth of the Dusseldorf School from the early 1970s to today. This impeccable survey is filled with superb reproductions of the best-known photographs by three generations of key Dusseldorf artists: Bernd and Hilla Becher, Laurenz Berges, Elger Esser, Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer, Axel Hutte, Simone Nieweg, Thomas Ruff, Jorg Sasse, Thomas Struth and Petra Wunderlich. With a scholarly text, extensive artist bios and a plate section dedicated to each of these artists, The Dusseldorf School of Photography offers the first comprehensive assessment of this important photographic movement--one that dominates the salesrooms and museums of our times.
New Topographics by
This book is dedicated to the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, held in 1975 at the International Museum of Photography, and demonstrates both the historical significance of the show and its continued relevance in today's culture. The show brought together Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel (Jr.). Signaling the emergence of a new approach to landscape, the exhibition effectively gave a name to a movement. Even today, the catchphrase New Topographics is used to characterize the work of artists not yet born when the exhibition was held. New Topographics has since come to be understood as marking a paradigm shift. The show occurred just as photography took its place within the contemporary art world. Arguably the last traditionally photographic style, New Topographics was also the first photo-conceptual style. Illustrated with selected works from the 1975 exhibition, installation views, and contextual comparisons, the book also includes an illustrated checklist of the show and an extensive bibliography.
Landscape without horizon: Near and far in contemporary photography. by 
A Class of Their Own by
The 'Düsseldorf School' has become a household name in the art world for one of the most successful and influential strains of modern photography. Coined in the late 1980s, the name refers mainly to the pioneer group of students of the late Bernd Becher, who in 1976 became the first professor for creative photography at a German arts academy. His students included Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth, all of them today internationally acclaimed artists in their own right. Whereas 'Düsseldorf School' initially was used as a handy term for a group of artists with the same university's background, it quickly turned into a powerful brand name both in critical and commercial contexts. Despite its welcomed impact on the art scene, the members of the 'School' felt rather ambiguous about their perception as a group which turned them into stars but simultaneously risked levelling individual profiles and differences. What exactly connects and distinguishes them aesthetically is for the first time thoroughly explored in Maren Polte's pioneering study.
Reframing the New Topographics by
In 1975 the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape crystallized a new view of the American West: the sublime “American” vistas of Ansel Adams were replaced and subverted by images of a landscape inundated with banal symbols of humanity. Organized by William Jenkins for the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, New Topographics showcased such photographers as Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke. Their pictures, illustrating the vernacular, human-made world of contemporary America, punctured the myth of the pristine, wild American landscape—and definitively changed the course of landscape photography. Reframing the New Topographics offers the first substantive analysis of this shift and the continuing influence of an exhibition that not only reshaped the look and subject matter of landscape photography, but also foreshadowed environmentalism’s expansion beyond the mere preservation of wilderness. The essays in this anthology will add an important new dimension to the studies of art history and visual culture.
Reconstructing the View by
Using landscape photography to reflect on broader notions of culture, the passage of time, and the construction of perception, photographers Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe spent five years exploring the Grand Canyon for their most recent project, Reconstructing the View. The team's landscape photographs are based on the practice of rephotography, in which they identify sites of historic photographs and make new photographs of those precise locations. Klett and Wolfe referenced a wealth of images of the canyon, ranging from historical photographs and drawings by William Bell and William Henry Holmes, to well-known artworks by Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, and from souvenir postcards to contemporary digital images drawn from Flickr. The pair then employed digital postproduction methods to bring the original images into dialogue with their own. The result is this stunning volume, illustrated with a wealth of full-color illustrations that attest to the role photographers-both anonymous and great-have played in picturing American places. Rebecca Senf's compelling essay traces the photographers' process and methodology, conveying the complexity of their collaboration. Stephen J. Pyne provides a conceptual framework for understanding the history of the canyon, offering an overview of its discovery by Europeans and its subsequent treatment in writing, photography, and graphic arts.
Post-Photography by
The real world is full of cameras; the virtual world is full of images. Where does all this photographic activity leave the artist-photographer? Post-Photography tries to answer that question by investigating the exciting new language of photographic image-making that is emerging in the digital age of anything-is-possible and everything-has-been-done-before. Found imagery has become increasingly important in post-photographic practice, with the internet serving as a laboratory for a major kind of image-making experimentation. But artists also continue to create entirely original works using avant-garde techniques drawn from both the digital and analogue eras. This book is split into six sections - Something Borrowed, Something New, Layers of Reality, Eye-Spy, Material Visions, Post-Photojournalism and All the World Is Staged - which cover the key strategies adopted by 53 of the most exciting and innovative artist-photographers of the 21st century, drawn from all over the world.
Uncommon Places by
Published by Aperture in 1982 and long unavailable, Stephen Shore's legendary Uncommon Places has influenced a generation of photographers. Among the first artists to take color beyond advertising and fashion photography, Shore's large-format color work on the American vernacular landscape stands at the root of what has become a vital photographic tradition. Uncommon Places: The Complete Works presents a definitive collection of the original series, much of it never before published or exhibited. Like Robert Frank and Walker Evans before him, Shore discovered a hitherto unarticulated version of America via highway and camera. Approaching his subjects with cool objectivity, Shore's images retain precise internal systems of gestures in composition and light through which the objects before his lens assume both an archetypal aura and an ambiguously personal importance. In contrast to Shore's signature landscapes with which Un-common Places is often associated, this expanded survey reveals equally remarkable collections of interiors and portraits. As a new generation of artists expands on the projects of the New Topographic and New Color photographers of the seventies--Thomas Struth (whose first book was titled Unconscious Places), Andreas Gursky and Catherine Opie among them--Uncommon Places: The Complete Works provides a timely opportunity to reexamine the diverse implications of Shore's project and offers a fundamental primer for the last 30 years of large-format color photography.
Photography after Conceptual Art by
Photography After Conceptual Art presents a series of original essays that address substantive theoretical, historical, and aesthetic issues raised by post-1960s photography as a mainstream artistic medium Selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2011 Appeals to people interested in artist's use of photography and in contemporary art Tracks the efflorescence of photography as one of the most important mediums for contemporary art Explores the relation between recent art, theory and aesthetics, for which photography serves as an important test case Includes a number of the essays with previously unpublished photographs Artists discussed include Ed Ruscha, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Douglas Huebler, Mel Bochner, Sherrie Levine, Roni Horn, Thomas Demand, and Jeff Wall
