Product Description
The most comprehensive survey of contemporary art photography on the market is now in paperback, and not a moment too soon. If photography helped shape art in the twentieth century, it has begun to dominate it in the twenty-first. Not only are major international museums and galleries devoting blockbuster exhibitions to the medium, but artist-photographers are being celebrated as contemporary masters, with their work commanding unprecedented prices. This essential s… More >>
#1 by David Gary on March 26, 2010 - 1:43 am
Very good Rhigting but only a few serious art photographers in this book all the others don’t know anything about photography or art and the “visual” failure to pass the message of the concept they are dealing with at all!
There are a lot of much more better artists that deal with the same matters to choose from.
Is sade to see how the curators and academics that deal with art photography, follow the art dealers and PR people and they are failing on their mission and leading this wonderfull art of photography to pathetic places
Rating: 2 / 5
#2 by N. michele on March 26, 2010 - 3:46 am
it’s not the first time for me to go throgh photograpy art books, and i have been into contemporary art and contemporary photography for many years. I can affirm that this book is one of the best and more interesting i have ever read… extremaly attractive and taken into great care!!!
Rating: 5 / 5
#3 by Kristopher on March 26, 2010 - 4:12 am
Ms. Bright provides truly wonderful text and insight into some quite diverse photographers. The photo illustrations are bright (no pun intended) and large. With fewer photographers or illustrations she might have been able to provide more information about the genre, photographer or concept but then I am a visualist and seeing the images alongside her breakdown of them is an immense help to my own progress.
Rating: 5 / 5
#4 by Conrad J. Obregon on March 26, 2010 - 5:30 am
Even the author Susan Bright admits in her introduction that Art Photography is hard to define. (Some aestheticians even claim that photography is not an art.) She appears to offer an operational definition. If it’s taken with a camera and people are willing to pay for it and hang it on a wall then it is art photography. The problem for Bright is that that definition includes images by artists ranging from Annie Liebovitz and Art Wolfe to the most extreme of the post-modernists and it is clear from the pictures in the book that that is not what Bright is presenting. Instead she seems to be aiming at some middle ground.
Her book is divided by genre into chapters on Portrait, Landscape, Narrative, Object, Fashion, Document and City. After a brief introduction she presents one to four pages on each individual photographer, with good sized images from each. Along with the pictures, Bright offers quotations from the photographers that I presume are meant to give us insight into their works. Most of the images show good control of the technical side of photography, unlike the work of many post-modernists who seem not only to challenge the meaning of a photograph, but also to reject established techniques.
Although she mentions the most famous and accomplished of photographers in the chapter introductions and shows a few of their pictures, like those of Jeff Wall and Cindy Sherman, many of the photographers, while known, are not from the most famous. All things being equal, getting an introduction to photographers with whom we are not familiar is a good thing. Unfortunately all things are not equal.
A photography book, just like an exhibit, works best when it has a theme that helps us to understand the works. A book can reveal the work of one photographer, or one school of photography, or one subject. This book gives us a potpourri of unrelated photographs that leaves the meaning of most of the pictures as enigmatic. From the title, the book suggests that it will provide some kind of insight into the state of the art. But it doesn’t. The chapter introductions appear trite and merely a recitation of the artists contained in the book and their subject matter.
People who read this book probably want to get their arms around the meaning of modern photography. It’s possible for a book to do this. As witness, look at Charlotte Cotton’s “The Photograph as Contemporary Art (World of Art)”. Although nowhere as extensive in content as “Art Photography Now” Cotton provides a taxonomy within which to consider pictures that makes it easy to understand how they fit into a larger scene. It’s true that she only examines post-modernists, but even examining that school (or really, schools) can give us a better understanding of photography.
It’s too bad for the photographers whose works appears in this book. Some of them are worth our attention. You just can’t tell it from this book.
Rating: 2 / 5
#5 by jack kerr on March 26, 2010 - 6:02 am
to call this ‘art photography now’ is a bold move, and this collection is less a survey than an advertisement for a particular style of photography. the work doesn’t vary much from artist to artist, and if you don’t like color fictive constructions and digital manipulation then you probably won’t like this book. as the trend of this type of large scale, color, set-up, advertising-influenced work fades, this book will seem a sad reminder of a rather lame period in photo history when the majority of galleries, critics, artists, and dealers joined forces to produce (like this title) little more than a shopping mall of trendy, elitist, high-priced commodity under the guise of art.
Rating: 1 / 5