Book Reviews
Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change
Text by Philip Brookman, Rebecca Solnit, Marta Braun, and Corey Keller (London: Steidl, with Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 2010)
Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change places Muybridge’s artistic and technical accomplishments within the context of late-nineteenthcentury American and European history. This lavishly illustrated catalog…
Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970–1980
Edited and text by Kevin Moore, essays by James Crump and Leo Rubinfien, (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2010, 276 pages)
The lyrics to “Star Light, Star Bright,” an American nineteenth century rhyme, alludes to the fantasy of wishing on a star. According to Kevin Moore, an independent curator who organized the Starburst exhibition and its catalog with Dr. James Crump, curator of photography at the Cincinnati Art Museum, “Color photography of the 1970s happened in a starburst.”
Road To Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956 – 1968
Atlanta: High Museum Of Art, 2008
“Road To Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956–1968,” organized by Julian Cox, curator of photography at the High Museum of Art, is one of the most noteworthy exhibitions devoted to photography of the Civil Rights Movement in years…
A Century of Colour Photography: from the autochrome to the digital age
By Pamela Roberts London: Andre Deutsch ltd, Carlton Publishing Group, 2007
Marking the centennial of the commercial introduction of the Lumière brothers’ autochrome process in 1907, Pamela Roberts, former Curator at the Royal Photographic Society from 1982 to 2001, has written a much-needed introduction to the underserved history of color photography.
Christian Boltanski Time
In a site-specific installation at the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt, Germany, Christian Boltanski combined new and old works to create a Gesamtkunstwerk—a synthesis of his art. The exhibition presented Boltanski’s complicated autobiographical oeuvre that, whether fictional or real (Boltanski has a reputation for intentionally making erroneous, contradictory, and misleading statements), provides the foundation for his pieces about time and its effect on memory.
Karl Blossfeldt: Working Collages
Edited by Ann and Jurgen Wilde, The MIT Pres
Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) used macro- and microscopic photography to present the “artistic” organizing patterns in nature. This pioneer of the New Objectivity movement of the 1920s and 1930s wanted to eliminate atmospheric effects and personal reactions to reveal a subject’s basic design and demonstrate that “Nature is our best teacher.”
William Christenberry
Texts by Elizabeth Broun, Walter Hopps, Andy Grundberg, and Howard N. Fox., Aperture 204 pp
William Christenberry presents a comprehensive survey of works in photography, drawing, painting, sculpture, and found object assemblage by this multifaceted artist. This collection offers a totality of Christenberry’s complex explorations into cultural identity shaped by his rural Alabama birthplace.
The Holocaust Encyclopedia
The Holocaust Encyclopedia edited by Walter Laqueur and Judith Tydor Baumel, featuring short essays by over 100 authors that place the Holocaust in social, political, religious, moral, and intellectual context.
No Ordinary Landscape: Encounters in a Changing Environment
Photographs by Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee, introduction by Rebecca Solnit, afterward by John McPhee.
The philosophy of this collaboration reflects the belief that civilization is defined by our relationship to the natural environment and how it is refashioned to meet human needs.
The Photobook: A History (Volume II)
Compiled by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, New York: Phaidon Press, 2006
The impetus for The Photobook: A History comes from Martin Parr’s intuitive understanding of the medium as a working photographer and his passion for collecting photo books.
Regarding the Pain of Others
Susan Sontag
Today nobody gives much thought to the quality and quantity of writing about photography. But this was not always the case. Whether you agree with her observations of not, the publication of Susan Sontag’s On Photography in 1977 was a innovative event that marked the first time an American Intellectual seriously considered photography worth thinking and writing about. Ironically the dramatic increase in scope and excellence of photographic writing, for which Sontag deserves credit for stimulating, has reduced the effect of what she has to say in Regarding the Pain of Others…
Alexey Brodovitch
by Gabriel Bauret
Alexey Brodovitch opens with the adroit graphic designerís words: “Begin without a camera: cut out a window in a piece of card. Look, discover, choose what you are going to photograph.”
Leni Riefenstahl-Five Lives
Edited by Angelika Taschen
While most of Germany’s film community had to flee when Hitler was elected chancellor in 1933, Leni Riefenstahl remained and was personally given carte blanche by Hitler to make a film of the 1934 Nuremberg Party Convention. The result was her brilliant and inflammatory propaganda film, Triumph of the Will (1935), banned by the Allies even after the end of World War II.
Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety
By Sue Taylor
Sue Taylor utilizes over 120 images to discuss Hans Bellmer’s sexually explicit drawings, paintings, and prints in addition to his notorious doll photographs. Taylor probes this German-born surrealist’s anxieties, fantasies, losses, and obsessions that include fetishism, lesbianism, pedophilia, rape, sado-masochism, and even murder, which haunted him and informed his picture making. Taylor investigates these disturbing issues through the lens of Freudian themes from her perspective as a feminist art historian.