"An essential guide."--Seattle Post-Intelligencer

A leading critic’s inside story of “the photo boom” during the crucial decades of the 1970s and 80s When Andy Grundberg landed in New York in the early 1970s as a budding writer, photography was at the margins of the contemporary art world. By 1991, when he left his post as critic for the New York Times, photography was at the vital center of artistic debate. Grundberg writes eloquently and authoritatively about photography’s “boom years,” chronicling the medium’s increasing role within the most important art movements of the time, from Earth Art and Conceptual Art to performance and video. He also traces photography’s embrace by museums and galleries, as well as its politicization in the culture wars of the 80s and 90s. Grundberg reflects on the landmark exhibitions that defined the moment and his encounters with the work of leading photographers—many of whom he knew personally—including Gordon Matta-Clark, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Mapplethorpe. He navigates crucial themes such as photography’s relationship to theory as well as feminism and artists of color. Part memoir and part history, this perspective by one of the period’s leading critics ultimately tells a larger story about the crucial decades of the 70s and 80s through the medium of photography.

Photography Is Magic draws together current ideas about the use of photography as an invaluable medium in the contemporary art world. Edited and with an essay by leading photography writer and curator Charlotte Cotton, this critical publication surveys the work of a diverse group of artists, many working at the borders of the "art world" and the "photography world," all of whom are engaged with experimental ideas concerning photographic practice and its place in a shifting photographic landscape being reshaped by digital techniques. Readers are shown the scope of photographic possibilities in the context of the contemporary creative process. From Michele Abeles and Walead Beshty to Daniel Gordon and Matthew Lipps, Cotton has selected artists who are consciously reframing photographic practices using mixed media, appropriation and a recalibration of analog processes. Cotton brings these artists together around the idea of magic, the properties of illusion and material transformation that uniquely characterize photography. Beautifully produced and critically rigorous, Photography Is Magic is aimed at younger photo aficionados, students and anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of contemporary photography. It includes images and text by more than 80 artists, including Sara Cwynar, Shannon Ebner, Annette Kelm, Josh Kline, Elad Lassry, Jon Rafman, Shirana Shahbazi and Sara VanDerBeek, among many others.

Photography played a critical role in conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, as artists turned to photography as both medium and subject matter. Light Years offers the first major survey of the key artists of this period who used photography to new and inventive ends. Whereas some employed photographic images to create slide projections, photographic canvases, and artists' books, others integrated them into sculptural assemblages and multimedia installations. This book highlights the work of acclaimed international artists such as Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Mel Bochner, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Giuseppe Penone, and Ed Ruscha. Matthew Witkovsky's essay provides the larger context for photography within conceptual art, a theme that is further elaborated in texts by Mark Godfrey, Anne Rorimer, and Joshua Shannon. An essay by Robin Kelsey focuses on the pioneering work of John Baldessari in which he explored the element of chance, and an essay by Giuliano Sergio illuminates the lesser-known work of Arte Povera, an Italian movement that sought to dismantle established conventions in both the making and presentation of art.

The second edition of Why Art Photography? is an updated, expanded introduction to the ideas behind today’s striking photographic images. Lively, accessible discussions of key issues such as ambiguity, objectivity, fiction, authenticity, and photography’s expanding field are supplemented with new material around timely topics such as globalization, selfie culture, and photographers’ use of advanced digital technologies, including CGI and virtual reality. The new edition includes: an expanded introduction extended chapters featuring emerging trends a larger selection of images, including new color images an improved and expanded bibliography This new edition is essential for students looking to enrich their understanding of photography as a complex and multi-faceted art form.

"An unparalleled exploration of the art of cameraless photography, Geoffrey Batchen's Emanations offers an authoritative and lavishly illustrated history of photographs made without a camera. The book reveals the myriad approaches that artists have employed to create photographic images using only a light-sensitive surface and a source of radiation. Looking back to the invention of photography in the early 19th century up through recent cameraless works by contemporary artists, Emanations tells the story of nearly 200 years of bold experimentation in photography."--Provided by publisher.

Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, when the new medium of photography was pressed into service to illustrate sculpture, photographs of sculptural objects have directed viewers as to what, in the course of ambling around a sculpture, was the single perfect moment to stop and look. What is the photograph’s place in writing the history of sculpture? How has it changed according to culture, generation, criti-cal conviction, and changes in media? Photography and Sculpture: The Art Object in Reproduction studies aspects of these questions from the perspectives of sixteen leading art historians. Their essays consider iconic photographs, archival collections, new and forgotten technologies, and conceptual challenges in photographing three-dimensional forms that have directed changing historical and stylistic attitudes about how we see, write about, and narrate histories of sculpture. Chapters on such varied topics as picturing Conceptual art, manipulating sacred images in India to be non-photographs, and framing Roman art with an iPad illustrate the latent visual and narrative powers and ever-expanding potential of these images of sculpture.

Public, Private, Secret explores the roles that photography and video play in the crafting of identity, and the reconfiguration of social conventions that define our public and private selves. This collection of essays, interviews, and reflections assesses how our image-making and consumption patterns are embedded and implicated in a wider matrix of online behavior and social codes, which in turn give images a life of their own. Within this context, our visual creations and online activities blur and remove conventional separations between public and private (and sometimes secret) expression. The writings address the various disruptions, resistances, and subversions that artists propose to the limited versions of race, gender, sexuality, and autonomy that populate mainstream popular culture. They anticipate a future for our image-world rich with diversity and alterity, one that can be shaped and influenced by the agency of self-representation.

"I met Charles Albert Lucien Snelling on a Saturday in April, 1992. He lived in a typical two-up, two-down terraced house amongst many other two-up, two-down terraced houses... it was yellow and orange. In that respect it was totally different from every other house on the street. Charlie was a simple, gentle man. He loved flowers and the names of flowers. He loved color and surrounded himself with color. He loved his wife. Without ever trying or intending to, he showed me that the most important things in life cost nothing at all. He was my antidote to modern living." Over eight years, photographer Julian Germain documented Charlie, an elderly man living alone on England's Southern Coast, unfettered by the misplaced aspirations of the modern world; instead he spent the last years of his life absorbed in memories of his family, his love for flowers, music and the quotidian pleasures of the crossword. Germain's charming photographs are a beautiful, gentle portrait of a gentleman in his twilight years.

"This reader surveys the rich history of relationships between the moving and the still image in photography and film, tracing their ever-changing dialogue since early modernism. Manifestations of the cinematic in photography and of the photographic in cinema have been a springboard for the work of some of the most influential contemporary artists."--BOOK JACKET.