Published to coincide with the presentation of the Hasselblad Award in Photography 2000 to Boris Mikhailov, and an exhibition of his work at the Hasselblad Center, Goteborg. This book includes photographs from the series entitled Dance.

An insider's account of the art and artists of the most interesting Russian artistic phenomenon since the Russian Avant-Garde. In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of “unofficial” artists in Moscow—artists not recognized by the state, not covered by state-controlled media, and cut off from wider audiences—created artworks that gave artistic form to a certain historical moment: the experience of Soviet socialism. The Moscow conceptualists not only reflected and analyzed by artistic means a spectacle of Soviet life but also preserved its memory for a future that turned out to be different from the officially predicted one. They captured both the shabby austerity of everyday Soviet life and the utopian energy of Soviet culture. In History Becomes Form, Boris Groys offers a contemporary's account of what he calls the most interesting Russian artistic phenomenon since the Russian avant-garde. The book collects Groys's essays on Moscow conceptualism, most of them written after his emigration to the West in 1981. The individual artists of the group—including Ilya Kabakov, Lev Rubinstein, and Ivan Chuikov—became known in the West after perestroika, but until now the artistic movement as a whole has received little attention. Groys's account sheds light not only on the Moscow Conceptualists and their work but also on the dilemmas of Soviet artists during the cold war.

The Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography for 2007 has been awarded to Nan Goldin. Nan Goldin is one of the most significant photographers of our time. Adopting the direct esthetics of snapshot photography she has been documenting her own life and that of her friends for more than 30 years. Her intimate and formally beautiful photographs focus on the urban scene in New York and Europe in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, a period dramatically marked by HIV and AIDS. Her use of photography as a memoir, as a means of protection against loss and as an act of preservation, and her use of the slide show as a means of presenting her work, resonates in the work of photographers of recent generations.

Essays by Peter Brger, Homay King, Tom Holert, Achim Hochdorfer, Fred Orton, Kaja Silverman, Gregor Stemmrich and Friedrich Tietjen.

The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography explores the vast international scope of twentieth-century photography and explains that history with a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary manner. This unique approach covers the aesthetic history of photography as an evolving art and documentary form, while also recognizing it as a developing technology and cultural force. This Encyclopedia presents the important developments, movements, photographers, photographic institutions, and theoretical aspects of the field along with information about equipment, techniques, and practical applications of photography. To bring this history alive for the reader, the set is illustrated in black and white throughout, and each volume contains a color plate section. A useful glossary of terms is also included.

Social Creatures: How Body Becomes Art presents obsessive kissers and young Iranian girls' dreams; it raises questions about altered ideas of human intimacy, about patterns of order in social structures, and about the meaning of the human being as a commodity. The human image, the view of self that shapes one's frame of action, appears to be in a constant state of flux. The destabilization of cultural, ethnic, and socio-political identities against the background of expanding global orientation is as much a part of this process as the dwindling significance of human labor. Social Creatures: How Body Becomes Art presents a collection of 13 current artistic positions, each of which pursues a different approach to the representation of the human body in photography and video art. With work by Francis Als, Max Baumann, Pierre Bismuth, Jeff Burton, Ghazel, Pierre Huyghe, Ben Judd, Boris Mikhailov, Carlos Nader, Stephen Shore, Santiago Sierra, Gillian Wearing, and Erwin Wurm.

How can art and visual theory contribute to the understanding of our current surveillance society? Watched! presents a selection of European artists who relate to current issues of discipline, control and security in our contemporary surveillance society. Surveillance is an expanding part of daily life. Since the start of the new millennium, we have seen major developments in security policies, data collection, software for private use, biometric science, social media, smartphones and technological innovations in other areas of ?smart surveillance?. Parallel to this change that has taken place in all parts of society, critical responses have increased across a wide range of disciplines, one of them being the arts. This publication offers a selection of artistic works and practices that addresses and reflects on issues of surveillance over the past fifteen years.