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3 comments about Art and Photography (Themes & Movements S.).

1. Notwithstanding the promise of its title, "Art in Photography" is simply a survey of avant-garde photography of the last half of the twentieth century.
   
   The book is divided into three parts: an essay by Campany, photographs and other works, and documents consisting of excerpts of articles, interviews and statements. The essay is divided into sections with titles like "The Urban and the Everyday" with similar sections of the photographs and documents. Each essay section makes a few general comments about the new in photography and then discusses in a sentence or two the particular photographers whose works appear among the photographs.
   
   The essay's principal thesis is that while other plastic arts moved away from content toward form in modern times, photography has generally moved away from form to content. At the same time, the goal of either set of movements was always self-referential, although it seemed as if photographers were deliberately subverting the form to show its inadequacies. (The author ignores the main stream of photography during that same period, when there were many portrait, fashion and landscape photographers who clung splendidly to the combination of form and content, using form to explicate the content.)
   
   The essay is often supported by thumbnails an inch and three-quarters high, but it is difficult to see much at this small size, and the reader may be further confounded in the effort to relate the picture to the text by the fact that the captions for the thumbnails are printed vertically in small type, requiring one to rotate the book 90 degrees and then look closely to confirm the relationship of the picture to the text.
   
   The pictures themselves are difficult to understand out of the context of a particular photographer's work, although occasionally an image will arrest one's eye, like the photograph of a single woman's face turned toward the camera in a sea of black-cloaked praying Moslem women, or Chuck Close's painting of Philip Glass. For the most part the pictures, out of context, are enigmatic. Campany acknowledges that it is difficult to draw any consistent theory of photography from the pictures.
   
   The documents vary in interest from insightful articles to artistic double-speak. It pained me to see Walter Benjamin's seminal article "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" abridged to a short excerpt, but it does add the flavor of the work to some understanding of the pictures presented.
   
   Survey books are always difficult for me because they can never go into enough detail to comprehend larger movements. Still, for the individual interested in a collection of representative works of avant-garde photography, this book may fill the bill,



2. The book starts with a 35-page survey written by the editor does a very good job of covering photography's use in the arts. This is then followed by some 150 pages of photographs. The next 80 pages cover the documents, writings on and by the artists using photography in their practice. The book concludes with artist and author biographies and a decent bibliography.
   
   Both the photography and the documents are organized into rough thematic groupings. These are:
   * Memories and Archives
   * Objective Objects
   * Traces of Traces
   * The Urban and the Everyday
   * The Studio Image
   * The Arts of Reproduction
   * `Just' Looking
   * The Cultures of Nature
   This organizational structure works quite well, in that rather than overwhelming you with a whole book worth of imagery and commentary, it is divided into more manageable chunks that still allow contemplation of the whole but also allow a tighter consideration, as needed. The work and documents cover the whole time range from the 60's to the early 21st Century (2003 to be specific, the year of publication). So the book is an excellent survey document.
   
   Anyone who is serious at coming to grips with the use of photography in contemporary art practice should have this book handy. It brings together in one great resource not only great examples of the work produced but also, through collating the writings that are included, bringing together the thoughts, criticisms and analysis of the major artists, critics, theorists and analysts of the time. Very highly recommended.



3. The front free endpaper of this book says "Art and Photography is the first book of its kind to survey the presence of photography in artistic practice from the 1960s onwards. The photographic image is central to contemporary art and the debates that surround it, yet it took most of the last century for it to acquire this status. Despite the extensive exploration of photography as an independent art in the Modernist era, it was not until the late twentieth century that artists, museums and galleries began to explore its social roles as a medium of representation. This volume provides a comprehensive survey of photography's place in recent art history, further contextualized in the Documents section by original artists' statements and interviews, together with critical and theoretical reflections on the photographic and the art of the photograph."
   
   Does the book live up to this hype? I think it does. It's a handsome 304-page tome, with the first two-thirds printed on white semiglossy paper (for the "Survey" and "Works") and the last third on cream-colored uncoated paper (for the "Documents," biographies, bibliography, and index).
   
   The "Survey," "Works," and "Documents" parts are arranged into the same eight sections: "Memories and Archives" on "public and private histories"; "Objective Objects" on photos' "apparently direct relation to the world"; "Traces of Traces" on "photography as a record of the real and its effects"; "The Urban and the Everyday" on "contemporary city life"; "The Studio Image" on "fine art's traditional space of making"; "The Arts of Reproduction" on "works that reflect upon the way mass culture is experienced as fragments"; " 'Just' Looking" on "the social structures of vision and the place of the gaze in the formation of our identity"; and "The Cultures of Nature" on "how the current understandings of the natural are formed and reflected through contemporary representation." This organization is unique to my knowledge; most books on art are arranged chronologically or by artist.
   
   The "Survey" essay by David Campany places the Works and Documents into historical context and explains in some detail the eight categories. It's illustrated with small reproductions of art and photos. I found it enlightening.
   
   Within each of the eight sections of "Works," from pages 46 to 205, the photos are presented in more or less chronological order, with the earliest works dating from the 1960s. Of the dozens of photographers, the ones who have more than one photo (from different series) reproduced in the book are John Baldessari, Victor Burgin, Gregory Crewdson, John Divola, John Hilliard, Joel Meyerowitz, Gabriel Orozco, Richard Prince, Gerhard Richter, Martha Rosler, Thomas Ruff, Allan Sekula, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Larry Sultan, Jeff Wall, Andy Warhol, Gillian Wearing, and William Wegman. I detect no significant errors of omission or commission in the choice of artists. The specifications of media (e.g., "tinted black and white photographs") and dimensions, and the lengthy captions, are valuable.
   
   "Documents" contains excerpts of writings by photographers (including ones with only a single photograph in "Works," e.g., Yve Lomax and Robert Smithson) and non-photographers (e.g., Roland Barthes, Jacque Derrida, Craig Owens, Marcel Proust), as well as interviews with photographers. These "mostly left-brain" texts complement the "half-left-brain, half-right-brain" Works.
   
   If I had to improve anything, I would say to editor Campany and publisher Phaidon only "Lay off the fancy typography, like the 'decreasing font size' effect from page 14 to page 17, and the full-page treatment of brief quotations on pages 221, 226, 235, and 283! While it makes the book visually attractive, it distracts from the book's main messages and wastes space." Buy this excellent book from Amazon.com!

5 comments about Lost Over Laos: A True Story Of Tragedy, Mystery, And Friendship.

1. Before picking up this book I had just finished Requiem by Horst Faas and Tim Page, The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam, A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan (all of which I loved), A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo, and Street Without Joy by Bernard Fall. I have to say that Richard Pyle is not in the same league (except maybe with Caputo). A dramatic, tragic story, but it just wasn't captivating in Pyle's hands. Also, he seemed to be stretching to create a book out of this story. Would have been better as an article in Atlantic Monthly rather than a complete book.



2. I throughly enjoyed this book. I love history and this book gave a good insight into the press of Saigon including their risks and misfortunes. I enjoyed reading about the relationships developed at a personal level between the press core and the military. I would highly recommend this book.



3. For those of us born too late to be part of the generation that was, in the words of Richard Pyle, "educated, molded, and aged by the Vietnam experience," our second-hand knowledge of this war has been limited largely to the negative: the horrors of the battlefield, the mental anguish of the young soldiers being asked to sacrifice their lives for goals that were far from clear, and the deeply divisive debates over the agony of continued warfare vs. the humiliation of abandoning the cause. Yet this book is about journalists who VOLUNTEERED to go into the jungle. What would make an otherwise sane person want to do this? As Pyle explores the lives and deaths of the four killed photojournalists, various answers to this question surface, making the journalist's motives comprehensible even to outsiders such as myself--the lure of the exotic setting, the sense of regret that one might have felt if excluded from the most important event of the decade, and the sense of obligation to "compel the world to see Vietnam," to see it "through a camera lens that illuminated, explained, told truths of what the war looked like and how it felt to be there." As for coping with the drawbacks of death and dismemberment, there was always denial. As Richard writes: "It was part of the war correspondent psyche to recognize the possibility of the worst, but to worry or even think much about that was to invite oneself to look for work in another field"; and "there was a sense among members of the Saigon media that journalists who reached celebrity status through repeated stellar performance could become exempt from ordinary danger, passing into a realm of immunity where the worst simply could not happen to them--as if North Vietnamese gunners tracking a helicopter would receive a last-second order: 'Don't shoot. That's Larry Burrows up there.'"

   As summarized in the reviews of others, the primary focus of this book is on (1) the lives of Larry Burrows, Henri Huet, Kent Potter, and Keisaburo Shimamoto; and (2) the difficult search for the details of a crash that took place behind enemy lines (details which, for almost thirty years, were limited to little more than "helicopter shot down over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, apparently killing all aboard"). Yet it's the tangent themes that I found the most affecting, perhaps none more than Pyle's search for meaning in the tragic loss of his colleagues and friends. These four civilian photographers went to Vietnam to share the images of war with the rest of the world, and it seems to double the tragedy "that the only monument to their commitment, their skill, and their courage should be a few bone shards and bits of metal, left out in the rain on a nameless, forgotten hillside." Five stars.




4. This book describes the world of photojournalists in the Vietnam work and focuses on the death of four photojournalists in a battle over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos during a the US government's semi-covert war against the North Vietnamese in that country (the pilots of their aircraft were South Vietnamese and their death occurred during a South Vietnamese attack against NVA supply lines). The book also describes the effort to find their remains and the authors' attempt to give meaning to their loss. The photojournalists who died included two of the most celebrated of the war and two younger men of great skill. In a relatively short text, the book manages to tell their stories and the story of Vietnam War photojournalism in a manner that is reverent without being professionally aggrandizing. By coincidence, I visited the village where the search for remains took place a few months before the authors and their time in that place was particularly evocative for me. The authors offer a perspective on the war that is complex and, in some ways, more hawkish than other first-hand retrospective war accounts, although too skeptical to really fit the conceptualizations of hawk and dove that characterized the times. Given the many parallels that some have drawn between Vietnam and our own era, this is a book that thoughtful critics and partisans of the Iraqi conflict should read. My only complaint is that book does not include enough of the award winning pictures of Larry Burrows and his fallen colleagues.



5. Collaboratively written by foreign correspondent Richard Pyle and Associated Press photographer and photo editor Horst Faas, Lost Over Laos: A True Story Of Tragedy, Mystery, And Friendship is an historical and memorial testimony showcasing four combat photographers who died in Indochina: Larry Burrows of "Life" magazine; Henri Huet of the Associated Press; Kent Potter of United Press International; and Keisaburo Shimamoto of "Newsweek". Twenty seven years later, a recovery team was able to visit the site of the helicopter crash that took the lives of these remarkable men, recover evidence, and bring closure to the tragedy. Lost Over Laos is a powerful and poignant narration, and especially recommended reading for students of journalism.

1 comments about Let's Wrestle.

1. Let's Wrestle is a superb wee book! The Shrig never fails to disappoint with his wit and insight. Although out of print, if you can acquire a copy...buy, buy, buy!

1 comments about Women of Our Time: 75 Portraits of Remarkable Women.

1. Opening this book, I expected to find glossy photos of Eleanor Roosevelt, Marilyn Monroe, and other names and faces I recognized. While I found summaries of the lives of Roosevelt and Monroe beside typical portraits, I also found glowing descriptions and realistically unflattering pictures of women whose names I had never heard or whose faces I had never seen. Among the familiar list of names and unfamiliar faces were Margaret Sanger, pioneer of birth control rights; Anne Sexton, a poet who wrote with heart-gripping emotionality; and Pearl S. Buck, whose works I had read in high school with little context. Among the women whose stories had been hidden to me until now were Rosalyn Yalow, a medical physicist who made in-roads into male-dominated fields; Frances Perkins, the first woman to hold a post in the U.S. Cabinet; and Zitkala-Sa Bonnin (also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), an author and activist for Native American rights.
   
   As broad and deep as the selection of featured women is, my only complaint is also about the selection. While a number of black, white, Asian and Native American writers, artists, activists, politicians and scientists are featured, nearly all of the subjects whose fame was acquired outside of the arts are white. The inclusion of Congresswoman and lawyer Barbara Jordan and Vietnam War Memorial architect Maya Lin is heartening, but surely a broad survey of ground-breaking women in the 20th century could offer a more inclusive pallet.

1 comments about Nitrate Won't Wait: A History of Film Preservation in the United States.

1. Anthony Slide writes a fascinating history of the film preservation movement in the United States. After covering the dangers of nitrate film and the wholesale junking of film prints during the silent era, he documents the beginning of the archive movement in the 1930s and 1940s. You would think that the book would be filled with stories of heroic efforts to save films, but there are just as many stories of incompetent and egotistical administrators who did more damage than good. The American Film Institute did a good job for a few years helping archives to preserve and restore films, but it quickly became a political organization and mostly claimed credit for projects that it had nothing to do with. The book goes into detail into the "colorization" controversy, a process which thankfully has pretty much disappeared since this book was published in 1992. There is also a section on how Scandinavian archives have done a much better job of preserving their countries' film heritage. If you are a serious lover of silent films or the golden age of sound films, you will definitely want to read this book!

4 comments about The Secret Paris of the '30s.

1. This was the second time I'd enjoyed this groundbreaking book-length photo essay by one of the pioneer French photojournalists. I'd first seen many of the very famous historic pictures when I was a student working on my BFA in the mid-1960's. I came across the book itself in the early 1970's but I don't think I read the text at the time because I seem to recall it was in French.
   Having just finished actually reading this 1976 English translation I purchased, I'm even more impressed than I was long ago when I examined an earlier foreign version. Not only have the pictures themselves remained some of the best photographs of the era, but also they are still fresh and as relevant as they were at the time. The author-photographer liked to stroll through the dark alleys and byways of Paris with the likes of Man Ray, KiKi and Henry Miller among others. What impressed me most about this book at this time in my own life is that the photographer was either very, very brave or had a "death wish." Taking the pictures in this book was a very dangerous undertaking. The major players in the pictures included drug dealers, thugs, prostitutes and other unsavory characters of the shadowy Paris underbelly. Brassai was lucky not to have been robbed of more than his money and film holders during his continuing documentation of the Paris underworld. Simply being out in some of the dangerous streets where he set up his camera and tripod was taking his life in his hands. Obviously, photographing known criminals in their element made him and his valuable camera equipment a really tempting target for a mugging. Since the local criminals also hated "stool pigeons" or police informers, he was a convenient target of their fear of betrayal. Having a crime magazine editor add a caption to one of his gangster portraits that said "This murderer who..." brought that murderer crashing through Brassai's bedroom door in the middle of the night mad as Hell and brandishing his switchblade and yelling "So I'm a murder, am I...Then I'm going to kill you!" Fortunately, he settled for just robbing him of all his money.
   This was the 1930's and Brassai was taking a bulky camera, tripod and the necessary flash equipment into Opium Dens for the wealthy and famous, illegal gambling dens, brothels, houses of illusion, the hidden club world of gay men and women, and dangerous bars where the crooks, pimps and thugs relaxed and conducted business or took revenge on (rubbed out) their competitors. There was no way he could hide the fact he was taking pictures--especially when his flash lit up the entire scene. He was a brave photographer who risked his life to show the insides of the officially unacknowledged flesh-peddling world of Paris life.
   Even though the pictures in the book are all from the 1930's and sometimes have a dated and quaint look to them, something else becomes obvious to every viewer and reader of the pictures. It's obvious that nothing much has really changed since those legendary times in Paris. Even Brassai points out that the things he photographed had been going on in the same areas of Paris for centuries. They still do as any tourist to Paris can confirm. The more things change, the more things stay the same. Brassai's world still exists relatively unchanged and not just in Paris, but in almost every major city in the world. That fact makes this a timeless book and that's really something worth knowing.



2. Divided into 19 sections, each including a short essay on one subject (ex.: The Street Fair) with accompanying illustrations. Photographs include full-page printed to the edge of the paper (unfortunately also to the spine of the book), full-page with border, half and quarter page. Copyrights on most of the the photographs, listed in an appendix, range from 1931-33, a few are 1934.

   Most of the 150 photographs are very good duotone reproductions, a few are less than great. My copy is a softcover, publ. by Thames & Hudson, 2001, labeled Printed in Italy on the back cover.

   The subjects range from public toilets and their various uses, through petty underworld figures, gay nightclubs, prostitutes and brothels, bums, to backstage at the Folie-Bergere and an upper-class opium den. One interesting section deals with the annual "Balls" (read orgies) organized by the Schools of Medicine and the Arts on the Left Bank for their students. All get a sympathetic and nonjudgemental treatment. Overall an fascinating, but fragmented glimpse of Paris night life in the early 30's.




3. The photographs and stories in this book are truly remarkable. The underground world Brassai allows the reader to navigate is one that will leave a mark on your heart and tear at your soul. From lonely streetwalkers to the many faces of Parisian nightclubs, this amazing photographic journey gives a modern audience a true glimpse of what life was like in the 30s.



4. Don't let the title put you off, there is very little in this book that would shock a modern audience. Times certainly ain't what they used to be. Brassai's photos and writings of a time now long gone however will slowly infuse in you a strange and somewhat uncomfortable nostalgia for a time long before you were born and places you wouldn't visit had you been born. Removed so far in time, it's all very safe - perhaps.

2 comments about Business Affairs.

1. These handsome men in sexy, classic suits are hot! Plenty of hot pictures of men for you to drool and view repeatedly!
   
   What's amazing is that these actors from menatplay.com were photographed by a simple digital camera. With the trick of light and angle, these pictures looked like they were shot by a really expensive camera.
   
   But that's not the point. There's a book of hot, sexy men in business suits teasing you visually! There better be a volume two coming out soon!



2. If you fantasize about hunky men in business attire, you're in for a real treat.

4 comments about Hawaii Dreamscapes Revealed - Big Island.

1. Beautiful pictures but I would have enjoyed more text describing what I was seeing.



2. Beautiful book! Some of the photos are of areas we couldn't get close enough to take. My only question is...when will the books for the other islands be published?



3. "This is a land that has ten of the world's fifteen types of climatic zones," so writes Andrew Doughty in the Introduction of HAWAII DREAMSCAPES REVEALED, a stunning collection of photos of the "Big Island."
   
   I went to Oahu a few years ago and was completely blown away by the beaches, the mountains, the ocean. It is one of the few places that not only lives up to the photographs but actually surpasses them in many ways. Paul Theroux, the international best-selling author of "The Mosquito Coast" and some of the greatest travel narratives of all time, moved to Hawaii after kayaking around the islands for his book, "The Happy Isles of Oceana"--and this was a guy who has literally been EVERYWHERE. (He went on to write "Hotel Honolulu" as well). So obviously these are enchanting islands that can get under your skin and draw you back.
   
   I expected great photography of the beaches and lava in HAWAII DREAMSCAPES REVEALED but I was also blown away by other unexpected scenes: an empty black beach covered by so many white pieces of coral that it looks like patches of snow, a cattle ranch beneath a range of mountains that HAS snow on its peaks (in Hawaii!), a high-altitude terrain above the clouds that looks like the surface of Mars. There's one wild shot of lava cooling in smooth orbs on the ground (I expected the liquid-metal Terminator to stand up out of them).
   
   The shots of lush forests and waterfalls and reefs are also striking and well-chosen.
   
   I will definitely be getting the Oahu volume since I'd like to see what this photography couple have done with an island I've seen.
   
   From what they've shown me of the Big Island, I will try to go back someday soon.



4. 
   There are two types of travel books. The first has interesting photos, but writing which either detracts, or does not add to the experience. The second has competent writing, but photos you've seen a million times.
   
   This book is neither.
   
   "Hawaii Dreamscapes Revealed" is in a category all of its own.
   
   From the renowned author, Andrew Doughty, along with his photographer, Leona Boyd, "Hawaii Dreamscapes Revealed" has ushered in an entirely new genre of travel books with this articulate and intelligent photo series.
   
   This is one of the most exquisite books I've ever read.
   
   Clearly, the writer and photographers of "Hawaii Dreamscapes Revealed" have found the beautiful and the savage, the profound and the simple, the dream and the reality. And even more amazingly, they share their extensive knowledge with their readers. Open this book to any page and you'll be astounded at the authors' breathtaking slant on one of the most incredible places in the world.
   
   Yet this is not your typical book of pretty photographs of palm trees in Hawaii. Truly, I've never seen anything like this. Their renderings of snow clouds beneath your feet, wild goats, beaches glittering with gems, jungle flowers, hellish fumes, driftwood, and mountains leave the reader wondering, "Where on earth is this place?"
   
   How in the world could one place contain all of this? Who knew that Hawaii has ten of the world's fifteen climatic zones? I hope to travel to Hawaii someday, and will now do so in an entirely different way.
   
   Check out pages 100-101 for a simply astonishing photo. Enter this dreamscape revealed, and perhaps you'll learn as much about yourself, as you do this amazing place.
   
   "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."- Ralph Waldo Emerson
   
   These two authors carry it with them. Travel with this pair as they let you glimpse the color of Hawaii's soul.
   
   You won't regret the journey.

No comments about Photojournalism: Content and Technique.