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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 779.0922
EAN num: 9781597110266
ISBN number: 1597110264
Label: Aperture
Manufacturer: Aperture
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 224
Printing Date: August 15, 2006
Publishing house: Aperture
Release Date: August 15, 2006
Sale Popularity Level: 172269
Studio: Aperture
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
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 survey presents the work of 76 of the most important and best-loved artist-photographers in the world today, including Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Sophie Calle, Wolfgang Tillmans, Nan Goldin, Martin Parr, Allan Sekula, Boris Mikhailov, Inez van Lamsweerde, Stephen Meisel, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Sam Taylor-Wood. Introductions to each thematic section-City, Portrait, Document, Object, Landscape, Fashion and Narrative-offer words from the artists and valuable insights into their motivation, inspiration and intentions. An introduction to the volume as a whole sets out the historical relationship between art and photography from the early nineteenth century forward, and covers the art world's embrace of the medium in recent decades. Art Photography Now is a deep and visually striking guide to the essential aspects of contemporary photography.
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Rated by buyers 
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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.
Rated by buyers -
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
Rated by buyers 
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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 colour 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.
Rated by buyers 
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It is difficult to find good contemporary photography overviews -- typically, you could go to galleries or museums for several years or buy a stack of art photography books and spend days going through them -- assuming you had a strong Art background. This book offers a nice alternative and it is one of the best overviews of contemporary fine art photography available.
Aperture, a respected photography publishing house, has beautifully produced this handsome book with 80 of what they consider to be the best living and working art photographers. The selection is broad, encompasses many areas and is well organized into 7 sections from Portrait to City. Several works from each artist are presented along with a short description of an artist's Work from a curator's perspective. Even more valuable are quotations from each artist describing their Work from their perspective. This alone makes the book worth owning.
Photographers you might know; Cindy Sherman, Thomas Ruff, Gregory Crewdson, Jeff Wall, Uta Barth, Joel Sternfeld, Thomas Demand and many others are alongside people you have probably never heard of but should get to know. The coverage of the cinematic, self exploration/psychological, conceptual and to some extent digital influences presented here should be thought provoking. Clearly, the "digitalness" of photography as a medium and all that implies -- interaction and collaboration, manipulation and realism, and authenticity and authority -- is growing in importance and will no doubt be better covered in the future as those artists emerge.
There are only two omissions that would have been interesting to see included; artists such as Gerhard Richter, best known for his painting and who uses photography extensively -- and some of the newest up and comers, like Idris Khan. To be fair, those areas are rich enough to support separate books and you should not let this keep you from buying this book. Overall, this is an excellent way to quickly learn about contemporary photography and you will not be disappointed.
Rated by buyers -
i think this book is one of the best art books available on the market. Every section is divided by the artist and it's explained in a very complete way and very simple to understand at the same time...a real dilight to your mind and a strong pleasure to the eye!!!
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