Art Photography Now

July 26th, 2010 by Bondo Nekat Leave a reply »

Art Photography Now

Andy Warhol looms larger than Alfred Stieglitz over this survey of contemporary photographers, who tend to be more preoccupied with popular and commercial imagery than traditional fine art photography. With their digital manipulations and cinematically constructed narratives, many of them unabashedly embrace flashy artifice over sober documentation. Not that Bright, a former curator of the National Portrait Gallery in London, tries to categorize the messy vitality of contemporary photography into any clearly labeled trends. She divides the 80 mostly British and American photographers into seven thematic chapters that allow for wide latitude. “Portraits,” for example, includes both Zwelethu Mthethwa’s straightforward images of South African migrant workers and Gillian Wearing’s photos of herself dressed as several of her own family members. While Bright’s own commentary follows the ponderous style adopted by curators everywhere, she gives equal room to the words of the photographers themselves, who often provide insight without even trying. Cindy Sherman, whose 1980s photographs of herself masquerading as movie stars and historical characters set the stage for much of the work in this book, says, “I didn’t know where [my art] was coming from. So I thought I had better not say anything or I’d blow it.” (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

“A single tome probably won’t manage to end any art/photography debates, but as a resource and up-to-date expose to the state of photography today, Art Photography Now hits the mark.” — Avis Cardella –Photo-Eye

“Forget twilight still lifes and peachy nudes. The photography in Bright’s lively survey of 80 artists who work with cameras has more to do with staged scenes of suburban anxiety, mock heroic tableaux of heavily armed children and the determined contemplation of whatever is enigmatic or unnerving.” –Time Magazine

“Photography not only shaped art in the last century, it dominated it — and what better to demonstrate and celebrate this domination that Susan Bright’s Art Photography Now, which surveys eighty of the most important and influential contemporary artist-photographers working today.” –Bookwatch

“This book does a wonderful job of capturing the state of the art at the beginning of the 21st century… This is a great overview of a great artistic medium for either serious art students or photographers who want to survey the world of their craft.” — Jym Wilson –USA Today

“With representative examples of city, portrait, documentary, object, landscape, fashion and narrative photography with a diverse grouping of the photographers associated with each domain, Art Photography Now establishes itself as both an important work of scholarship and an enjoyable catalog of the photographers who are shaping the medium’s future.” — Jay Gardner –Picture Magazine

Art Photography Now by Susan Bright

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