Amazon.com Review
In 1964 the Hallmark corporation established its photography collection--the first corporate collection of its kind--with the purchase of more than 100 prints by Harry Callahan. The company's acquisitive pace never slowed: they currently own about 4,000 prints. The scope of the work is dizzying--name a photographer, and you'll likely find an excellent example of his or her work here. Strand, Modotti, Hine, Arbus, Wegman, Mapplethorpe, and Mann are just a small number of the photographers who represent the breadth and depth of this group of images. The book itself is as colossal as its title would indicate. Keith Davis, the director of Hallmark's fine-art programs, has written a meaty if occasionally dry history of the medium to accompany and illuminate the nearly 500 photos. Most of the images, from Henry Cady's late-19th-century shots of his family to Irving Penn's Duke Ellington and Bruce Davidson's gang kids, are black and white. But Sandy Skoglund's surreal Fox Games and Larry Burrows's painful Reaching Out are skillfully reproduced to maintain their lush color saturation. Look for the collection at an exhibition that tours the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Seattle Art Museum, the Denver Art Museum, and other venues from 1999 to 2002. --Anna Baldwin
From Publishers Weekly
Drawing on Hallmark's major picture collection, Davis, the company's fine arts program director, here chronicles the technical and artistic evolution of photography since the 1880s in a richly produced accompaniment to a current traveling exhibition. The project's sweep is all-inclusive, reflecting cultural change from 19th-century sentimentality?and later a literal documentation of war, misery and disaster?to a "circular process of signification" seen by critics in today's fragmentation, construction and print manipulation for avant-garde experiments. More a reference source than a leisurely read, this tome nevertheless offers pleasant surprises and illuminates photography's amateur enthusiasms, social commentary, artistic innovation and technical achievement over the years.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
