Art Photography Now [Hardcover]

Susan Bright (Editor), Nan Goldin (Photographer), Cindy Sherman (Photographer), Jeff Wall (Photographer)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 2005

In the previous century, photography helped shape art; in the current one, it has begun to dominate it. Not only are major international museums and galleries mounting blockbuster exhibitions, but art photographers are also being celebrated as contemporary masters and their work commands unprecedented prices. This indispensable survey presents the work of 76 of the most important and best-known art photographers in the world: 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, Sam Taylor-Wood, and many more are featured in its pages.

Susan Bright, former Curator of Photographs at London's National Portrait Gallery, has organized the book into seven sections--City, Portrait, Document, Object, Landscape, Fashion, and Narrative--and provides an introductory essay for each. Along with each photographer's works, presented in sequence within those divisions, Bright's commentaries provide context and depth, and quotations from the artists themselves offer valuable insights into the motivation, inspiration, and intentions behind the work.

Following in the tradition of Photography Past/Forward: Aperture at 50 and the Photography Speaks series, this volume will become an essential resource for curators, collectors, scholars, practitioners, and anyone who wants comprehensive, up-to-date exposure to the state of the medium today.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
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Review

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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 text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Aperture (October 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 193178891X
• ISBN-13: 978-1931788915
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 9.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #882,627 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A trip to 80 (good) art galleries in a single book, May 7, 2006

By 

Chris Kitze (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Art Photography Now (Hardcover)

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.

21 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Much more than your usual photography exhibition, December 5, 2005

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Art Photography Now (Hardcover)

Photography not only shaped art in the last century, it dominated it - and what better to demonstrate and celebrate this domination than Susan Bright's Art Photography Now, which surveys eighty of the most important and influential contemporary artist-photographers working today. Seven sections are divided by photo type: portrait, landscape, fashion, etc., and each explores and contrasts methods used by artists in their genres. Not only are styles compared, but inspirations and different philosophical and artistic approaches shared. Much more than your usual photography exhibition, Art Photography Now seeks an explanation of the nature and purposes of contemporary art photographers.

40 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars one-sided view, June 20, 2006

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jack kerr (northport, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Art Photography Now (Hardcover)

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 color 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.