Customer Reviews

Photography After Frank (Aperture Ideas)

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I started reading it about a week ago and have made it half way through. Though I have not completed the book, I feel as though my review won't change much once I reach the end (if I ever do).

The writer, Philip Gefter, wrote for the New York times and several other publications in his career. Each of the essays is a review that he has written in the past 8 years or so about various shows going on along with a brief history of each photographer. I went into this book looking for some great dialogue about contemporary photography and instead found a book about photography, or photographer, appreciation. It isn't that I have a problem with art appreciation books, but the way Photography After Frank was marketed made me think otherwise. Each essay is about four pages in length and is organized like this:

1: A paragraph dedicated to saying how awesome that photographer is.

2: The connection to Frank or whoever else (but there is a lot of Frank).

3: An extremely basic explanation of what the work is "about".

4: And then more about how awesome that artist is.

My main issue with this book is that it is not saying anything. There is no opinion, there is no statement or over arching theme here, it is just a retelling of the major players in photography since Robert Frank. The only reason this book should ever be picked up is by people who want to learn about the basic, and I mean BASIC, history of photography of the past 50 or so years.

This book just furthers my issue with most things going on in art right now. We need to realize that modernism is over, we have to be okay with moving on, but yet we still sit here and continue thinking about art the same way that we did when Robert Frank made The Americans!

I don't have much else to say without repeating myself on how disappointed I am with this purchase. But if you want to learn about the history of photography this will do it for you.

To be even-handed at the outset, I must state that there are a number of things which recommend this book. Gefter is familiar with contemporary photography and is able to convey a good sense of his essay subjects in a page or two, the length of most of the essays in this collection. There is a wide range of photographers included and unless you are well versed in modern photography you will learn quite a lot. Gefter's prose is not always artful but the essays are information dense and filled with interesting anecdotes and quotes, what one expects from newspaper photography writing (these essays are mostly from Gefter's writings for The New York Times). However, a major sin of this book is that the contents are not at all an examination of contemporary photography practice in relation to Robert Frank, despite the book's title and claims on the back jacket such as "throughout the book, Gefter seamlessly interweaves Frank's legacy with the work of dozens of important artists who have followed in his wake...". In fact, that claim is simply a blatant untruth: after the three and one-half page introduction, intended to be an examination of "...Frank's challenge to photography's formal objectivity with the grainy, off-handed spontaneity of The Americans," Frank and his work is mentioned only in passing and in only a handful of the 40-plus essays in the book. Despite the value of Gefter's essays in and of themselves, this book is a case of misleading marketing and Aperture should be deeply ashamed of themselves for this deceit and Gefter as well for allowing his collection of essays to be presented as something they are not.

There are photography technique books, and portfolio books, and books of critiques and even philosophy and theory of photography. All of them are probably interesting to someone and occasionally quite challenging. But sometimes a person interested in photography wants to read something light and accessible with little anecdotes, and if I can say it without being insulting, just veg out. Here's the book for that time.

The book is a collection of short essays (mostly newspaper articles) by Philip Gefter about photography covering everything from reviews of show openings to obituaries of photographers, as well as some new introductory material prepared for the book and an interview with Gefter by Veronique Vienne. Gefter served for several years as the picture editor for the front page of the New York Times. (Who knew "the gray lady" was so serious about photography that it even had such a position?) The sections of the book are called the document; the staged document; photojournalism; the portrait; the collection; and the marketplace. The essays are chatty and often contain tidbits about the world of photography that I had not encountered but found interesting.

The title may be a little misleading. One might think that it would show how the elements of Robert Frank's style that made such an impact with the publication of "The Americans" shaped photography. While the author does occasionally refer to Frank in the essays, it is not to emphasize his role or how other photographers built on his style. Instead the publication date of "The Americans" serves as a kind of marker for the period that the essays cover.

The essays cover a broad view of the photography scene, even going as far as to discuss how the painter Eric Fischl uses photography in his painting, not to copy from, but rather to provide a vocabulary to examine the world. On the other hand while Gefter notes the arrival of Ryan McGinley on the photography scene as a rising star, there was little in his essay on the photographer to help me understand why McGinley's pictures of leaping naked young people were worth my attention. There are 47 pages in the plates section that contain enough photographs to show an accurate exploration of the history of photography beginning with Frank.

Some articles are quite mundane, like the obituary of Cornell Capa, who founded the International Center for Photography, which essentially is a "then he did X" article. Sometimes the articles are mind-provoking like the article that suggests that many news photographs can't stand alone as images, but can tell a significant story with just a short caption.

Folks who are interested in some light but interesting reading about photography should enjoy this book.

I don't buy the supposed connection between Frank and some of the photographers covered in this book. Avedon and Mapplethorpe? Pics are too small. Too much writing not enough pictures. The writing does not make the case. It is contrived art scholar verbiage. Walker Evans and Company is a much better book in this genre. As is Arthur Wesley Dow and American Arts and Crafts.

Mr. Gefter has a tenuous grasp on photographic history at best, and, at worst, comes across as hawking for the publishing company Aperture.

I highly recommend "Photography After Frank". It gave me a really good grasp of the landscape of contemporary photography by tracing its roots back to Robert Frank. The essays are well written and insightful and devoid of artspeak. As a whole, a really good explanation of the way the photographic image has mutated and transformed with new technologies, and, also, evolved alongside painting.

[...]

When people ask me what they need to do to understand the world of fine art photography, I tell them: go to galleries, preview auctions, and read the photography criticism in The New York Times. The Times suggestion was in large part because of the timely, eloquent, and provocative writing of Philip Gefter, the picture editor and photography writer for the paper's Arts & Leisure section. Gefter has now left the paper although he continues to contribute as a freelance and you'll now see his byline in other publications. But the good news is that Aperture have gathered 39 of his pieces in one volume that no-one interested in photography should be without.

As you can see above, it has a great cover featuring Ryan McGinley's "Dakota Hair" from 2004. From there, much like the picture, it's an exhilarating and breezy journey though modern photography. Stephen Shore is "Walker Evans - stoned"! On Richard Misrach "Don't let the beauty of Richard Misrach fool you. ... What lies beneath the surface is more to the point." And from an essay on Vince Aletti's magazine collection, "One Saturday afternoon, I accompanied Vince on his rounds and, after nine galleries, with flagging energy I begged off. But Vince was not finished for the day. He is dogged apparently insatiable in his quest to know what's out there, to see what artists are doing. I have come to understand that his commitment to looking at art stems from the same impulse to collect: know thy culture, know thyself."

Now that's summer reading!

For us photography nuts this is must have. This collection of essays on artists and other photo subjects is a delightful and valuable read.