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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A tour-de-force of What Can Be Done, January 11, 2006
This review is from: Photography Reborn: Image Making in the Digital Era (Abrams Studio) (Paperback)
The one thing you can say about digital photography is that it is certainly changing fast. And in this book Mr. Lipkin shows what a series of what you might call photographer/artists have done using digital images and computer manipulation of those images.
In many cases, you might view these images as closer to paintings than photographs. In other cases, the images are of things that we cannot see ourselves, MRI images from inside the skull of a living person, mountains on the surface of Venus. Other images are from somewhere in the mind of the producer. These might be composite pictures of several people, these might be images that start with a photograph but which now are so distorted and colors so changed that their origin is difficult to see.
This is not a book of techniques, it is a book of results, of ideas from the minds of people who are carrying digital photography into new areas.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Nice survey; not so great otherwise, January 11, 2008
This review is from: Photography Reborn: Image Making in the Digital Era (Abrams Studio) (Paperback)
Having recently read Susan Bright (Art Photography Now) and Charlotte Cotton (The Photograph As Contemporary Art), I can vouch that Lipkin avoids the deliberately opaque writing style his peers employ. And he seems to have some interesting ideas about how artists change with technology.
Unfortunately those ideas are often buried in thematic blubber. Lipkin's chapters are amorphous, no clear idea emerging through. He never fully says what a chapter is and why the photos are tied in. For instance, many of the photos in "The Body Electric" would seem more tied to "Portraiture in the Digital Age", at least going by the names. It would seem that clear sentences and an insightful writer would ensure a good book. Unfortunately, the lack of a decent editor standing over Lipkin's shoulder, telling him to define his ideas, predominates.
Still, you'll be exposed to 30 or so really great artists and some interesting points of view. One of his ideas--that Jennycam represented some major change in image-making and photography--was particularly annoying to me, as the accompanying J-cam images are artless and careless. Photography implies some vision sculpting an individual image; Jennicam was shapeless and random. That said, I appreciate Lipkin's provocation, here and elsewhere.
The book concludes with a tedious and, again, poorly defined history of digital photography (at one point Lipkin says the first digital image was created in 1957; then later says "the earliest digital images ... actually preceded the growth of electronic communication", the phone having been widely known for 50 years earlier). Given a chance to tie his disparate chapters together, Lipkin unwisely skimps on his bread-and-butter (theory) and instead emphasizes mechanical processes.
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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Digital Image, December 20, 2005
This review is from: Photography Reborn: Image Making in the Digital Era (Abrams Studio) (Paperback)
It is truly amazing the rate at which technology moves! Four years ago, the author thought that film photography was here to stay for a long while because digital cameras were expensive, not so good, and anyway, people would need fancy computers and printers to make accessible photos. Now easy internet business is routinely conducted with digital images. But, as Lipkin points out, in PHOTOGRAPHY REBORN, it is not only that digital photography takes the place of film. It does, but it also is a genuine new medium. This book tells how and why digital images can outmanipulate experience and reality, be a new aesthetic medium and be more subversive than film photographs in which Trotsky's image was removed from Stalin's. In fact, the book tells not only how digital photography works, but also is a great guide to what it promises to do in the future.
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