Customer Reviews

Photospeak: A Guide to the Ideas, Movements, and Techniques of Photography, 1839 to the Present

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The author, Gilles Mora, a former editor of "Cahiers de Photographie" called his book a "guide." I think it is more of an encyclopedia. Divided, as it is, into the categories of "Who, When, Where & What," the reader can easily find the principal photographers from 1839 til today ("Who"), the moment of greatest significance for a particular style or method of photography ("When"), the cities, countries and continents in which a movement was centered ("Where") and the nature and origins of the style or technique (What").

For example, we learn that "collage" which had long been used in decorative arts, was actually first used in fine art when Picasso pasted oilcloth onto his 1912 painting "Still Life With Chair Caning." We learn a useful, simple definition of collage and how some modernist painters/photographers have used it including David Hockney and Robert Frank in the 1980's. We learn that in 1854, a man named Andre-Adolphe-Eugene Disderi patented something called a "carte-de-visite" which is a portrait glued to a piece of cardboard the size of a traditional visiting card....like the ones forever being left on hallway trays in the novels of Edith Wharton and Henry James.

There also terms and phrases we might have heard but, perhaps, did not understand fully like "contact sheet" or "daguerreotype," "The New York School" or "Photojournalism" and "Camera Obscura" to name just a few.

The book is crammed full of wonderful bits and pieces of information, interestingly written and invaluable for the photographer, the photography collector or the hobbyist. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

It is debatable whether the "expert" mentioned in the introduction will find it useful in finding "specific facts". It is really for the novice and casual user who does not need technical or extensive discussions. The alphabetical arrangement puts it in the class of a simple dictionary or one volumn cyclopedia. It is arranged well and well indexed unfortunately there is no bibliography to guide the reader to more in depth study--since Mr. Mora is apparantly French this might not be helpful to an American audience. It might also explain why his timeline erroneously places the end of the American Civil war as 1864---no, April 9, 1865. To be fair many American students probably don't know that today. It is puzzling that he mentions Einstein's Theory of Relativity in 1905 but not the Photoelectric Effect Theory which descibes the phenomenon that makes a Light Meter possible. Oh well. This is a good book for a quick, simple reference and does well within its size limitations. His european perspective is worth having the book, though the serious student will need to look elsewhere for thorough dicussion of the topics. I don't regret buying it and would recomed it for its purpose.

This book was required for a photography class I attended. I kept the book because it is informative on the basic and advanced level. Whenever I do not understand a photographic term, I go to this reference.