Art Photography Now [ハードカバー]

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.

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.

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.