Book picks similar to
The Photograph as Contemporary Art by Charlotte Cotton
photography
art
non-fiction
nonfiction
Power of Feminist Art
Norma Broude - 1994
. . . Until Power, feminist art has been conspicuously absent from standard academic narratives. . . . Now, no critic or historian, conservative or not, can argue that feminist art is insignificant.--Elizabeth Hess, Village Voice. 270 illustrations, 118 in full color.
Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Fredric Jameson - 1991
Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature.
Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture
Carl E. Schorske - 1980
A landmark book from one of the original scholars of our time: a magnificent revelation of turn-of-the-century Vienna where out of a crisis of political & social disintegration so much of modern art & thought was born.This edition contains:IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPolitics & the psyche: Schnitzler & HoffmannsthalThe Ringstrasse, its critics & the birth of urban modernismPolitics in a new key: an Austrian trioPolitics & patricide in Freud's Interpretation of dreamsGustav Klimt: painting & the crisis of the liberal egoThe transformation of the garden Explosion in the garden: Kokoschka & SchoenbergIndex
The Writings of Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp - 1973
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the writings of Marcel Duchamp, who fashioned some of the more joyous and ingenious couplings and uncouplings in modern art. This collection beings together two essential interviews and two statements about his art that underscore the serious side of Duchamp. But most of the book is made up of his experimental writings, which he called ”Texticles,” the long and extraordinary notes he wrote for The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Eben (also known as The Large Glass), and the outrageous puns and alter-ego he constructed for his female self, Rrose Sélavy (”Eros, c’est la vie” or arouser la vie”drink it up”; celebrate life”). Wacky, perverse, deliberately frustrating, these entertaining notes are basic for understanding one of the twentieth century’s most provocative artists, a figure whose influence on the contemporary scene has never been stronger.
Beyond Portraiture: Creative People Photography
Bryan Peterson - 2006
They reveal one of the millions of intimate human moments that make up a life. In Beyond Portraiture, renowned photographer Bryan Peterson shows how to spot those “ah-ha!” moments and capture them forever. A teary child...old people laughing together...a smiling girl with big, big hair. Everyone remember pictures like these, usually taken by a mother, a father, a friend holding a camera, forever preserving small yet revealing vignettes of our personal histories. But we always relied on pure luck and chance to catch those moments. Peterson’s approach explains what makes a photo memorable, how to spot the universal themes that everyone can identify with, and how to use lighting, setting, and exposure to reveal the wonder and the joy of everyday moments. Beyond Portraiture makes it easy to create indelible memories with light and shadow.
Wisconsin Death Trip
Michael Lesy - 1973
Lesy has collected and arranged photographs taken between 1890 and 1910 by a Black River Falls photographer, Charles Van Schaik.
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
Elaine Scarry - 1985
The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate.
What Art Is
Arthur C. Danto - 2013
Danto addresses this fundamental, complex question. Part philosophical monograph and part memoiristic meditation, What Art Is challenges the popular interpretation that art is an indefinable concept, instead bringing to light the properties that constitute universal meaning. Danto argues that despite varied approaches, a work of art is always defined by two essential criteria: meaning and embodiment, as well as one additional criterion contributed by the viewer: interpretation. Danto crafts his argument in an accessible manner that engages with both philosophy and art across genres and eras, beginning with Plato’s definition of art in The Republic, and continuing through the progress of art as a series of discoveries, including such innovations as perspective, chiaroscuro, and physiognomy. Danto concludes with a fascinating discussion of Andy Warhol’s famous shipping cartons, which are visually indistinguishable from the everyday objects they represent.Throughout, Danto considers the contributions of philosophers including Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, and artists from Michelangelo and Poussin to Duchamp and Warhol, in this far-reaching examination of the interconnectivity and universality of aesthetic production.
Paris
Robert Doisneau - 2005
The unprecedented scope of this collection provides the opportunity to study his more composed, aesthetically structured images alongside his snapshots, which offer a more anecdotal account of Doisneau's Paris. Organized thematically, the book leads us on an entrancing tour through the gardens of Paris, along the Seine, and through the crowds of Parisians who define their beloved city. More than 600 photographs-many rare, forgotten, and previously unpublished-are assembled in this beautiful volume to create a unique portrait of Paris. From toddlers scrambling to cross rue de Rivoli to fresh-faced accordionists, from elegant dog walkers to exuberant roller skaters, and from the indelible kiss in front of the Hétel de Ville to cyclists beneath the Eiffel Tower, the magic of Paris in black and white is a timeless treasure. The photographs, edited by Doisneau's daughter, are complemented by citations from the photographer himself, which reveal his profound fascination with the city where he lived and worked.
Architecture: Form, Space, & Order
Francis D.K. Ching - 1979
K. Ching. Each page has been meticulously revised to incorporate contemporary examples of the principles of form, space, and order - the fundamental vocabulary of every designer. The result is a beautifully illustrated volume that embraces today's forms and looks at conventional models with a fresh perspective. Here, Ching examines every principal of architecture, juxtaposing images that span centuries and cross cultural boundaries to create a design vocabulary that is both elemental and timeless. Among the topics covered are point, line, plane, volume, proportion, scale, circulation, and the interdependence of form and space. While this revision continues to be a comprehensive primer on the ways form and space are interrelated and organized in the shaping of our environment, it has been refined to amplify and clarify concepts. In addition, the Second Edition contains numerous new hand-rendered drawings; expanded section on openings and scale; examples of contemporary architectural design elements; expanded chapter on design principles; new glossary and index categorized by the author; and new 8 1/2 x 11 upright trim. In the Second Edition of Architecture: Form, Space, and Order, the author has opted for a larger format and crisper images. Mr. Ching has retained the style of his hand-lettered text, a hallmark of each of his books. This rich source of architectural prototypes, each rendered in Mr. Ching's signature style, also serves as a guide to architectural drawing. Doubtless, many will want this handsomevolume for the sheer beauty of it. Architects and students alike will treasure this book for its wealth of practical information and its precise illustrations. Mr. Ching has once again created a visual reference that illuminates the world of architectural form.
The Photographer's Guide to Posing: Techniques to Flatter Everyone
Lindsay Adler - 2017
Posing is truly a crucial skill that photographers need to have in order to create great photographs. If you're looking to improve your ability to pose your subjects--whether they're men, women, couples, or groups--best-selling author and photographer Lindsay Adler's The Photographer's Guide to Posing: Techniques to Flatter Everyone is the perfect resource for you.In the first half of The Photographer's Guide to Posing, Lindsay discusses how the camera sees, and thus how camera angle, lens choice, and perspective all affect the appearance of your subject. Lindsay then covers the five most important things that ruin a pose--such as placement of the hands, and your subject's expression and posture. If you can look out for and avoid these five things, your skills (and your images) will quickly improve. Next, Lindsay dives into -posing essentials, - outlining her approach to start with a -base pose, - then build on that to create endless posing opportunities. She also discusses posing the face--with specific sections dedicated to the chin, jaw, eyes, and forehead--as well as posing hands.In the second half of the book, Lindsay dedicates entire chapters to posing specific subject matter: women, men, couples, curvy women, families and small groups, and large groups. In each chapter, Lindsay addresses that subject matter's specific challenges, provides five -go-to poses- you can always use, and covers how to train the eye to determine the best pose for your subject(s). In the final chapter of the book, Lindsay brings it all together as she teaches you how to analyze a pose so that you can create endless posing opportunities and continuously improve your work
Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
Mikhail Bakhtin - 1963
It is at this time that he began his engagement with the work of Dostoevsky. Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art is considered to be Bakhtin’s seminal work, and it is here that Bakhtin introduces three important concepts.First, is the concept of the unfinalizable self: individual people cannot be finalized, completely understood, known, or labeled. Though it is possible to understand people and to treat them as if they are completely known, Bakhtin’s conception of unfinalizability respects the possibility that a person can change, and that a person is never fully revealed or fully known in the world. Readers may find that this conception reflects the idea of the soul; Bakhtin had strong roots in Christianity and in the Neo-Kantian school led by Hermann Cohen, both of which emphasized the importance of an individual's potentially infinite capability, worth, and the hidden soul.Second, is the idea of the relationship between the self and others, or other groups. According to Bakhtin, every person is influenced by others in an inescapably intertwined way, and consequently no voice can be said to be isolated. In an interview, Bakhtin once explained that, In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others. ~New York Review of Books, June 10, 1993.As such, Bakhtin's philosophy greatly respected the influences of others on the self, not merely in terms of how a person comes to be, but also in how a person thinks and how a person sees him- or herself truthfully.Third, Bakhtin found in Dostoevsky's work a true representation of polyphony, that is, many voices. Each character in Dostoevsky's work represents a voice that speaks for an individual self, distinct from others. This idea of polyphony is related to the concepts of unfinalizability and self-and-others, since it is the unfinalizability of individuals that creates true polyphony.Bakhtin briefly outlined the polyphonic concept of truth. He criticized the assumption that, if two people disagree, at least one of them must be in error. He challenged philosophers for whom plurality of minds is accidental and superfluous. For Bakhtin, truth is not a statement, a sentence or a phrase. Instead, truth is a number of mutually addressed, albeit contradictory and logically inconsistent, statements. Truth needs a multitude of carrying voices. It cannot be held within a single mind, it also cannot be expressed by "a single mouth." The polyphonic truth requires many simultaneous voices. Bakhtin does not mean to say that many voices carry partial truths that complement each other. A number of different voices do not make the truth if simply "averaged" or "synthesized." It is the fact of mutual addressivity, of engagement, and of commitment to the context of a real-life event, that distinguishes truth from untruth.When, in subsequent years, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art was translated into English and published in the West, Bakhtin added a chapter on the concept of carnival and the book was published with the slightly different title, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics. According to Bakhtin, carnival is the context in which distinct individual voices are heard, flourish and interact together. The carnival creates the "threshold" situations where regular conventions are broken or reversed and genuine dialogue becomes possible. The notion of a carnival was Bakhtin's way of describing Dostoevsky's polyphonic style: each individual character is strongly defined, and at the same time the reader witnesses the critical influence of each character upon the other. That is to say, the voices of others are heard by each individual, and each inescapably shapes the character of the other.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_...
The Poetics of Space
Gaston Bachelard - 1957
Bachelard takes us on a journey, from cellar to attic, to show how our perceptions of houses and other shelters shape our thoughts, memories, and dreams."A magical book. . . . The Poetics of Space is a prism through which all worlds from literary creation to housework to aesthetics to carpentry take on enhanced-and enchanted-significances. Every reader of it will never see ordinary spaces in ordinary ways. Instead the reader will see with the soul of the eye, the glint of Gaston Bachelard." -from the new foreword by John R. Stilgoe
Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory
Peter Barry - 1995
This new and expanded third edition continues to offer students and readers the best one-volume introduction to the field.The bewildering variety of approaches, theorists and technical language is lucidly and expertly unraveled. Unlike many books which assume certain positions about the critics and the theories they represent, Peter Barry allows readers to develop their own ideas once first principles and concepts have been grasped.
The Education of a Photographer
Charles H. Traub - 2006
What does it mean to become a photographer in the twenty-first century? This thoughtful collection of essays illuminates the spirit of the people who make the indelible images of our times. Aspiring and professional photographers—especially those in arts programs throughout the United States—will appreciate the comprehensive vision of The Education of a Photographer. Classic writings from the twentieth century as well as the thoughts of the most influential talents working today, plus essays from designers, editors, and gallery owners, make this a compelling look at what drives and inspires photographers to create great work.