spullanbooklover's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
Read for a class, really informative for the new art photographer. Really cool examples of what people are doing in the photographic world today.
mrjoe's review
2.0
The categories are useful. I found a good number of photographers in this book whose work I'm going to look into. Like any survey, sometimes the surface is barely being scratched. This book also holds up some terrible work as genius, but it's not the author's fault that the emporer often wears no clothes with fine art photography. Did I just make a Juergen Teller joke?
The historical info in the beginning could really be summarized like this:
William Eggleston and Stephen Shore took pictures, and it was good. I wish there was some more depth here. Sall Eauclaire's The New Color Photography is head and shoulders above this book in that respect, and highly recommended.
Amongst the glossings over and too brief reductive mentions of photographers I like, there were a couple of interesting pieces of analysis about art criticism that were valuable (especially about Nan Goldin's work).
All in all I'm glad I spent 3 hours blasting through this book, and making a list of photographers to look up.
The historical info in the beginning could really be summarized like this:
William Eggleston and Stephen Shore took pictures, and it was good. I wish there was some more depth here. Sall Eauclaire's The New Color Photography is head and shoulders above this book in that respect, and highly recommended.
Amongst the glossings over and too brief reductive mentions of photographers I like, there were a couple of interesting pieces of analysis about art criticism that were valuable (especially about Nan Goldin's work).
All in all I'm glad I spent 3 hours blasting through this book, and making a list of photographers to look up.
verycarefully's review
2.0
An interesting overview of various styles and approaches to photography, let down by some surprisingly poor writing and general shallowness; the latter is to be expected when such a small book attempts to cover so much territory, but unfortunately the price is a certain frustration on the part of any reader who would like to hear about any of said territory in more detail.
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