New York: Capital of Photography - Softcover

Kozloff, Max

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300094450 ISBN 13: 9780300094459

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2002

Synopsis

For street photographers, New York has always been a city of unparalleled visual excitement, teeming with diverse people and distinctive neighborhoods. New York: Capital of Photography examines how photographers chronicled New York throughout the twentieth century, how the city changed their vision, and how their work affected ideas about New York throughout the world. This beautifully illustrated book presents the work of both famous and lesser-known photographers, many of them Jewish. An underlying theme in this pictorial history of New York is the critical role played by Jewish sensibility. Max Kozloff begins with the development of street photography that emerged in New York in the early 1900s with a local school of photographers led by Alfred Stieglitz. Documenting work, loneliness, play, conflict, love, and spectacle, this group came to define urban perception as the characteristic visual experience of modernity. Some photographers also became social activists, observing New York's ethnic and racial diversity and focusing their lenses on newcomers and marginalized groups. From the 1930s to 1960s, Kozloff shows, members of the New York School envisioned the city in a different way, as a processing center for immigrants, a site of commercial display, and a crossroads of world culture. In the 1950s and 1960s, photographers saw New York as an uneasy battleground, and their pictures caught the forces of civil rights, sexual liberation, and leftist politics as they clashed with traditional powers. Finally, as the century waned, photographers became more self-conscious, exploring their own and their friends' identities through the camera's eye. From Lewis Hine's 1905 picture of recent immigrants at Ellis Island to Nan Goldin's portraits of her friends over the past thirty years, these photographs reveal the true vitality of New York. The book accompanies an exhibition at The Jewish Museum, New York, from April 28 to September 2, 2002.

About this title

About the Author

Max Kozloff, an acclaimed art critic and former executive editor of Artforum, has published widely on twentieth-century art and photography. Karen Levitov is assistant curator and Johanna Goldfeld is project assistant at The Jewish Museum.

Reviews

As Walker Evans aged, he arrived in New York City to demonstrate some of photography's best tricks, epitomized by his candid portraits of subway riders shot through peepholes cut in newspapers he pretended to read. Evans is one of dozens of photographers in this well-designed and often surprising book, which accompanies an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York and reveals a city full of visual excitement. The former executive editor of Artforum, Kozloff curated the show and compiled this volume of black-and-white (and some color) photographs, mostly by Jewish artists, spanning from 1898 to 2001. In technique and composition, these pictures fail to fit any studious or professional parameters. Instead, they represent a rough, immediate, and nearly accidental moment on film, the work of an exceptionally savvy and improvisational band of photographers. Weegee, Diane Arbus, Ben Shahn, Alfred Stieglitz, and others represented here have understood and pointed a camera at scenes that capture the heart of a great metropolis its random and endless gatherings of people, who are all New Yorkers. Recommended. David Bryant, New Canaan Lib., CT
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300094450
• ISBN 13: 9780300094459
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208