Photography Until Now - Softcover

John Szarkowski

4.43

35 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0870705741 ISBN 13: 9780870705748

Publisher: Little Brown & Co, 1992

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Traces the first one hundred and fifty years of photography, and shows photographs of representative artists from William Henry Fox Talbot to Cindy Sherman

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From Publishers Weekly:

"Inventions--the name by which we call devices that seem fundamentally new--are almost always born out of a process that is more like farming than magic." With these reifying, revivifying words, Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art photography director Szarkowski ( The Photographer's Eye ) embarks on what is perhaps his most ambitious book. Less a conventional history of photography than a carefully ordered series of reflections on the stages of the art, the volume begins with the invention of the camera obscura by Johannes Kepler in 1611 and concludes, in a chapter entitled "After the Magazines," with the enormous growth of audience and technical innovation for photography that began in the 1940s--when Magnum was founded to meet photographic needs and improve the standards of magazines around the world. Szarkowski's exquisite eye, as exemplified by photographs included here by Josef Albers, Eliott Erwitt, William Henry Fox Talbot, Timothy H. O'Sullivan, anonymous greats and many others, is matched by prose whose grace is equal to its deep seriousness. The book, a tie-in to a MOMA exhibition, is essential for anyone with an interest in photography or culture in larger terms.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

This late entry among the numerous lush books and traveling exhibitions celebrating photography's sesquicentennial is well worth the wait. Szarkowski, director of photography at MOMA for 25 years, finally presents his own history of photography in the articulate prose for which he is widely respected. He supports his observations with an exciting choice of well-reproduced and seldom-seen images: portraits, news and war photos, landscapes, still lifes, architectural views, advertising, and medical images. Chronological chapters trace the mutual influences and evolution of technology and style, from "Before Photography" to the post-1960s period, "After the Magazines." He has bypassed derivative images in favor of those pictures, old and new, that show what photography does best. A small complaint: the omission of the photographic process in the picture captions. Full information about each image and photographer is provided in the end matter. Highly recommended for photography and art history collections.
- Kathleen Collins, Great Barrington, Mass.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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