At the Edge of the Light: Thoughts on Photography & Photographers, Talent & Genius - Hardcover

Travis, David

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9781567922110: At the Edge of the Light: Thoughts on Photography & Photographers, Talent & Genius

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1567922112 ISBN 13: 9781567922110

Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher, 2006

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David Travis, the Curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, is among the select few whose views on the subject are in focus and worth a close look. He has lived, breathed, and contemplated photographs for the past three decades and is among the small number of critics and writers whose knowledge of art, technique, and history (not to mention linguistics, mathematics, poetry, and philosophy) has enabled him to transcend the typical blather that surrounds photographs and get to the emotional, technical, and esthetic core of genius at work. In these seven essays, revised, rewritten, and expanded from his lectures, he presents his thoughts on a some of his favorite subjects: Weston, Stieglitz, Kert�sz, Brassa�, and Strand. His knowledge is such (often enriched by first-hand acquaintance) that he can, and does, discuss more than images or personalities; he understands what informs the work, from what milieu it derives, under what in?uences it matured, how it evolved, and how it succeeded. He is an art historian willing to venture far beyond the periphery of traditional academic fences; to discuss game theory (quite literally), the mathematics of G. H. Hardy, the poetry of Rimbaud, Val�ry, Rilke, and Goethe, the philosophy of Nietzsche, the extravagance of Henry Miller.

Not since Szarkowsky s Looking at Photographs has so much singular and informed intelligence been brought to bear on this most recent of the fine arts. This is not so much a book of art criticism as a journey of philosophical inquiry. It is a text that completely understands the limitations, and potential glories, of the form within its wider context, celebrating the march of individual genius that has slowly, but inexorably, transformed a technical curiosity into an accepted art.

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About the Author:

David Travis is Curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago where he has directed photography programs and acquisitions since 1972.

From Booklist:

In this enlivening suite of precise and thoughtful essays, Travis, curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, conducts a unique and ardent inquiry. He explores "lived experience as a source of visual ideas" by considering the personal context within which specific photographs are made, reporting, for instance, on the revelations granted by his conversations with Brassai and scrutiny of the photographer's heavily marked books. Travis, who often quotes poetry, including that of Gary Snyder (the title is his) and Wallace Stevens, is intrigued with the "third period" of an artist's life, and offers thrillingly fresh analysis of late work by Edward Weston and Alfred Stieglitz. Travis also seeks to discern how exactly the artist transcends the mechanical point-and-shoot aspect of photography. And, most strikingly, he seeks new metaphors for understanding the power of images in mathematics, discussing Garry Winograd's gift for discovering "situational primes" and the way Henri Cartier-Bresson's photographs are "like a set geometric trap" into which the photographer adds "the dimension of incidence." This is cogent and adventurous thinking. A true intellectual pleasure. Donna Seaman
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