Review
‘Here is the history we’ve been waiting for … erudite and entertaining … she shows how pictures really did change the world. Her shrewd selection of over 600 fascinating photos (many in color) illustrate a history that meets the ultimate test: open to any page and you’re hooked … and it’s free from tormenting academic jargon.’ Camera Arts
Product Description
For one or two semester courses in the History of Photography.
Mary Warner Marien has constructed a richer and more kaleidoscopic account of the history of photography than has previously been available. Her comprehensive survey shows compellingly how photography has sharpened, if not altered forever, our perception of the world.
The book was written to introduce students to photography. It does not require that students possess any technical know-how and can be taught without referring to techniques in photography. Incorporating the latest research and international uses of photography, the text surveys the history of photography in such a way that students can gauge the medium's long-term multifold developments and see the historical and intellectual contexts in which photographers lived and worked. It also provides a unique focus on contemporary photo-based work and electronic media.
From the Back Cover
The third edition of this groundbreaking survey of international photography has not only been expanded and brought up to date but restructured to offer readers even greater clarity and ease of use. It now comprises 14 shorter chapters each with an introduction and brief summary. Chapters are grouped into six Parts which begin with an introduction to the time period.
Photography is examined through the lenses of art, science, social sciences, travel, war, fashion, the mass media, and individual practitioners. These broad topics complement a fully developed cultural context whose emphasis is more key ideas than individuals. The author has further enriched the third edition with the findings of the most recent research and exhibitions. These include fresh insights into Victorian photography’s relationship to painting and to the expansion of the British Empire, as well as photography’s involvement in German and Russian experimental art movements between the World Wars. The author also draws on publications that show the extent to which vernacular photography existed alongside art and commercial practice. ‘Focus’ boxes highlight interesting cultural or controversial issues, for example ‘Film and Photography’, ‘Photomontage or Photocollage’, and ‘Making an Icon of Revolution’. In the revised final chapter, the author pays close attention to the impact of digital photography on photographic history and contemporary practice, particularly the ease and frequency with which people worldwide use digital cameras and camera phones.
In addition to representing the canon of Europe and the United States, the book presents work from Latin America, Africa, India, Russia, China, and Japan. ‘Portrait’ boxes feature certain photographers in greater detail and new to this edition are works by contemporary artists including Vik Muniz, Suzanne Opton, Tyler Hicks, Walid Raad, Anthony Goicolea, and Jean-Luc Mylayne.
About the Author
Mary Warner Marien is a professor in the Department of Fine Arts at Syracuse University New York where she teaches courses on photographic history as well as on art criticism and its history. In 2008 she won an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writer award for her continuing work on the history and theory of documentary photography and is the author of 'Photography and its Critics' (Cambridge University Press, 1997) as well as numerous articles on the history of photography.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Although I have been captivated by photography since childhood, the thought that I might teach and write about a subject that was a fervent personal interest of mine never occurred to me until 1984. In that year, Professor David Tatham, then Chair of the Fine Arts Department at Syracuse University, persuaded me to try a one-semester course. I have been teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in the history of photography and writing about the subject ever since.
Despite the impressive increase in college photography courses during the last decades of the twentieth century, autodidacts such as myself make up the bulk of photohistorians. Like many others, I became a photographic historian in my parents' living room, while looking at copies of Life magazine. As a group, we revel in our passionate preferences. If I thought I could get away with it, I would have filled this book with my favorite pictures, such as those that French photographer Robert Doisneau made of Paris in the 1950s and 1960s. I have not yet found a way to show Doisneau's work in my undergraduate survey, nor have I included him here, even though, in a portrait pinned above my desk, a broadly grinning Doisneau points directly at me, prompting me to keep on trying.
In writing this book, I have tried to survey photography's history in such a way that readers can gauge the medium's manifold developments, and appreciate the historical and cultural contexts in which photographers lived and worked. Some readers may long for a comprehensive taxonomy of-photography, a unified field with movements and ideas carefully delineated like kingdoms, phyla, orders, and species. Indeed, this sort of categorization is a practical if sometimes blunt instrument with which to create order and highlight dominant ideas and visual approaches. Yet it is crucial to remember that people living in a particular era do not synchronize their thoughts. They interpret, refine, resist, oppose, or ignore the prevalent attitudes of their time. Years of teaching have brought home to me the dangers of homogenizing subtly distinctive viewpoints or creating periods so watertight that they leave no residue in the next chapter. The Victorians did not simultaneously pull out their pocket watches on the stroke of New Year's Eve and agree that the epoch of heroic landscape photography in the American West should end promptly then and there.
My students have taught me that, contrary to conventional wisdom, they do not dislike history, but are instead hungry for it. Consequently, I have tried to sketch the political and economic events, such as wars and depressions, that shaped the circumstances in which photography was practiced, while paying special attention to the particular ideas generated by and about photography in each period. The Focus boxes in this book contain much of this material.
The short history of photography gives it a special excitement, and it is still possible to discover historically significant images at tag sales and regional museums. In the last few decades, the scope of photographic history has widened to encompass fresh materials and new analytic tools that promise the emergence of a vital interdisciplinary field. Although photography is a Western discovery, students are rightly curious about its manifestations in the wider world. To serve that interest, I have both incorporated recent research into non-Western photographers and Western visions of the non-Western world as they were directed towards science, anthropology, journalism, and art.
Yet I am mindful that comprehensive histories of photography in India and China, those countries that make up more than one-third of the world's population, have yet to be written. Moreover, the photographic archives of business and industry have scarcely been mined, and the history of advertising photography, which has shaped the modern experience internationally, remains mostly unwritten.
Influential photographers have often led long lives traversing eras during which many changes took place. For example, Alfred Stieglitz (r864-i9q.G) was born one year before the American Civil War ended, and he died one year after World War II. Having taught an introductory course, I realized that newcomers to the field appreciate an overview of individual careers such as that of Stieglitz, even if this requires occasionally disrupting the chronological order of the presentation. Hence I have included a number of Portrait boxes that concentrate the mind on certain influential photographers.
I have discovered in the classroom that today's students are puzzled by the lengthy struggle waged through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to have photography accepted as an art form. I have narrated that contest, not simply as a large-scale attempt to achieve parity with painting, but as it relates to wider social issues, such as the ascent of a professional, moneyed middle class and the rise of consumer culture.
Globalization has encouraged a convergence and blurring of photographic genres: photojournalists show their work in art galleries; artists create new magazines to foster social change; practitioners from developing countries depict indigenous motifs from a postmodern perspective. The computer, invented, as its name suggests, to facilitate computations, has instead spun a communications web that has been investigated and refined by photographers from many fields. Along with my student-colleagues, I am intrigued by emerging technologies, and I have concluded this survey with an investigation of digital photography at the beginning of the new millennium.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
