Photography and the Art of Chance
eBook - ePub

Photography and the Art of Chance

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Photography and the Art of Chance

About this book

Photography has a unique relationship to chance. Anyone who has wielded a camera has taken a picture ruined by an ill-timed blink or enhanced by an unexpected gesture or expression. Although this proneness to chance may amuse the casual photographer, Robin Kelsey points out that historically it has been a mixed blessing for those seeking to make photographic art. On the one hand, it has weakened the bond between maker and picture, calling into question what a photograph can be said to say. On the other hand, it has given photography an extraordinary capacity to represent the unpredictable dynamism of modern life. By delving into these matters, Photography and the Art of Chance transforms our understanding of photography and the work of some of its most brilliant practitioners.

The effort to make photographic art has involved a call and response across generations. From the introduction of photography in 1839 to the end of the analog era, practitioners such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, Frederick Sommer, and John Baldessari built upon and critiqued one another's work in their struggle to reconcile aesthetic aspiration and mechanical process. The root problem was the technology's indifference, its insistence on giving a bucket the same attention as a bishop and capturing whatever wandered before the lens. Could such an automatic mechanism accommodate imagination? Could it make art? Photography and the Art of Chance reveals how daring innovators expanded the aesthetic limits of photography to create art for a modern world.

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Yes, you can access Photography and the Art of Chance by Robin Kelsey in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Art & Art Theory & Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Belknap Press
Year
2015
Print ISBN
9780674744004

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Introduction
  7. 1. William Henry Fox Talbot and His Picture Machine
  8. 2. Defining Art against the Mechanical, c. 1860
  9. 3. Julia Margaret Cameron Transfigures the Glitch
  10. 4. The Fog of Beauty, c. 1890
  11. 5. Alfred Stieglitz Moves with the City
  12. 6. Stalking Chance and Making News, c. 1930
  13. 7. Frederick Sommer Decomposes Our Nature
  14. 8. Pressing Photography into a Modernist Mold, c. 1970
  15. 9. John Baldessari Plays the Fool
  16. Conclusion
  17. Illustrations
  18. Notes
  19. Acknowledgments
  20. Index