VIS 60: Introduction to Photography: Finding Background Information

A wide-ranging and detailed survey dedicated to the protagonists of the contemporary art scene in Africa and Middle East. This heterogeneous selection offers a clear interpretation of contemporary reality through the languages of images. African photographers are looking at the unfolding drama of contemporary life and experience in Africa with a fine-tuned alertness.

Filled with luminous photographs from the best practitioners working today, this unique collection contextualizes contemporary Asian photography against the backdrop of massive cultural, social, and political changes in the region.

This catalogue on contemporary photography and video art provides a rich insight into the dynamics shaping the contemporary Indian psyche and landscape.

Photography After Conceptual Art presents a series of original essays that address substantive theoretical, historical, and aesthetic issues raised by post-1960s photography as a mainstream artistic medium

The images gathered in this volume function as a paranamic cartography of contemporary Mexico. The photographers have captured the complexity and diversity of the country, renewing our perceptions of it's geographical and idiosyncrasy, and shuffling, breaking, or corrupting the models of national representation fostered by the modernity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The compulsion to dwell on history-on how it is recorded, stored, saved, forgotten, narrated, lost, remembered, and made public-has been at the heart of artists' engagement with the photographic medium since the late 1960s. Uncertain Histories considers some of that work, ranging from installations that incorporate vast numbers of personal and vernacular photographs by Christian Boltanski, Dinh Q. Lê, and Gerhard Richter to confrontations with absence in the work of Joel Sternfeld and Ken Gonzales-Day. Projects such as these revolve around a photographic paradox that hinges equally on knowing and not knowing, on definitive proof coupled with uncertainty, on abundance of imagery being met squarely with its own inadequacy. Photography is seen as a fundamentally ambiguous medium that can be evocative of the historical past while at the same time limited in the stories it can convey. Rather than proclaiming definitively what photography is, the work discussed here posits photographs as objects always held in suspension, perpetually oscillating in their ability to tell history. Yet this ultimately leads to a new kind of knowledge production: uncertainty is not a dead end but a generative space for the viewer's engagement with the construction of history.

This reference work boasts worldwide coverage of modern and contemporary art from 1900 to the present day. It features A to Z entries on movements, styles, techniques, artists, critics, schools, and galleries.

The most comprehensive reference to the art, history, and science of photography worldwide to date, the culmination of nearly ten years of research and development