Art Photography Now (Second Edition)

It is difficult to find good contemporary photography overviews -- typically, you could go to galleries or museums for several years or buy a stack of art photography books and spend days going through them -- assuming you had a strong Art background. This book offers a nice alternative and it is one of the best overviews of contemporary fine art photography available.Aperture, a respected photography publishing house, has beautifully produced this handsome book with 80 of what they consider to be the best living and working art photographers. The selection is broad, encompasses many areas and is well organized into 7 sections from Portrait to City. Several works from each artist are presented along with a short description of an artist's Work from a curator's perspective. Even more valuable are quotations from each artist describing their Work from their perspective. This alone makes the book worth owning.Photographers you might know; Cindy Sherman, Thomas Ruff, Gregory Crewdson, Jeff Wall, Uta Barth, Joel Sternfeld, Thomas Demand and many others are alongside people you have probably never heard of but should get to know. The coverage of the cinematic, self exploration/psychological, conceptual and to some extent digital influences presented here should be thought provoking. Clearly, the "digitalness" of photography as a medium and all that implies -- interaction and collaboration, manipulation and realism, and authenticity and authority -- is growing in importance and will no doubt be better covered in the future as those artists emerge.There are only two omissions that would have been interesting to see included; artists such as Gerhard Richter, best known for his painting and who uses photography extensively -- and some of the newest up and comers, like Idris Khan. To be fair, those areas are rich enough to support separate books and you should not let this keep you from buying this book. Overall, this is an excellent way to quickly learn about contemporary photography and you will not be disappointed.

Art Photography Now by Susan Bright looks at modern photography in a way that's easy to understand. It talks about lots of different photographers and the interesting things they're doing with pictures. The book is organized by different ideas, showing a wide variety of photographs and explaining what makes them special. Susan Bright writes about each photographer, helping us get why their images are appealing.Susan Bright's writing is easy to follow, and she helps us understand things about photography without making it too hard. Whether you love taking pictures or you're just curious, Art Photography Now is a fun book that shows you lots of awesome photos and helps you see why they're so interesting.

Ms. Bright provides truly wonderful text and insight into some quite diverse photographers. The photo illustrations are bright (no pun intended) and large. With fewer photographers or illustrations she might have been able to provide more information about the genre, photographer or concept but then I am a visualist and seeing the images alongside her breakdown of them is an immense help to my own progress.

I ordered this as a text book for my Intermediate Photography course. This books was extremely helpful for inspiring my work and helping me understand my own process of taking photographs. It also really helped during critiques to reference other artists currently working in the field of photography.

As one of the reviewers said: „a single tome probably won't manage to end any art/photography debates, but as a resource and up-to-date expose to the state of photography today, Art Photography Now hits the mark."The book though is both excellent and... a bit confusing. Although she mentions the most famous and accomplished of photographers in the chapter introductions and shows a few of their pictures, like those of Nan Goldin, Martin Parr or Andreas Gursky, many of the photographers, while known, are not from the most famous. All things being equal, getting an introduction to photographers with whom we are not familiar is a good thing. Unfortunately all things are not equal.Still, to be fair, this indispensable survey presents the work of almost 80 of the most important and best-known art photographers in the world: Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Cindy Sherman, Boris Mikhailow, Jeff Wall, Sophie Calle, Wolfgang Tillmans, Nan Goldin, Martin Parr, Allan Sekula, Inez van Lamsweerde, Sam Taylor-Wood, and many more are featured in its pages.Edited by Ms. Susan Bright, former Curator of Photographs at London's National Portrait Gallery, has organized the book into seven sections -- Object, City, Portrait, Fashion, Document, Landscape and Narrative--and provides an introductory essay for each. Along with each photographer's works, presented in sequence within those divisions. Ms. Bright's commentaries provide, most of the time, a true context and depth, and quotations from the artists themselves offer valuable insights into the motivation, inspiration, and intentions behind the work.

Amazing contemporary artists and a well written, in-depth look at the different tools and subjects of photography.

I wasn't too sure what to expect from this book, but it's really stunning. I teach and this gives me some new photographers to follow, new images to use in class, new things to think about. A lovely book, well worth the price.

Used it a few times for class the write-ups were great and easy to get through.