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Voyage to Italy
Over the past 30 years, Victor Burgin (born in 1941) has become both a highly influential artist and a renowned theorist of the still and moving image, with work in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Modern in London. Burgin rose to prominence in the late 1960s as an originator of Conceptual art. In the 1970s he worked in large framed photographic sequences, in which printed texts were either juxtaposed with or superimposed on the images. In the 1990s he turned towards digital video. The historian and critic Stephen Bann has written that Burgin's "exploitation of new technologies is itself fairly uninteresting compared with the remarkable consistency of the underlying themes and propositions of his work," among them narrative, memory and fantasy. These duotones refute all that uninteresting technology to offer Burgin's reflections on Pompeii, gleaned through his research of nineteenth-century photographs.
- GenresPhotography
104 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 26, 2017
I bought this book on a sale on the internet, so I was not sure what to expect. Photography on Pompeii. Seems interesting? Was not. This time I got pretty disappointed.
The book starts with some not-too-special photos and some pointless texts between a man and a woman in a bad mood. In the end of the book we find out that that was a conversation from some movie, but this fact doesn’t make them more interesting.
All photos are black and white, also very similar. For instance, Basilica I: there are 12 almost identical photos of each columnar naves. And then more 12 almost identical photos of navels from the other side. I am sure, 1 photo would be quite enough for me. And then we have another building, Basilica II with 12 also boringly very similar photos. Black and white colouring did not help to wake my interest this time at all.
Besides, I believe, they could have saved some paper and made a smaller book. O at least bigger photos. Most of them are too small (like those mentioned columns – 15*10 cm) for the page (24*28 cm). A lot of white space for the sake of what? Art?
None of the photos of this photographer caught my attention. The only photo that I actually appreciated had been taken by Carlo Fratacci in 1864 (p. 71)
I’ve never accused a book of being pretentious before, but this one looks a lot like it. Or… I might be just a simple commoner and this way of art is beyond my liking.
The book starts with some not-too-special photos and some pointless texts between a man and a woman in a bad mood. In the end of the book we find out that that was a conversation from some movie, but this fact doesn’t make them more interesting.
All photos are black and white, also very similar. For instance, Basilica I: there are 12 almost identical photos of each columnar naves. And then more 12 almost identical photos of navels from the other side. I am sure, 1 photo would be quite enough for me. And then we have another building, Basilica II with 12 also boringly very similar photos. Black and white colouring did not help to wake my interest this time at all.
Besides, I believe, they could have saved some paper and made a smaller book. O at least bigger photos. Most of them are too small (like those mentioned columns – 15*10 cm) for the page (24*28 cm). A lot of white space for the sake of what? Art?
None of the photos of this photographer caught my attention. The only photo that I actually appreciated had been taken by Carlo Fratacci in 1864 (p. 71)
I’ve never accused a book of being pretentious before, but this one looks a lot like it. Or… I might be just a simple commoner and this way of art is beyond my liking.
Displaying 1 of 1 review