Art History of Photography

by Volker Kahmen

An analytical history of the aesthetic and other aims of photography and of their social and economic contexts accompanies a catalogue of over three hundred fifty representative photographs by major photographers from 1839 to the present

Genres: Art

55 pages, Hardcover

Published April 28, 1975

Reviews

[aryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

p35-36: 'A different nature speaks to the camera than speaks to the eye; different primary in that in place of a world interwoven with human consciousness, another one, unconsciously interwoven, enters. ... One experiences this optic-unconscious with the help of the camera, just as one learns of the impulsive-unconscious through psycho-analysis. Structure, cell-tissue, with which technology and medicine strive to come to terms - all this is far more relevant to the camera than the atmospheric landscape or the soulful portrait. But at the same time photography opens up the physiognomical aspects of pictorial worlds existing in the minutest detail, yet sufficiently clear and latent to have found refuge in waking dreams; now, grown large and definable, they demonstrate that the relationship between magic and technique is through and through a historical vehicle.'

[Chris Schneider · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a different kind of photo history book, one focused more on themes and ideas than on chronology and technological advances. It is primarily just a photographic plates, with around 30 pages in the beginning discussing photography as an artform. It is rather conversational in tone, and seems to dwell on rather small issues given the subject is so large. Even so, its discussion has not been fully resolved today in arguing that photography is every bit art as painting or sculpture or the traditional forms. I know that my local art museums in Detroit, Ann Arbor, and Flint, have has long periods of time where there were either no photographs displayed as art, but fewer than a handful. In institutions like the Art Institute of Chicago, it is relegated to the basement below the stairs (same at the Detroit Institute of Arts) and rarely do they let any others be seen elsewhere in the museum.