Juliet Hacking (Editor) and Joanne Lukitsh (Editor).
Photography — Culture and Theory.
“Photography, both in the form of contemporary practice and that of historical material, now occupies a significant place in the citadels of Western art culture. All of this cultural activity consolidates an artistic practice and critical discourse of photography that distinguishes what is increasingly termed ‘art photography’ from its commercial, scientific and amateur guises. But this long-awaited recognition of photography as high art brings new challenges. How will photography's newly privileged place in the art world affect how the history of creative photography is written?
Modernist claims for the medium as having an aesthetic often turned on precedents from painting. Postmodernism challenged a cultural hierarchy organized around painting. Nineteenth-century photographs move between the symbolic spaces of the gallery wall and the archive: de-contextualised for art and re-contextualised for history. Photography and the Arts revisits practices both celebrated and elided by the modernist and postmodernist grand narratives of art and photographic history in order to open up new critical spaces. Written by leading scholars in the fields of photography, art and literature, the essays examine the metaphorical as well as the material exchanges between photography and the fine, graphic, reproductive and sculptural arts.”
Paperback, 248 pages, 62 b&w illustrations — Bloomsbury Visual Arts — March 2022 — $35.95. Available at Bloomsbury Publishing.