Trace and Transformation: American Criticism of Photography in the Modernist Period

Book info: Trace and Transformation: American Criticism of Photography in the Modernist Period (Hardcover, 314 pages) – Univ of New Mexico Pr, 1995. Language: English.

In this historical survey of American theory and criticism of art photography, the author covers the period from late-nineteenth-century Pictorialism through 1970s formalism. He deals deftly with the difficulties faced by critics¾from the essential question, how is photography an art at all? to the more modernist question of what constitutes the medium of photography at its pure core.

With Pictorialism representing the first theory of photography as art, Eisinger begins his chronological overview with Charles Caffin and Sadakichi Hartmann, the two major Pictorialist critics who worked in the circle of Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession. Alfred Stieglitz himself was not only an influential photographer and early champion of photography as a fine art, but also, later, the leading proponent of straight photography along with colleagues in the 1920s and 1930s Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams. A discussion of documentary photography of the 1930s and magazine photography of the 1940s offers an explanation for these years being a low point for photographic art criticism. The writings of Minor White, Henry Holmes Smith, and others in the 1950s brought renewal to photographic criticism, whose apogee is, arguably, John Szarkowski.

This book offers the first overview of the criticism of photography as art. It will be informative and useful to anyone interested in photography and the cultural life of modernist America.

Editorial Reviews About the Author Joel Eisinger teaches in the Humanities Division of the University of Minnesota, Morris.