Conversations With Contemporary Photographers

"Conversations is a landmark series in photography, featuring extensive interviews by major international critics with living masters on aesthetics, craft, and culture. The book traces the heritage of the medium in fascinating, informal discourses on topics ranging from the personal to the political, covering intimate detail and theoretical background alike. Complete with biographies, bibliographies, and self-portraits of each featured artist, it is both a vital record of contemporary photography and an engaging read."--BOOK JACKET.

'Wide-ranging and eclectic’ TLS 'Seductively curious' Observer ‘A visual and intellectual journey' Herald See/Saw is an illuminating history of how photographs frame and change our perspectives. Starting from single images by the world’s most important photographers – from Eugène Atget to Alex Webb – Geoff Dyer shows us how to read a photograph, as he takes us through a series of close readings that are by turns moving, funny, prescient and surprising.

This book makes available for the first time in English—and for the first time in its entirety in any language—an important yet little-known interview on the topic of photography that Jacques Derrida granted in 1992 to the German theorist of photography Hubertus von Amelunxen and the German literary and media theorist Michael Wetzel. Their conversation addresses, among other things, questions of presence and its manufacture, the technicity of presentation, the volatility of the authorial subject, and the concept of memory. Derrida offers a penetrating intervention with regard to the distinctive nature of photography vis-à-vis related technologies such as cinema, television, and video. Questioning the all-too-facile divides between so-called old and new media, original and reproduction, analog and digital modes of recording and presenting, he provides stimulating insights into the ways in which we think and speak about the photographic image today. Along the way, the discussion fruitfully interrogates the question of photography in relation to such key concepts as copy, archive, and signature. Gerhard Richter introduces the volume with a critical meditation on the relationship between deconstruction and photography by way of the concepts of translation and invention. Copy, Archive, Signature will be of compelling interest to readers in the fields of contemporary European critical thought, photography, aesthetic theory, media studies, and French Studies, as well as those following the singular intellectual trajectory of one the most influential thinkers of our time.

Redheaded Peckerwood is Christian Patterson's second book; a body of photographs, documents and objects that utilizes the underlying narrative of a true crime story as a spine.

An intimate meditation on photography for the ages, curated around 120 epochal photographs. In On Photographs, curator and writer David Campany presents an exploration of photography in 120 photographs. Proceeding not by chronology or genre or photographer, Campany's eclectic selection unfolds according to its own logic. We see work by Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Eggleston, Helen Levitt, Garry Winogrand, Yves Louise Lawler, Andreas Gursky, and Rineke Dijkstra. There is fashion photography by William Klein, one of Vivian Maier's contact sheets, and a carefully staged scene by Gregory Crewdson, as well as images culled from magazines and advertisements. Each of the 120 photographs is accompanied by Campany's lucid and incisive commentary.

This book is a compilation of interviews and essays that cover a broad range of photographers and photographic disciplines. Each photographer profiled made a living by concentrating on a specific aspect of the craft, but in doing so transcended their livelihood to become recognized for more than the type of images they created. Each had a distinct "style," creative approach, dedication to the craft, point of view about themselves and the world. These interviews were conducted during a seminal period in the shift from film to digital and from print reproduction to global distribution on the Internet. Just like their photographs continue to inspire today, now these pros’ words can live on as an invaluable reference for the photographers of the future. The truth and wisdom in this collection transcend time and technology.