Photography and the Real: Essays on Contemporary Photography Book

Mark Durden provides a series of essays which examine a variety of different photography practices in Britain, Europe and America from the late 1960's to the present. Examining photography in terms of recent questions of the real, Durden shows the importance and centrality of documentary to much recent and contemporary photographic art. The book begins by examining the central role photography occupied in conceptual art practices if the 1960's and 1970's, including the work of John Baldessari, John Hilliard and Victor Burgin. Through these examinations the author shows how we can understand the distinctive postmodern strategy of appropriation and quotation in the work of such American artists as Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince. Following chapters consider the blurring of fiction and factuality in the work of Christian Boltanski and Sophie Calle, an exploitation of photography's realism in Andres Serrano's Morgue photographs, questions of class and taste raised by the work of suck British realist photographers as Martin Parr and Richard Billingham, Allan Sekula's photo-text documentary Fish Story, the tableau photography of Jeff Wall and Philip-Lorca deCorcia. The book closes with a discussion of the work of the artist, Alfredo Jaar, considering his distinctive use of photography in response to the recent genocide in Rwanda..Read More