Product Description

Edited by Horacio Fernandez.

From its inception, photography has been both a medium of documentation and of artistic creation. However, it did not acquire its standing as a large-scale reproducible and publishable art until the interwar period of this century, when the work of artists and publishers contributed to the creation of an international style. Photography, photomontage, and the photogram were techniques that established a new world of visual communication, a new world of modernity. Fotografa Pblica: Photography in Print chronicles works by artists, from Japan to Mexico, the whole of Europe and the U.S., who produced work of great quality, whether for recording events, artistic experimentation, or propaganda. Beautifully organized and printed, this book presents artist biographies, histories of the publications in which their creations were first published, and a detailed and informative essay by the Horacio Fernandez, curator at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. Contrary to the 20s and 30s, we now continually receive an overwhelming quantity of visual information which, to a certain extent, is discarded at the same time it is consumed. In this book, the spectator of today can discover the prehistory of his or her sensibility, and will probably find it more extremist, though no less rich and possibly even more exciting.

Includes works by: Alexander Rodchenko Bernice Abbott John Heartfield Herbert Bayer Karl Blossfeldt Eugne Atget

Cecil Beaton Margaret Bourke-White Brassa Alexey Brodovitch Gabriel Casas Bruno and Robert Schultz Walker Evans Augustn Jimnez Andr Kertsz Gustav Klucis Germaine Krull Dorothea Lange El Lissitzky Man Ray Herbert Matter Tina Modotti Lszl Moholy-Nagy Nicolai Prusakov Paul Schuitema Piet Zwart And many others

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1126721 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-01
• Released on: 2000-03-01
• Original language: Spanish
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 274 pages

From Library Journal
This handsome catalog documents an exhibit at Spain!s Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia devoted to photography and the phenomenon of modernity. As the introductory essay by exhibit curator Fernandez explains, from its invention photography has been a public medium, yet technological advances during the interwar years allowed large-scale reproduction and publication. Arranged alphabetically from Berenice Abbott to Piet Zwart, including Russian constructivists as well as photographers of the American WPA and FSA, each entry discusses the role of a specific photographer, designer, publication, or one of the many influential countries. With appropriately aesthetic graphic design, the volume includes beautifully reproduced color and black-and-white images of newspapers, magazines, books, posters, and other printed material. It offers parallel texts in Spanish and English and is recommended for all appropriate collections with an interest in art photography."James E. Van Buskirk, San Francisco P.L.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
…this book evokes an energetic optimism, a fascination with machines, the human body, and the dynamics of societies in transition. -- Print Magazine, Winter 2000 –Fred Ritchin

Customer Reviews

A PRECEDENT SETTING COLLECTION
Fotografia Publica set's a precedent and standard in its unparalleled collection of layout/graphic design culled from turn of the century print media. No serious visual communication, new media or art student should be without it! This book takes you into the "modern past" as you will see...what is contemporary is actually rather old. If you want an education in layout design BUY THIS BOOK!

Critical Mass(es)
I am a graphic designer, photographer, and book collector. Fotografia Publica is an assemblage of pages that drives all three of my passions. The typography is sophisticated insofar as it is lively without upstaging the contents. The photographs are presented on the public stage of literature for the masses. Such a presentation underscores the vitality of camerawork that baffels even its practitioners. How can something so commonplace be so compelling. This catalog captures a spirit that fades (no, bleaches paler than white) in light of our contemporary reliance of stock photography to fill the bill. Here was an age where photography was a language and not a downloadable, royalty-free commodity. As the director of MNCARS, José Guirao Cabrera, states in the foreword: "A 20th-century art museum has the duty to examine one of the few occasions in which high culture has used the channels of low culture while maintaining (and even surpassing) the highest levels of quality."

My third passion, books, richochets and caroms in a mirror-world of simultaneous presentation of images of images in books. To turn the pages is to hold these photomontages in your hands, unsliced by the four edges of clean-to-the-edges historical approach. Here are pictures of books, shadows and all. Not just a transcript of what was said, but noise in the background. The crowds cheering. This catalog does not excerpt, but seems to pull up mass-culture's phenomenal treasures roots and all. The paper of the catalog becomes soil for these roots. The book is printed on an uncoated stock that invokes page turning and texture and the quiet light that must have layered the originals in a friable texture of utility and startling imagination. Turn the pages; turn the soil. Buy this book.

Peter W. Johnson