From the Introduction
In the broad sweep of art history photography is just a blip, coming at the tail end of a long continuum that reflects and parallels the evolution of consciousness. From cave drawings to Greek sculpture to Italian frescoes to French neoclassical painting, artmaking over time is a story about increasingly refined tools, measured accuracy in representing the objective world, and eventually, a gradual progression into perceptual abstraction. Accordingly, it can be viewed as a sequential narrative that charts over thousands of years the simultaneous stages of necessity, invention, and imagination to reveal, ultimately, the manifest intelligence of the species in the complexity of human expression.
Still, during photography’s relatively brief history, the species has never been brought into sharper focus. Overall, photography has given us a self-adjusting clarity about who we are, what we look like, and how we behave, reflecting our world—individually, culturally, scientifically, and, ultimately, existentially—in ways unimaginable merely two hundred years ago. Whether the camera is a scientific, utilitarian, or artistic tool has ceased to be the relevant debate.
ESSAYS
“Essay: Icons as Fact, Fiction and Metaphor”
—by Philip Gefter, The New York Times, July 23, 2009.
“Robert Frank: Snapshots from the American Road”
—by Philip Gefter, The New York Times, December 8, 2008.