How You Look At It: Photographs of the 20th Century
- Book Review,
by Thomas Weski, Heinz Liesbrock
Amazon.com
How You Look at It is the catalog of a major photographic exhibition organized by the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Germany. Its thesis--that photography is the defining art of the 20th century--is straightforward, but its organization is unusual. Rather than a chronological survey of iconic images, the book presents only 40 photographers, from the pioneering Frenchman Atget to postwar Americans and modern German masters like Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky. This enables the chosen artists to be shown in depth, though the criteria for their being chosen are not clear to this reviewer. Exposure to European material will benefit the American audience to whom this English-language edition of the book is directed, but it is unfortunate that, apart from Tomatsu Shomei, no non-Western photographer is included. Just as it took Robert Frank, a Swiss, to shock the art establishment in 1959 with the raw images of his collection The Americans, Americans today can learn from the formal explorations of their transatlantic counterparts. Examples of non-photographic artworks are sprinkled through the book--a Picasso portrait, for example, or a David Hockney cityscape--giving context to the photographs. The thoughtful text consists of essays by the two curators of the show and three other critics who analyze the current theoretical underpinnings of photography. This is not easy reading; the translations successfully preserve the denseness of the original German. The 500 images, however, speak for themselves, making How You Look at It valuable material for anyone interested in photography and its relations to contemporary cultural issues. --John Stevenson
From Library Journal
This book accompanies a 2000 exhibit of the same name, jointly sponsored by the Sprengel Museum Hannover and the St delsches Kunstinstitute and St dische Galerie, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The editors have put together a large group of pictures to support their assertion that photography is the definitive art form of the 20th century, one that has had a profound effect on the way we see the world, the process by which artists create images, and the course of world events. This is not a survey of 20th-century photography, so many of which were published last year. Rather, by carefully sequencing and juxtaposing photographs and other works of art (paintings, sculpture), the editors establish a kind of dialog that reveals common messages by two or more artists. These groupings work most of the time, though sometimes the nonphotographic comparisons are puzzling at best. The essays are academic in the worst sense but may have suffered from bad translations. One of the most valuable parts of the book is the end matter, which provides biographies, exhibitions, bibliographies of artists in the book, along with full information on each work reproduced (or exhibited). For academic and large public library art and photohistory collections.DKathleen Collins, Bank of America Corporate Archives, San Francisco Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The San Francisco Bay Guardian, December 2000
Beyond the organizational trope, this coffee-table book with substance also serves quite nicely as a collection of really great pictures.
IKEA space Magazine, September 2000
… exposes unexpected connections and threads in what is arguably one of the definitive art forms of the last century.
Nylon, October 2000
The…essays…discuss the technical, historical, and social backgrounds of…photography as well as…ties to more traditional painting and sculpture. -Ingrid Eberly
Playboy, December 2000
...highlights many of the big guns of photography-Walker Evans, William Eggleston and Eugene Atget-in a refreshingly different way.
Flaunt, October 2000
“How you look at it” effortlessly spans the century, reaching a crescendo with its final image…
Jane Magazine, October 2000, Lesley Meyer
The best part: Instead of boiling an artist down to one image [it] gives us a sampling from each photographer.
DKNY, Fall 2000
A panoramic view of 20th century photography presenting entire bodies of work that are arranged thematically rather than chronologically.
Andy Warhol’s Interview, December 2000
For Snap-Happy People. A photography-fan’s must-have.
W Magazine, December 2000
…a smartly conceived ramble over the lenscape of 20th-century photography.
DoubleTake, Winter 2001
…an intelligent survey of the history of the photographic medium and its uses and variations during its relatively young life.
Book Description
Eugene Atget's Parisian storefronts precede Thomas Struth's desolate views of Wall Street; Charles Sheeler's studies of the Ford Motor Plant are contrasted with Bernd and Hilda Becher's Blast Furnace series; Walker Evans' sharecroppers are presented alongside Rineke Dijkstra's troubled late twentieth century teens. These are just some of the surprising and delightful editorial pairings to be found in How You Look At It: Photographs of the 20th Century. Intelligently and carefully edited by Thomas Weski and Heinz Liesbrock, this stunning volume makes an argument for photography as the definitive art form of the twentieth century by presenting whole series of works by the medium's pioneers, as opposed to isolated individual photographs. Arranged thematically rather than chronologically, the connections between seemingly disparate bodies of work are made clear, Cindy Sherman's early film stills sit easily across the page from Lee Friedlander's sly shadow self portraits; Robert Adams' desolate suburban sprawls lead a path to Larry Clark's strung out dopers in Tulsa several pages later. Interspersed throughout the book are also reproductions of relevant art pieces, thus a Mark Rothko painting flanks a piece from Robert Frank's The Americans and Christian Boltanski's L'album de la famille introduces Nicholas Nixon's The Brown Sisters. Published to accompany an exhibition of the same name, How You Look At It is a comprehensive and unprecedented look at the century of photography.
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