Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2014 -

Kelsey (Harvard Univ.) interweaves history, art, philosophy, psychology, and more with chance and photography to explore the complexity of photographys roles and its challenges and changes to the visual arts, the larger picturized changes and chances of daily lives, and the world of humans' interactions with one another and with everything else.  All is especially significant as people more and more quickly submit to a mechanized life.  Kelsey structures his text by tracking photographys evolution and its important place within the larger world by exploring key periods via the works of Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, Frederick Sommer, and John Baldessari.  Including a few other photographers, such as Aaron Siskind and Robert Heinecken, would have been useful.  Kelsey's points, however, are significantly covered.  As he says, This book is about photography, but its also about the search for meaning in the modern world.  Chance is the key.  Extensive notes amplify a useful index.  This book is a stimulus for further research.  A point to consider is that people using other imaging media are as prone to not being artists as those using photography.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

While this book (the first of two) is notthe history of photography, it is overflowing with excellent and challenging explorations of photography and the extensive interaction of photography with visual life (analogy in particular).  Sillverman (Univ. of Pennsylvania) provides a superb overview of photographic making and thinking.  She describes how viewers react in multiple ways to the visual world through pictures; the way that pictures affect that world; and how viewers' reactions have been affected by the medium's products, their presence, and use of them in thought and action.  A limited number of pictures are examined, but they are effectively used to explore the ideas presented in the book.  Silverman explores photographic practices and their effects more deeply than most authors who have preceded her.  Her intensive investigation of ideas and pictures through careful analysis of the writings of significant authors (e.g., Marcel Proust and Walter Benjamin) is remarkable and very effective in communicating her broad investigation of photography's effects on human thought and action. The writing is excellent and makes for satisfying reading.  Notes, bibliography, and index expand her work.  Volume one readers will look forward to volume two.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, and research collections.