Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Exploring one of the most exciting and transformative developments in the history of photography, this book focuses on the masters of contemporary digital art photography. The rise of digital photography is perhaps the most manifest legacy of the digital revolution in art. Through the use of sophisticated software and scanners, artists are able to enhance photographs, saturate them with colour, and create mesmerizing effects. Focusing exclusively on digital photography and its enormous varieties of technique and style being practiced today, Sylvia Wolf explores a genre that challenges our notions of the art and the role of the artist. This lavishly illustrated book takes readers from the earliest experiments in digital photography to the latest innovations. Wolf candidly discusses issues of global panoply of artists, including Andreas Gursky, Chris Jordan, Loretta Lux, and Lucas Samaras, demonstrates just how diverse and complex the field has become. Today as digital photography is being used by artists to portray unbridled consumption and warn of ecological disaster; as artists employ Photoshop, Google and their own programming skills to create software-cum-art objects; and as seasoned photographers turn from film to their laptops; this volume offers a riveting snapshot of a medium that is changing the way we look at pictures. AUTHOR: Sylvia Wolf is Director of the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington in Seattle. She was formerly an adjunct curator at the Whitney Museum of Art and Photography Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. ILLUSTRATIONS 150 photos *

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This excellent, compact guide by Wolf (Univ. of Washington) is an insightful introduction to the past quarter-century of digital and electronic imaging in the photographic arts. In the introductory essay to this well-illustrated survey of works by more than 50 artists, Wolf posits simultaneous beginnings for the technologies that underlie photography and computing and directs readers' attention to the intersections of technology and visual culture. Her straightforward characterization of analog as a transcription of nature and digital as an encryption into code provides the framework for considering recent directions in creative photography. Wolf outlines several broad areas of artistic concern and highlights the creative processes of culling, combining, constructing, and coding within the fields of cultural, social, and aesthetic values. This book makes clear the shifting emphasis from the durable fiction that has been photography's version of representation and its relation to "the real," to the narrowing distance between reality and imagination. Illustrated works are from a diverse selection of artists. The volume takes significant notice of little-recognized pioneers including Esther Parada and Paul Berger. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general readers. E. Baden Warren Wilson College