Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Now available in paperback, this is the first survey of international photography to examine the discipline across the full range of its uses by professionals and amateurs. Each of the eight chapters takes a strict time frame of, say, fifteen to thirty years in which to examine the medium through the lenses of art, science, social science, travel, war, mass media and individual practitioners. The coverage is truly global including rarely seen work from Latin America, Africa, China, Japan, India, and Russia as well as the more established canon of Europe and the United States. Seminal figures, from Julia Margaret Cameron to Cindy Sherman, are profiled, but the emphasis is more on key ideas than individuals. So the reader follows such debates as the nature of discovery/invention, the effect of mass media on morality, the use of imagery as a tool of Western colonialism, and the role of the photograph in advertising, radical politics and family life.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Marien (fine arts, Syracuse Univ.) winnows the abundant photographic production of the mid-19th to the late 20th centuries to harvest a concise and essential chronology of the medium's technologies and aesthetics. She opens with photography's prehistory, examining the many figures, theories, and experiments leading to its invention and thus extending and deepening the presentation in Naomi Rosenblum's A World History of Photography, which begins in 1839. She carefully considers the import of photography's initial public reception and considers how, in this age of aesthetic and ideological pluralism, photography influences our experiences of the world. Ambitious in her scope, she ranges worldwide, offering detailed profiles of regional styles and previously under-recognized photographers. She also departs from the traditional "grand narrative" of other retrospective histories to expose the sometimes myriad ideological paths within a particular historical or aesthetic debate. With 600 illustrations, 166 in color, this volume is highly recommended for public and academic libraries.-Savannah Schroll, formerly with Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

Marien (fine arts, Syracuse Univ.) offers this cultural history of photography, prepared in the tradition of other studies by Newhall, Gernsheim, Rosenblum, and Trachtenberg. It is a large book with nearly 500 pages of text, a glossary, photographic time line along with major historical developments, extensive notes, and a very good bibliography. It covers photography from 1839 to just before the end of the 20th century (1999), and, along with all the major historical figures, it includes current photographers in the Americas, Europe, and Asia who are not widely known. Some photographers from Africa and South Asia also are included. Chapters are arranged chronologically, but the organization within chapters is topical, with each topic including a "Focus" section that examines a specific area of interest to the time period. There are also portraits of individual photographers starting with Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner and ending with Sebastiao Salgado. This is a high-quality publication that updates and extends all earlier books on similar topics. It belongs in all libraries that have collections on photography, fine arts, and cultural history. ^BSumming Up: Essential. All levels. C. Stroh Western Michigan University