"In 1970, photography curator Peter C. Bunnell organized the exhibition Photography into Sculpture for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, bringing together twenty-three photographers and artists from across the United States as well as Vancouver, British Columbia, whose work challenged accepted practices and categories. The Photographic Object 1970 serves as an exhibition catalogue after the fact, an oral history, and critical reading of exhibitions and experimental photography during the 1960s and 70s. It proposes precedents for contemporary artists who continue to blur the boundaries between photography and other art mediums."--Provided by publisher.

"In 1970, photography curator Peter C. Bunnell organized the exhibition Photography into Sculpture for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, bringing together twenty-three photographers and artists from across the United States as well as Vancouver, British Columbia, whose work challenged accepted practices and categories. The Photographic Object 1970 serves as an exhibition catalogue after the fact, an oral history, and critical reading of exhibitions and experimental photography during the 1960s and 70s. It proposes precedents for contemporary artists who continue to blur the boundaries between photography and other art mediums."--Provided by publisher.

Surveys the presence of photography in artistic practice from the 1960s onwards.

OBJECT:PHOTO shifts the dialogue about modernist photography from an emphasis on the subject and the image to the actual photographic object, created by a certain artist at a particular time and present today in its unique physicality. This shift is especially significant for a study of the period during which photography developed a distinctive formal language. A growing awareness of the rarity of images made between the two world wars has altered historians' considerations, encouraging new approaches privileging the originality of each work and the density of references each contains. This richly illustrated publication culminates a four-year collaborative research endeavor between The Museum of Modern Art's Departments of Photography and Conservation, and nearly 30 visiting scholars, on the material and aesthetic evolution of avant-garde photography in the early twentieth century. The 341 modernist photographs known as The Thomas Walther Collection, a major museum acquisition made in 2001, is presented in its entirety, establishing a new standard of depth for the medium. Essays by curators, researchers, and conservators consider the history of collecting from this era to the present and how deepening knowledge has shifted the perspective on the medium; the material facts of the Walther pictures as a baseline for understanding the development of photographic materials in this era; and how the intellectual formation of the writers of critical photographic publications of the era and the societal and cultural pressures of that historical moment inflected the photography's sense of its own history. Together with thematic, object-based case studies of groups of pictures that demonstrate new approaches in specific, divergent examples, these contributions reanimate the dialogue on this formative era in photography.

The first comprehensive study of the artist Robert Heinecken and his critical views on the culture of mass media This is the first book-length study dedicated to the artist Robert Heinecken, whose innovative photographic practices sought to interrogate how mass media imagery facilitated the construction of individual and collective identities. Appropriating, rephotographing, and layering pictures culled from newspapers, advertisements, pornography, and television, Heinecken recombined and transformed the ubiquitous images of mass culture to encourage viewers to critically reflect on their sense of self. From the 1960s through the late 1990s, Heinecken’s controversial art continually challenged inherited ideas around consumerism, the facticity of reportage, and visual culture’s relationship to gender and identity politics. Embodying the evolution of contemporary art toward increasingly hybrid and conceptual approaches, his oeuvre includes examples of painting, sculpture, photomontage, performance, installation, time-based media, and artist’s books, all of which collectively exploit photography’s reproducibility to subvert society’s dominant ideologies and stereotypical modes of representation. Author Matthew Biro presents an exhaustive look at Heinecken’s life and art, locating him within a lineage that encompasses the activities of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes and the postmodern strategies of the Pictures Generation artists. Assessing his career within the specific political and historical contexts from which he gleaned his material, and illustrated throughout with vibrant full-color reproductions of his art, this in-depth examination demonstrates Robert Heinecken’s significance as a key figure of twentieth-century art and an incisive commentator on modern life in America.

"Published in conjunction with the exhibition The original copy: photography of sculpture, 1839 to today, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (August 1-November 1, 2010)"--T.p. verso.

An intimate meditation on photography for the ages, curated around 120 epochal photographs. In On Photographs, curator and writer David Campany presents an exploration of photography in 120 photographs. Proceeding not by chronology or genre or photographer, Campany's eclectic selection unfolds according to its own logic. We see work by Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Eggleston, Helen Levitt, Garry Winogrand, Yves Louise Lawler, Andreas Gursky, and Rineke Dijkstra. There is fashion photography by William Klein, one of Vivian Maier's contact sheets, and a carefully staged scene by Gregory Crewdson, as well as images culled from magazines and advertisements. Each of the 120 photographs is accompanied by Campany's lucid and incisive commentary.