Product Details
Hardcover
208 pages
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Published 1994
From Publishers Weekly
This catalogue of 150 photos drawn from an exhibition at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art is at once a retrospective of America's cultural ambiguities, a pageant of visual technology, a paean to antiestablishment photo-artists like Robert Frank and Gary Winogrand and a meticulous register of source data primarily of interest to specialists. Kismaric, curator of MoMA's department of photography, traces the photography of American politics from early devotional portraits of John Quincy Adams, Lincoln, et al., through the interplay of political and photojournalistic aims that came with faster film, handier cameras and personalities like Teddy Roosevelt, FDR and John F. Kennedy. This panoply has now dwindled, the author finds, to a dull, security-minded photo policy on the part of most modern politicians concerned with controlling their images. Some of the photos included here of Lincoln and others appear to have been enhanced technically, with telling effect.
Copyright 1994 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In this book, published in conjunction with a Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) exhibition of the same title, Kismaric has selected 150 duotone photographs that build a chronology of American photography of politicians, from the carefully staged portraits of the 19th century to more contemporary images, generated by motor-driven 35 mm cameras that can grab odd moments of face and form. Kismaric is curator of MOMA's Department of Photography, and true to her museum's tradition she offers a crisp and... read more |
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