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University of California Press

About the Book

The ubiquity of digital images has profoundly changed the responsibilities and capabilities of anyone and everyone who uses them. Thanks to a range of innovations, from the convergence of moving and still image in the latest DSLR cameras to the growing potential of interactive and online photographic work, the lens and screen have emerged as central tools for many artists. Vision Anew brings together a diverse selection of texts by practitioners, critics, and scholars to explore the evolving nature of the lens-based arts.

Presenting essays on photography and the moving image alongside engaging interviews with artists and filmmakers, Vision Anew offers an inspired assessment of the medium’s ongoing importance in the digital era. Contributors include Ai Weiwei, Gerry Badger, David Campany, Lev Manovich, Christian Marclay, László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Murch, Trevor Paglen, Pipilotti Rist, Shelly Silver, Rebecca Solnit, and Alec Soth, among others. This vital collection is essential reading for artists, educators, scholars, critics, and curators, and anyone who is passionate about the lens-based arts.

About the Author

Adam Bell is a photographer and writer. Coeditor of The Education of a Photographer, he has written for numerous publications, including Afterimage, The Brooklyn Rail, The Art Book Review,FOAM Magazine, photo-eye, and Paper Journal. He is currently on staff and faculty in the MFA Photography, Video, and Related Media Department, School of Visual Arts.

Charles H. Traub is chair of the MFA Photography, Video, and Related Media Department, School of Visual Arts, and president of the Aaron Siskind Foundation. His many books include Dolce Via: Italy in the 80s, The Education of a Photographer, and In the Realm of the Circuit, and his writings have been published in Connoisseur, Fortune, Newsweek, Aperture, U.S. News & World Report, Afterimage, Popular Photography, American Photographer, and The New Yorker.

 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Foreword - Adam Bell

Introduction - Charles Traub

Part 1. From the Lens

1. Photography Is (1961) - Arthur Siegel
2. Keep It Simple Stupid, Just Make a Good Picture: The Basics of Photography (2012) - Gerry Badger
3. Excerpt from A New History of Photography: The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads (2008) - Ken Schles
4. Photographs about Photographs (2010) - Adam Bell
5. On Books and Photography (2012) - Ofer Wolberger, Jason Fulford, and Adam Bell
6. Stillness, Depth, and Movement Reconnected (2012) - Robert Bowen
7. A Little History of Photography Criticism; or, Why Do Photography Critics Hate Photography? (2010) - Susie Linfield
8. If You See Something, Say Something: Why We Need to Talk about and Teach Visual Literacy, Now (2014) - Marvin Heiferman
 

Part 2. Vision and Motion
9. Excerpt from Vision in Motion (1947) - László Moholy-Nagy
10. Stillness (2008) - David Campany
11. The Annihilation of Time and Space (2004) - Rebecca Solnit
12. On Editing and Structure (2002) - Wolf Koenig
13. Flickering Screens (2008) - Ai Weiwei
14. A Lecture (1968) - Hollis Frampton
15. Flatness/Depth. Still/Moving. Photography/Cinema. (2012) - Grahame Weinbren
16. HD Vision (2012) - Bob Giraldi, Ethan David Kent, Christopher Walters, Charles Traub, and Adam Bell
17. Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality (2007) - Tom Gunning
18. Seeing around the Edge of the Frame (2001) - Walter Murch
19. Sensorial Cinema: Conjectures/Conversations (2014) - Scott MacDonald
20. Reconquering Space and the Screen (2005) - Pipilotti Rist and Doug Aitken
21. Looking and Being Looked At (2014) - Shelly Silver and Claire Barliant
22. It’s about Time (2013) - Christian Marclay and Amy Taubin


Part 3. Old Medium/New Forms

23. Photography and the Future (2010) - Tom Huhn
24. Machine-Seeing (2012) - Trevor Paglen and Aaron Schuman
25. There Is Only Software (2011) - Lev Manovich
26. Google Street View: The World Is Our Studio (2011) - Lisa Kereszi
27. Exploring Options (2011) - Alec Soth and Charles Traub
28. On <img> (2014) - Charlie White
29. Sharing Makes the Picture (2012) - Barry Salzman
30. Posits and Questions (2014) - Fred Ritchin and Brian Palmer
31. Capture/Curate </> Touch/Play: Reality Is the New Fiction (2014) - Claudine Boeglin and Paul Pangaro
32. A Post-photographic Manifesto (2011) - Joan Fontcuberta (trans. Graham Thomson)
33. Feedback Manifesto (2010) - David Joselit
34. Ant!foto and the Antifoto Manifesto (2013) - Katja Stuke and Oliver Sieber
35. Creative Interlocutors: A Manifesto (1997) - Charles Traub

Notes
List of Contributors
Credits

Reviews

"Through its variety of voices, Vision Anew doesn’t promote a new language to define "lens art," but dissects the languages that the medium itself has created."
The Brooklyn Rail
“The reconsideration of medium provides some of the richest content in Vision Anew…. As a reader in a rapidly shifting field, it seeks to avoid the more fixed or ideologized positions that have often characterized polarized debates around photography in particular.”
Afterimage
“A valuable, timely, and stimulating collection.”—Geoff Dyer, author of The Ongoing Moment

Vision Anew is a remarkable compendium of important artists, practitioners, theorists, and essayists, who muse on what constitutes creativity in the lens and screen arts today. The book reveals how the intersection of a mobile Internet with photography and video has radically changed what we expect from the witnessing camera. I think this book is destined to be essential reading for all those thinking about the future of our visual culture.”—Mark Lubell, Executive Director, International Center of Photography

“Brings together prophetic historic texts with the best of recent thinking to create an essential reader. This book provides a critical framework that genuinely supports a creative life in photography; its pluralism in the range of ideas and voices speaks out for what is new and what is enduring in the vital dynamics of photographic culture.”—Charlotte Cotton, author of The Photograph as Contemporary Art