Search results for ""author andy grundberg""

A leading critic's acclaimed story of the photo boom during the crucial decades of the 1970s and '80s

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A leading critic’s inside story of “the photo boom” during the crucial decades of the 1970s and ’80s “Grundberg . . . is a vibrant, opinionated, authoritative guide to the medium’s past and present.”—Jackie Wullschläger, Financial Times, "Best Books of 2021: Visual Arts" When Andy Grundberg landed in New York in the early 1970s as a budding writer, photography was at the margins of the contemporary art world. By 1991, when he left his post as critic for the New York Times, photography was at the vital center of artistic debate. Grundberg writes eloquently and authoritatively about photography’s “boom years,” chronicling the medium’s increasing role within the most important art movements of the time, from Earth Art and Conceptual Art to performance and video. He also traces photography’s embrace by museums and galleries, as well as its politicization in the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. Grundberg reflects on the landmark exhibitions that defined the moment and his encounters with the work of leading photographers—many of whom he knew personally—including Gordon Matta-Clark, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Mapplethorpe. He navigates crucial themes such as photography’s relationship to theory as well as feminism and artists of color. Part memoir and part history, this perspective by one of the period’s leading critics ultimately tells a larger story about the crucial decades of the 1970s and ’80s through the medium of photography.

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The Devil’s Pool photographs explore a swimming hole in Philadelphia’s Wissahickon Park and emphasize the value of access to green spaces within an urban setting. The project investigates how people relate to their environment and affirms a human need or impulse to commune with the natural world. The work pictures diversity, celebrating the human body interacting with nature, and looks at relationships among people, their bodies, and the environments that they inhabit. It recognizes a long tradition of bathing throughout art history (both indoors and out in nature) and the potential for a pictorial space where the body can be openly represented and honored. This work considers the reflexivity in viewing imagery of people fully taken by their physical and psychological surroundings. Devil’s Pool stems from my love for the Wissahickon and the respite that it provides. People from all over are drawn to this urban swimming hole as a place to play and revel in physicality and nature. The images depict moments of coherence among our bodies and the world around us. At Devil’s Pool, I am able to expand my admiring picture of everyday bodies, their owners absorbed in unselfconscious presence.

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This volume presents more than 150 works from the collection of the Miami-raised and New York-based collector, art dealer and curator Charles Cowles. Spanning the breadth of modern photographic history from the early twentieth-century to the present, these works display a broad range of styles, processes and aesthetic intentions and an impressive number of concentrated strengths--featuring works by Atget, Arbus, Cartier-Bresson, Eggleston, Evans, Hockney, Frank, Mapplethorpe, Ruscha, Schorr, Sherman, Sugimoto, Warhol, Weegee and Winogrand, among many others. Renowned photography critic Andy Grundberg presents a precise analysis of the collection along with studied observations about the nature of photography and how it has become the art form that it is today. Cowles provides an engaging inside look at the development of a collection in an era when photography gained acceptance as an acknowledged art form. And Miami Art Museum Director Terence Riley contributes an introduction.

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