What is to be understood by the expression ‘Photographic Modernism’ ?

[ageorge]

I would recommend a book entitled "Crisis of the Real" by Andy Grundburg. Andy is a former photography critic for the New York Times. The book discusses photographic modernism at great length, but this is in the context of describing what post-modernism is in photography. It's pretty thick with critic-speak, but if you are interested in these topics, it a good place to start.

Below is a description of the book.

http://journalism.nyu.edu/portfolio/books/book400.html

[Matt Blaze]

I've got nothing intelligent to add about modernism, but Martin, I just looked at your web portfolio. What a interesting and beautiful body of work.

And following up on that, I was in Manhattan yesterday and in the neighborhood, and dropped by the Prince St. Gallery, where I saw Martin's photo of the Trinity bomb (the only photo in that exhibition). Beautiful work.

[Martin Miller]

Thanks for the eyewitness testimonial, Matt. After I received word of the acceptance for that show, I became aware that in the original prospectus they had requested no photos! Evidently, Irving Sandler, the juror for the show, had not been informed of this limitation. I was unable to get to the show and was not quite sure whether they hung it or not. Not wanting to draw their attention to this issue, I did not call to ask.

[ageorge]

The public radio show "Philosophy Talk" had a show that covered Postmoderism. As you might expect, they defined and discussed Moderism in relation. There is no mention of photography but is definitely applicable to this thread. You can access a RealPlayer streaming version from the link below.

http://www.philosophytalk.org/pastSh...modernism.html

[paulr]

Seems like one of the more useful things to come out of postmodernism is all the discussion about what modernism is. Pomo is so all over the place that all people can agree on is that it's a reaction against the Modern. But ok, what was that? And so it forces us to go back and take a closer look, and maybe realize that modernism was more things (and more complex) than we used to assume.