num_pages: 154
description: To help reconcile his roles as an exhibiting photographer and as an academic during the shift from formalism to deconstructionism, Salemme looks at photographic modernism through selected lenses of postmodernism. He draws on formalist writings about photography to explore paradoxes that he has found to characterize and constitute American modernism, and more specifically formalist, aesthetics in 20th-century photography. His five paradoxes are the particular versus the universal, discovery and creation, a recording of exteriors of objects that can reveal what lies beneath their surfaces, truth versus interpretational ambiguity, and the ephemeral moment that persists as an artifact. He does not include illustrations. The text is double spaced. Annotation (c) Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
language: English
title: American Photographic Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century: The Five Paradoxes of Modernism
titlecomplete: American Photographic Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century: The Five Paradoxes of Modernism (Studies in Photographic Arts, V. 5)
publisher: Edwin Mellen Pr