After the Photo-Secession: American Pictorial Photography, 1910-1955
This book gathers and honors the work of the pictorial photographers who followed Alfred Stieglitz, including Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston. Peterson's previous book, Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Notes (LJ 10/15/93), gives him the aesthetic grounding to offer insight into this photographic style, which, he effectively argues, faded with the advent of 35mm photography. The pictorial photographers featured in this volume conducted their work in a slow, carefully planned, intellectual, artistic, and physical process. Their equipment was large and heavy, while their results are almost painterly images, composed and refined with painstaking care. Peterson's book is slowly paced, as if in tribute to the genre, demanding time for full appreciation of the work of dozens of lesser-known, even forgotten photo-artists of an earlier day. But his finely crafted text, woven around beautiful images and supported by brief biographies of 75 practitioners of this art, provides great satisfaction to the reader and the viewer. For all art and photography collections.?David Bryant, New Canaan P.L., Ct.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.