Transforming Images: How Photography Complicates the Picture
This well-written book by Savedoff (philosophy, Baruch Coll., CUNY) combines several disciplines: aesthetics, photography and its history, and digital imaging. She has chosen a fascinating and relatively unexplored areaAthe mysterious effect that occurs when one image includes another image within it (e.g., a painting that includes another painting or a photograph of a scene that includes a poster), or when works of art include objects and abstractions of those objects (e.g., people and their shadows or reflections). This book promotes a greater awareness of the inherent differences between photography and other visual arts and media; regarding the old question of whether photography is an art or a documentary tool, she concludes that we read photographs as records of reality and that therein lies photography's transformative power as an artistic form. Her real contribution in this scholarly and engaging book is to make us alert to what, exactly, we are seeing when we look at reproductions and originals. Recommended for art history, visual studies, and photography collections.AKathleen Collins, Bank of America Archives, San FranciscoCopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.