New York: Capital of Photography [Paperback]

New York: Capital of Photography is one of those rare books that takes on a difficult subject and carries it off so well that more is achieved than any reader could normally expect.

The subject is New York City in the 20th century. How did the most prominent and highly respected photographers look at and capture the Big Apple? That's the subject here. The only photographers that you might have expected to be in the book that aren't are Diane Arbus, Roy DeCarava and Robert Frank -- due to disputes with Ms. Arbus's daughter and the latter two photographers. So it?s quite complete.

I am a photography fan, and was familiar with most of the photographers covered in the book. But I found the book built on my previous understanding of their work by exposing me to works that I had not seen before and by carefully explaining those works. Some may be disappointed that many iconographic works are not included here . . . but many of those are referenced in Max Kozloff's essay. So you'll see them indirectly in your mind.

The plates capture many different focuses for photography, different styles, varieties of techniques and equipment, and different philosophies about the purpose of photography. As such, they present a catalog of the whole field of photography in the last century. That catalog is more valuable because it concentrates on one subject . . . in many different dimensions.

Frankly, how do you capture New York on film? You can't. Most photographers tried to capture tiny elements that express universal truths. Some succeeded in timeless ways while others created time-limited archives of the past.

As wonderful as the photographs are, the essay by Max Kozloff is what sets this book apart from other photography books. It's as though he gives you a personal tour of the show and answers your questions about the photographers and the plates in as much detail as you want. Almost every plate is discussed and some figures are added for context as well. Seeing the collection through his eyes was like suddenly being loaned an advanced degree in photography studies. Enlivened by this education, I'm sure my eye will always notice more about fine photography when I see it displayed in the future.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to deepen their understanding of this field. In addition, I strongly urge New Yorkers to get copies. The sights captured here will trigger many important memories.

As I finished this wonderful volume, I thought about how fortunate photography students would be if their teachers used this book as a source . . . and then assigned the students to photograph New York.

This has to be my favorite book on New York photographers after Jane Livingstone's brilliant study The New York School: Photographs, 1936-1963. The 101 photos capture the feel of the city over the decades of the last century and especially the street ambience of the thirties to the sixties.

The book is a record of an exhibition of the photos organized by the New York Jewish Museum in 2002. Most of the fifty-nine photographers who exhibited were Jewish. NYC is, after all, their city and perhaps no other metropolis has generated such an amazing number of talented, creative camera folk. The book's contents clearly show this.

The first seventy-eight pages have a wonderful essay, by Max Kozloff, about all these photographers and the various influences that showed up in their work. Here and there a bit of editing wouldn't have gone amiss though, as in this example:
'They almost describe an arc, wherein a material triumphalism is aestheticized to an apex of etherealization, then rounds over to an accounting of the social and human costs of "progress", and finally descends to the pathos of life and the solitude of observation'.
Hmmmm!
Karen Levitov's Introduction, over seven pages also adds to the book's overall comprehension. The back pages provide useful biographies to all the photographers followed by a good bibliography (with ten references to Kozloff's writing). There is a slight editorial lapse in not providing, in the Index, any reference to 101 images.

As to the photos I found them enormously varied in content and style. The first, by the Byron Company, is from 1913 and shows Indians and teepees on the roof of the Hotel McAlpin. A wonderful shot by Ruth Orkin taken on the canopy to the Hotel Astoria in Times Square on V-E Day and includes what looks like a TV camera. Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Lewis Hine, Edward Steichen, Helen Levitt, Bruce Davidson, Paul Strand, Berenice Abbott, Andreas Feininger and many others are all represented.

The book's production is as you would expect for a photo book, one photo to a page with generous margins and thankfully the comprehensive captions are on the same page. The paper is a good matt art for the 117 duotones printed with a 175 screen. I was made aware of an interesting point while with Morris Engel's 1937 photo of a Harlem merchant (plate twenty-one) looking out of a small window of his street stall. The photos show plenty of detail: small packets and bric-a-brac; strip ads for products; bottles and jars etcetera. This same photo also appears, about the same size, in a 1972 Time/Life book on documentary photography but the print used was darker and shows a lot more detail that was obviously included on the original negative. It was also a duotone but although it was printed with a 150 screen it had stronger second black plate to punch out the detail. This does raise the point that photos in art books can have a look that varies depending on the quality of the original print supplied to the printer. A reader could have a different interpretation of a photographer's creativity depending on how their work is presented on the page.

+++LOOK INSIDE THE BOOK by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.

Had really no time to finalize the book so far, however, quick overview: as always, one of the most original authors on photography (along with Ian Jeffrey), Max Kozloff exploits the depth of the medium with exceptional originality and taste. I would highly recommend to anyone interested in the medium of photography as such as well as to those interested in excellent criticism of nowadays.

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