On Photographs
David Campany
Thames & Hudson
English\
Hardcover
272 pages
171 x 216 mm
2020
ISBN 9780500545065
What shapes our response to a photograph? Where does the meaning we ascribe to it come from? And how important to our reading of it are the photographer’s intentions? In a dazzling example of photography writing – an exploration of the photographic medium through 120 images, some familiar, some surprising – David Campany shows us that how we think about photographs is just as important as what we think about them.
Rejecting the conventions of chronology and the heightened status afforded to ‘classics’ in traditional accounts of the history of the medium, Campany’s selection of photographs is an expertly curated and personal one – mixing fine art prints, film stills, documentary photographs, fashion editorials and advertisements. In this playful new take on the history of photography, anonymous photographers stand alongside photography pioneers, 20th-century talents and contemporary practitioners. Each photograph is accompanied by Campany’s highly readable commentary, which strives to guide the reader in their own interpretation and understanding of the image itself.
In a visual culture in which we have become accustomed to not looking, Campany helps us to see.
(source: https://thamesandhudson.com/on-photographs-9780500545065)
About the Artist
David Campany is a London based writer, curator, and artist. He writes about documentary, photojournalism, art, cinema, fashion, archives, and architecture. He has published essays on many artists and photographers including, Paul Graham, Chris Killip, Edgar Martins and John Stezaker. His books include Walker Evans: the magazine work (2013), Art and Photography (2003), Photography and Cinema (2008), and The Open Road: photographic road trips in America (forthcoming in 2014). Campany writes regularly for Aperture, Frieze, TATE, Source, and Photoworks. In 2010 he co-curated Anonymes: Unnamed America in Photography and Film at Le Bal (Paris). In 2012 he won the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Writing.
davidcampany.com
(source: https://davidcampany.com/about/)
About the Publisher
Thames & Hudson was founded in 1949 by Walter and Eva Neurath. Their passion and mission was to create a ‘museum without walls’ and to make accessible to a large reading public the world of art and the research of top scholars. To reflect its international outlook the name for the company linked the rivers flowing through London and New York, represented in its logo by two dolphins symbolizing friendship and intelligence, one facing east, one west, suggesting a connection between the Old World and the New. Today, still an independent, family-owned company, Thames & Hudson is one of the world’s leading publishers of illustrated books with over 2,000 titles in print. They publish high-quality books across all areas of visual creativity: the arts (fine, applied, decorative, performing), architecture, design, photography, fashion, film and music, and also archaeology, history and popular culture.
thamesandhudson.com
(source: https://thamesandhudson.com/page/about-us)
