The Edge of Vision The Rise of Abstraction in Photography

From the beginning, abstraction has been intrinsic to photography, and its persistent popularity reveals much about the medium. The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography is the first book in English to document this phenomenon and to put it into historical context, while also examining the diverse approaches thriving within contemporary photography. Aperture is pleased to release this book in an affordable paperback edition. Author Lyle Rexer examines abstraction at pivotal moments, starting with the inception of photography, when many of the pioneers believed the camera might reveal other aspects of reality. The Edge of Vision traces subsequent explorationsfrom the Photo-Secessionists, who emphasized process and emotional expression over observed reality, to Modernist and Surrealist experiments. In the decades to follow, in particular from the 1950s through the 1980s, a multitude of photographersEdward Weston, Aaron Siskind, Barbara Kasten, Ellen Carey, and James Welling among themtook up abstraction from a variety of positions. Finally, Rexer explores the influence the history of abstraction exerts on contemprary thinking about the medium. Many contemporary artistsmost prominently Penelope Umbrico, Michael Flomen, and Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarinreject classic definitions of photographys documentary dimension in favor of other conceptually inflected possibilities, somewhere between painting and sculpture, that include the manipulation of process and printing. In addition to Rexers engagingly written and richly illustrated history, this volume includes a selection of primary texts from and interviews with key practitioners and critics, such as Alvin Langdon Coburn, László Moholy-Nagy, Gottfried Jägger, Silvio Wolf, and Walead Beshty.