Photography at MoMA: 1920-1960
Ed. Quentin Bajac et al.
Essay by Kevin Moore
2016
Irving Penn, Salad ingredients, New York, 1947
Dye transfer print
Copyright 1947 (renewed 1975) Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The second of three volumes that present a new history of photography through works from The Museum of Modern Art’s collection, Photography at MoMA: 1920–1960 charts the explosive development of the medium during the height of the modernist period. As photography evolved from a tool of documentation and identification into one of tremendous variety, its rapport with the visible world was transformed, as seen in Walker Evans’s documentary style, Dora Maar’s Surrealist exercises, El Lissitzky’s photomontages, August Sander’s unflinching objectivity, the iconic news images published in the New York Times Man Ray’s darkroom experiments, and Tina Modotti’s socio-artistic approach.
In eight thematic chapters, this book presents more than two hundred artists, including Berenice Abbott, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Geraldo de Barros, Margaret Bourke-White, Bill Brandt, Claude Cahun, Harry Callahan, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Roy DeCarava, Robert Frank, Germaine Krull, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Alfred Stieglitz, Otto Steinert, and James Van Der Zee. Hardcover, 533 illustrations.
Edited with text by Quentin Bajac, Lucy Gallun, Roxana Marcoci, and Sarah Hermanson Meister. Essays by Douglas Coupland, Kevin Moore, Drew Sawyer, and Pepper Stetler