Poetics of Space: A Critical Photographic Anthology

Artists and critics as diverse as Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitzky in the 1920s and Lucy Lippard and Dore Ashton in recent years are included in this rich anthology of essays exploring the evolving notion of space in modern art and photography. As Steve Yates notes in his introduction, the meaning of space provides an uncommonly neutral ground for interpretation, yet the representation of space in art has been a matter of primary importance since the Renaissance gave us the pictorial conventions of perspective. The choice between representing space and confounding the viewer’s understanding of space is integral to modern art, and the wealth of photographic experimentation in the twentieth century has contributed much to debate in this arena. This volume begins with the early modern period when avant-garde artists were challenging the traditional aesthetic with Constructivism and Futurism in Russia, Dadaism and Surrealism in Germany and France, and new forms of photography—collage, photomontage, photograms, and so on—were emerging throughout the Western art world. Included also are influential midcentury essays by Gaston Bachelard, Leo Steinberg, and William M. Ivins, as well as essays on contemporary art issues by Lucy Lippard, Frederick Sommer, and Joel Snyder. In this serious and challenging collection, Steve Yates brings together a valuable array of material to reveal how deeply involved in the aesthetic debate twentieth-century photography has become.