Transforming Images: Diversity, Inequality, and Community in American Society

By Barbara E. Savedoff

Barbara E. Savedoff seeks to discern the distinctive character of photography as an art. Why, she asks, do similar images in paintings and photographs strike us differently? How is our reaction to a photograph of a painting unlike our response to the "real" painting? In this imaginative and beautifully illustrated book, she argues that the way we look at and understand photographs varies dramatically from the way we view other images. Savedoff convincingly demonstrates that photography's perceived realism, along with its unexpected ability to transform its subjects, gives this art form its enigmatic power. Featuring examples of the image-within-an-image, her book explores ambiguities of representation in paintings, in photographs, and in films such as Shall We Dance, Sabotage, and Buster Keaton's Sherlock Junior. The volume also addresses questions concerning altered photographs, photo-realist paintings, animated cartoons, and photographic reproductions.A meditative closing chapter probes the effects of digital alteration on our understanding of images. Savedoff argues that as digital imagery becomes more common, our way of looking at photographs and gauging their impact is irrevocably changed.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801433754
• ISBN13: 9780801433757
• Release Date: April 2000
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.3" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

the eternal question - photography as art

This is an excellent introduction to the idea of photography as realism that sets the medium in the context of other art forms and the cross-fertilisation between media. Eminently readable, here is a painless and engaging survey of the history of photography that reveals how profoundly the medium has transformed not only the appearance of artworks but our very perception of the world. An example of her approach is the way Savedoff contemplates, with nods to Berger and Benjamin, the impact that the proliferation of photographic reproductions have had on our attitude and understanding of of artworks experienced remotely and vicariously, examining more speculatively than other writers just what it is that we see and cannot see in photographs of art. Good monochrome illustrations throughout jog the memory or inspire a search for something more satisfyingly close to the original. Here's a lively and wise discussion that I have found has just the right pitch for our second year tertiary fine art photography students.