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List of illustrations

  • Andy Grundberg at his first job
  • Ambulance Disaster
  • Crocus
  • Female Figure
  • Phillips 66, Flagstaff , Arizona
  • New York City
  • Rope Bridge, Ithaca, New York
  • Press check for Walls Paper, with Gordon Matta-Clark, center, and Joan Simon, right
  • Gordon Matta-Clark barbecuing on the top floor of Dumpster Duplex
  • Splitting
  • Day’s End (Pier 52)
  • Conical Intersect
  • What Is On
  • Patti Smith reading at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, New York
  • Halloween Revelers at the Waldorf Astoria, New York
  • Double Negative
  • Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971
  • Installation view of Grass Grows, for Earth Art
  • Installation view of Earth Art, in progress
  • Accumulation Cut, in progress
  • Spiral Jetty
  • The Great Pipes Monument
  • Tide (Vloed)
  • An Artist is Not Merely the Slavish Announcer. . .
  • Fountain
  • Variable Piece #70
  • Schematic Drawings for Muybridge II, 1964
  • Homes for America
  • Water Towers
  • Strobe Series / Futurist: Trying To Get A Straight Line With A Finger
  • Shoot
  • Eye Body #11
  • Jumps
  • Catalysis IV
  • S.O.S. Starification Object Series (Back)
  • Advertisement for Robert Morris’s concurrent exhibitions at Castelli and Sonnabend galleries
  • Lynda Benglis advertisement
  • Bird Transformation
  • Untitled, from the series Silueta
  • Paradise Regained
  • Untitled
  • Equivalent
  • Bare Legs by Store
  • Apertures
  • Stockholm
  • Are You Rea
  • Untitled
  • Kingman Holiday
  • The Magic Finger (Self-Portrait with Pointing Finger)
  • Untitled
  • Embed Series: Cigar Dreams (Seeing is Believing)
  • Blondes/ Brunettes
  • Two Views of One Mishap of Minor Consequence
  • Colorado
  • Southeast Corner, Semicoa, 333 McCormick, Costa Mesa
  • Main Street, Gull Lake, Saskatchewan, August 18, 1974
  • Untitled
  • Porch, Provincetown, Massachusetts
  • Photo-Transformation, December 17, 1973
  • Elephant
  • Church, Sprott , Alabama
  • Self-Portrait as a Fountain
  • Magnet TV
  • Still from Three Transitions
  • Still from Vertical Roll
  • Still from Stamping in the Studio
  • Still from New and Used Car Salesman
  • Still from Media Burn
  • Still from Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman
  • Four stills from Ohio at Giverny
  • Installation view of Room for St. John of the Cross
  • Sunday New York Times
  • Susan Sontag
  • Panel discussion at symposium, Photography: Where We Art
  • Untitled Film Still #7
  • Untitled (Hats)
  • Woman with Red Chair
  • Subdivision with Spotlight
  • Untitled (President Collage: 4)
  • Untitled (three men looking in the same direction)
  • Installation view of "Arrangements of Pictures," Metro Pictures, New York
  • Figures
  • Untitled (You Are Not Yourself)
  • Untitled #96
  • Cindy Sherman and Andy Grundberg at the opening of the Cindy Sherman retrospective, Akron Art Museum, Ohio
  • Rise and Monty Kissing, NYC
  • Self Deceit #4, Rome, Italy
  • Untitled
  • Untitled
  • Haystack Cone, Freeport, Maine
  • Untitled [Doctor and Nurse]
  • Untitled
  • Zuma #29
  • No. 160, Division with Irregular Squares in Magenta and Orange
  • Revenge of the Goldfish
  • Red Rock State Campground, Gallup New Mexico
  • Double Rembrandt with Steps
  • Outburst
  • Falkland Road, Bombay, India
  • Installation view of "Portraits exhibition,"Marlborough Gallery, New York
  • Deli Package, New York
  • Talent
  • Interior
  • Mary Boone
  • Estelí
  • Self-Portrait
  • Piss Christ
  • Untitled
  • San Francisco, California
  • You’re Fine
  • Untitled (Woman and Daughter with Makeup)
  • Memory Rendering of Kiss at Times Square
  • Untitled
  • Color Theory
  • Camera Obscura View of Brookline fr om Brady’s Bedroom
  • Porträt (P. Stadtbäumer)
  • Art Institute of Chicago 2, Chicago
  • Ruhr Valley
  • Androgyny (6 Men + 6 Women)
  • Die Photographie ist auch nicht mehr das was sie mal war (Photography isn’t anymore what it used to be)
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Description: How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to...
~First, thanks to all the artists whose work I discuss; they have provided the material that shapes my narrative as well as a central reason my life has been so full and rewarding. Also, to the critics, writers, and editors of my generation who have endeavored to explain why art matters and which art matters more than most. I am blessed to have experienced firsthand...
PublisherYale University Press
Description: How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to...
That’s one of the central problems of history, isn’t it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.1-11
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00262.001

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Description: How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to...
In the fall of 1962—when the United States and the Soviet Union were flirting with nuclear Armageddon over the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Beatles were recording “Love Me Do” at Abbey Road Studios with their new drummer, Ringo Starr—the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol met for the first time. The encounter had been organized by Henry Geldzahler, then an...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.13-23
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00262.002

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Description: How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to...
When I landed in Manhattan in the hot August of 1971 something remarkable was happening downtown: the transformation of a square-mile, nearly emptied commercial neighborhood into a thriving center for contemporary art. I am of course speaking of Soho, the area south of Houston Street roughly bounded by West Broadway on the west, Lafayette Street on the east, and Canal Street on the...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.25-39
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00262.003

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Description: How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to...
One day the photograph is going to become even more important than it is now—there’ll be a heightened respect for photographers. Let’s assume that art has moved away from its manual phase and that now it’s concerned with the location of material and with speculation. So the work of art now has to be visited or abstracted from a photograph, rather than made. I...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.41-51
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00262.004

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Description: How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to...
Because a great deal of postminimal art was inaccessible or ephemeral, artists photographed it to show what it looked like and to preserve its memory. The photodocumentation soon came to be thought of as integral to the work itself—a kind of trace of the real thing or event and a real work of art in its own right.
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.53-65
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00262.005

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Description: How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to...
One Saturday evening in the early seventies I went to a ground-floor space in Soho to see what was billed as a play, written by the poet Ted Greenwald. The audience was not large (there were only a couple dozen of us, friends of Ted’s by all appearances), and we had to wait outside on the street until the appointed hour, when a door was opened. Once inside we found seats at one end of an...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.67-81
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00262.006

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Description: How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to...
By the midseventies it had become clear that the contemporary art world had given up on the idea that any singular movement or “ism” could embody vanguard art, as Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism seemed to have done...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.83-101
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00262.007

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Description: How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to...
My career as a critic stemmed in part from my connections to the downtown art world—and in particular to my friendship with Joan Simon, who opened the door for my writing to appear on the pages of Art in America in the midseventies. It also helped that I had something of a catbird seat at Modern Photography, where my editor, Julia Scully, gave me the opportunity to follow my...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.103-123
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00262.008

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Description: How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to...
I first had the urge to write for the New York Times one Sunday in 1980 when I was staying at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, courtesy of an assignment from Modern Photography, where I continued to work while writing reviews for the Soho Weekly News. (This was before John Belushi’s death made the hotel notorious and wildly popular.) I remember walking across...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.125-143
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00262.009

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Description: How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to...
Earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question—whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art—was not raised.
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.145-157
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00262.010

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Description: How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to...
“Quotation,” “appropriation,” “image-scavenging,” “age of simulacra” … For several years now these words have filled the air as we have tried to explain to ourselves what has been happening in recent art. They are such complex words. They provoke a certain nostalgia for the clear brightness of slang. Sometimes, when thinking about...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.159-177
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00262.011

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Description: How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to...
My first review for the New York Times appeared May 10, 1981, and focused on a show of Tod Papageorge’s work at Daniel Wolf Gallery on 57th Street, one of a number of new galleries opened in the late...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.179-189
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00262.012

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Description: How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to...
The special genius of photography depends on the seamless coherence of its description; the camera shows us a particular cone of space during a specific parcel of time. This makes it a perfect tool for visual exploration and discovery, but a rather clumsy one for realizing the inventions of pure imagination.
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.191-209
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00262.013

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Description: How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to...
It is clear that photography is too multiple, too useful to other discourses, ever to be wholly contained within traditional definitions of art. Photography will always exceed the institutions of art, always participate in non-art practices, always threaten the insularity of art’s discourse.
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.211-225
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00262.014

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Description: How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to...
I do not know Mr. Andres Serrano, and I hope I never meet him. Because he is not an artist, he is a jerk.
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.227-237
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00262.015

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Description: How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to...
A few months into 1991 I announced that I was leaving New York and ending my tenure as a critic and columnist for the Times to move to San Francisco, where I had been offered a job with the Friends of Photography. Although the organization had been the brainchild of Ansel Adams and operated a museum called the Ansel Adams Center, its mission was to support contemporary photography. I would...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.239-259
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00262.016

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Description: How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to...
It is tempting to conclude my account of photography’s rise within contemporary art by asserting that its recognition and acceptance was a fait accompli by the beginning of the nineties. Or, for the benefit of any doubters, say by the end of the century. But it may be more accurate to say that its recognition is recursive. Every generation, it now seems, gets to discover photography’s...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.261-264

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