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. Author Lyle Rexer examines abstraction at pivotal moments, starting with the inception of photography, when many of its pioneers believed the camera might reveal other aspects of reality. The Edge of Vision traces subsequent explorations– from 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 1940s through the 1980s, a multitude of photographers– Edward Weston, Aaron Siskind, and Barbara Kasten, among them–took up abstraction from a variety of positions. Finally, Rexer explores the influence the history of abstraction exerts on contemporary thinking about the medium. Many contemporary artists–most prominently Silvio Wolf, Marco Breuer, and Ellen Carey–reject photography’s documentary dimension in favor of other possibilities, somewhere between painting and sculpture, that include the manipulation of process and printing. In addition to Rexer’s engagingly written and richly illustrated history, this volume includes a selection of primary texts from key practitioners and critics, such as Edward Steichen, László Moholy-Nagy, and James Welling.