Preview our FALL 2024 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
APERTURE
The Pleasures of Good Photographs
By Gerry Badger.
“If looking at photographs is a pleasurable activity, it is pleasurable in a complex, transformative, frequently unsettling sense. It is not pleasure unalloyed, for no profound pleasure is pure... Like many truly enriching pleasures... photography has its dark, troubling, even dangerous aspects.” —Gerry Badger The Pleasures of Good Photographs is an intellectual and aesthetic excursion led by Gerry Badger, one of the field's eminent critics and popular writers and the author of more than a dozen books including both volumes of The Photobook: A History. In this new volume of essays, Badger offers insight into some of his favorite images, artists and themes, drawing upon nearly three decades of experience writing and thinking about photography. With deep discernment and a readable blend of scholarly finesse and wit, Badger elucidates works by dozens of photographers, from Dorothea Lange and Eugène Atget to Martin Parr, Luc Delahaye, Susan Lipper and Paul Graham. Among the broader topics discussed are the photobook, where Badger believes “photography sings its loudest and most complex song,” and Photoshop's role in art-making. An interlude at the heart of the book pairs the author's evocative meditations with nearly a dozen particular images. Alongside some of Badger's classics, The Pleasures of Good Photographs showcases primarily new essays, making it an important addition to the canon of photographic writing.
Featured image, Room 316, Howard Johnson's, Battle Creek, Michigan (July 6, 1973), by Stephen Shore, is reproduced from the chapter, "Without Author or Art: The 'Quiet' Photograph" in Gerry Badger's best-selling essay collection, The Pleasures of Good Photographs.
FROM THE BOOK
Throughout the development of twentieth-century photography there has been a consistent and obdurate tendency that has been underrated within the general scheme of things. It is so fundamental as to be taken absolutely for granted, largely disregarded, and certainly little remarked upon. It is a characteristic that is invariably in fashion, but is inherently unfashionable. Some of those recognized as being among the medium's greatest practitioners have their work defined by this trait to alarge degree. For others, it has proved a contributing factor in their relative neglect. The result of this tendency is what I term the 'quiet' photograph. The 'quiet' photograph is a difficult notion to define with any exactitude, partly a question of style, more a question of voice. To begin with, it means essentially what it suggests, that the photographer's voice is not of the hectoring kind, that his or her artistic persona from first to last is modest, self-effacing. The egotistical mediation of the determinedly expressive auteur is politely shunned. The 'quiet' photographer focuses upon modest rather than determinedly grand subjects, eschews quirky tricks of technique or vision, and (perhaps crucially) presents the work in an understated way. One cannot really consider a photograph two meters wide to be a quiet photograph, no matter how calm, meditative, or unadorned its subject matter, no matter how much it meets the criteria in other ways…" Excerpt is from the chapter "Without Author or Art: The 'Quiet' Photograph" in Gerry Badger's best-selling essay collection, The Pleasures of Good Photographs.
FORMAT: Pbk, 6 x 8.5 in. / 256 pgs / 17 color / 18 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $29.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $35 ISBN: 9781597111393 PUBLISHER: Aperture AVAILABLE: 6/30/2010 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: No longer our product AVAILABILITY: Not Available
“If looking at photographs is a pleasurable activity, it is pleasurable in a complex, transformative, frequently unsettling sense. It is not pleasure unalloyed, for no profound pleasure is pure... Like many truly enriching pleasures... photography has its dark, troubling, even dangerous aspects.” —Gerry Badger
The Pleasures of Good Photographs is an intellectual and aesthetic excursion led by Gerry Badger, one of the field's eminent critics and popular writers and the author of more than a dozen books including both volumes of The Photobook: A History. In this new volume of essays, Badger offers insight into some of his favorite images, artists and themes, drawing upon nearly three decades of experience writing and thinking about photography. With deep discernment and a readable blend of scholarly finesse and wit, Badger elucidates works by dozens of photographers, from Dorothea Lange and Eugène Atget to Martin Parr, Luc Delahaye, Susan Lipper and Paul Graham. Among the broader topics discussed are the photobook, where Badger believes “photography sings its loudest and most complex song,” and Photoshop's role in art-making. An interlude at the heart of the book pairs the author's evocative meditations with nearly a dozen particular images. Alongside some of Badger's classics, The Pleasures of Good Photographs showcases primarily new essays, making it an important addition to the canon of photographic writing.
