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Rating: 
Summary: Good Exploration of the History of Photography
Review: This paperback has 14 pages of text and 79 plates, the latter of which are "only a sampling of the approximately ten thousand photographs" in the SFMOMA collection. The photographers include Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Eugène Atget, Mathew Brady, Brassaï, Julia Margaret Cameron, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Imogen Cunningham, Roy DeCarava, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Ralph Gibson, Lewis Hine, André Kertész, William Klein, Dorothea Lange, Ralph Meatyard, Lisette Model, László Moholy-Nagy, Timothy H. O'Sullivan, Irving Penn, Man Ray, Jacob Riis, Alexander Rodchenko, August Sander, Cindy Sherman, Aaron Siskind, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Josef Sudek, William Henry Fox Talbot, Edward Weston, and Garry Winogrand.
The photos are nicely reproduced, better than in many exhibition catalogs. A handful of the plates are in color, and the rest are duotone black & white. The nationality, birth date, and death date of each photographer are given, which is helpful. I would have liked to see more text for each work (besides the title, date, medium, and dimensions), since the 14 pages of text specifically mention only one-third of the plates. It would also have been nice for the photos to be reproduced in sizes "more or less proportionate to those of the prints" as in "Ansel Adams at 100" of 2001. Instead, some small prints in reality are large in the book, and vice versa. Finally, the photos were made from 1843 to 1994, but the order of the photos in the book is 1850, 1848, 1843, 1854, 1850, ... , 1994, 1975, 1990, 1983, 1976, 1984, 1989, 1987, 1991, 1984, 1979, and 1991-1992. I did not see a strong reason to vary from a strict chronological order, although it was interesting that some photos facing each other were visually related (e.g., "strong background light," "shadow over part of photo") or thematically related (e.g., "children playing," "men with hats").
Overall, the book provides a good exploration of the history of photography. Buy this from Amazon.com!
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