A few weeks ago Conscientious (I think) posted that Photography After Frank was on sale from the Aperture Foundation for twenty bucks. I felt like I was in a bit of a photo theory slump after graduating so I picked it up with free two day shipping (woohoo). I started reading it about a week ago and have made it half way through. Though I have not completed the book, I feel as though my review won’t change much once I reach the end (if I ever do).

The writer, Philip Gefter, wrote for the New York times and several other publications in his career. Each of the essays is a review that he has written in the past 8 years or so about various shows going on along with a brief history of each photographer. I went into this book looking for some great dialogue about contemporary photography and instead found a book about photography, or photographer, appreciation. It isn’t that I have a problem with art appreciation books, but the way Photography After Frank was marketed made me think otherwise. Each essay is about four pages in length and is organized like this:

1: A paragraph dedicated to saying how awesome that photographer is.

2: The connection to Frank or whoever else (but there is a lot of Frank).

3: An extremely basic explanation of what the work is “about”.

4: And then more about how awesome that artist is.

My main issue with this book is that it is not saying anything. There is no opinion, there is no statement or over arching theme here, it is just a retelling of the major players in photography since Robert Frank. The only reason this book should ever be picked up is by people who want to learn about the basic, and I mean BASIC, history of photography of the past 50 or so years. The photographs that he picks for his arguments are often strange as well. They are not often the image of given photographer, but they also don’t add anything to his sparse amount of explanation.
This book just furthers my issue with most things going on in art right now. We need to realize that modernism is over, we have to be okay with moving on, but yet we still sit here and continue thinking about art the same way that we did when Robert Frank made The Americans!

I don’t have much else to say without repeating myself on how disappointed I am with this purchase. But if you want to learn about the history of photography you can get it here for 20 bucks on amazon. It’s now 24 on Aperture.