The Photo Book

Phaidon's latest massive reference, after the wildly popular The Art Book (LJ 12/94) and The 20th-Century Art Book (LJ 2/1/97), again presents a single work and a one-paragraph summary of the work, the artist, and the career for each of 500 artists. The same obvious reference value of the previous titles is to be found here. The unnamed editors have done a fine job picking one work to summarize a career, though, of course, the same sort of arguments about inclusion will also be provoked: Where are George Platt Lynes and George Dureau? Why include photojournalists' works that function more as pop-culture icons than as representives of a style, movement, or singular talent? In the earlier books, the choice to present the images alphabetically by artists' names left one without any sense of stylistic relationships; here the effect is to create surprising juxtapositions of art and documentary works, and pieces from the 19th and 20th centuries. Indeed the inclusion of iconic images and the juxtapositions raise questions central to the history of the medium and make this perhaps the most successful of the books.