Crisis of the real : writings on photography since 1974 /

Includes bibliographical references and index.

I. The crisis of the real -- II. Re: mastering modernism : Alfred Stieglitz and the contradictions of modernism -- Edward Weston's late landscapes -- Ansel Adams: the politics of natural space -- Minor White: the fall from grace of a spiritual guru -- The radical failure of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy -- Robert Frank's existential refrain -- III. In search of America : The machine and the garden: photography, technology, and the end of innocent space -- Walker Evans, connoisseur of the commonplace -- Helen Levitt's realist theater -- The final "facts" of Garry Winogrand -- Lee Friedlander's portraits -- Robert Adam's pathetic frontier -- Joel Sternfeld: the itinerant vision -- Richard Avedon's portraits: inverted fashion, fashionable mud -- Nan Goldin's grim "ballad" -- IV. A new kind of art: camera culture in the 1980s : Introduction -- Photographic culture in a drawn world -- Andy Warhol: presentation without representation -- Chuck Close's hyperbolic verisimilitude -- Lucas Samaras's photographs: sliced, stabbed, and cubed polaroids -- Cindy Sherman: a playful and political postmodernist -- Cindy Sherman, continued: grimm, but still playful -- Laurie Simmons: water buoyed -- Barbara Kruger: photomontage with difference -- Richard Prince, rephotographer ; Robert Cumming, conflationist -- Jan Groover: consciousness as content -- The photograph as art object -- Robert Mapplethorpe: the subject is style -- Now starring the Starn twins -- The representation of abstraction/the abstraction of representation -- V. Documentary dilemmas : Introduction -- What kind of art is it? Connoisseurs versus contextualists -- Decoding National Geographic -- Oliver North, Fawn Hall, and the view of life from Life -- The foreign and the fabulous -- The "new photojournalism" and the old -- Magnum's postwar paradox -- Subject and style: prospects for a new documentary -- Portraits, real and recycled -- Nicholas Nixon's people, with AIDS -- Displaced sympathies: a reading of Bill Burke's portraits -- VI. Photography at the end of the millennium : Photography in its 150th year -- Photography in the age of electronic simulation -- Looking at television -- Photographic memory and the news in "real time" -- Art under attack: who dares say that it's no good? -- Points of entry: Tracing Cultures -- Photography's dark side: the work of Sophie Calle -- Sweet illusion: Vik Muniz's Sigmund -- J. John Priola: the photograph as index -- Photography beside itself.

"Grundberg argues that photographs, by fundamentally altering the way in which we perceive reality, have upset conventional ideas about the relationship of art and life. How photographs have redefined the mission of art, and in what sense they have replaced reality, are questions that underlie much of Grundberg's criticism."--BOOK JACKET.