Walter Guadagnini

The second volume in the Skira Photography series serving as a major reference in the field. The fifty years of artistic and mass photography taken into consideration in this volume are unquestionably the most important in the twentieth century. The acceleration of technological progress, the advent of the era of the machine and the metropolis, the epoch-making economic crisis, the dramatic aftermath of the collapse of the old nineteenth-century order in Europe with political upheavals, wars, revolutions, and dictatorships, the first appearance of a mass society capable of expressing cultures and systems of communication in line with its needs: these are the most obvious stages of a history that was also recorded as it happened, in various forms and media. Among these, key importance certainly attaches to photography. This richly illustrated book--complete with synoptic tables and glossary--offers a wide-ranging survey of this era that will delight and inform a constantly growing audience.

An accessible, sweeping survey of the history of photography Photography has been one of the key languages of modernity and, since the advent of the digital revolution, has also established itself as the most used medium in everyday private and public communication. This book illustrates the captivating adventure of world photography from its origins to the present day in an accessible, exacting and narrative tone that will appeal to experts, amateurs and photography enthusiasts alike. Setting off from the medium's pioneers and early protagonists, this volume traces the spread of photography in all ambits (scientific, forensic and artistic), the development of portraiture, the advent of early 19th-century avant-gardes, the use of photography as record, reportage and propaganda, its contribution to Pop and Conceptual art, the steps toward its institutionalization and, lastly, its most recent developments, from staged photography to new millennium post-photography.