Photography and Art: Documents and Dreams

The survey began in April 1988 as interviews with artists, jewellers, fashion designers and furniture restorers, based at Old Loom House in Whitechapel, launching a quarterly review Cv Journal of Art and Crafts. Cv Journal was published to 1992 and the collection of interviews and features provided the foundation of Cv/Visual Arts Research archive and subsequent publications. Cv/VAR 154 publishes a study of Photography and Art in which authors Marina Vaizey and Anne Blood consider the historical impact of photography from pioneers Hill and Adamson, William Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre to contemporary practitioners such as Andreas Gursky and Boris Mikhailov. The documentary power and graphic clarity of the medium challenged and persuaded artists such as Degas, Sickert, Andy Warhol and Richard Hamilton, and innumerable creative voices. In their essays Marina and Anne explore the conjunctions and variations where document and dream intermingle, in a revolutionary medium which transformed the classical canons of Western tradition. The volume includes biographical details of leading figures and a guide to National Collections and study centres. of the spectacle of battle and the horrors of war and human conflict.