Photography Transformed: the Metropolitan Bank & Trust Collection

New York: Abrams, 2002. Hardcover. VG/VG- light corner and edge wear and light interior foxing to dust jacket.. Pale blue cloth boards with silver stamped lettering. Glossy color-illustrated dust jacket with orange and white lettering. 264 pp. Mainly color illustrations. "Since the 1960s, the photographic medium has undergone fundamental changes in both its intentions and perceptions, joining and in some cases eclipsing the traditional fine arts of painting and sculpture. No longer a minor tributary navigated primarily by specialists, photography has become a powerful current in the art world's mainstream. Traditional photographers have been joined by painters, sculptors, filmmakers, and performance and video artists, and their dynamic innovations have forever altered the course of photography. The demand for the resulting works has developed and grown so quickly that no single museum could have assembled them. That they have now been brought together in one book is testament to the vision of a determined private collector, Robert M. Kaye, Chairman of the Metropolitan Bank & Trust." "The Metropolitan Bank & Trust holds the most comprehensive collection of contemporary artist-based and conceptual photography in the world, and this book represents the most complete survey - representing the work of nearly 200 artists - of contemporary art photography available. The artists and works featured range from Andy Warhol's dead-pan self-portraits and Robert Rauschenberg's revelatory elevations of the banal to the beautiful to Cindy Sherman's revolutionary filmic narratives and Andreas Gursky's monumental studies of modern life." "Klaus Kertess's essay, which serves as an introduction to the collection, places the artists and their work in the context of contemporary art practices, locating their origins and influences in the 1960s Minimalist and Pop Artraditions. His analysis explains how the works in the collection have revolutionized the medium, expressing ideas and innovations that had almost no precedent in its previous history, providing a fundamental understanding of how and why photography has taken center stage in the art world." -Jacket.