Body: The Photography Book

Description

The body remains a battleground. Politicized, conceptualized and increasingly shared, our often-paradoxical relationship with the human form is nothing new, but finds itself heightened in the digitised, virtualised era of the 'post-industrial' body. No longer a tool but a work-in-progress, our bodily expectations bound from fantasy to reality, beauty to tyranny, art to commerce and curiosity to obsession, leaving us dreaming of other bodies and alternate lives. Surveying a range of over 360 photographic re-presentations from the worlds of art, fashion, scientific and vernacular photography - including the work of Nobuyoshi Araki, Bettina Rheims, Lauren Greenfield, Viviane Sassen, Cindy Sherman, Wolfgang Tillmans, Daido Moriyama, Sally Mann, Pieter Hugo and Juergen Teller, Solve Sundsbo and Daniel Sannwald - Body: The Photography Book explores what our imaging of the human form, and the ways in which those images have been used and shared, might reflect of our relationship to the body. Supporting the broad range of photography is a foreword by a cultural critic, and an essay by the acclaimed psychologist Professor David Sander, PhD., discussing the neurological representation of our own bodies.

Nathalie Herschdorfer is an author and curator specialised in photography. She is the director of the Museum of Fine Arts Le Locle, Switzerland, and a curator with FEP (Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography). She has written a number of books amongst which are Afterwards, The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Photography, Coming into Fashion and reGeneration, all published by Thames & Hudson.

'Visually stimulating' - Aesthetica 'Explores in 432 pages what our imagery of the human form and the ways in which these images have been used and shared can reflect our relationship to the body' - The Eye of Photography 'A landmark survey' - i newspaper 'Drawing on myriad genres and techniques - portraits, nudes, fashion spreads, medical micrographs - Nathalie Herschdorfer approaches the body as a nebulous and dynamic organism, a site for self-invention, a source of self-loathing, and an arena for personal myth and public scrutiny ... the book contains a number of contemporary masterpieces' - New York Times Book Review