Book of the Week: A Pick by Alan Rapp

Shooting Space edited by Elias Redstone.

Phaidon, 2014.

This week's Book of the Week pick comes from senior editor of The Monacelli Press Alan Rapp who has selected Shooting Space edited by Elias Redstone published by Phaidon.

"If I told you a year ago, or five, that there is no survey of contemporary architectural photography, you’d be shocked, right? For someone who is focused on both architecture and photography, the intersection of the two is a natural interest to me. And where these two disciplines meet pretty much describes the world we live in: massively and ever rapidly conditioned by the combined forces of globalization and urbanization — and the third big process whereby images overtake their function of reflecting and describing the world, and become their own realm.

So this book of contemporary architectural photography has been eagerly awaited by me. Editor Elias Redstone, who has also co-curated a sweeping exhibition of architectural photography at the Barbican, has grouped the artists into thematic sections. The range of approaches to the subject here is dizzying, culminating in febrile artifices which reflect the reality of the globalized built world today better perhaps than even the conventional images do. It’s clear in this grand anthology not only that the older conventions of architectural photography have been totally upended, but that the full range of visual art practices now applies to architectural imaging today, and that urbanism and architecture are increasingly the subjects of artists."—Alan Rapp

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Shooting Space edited by Alan Rapp. Phaidon, 2014.

Alan Rapp is a senior editor at The Monacelli Press. He develops visual books and writes criticism on architecture, design, and photography. He most recently provided a foreword to Joël Tettamanti’s Works: 2001–2019 (Benteli).

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Book of the Week: A Pick by Alan Rapp