Series:

Metropolitan Museum of Art

2 total works

Cover of Raghubir Singh
Raghubir Singh (1942-1999) was a pioneer of color street photography who worked and published prolifically from the late 1960s until his death in 1999 at age 56. His vivid, intensely hued photographs capture rural and urban India and iconic depictions of Indian culture though a truly cosmopolitan approach that succeeded in blending East and West. This richly illustrated volume studies in depth the full breadth of Singh's work, situating it at the intersection of Western modernism and traditional South Asian modes of picturing the world. The book showcases 90 of his photographs, including some previously unpublished images, in counterpoint both with the work of his contemporaries and with images of traditional South Asian artworks that inspired his practice.

Cover of Faking It

Faking It

by Mia Fineman

Published 30 October 2012

Photographic manipulation is a familiar phenomenon in the digital era. What will come as a revelation to readers of this captivating, wide-ranging book is that nearly every type of manipulation we associate with Adobe’s now-ubiquitous Photoshop software was also part of photography’s predigital repertoire, from slimming waistlines and smoothing away wrinkles to adding people to (or removing them from) pictures, not to mention fabricating events that never took place. Indeed, the desire and determination to modify the camera image are as old as photography itself—only the methods have changed.

By tracing the history of manipulated photography from the earliest days of the medium to the release of Photoshop 1.0 in 1990, Mia Fineman offers a corrective to the dominant narrative of photography’s development, in which champions of photographic “purity,” such as Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, get all the glory, while devotees of manipulation, including Henry Peach Robinson, Edward Steichen, and John Heartfield, are treated as conspicuous anomalies. Among the techniques discussed on these pages—abundantly illustrated with works from an international array of public and private collections—are multiple exposure, combination printing, photomontage, composite portraiture, over-painting, hand coloring, and retouching. The resulting images are as diverse in style and motivation as they are in technique. Taking her argument beyond fine art into the realms of politics, journalism, fashion, entertainment, and advertising, Fineman demonstrates that the old adage “the camera does not lie” is one of photography’s great fictions.



Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press


Exhibition Schedule:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art(10/11/12–01/27/13)

The National Gallery, Washington, D.C.(02/17/13–05/05/13)

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston(06/02/13-08/25/13)