Now revised and expanded, this essential survey presents the work of eighty of the most important artist-photographers in the world. The book is divided into seven sections Portrait, Landscape, Narrative, Object, Fashion, Document, and City that explore the diverse subjects, styles, and methods of the leading practitioners. Introductions to each section outline the genres and consider why photographers are attracted to certain themes, and how issues like memory, time, objectivity, politics, identity, and the everyday are tied to their approaches. Each photographer s work is accompanied by Susan Bright s commentaries and by quotations from the artist.Leading artists such as Andreas Gursky, Cindy Sherman, Sophie Calle, Nan Goldin and Martin Parr, Gregory Crewdson, Candida Ho fer, Gabriel Orozco, and Wolfgang Tillmans are featured alongside emerging international figures, including Viviane Sassen, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Leigh Ladure. The introduction explores the historical relationship between art and photography from the early nineteenth century, and a new final chapter looks at the changes photography has undergone in recent years.

«Auto Focus» features the work of 75 contemporary photographers from around the world for whom self-portraiture is a central part of their work. Issues of identity national, sexual, racial, personal or artistic are key to all the images featured in this book. In an extended introduction, historical examples are used to enrich the understanding of how self-portraiture was first used in photography and to illustrate how the contemporary self-portrait derived and developed from those origins. The book, organized around five themes dominant in contemporary self-portraiture, provides a clear guide for readers through a significant and dynamic genre.»