Photography Changes Everything-drawn from the online Smithsonian Photography Initiative-offers a provocative rethinking of photography's impact on our culture and our lives. It is a reader-friendly exploration of the many ways photographs package information and values, demand and hold attention, and shape our knowledge of and experience in the world. At this transitional moment in visual culture, Photography Changes Everything provides a unique opportunity to better understand the history, practice, and power of photography. The publication harnesses the extraordinary visual assets of the Smithsonian Institution's museums, science centers, and archives to trigger an unprecedented and interdisciplinary dialogue about how photography does more than record the world-how it shapes and changes every aspect of our experience of and in the world. The book features over three hundred images and nearly one hundred engaging short texts commissioned from experts, writers, inventors, public figures, and everyday folk-Hugh Hefner, John Baldessari, John Waters, Robert Adams, Sandra Phillips, and others. Each story responds to images selected by project contributors. Together they engage readers in a timely exploration of the extent to which our lives have been transformed through our interactions with photographic imagery.

About the Author
Curator and writer Marvin Heiferman has focused on the influence of photographic images on culture and history in projects such as Fame After Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1999) and Image World: Art and Media Culture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1989). A contributing editor to Art in America, he serves on the faculty of both the International Center of Photography/Bard College and the School of Visual Art's MFA programs in photography. He was creative consultant to the Smithsonian Photography Initiative from 2005 to 2011, during which time he conceptualized and curated click! photography changes everything (click.si.edu). Art historian and author of numerous essays and articles on American art and photography, Merry A. Foresta, was the founding director of the Smithsonian Photography Initiative from 2000 to 2010. Prior to that, she was senior curator for photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her publications include Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray (1998), Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography (1992), Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype (1995), and At First Sight: Photography and the Smithsonian (2004).


Book Information
ISBN 9781597111997
Author Marvin Heiferman
Format Paperback
Page Count 264
Imprint Aperture
Publisher Aperture
Weight(grams) 770g