The Genius of Photography

I saw a great six part documentary a year or so ago on BBC 4 called The Genius of Photography, which doesn’t appear to be available on DVD outside of the UK… but can be found in the various places on the internets where video is usually located. I won’t Google it for you but… Veoh has 4 of the 6 episodes here.

The documentary skips around in the history of photography, giving some artists no more than a few seconds of screen-time and leaving many out altogether… but for everything familiar that’s left out there’s something unusual brought in. For example… the first episode points out the influence of photography in the painter Degas, whose paintings have a “photographic” quality to them…. with cut off edges and arrangements that are reminiscent of stereographs. And there are many snippets of interviews with living photographers, art-directors, curators and others that make this series worth hunting down.

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