Moving Pictures

In recent decades, the border areas between photography and film have emerged as an important field of contemporary photographic art. Well-known practitioners include the American artist Cindy Sherman with her "Film Stills," a series of black-and-white self-portraits evoking film stills from the 1940s and 1950s both in form and content, and the Australian Sam Taylor-Wood, whose photographic panoramas-sometimes more than 30 feet long-forge interpersonal dramas from individual pictures, not unlike unrolled scrolls of film. With works by 40 international artists, this book is the first dedicated to a growing artistic fascination. Based on the observation that at the beginning of the 21st century the history of the moving picture is at an end and yielding fast to the reality of accelerated information, the book bridges the gap between the "classical" position of photography and contemporary work using the Internet and other technologies.