with Essays by John Wood and Libby Horner
Edited by Paul Cava
from "The Photographic Art of Frank Brangwyn"
by John Wood
"Since the invention of photography painters have often relied on photographs in the same way they rely on their own preliminary sketches. Ingres was secretive about it, Delacroix quite open – excited even – and Courbet particularly obvious and blatant in his use. Last year the Dallas Museum of Art even organized an exhibition, The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso, which explored the way a number of major artists at the turn of the century used photography in both painting and sculpture. A painter's or sculptor's use of a camera is, then, not a remarkable fact in itself. But what is remarkable is when the photographs are powerful works of art in their own right. . . .
There is nothing more avant-garde in contemporary photography than its beauty, and Frank Brangwyn's work looks as radical and fresh in 2001 as it did in 1901 – probably even fresher and more radical. Today it presents a vision clearly at odds with much of the last half century of visual art but a humane vision we are seeing more and more expressed in the arts of our moment, especially in music and in photography."
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