Salemme, Kevin

About the author: After finishing three years at the Art Institute of Boston, Kevin Salemme began teaching introductory photography courses at Merrimack College, all the while continuing his personal work as a photographer, with exhibitions as far afield as Switzerland. He received his MLA in Studio Arts, Film and Photography from Harvard University.

American Photographic Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century

2003 0-7734-6760-2
This study takes the theories of postmodernists such as Allan Sekula and John Tagg one step further by using their criticisms depicting modernism as contradictory as a starting point to generate a definition of modernism and formalism as a system of paradoxes. The book presents a history of modernism in America as a means of describing the evolution and multiplication of these paradoxes through the 1970s, and shows that the museum and gallery systems still rely on these aesthetics to perpetuate themselves as the authority on photography. The theory provided by this study collates and organizes chronologically the vast array of modernist and formalist writings throughout the 20th century.