reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow

The editors of this handsome and diverting book set out with a broad question—What are young art photographers up to these days?—and with due allowance for the limitations of space, they largely succeed in answering it. Of course, it's impossible to know whether any of their 50 artists will become the next decade's Jeff Wall or Cindy Sherman, but the styles, methods and nationalities on offer give a good overview of the milieu from which such future greatness might emerge. A number of distinct trends are visible: the use of digital technologies is widespread, social comment is ironic and oblique, a distrust of beauty and landscape is omnipresent, and few of the photographers seem much concerned with such notions as Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment," let alone Minor White's zone system. But even such highly conceptual work as Miklos Gaal's hallucinatory half-blurred images of distant swimmers and Mieke Van de Voort's photographs of the rooms left behind by people who have died alone pack real aesthetic and emotional punch. Dodging their way through a difficult terrain of influences and possibilities, the photographers in this book have found widely divergent but similarly provocative new ways of depicting the world. (Apr.)