Moving Pictures: Contemporary Photography and Video from the Guggenheim Collection

The body of the book ("Catalogue Entries") consists of text about and photographs or video stills by 50 artists in alphabetical order (Marina Abramovic through Jane and Louise Wilson). Each of the artists is given up to one page of text. For most of the artists there is only one page of images, but Francis Alys, Matthew Barney, Miles Coolidge, Gregory Crewdson, Rineke Dijkstra, Olafur Eliasson, Peter Fischli / David Weiss, Anna Gaskell, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, Andreas Gursky, Ann Hamilton, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Mariko Mori, Aika Noguchi, Catherine Opie, Gabriel Orozco, Pipilotte Rist, Michal Rovner, Thomas Struth, Sam Taylor-Wood, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Kara Walker have at least three pages. Some works by Dijkstra, Gaskell, Goldin, Gursky, Anthony Hernandez, Manglano-Ovalle, Mori, Orozco, Rovner, Thomas Ruff, Taylor-Wood, and Tillmans are not reproduced in the book but were in the exhibition (per the list on pages 205-216). Virtually all of the works are dated 1990-2002; some images of Goldin's were taken in the 1970s and 1980s but were published later. For each artist, 2-4 "selected readings" are listed in the back of the book.

The photography is mostly great, but the book does not really do the videos justice for a couple reasons. First, there are not enough stills to give the reader a good idea of the course of each video. I would have preferred a larger number of smaller-sized stills. Second, the one-page-of-text limit for each video artist gives the same amount of space for the massive Cremaster series by Barney as for a three-minute video by Patty Chang. You'll have to travel to Spain to fully appreciate the videos, but meanwhile buy the book from Amazon.com!