Brendan Fay – författare

A richly illustrated look at three visionary artists who charted new directions for photography in midcentury AmericaMinor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan carved out a new role for photographers and their art in the decades after World War Two. Photography as a Way of Life traces how these influential teachers and theorists reimagined the medium as a livelihood and a life’s work.Together with growing markets for snapshots and photojournalism, the postwar years saw the emergence of photography as an established field of study in higher education. In this beautifully produced book, Brendan Fay takes readers from the late 1940s through the 1970s to explore how White, Siskind, and Callahan transformed the ways photography was taught, shown, and understood. Inclined toward abstraction and personally expressive images, they modeled a commitment to art in the face of commercial and professional pressures. In classrooms and private workshops and through exhibitions, photobooks, and magazines—including Aperture, with White as its founding editor—they offered training and inspiration while building a devoted audience for their pictures.Blending stunning illustrations with rare archival material published here for the first time, Photography as a Way of Life brings together the work of three boldly inventive artists and educators who opened new possibilities for photography in postwar America and exemplified a vision of learning and living through photography.Published in association with the Princeton University Art MuseumExhibition SchedulePrinceton University Art Museum, Princeton, New JerseyApril 18–September 7, 2026

From Hitler’s notorious fondness for Wagner’s operas to classical music’s role in fuelling German chauvinism in the era of the world wars, many observers have pointed to a distinct relationship between German culture and reactionary politics. In Classical Music in Weimar Germany, Brendan Fay challenges this paradigm by reassessing the relationship between conservative musical culture and German politics. Drawing upon a range of archival sources, concert reviews and satirical cartoons, Fay maps the complex path of classical music culture from Weimar to Nazi Germany—a trajectory that was more crooked, uneven, or broken than straight. Through an examination of topics as varied as radio and race to nationalism, this book demonstrates the diversity of competing aesthetic, philosophical and political ideals held by German music critics that were a hallmark of Weimar Germany. Rather than seeing the cultural conservatism of this period as a natural prelude for the violence and destruction later unleashed by Nazism, this fascinating book sheds new light on traditional culture and its relationship to the rise of Nazism in 20th-century Germany.