One of the important cultural responses to political and sociohistorical events in Latin America is a resurgence of urban photography, which typically blends high art and social documentary. But ...unlike other forms of cultural production in Latin America, photography has received relatively little sustained critical analysis. This pioneering book offers one of the first in-depth investigations of the complex and extensive history of gendered perspectives in Latin American photography through studies of works from Argentina, Mexico, and Guatemala.David William Foster examines the work of photographers ranging from the internationally acclaimed artists Graciela Iturbide, Pedro Meyer, and Marcos López to significant photographers whose work is largely unknown to English-speaking audiences. He grounds his essays in four interlocking areas of research: the experience of human life in urban environments, the feminist matrix and gendered cultural production, Jewish cultural production, and the ideological principles of cultural works and the connections between the works and the sociopolitical and historical contexts in which they were created. Foster reveals how gender-marked photography has contributed to the discourse surrounding the project of redemocratization in Argentina and Guatemala, as well as how it has illuminated human rights abuses in both countries. He also traces photography's contributions to the evolution away from the masculinist-dominated post–1910 Revolution ideology in Mexico. This research convincingly demonstrates that Latin American photography merits the high level of respect that is routinely accorded to more canonical forms of cultural production.
Before most Americans ever saw an actual daguerreotype, they encountered this visual form through written descriptions, published and rapidly reprinted in newspapers throughout the land. InThe Camera ...and the Press, Marcy J. Dinius examines how the first written and published responses to the daguerreotype set the terms for how we now understand the representational accuracy and objectivity associated with the photograph, as well as the democratization of portraiture that photography enabled. Dinius's archival research ranges from essays in popular nineteenth-century periodicals to daguerreotypes of Americans, Liberians, slaves, and even fictional characters. Examples of these portraits are among the dozens of illustrations featured in the book.The Camera and the Presspresents new dimensions of Nathaniel Hawthorne'sThe House of the Seven Gables, Herman Melville'sPierre, Harriet Beecher Stowe'sUncle Tom's Cabin, and Frederick Douglass'sThe Heroic Slave. Dinius shows how these authors strategically incorporated aspects of daguerreian representation to advance their aesthetic, political, and social agendas. By recognizing print and visual culture as one, Dinius redefines such terms as art, objectivity, sympathy, representation, race, and nationalism and their interrelations in nineteenth-century America.
The Arab Imago Sheehi, Stephen
2021, 2016, 2021-08-10
eBook
The first history of indigenous photography in the Middle East The birth of photography coincided with the expansion of European imperialism in the Middle East, and some of the medium's earliest ...images are Orientalist pictures taken by Europeans in such places as Cairo and Jerusalem—photographs that have long shaped and distorted the Western visual imagination of the region. But the Middle East had many of its own photographers, collectors, and patrons. In this book, Stephen Sheehi presents a groundbreaking new account of early photography in the Arab world. The Arab Imago concentrates primarily on studio portraits by Arab and Armenian photographers in the late Ottoman Empire. Examining previously known studios such as Abdullah Frères, Pascal Sébah, Garabed Krikorian, and Khalil Raad, the book also provides the first account of other pioneers such as Georges and Louis Saboungi, the Kova Brothers, Muhammad Sadiq Bey, and Ibrahim Rif'at Pasha—as well as the first detailed look at early photographs of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. In addition, the book explores indigenous photography manuals and albums, newspapers, scientific journals, and fiction.Featuring extensive previously unpublished images, The Arab Imago shows how native photography played an essential role in the creation of modern Arab societies in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon before the First World War. At the same time, the book overturns Eurocentric and Orientalist understandings of indigenous photography and challenges previous histories of the medium.
When Andy Grundberg landed in New York in the early 1970s as a
budding writer, photography was at the margins of the contemporary
art world. By 1991, when he left his post as critic for the New
York ...Times , photography was at the vital center of artistic
debate. Grundberg writes eloquently and authoritatively about
photography's "boom years," chronicling the medium's increasing
role within the most important art movements of the time, from
Earth Art and Conceptual Art to performance and video. He also
traces photography's embrace by museums and galleries, as well as
its politicization in the culture wars of the 80s and 90s.
Grundberg reflects on the landmark exhibitions that defined the
moment and his encounters with the work of leading
photographers-many of whom he knew personally-including Gordon
Matta-Clark, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Mapplethorpe. He navigates
crucial themes such as photography's relationship to theory as well
as feminism and artists of color. Part memoir and part history,
this perspective by one of the period's leading critics ultimately
tells a larger story about the crucial decades of the 70s and 80s
through the medium of photography.
First study on empty places in photography and the Covid-19 pandemic. In the aftermath of Covid-19, the subject of ‘empty places’ has gained renewed topicality and resonance. Watching, Waiting ...presents a collection of essays that brings emptiness into interdisciplinary focus as an object of study that extends beyond the present. The contributors approach the specific interrelationships of photography and place through emptiness by considering historical and contemporary material in equal measure. Drawing on architecture, anthropology, sociology, and public health, among other fields, they provide insights into geographically and temporally diverse production models of empty places and their corresponding complex and sensitive global and local relations, while also tackling the ethics of behaviour and protests that unfold within them. The book's chapters, both photographic and scholarly essays, cover areas that range widely both thematically and geographically, spanning static film footage of Nicosia's Buffer Zone, protest photographs in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement in Bristol, staged images from the University of Zagreb's ethnological archives, historic landscape and architectural photography, aerial shots of Covid-19 mass graves in Brazil, photos of artificially built field hospitals and quarantine rooms during the pandemic, and images of empty airports at night. Through still and moving images, Watching, Waiting examines the photographic aestheticisation of emptiness, existing stereotypes of ‘empty places’, and transformations of human experiences. Ebook available in Open Access. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).
Contributors: Ruth Baumeister (Aarhus School of Architecture), Isabelle Catucci da Silva (Federal University of Paraná), Stella Fatović-Ferenčić (Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts), Martin Kuhar (Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts), Catlin Langford (Centre for Contemporary Photography), Jessie Martin (University of West London), Stuart Moore (University of the West of England), Luca Nostri (Independent Artist Photographer), Kayla Parker (University of Plymouth), Bec Rengel (University of the West of England), Tihana Rubić (University of Zagreb), Klaudija Sabo (University of Klagenfurt), Anna Schober (University of Klagenfurt), Elke Katharina Wittich (Leibniz University Hannover)
The Violence of the Image Kennedy, Liam; Patrick, Caitlin
2014, 2014-07-23, 2020-09-13, Volume:
15
eBook
Photography has visualized international relations and conflicts from the midnineteenth century onwards and continues to be an important medium in framing the worlds of distant, suffering others. ...Although photojournalism has been challenged in recent decades, claims that it is dead are premature. The Violence of the Image examines the roles of image producers and the functions of photographic imagery in the documentation of wars, violent conflicts and human rights issues; tackling controversial ideas such as witnessing, the making of appeals based on displays of human suffering and the much-cited concept of compassion fatigue.
In Projecting Citizenship , Gabrielle Moser gives a comprehensive account of an unusual project produced by the British government’s Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee at the ...beginning of the twentieth century—a series of lantern slide lectures that combined geography education and photography to teach schoolchildren around the world what it meant to look and to feel like an imperial citizen.
Through detailed archival research and close readings, Moser elucidates the impact of this vast collection of photographs documenting the land and peoples of the British Empire, circulated between 1902 and 1945 in classrooms from Canada to Hong Kong, from the West Indies to Australia. Moser argues that these photographs played a central role in the invention and representation of imperial citizenship. She shows how citizenship became a photographable and teachable subject by tracing the intended readings of the images that the committee hoped to impart to viewers and analyzing how spectators may have used their encounters with these photographs for protest and resistance. Moser shows how the Visual Instruction Committee pictured citizenship within an everyday context and decenters the preoccupation with trauma, violence, atrocity, and conflict that characterizes much of the theoretical literature on visual citizenship and demonstrates that the relationship between photography and citizenship emerged not in the dismantling of modern colonialism but in its consolidation.
Interweaving political and economic history, history of pedagogy, and theories of citizenship with a consideration of the aesthetic and affective dimensions of viewing the lectures, Projecting Citizenship offers important insights into the social inequalities and visual language of colonial rule.
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