What in the World Carvalho, John
Contemporary aesthetics,
01/2023, Letnik:
21
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Photographs bear witness. Minimally, they record or collect evidence. Bearing witness is not, however, reducible to showing that this was there then. Bearing witness has an affective dimension. What ...led a photographer to select this and not that to capture on a light sensitive medium? What was he or she feeling? How was the photographer embodied when he or she trained their lens on the scene to be photographed? How is the photographer's embodiment culturally situated relative to that scene, and how does his or her embodiment bear on what he or she hopes to witness and for others to witness? This essay explores what Edward Burtynsky embodies and hopes to capture with the photographs collected for The Anthropocene Project. It argues that Burtynsky's photographs embody and bear witness to a melancholia, a lost sense of unspoiled Nature felt in the presence of his photographs. It contends that this affect motivates audiences to mitigate the impact of human industry on the environment more effectively than ethical arguments about the responsibility of human industry to police its actions. The irony is that unspoiled Nature is a myth generated alongside the industry once mobilized to harvest its riches and now exposed in Burtynsky's photographs as spoiling it.
Most view the relationship of Jews to the Soviet Union through the lens of repression and silence. Focusing on an elite group of two dozen Soviet-Jewish photographers, including Arkady Shaykhet, ...Alexander Grinberg, Mark Markov-Grinberg, Evgenii Khaldei, Dmitrii Baltermants, and Max Alpert,Through Soviet Jewish Eyespresents a different picture. These artists participated in a social project they believed in and with which they were emotionally and intellectually invested-they were charged by the Stalinist state to tell the visual story of the unprecedented horror we now call the Holocaust.These wartime photographers were the first liberators to bear witness with cameras to Nazi atrocities, three years before Americans arrived at Buchenwald and Dachau. In this passionate work, David Shneer tells their stories and highlights their work through their very own images-he has amassed never-before-published photographs from families, collectors, and private archives.Through Soviet Jewish Eyeshelps us understand why so many Jews flocked to Soviet photography; what their lives and work looked like during the rise of Stalinism, during and then after the war; and why Jews were the ones charged with documenting the Soviet experiment and then its near destruction at the hands of the Nazis.
An illustrated account of the life and work of the pioneering photographer The Photographic Legacy of Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952) draws on original papers and photographs from the Library ...of Congress to document the extraordinary life and nearly seventy-year career of this pioneering photographer. Maria Elizabeth Ausherman illuminates the early origins of Johnston's style and vision, and her attempts to change society through her art. One of the first women to work in an emerging field dominated by men, Johnston achieved acclaim as an accomplished photographer and photojournalist.As the official White House photographer for five administrations, she was instrumental in defining the medium and inspiring women to train in and appreciate photography. But it is her monumental nine-state survey of southern American architecture that stands as her most significant contribution to the history and development of photography both as art and as documentary. Through her photography, Johnston showed reverence for the beautiful historic buildings she appreciated and also helped shape architectural and photographic preservation in the United States.
Lange, Dorothea (1895–1965) Potter, Robin
Technical Innovation in American History : An Encyclopedia of Science and Technology: Reconstruction Through World War II,
2019
Reference
It would be unthinkable now to omit early female pioneers from any survey of photography’s history in the Western world. Yet for many years the gendered language of American, British and French ...photographic literature made it appear that women’s interactions with early photography did not count as significant contributions. Using French and English photo journals, cartoons, art criticism, novels, and early career guides aimed at women, this volume will show why and how early photographic clubs, journals, exhibitions, and studios insisted on masculine values and authority, and how Victorian women engaged with photography despite that dominant trend. Focusing on the period before 1890, when women were yet to develop the self-assurance that would lead to broader recognition of the value of their work, this study probes the mechanisms by which exclusion took place and explores how women practiced photography anyway, both as amateurs and professionals. Challenging the marginalization of women’s work in the early history of photography, this is essential reading for students and scholars of photography, history and gender studies.
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