Experimental Self-Portraits in Early French Photography

Experimental Self-Portraits in Early French Photography
Author: Jillian Lerner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2020-11-16
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000214826

This book explores a range of experimental self-portraits made in France between 1840 and 1870, including remarkable images by Hippolyte Bayard, Nadar, Duchenne de Boulogne, and Countess de Castiglione. Adapting photography for different social purposes, each of these pioneers showcased their own body as a living artifact and iconic attraction. Jillian Lerner considers performative portraits that exhibit uncanny transformations of identity and embodiment. She highlights the tactical importance of photographic demonstrations, promotions, conversations, and the mongrel forms of montage, painted photographs, and captioned specimens. The author shows how photographic practices are mobilized in diverse cultural contexts and enmeshed with the histories of art, science, publicity, urban spectacle, and private life in nineteenth-century France. Tracing calculated and creative approaches to a new medium, this research also contributes to an archaeology of the present. It furnishes a prehistory of the “selfie” and offers historical perspectives on the forces that reshape human perception and social experience. This interdisciplinary study will appeal to readers interested in the history of photography, art, visual culture, and media studies.

Experimental Self-Portraits in Early French Photography

Experimental Self-Portraits in Early French Photography
Author: Jillian Lerner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2020-11-16
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000214729

This book explores a range of experimental self-portraits made in France between 1840 and 1870, including remarkable images by Hippolyte Bayard, Nadar, Duchenne de Boulogne, and Countess de Castiglione. Adapting photography for different social purposes, each of these pioneers showcased their own body as a living artifact and iconic attraction. Jillian Lerner considers performative portraits that exhibit uncanny transformations of identity and embodiment. She highlights the tactical importance of photographic demonstrations, promotions, conversations, and the mongrel forms of montage, painted photographs, and captioned specimens. The author shows how photographic practices are mobilized in diverse cultural contexts and enmeshed with the histories of art, science, publicity, urban spectacle, and private life in nineteenth-century France. Tracing calculated and creative approaches to a new medium, this research also contributes to an archaeology of the present. It furnishes a prehistory of the “selfie” and offers historical perspectives on the forces that reshape human perception and social experience. This interdisciplinary study will appeal to readers interested in the history of photography, art, visual culture, and media studies.

Empire, Early Photography and Spectacle

Empire, Early Photography and Spectacle
Author: Elisa deCourcy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2020-11-23
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000209873

James William Newland’s (1810–1857) career as a showman daguerreotypist began in the United States but expanded into Central and South America, across the Pacific to New Zealand and colonial Australia and onto India. Newland used the latest developments in photography, theatre and spectacle to create powerful new visual experiences for audiences in each of these volatile colonial societies. This book assesses his surviving, vivid portraits against other visual ephemera and archival records of his time. Newland’s magic lantern and theatre shows are imaginatively reconstructed from textual sources and analysed, with his short, rich career casting a new light on the complex worlds of the mid-nineteenth century. It provides a revealing case study of someone brokering new experiences with optical technologies for varied audiences at the forefront of the age of modern vision. This book will be of interest to scholars in art and visual culture, photography, the history of photography and Victorian history.

The Selfie, Temporality, and Contemporary Photography

The Selfie, Temporality, and Contemporary Photography
Author: Claire Raymond
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2021-05-09
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000379981

This book is a theoretical examination of the relationship between the face, identity, photography, and temporality, focusing on the temporal episteme of selfie practice. Claire Raymond investigates how the selfie’s involvement with time and self emerges from capitalist ideologies of identity and time. The book leverages theories from Katharina Pistor, Jacques Lacan, Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson, and Hans Belting to explore the ways in which the selfie imposes a dominant ideology on subjectivity by manipulating the affect of time. The selfie is understood in contrast to the self-portrait. Artists discussed include James Tylor, Shelley Niro, Ellen Carey, Graham MacIndoe, and LaToya Ruby Frazier. The book will be of interest to scholars working in visual culture, history of photography, and critical theory. It will also appeal to scholars of philosophy and, in particular, of the intersection of aesthetic theory and theories of ontology, epistemology, and temporality.

Hybrid Photography

Hybrid Photography
Author: Sara Hillnhuetter
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2021-04-08
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 100036528X

This book explores the territories where manual, graphic, photographic, and digital techniques interfere and interlace in sciences and humanities. It operates on the assumption that when photography was introduced, it did not oust other methods of image production but rather became part of ever more specialized and sophisticated technologies of representation. The epistemological break commonly set with the advent of photography since the nineteenth century has probably been triggered by photographic techniques but certainly owes much to the availability of a plethora of hybrid media—media that influence the relation of sciences, humanities, and their methods and subjects. This book will be of interest to scholars in art and visual culture, photography, and history of photography.

The Image of Environmental Harm in American Social Documentary Photography

The Image of Environmental Harm in American Social Documentary Photography
Author: Chris Balaschak
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2021-03-03
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000349276

With an emphasis on photographic works that offer new perspectives on the history of American social documentary, this book considers a history of politically engaged photography that may serve as models for the representation of impending environmental injustices. Chris Balaschak examines histories of American photography, the environmental movement, as well as the industrial and postindustrial economic conditions of the United States in the 20th century. With particular attention to a material history of photography focused on the display and dissemination of documentary images through print media and exhibitions, the work considered places emphasis on the depiction of communities and places harmed by industrialized capitalism. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, photography, ecocriticism, environmental humanities, media studies, culture studies, and visual rhetoric.

The Materiality of Exhibition Photography in the Modernist Era

The Materiality of Exhibition Photography in the Modernist Era
Author: Laurie Taylor
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2020-12-30
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000317765

This book challenges the status quo of the materiality of exhibited photographs, by considering examples from the early to mid-twentieth century, when photography’s place in the museum was not only continually questioned but also continually redefined. By taking this historical approach, Laurie Taylor demonstrates the ways in which materiality (as opposed to image) was used to privilege the exhibited photograph as either an artwork or as non-art information. Consequently, the exhibited photograph is revealed, like its vernacular cousins, to be a social object whose material form, far from being supplemental, is instead integral and essential to the generation of meaning. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, history of photography, theory of photography, curatorial studies and museum studies.

The Camera as Actor

The Camera as Actor
Author: Amy Cox Hall
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2020-11-29
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1000185702

Looking beyond the impact photographs have on the perpetuation and expression of social norms and stereotypes, and the influence of the act of taking a photograph, this new collection brings together international scholars to examine the camera itself as an actor. Bringing the camera back into view, this volume furthers our understanding of how, and in what ways, imaging technology shapes us, our lives, and the representations out of which we fashion knowledge, base our judgments and ultimately act. Through a broad range of case studies, the authors in this collection make the convincing claim that the camera is much more than a mechanical device brought to life by the photographer. This book will be of interest to scholars in photography, visual culture, anthropology and the history of photography.

Jeff Wall and the Concept of the Picture

Jeff Wall and the Concept of the Picture
Author: Naomi Merritt
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2020-12-30
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1000182703

This book grapples with fundamental questions about the evolving nature of pictorial representation, and the role photography has played in this ongoing process. These issues are explored through a close analysis of key themes that underpin the photography practice of Canadian artist Jeff Wall and through examining important works that have defined his oeuvre. Wall’s strategic revival of ‘the picture’ has had a resounding influence on the development of contemporary art photography, by expanding the conceptual and technical frameworks of the medium and introducing a self-reflexive criticality. Naomi Merritt brings a new and original contribution to the scholarship on one of the most significant figures to have shaped the course of contemporary art photography since the 1970s and shines a light on the multilayered connections between photography and art. This book will be of interest to scholars in the history of photography, art and visual culture, and contemporary art history.

Visual Culture Approaches to the Selfie

Visual Culture Approaches to the Selfie
Author: Derek Conrad Murray
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2021-11-19
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0429552394

This collection explores the cultural fascination with social media forms of self-portraiture, "selfies," with a specific interest in online self-imaging strategies in a Western context. This book examines the selfie as a social and technological phenomenon but also engages with digital self-portraiture as representation: as work that is committed to rigorous object-based analysis. The scholars in this volume consider the topic of online self-portraiture—both its social function as a technology-driven form of visual communication, as well as its thematic, intellectual, historical, and aesthetic intersections with the history of art and visual culture. This book will be of interest to scholars of photography, art history, and media studies.