Photography, Vision, and the Production of Modern Bodies

Photography, Vision, and the Production of Modern Bodies
Author: Suren Lalvani
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 1996-01-01
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9780791427170

Lalvani argues that modernity represents the powerful privileging of vision and the introduction of a paradigm of seeing that is historically distinctive. Taking the introduction of photography in the nineteenth century as a crucial development in the expansion of modern vision, he draws on the writings of Alan Sekula, John Tagg, Jonathan Crary, Norman Bryson and Martin Jay to examine in a comprehensive manner how photography functioned to organize a set of relations between knowledge, power, and the body. However, in taking a broad cultural studies approach Lalvani situates the practices of photography within the larger visual order of the nineteenth century. He demonstrates how the new lines of visibility formed not only by photography but by new urban spaces and new modes of transportation resulted in a particular organizing of the social order, of subjectivity and social relations.

Visual Rhetoric

Visual Rhetoric
Author: Lester C. Olson
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2008-03-20
Genre: Art
ISBN: 141294919X

Visual images, artifacts, and performances play a powerful part in shaping U.S. culture. To understand the dynamics of public persuasion, students must understand this "visual rhetoric." This rich anthology contains 20 exemplary studies of visual rhetoric, exploring an array of visual communication forms, from photographs, prints, television documentary, and film to stamps, advertisements, and tattoos. In material original to this volume, editors Lester C. Olson, Cara A. Finnegan, and Diane S. Hope present a critical perspective that links visuality and rhetoric, locates the study of visual rhetoric within the disciplinary framework of communication, and explores the role of the visual in the cultural space of the United States. Enhanced with these critical editorial perspectives, Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture provides a conceptual framework for students to understand and reflect on the role of visual communication in the cultural and public sphere of the United States. Key Features and Benefits Five broad pairs of rhetorical action—performing and seeing; remembering and memorializing; confronting and resisting; commodifying and consuming; governing and authorizing—introduce students to the ways visual images and artifacts become powerful tools of persuasion Each section opens with substantive editorial commentary to provide readers with a clear conceptual framework for understanding the rhetorical action in question, and closes with discussion questions to encourage reflection among the essays The collection includes a range of media, cultures, and time periods; covers a wide range of scholarly approaches and methods of handling primary materials; and attends to issues of gender, race, sexuality and class Contributors include: Thomas Benson; Barbara Biesecker; Carole Blair; Dan Brouwer; Dana Cloud; Kevin Michael DeLuca; Anne Teresa Demo; Janis L. Edwards; Keith V. Erickson; Cara A. Finnegan; Bruce Gronbeck; Robert Hariman; Christine Harold; Ekaterina Haskins; Diane S. Hope; Judith Lancioni; Margaret R. LaWare; John Louis Lucaites; Neil Michel; Charles E. Morris III; Lester C. Olson; Shawn J. Parry-Giles; Ronald Shields; John M. Sloop; Nathan Stormer; Reginald Twigg and Carol K. Winkler "This book significantly advances theory and method in the study of visual rhetoric through its comprehensive approach and wise separations of key conceptual components." —Julianne H. Newton, University of Oregon

Making Photography Matter

Making Photography Matter
Author: Cara A. Finnegan
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2015-05-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0252097319

Photography became a dominant medium in cultural life starting in the late nineteenth century. As it happened, viewers increasingly used their reactions to photographs to comment on and debate public issues as vital as war, national identity, and citizenship. Cara A. Finnegan analyzes a wealth of newspaper and magazine articles, letters to the editor, trial testimony, books, and speeches produced by viewers in response to specific photos they encountered in public. From the portrait of a young Lincoln to images of child laborers and Depression-era hardship, Finnegan treats the photograph as a locus for viewer engagement and constructs a history of photography's viewers that shows how Americans used words about images to participate in the politics of their day. As she shows, encounters with photography helped viewers negotiate the emergent anxieties and crises of U.S. public life through not only persuasion but action, as well.

Liminalities of Gender and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Iranian Photography

Liminalities of Gender and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Iranian Photography
Author: Staci Gem Scheiwiller
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2016-12-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1315512122

Nineteenth-century Iran was an ocularcentered society predicated on visuality and what was seen and unseen, and photographs became liminal sites of desire that maneuvered "betwixt and between" various social spaces—public, private, seen, unseen, accessible, and forbidden—thus mapping, graphing, and even transgressing those spaces, especially in light of increasing modernization and global contact during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of primary interest is how photographs negotiated and coded gender, sexuality, and desire, becoming strategies of empowerment, of domination, of expression, and of being seen. Hence, the photograph became a vehicle to traverse multiple locations that various gendered physical bodies could not, and it was also the social and political relations that had preceded the photograph that determined those ideological spaces of (im)mobility. In identifying these notions in photographs, one may glean information about how modern Iran metamorphosed throughout its own long durée or resisted those societal transformations as a result of modernization.

Photography

Photography
Author: Liz Wells
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2000
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9780415190589

This textbook examines key debates in photographic theory and place them in their social and political context. This second edition includes key concepts, biographies of major thinkers and seminal references, and provides a coherent introduction to the nature of photographic viewing.

The Handbook of Photography Studies

The Handbook of Photography Studies
Author: Gil Pasternak
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 610
Release: 2020-08-13
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 100021141X

The Handbook of Photography Studies is a state-of-the-art overview of the field of photography studies, examining its thematic interests, dynamic research methodologies and multiple scholarly directions. It is a source of well-informed, analytical and reflective discussions of all the main subjects that photography scholars have been concerned with as well as a rigorous study of the field’s persistent expansion at a time when digital technology regularly boosts our exposure to new and historical photographs alike. Split into five core parts, the Handbook analyzes the field’s histories, theories and research strategies; discusses photography in academic disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts; draws out the main concerns of photographic scholarship; interrogates photography’s cultural and geopolitical influences; and examines photography’s multiple uses and continued changing faces. Each part begins with an introductory text, giving historical contextualization and scholarly orientation. Featuring the work of international experts, and offering diverse examples, insights and discussions of the field’s rich historiography, the Handbook provides critical guidance to the most recent research in photography studies. This pioneering and comprehensive volume presents a systematic synopsis of the subject that will be an invaluable resource for photography researchers and students from all disciplinary backgrounds in the arts, humanities and social sciences.

Mina Loy, Twentieth-Century Photography, and Contemporary Women Poets

Mina Loy, Twentieth-Century Photography, and Contemporary Women Poets
Author: Linda A. Kinnahan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2017-03-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351793462

In Mina Loy, Twentieth-Century Photography, and Contemporary Women Poets, Linda A. Kinnahan explores the making of Mina Loy’s late modernist poetics in relation to photography’s ascendance, by the mid-twentieth century, as a distinctively modern force shaping representation and perception. As photography develops over the course of the century as an art form, social tool, and cultural force, Loy’s relationship to a range of photographic cultures emerging in the first half of the twentieth century suggests how we might understand not only the intriguing work of this poet, but also the shaping impact of photography and new technologies of vision upon modernist poetics. Framing Loy’s encounters with photography through intersections of portraiture, Surrealism, fashion, documentary, and photojournalism, Kinnahan draws correspondences between Loy’s late poetry and visual discourses of the body, urban poverty, and war, discerning how a visual rhetoric of gender often underlies these mappings and connections. In her final chapter, Kinnahan examines two contemporary poets who directly engage the camera’s modern impact –Kathleen Fraser and Caroline Bergvall – to explore the questions posed in their work about the particular relation of the camera, the photographic image, and the construction of gender in the late twentieth century.

Contemporary Photography and Theory

Contemporary Photography and Theory
Author: Sally Miller
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2019-11-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1350003336

Exploring contemporary theory and practice in photography, this textbook moves beyond introductory studies to cover more advanced concepts for the upper-level student. Building on a foundational understanding of photography, it addresses recent theoretical debates and more complex ideas to enable students to acquire the tools and confidence to develop the independent thinking and analytical skills needed for this level of study.Contemporary Photography and Theory analyses five key topics: identity, place, the politics of looking, psychoanalysis and the event. Its conceptual approach encourages students to apply theoretical texts to a range of issues and themes, both in their own work and that of others. Each topic is broken down into three chapters to address the central concept in detail, supported by the following features: - Troubleshooting footnotes to flag up and clarify common misunderstandings - Detailed case studies to show how theoretical concepts can be applied to artists' work - Further examples and reading suggestions from an international range of photographers and thinkersThe chapters are designed to be a suitable length for assigned weekly readings, making this the ideal resource for in-class discussion, as well as the perfect starting place for dissertation research.

Pedagogies of the Image

Pedagogies of the Image
Author: Hannah M. Tavares
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 112
Release: 2016-06-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9401776199

This work considers the potential of photographs for orienting in a critical direction the scope, questions and interests of the disciplinary conventions of the field of educational inquiry. Visual objects may help illuminate broader socio-historical events and logics that are deeply entwined with education yet remain marginal to or “outside” of what constitutes its domain of study. In this work photographic images are treated as resources for re-visioning the founding disciplinary objects of educational studies by reorienting its proper objects of study, traditional archives, persistent categories, frames of reference, and accepted portals of research and inquiry. A theoretic framing shapes the question taken up in this work, "How might an engagement with photo-archives open new horizons in the study of education from a postfoundationalist, multi-theoretic and cross-disciplinary perspective?" The author constructs a rather unconventional vantage point to explore this question that opens on to the discursive spaces of three photographs made of three women in the years 1897, 1949, and 1966. The photographs are analysed from three theoretic approaches. First, it is indicated how each photographic image not only marks a relationship to the past, the present, and the future but to the rules and conventions of photographic practices. These particular images give an account of what both persists and exceeds the photographic image, and permit to rewrite the bodies and lives pictured. Second, the subject matter of each photographic image while singular and local bears witness to the complex network of racial, patriarchal and colonial logics and their profound imbrication with a "technically mediated inscription." For all their singularity the photographs cannot but evoke their relation to the deeply historical character of photography. Finally, the photographs make possible an account of broader occurrences, subterranean histories, contexts, and differently situated experiences that illuminate, much like the principle of montage, a sequence of overlapping events crosscutting with one another consequently throwing open the possibility of responding to and transforming the histories and archives we are given. This book 'Pedagogies of the Image' is a winner of the 2017 American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Award

Picture Imperfect

Picture Imperfect
Author: Anne Maxwell
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2010-03-11
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1837642087

Analyses the photographs that helped strengthen as well as bring down the Eugenics Movement. Concentrating mainly on developments in Britain, the USA and Nazi Germany, this book argues that photography, as the most powerful visual medium of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was vital to the Eugenics Movement's success.