The Civil Contract of Photography

Author: Ariella Azoulay
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1935408372
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 586

Book Description
In this groundbreaking work, Ariella Azoulay thoroughly revises our understanding of the ethical status of photography. It must, she insists, be understood in its inseparability from the many catastrophes of recent history. She argues that photography is a particular set of relations between individuals and the powers that govern them and, at the same time, a form of relations among equals that constrains that power. Anyone, even a stateless person, who addresses others through photographs or occupies the position of a photograph’s addressee, is or can become a member of the citizenry of photography. The crucial arguments of the book concern two groups that have been rendered invisible by their state of exception: the Palestinian noncitizens of Israel and women in Western societies. Azoulay’s leading question is: Under what legal, political, or cultural conditions does it become possible to see and show disaster that befalls those with flawed citizenship in a state of exception? The Civil Contract of Photography is an essential work for anyone seeking to understand the disasters of recent history and the consequences of how they and their victims are represented.

Potential History

Author: Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788735730
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 657

Book Description
A passionately urgent call for all of us to unlearn imperialism and repair the violent world we share, from one of our most compelling political theorists In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences. Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasized the possibility of progress while it tries to destroy what came before, and voraciously seeks out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums. By practicing what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the original imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas at the moment of conquest to the Congo ruled by Belgium's brutal King Léopold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day. In Potential History, Azoulay travels alongside historical companions—an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-ravaged Berlin, looted objects and documents torn from their worlds and now housed in archives and museums—to chart the ways imperialism has sought to order time, space, and politics. Rather than looking for a new future, Azoulay calls upon us to rewind history and unlearn our imperial rights, to continue to refuse imperial violence by making present what was invented as “past” and making the repair of torn worlds the substance of politics.

Believing Is Seeing

Author: Errol Morris
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143124250
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
Academy Award–winning director Errol Morris turns his eye to the nature of truth in photography In his inimitable style, Errol Morris untangles the mysteries behind an eclectic range of documentary photographs. With his keen sense of irony, skepticism, and humor, Morris shows how photographs can obscure as much as they reveal, and how what we see is often determined by our beliefs. Each essay in this book is part detective story, part philosophical meditation, presenting readers with a conundrum, and investigates the relationship between photographs and the real world they supposedly record. Believing Is Seeing is a highly original exploration of photography and perception, from one of America’s most provocative observers.

Feeling Photography

Author: Elspeth H. Brown
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822377314
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Book Description
This innovative collection demonstrates the profound effects of feeling on our experiences and understanding of photography. It includes essays on the tactile nature of photos, the relation of photography to sentiment and intimacy, and the ways that affect pervades the photographic archive. Concerns associated with the affective turn—intimacy, alterity, and ephemerality, as well as queerness, modernity, and loss—run through the essays. At the same time, the contributions are informed by developments in critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and feminist theory. As the contributors bring affect theory to bear on photography, some interpret the work of contemporary artists, such as Catherine Opie, Tammy Rae Carland, Christian Boltanski, Marcelo Brodsky, Zoe Leonard, and Rea Tajiri. Others look back, whether to the work of the American Pictorialist F. Holland Day or to the discontent masked by the smiles of black families posing for cartes de visite in a Kodak marketing campaign. With more than sixty photographs, including twenty in color, this collection changes how we see, think about, and feel photography, past and present. Contributors. Elizabeth Abel, Elspeth H. Brown, Kimberly Juanita Brown, Lisa Cartwright, Lily Cho, Ann Cvetkovich, David L. Eng, Marianne Hirsch, Thy Phu, Christopher Pinney, Marlis Schweitzer, Dana Seitler, Tanya Sheehan, Shawn Michelle Smith, Leo Spitzer, Diana Taylor

Death's Showcase

Author: Ariella Azoulay
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262511339
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
An interdisciplinary exploration of the visual presence of death in contemporary culture.

A Companion to Photography

Author: Stephen Bull
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405195843
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 568

Book Description
The study of photography has never been more important. A look at today's digital world reveals that a greater number of photographs are being taken each day than at any other moment in history. Countless photographs are disseminated instantly online and more and more photographic images are earning prominent positions and garnering record prices in the rarefied realm of top art galleries. Reflecting this dramatic increase in all things photographic, A Companion to Photography presents a comprehensive collection of original essays that explore a variety of key areas of current debate around the state of photography in the twenty-first century. Essays are grouped and organized in themed sections including photographic interpretation, markets, popular photography, documents, and fine art and provide comprehensive coverage of the subject. Representing a diversity of approaches, essays are written by both established and emerging photographers and scholars, as well as various experts in their respective areas. A Companion to Photography offers scholars and professional photographers alike an essential and up-to-date resource that brings the study of contemporary photography into clear focus.

From Palestine to Israel

Author: Ariella Azoulay
Publisher: Pluto Press
ISBN: 9780745331690
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
In this carefully curated and beautifully presented photobook, Ariella Azoulay offers a new perspective on four crucial years in the history of Palestine/Israel.The book reconstructs the processes by which the Palestinian majority in Mandatory Palestine became a minority in Israel, while the Jewish minority established a new political entity in which it became a majority ruling a minority Palestinian population. By analyzing more than 200 photographs from that period, most of which were previously confined to Israeli state archives, Azoulay recounts the events and the stories that for years have been ignored or only partially acknowledged in Israel and the West. Including substantial analytical text, this book will give activists, scholars, and journalists a new perspective on the origins of the Palestine-Israel conflict.

The Burden of Representation

Author: John Tagg
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816624058
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
Photographs are used as documents, evidence, and records every day in courtrooms, hospitals, and police work, on passports, permits, and licenses. But how did such usages come to be established and accepted, and when? What kinds of photographs were seen seen as purely instrumental and able to function in this way? What sorts of agencies and institutions had the power to give them this status? And more generally, what conception of photographic representation did this involve, and what were its consequences?

Photography's Other Histories

Author: Christopher Pinney
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822331131
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Book Description
Richly illustrated with over 100 images, this volume explores the role of photography in raising historical consciousness from a variety of geographic, cultural, and historical perspectives. 128 photos.

The Disciplinary Frame

Author: John Tagg
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816642877
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Book Description
How do photographs gain their meaning and power? John Tagg claims that, to answer this question, we must look at the ways in which everything that frames photography - the discourse that surrounds it and the institutions that circulate it - determines what counts as truth.