The Social Photo

Author: Nathan Jurgenson
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1786635461
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 149

Book Description
"Mr. Jurgenson makes a first sortie toward a new understanding of the photograph, wherein artistry or documentary intent have given way to communication and circulation. Like Susan Sontag’s On Photography, to which it self-consciously responds, The Social Photo is slim, hard-bitten and picture-free." – New York Times A set of bold theoretical reflections on how the social photo has remade our world. With the rise of the smart phone and social media, cameras have become ubiquitous, infiltrating nearly every aspect of social life. The glowing camera screen is the lens through which many of us seek to communicate our experience. But our thinking about photography has been slow to catch-up; this major fixture of everyday life is still often treated in the terms of art or journalism. In The Social Photo, social theorist Nathan Jurgenson develops bold new ways of understanding photography in the age of social media and the new kinds of images that have emerged: the selfie, the faux-vintage photo, the self-destructing image, the food photo. Jurgenson shows how these devices and platforms have remade the world and our understanding of ourselves within it.

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.

The Beauty of a Social Problem

Author: Walter Benn Michaels
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022621026X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Book Description
Bertolt Brecht once worried that how we feel about the victims of a social problem can get in the way of the beauty and attraction of the problem itself. In this book, Walter Benn Michaels explores the same dilemma through a study of several contemporary artist-photographers whose work speaks to questions of political economy. Michaels focuses on the work of several artists, mostly born in the 1970s and thus raised in a world where artistic ambition has been identified with a critique of autonomous form and of meaning as a function of intention. Michaels shows that these artists engage but also push beyond this critique of autonomy and intentionality, producing works that embody a new commitment to form and meaning. The explanation for this commitment, he argues, is these artists consciousness of making art in an economy riven by structural conflict, especially an unprecedented rise in inequality. For them, he argues, the relationship of the art work to the worldto its subject and to its beholderfunctions as an emblem of the relation between classes (rather than identities or subject positions). This book will join the short shelf of essential writings about the medium of photography."

Using Photographs in Social and Historical Research

Author: Penny Tinkler
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1446291529
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Book Description
Sophisticated, original and comprehensive, this book investigates photographic research practices and the conceptual and theoretical issues that underpin them. Using international case studies and ′behind the scenes′ interviews, Penny Tinkler sets out research practices and explores the possibilities, and challenges, of working with different methods and photographic sources. The book guides the reader through all aspects of doing photographic research including practical issues and ethical considerations. Key topics include: - Working with images - Generating photos in research - Managing large archives and digital databases - Reviewing personal photos - Photo-elicitation interviews Written in a clear, accessible style, this dynamic book is essential reading for students and researchers working with photographs in history and the social sciences.

So You Want to Talk About Race

Author: Ijeoma Oluo
Publisher: Seal Press
ISBN: 1541619226
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Book Description
In this #1 New York Times bestseller, Ijeoma Oluo offers a revelatory examination of race in America Protests against racial injustice and white supremacy have galvanized millions around the world. The stakes for transformative conversations about race could not be higher. Still, the task ahead seems daunting, and it’s hard to know where to start. How do you tell your boss her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law hang up on you when you had questions about police reform? How do you explain white privilege to your white, privileged friend? In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from police brutality and cultural appropriation to the model minority myth in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race, and about how racism infects every aspect of American life. "Simply put: Ijeoma Oluo is a necessary voice and intellectual for these times, and any time, truth be told." ―Phoebe Robinson, New York Times bestselling author of You Can't Touch My Hair

Reasoned and Unreasoned Images

Author: Josh Ellenbogen
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271052597
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
"Examines three projects in late nineteenth-century scientific photography: the endeavors of Alphonse Bertillon, Francis Galton, and Etienne-Jules Marey. Develops new theoretical perspectives on the history of photographic technology, as well as the history of scientific imaging more generally"--

Good Pictures

Author: Kim Beil
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503612325
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Book Description
A picture-rich field guide to American photography, from daguerreotype to digital. We are all photographers now, with camera phones in hand and social media accounts at the ready. And we know which pictures we like. But what makes a "good picture"? And how could anyone think those old styles were actually good? Soft-focus yearbook photos from the '80s are now hopelessly—and happily—outdated, as are the low-angle portraits fashionable in the 1940s or the blank stares of the 1840s. From portraits to products, landscapes to food pics, Good Pictures proves that the history of photography is a history of changing styles. In a series of short, engaging essays, Kim Beil uncovers the origins of fifty photographic trends and investigates their original appeal, their decline, and sometimes their reuse by later generations of photographers. Drawing on a wealth of visual material, from vintage how-to manuals to magazine articles for working photographers, this full-color book illustrates the evolution of trends with hundreds of pictures made by amateurs, artists, and commercial photographers alike. Whether for selfies or sepia tones, the rules for good pictures are always shifting, reflecting new ways of thinking about ourselves and our place in the visual world.

On Photography

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Photography, Artistic
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description

Latinx Photography in the United States

Author: Elizabeth Ferrer
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295747641
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Book Description
Whether at UFW picket lines in California’s Central Valley or capturing summertime street life in East Harlem Latinx photographers have documented fights for dignity and justice as well as the daily lives of ordinary people. Their powerful, innovative photographic art touches on family, identity, protest, borders, and other themes, including the experiences of immigration and marginalization common to many of their communities. Yet the work of these artists has largely been excluded from the documented history of photography in the United States. Through individual profiles of more than eighty photographers from the early history of the photographic medium to the present, Elizabeth Ferrer introduces readers to Latinx portraitists, photojournalists, and documentarians and their legacies. She traces the rise of a Latinx consciousness in photography in the 1960s and '70s and the growth of identity-based approaches in the 1980s and '90s. Ferrer argues that in many cases a shared sense of struggle has motivated photographers to work purposefully, driven by a deep sense of resistance, social and political commitments, and cultural affirmation, and she highlights the significance of family photos to their approaches and outlooks. Works range from documentary and street photography to narrative series to conceptual projects. Latinx Photography in the United States is the first book to offer a parallel history of photography, one that no longer lies at the margins but rather plays a crucial role in imagining and creating a broader, more inclusive American visual history.

Touching Photographs

Author: Margaret Olin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226626466
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
Photography does more than simply represent the world. It acts in the world, connecting people to form relationships and shaping relationships to create communities. In this beautiful book, Margaret Olin explores photography’s ability to “touch” us through a series of essays that shed new light on photography’s role in the world. Olin investigates the publication of photographs in mass media and literature, the hanging of exhibitions, the posting of photocopied photographs of lost loved ones in public spaces, and the intense photographic activity of tourists at their destinations. She moves from intimate relationships between viewers and photographs to interactions around larger communities, analyzing how photography affects the way people handle cataclysmic events like 9/11. Along the way, she shows us James VanDerZee’s Harlem funeral portraits, dusts off Roland Barthes’s family album, takes us into Walker Evans and James Agee’s photo-text Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and logs onto online photo albums. With over one hundred illustrations, Touching Photographs is an insightful contribution to the theory of photography, visual studies, and art history.