Contemporary Art, Photography, and the Politics of Citizenship

Author: Vered Maimon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000096769
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Book Description
This book analyzes recent artistic and activist projects in order to conceptualize the new roles and goals of a critical theory and practice of art and photography. Vered Maimon argues that current artistic and activist practices are no longer concerned with the “politics of representation” and the critique of the spectacle, but with a “politics of rights” and the performative formation of shared yet highly contested public domains. The book thus offers a critical framework in which to rethink the artistic, the activist, and the political under globalization. The primary focus is on the ways contemporary artists and activists examine political citizenship as a paradox where subjects are struggling to acquire rights whose formulation rests on attributes they allegedly don't have; while the universal political validity of these rights presupposes precisely the abstraction of every form of difference, rights for all. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, photography theory, visual culture, cultural studies, critical theory, political theory, human rights, and activism.

The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East

Author: Liat Berdugo
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1838602747
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Drawing on unprecedented access to the video archives of B'Tselem, an Israeli NGO that distributes cameras to Palestinians living in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, Liat Berdugo lays out an argument for a visual studies approach to videographic evidence in Israel/Palestine. Using video stills as core material, it discusses the politics of videographic evidence in Israel/Palestine by demonstrating that the conflict is one that has produced an inequality of visual rights. The book highlights visual surveillance and counter surveillance at the citizen level, how Palestinians originally filmed to “shoot back” at Israelis, who were armed with shooting power via weapons as the occupying force. It also traces how Israeli private citizens began filming back at Palestinians with their own cameras, including personal cell phone cameras, thus creating a simultaneous, echoing counter surveillance. Complicating the notion that visual evidence alone can secure justice, the Weaponized Camera in The Middle East asks how what is seen, but also who is seeing, affects how conflicts are visually recorded. Drawing on over 5,000 hours of footage, only a fraction of which is easily accessible to the public domain, this book offers a unique perspective on the strategies and battlegrounds of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

Photography and Imagination

Author: Amos Morris-Reich
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429853424
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
As the prototypical exemplar of modern visual technology, photography was once viewed as a way to enable vision to bypass imagination, producing more reliable representations of reality. But as an achievement of technological modernity, photography can also be seen as a way to realize a creation of the imagination more vividly than can painting or drawing. Photography and Imagination investigates, from diverse points of view focusing on both theory and practice, the relation between these two terms. The book explores their effect on photography’s capacity, through various forms and modalities of imaginative investments and displacements, to affect even reality itself.

Civil Imagination

Author: Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 178478303X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
Understanding photography is more than a matter of assessing photographs, writes Ariella Azoulay. The photograph is merely one event in a sequence that constitutes photography and which always involves an actual or potential spectator in the relationship between the photographer and the individual portrayed. The shift in focus from product to practice, outlined in Civil Imagination, brings to light the way images can both reinforce and resist the oppressive reality foisted upon the people depicted. Through photography, Civil Imagination seeks out relations of partnership, solidarity, and sharing that come into being at the expense of sovereign powers that threaten to destroy them. Azoulay argues that the “civil” must be distinguished from the “political” as the interest that citizens have in themselves, in others, in their shared forms of coexistence, as well as in the world they create and transform. Azoulay’s book sketches out a new horizon of civil living for citizens as well as subjects denied citizenship—inevitable partners in a reality they are invited to imagine anew and to reconstruct. Beautifully produced with many illustrations, Civil Imagination is a provocative argument for photography as a civic practice capable of reclaiming civil power.

Photography and Political Aesthetics

Author: Jane Tormey
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000997723
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
This accessible book explores the creative uses of photography with political purpose, both in terms of subject matter and of the political perspectives that have driven attitudes to viewing photographs. The shorter Part I reviews twentieth-century thinking that has influenced attitudes to photography and the political. Part II identifies the political ideas that drive practical strategies in the twenty-first century. It considers the politics of photography by looking at what affects people’s lives and agency: attitudes to difference and identity; power relations between institutions, individuals, and communities; the impact of trauma and global change. With a focus on the exchange of ideas between visual practice and theories, a selection of projects are examined from a range of perspectives, such as post-colonial and feminist thinking, post-humanism, and cultural and social theory, with references ranging from Michel Foucault and Judith Butler to Achille Mbembe, Bruno Latour, and Chantal Mouffe. The pursuit of ‘political aesthetics’ borrows from Jacques Rancière’s ideas about cultural production. Photography and Political Aesthetics identifies photography as politically productive when positioned within political movements, and champions practices that perform, investigate, or give attention to presentation and public dissemination. This book is ideally suited to students studying photography, art and aesthetics, visual politics, and cultural studies, and researchers across the fields of photography, media, art, and politics.

The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory

Author: Mark Durden
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317541588
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 483

Book Description
With newly commissioned essays by some of the leading writers on photography today, this companion tackles some of the most pressing questions about photography theory’s direction, relevance, and purpose. This book shows how digital technologies and global dissemination have radically advanced the pluralism of photographic meaning and fundamentally transformed photography theory. Having assimilated the histories of semiotic analysis and post-structural theory, critiques of representation continue to move away from the notion of original and copy and towards materiality, process, and the interdisciplinary. The implications of what it means to ‘see’ an image is now understood to encompass, not only the optical, but the conceptual, ethical, and haptic experience of encountering an image. The 'fractal' is now used to theorize the new condition of photography as an algorithmic medium and leads us to reposition our relationship to photographs and lend nuances to what essentially underlies any photography theory — that is, the relationship of the image to the real world and how we conceive what that means. Diverse in its scope and themes, The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory is an indispensable collection of essays and interviews for students, researchers, and teachers. The volume also features extensive images, including beautiful colour plates of key photographs.

Palestinian Citizens of Israel

Author: Sharri Plonski
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786731223
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
The contest to maintain and reclaim space is firmly tied to the identity and culture of a displaced population. Palestinian Citizens of Israel is a study of Palestinian communities living inside the Jewish state and their attempts to disrupt and reshape the physical and abstract boundaries that contain them. Through extensive fieldwork and numerous interviews, Sharri Plonski conducts a comparative analysis of resistance movements anchored in three key sites of the Palestinian experience: the defence of housing rights in Jaffa; the protest against settlement in the Galilee region; and the campaign for Bedouin land rights in the Naqab desert. Her research investigates the dialectical relationship between power and resistance as it relates to socio-spatial segregation and the struggle for national recognition. Plonski's examination of Palestinian activism and transgression offers valuable insight into the structures and reaches of power from within the Israeli state. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of both Middle East Studies and Palestinian-Israeli politics.

Civic Aesthetics

Author: Noa Roei
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474253180
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Awarded an Honourable Mention by the Association for Israeli Studies. Exploring the politics of the image in the context of Israeli militarized visual culture, Civic Aesthetics examines both the omnipresence of militarism in Israeli culture and society and the way in which this omnipresence is articulated, enhanced, and contested within local contemporary visual art. Looking at a range of contemporary artworks through the lens of “civilian militarism”, Roei employs the theory of various fields, including memory studies, gender studies, landscape theory, and aesthetics, to explore the potential of visual art to communicate military excesses to its viewers. This study builds on the specific sociological concerns of the chosen cases to discuss the complexities of visuality, the visible and non-visible, arguing for art's capacity to expose the scopic regimes that construct their visibility. Images and artworks are often read either out of context, on purely aesthetic or art-historical ground, or as cultural artefacts whose aesthetics play a minor role in their significance. This book breaks with both traditions as it approaches all art, both high and popular art, as part of the surrounding visual culture in which it is created and presented. This approach allows a new theory of the image to come forth, where the relation between the political and the aesthetic is one of exchange, rather than exclusion.

Emplaced Resistances in Occupied Palestine

Author: Suzanne Hassan Hammad
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786612054
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Book Description
In this deeply personal study, Hammad illuminates a deep agenda of place, meaning, and resistance in territorial struggles through the telling of a less-heard story of how women, men, and young people understand their world and their lives in the occupied Palestinian West Bank landscape. Taking a case study of a contested and divided Palestinian village situated in the heart of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and known for its sustained, non-violent protest against the Separation Wall that cuts through its lived spaces, Hammad examines how villagers live, experience, interpret, and attempt to resist infringements on their property and person. The study considers the spectrum of ways that people resist in this context, examining not only the overt weekly protests but also the everyday acts and subjectivities of resistance of its residents, young and old. It offers valuable theoretical insight into the extent and ways that meanings of place hold the potential to mediate, shape, and sustain resistance struggles through the voices and experiences of people. The backdrop of the protracted Palestinian-Israeli conflict and Palestinians’ struggle over space, place, and history—which continues to play out in the present—makes this book politically relevant and empowering as it brings voices from a secluded contested village to the world.

Linguistic Landscape

Author: Elana Shohamy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135859124
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 423

Book Description
In this comprehensive and pioneering volume, language scholars from around the world examine the "linguistic landscape" from multiple perspectives – theoretical, methodological, and critical. Written by widely recognized experts, the articles in Linguistic Landscape analyze linguistic landscapes in a range of international contexts. Dozens of photographs illustrate the use of language in the environment – the words and images displayed and exposed in public spaces. Suitable for graduate or advanced undergraduate students in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language policy studies, Linguistic Landscape is a vital contribution to a burgeoning field.