138 avsnitt • Längd: 55 min • Oregelbundet
Interviews with Photographers and Scholars of Photography about their New Books
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The podcast New Books in Photography is created by New Books Network. The podcast and the artwork on this page are embedded on this page using the public podcast feed (RSS).
Photography emerged in the 1840s in the United States, and it became a visual medium that documents the harsh realities of enslavement. Similarly, the photography culture grew during the Civil War, and it became an important material that archived this unprecedented war. Deborah Willis's The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (New York University Press, 2021) contains rarely seen letters and diary notes from Black men and women and photographs of Black soldiers who fought and died in this war. These ninety-nine images reshape African American narratives. The Black Civil War Soldier offers an opportunity to experience the war through their perspectives.
N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates.
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They call it Spanish Harlem or sometimes just El Barrio. But for over a century, East Harlem has been a melting pot of many ethnic groups, including Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, and Mexican immigrants, as well as Italian, Jewish, and African American communities. Though gentrification is rapidly changing the face of this section of upper Manhattan, it is still full of sites that attest to its rich cultural heritage.
Now East Harlem native Christopher Bell takes you on a tour of his beloved neighborhood. He takes you on three separate walking tours, each visiting a different part of East Harlem and each full of stories about its theaters, museums, art spaces, schools, community centers, churches, mosques, and synagogues. You'll also learn about the famous people who lived in El Barrio, such as actress Cecily Tyson, opera singer Marian Anderson, portrait artist Alice Neel, incomparable poet Julia De Burgos, and King of Latin Music Tito Puente.
Lavishly illustrated with over fifty photos, Walking East Harlem: A Neighborhood Experience (Rutgers University Press, 2024) points out not only the many architectural and cultural landmarks in the neighborhood but also the historical buildings that have since been demolished. Whether you are a tourist or a resident, this guide will give you a new appreciation for El Barrio's exciting history, cultural diversity, and continued artistic vibrancy.
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Perhaps no American landscape is as iconic as the rainbow rocks of Arizona's Grand Canyon. Yet, as the geographer Yolonda Youngs argues, the Grand Canyon many people think they know is but one sliver of the story of the wider Grand Canyon as a historical and physical place.
In Framing Nature: The Creation of an American Icon at the Grand Canyon (U Nebraska Press, 2024), Youngs, a Cal State - San Bernardino professor, tracks the history of the canyon from the perspective of spatial, physical, and visual culture studies. In doing so, she shows how the ways we think of a place shape how humans use that place. In the case of the Grand Canyon, that means the "classic" perspective that people recognize of the canyon from the south rim, means that changes to the riparian landscape hundreds of feet below often go unnoticed. Wider changes in American visual culture, including the development of postcards, film, and television, also shaped tourist expectations - visitors expecting to see rapids, for instance, rather than the fern groves and waterfalls which also form critical parts of the wider Grand Canyon environment. As the cliche goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and in the example of the Grand Canyon, those same storytelling pictures also shape use in ways that continue up through the present day.
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An expressive book of prose and photographs that reveals the powerful ways our everyday places support our shared belonging. Where would you take someone on a guided tour of your neighborhood? In The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places (MIT Press, 2024), photographer and urbanist Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani introduces us to the complex, political, and eminently personable stories of residents who answered this question in Brooklyn, New York, and Oakland, California. Their universal stories and Bendiner-Viani’s evocative images illuminate what’s at stake in our everyday places—from diners to churches to donut shops. In this culmination of two decades of research and art practice, Bendiner-Viani intertwines the personal, historical, and photographic to present us with placework, the way that unassuming places foster a sense of belonging and, in fact, do the essential work of helping us become communities.
In this unique book, Bendiner-Viani makes visible how seemingly unimportant places can lay the foundation for a functional interconnected society, so necessary for both public health and social justice. The Cities We Need explores both what we gain in these spaces and what we risk losing as they are threatened by gentrification, large-scale development, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimately, Bendiner-Viani shows us how to understand ourselves as part of a shared society, with a shared fate; she shows us that everyday places can be the spaces of liberation in which we can build the cities we need.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani is a visual urbanist and cofounder of the interdisciplinary studio Buscada. She is the author of Contested City, a finalist and honoree for the Brendan Gill Prize. A widely exhibited photographer, she holds a doctorate in environmental psychology from the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.
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In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation’s racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen—until now.
The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War—the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the US Civil War—revealed the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive “Caucasian” for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures ranging from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois to Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions and more, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them.
To acknowledge the falsehood at the core of racial order proved unthinkable, especially as Jim Crow and segregation took hold. Sight became a form of racial sculpture, vision a knife excising what no longer served the stability of racial hierarchy. That stability was shaped, crucially, by what was left out, what we have been conditioned not to see. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (Harvard University Press, 2024) shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations—and offers a way to begin to dismantle it.
Sarah Lewis is the founder of Vision & Justice and the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (Harvard University Press), the bestseller, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (Simon & Schuster), Lewis is the editor of the award-winning volumes, “Vision & Justice” by Aperture magazine and the anthology on the work of Carrie Mae Weems (MIT Press). She is the organizer of the landmark Vision & Justice Convening at Harvard University, and co-editor of the Vision & Justice Book Series, launched in partnership with Aperture. Her awards include the Infinity Award, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Cullman Fellowship, the Freedom Scholar Award (ASALH), the Arthur Danto/ASA Prize from the American Philosophical Association, and the Photography Network Book Prize. Her writing has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Artforum, and the New York Review of Books, and her work has been the subject of profiles from The Boston Globe to the New York Times. Lewis is a sought-after public speaker, with a mainstage TED talk that received over three million views. She received her BA from Harvard University, an MPhil from Oxford University, an MA from Courtauld Institute of Art, and her PhD from Yale University. She lives in New York City and Cambridge, MA.
Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).
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Joseph Heathcott discusses his latest book, Global Queens: An Urban Mosaic (Fordham University Press, 2023), an engaging hybrid of text and visual that features a trove of his personal photography of urban spaces throughout NYC's most diverse borough. Including: airports, overgrown yards, possibly the last living speakers of indigenous languages, the Queens Public Library, racial covenants and civil resistance in early real estate development, and much more that, like the borough itself, is centerless, mundane, surprising, vibrant, challenging, and beautifully contradictory.
Joseph Heathcott is Chair of Urban and Environmental Studies at The New School. His work has appeared in a wide range of venues, including books, academic journals, magazines, exhibits, and juried art shows. His most recent books include Urban Infrastructure: Historical and Social Dimensions of an Interconnected World; The Routledge Handbook of Infrastructure Design: Global Perspectives from Architectural History; and Capturing the City: Photographs from the Streets of St. Louis, 1900-1930.
Tyler Thier is a writing administrator, adjunct professor, and freelance critic. His research is concerned with violent writings and controversial media -- namely, content produced by hate groups and other extremists. He writes a lot about visuals (specifically "bad" or otherwise maligned pieces of pop culture) and how they shape our social realities. For better and worse.
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Queer Obscenity: Erotic Archives in Dictatorial Spain (Stanford University Press, 2024) takes us inside the archive to demonstrate how the incongruities of the Primo de Rivera (1923–1930) and Franco (1939–1975) regimes were manifested in the regulation of erotic material cultures. Focusing on amateur pornographers and their confiscated and censored erotica, this book adds a rich complexity to both the history and theory of pornography, demonstrating that surveillance depends entirely on documenting intimacy and preserving transgression. This book sheds new light on the production, consumption, and circulation of pornography and erotica in Spain over the course of the twentieth century, drawing connections between intimate queer desires, preservation, and erasure.
Javier Fernández-Galeano is Ramón y Cajal postdoctoral fellow at Universitat de València in Spain.
Tatiana Klepikova is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism.
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Losing a pet has always been a unique kind of pain. No set rituals exist to help provide closure when pets die, there are no readily shared passages from spiritual texts, no community of compassion to surround the mourner and help alleviate grief. And there is a sense of taboo, that it is somehow socially incorrect to mourn an animal as one would a person and feel the pain so intensely. Faithful Unto Death: Pet Cemeteries, Animal Graves, and Eternal Devotion (Thames & Hudson, 2024) by Dr. Paul Koudounaris confronts this taboo by telling the stories of people who have memorialised their beloved animals.
The book addresses the moral and spiritual prejudices that have historically surrounded animals, and reveals how, in the face of these prejudices, a movement started in the nineteenth century to treat pets with dignity even in death. It is a fight that is still far from over, but the triumphs that are revealed as the book unfolds, found in burial grounds small to grand and on monuments humble to huge, possess the power to touch everyone who has ever cared for an animal companion. In tracing the historical evolution of pet cemeteries through the stories of the people and pets that have been integral to their development, this book reveals both similarities in the way we mourn animal companions and a stunning cultural diversity. From humble Cherry in London to pets of the rich and powerful, this is a history filled with inspiration, wild eccentricity, and eternal love.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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The Loneliness Room: A Creative Ethnography of Loneliness (Manchester University Press, 2024) by Dr. Sean Remond is a remarkably unique book takes the conceit of the loneliness room to show how everyday artistic practice opens up loneliness to new definitions and new understandings. Refusing to pathologise loneliness, the book draws on the creative submissions supplied by its participants to demonstrate that being lonely can mean different things to different people in differing contexts. Filled with the photographs, paintings, videos, songs, and writings of its participants, The loneliness room is a deeply moving account of loneliness today.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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In Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke UP, 2024) Siobhan Angus tells the history of photography through the minerals upon which the medium depends. Challenging the emphasis on immateriality in discourses on photography, Angus focuses on the inextricable links between image-making and resource extraction, revealing how the mining of bitumen, silver, platinum, iron, uranium, and rare earth elements is a precondition of photography. Through a materials-driven analysis of visual culture, she illustrates histories of colonization, labor, and environmental degradation to expose the ways in which photography is enmeshed within and enables global extractive capitalism.
This conversation discusses the meta-narrative and performative aspects of some of the photographs shown in the text, dives into some of the stories and examples from Ann Atkin's cyanotypes of the 1800s to Warren Cariou's contemporary bitumin prints, and asks what ethical photography looks like given the resource extraction required.
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Listen to Episode No.10 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois, and as well, John Jones, assistant professor at SUNY Cortland. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is Image as Form in a Transpositional Grammar: The Example of Photography.
Bill Cope : "Every time a new medium turns up, it does new things. So, in the case of photography — our example medium today — its form is Image, and in our grammar, the Image is the human's way of representing the world on a two-dimensional plane. Now, of course, the Image has been around for a very long time, but when photography develops, it adds new things to the Image — it makes the Image much more accessible. You know, how many zillions of photographs are taken every day now, and most of them pushed across space and time via the Internet, right? So we ask, what does that massification of the ability to create the Image do?"
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The Study of Photography in Latin America: Critical Insights and Methodological Approaches (University of New Mexico Press, 2023) provides an insider's perspective to the study of photography. Nathanial Gardner provides readers with a carefully structured introduction that lays out his unique methodology for this book, which features over eighty photographs and the insights from sixteen prominent Latin American photography scholars and historians, including Boris Kossoy, John Marz, and Ana Mauad. The work reflects the advances of the study of photography throughout Latin America with certain emphasis on Brazil and Mexico. The author further underlines the role of important institutions and builds context by discussing influential theories and key texts that currently guide the discipline. The Study of Photography in Latin America is critical to all who want to expand their current knowledge of the subject and engage with its experts.
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In Photography and Making Bedouin Histories in the Naqab, 1906-2013:: An Anthropological Approach (Routledge, 2023), Emilie Le Febvre takes us to the Naqab Desert where Bedouin use photographs to make, and respond to, their own histories. She argues Bedouin presentations of the past are selective, but increasingly reliant on archival documents such as photographs, which spokespersons treat as evidence of their local histories amid escalating tensions in Israel-Palestine. These practices shape Bedouin visual historicity; the diverse ways people produce their pasts in the present through images.
The book charts these processes through the afterlives of six photographs as they circulate between the Naqab’s entangled visual economies – a transregional landscape organized by cultural ideals of proximity and assemblages of Bedouin iconography. She illustrates how representational contentions associated with tribal, civic, and Palestinian-Israeli politics influence how images do history work in this society. Here, Bedouin value photographs not because they evidence singular narratives of the past; rather, the knowledges inscribed by photography are manifold as they support diverse constructions of Naqab Bedouin history and society. In this episode, Emilie joins me to discuss the ethics of photographs of the Naqab Bedouin as a historical source; the nuances of gender norms around photographing Bedouin women; and how social media and modern technology have changed how photographs are used and understood.
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In the middle decades of the twentieth century in New York City, Dubrow’s cafeterias in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and the garment district of Manhattan were places to get out of your apartment, have coffee with friends, or enjoy a hearty but affordable meal. They were grounded in the world of Jewish immigrants and their children, and they thrived in years when Flatbush and the Garment District each had a distinctly Jewish character. The cafeterias were also places where working class and modestly middle class New Yorkers of European ancestry, with few great luxuries in their lives, could enjoy a taste of culinary abundance.
Under demographic changes, economic decay and high crime in the 1970s and 1980s, the world that produced Dubrow’s came apart. The Brooklyn branch of Dubrow’s closed in 1978, the Manhattan branch in 1985.
But before Dubrow’s cafeterias were shuttered, Marcia Bricker Halperin captured their mood and their patrons in black and white photographs. These pictures, along with essays by the playwright Donald Margulies and the historian Deborah Dash Moore, constitute Marcia’s book Kibitz and Nosh: When We All Met at Dubrow’s Cafeteria, published by Cornell University Press (2023) and winner of a National Jewish Book Council prize for Food Writing and Cookbooks.
Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus at Rutgers University, is editing an anthology of New Yorkers’ memories of the COVID-19 pandemic for Cornell University Press.
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Shortly after its introduction, photography transformed the ways Americans made political arguments using visual images. In the mid-19th century, photographs became key tools in debates surrounding slavery. Yet, photographs were used in interesting and sometimes surprising ways by a range of actors. Matthew Fox-Amato, an Assistant Professor at the University of Idaho, examines the role of photography in the politics of slavery during the 19th century and the important legacies of those uses on later visual politics in his new book, Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America (Oxford University Press, 2019). The book examines the use of photographs by slaves, abolitionists, slaveholders, and Union soldiers to explore the rich complexities of the visual politics of the moment. He also considers the legacies of this use of the new medium.
In this episode of the podcast, Fox-Amato discusses the ways these various groups used photography for individual purposes and to shape the debates surrounding slavery in the antebellum period. He explains how photographs also highlight how union soldiers were beginning to think about a post-slavery racial hierarchy during the war. The book demonstrates the importance of thinking about photographs as both visual images and material objects. In the interview, Fox-Amato discusses the research necessary to analyze the photographs in both these ways and the broader importance of studying visual and material culture in all their historical complexity.
Christine Lamberson is an Associate Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at [email protected].
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A provocative investigation of the future of photography and human perception in the age of AI.
We are constantly photographing and being photographed while feeding machine learning databases with our data, which in turn is used to generate new images. Analyzing the transformation of photography by computation—and the transformation of human perception by algorithmically driven images, from CGI to AI—The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future between the Eye and AI (MIT Press, 2023) investigates what it means for us to live surrounded by image flows and machine eyes. In an astute and engaging argument, Joanna Zylinska brings together media theory and neuroscience in a Vilém Flusser–Paul Virilio remix. Her “perception machine” names a technical universe of images and their infrastructures. But it also refers to a sociopolitical condition resulting from today's automation of vision, imaging—and imagination.
Written by a theorist-practitioner, the book incorporates Zylinska's own art projects, some of which have been co-created with AI. The photographs, collages, films, and installations available as part of the book (and its companion website) provide a different mode of thinking about our technological futures, at a local as well as a planetary level. Offering provocative concepts such as eco-eco-punk, AUTO-FOTO-KINO, planetary micro-vision, loser images, and sensography, the book outlines an existential philosophy of messy media for a time when our practices of imaging and self-imaging are being radically redesigned. Importantly, it also offers a new vision of our future.
Joanna Zylinska is Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King's College London. The author of Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press) and many other books on art, technology, and ethics, she is also an artist and curator.
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The global refugee, the ship passenger, the displaced person. How did their homeseeking routes and visual motifs intersect and diverge in the early Holocaust film archive? Simone Gigliotti's Restless Archive: The Holocaust and the Cinema of the Displaced tracks the footsteps and routes of predominantly Jewish refugees and postwar displaced persons in what I call a “restless archive” of photographic, cinematographic and visual material that was created and re-used between 1933 and 1949. The historical and spatial analysis concentrates on tracing the emergence and remediation (migration) of images of displacement and transit and the forgotten-ness of others. The visual inventory is anchored in non-fiction historical material, including newsreels, institutional projections, found footage, home movies, short films, "fundraisers" and documentaries. In addition to Manifold's narrative platform, creative technologies, such as StoryMaps, have enabled the digital curation, mapping and “repatriation” of this visual and spatial archive of obstruction which has, to date, eluded analysis in its local and global entanglements.
You can find the open access book here. You can also find all of the source material mentioned in the interview if you keep scrolling down to the "Resources" section.
Links Mentioned in the Episode
Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
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The end of the nineteenth century saw massive developments and innovations in photography at a time when the forces of Western modernity—industrialization, racialization, and capitalism—were quickly reshaping the world. The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism (NYU Press, 2023) slows down the moment in which the technology of photography seemed to speed itself—and so the history of racial capitalism—up. It follows the substantial shifts in the markets, mediums, and forms of photography during a legally murky period at the end of the nineteenth century. Monica Huerta traces the subtle and paradoxical ways legal thinking through photographic lenses reinscribed a particular aesthetics of whiteness in the very conceptions of property ownership.
The book pulls together an archive that encompasses the histories of performance and portraiture alongside the legal, pursuing the logics by which property rights involving photographs are affirmed (or denied) in precedent-setting court cases and legal texts. Emphasizing the making of “expression” into property to focus our attention on the failures of control that cameras do not invent, but rather put new emphasis on, this book argues that designations of control’s absence are central to the practice and idea of property-making.
The Unintended proposes that tracking and analyzing the sensed horizons of intention, control, autonomy, will, and volition offers another way into understanding how white supremacy functions. Ultimately, its unique historical reading practice offers a historically-specific vantage on the everyday workings of racial capitalism and the inheritances of white supremacy that structure so much of our lives.
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In the decades leading up to the Civil War, abolitionists crafted a variety of visual messages about the plight of enslaved people, portraying the violence, familial separation, and dehumanisation that they faced. In response, proslavery southerners attempted to counter these messages either through idealisation or outright erasure of enslaved life.
In Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture (University of Arkansas Press, 2023), Dr. Rachel Stephens addresses an enormous body of material by tracing themes of concealment and silence through paintings, photographs, and ephemera, connecting long overlooked artworks with both the abolitionist materials to which they were responding and archival research across a range of southern historical narratives.
Dr. Stephens begins her fascinating study with an examination of the ways that slavery was visually idealised and defended in antebellum art. She then explores the tyranny—especially that depicted in art—enacted by supporters of enslavement, introduces a range of ways that artwork depicting slavery was tangibly concealed, considers photographs of enslaved female caretakers with the white children they reared, and investigates a printmaker’s confidential work in support of the Confederacy. Finally, she delves into an especially pernicious group of proslavery artists in Richmond, Virginia. Reading visual culture as a key element of the antebellum battle over slavery, Hidden in Plain Sight complicates the existing narratives of American art and history.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Shortlisted for the 2023 Lumen Prize, Kat Mustatea's Voidopolis (MIT Press, 2023) is a hybrid digital artistic and literary project in the form of an augmented reality book, which retells Dante's Inferno as if it were set in pandemic-ravaged New York City.
Voidopolis is a digital performance about loss and memory presented as an augmented reality (AR) book with a limited lifespan. The book loosely retells the story of Dante's Inferno as if it were the dystopic experience of wandering through New York City during the pandemic; instead of Virgil, however, the narrator is guided through this modern hellscape by a caustic hobo named Nikita.
Voidopolis is meant to culminate in loss. It features images that are created by digitally “wiping” humans from stock photography and text that is generated without the letter “e”—in homage to Oulipo author Georges Perec's A Void, a 300-page novel written entirely without the letter—by using a modified GPT-2 text generator. The book, adapted from a series of Instagram posts that were ultimately deleted, is likewise designed to disappear: its garbled pages can only be deciphered with an AR app, and they decay at the same rate over a period of one year, after which the decay process restarts and begins again. At the end of this decay cycle, only the printed book, with its unintelligible pages, remains. Each July 1, the date the project first started on Instagram, the book resets again, beginning anew the cycle of its own vanishing.
A first-of-its-kind augmented reality book from a major university press, Voidopolis is a unique and deeply affecting artwork that speaks as much to our existential moment as it does to the fragility of experience, reality, and our connection to one another.
A guide to reading Voidopolis can be found here.
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Addressing the relationship between law and the visual, this book examines the importance of photography in Central, East, and Southeast European show trials.
The dispensation of justice during communist rule in Albania, East Germany, and Poland was reliant on legal propaganda, making the visual a fundamental part of the legitimacy of the law. Analysing photographs of trials, Agata Fijalkowski's Law, Visual Culture, and the Show Trial (Routledge, 2023) examines how this message was conveyed to audiences watching and participating in the spectacle of show trials. The book traces how this use of the visual was exported from the Soviet Union and imposed upon its satellite states in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It shows how the legal actors and political authorities embraced new photographic technologies to advance their legal propaganda and legal photography. Drawing on contemporary theoretical work in the area, the book then challenges straightforward accounts of the relationship between law and the visual, critically engaging entrenched legal historical narratives, in relation to three different protagonists, to offer the possibility of reclaiming and rewriting past accounts. As its analysis demonstrates, the power of images can also be subversive; and, as such, the cases it addresses contribute to the discourse on visual epistemology and open onto contemporary questions about law and its inherent performativity.
Alex Batesmith is a Lecturer in Legal Profession in the School of Law at the University of Leeds, and a former barrister and UN war crimes prosecutor, with teaching and research interests in international criminal law, cause lawyering and the legal profession, and law and emotion. Twitter: @batesmith. LinkedIn.
His recent publications include:
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How the image collection, organized and made available for public consumption, came to define a key feature of contemporary visual culture. The origins of today’s kaleidoscopic digital visual culture are many. In Picture-Work: How Libraries, Museums, and Stock Agencies Launched a New Image Economy (MIT Press, 2023), Diana Kamin traces the sharing of photographs to an image economy developed throughout the twentieth century by major institutions. Picture-Work examines how three of these institutions—the New York Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art, and the stock agency H. Armstrong Roberts Inc.—defined the public’s understanding of what the photographic image is, while building vast collections with universalizing ambitions.
Highlighting underexplored figures, such as the first rights and reproduction manager at MoMA Pearl Moeller and visionary NYPL librarian Romana Javitz, and underexplored professional practices, Diana Kamin demonstrates how bureaucratic work communicates ideas about images to the public. Kamin artfully shows how the public interfaces with these image collections through systems of classification and protocols of search and retrieval. These interactions, in turn, shape contemporary image culture, including concepts of authorship, art, property, and value, as well as logics of indexing, tagging, and hyperlinking. Together, these interactions have forged a concept of the image as alienable content, which has intensified with the advent of digital techniques for managing image collections. To survey the complicated process of digitization in the nineties and early aughts, Kamin also includes interviews with photographers, digital asset management system designers, librarians, and artists on their working practices.
Links Mentioned in the Episode
Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
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In this episode of High Theory, Margaret Galvan talks about the queer politics of Visibility. In her work the activist practices of representation take concrete form in comic books, photographs, and even drawings on lecture slides!
In the episode, she discusses the photography of Nan Goldin and queer comic books in the 1980s. She quotes Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” She also references This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. At the end of the episode she references the Lesbian Avengers, who have amazing images.
Margaret Galvan is an assistant professor of English at the University of Florida. Her research examines how visual culture operates within the print media of feminist and queer social movements of the 1970s-1990s. Her brand new book In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s, is out this fall from University of Minnesota Press‘s Manifold Scholarship Series. You should go check it out!
Because the amazing images Margaret talks about were drawn recently, they’re still in copyright. Our image this week is from Gladys Parker’s comic Mopsy which ran from 1937 to 1966. Parker was a successful female artist in a world of mainstream US comic books dominated by men.
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Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities.
Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub.
Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.
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Framing the Holocaust: Photographs of a Mass Shooting in Latvia, 1941 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023), edited by Valerie Hébert, compiles essays on the meaning of twelve photographs of a terrible atrocity. In December 1941, German police and their local collaborators shot 2,749 Jews at the beach in Sķēde, near Liepāja, Latvia. Twelve photographs were taken at the scene. These now-infamous images show people in extreme distress, sometimes without clothing. Some capture the very moments when women and children confronted their imminent deaths, while others show their dead bodies. They are nearly unbearable to look at -- so why should we?
Framing the Holocaust offers a multidimensional response to this question. While photographs are central to our memory of modern historical events, they often inhabit an ambivalent intellectual space. What separates the sincere desire to understand from voyeuristic curiosity? Comprehending atrocity photographs requires viewers to place themselves in the very positions of the perpetrators who took the images. When we engage with these photographs, do we risk replicating the original violence? In this tightly organized book, scholars of history, photography, language, gender, photojournalism, and pedagogy examine the images of the Sķēde atrocity along with other difficult images, giving historical, political, and ethical depth to the acts of looking and interpreting. With a foreword by Edward Anders, who narrowly escaped the December 1941 shooting, Framing the Holocaust represents an original approach to an iconic series of Holocaust photographs. This book contributes to compelling debates in the emerging field of visual history, including the challenges and responsibilities of using photographs to teach about atrocity.
Link Mentioned in the Episode: Digitized Mizrakh Yidisher Historisher Arkhiv archive (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)
Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
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The Twin Children of the Holocaust: Stolen Childhood and the Will to Survive (Academic Studies Press, 2023) is an annotated collection of original, informative, and moving photographs of the twins who survived the brutal medical experiments conducted at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp (1943-1945). The experiments were conducted by the infamous physician, Josef Mengele. These never-before-seen photographs were taken by the author (Segal) at the 40th anniversary of the camp’s liberation (January 27, 1985) and the public hearing on Mengele’s crimes at Yad Vashem (A Memorial and a Name) in Jerusalem that followed. Other memorable moments, captured in photographs, include traveling to Krakow, visiting Warsaw and hearing survivors’ testimonies. The photographs are organized into ten sections that unfold chronologically—each section is accompanied by a brief essay to provide compelling context and each photograph has an informative caption.
Dr. Nancy L. Segal is Psychology Professor and Director, Twin Studies Center, at California State University, Fullerton. Her book, Born Together-Reared Apart, won the American Psychological Association’s William James Book Award. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and Atlantic Monthly. She has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America, and the BBC.
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Life on Earth depends on the busy activities of insects, but global populations of these teeming creatures are currently under threat, with grave consequences for us all. Steve Nicholls' book Alien Worlds: How Insects Conquered the Earth, and Why Their Fate Will Determine Our Future (Princeton UP, 2023) presents insects and other arthropods as you have never seen them before, explaining how they conquered the planet and why there are so many of them, and shedding light on the evolutionary marvels that enabled them to thrive. Blending glorious imagery with entertaining and informative science writing, this book takes you inside the hidden realm of insects and reveals why their fate carries profound implications for our own.
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The late nineteenth century witnessed a rapid increase in colonial conflicts throughout the French and British empires. It was also the period in which the first mass-produced cameras became available. Colonial authorities were quick to recognise the power of this new technology, which they used to humiliate defeated opponents and project an image of supremacy across the world.
Drawing on a wealth of visual materials, from soldiers’ personal albums to the collections of press agencies and government archives, The Violence of Colonial Photography (Manchester UP, 2022) offers a new account of how conflict photography developed in the decades before the First World War. It explores the ways the camera was used to impose order on subject populations in Africa and Asia and to generate propaganda for the public in Europe, where a visual economy of violence was rapidly taking shape. At the same time, the book reveals how photographs could escape the intentions of their creators, offering a means for colonial subjects to push back against oppression.
Daniel Foliard is a Professor of Modern History at Université Paris Cité
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.
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In The War on the Eastern Front: The Soviet Union, 1941-1945 - A Photographic History (Pen & Sword Military, 2021), Professor Alexander Hill has collected photographs from the brutal conflict on the Eastern Front and the extraordinary experience of the soldiers and civilians who were caught up in it. The book covers the formation of Soviet military forces and the conflicts leading up to the war to the final phases in Manchuria. Photographs and captions in the book take the reader from the Nazi-Soviet Pact through Operation Barbarossa to the tide-shifting battles at Stalingrad and Kursk and the collapse of Nazi forces in Berlin in 1945. Each chapter features an introduction along with extensive descriptions of the battlefields, shattered towns, and combatants left behind by two titanic armies locked in a devastating war.
Professor Alexander Hill teaches military history at the University of Calgary in Canada and is an expert on the military and political history of Russia and the Soviet Union post-1917. Professor Hill is the author of The Red Army and the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2019); The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, 1941-45: A Documentary Reader (Routledge, 2008); and The War Behind the Eastern Front: Soviet Partisans in North West Russia 1941-1944 (Routledge, 2006).
Rick Northrop is an ex-journalist and undergraduate student in Calgary, Alberta Canada. He can be reached at [email protected]
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Photography matters, writes Jerry Thompson, because of how it works--not only as an artistic medium but also as a way of knowing. With this provocative observation, Thompson begins a wide-ranging and lucid meditation on why photography is unique among the picture-making arts. In Why Photography Matters, he constructs an argument that moves with natural logic from Thomas Pynchon (and why we read him for his vision and not his command of miscellaneous facts) to Jonathan Swift to Plato to Emily Dickinson (who wrote "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant") to detailed readings of photographs by Eugène Atget, Garry Winogrand, Marcia Due, Walker Evans, and Robert Frank. Forcefully and persuasively, he argues for photography as a medium whose business is not constructing fantasies pleasing to the eye or imagination, but describing the world in the toughest and deepest way.
Jerry L. Thompson is a working photographer who also writes about photography. He worked as Walker Evans’s principal assistant from 1973 to Evans’s death in 1975. He is the author of The Last Years of Walker Evans and Truth and Photography.
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Picture Research: The Work of Intermediation from Pre-Photography to Post-Digitization (MIT Press, 2023) focuses on how pictures were saved, stored, and searched for in a time before scanners, servers, and search engines, and describes the dramatic difference it made when images became scannable, searchable, and distributable via the internet. While the camera, the darkroom, and the printed page are well-known sites of photographic production that have been replaced by cell phones, imaging software, and websites, the cultural intermediaries of mass-circulation photography—picture librarians and researchers, editors, and archivists—are less familiar. In this book, Nina Lager Vestberg artfully details the range of research skills, reproduction machinery, and communication infrastructures that was needed to make pictures available to a public before digitization.
Drawing on documents and representations across a range of cultural expressions, Picture Research reveals the intermediation that has been performed by skilled workers in a variety of roles, making use of pre-photographic, photographic, and digital machineries of capture, accumulation, extraction, and transmission. Tracing a history of the modern pictorial economy from the pre-photographic 1830s to the post-digitized 2010s, it makes visible and explicit the invisible labor that has built—and still sustains—the visual commodity culture of everyday life.
Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.
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Told through the eyes of witnesses to the fall of Kabul, Walkley award-winning journalist Andrew Quilty's debut publication offers a remarkable record of this historic moment. August in Kabul: America's Last Days in Afghanistan (Bloomsbury, 2023) is the story of how America's longest mission came to an abrupt and humiliating end, told through the eyes of Afghans whose lives have been turned upside down: a young woman who harbors dreams of a university education; a presidential staffer who works desperately to hold things together as the government collapses around him; a prisoner in the notorious Bagram Prison who suddenly finds himself free when prison guards abandon their post. Andrew Quilty was one of a handful of Western journalists who stayed in Kabul as the city fell. This is his first-hand account of those dramatic final days.
Andrew Quilty’s photography career began in Sydney, in the year 2000, on the day his application to a university photo elective was rejected. He quit, and set off around Australia with a surfboard and a Nikon F3 that his uncle—also a photographer—had passed down. His work in Afghanistan has been published worldwide and garnered accolades including, in 2019, a World Press Photo, a Picture of the Year International award of excellence in the category of Photographer of the Year (POYI), and prior to that, a George Polk Award, three POYI awards, a Sony World Photography award and six Walkley Awards, including the Gold Walkley, the highest honor in Australian journalism. In 2016, a selection of his work from Afghanistan was exhibited at the Visa pour L'Image Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan, France. He has travelled to two thirds of Afghanistan's 34 provinces and continues to document the country through pictures and, increasingly, the written word.
Connor Christensen is a graduate student at the University of Chicago, pursuing both an MPP at the Harris School of Public Policy and an MA at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. His work focuses on the reintegration process of veterans of the military and non-state armed groups in contexts spanning the US, Colombia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and beyond. He is a staff writer for the Chicago Policy Review, director of projects and programs at Corioli Institute, and a contributing researcher at Trust After Betrayal. He welcomes collaboration, so feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or at his email, [email protected].
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Way back in 2019, Elizabeth and John were already thinking about collaboration. Here they speak with Jared Green and explore The Electro-Library, a podcast he co-created.
Elizabeth, Jared and John play snippets from a recent Electro-Library episode on the decidedly non-podcasty topic of photographs, and use it as a springboard to discuss the different aesthetic experiences of radio, television, film, reading, audiobooks, and podcasts. Which are the easiest and which the hardest artworks to get lost in? Would Frankenstein’s monster be more popular as a podcaster than as a YouTuber? (The answer to that one seems most likely to be yes).
The conversation then turns to the difference between artworks that slide in at the ear and those that come in by eye. What kind of world-building is going on on Recall This Book? Which podcasts are like a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk and which are more Schubertian, semi-detached and conversational? Then, in Recallable Books, Jared recommends Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Elizabeth recommends the work of Sarah Lewis, and John recommends the Habitat podcast.
Discussed in this episode:
Read the episode here.
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July 1967. After the arrest, beating, and imprisonment of cab driver John Smith by local police, the city of Newark--already a tinderbox, became a hotbed of protest and retaliation. Over five long days, 26 people were killed by police gunfire and hundreds more were injured, thousands arrested, and millions of dollars in property damage was caused. The scars on the city remained for decades.
Bud Lee, a 26-year-old novice photographer for Life magazine, was shooting a portrait of a Wall Street stockbroker when a call came in requesting he leave immediately to cover the civic uprising in Newark, which had already been raging for two days. Lee and Life magazine reporter Dale Wittner arrived in the city late on 14th July. What they found was a majority Black population--already living in deprivation under a thoroughly corrupt local government, and a vicious, authoritarian police force--struggling to maintain some semblance of normalcy under extraordinary circumstances: stores burnt and looted; a city under siege by trigger-happy city and state police; and the young, inexperienced, and exhausted National Guardsmen, sent to patrol it day and night.
The War is Here: Newark 1967 (ZE Books, 2023) documents the several days Bud Lee spent in Newark. These photographs, most of which have never been published, capture life in a city transformed into an urban war zone and killing ground, something Lee would witness first-hand on seeing two policemen shoot a man named Billy Furr in the back, murdering him in cold blood. This, Lee captured in a dramatic sequence of images that ran in Life.
The same bullets also hit and wounded a 12-year-old boy named Joey Bass Jr., who had been playing at a nearby intersection. Lee's stark, emotional image of Bass, lying bleeding and contorted in pain on dirty concrete, ran on the July 28, 1967 cover of Life, sparking a national conversation on race and police violence, and becoming the defining image of the 'long, hot summer' of '67--a summer of fire and fury, protest and rage across the country. Over half a century later, Bud Lee's raw, desolate, and empathetic photographs of the people of Newark, at a turning point in the city's history, continue to resonate: a testament to their resilience and fortitude.
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Explores expressionlessness, inscrutability, and emotional withholding in Black cultural production.
Arguing that inexpression is a gesture that acquires distinctive meanings in concert with blackness, Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression (NYU Press, 2023) tracks instances and meanings of deadpan—a vaudeville term meaning “dead face”—across literature, theater, visual and performance art, and the performance of self in everyday life. Tina Post reveals that the performance of purposeful withholding is a critical tool in the work of black culture makers, intervening in the persistent framing of African American aesthetics as colorful, loud, humorous, and excessive. Beginning with the expressionless faces of mid-twentieth-century documentary photography and proceeding to early twenty-first-century drama, this project examines performances of blackness’s deadpan aesthetic within and beyond black embodiments, including Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, as well as Buster Keaton’s signature character and Steve McQueen’s restitution of the former’s legacy within the continuum of Black cultural production. Through this varied archive, Post reveals how deadpan aesthetics function in and between opacity and fugitivity, minimalism and saturation, excess and insensibility.
Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.
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Photos from the Front Lines follows medics from Falck Alameda County ambulance during one of the most tumultuous years in recent collective memory - 2020. From a global pandemic to demonstrations to wildfires and mass vaccinations, Photos from the Front Lines provides unequalled coverage of this year and beyond from the perspective of those on the front lines every day of the crisis, with a colossal 500 original photos! The use of the term "front line" came about this year to describe personnel who were putting their lives on the line every day during the global COVID-19 pandemic, and medics were at the absolute forefront of this fight; Photos from the Front Lines takes you there with them.
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The relationship between images and truth has a complicated history. In the Western tradition, the Kantian settlement on aesthetic judgment as detached from external interests gave rise to artistic production of images that were read with epistemic authority. But the advent of modernity has at once shaken this certainty and reinforced it. No sooner than we reckoned with the singular history painting and illustrated magazines, we have landed in a mass-media world where any possible image can and does exist.
And the more we are surrounded by images, the greater claims they make. Photographs are not only routinely used to convey news, they are used to establish what is and isn’t true. The crime scene photograph is now as likely to be used in a court of law as in a newspaper infographic explainer. The artifact is at once the evidentiary carrier of truth and a visualisation used to confirm it. It creates meaning and it argues for it
Visual Culture and the Forensic: Culture, Memory, Ethics (Routledge, 2022) bridges practices conventionally understood as forensic, such as crime scene investigation, and the broader field of activity which the forensic now designates, for example, in performance and installation art, or photography. Such work responds to the object-oriented culture associated with the forensic and offers a reassessment of the relationship of human voice and material evidence.
David Houston Jones speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the evidentiary and forensic burden of art and photography, the artifice of crime imaging, the visual traces of data, and the ontology of data and objects.
David Houston Jones is Professor of French and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter.
Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.
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In Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019), Nicholas Brown offers a fresh perspective on aesthetic autonomy and its political value, one of the great debates of the twentieth century. The monograph illustrates the viability of the modernist project in the era after postmodernism while offering one illuminating reading after another of contemporary examples in novels, photography, sculpture, popular music, TV, or movies. Brown defends art as a liberatory force in an age dominated by markets. By exploring the nuances of artistic production, Autonomy is a feast of delicious and insightful appraisals of artwork—with surprising turns and twists—within a larger context of the dialectics between art and market.
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Artist Penelope Umbrico talks about her work, images as currency, and how technology and various platforms herd images. And is photography tyrannical? Umbrico has some thoughts.
Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at our website.
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Alexis L. Boylan is the director of academic affairs of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI) and an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Art and Art History Department and the Africana Studies Institute
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Lesly Deschler Canossi and Zoraida Lopez-Diago's edited volume Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing (Leuven UP, 2022) questions how the Black female body, specifically the Black maternal body, navigates interlocking structures that place a false narrative on her body and that of her maternal ancestors. Drawing on a wide range of scholarly inquiry and contemporary art, this book addresses these misconceptions and fills in the gaps that exist in the photographic representation of Black motherhood, mothering, and mutual care within Black communities.
The essays and interviews, paired with a curated selection of images, address the complicated relationship between Blackness and photography and in particular its gendered dimension, its relationship to health, sexuality, and digital culture - primarily in the context of racialized heteronormativity. This collection, then, challenges racist images and discourses, both historically and in its persistence in contemporary society, while reclaiming the innate brilliance of Black women through personal stories, history, political acts, connections to place, moments of pleasure, and communal celebration.
This visual exploration of Black motherhood through pictures made by Black woman-identifying photographers thus serves as a reflection of the past and a portal to the future and contributes to recent scholarship on the complexity of Black life and Black joy.
This book emerges from the project Women Picturing Revolution.
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In far northeastern Alaska lies one of the most remarkable, and contested, places in North America: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This coastal arctic region is a place of great natural beauty, ecological importance, as well as being home and birthplace of the Gwich'in people. It's also thought to contain massive fossil fuel wealth, making it a site of fifty years and more political contestation.
In the award-winning book, Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, An Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice (UNC Press: 2021), Finis Dunaway explains how Indigenous people teamed up with the activist, photographer, and jazz drummer Lenny Kohm to build a grassroots movement to protect this sacred place from extractive industry. Using a humble photo slide show, Kohm and other activists, both Native people from the region and outsiders, marshaled the power of everyday people to convince critical and powerful actors that this was a place that deserved federal protection. While this fight is ongoing, Dunaway's book shows that sometimes power can be found in unexpected places, and that environmental history is not a simple story of decline and hopelessness.
Defending the Arctic Refuge website and teaching tools are here.
Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.
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Monica Juneja and Sumathi Ramaswamy's Motherland: Pushpamala N.'s 'Woman and Nation' (Roli Books, 2022) examines Motherland, an important series of photo-performances by the acclaimed artist Pushpamala N. on the Indian nation personified as woman, mother, and goddess. The series shows Pushpamala taking on Mother India's myriad personifications: nubile beauty and saintly renunciant; militant goddess wearing a garland of skulls or receiving the ultimate sacrifice of a warrior's head; the mother-surgeon activating the birth of model citizens; and destitute widow, bent from years of abject labor. As she does so, she reveals that nations are invented, as are national embodiments. The artist's burden is to reveal the ingredients of such inventions.
Ujaan Ghosh is a graduate student at the Department of Art History at University of Wisconsin, Madison
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In African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke UP, 2021), Cajetan Iheka examines the ecological footprint of media in Africa alongside the representation of environmental issues in visual culture. Iheka shows how, through visual media such as film, photography, and sculpture, African artists deliver a unique perspective on the socioecological costs of media production, from mineral and oil extraction to the politics of animal conservation. Among other works, he examines Pieter Hugo's photography of electronic waste recycling in Ghana and Idrissou Mora-Kpai's documentary on the deleterious consequences of uranium mining in Niger. These works highlight not only the exploitation of African workers and the vast scope of environmental degradation but also the resourcefulness and creativity of African media makers. They point to the unsustainability of current practices while acknowledging our planet's finite natural resources. In foregrounding Africa's centrality to the production and disposal of media technology, Iheka shows the important place visual media has in raising awareness of and documenting ecological disaster even as it remains complicit in it.
Dr. Cajetan Iheka is a Professor in the English Department at Yale University. Before African Ecomedia he published Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature in 2018, which won two prizes - the Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the African Literature Association First Book Prize. Dr. Iheka has also edited the volume, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media, and co-edited another titled African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space.
Sara Katz is a Postdoctoral Associate in the History Department at Duke University.
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Image by image and hashtag by hashtag, Instagram has redefined the ways we relate to food. Emily J. H. Contois and Zenia Kish’s edited book Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation (published by the University of Illinois Press in 2022) explore the massively popular social media platform as a space for self-identification, influence, transformation, and resistance. Artists and journalists join a wide range of scholars to look at food’s connection to Instagram from vantage points as diverse as Hong Kong’s camera-centric foodie culture, the platform’s long history with feminist eateries, and the photography of Australia’s livestock producers. What emerges is a portrait of an arena where people do more than build identities and influence. Users negotiate cultural, social, and economic practices in a place that, for all its democratic potential, reinforces entrenched dynamics of power.
Interdisciplinary in approach and transnational in scope, Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation offers general readers and experts alike new perspectives on an important social media space and its impact on a fundamental area of our lives.
Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.
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Lessons in resilience in the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in India. Focusing on the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in India between April and December 2021, Rustom Bharucha's timely essay reflects on four interconnected realities that haunted this ongoing crisis--death, grief, mourning, and extinction. How do we cope with multiple deaths and the dislocation of rituals when the act of mourning is either postponed or denied? What roles do political surveillance, censorship, the regulation of lockdowns, and the sheer indifference to the lives of people play in the containment of civil liberties? Through vivid examples of photography, theater, dance, visual arts, and the cultures of everyday life, this meditative essay illuminates both the horror of the pandemic as well as its unexpected intimacies and revelations of shared suffering. Against the destruction of nature and the disrespect for the nonhuman, The Second Wave: Reflections on the Pandemic Through Photography, Performance, and Public Culture (Seagull Books, 2022) offers lessons in resilience through its reflections on the ethos of waiting and the need to re-envision breath as a vital resource of self-renewal and resistance.
Garima Jaju is a Smuts fellow at the University of Cambridge.
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Want to take a trip with the king of the Blues? As B.B. King’s photographer and original biographer, Charlie Sawyer was along for the ride. In B.B. King from Indianola to Icon: A Personal Odyssey with the King of the Blues (Schiffer, 2022), journalist and photographer Charles Sawyer discusses his many years working with and near the greatest of Blues icons, from the early years as King was transitioning to the “Chitlin Circuit” to mainstream audiences to the founding of the B. B. King Museum & Delta Interpretive Center, Sawyer was there for it all, and shares it with us—along with more than 100 photographs.
David Hamilton Golland is professor of history and immediate past president of the faculty senate at Governors State University in Chicago's southland. @DHGolland.
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Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine (U California Press, 2022) is a critical exploration of Jerusalemite chronicler Wasif Jawhariyyeh (1904–1972) and his seven photography albums entitled The Illustrated History of Palestine. Jawhariyyeh’s nine hundred images narrate the rich cultural and political milieu of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine. Nassar, Sheehi, and Tamari locate this archive at the juncture between the history of photography in the Arab world and the social history of Palestine. Shedding new light on this foundational period, the authors explore not just major historical events and the development of an urban bourgeois lifestyle but a social field of vision of Palestinian life as exemplified in the Jerusalem community. Tracking the interplay between photographic images, the authors offer evidence of the unbroken field of material, historical, and collective experience from the living past to the living present of Arab Palestine.
In this podcast we discussed the origins of the book, its methodological approach and what the work of Wasif Jawhariyyeh can tell us about Palestine. The three ways conversation does not just discuss the book, but it serves as a companion and provides a great introduction to the life and work of Wasif Jawhariyyeh.
Roberto Mazza is currently an independent scholar. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Twitter and IG: @robbyref
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The images featured in Splashes (RVB Press, 2018) are characteristic of Gabriel Jones’ approach to making images by capturing the “backdrop”, things behind the original subject. There is a performative element to this series in that Gabriel invited friends to pretend to pose at a party, he focused his camera towards them but not on them which allowed him to actually photography the situations taking place in the background of the scene. The photographs were taken with early cellphone cameras, and have mostly been reframed to show only the situations and compositions that sparked the artist’s interest the most. This tight cropping resulted in highly pixelated images, and Jones applied some retouching techniques to further accentuate the strangeness of the scenes in his collections.
Gabriel photographed the album cover The Suburbs, for Canadian Indie-Rock band Arcade Fire. The album won the 2012 Grammy Award for Best Record Packaging, and 2011Album of the Year. In 2010 and 2014, Jones curated an exhibition called The Pseudonym Project New York / Paris. A series of established and emerging artists– such as Robert Barry, Liam Gillick, Fouad Bouchoucha, Melanie Bonajo, Joseph Marzolla and Jonathan Monk–were invited to create new pieces under pseudonyms. Their real names were disclosed at the end of the exhibition. His photographs have been exhibited in venues such as Photo España Festival; Paris Photo; Galerie Le Château d’Eau, Toulouse; as well as Galleries Michèle Didier, Paris; Priska Juschka Fine Art, New York and Bugdahn und Kaimer, Dusseldorf. He is a faculty member at the Paris College of Art.
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During the early years of photography, settlers around the Pacific World were fascinated with the landscapes of the places they conquered. According to Dr. Jarrod Hore, a postdoctoral researcher and co-director of the New Earth Histories Research Program at the University of New South Wales, wilderness images helped Americans and Australians make sense of the places they were in the process of dispossessing. In Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism (U California Press, 2022), Hore tells the story of six landscape photographers from around the Pacific World and explains how their images of places like the Tasmanian Central Highlands, the Yosemite Valley, and even California's Spanish Missions, helped construct a narrative of wild frontier spaces emptied of people, waiting to be settled and improved by white hands. Hore places these photographers in their context as imperial actors, and in doing so explains how images attempted to legitimize settler colonialism in the American West and elsewhere at the end of the nineteenth century.
Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.
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Alan John Ainsworth's book Sight Readings: Photographers and American Jazz, 1900-1960 (Intellect, 2022) explores the work of a wide range of American photographers attracted to jazz during the period 1900–60. It includes discussions of jazz as a visual subject, its attraction to different types of photographers and offers analysis of why and how they approached the subject in the way they did. While some of these photographers are widely recognized for their work, many African American photojournalists, studio photographers, early twentieth-century émigrés, the Jewish exiles of the 1930s and vernacular snapshots are frequently overlooked. Drawing on ideas from contemporary photographic theory backed up by extensive archival research, this book allows the reader to explore and understand twentieth-century jazz photography in both an engaging and comprehensive fashion.
Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com.
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In Selfie Aesthetics: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art (Duke University Press, 2022) Nicole Erin Morse examines how trans feminine artists use selfies and self-representational art to explore transition, selfhood, and relationality. Morse contends that rather than being understood as shallow emblems of a narcissistic age, selfies can produce politically meaningful encounters between creators and viewers. Through close readings of selfies and other digital artworks by trans feminist artists, Morse details a set of formal strategies they call selfie aesthetics: doubling, improvisation, seriality, and nonlinear temporality. Morse traces these strategies in the work of Zackary Drucker, Vivek Shraya, Tourmaline, Alok Vaid-Menon, Zinnia Jones, and Natalie Wynn, showing how these artists present improvisational identities and new modes of performative resistance by conveying the materialities of trans life. Morse shows how the interaction between selfie creators and viewers constructs collective modes of being and belonging in ways that envision trans feminist futures. By demonstrating the aesthetic depth and political potential of selfie creation, distribution, and reception, Morse deepens understandings of gender performativity and trans experience.
Daniela Meneses Sala is Peruvian Academic and Journalist. She holds an MSc in Gender (Sexuality) from the London School of Economics and Political Science. In October, she is starting a PhD in Latin American Studies at Cambridge University, funded by the Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholars Programme.
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One of the largely untold stories of Orientalism is the degree to which the Middle East has been associated with "deviant" male homosexuality by scores of Western travelers, historians, writers, and artists for well over four hundred years. And this story stands to shatter our preconceptions of Orientalism.
To illuminate why and how the Islamicate world became the locus for such fantasies and desires, Boone deploys a supple mode of analysis that reveals how the cultural exchanges between Middle East and West have always been reciprocal and often mutual, amatory as well as bellicose. Whether examining European accounts of Istanbul and Egypt as hotbeds of forbidden desire, juxtaposing Ottoman homoerotic genres and their European imitators, or unlocking the homoerotic encoding in Persian miniatures and Orientalist paintings, this remarkable study models an ethics of crosscultural reading that exposes, with nuance and economy, the crucial role played by the homoerotics of Orientalism in shaping the world as we know it today.
A contribution to studies in visual culture as well as literary and social history, The Homoerotics of Orientalism (Columbia UP, 2014) draws on primary sources ranging from untranslated Middle Eastern manuscripts and European belles-lettres to miniature paintings and photographic erotica that are presented here for the first time.
Joseph Allen Boone is a professor of English and gender studies at the University of Southern California and the author of Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism and Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Huntington, the Stanford Humanity Center, and the American Council of Learned Societies and has been in residency at the Liguria Center at Bogliasco, the Rockefeller-Bellagio Center, and the Valparaiso Foundation.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter.
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Images of Japanese and Japanese American women can teach us what it meant to be visible at specific moments in history. In Shadow Traces: Seeing Japanese/American and Ainu Women in Photographic Archives (U Illinois Press, 2022), Elena Tajima Creef employs an Asian American feminist vantage point to examine ways of looking at indigenous Japanese Ainu women taking part in the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition; Japanese immigrant picture brides of the early twentieth century; interned Nisei women in World War II camps; and Japanese war brides who immigrated to the United States in the 1950s. Creef illustrates how an against-the-grain viewing of these images and other archival materials offers textual traces that invite us to reconsider the visual history of these women and other distinct historical groups. As she shows, using an archival collection's range as a lens and frame helps us discover new intersections between race, class, gender, history, and photography.
Innovative and engaging, Shadow Traces illuminates how photographs shape the history of marginalized people and outlines a method for using such materials in interdisciplinary research.
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Dr. Rachel Lindsey is Assistant Professor in Saint Louis University’s Department of Theological Studies. She has a Ph.D. and M.A. in American Religion from Princeton University, and a B.A. in Religious Studies from Missouri State University. She is the author of Communion of Shadows: Religion and Photography in Nineteenth Century America from University of North Carolina Press. We discussed Communion of Shadows and her fantastic projects, Lived Religion in the Digital Age and Arch City Religion. You can find Dr. Lindsey’s projects at archcityreligion.org and religioninplace.org.
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Stewart Brand has long been famous if you know who he is, but for many people outside the counterculture, early computing, or the environmental movement, he is perhaps best known for his famous mantra "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." Steve Jobs's endorsement of these words as his code to live by is fitting; Brand has played many roles, but one of the most important is as a model for how to live.
In Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (Penguin, 2022), the contradictions are striking: A blond-haired WASP with a modest family inheritance, Brand went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 1960s he became an artist and a photographer in the thick of the LSD revolution. While tripping on acid on the roof of his building, he envisioned how valuable it would be for humans to see a photograph of the planet they shared from space, an image that in the end landed on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, the defining publication of the counterculture. He married a Native American woman and was committed to protecting indigenous culture, which connected to a broader environmentalist mission that has been a throughline of his life. At the same time, he has outraged purists because of his pragmatic embrace of useful technologies, including nuclear power, in the fight against climate change. The famous tagline promise of his catalog was "Access to Tools"; with rare exceptions, he rejected politics for a focus on direct power. It was no wonder, then, that he was early to the promise of the computer revolution and helped define it for the wider world.
John Markoff was one of a team of New York Times reporters who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He has covered Silicon Valley since 1977, wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993, and broke the story of Google's self-driving car in 2010.
Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).
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Spanning the decades from the rise of photography to the age of the selfie, The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain: From the First Photographs to David Beckham (University of Chicago Press, 2021) traces the complex visual and consumer cultures that shaped masculine beauty in Britain, examining the realms of advertising, health, pornography, psychology, sport, and celebrity culture. Paul R. Deslandes chronicles the shifting standards of male beauty in British culture—from the rising cult of the athlete to changing views on hairlessness—while connecting discussions of youth, fitness, and beauty to growing concerns about race, empire, and degeneracy. From earlier beauty show contestants and youth-obsessed artists, the book moves through the decades into considerations of disfigured soldiers, physique models, body-conscious gay men, and celebrities such as David Beckham and David Gandy who populate the worlds of television and social media. Deslandes calls on historians to take beauty and gendered aesthetics seriously while recasting how we think about the place of physical appearance in historical study, the intersection of different forms of high and popular culture, and what has been at stake for men in “looking good.”
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In the autumn of 2014, the Royal Air Force released blurry video of a missile blowing up a pick-up truck that may have had a weapon attached to its flatbed. This was a lethal form of gesture politics: to send a £9-million bomber from Cyprus to Iraq and back, burning £35,000 an hour in fuel, to launch a smart missile costing £100,000 to destroy a truck or, rather, to create a video that shows it being destroyed. Some lives are ended—it is impossible to tell whose—so that the government can pretend that it taking effective action by creating a high-budget snuff movie. This is killing for show.
Since the Vietnam War the way we see conflict – through film, photographs, and pixels – has had a powerful impact on the political fortunes of the campaign, and the way that war has been conducted. In Killing for Show: Photography, War, and the Media in Vietnam and Iraq (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), Julian Stallabrass tells the story of post-war conflict, how it was recorded and remembered through its iconic photography. Through accounts of events such as My Lai massacre, the violent suppression of insurgent Fallujah, or the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, Stallabrass maps a comprehensive theoretical re-evaluation of the relationship between war, politics and visual culture.
Julian Stallabrass talks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the inescapable complicity of photography and media in warfare, the technical and social evolution of images as lethal weapons, and their changing role as witnesses or propaganda documents.
Julian Stallabrass is an art historian, photographer, curator, and professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.
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Imaging Culture: Photography in Mali, West Africa (Indiana University Press, 2021) is a sociohistorical study of the meaning, function, and aesthetic significance of photography in Mali, West Africa, from the 1930s to the present. Spanning the dynamic periods of colonialism, national independence, socialism, and democracy, its analysis focuses on the studio and documentary work of professional urban photographers, particularly in the capital city of Bamako and in smaller cities such as Mopti and Ségu.
Featuring the work of more than twenty-five photographers, it concentrates on those who have been particularly influential for the local development and practice of the medium as well as its international popularization and active participation in the contemporary art market.
Imaging Culture looks at how local aesthetic ideas are visually communicated in the photographers' art and argues that though these aesthetic arrangements have specific relevance for local consumers, they transcend geographical and cultural boundaries to have value for contemporary global audiences as well.
Imaging Culture is an important and visually interesting book that will become a standard source for those who study African photography and its global impact.
Candace M. Keller is Associate Professor of African Art and Visual Culture in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design at Michigan State University. She also directs the Archive of Malian Photography (amp.matrix.msu.edu) and is Associate Director of Matrix: Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at Michigan State University.
Sara Katz is a Postdoctoral Associate in the History Department at Duke University.
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Joseph W. Ho’s book Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2021) offers a transnational cultural history of US and Chinese communities framed by missionary lenses through time and space―tracing the lives and afterlives of images, cameras, and visual imaginations from before the Second Sino-Japanese War through the first years of the People's Republic of China.
When American Protestant and Catholic missionaries entered interwar China, they did so with cameras in hand. Missions principally aimed at the conversion of souls and the modernization of East Asia, became, by virtue of the still and moving images recorded, quasi-anthropological ventures that shaped popular understandings of and formal foreign policy toward China. Portable photographic technologies changed the very nature of missionary experience, while images that missionaries circulated between China and the United States affected cross-cultural encounters in times of peace and war.
Ho illuminates the centrality of visual practices in the American missionary enterprise in modern China, even as intersecting modernities and changing Sino-US relations radically transformed lives behind and in front of those lenses. In doing so, Developing Mission reconstructs the almost-lost histories of transnational image makers, subjects, and viewers across twentieth-century China and the United States.
Dr. Joseph W. Ho is Assistant Professor of History at Albion College and Center Associate at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan. In addition to his current book, Dr. Ho is the coeditor of War and Occupation in China: The Letters of an American Missionary from Hangzhou, 1937-1938.
Linshan Jiang is Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests are modern and contemporary literature, film, and popular culture in mainland China, Taiwan and Japan; trauma and memory studies; gender and sexuality studies; queer studies; as well as comparative literature and translation studies.
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Jack Robinson made his name as a much-sought-after fashion and celebrity photographer during the 1960s and early 1970s, and his work is well documented in hundreds of pages of Vogue, the New York Times, and Life, as well as other publications. However, his personal life remains virtually unknown. In this study of Robinson and his photography, Howard Philips Smith takes an in-depth look at Robinson’s early life in New Orleans, where he discovered his passion for painting, photography, and the Dixie Bohemian life of the French Quarter.
A Sojourn in Paradise: Jack Robinson in 1950s New Orleans (UP of Mississippi, 2020) features more than one hundred photographs taken by the artist, accompanied by detailed commentary about Robinson’s life in New Orleans and excerpts from interviews with the people who knew him when he lived there. Robinson’s photographs of New Orleans reveal the genesis of two unique and fascinating facets of the city’s history and culture: the creation of the first gay Carnival krewes who would make their own unique contribution to the rich cultural history of the city and the formation of the Orleans Gallery, one of the earliest centers of the contemporary art movement blossoming in 1950s America. This detailed study of Jack Robinson’s early life and photography illustrates the contributions of a gifted, gay artist whose quiet spirit and constant interior struggle found refuge in New Orleans, the city where he was able to find himself, for a time, free from society’s grip and open to exploring life on his own terms.
Other interviews by Isabel Machado with Howard Philips Smith:
Southern Decadence in New Orleans
Unveiling the Muse The Lost History of Gay Carnival in New Orleans
Isabel Machado is Research Associate with the SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture hosted by the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture at the University of Johannesburg.
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Photographers and their images were critical to the making of Mozambique, first as a colony of Portugal and then as independent nation at war with apartheid in South Africa. When the Mozambique Liberation Front came to power, it invested substantial human and financial resources in institutional structures involving photography, and used them to insert the nation into global debates over photography's use. The materiality of the photographs created had effects that neither the colonial nor postcolonial state could have imagined.
Filtering Histories: The Photographic Bureaucracy in Mozambique, 1960 to Recent Times (U Michigan Press, 2021) tells a history of photography alongside state formation to understand the process of decolonization and state development after colonial rule. At the center of analysis are an array of photographic and illustrated materials from Mozambique, South Africa, Portugal, and Italy. Thompson recreates through oral histories and archival research the procedures and regulations that engulfed the practice and circulation of photography. If photographers and media bureaucracy were proactive in placing images of Mozambique in international news, Mozambicans were agents of self-representation, especially when it came to appearing or disappearing before the camera lens. Drawing attention to the multiple images that one published photograph may conceal, Filtering Histories introduces the popular and material formations of portraiture and photojournalism that informed photography's production, circulation, and archiving in a place like Mozambique. The book reveals how the use of photography by the colonial state and the liberation movement overlapped, and the role that photography played in the transition of power from colonialism to independence.
Drew A. Thompson is Assistant Professor of Historical and Africana Studies and Director of Africana Studies, Bard College.
Sara Katz is a postdoctoral associate in the history department at Duke University.
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Snapshots of the Soul: Photo-Poetic Encounters in Modern Russian Culture (Cornell UP, 2021) considers how photography has shaped Russian poetry from the early twentieth century to the present day. Drawing on theories of the lyric and the elegy, the social history of technology, and little-known archival materials, Molly Thomasy Blasing offers close readings of poems by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Joseph Brodsky, and Bella Akhmadulina, as well as by the late and post-Soviet poets Andrei Sen-Sen'kov, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, and Kirill Medvedev, to understand their fascination with the visual language, representational power, and metaphorical possibilities offered by the camera and the photographic image.
Within the context of long-standing anxieties about the threat that visual media pose to literary culture, Blasing finds that these poets were attracted to the affinities and tensions that exist between the lyric or elegy and the snapshot. Snapshots of the Soul reveals that at the core of each poet's approach to writing the photograph is the urge to demonstrate the superior ability of poetic language to capture and convey human experience.
Molly T. Blasing holds degrees in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University (AB, 2002) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (MA, 2006; PHD, 2014). After teaching at Florida State University, Wellesley College, and Oberlin College, she joined the faculty of the University of Kentucky as Assistant Professor of Russian Studies in 2014 and was promoted to Associate Professor in July 2021.
Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.
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In the last two decades, amid the global spread of smartphones, state killings of civilians have increasingly been captured on the cameras of both bystanders and police. Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine (Stanford UP, 2021) studies this phenomenon from the vantage point of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Here, cameras have proliferated as political tools in the hands of a broad range of actors and institutions, including Palestinian activists, Israeli soldiers, Jewish settlers, and human rights workers. All trained their lens on Israeli state violence, propelled by a shared dream: that advances in digital photography-closer, sharper, faster-would advance their respective political agendas. Most would be let down.
Drawing on ethnographic work, Rebecca L. Stein chronicles Palestinian video-activists seeking justice, Israeli soldiers laboring to perfect the military's image, and Zionist conspiracy theorists accusing Palestinians of "playing dead." Writing against techno-optimism, Stein investigates what camera dreams and disillusionment across these political divides reveal about the Israeli and Palestinian colonial present, and the shifting terms of power and struggle in the smartphone age.
Mathew Gagné in an independent writer, scholar, and educator, currently teaching in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Mississauga.
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Today I talk to Mark Beehre about his new book, A Queer Existence, published by Massey University Press New Zealand 2021.
A Queer Existence is a major documentary project that uses photographic portraiture and oral history to record the life experiences of a group of twenty-seven gay men born since the passing of the Homosexual Law Reform Act in 1986. In New Zealand, discrimination in work was outlawed in 1993, same-sex relationships were granted legal recognition in 2005, and marriage equality followed in 2013. In 2018 Parliament apologised to those whose lives had been blighted by criminal prosecution for expressing their sexuality.
As a result, these men have life experiences very different to earlier generations of gay New Zealand men. Even so, gay men growing up today may continue to feel stigmatised, and for many coming out is still a major hurdle. Candid, powerful and affecting, the first-person narratives of A Queer Existence form a valuable and unique insight into how gay men continue to have to step out of the mainstream and face their own challenges as they forge their queer identities.
Mark Beehre initially trained as a specialist physician and worked for several years in medical practice before studying photography at the Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland and Massey University. If you want to explore the fantastic work by Mark Beehre, please visit http://www.markbeehre.co.nz/
Ed Amon is a Master of Indigenous Studies Candidate at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, a columnist at his local paper: Hibiscus Matters, and a Stand-up Comedian. His main interests are indigenous studies, politics, history, and cricket. Follow him on twitter @edamoned or email him at [email protected]
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Photography emerged in the 1840s in the United States, and it became a visual medium that documents the harsh realities of enslavement. Similarly, the photography culture grew during the Civil War, and it became an important material that archived this unprecedented war. Deborah Willis's The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (New York University Press, 2021) contains rarely seen letters and diary notes from Black men and women and photographs of Black soldiers who fought and died in this war. These ninety-nine images reshape African American narratives. The Black Civil War Soldier offers an opportunity to experience the war through their perspectives.
N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates.
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The legendary Magnum photo agency has long been associated with heroic lone wolf male photographers such as Frank Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, roaming the world in search of the “decisive moment” – the perfect shot that captured the essence of a major news story. Nadya Bair’s highly original book The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (University of California Press 2020) argues that this idealized portrayal of Magnum occludes the larger networks within which these photographers operated, including the crucial roles performed by often female office staff, by picture editors and corporate clients. She sets out to show that right from the outset, Magnum was also a business operation, one that pioneered modern ideas of branding borrowed from advertising agencies and commercial partners.
Drawing on extensive archival work and including numerous images of photo page spreads, The Decisive Network presents Magnum in a novel and distinctive light, as the framer of new global imaginaries that reflected the evolution of post-war capitalism.
Nadya Bair is an assistant professor of art history at Hamilton College
For digital explorations of the Magnum network, see Nadya’s fascinating website.
Duncan McCargo is an eclectic, internationalist political scientist and literature buff: his day job is directing the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Learn more here, here, here, and here.
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It’s hard to imagine a place more central to American mythology today than Silicon Valley. To outsiders, the region glitters with the promise of extraordinary wealth and innovation. But behind this image lies another Silicon Valley, one segregated by race, class, and nationality in complex and contradictory ways. Its beautiful landscape lies atop underground streams of pollutants left behind by decades of technological innovation, and while its billionaires live in compounds, surrounded by redwood trees and security fences, its service workers live in their cars.
With arresting photography and intimate stories, Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America (U Chicago Press, 2021) makes this hidden world visible. Instead of young entrepreneurs striving for efficiency in minimalist corporate campuses, we see portraits of struggle—families displaced by an impossible real estate market, workers striving for a living wage, and communities harmed by environmental degradation. If the fate of Silicon Valley is the fate of America—as so many of its boosters claim—then this book gives us an unvarnished look into the future.
Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future.
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The People's Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America (Reaktion Books, 2020) is a beautifully written and groundbreaking historical study of homemade, handmade and amateur pornographic artifacts. Covering everything from erotic scrimshaw to amateur videos on the web, Lisa Sigel offers a fascinating account of what ordinary people thought about sexuality and desire. This hidden chapter of American sexual history is not only a much-needed counterbalance to ahistorical arguments which dominate pornography today, it’s also a reminder of humanity’s prodigious tendency to create and communicate sexual desires. At times, the images and objects presented in this book might appear shocking, crude, grotesque, problematic, confrontational, unrestrained, unruly; but in the end they are deeply human.
Zachary Lowell holds an MA in global studies from Humboldts Universtität zu Berlin.
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Today I talked to Jessica Helfand about her new book Face: A Visual Odyssey (MIT Press, 2019)
Helfand is a designer, artist, and author. She’s taught at Yale University for more than 20 years, cofounded Design Observer, and has had additional roles at a variety of institutions ranging from the American Academy in Rome to the California Institute of Technology.
We’ve always visited churches and museums to gaze at faces. So what’s now changed? Today, about two billion images get uploaded daily to social media – of which nearly 100 million are estimated to be selfies. As Daniel Boorstin presaged in his seminal 1962 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, we’ve become consumed as a culture by our own self-reflections. In this episode, Helfand guides listeners through everything from caricatures (i.e., loaded portraits), to Facebook and selfie-sticks hitting the mainstream in 2006, to how now every third photograph taken by people from 18 to 24 years of age is of themselves. From the question of who’s behind the camera to othering as part of biased behavior, this episode has it all as, indeed, do faces as an enduring centerpiece to how we judge ourselves and others.
Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.
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What do startling photographic images of state violence from events such as the 6 October 1976 massacre at Thammasat University tell us about the nature of human rights in Thailand?
In conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo, Karin Zackari of Lund University discusses some of the key themes that emerge from her doctoral thesis, the first study to view egregious episodes of human rights violations in Thailand through a photographic lens. Karin talks about some of the iconic images she studied, the challenges of tracking down archival sources, and how a recent online project is now making some of these important materials more accessible (see https://doct6.com/).
Karin Zackari defended her PhD thesis entitled Framing the Subject: Human Rights and Photography in Contemporary Thai History at Lund University in September 2020. You can download her thesis here.
The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University.
We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.
About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk
Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast
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Defining the Chief Executive via flash powder and selfie sticks. In this episode, Dr. Lee M. Pierce (they & she) interviews Dr. Cara A. Finnegan about Photographic Presidents: Making History from Daguerreotype to Digital (University of Illinois Press, 2021).
Lincoln's somber portraits. Lyndon Johnson's swearing in. George W. Bush's reaction to learning about the 9/11 attacks. Photography plays an indelible role in how we remember and define American presidents. Throughout history, presidents have actively participated in all aspects of photography, not only by sitting for photos but by taking and consuming them. Cara A. Finnegan ventures from a newly-discovered daguerreotype of John Quincy Adams to Barack Obama's selfies to tell the stories of how presidents have participated in the medium's transformative moments. As she shows, technological developments not only changed photography, but introduced new visual values that influence how we judge an image. At the same time, presidential photographs--as representations of leaders who symbolized the nation--sparked public debate on these values and their implications. An original journey through political history, Photographic Presidents reveals the intertwined evolution of an American institution and a medium that continues to define it.
Have questions or comments? Connect with your host, Dr. Lee M. Pierce, on social media and Gmail @rhetoriclee or with guest author, Dr. Cara Finnegan on Twitter.
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Chemistry is not just about microscopic atoms doing inscrutable things; it is the process that makes flowers and galaxies. We rely on it for bread-baking, vegetable-growing, and producing the materials of daily life. In stunning images and illuminating text, this book captures chemistry as it unfolds. Using such techniques as microphotography, time-lapse photography, and infrared thermal imaging, The Beauty of Chemistry: Art, Wonder, and Science (MIT Press, 2021) shows us how chemistry underpins the formation of snowflakes, the science of champagne, the colors of flowers, and other wonders of nature and technology. We see the marvelous configurations of chemical gardens; the amazing transformations of evaporation, distillation, and precipitation; heat made visible; and more.
Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].
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On the evening of May 31, 1921, thousands of white Oklahomans assaulted the Greenwood District of the city of Tulsa. In what would come to be known as the Tulsa Race Massacre, dozens of Black residents were killed and thousands more displaced as armed whites looted their homes and businesses before burning them to the ground.
Karlos K. Hill’s The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History (University of Oklahoma Press, 2021) provides a visual record of the attack upon the community and the destruction it wrought upon the neighborhood, along with pictures of the aftermath and the testimony of the survivors.
As Hill’s images reveal, Greenwood had established itself as the most prosperous Black community in the United States prior to the massacre. This prosperity was a source of resentment for many whites, and fueled much of the anger reflected in the massacre. Yet Hill’s photos also reveal the resilience of a community, as in the aftermath of the devastation the residents of Greenwood rallied to rebuild much of what had been destroyed, serving as a foundation for further prosperity in the decades that followed.
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What does it mean to tie your cloth to that of another person, as in the Ghanaian tradition, or to be in full dress? How is fashion photography in a colonial and decolonial context more than just a "look" but in fact a looking and a looking at?
Join author Catherine McKinley (she/her) and host Lee M. Pierce (they) for a discussion of these provocative questions in the context of fashion photography by and about pan-African women from the 1870s to the 1970s.
Most of us grew up with images of African women that were purely anthropological—bright displays of exotica where the deeper personhood seemed tucked away. Or they were chronicles of war and poverty—“poverty porn.” But now, curator Catherine E. McKinley draws on her extensive collection of historical and contemporary photos, spanning the 150-year arc of photography on the continent, to tell a different story of African women: how deeply cosmopolitan and modern they are in their style; how they were able to reclaim the tools of the colonial oppression that threatened their selfhood and livelihoods.
Featuring works by celebrated African masters, African studios of local legend, and anonymous artists, The African Lookbook: A Visual History of 100 Years of African Womanhood (Bloomsbury, 2021) captures the dignity, playfulness, austerity, grandeur, and fantasy-making of African women across centuries. McKinley also features photos by Europeans—most starkly, striking nudes—revealing the relationships between white men and the black female sitters where, at best, a grave power imbalance lies. It’s a bittersweet truth that when there is exploitation there can also be profound resistance expressed in unexpected ways—even if it’s only in gazing back. These photos tell the story of how the sewing machine and the camera became powerful tools for women’s self-expression, revealing a truly glorious display of everyday beauty.
Discussion welcome! Connect with author Catherine McKinley on Instagram @the_african_lookbook and the_mckinley_collection and host Lee M. Pierce on Gmail, Instagram and Twitter @rhetoriclee.
Special thanks to Oslo-based Norwegian-Nigerian artist Frida Orupado (nemieppeba) for contributing a series of collages to the work to deepen the way in which we engage the original photos and their histories.
If you enjoyed this interview you may also enjoy New Books Network interviews with Anne Cheng about Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson about Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World.
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This book began as a bet between a father and son: could Richard White, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University and renowned historian of the American West, tell a complete history of California through photographs taken by his son, the photographer Jesse Amble White? As he tells it, no - Richard White lost that bet to Jesse. But the resulting book they created together, California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History (Norton, 2020), is nonetheless an engrossing read. Taking Jesse's photographs as touchstones for the meeting places between myth and history, White tracks the history of California through the moment of Sir Francis Drake's landing in the 16th century (though where exactly that landing took place is a matter of some debate), all the way to the water crises engulfing the state now in the early 21st century. Along the way, Richard and Jesse both show and tell stories of Indigenous California, of settlement and agriculture, and of research libraries blocking entry to sensitive material. If California history is American history in microcosm, California Exposures argues that history needs to be seen to be believed.
Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.
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In Visual Worlds: Looking, Images, Visual Disciplines (Oxford University Press, 2020), James Elkins and Erna Fiorentini provide a full introduction to the visual world across all the fields that theorize it. In contrast with typical visual culture texts, their book looks beyond the arts, taking a comparative approach that considers a number of fields, including art history and theory but also epistemology, ontology, vision science, neurology, cognitive psychology, law, advertising, medicine, warfare, and more. Intended for first-year university students from diverse backgrounds, Visual Worlds presents a broad array of examples and covers a wide range of topics in short, thematic chapters which offer instructors great flexibility. By focusing on different modes of looking, the book shows students how seeing can change depending on the object that is seen and on its interpretation by an individual.
Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.
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When Camille Melissa emigrated to the UK from Australia via Paris and entered the sex industry in 2005, she always knew that photography would play a crucial role as she navigated the complex structures – both visible and invisible – of this misrepresented community. The rhetoric surrounding sex work is often frustratingly one-dimensional in mainstream media; those who enter the industry are somehow ‘damaged’, labourers of the patriarchy, powerless individuals who need saving from themselves. Sex work activists continue to challenge the victim narrative forced upon them, across politics, film and art.
Camille is one such activist. She started her online platform Whoretography as a way of examining the intersection of images, technologies, society and the sex workers’ rights movement. As ‘a visual activist platform and a sex work positive publishing house’, Whoretography seeks to answer two fundamental questions: Is it possible to reclaim the word ‘whore’ through creative practice as research? What role does photography play in contemporary online sexual consumption?
“The easy availability of information on the internet has revolutionised the industry’s marketing techniques and its verbal and visual vocabulary,” Camille says, “Digital photographs are now fundamental to the transaction of sex. Photography needs to form a greater part of the sex work discussion; I have learned how negatively impactful photography can be in presenting sex workers as different from and less than other people.”
Camille's Twitter handle is @Whoretography and her website with more information about her ebooks is https://thephotographictheoris... and will be online from May
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Everyone will lose someone they love at some point in their life; a spouse, a parent, or a child. Having to deal with the clothes or personal effects that remain can be a heartbreaking experience. It is a challenge: what is one to do with all the small and large items that made up the material life of the one who’s gone - store them in the attic? Discard them? Donate them to charity or call the junkman?
In his recently released book, Heirlooms: Memory and Cherished Objects, artist and writer Jay Garfinkel found another way. His unique book contains photographs of the personal effects of victims of terror attacks in Israel. He gave the families a way to preserve a piece of their legacy through a fine art photograph of their cherished object.
The subtitle of the book, Memory and Cherished Objects, was selected, says Garfinkel, because "the person we have lost will not make any new memories, so we need to create a space for them in our life. Heirlooms create a space where memory happens.”
The American-Israeli artist Jay Garfinkel tragically lost his son in middle age. His response was to create a dozen fine art photographs of his son's most treasured possessions that stirred memories. His exhibit-sized prints freed him to throw away everything else. It gave him some comfort. But real comfort came after he agreed to work with OneFamily, an Israeli NGO that assists families affected by terror and war. Over a period of 14 months, he met with 33 Israel families whose loved ones were murdered in terror attacks—and with their cooperation, he selected an object of the deceased, which he then documented as a still life photograph.
Heirlooms: Memory and Cherished Objects describes his journey meeting families of diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds in different parts of the country. Garfinkel recorded intimate conversations about love, loss, and finding one's equilibrium by helping others find their way.
Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at [email protected].
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Maybe the People Would Be the Times (Verse Chorus Press, 2020) could be described as a memoir in essay form. Collecting pieces from the past two decades, this book covers Luc Sante's childhood as an immigrant from Belgium, his engagement with the downtown arts scene that gave rise to punk, and the eventual downfall of a version of New York that may have been dangerous but certainly allowed space for creative experimentation, even failure. It also includes essays covering sideshow photography, detective fiction, and experimental film, and profiles of figures including Barbara Epstein, H.P. Lovecraft, and Vivian Maier. As Sante says in this interview, in the war between poetry and prose he is a non-combatant: these essays often read as prose poems in the deep lyricism and experimentation with form.
Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.
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Folklorist Robert L. Stone presents a rare collection of high-quality documentary photos of the sacred steel guitar musical tradition and the community that supports it. The introductory text and extended photo captions in Can’t Nobody Do Me Like Jesus! Photographs from the Sacred Steel Community (University of Mississippi Press, 2020) offer the reader an intimate view of this unique tradition of passionately played music that is beloved among fans of American roots music and admired by folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and other scholars.
In 1992, a friend in Hollywood, Florida, introduced Stone to African American musicians who played the electric steel guitar in the African American Holiness-Pentecostal churches House of God and Church of the Living God. With the passion, skill, and unique voice they brought to the instruments, these musicians profoundly impressed Stone. He produced an album for the Florida Folklife Program, which Arhoolie Records licensed and released worldwide. It created a roots music sensation.
In 1996, Stone began to document the tradition beyond Florida. He took the photos in this book from 1992 to 2008 in Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Mississippi, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida, and at concerts in Italy. The images capture musicians as they play for worship services before spirit-filled believers singing, dancing, shouting, praying, and testifying. Stone gives the viewer much to witness, always presenting his passionate subjects with dignity. His sensitive portrayal of this community attests to the ongoing importance of musical traditions in African American life and worship.
Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.
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Paola Bonifazio’s The Photoromance. A Feminist Reading of Popular Culture (MIT Press, 2020) is the first feminist reading of photoromances that examines both its industry and its fandom, arguing for their relevance as transmedia narratives in a transnational market. The photoromance, a form of graphic storytelling that uses photographs instead of drawings, reached a readership of millions in the 1960s. Despite its popularity, the photoromance was—and still is—widely scorned as a medium, and its largely female audience derided as naïve, pathetic, and uneducated. Bonifazio reframes and problematizes the “natural” association between this genre and the female readers, claiming that the photoromance is relevant to both feminism and media culture. She investigates how female readers powered the Italian photoromance’s industry success and discusses the photoromance as the precursor of the phenomenon of convergence culture—as in the case of Senso, a photoromance inspired by director Luchino Visconti’s Senso.
Nicoletta Marini Maio is professor of Italian and Film Studies at Dickinson College.
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In his latest authoritative book, Journeys Through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky (Duke University Press, 2020) Russian scholar, photographer, and chronicler of Russian architecture William Craft Brumfield frames the life and work of pioneering color photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1863-1944), while also putting his own magisterial career into sharp perspective. Brumfield updates and interprets several of Prokudin-Gorsky’s iconic images with his own late twentieth and early twenty-first century versions, and the result is an extraordinary study of two photographers and two Russias.
Prokudin-Gorsky was a polymath, inventor, explorer, entrepreneur, and eminently talented photographer, who pursued an over-arching goal of bringing color to the emerging technology of photography. Prokudin-Gorsky combined a strong grounding in both the science and the arts, which gave him easy mastery over the technology. But he was also a gifted entrepreneur, able to see the vast mainstream potential of photography, and throughout his career, he championed the rights of photographers and led the industry in its professional development. From the beginning of his professional life, he pursued his goal to produce color photography, but throughout his career, he was a vocal champion for his colleagues, assuming the editorship of Russia’s “Amateur Photography,” and campaigning successfully for photographers to assert ownership of their work.
Prokudin-Gorsky’s groundbreaking use of glass slides to produce color soon came to the attention of the Imperial Family — passionate shutterbugs themselves — and Prokudin-Gorsky secured an invitation to present his slides to Nicholas II. The tsar became a staunch supporter of Prokudin-Gorsky, ordering the Minister of Ways and Communications to furnish Prokudin-Gorsky with a specially designed railway car for his laboratory, and access to river transport. The tsar also gave Prokudin-Gorsky an enviable laissez-passer for the entire empire, and an order that enabled the photographer to solicit aid from all government officials. For the next six years, Prokudin-Gorsky traveled throughout Imperial Russia on several regional expeditions, sponsored by the Ministry of Ways and Communications, capturing the emerging industrial might of the empire. But along the way, he also captured the natural beauty of Russia’s wilder corners: the majestic Caucasus, the arid desert of Central Asia, and the dense forests of the Urals.
Did Prokudin-Gorsky understand that he was documenting a world that would soon disappear? For disappear it soon did, and Prokudin-Gorsky fled Russia in 1918, bringing with him thousands of color slides. Fast forward half a century, and enter William Craft Brumfield, who began documenting Russia’s architecture in the 1970s. He was a natural choice to curate a public exhibition of Prokudin-Gorsky’s collection for the Library of Congress in 1986, and his association with the Library and the collection has continued to this day. “Journeys Through the Russian Empire” is the magnificent culmination of this decades-long collaboration.
William Craft Brumfield is the foremost Western expert on Russian architecture, and taught at some world’s most renowned centers of Slavic studies, including Harvard, Tulane, and the Pushkin Institute. In 2019, in recognition of Brumfield’s contribution to Russian culture, President Putin awarded him with Russia’s highest honor for a foreigner: The Order of Friendship.
Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Pocket Guide to Russian History.
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Psychotherapy offices are typically thought of as existing in the background of treatment, but they are brought to the foreground in Mark Gerald’s new book In the Shadow of Freud’s Couch: Portraits of Psychoanalysts in Their Office (Routledge, 2020). In this beautifully written book, illustrated with pictures of psychoanalysts in their offices from around the world, psychoanalyst and photographer Mark Gerald explores the stories offices tell about their holders and their role in the transformations experienced by patients. In our interview, we discuss why he became involved in this decades-long photography project and what he learned along the way about the powerful interface of psyche and physical space.
Mark Gerald is a practicing psychoanalyst and trained photographer based in the USA who has written, presented, and taught widely about the visual dimension of psychoanalysis. He is a faculty member of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies, the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, and the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy.
Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute in Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York City and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group; and faculty at Florida Psychoanalytic Institute in Miami. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge).
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Captive elephants exhibit what biologists refer to as stereotypy, which includes rhythmic rocking, head bobbing, stepping back and forth, and pacing.
Colleen Plumb traveled to over seventy zoos in the US and Europe, and created video featuring dozens of captive elephants in their small enclosures. She has photographed her guerrilla public projections of the video in over 100 locations worldwide.
Thirty Times a Minute (Radius Books, 2020) includes a selection of these photos, along with nine contributions from animal rights activists and scientists, in order to examine the way animals in captivity function as colonialist symbols of human domination over nature.
Colleen Plumb is a Chicago based artist who makes photographs and videos that explore the ambivalence and contradiction in our relationships with non-human animals.
Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.
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La Batea is an unconventional book. A collaboration between anthropologist Elizabeth Ferry and her photographer brother Stephen, it combines text and images to paint a picture of the lives of small-scale miners in Colombia in a unique and powerful way. Moreover, the book is physically designed to pull the reader into the topic. Cardboard covers, a specially-chosen paper, and carefully designed chosen fonts provide a unique experience which is topped off by the small piece of gold embedded in the cover.
In this episode of the podcast, Alex Golub talks with Stephen and Elizabeth Ferry about the design, photography, and text of this book. They also talk about the Kickstarter they ran to create the book, and their decision to produce both Spanish and English language versions that were affordable for local communities. Other questions include: What is it like to write a book with your sibling? How elemental a human experience is mining?
La Batea is available in English from Red Hook Publications and in Spanish from Icono Editorial.
Stephen Ferry is a non-fiction photographer who covers social and political change, human rights, and the environment. His books include I Am Rich Potosí: The Mountain that Eats Men (Monacelli, 1999) and Violentology: A Manual of the Colombian Conflict (Umbrage/Icono, 2012). He has received grants and fellowships from the National Geographic Expeditions Council, the Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Preservation, among others.
Elizabeth Ferry is a professor of anthropology at Brandeis University, with interests in value, materiality, mining, and finance, and with fieldwork emphases in Mexico, Colombia, and the United States. Her books include Not Ours Alone: Patrimony, Value and Collectivity in Contemporary Mexico (Columbia University Press, 2005) and Minerals, Collecting and Value Across the U.S.-Mexican Border (Indiana University Press, 2013).
Alex Golub is a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He studies gold mining in Papua New Guinea and is the author of the open access article "Mining" in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology.
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James West speaks with Erik Gellman, an associate professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, about his new book Troublemakers: Chicago Freedom Struggles Through the Lens of Art Shay (University of Chicago Press, 2020).
Fusing photography and history to demonstrate how racial and economic inequality gave rise to a decades-long struggle for justice in one of America's most iconic cities, Gellman challenges us to consider: what does democracy look like? And when should we cause trouble to pursue it? This innovative collaboration provides a timely look at how social conflict can shape a city - and may even inspire readers to pursue their own forms of 'good' trouble.
E. James West is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in American History at Northumbria University, Newcastle. He is the author of Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (Illinois, 2020)
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In the middle of the twentieth century, a newspaper photographer who went by the name of Weegee took memorable pictures of New York City’s street life that appeared everywhere from tabloid newspapers to seminars on the history of photography. Christopher Bonanos’ book Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous (Henry Holt and Company, 2018), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, tells the story of his life from his childhood as an immigrant street kid on the Lower East Side to his years photographing murder scenes to his experiments with caricatures of celebrities. As Bonanos observes, Weegee “very early on grasped that the distinction between high culture and low culture was growing blurry.” Out of that insight he made a career and a body of work that tell us a lot about New York City, its journalism, and photography.
Robert W. Snyder, professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers-University-Newark and Manhattan Borough Historian, is the author of Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York and co-author of All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants and the Making of New York. He can be reached at [email protected].
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Photographs play a hugely influential but largely unexamined role in the practice of landscape architecture and design. Through a diverse set of essays and case studies, this seminal text unpacks the complex relationship between landscape architecture and photography. It explores the influence of photographic seeing on the design process by presenting theoretical concepts from photography and cultural theory through the lens of landscape architecture practice to create a rigorous, open discussion.
Beautifully illustrated in full color throughout, with over 200 images, Anne Godfrey's Active Landscape Photography: Theoretical Groundwork for Landscape Architecture (Routledge, 2020) covers a variety of topics: the diversity of everyday photographic practices for design decision making, the perception of landscape architecture through photography, transcending the objective and subjective with photography, and deploying multiplicity in photographic representation as a means to better represent the complexity of the discipline. Rather than solving problems and providing tidy solutions to the ubiquitous relationship between photography and landscape architecture, this book aims to invigorate a wider dialogue about photography's influence on how landscapes are understood, valued and designed. Active photographic practices are presented throughout for professionals, academics, students and researchers.
Anne Godfrey is an award winning professor of landscape architecture in both teaching and research at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
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Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)
Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.
John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at [email protected] and @johnwphd.
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Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day.
The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.
Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia).
Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
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Performance / Media / Art / Culture: Selected Essays 1983-2018 (Intellect Books, 2019) collects more than thirty years of critical writing by artist and writer Jacki Apple. These essays trace important developments in performance art both in the Los Angeles and New York scenes, discuss artists including Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray, Meredith Monk, and Lin Hixson, and track cultural shifts such as the culture wars of the 1980s, the emergence of left-wing censorship in the 1990s, and the emerging ecological consciousness of today. An essential monument to performance practices that often left behind few records and produced scant archives but radically reshaped performance in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Andy Boyd is a playwright and podcaster.
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The fact that secrecy and the concealment of information is important in today’s China is hardly a secret in itself, yet the ways that this secrecy is structured and sustained in such a vast society is not especially well understood. A lot more must be at play than simply the PRC state’s vast censorship apparatus when it comes to obscuring everything from the leadership’s private lives to dark chapters of country’s recent history.
Margaret Hillenbrand’s Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China (Duke University Press, 2020) sheds unique light on the operation of what she calls China’s culture of ‘public secrecy’. Focusing on the storied afterlives and artistic re-purposings of photographic images from key junctures of China’s twentieth-century – the Nanjing Massacre, the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square protests – Hillenbrand shows how they expose the subtle contours of what it is permissible and what impermissible to know. The book’s highly original and at times haunting exploration of photographic afterlives in art, literature and online offers up a nuanced but also forceful picture of how secrecy reigns in the PRC, and indeed beyond.
Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups.
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Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction.
The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more.
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How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike.
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If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you.
Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that.
Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to [email protected].
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Alex Lichtenstein, Associate Professor of History at Indiana University, discusses his new book with co-author Rick Halpern, Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid (Indiana University Press, 2016) photojournalism, and writing transnational histories of labor and social justice movements.
As a photographer for Life and Fortune magazines, Margaret Bourke-White traveled to Russia in the 1930s, photographed the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1938, and recorded the liberation of Buchenwald at the end of WWII. In 1949, Life sent her to South Africa to take photographs in a country that was becoming racially polarized by white minority rule. Life published two photo-essays highlighting Bourke-White’s photographs, but much of her South African work remained unpublished until now. Here, these stunning photographs collected by Alex Lichtenstein and Rick Halpern offer an unparalleled visual record of white domination in South Africa during the early days of apartheid. In addition to these powerful and historically significant photographs, Lichtenstein and Halpern include two essays that explore Bourke-White's artistic and political formation and provide background material about the cultural, political, and economic circumstances that produced the rise and triumph of Afrikaner nationalism in South Africa. This richly illustrated book brings to light a large body of photography from a major American photographer and offers a compelling history of a reprehensible system of racial conflict and social control that Bourke-White took such pains to document.
Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.
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As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it.
How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in.
Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at [email protected].
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With the threats of sea water warming and ocean acidification, coral reefs have become both a fire alarm and a barometer for the dangers of human induced climate change. We now face the possibility of a world without coral. In this cogent and timely work, Ann Elias interrogates how we came to know coral reefs in the way we do and the complicity of this knowing with the forms of modernity that now threaten to destroy them. Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity (Duke UP, 2019) traces the work and lives of two iconic coral photographers of the interwar period – Frank Hurley and J.E. Williamson – who introduced Western audiences to (respectively) the Great Barrier Reef off Australia and the reefs off the Bahamas. Both self-fashioned men of science and entertainers with an eye for spectacle, Hurley and Williamson not only brought the “flowers of the sea” into consumer life, but also tethered them to the tropical exoticism that underpinned colonialism, racism, and the domination of nature. For audiences in Australia, Europe, and the US, their photographs primed postwar consumption of tropical nature through tourism and entertainment. By unweaving how these images were produced, Elias illustrates that how we know the sea is deeply entwined with the values, ethics, and logics of human politics.
Ann Elias is Associate Professor of the History and Theory of Contemporary Global Art at the University of Sydney.
Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. More at http://empiresprogeny.org.
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The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all.
Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).
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What’s the first image that comes to mind when you hear the words “Paris” and “photography”? Is it a famous photo, perhaps an Atget, Brassai, or Doisneau? In her new book, Paris and the Cliché of History: The City in Photographs, 1860-1970 (Oxford UP, 2018), Catherine Clark explores the history of how and why photographic images have been central to understanding and imagining the city’s present and past, figuring profoundly in the representation and documentation of change over time in the French capital. In this beautifully illustrated and fascinating book, Clark recounts and analyzes the story of the collection, mobilization, and recollection of photographs as historical documents, a visual archive of urban transformation and memory.
From the inauguration of the city’s first photo archives at the Musée Carnavalet, to the illustrated “photohistory” books that used images as documentary evidence, to the photographic museum exhibits, commemoration, and even a citywide contest, in which past and pictures were imbricated, the book looks at how photographs work, and takes seriously their biographies long after moments of capture. Moving beyond the work of key photographers, Clark examines how publishers, historians, public servants, and a range of other actors all participated in making Paris the quintessential capital of photography from the nineteenth century up to the 1970s. The book will be of great interest to anyone interested in the history of the city, of photography, of how the past is conceived and made in a field at once visual, technological, material, and affective.
Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email ([email protected]).
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Using a mixture of genres, Kent Gramm captures the voices of those past and present in his book, Gettysburg: The Living and the Dead(Southern Illinois University Press, 2019) Alongside stunning photographs by Chris Heisey, Gramm shares the experiences of the people at Gettysburg—both those historical figures who took part in the battle in some meaningful way and those of us today who return to the battlefield to try and make sense of such a tragic and mournful part of our history. Gramm’s writing style is eloquent and thought-provoking. By listening to the people who were at Gettysburg, he brings them back to life in a way that reveals the truth of the human experience and elicits empathy from his readers. Gettysburg: The Living and the Dead is emotionally stirring and absolutely essential toward helping us understand and heal from this tragic, watershed event in American history.
Kent Gramm is an adjunct professor of English and Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. A Wisconsin native, Gramm has also taught at colleges in Germany, Illinois, and Indiana. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing and American Literature from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and studied theology at Princeton Theological Seminary at the University of Tuebingen, Germany. He has written books, plays, novels, and poetry about Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg, and the American Civil War. His book, November: Lincoln's Elegy at Gettysburg, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and the graduate writing program at LSU awards an annual Kent Gramm Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Finally, he is a lifelong student of the Civil War.
Colin Mustful is the author of four historical novels about Minnesota’s settlement and Native history. He holds an MA in history and a MFA in creative writing. He is the founder and editor of a small independent press called History Through Fiction. You can learn more about Colin and his work at colinmustful.com.
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Along with the rapid expansion of the market economy and industrial production methods, such innovations as photography, lithography, and steam printing created a pictorial revolution in nineteenth-century society. The proliferation of visual prints, ephemera, spectacles, and technologies transformed public values and perceptions, and its legacy was as significant as the print revolution that preceded it. Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Oxford University Press, 2018) explores the significance of the pictorial revolution in one of its vanguard cities: San Francisco, the revolving door of the gold rush. In their correspondence, diaries, portraits, and reminiscences, thousands of migrants to the city by the Bay demonstrated that visual media constituted a central means by which people navigated the bewildering host of changes taking hold around them in the second half of the nineteenth century, from the spread of capitalism and class formation to immigration and urbanization. Amy K. Defalco Lippert, Assistant Professor of American History and the College at the University of Chicago, argues that images themselves were inextricably associated with these world-changing forces; they were commodities, but as representations of people, they also possessed special cultural qualities that gave them new meaning and significance.
Visual media transcended traditional boundaries of language and culture that divided diverse groups within the same urban space. From the 1848 conquest of California and the gold discovery to the disastrous earthquake and fire of 1906, San Francisco anticipated broader cultural transformations in the commodification, implementation, and popularity of images. For the city's inhabitants and sojourners, an array of imagery came to mediate, intersect with, and even constitute social interaction in a world where virtual reality was becoming normative.
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Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.
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Shortly after its introduction, photography transformed the ways Americans made political arguments using visual images. In the mid-19th century, photographs became key tools in debates surrounding slavery. Yet, photographs were used in interesting and sometimes surprising ways by a range of actors. Matthew Fox-Amato, an Assistant Professor at the University of Idaho, examines the role of photography in the politics of slavery during the 19th century and the important legacies of those uses on later visual politics in his new book, Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America (Oxford University Press, 2019). The book examines the use of photographs by slaves, abolitionists, slaveholders, and Union soldiers to explore the rich complexities of the visual politics of the moment. He also considers the legacies of this use of the new medium.
In this episode of the podcast, Fox-Amato discusses the ways these various groups used photography for individual purposes and to shape the debates surrounding slavery in the antebellum period. He explains how photographs also highlight how union soldiers were beginning to think about a post-slavery racial hierarchy during the war. The book demonstrates the importance of thinking about photographs as both visual images and material objects. In the interview, Fox-Amato discusses the research necessary to analyze the photographs in both these ways and the broader importance of studying visual and material culture in all their historical complexity.
Christine Lamberson is an Associate Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at [email protected].
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In one of history’s largest migrations, hundreds of thousands of Norwegians immigrated to North American during the 1800s and early 1900s. In addition to letters sent home, Norwegian-Americans often included photographs showcasing their new American lives. In her book, Pictures of Longing: Photography and the Norwegian-American Migration (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), Dr. Sigrid Lien keenly evaluates the photographs Norwegian immigrants sent home—including one of her own grandfather. Throughout the book, Lien delves into the lives of everyday people seeking a new and prosperous life in America. Using talented writing and skillful research Sigrid Lien brings the past to life without overlooking the important historical context in which the Norwegian-American migration took place. A new edition translated by Barbara Sjoholm, Pictures of Longing is an endlessly fascinating account of real people who, through photographs, sought to share their experience during a time of hope and change.
Sigrid Lien is professor of art history and photography studies at the University of Bergen, Norway, and a leading authority on Norwegian photography. She has published extensively on modern and contemporary visual culture and is the author of the first extensive history of photography in Norway.
Colin Mustful has an M.A. in history from Minnesota State University, Mankato, and is currently a candidate for an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Augsburg University. You can learn more about his work at his website: www.colinmustful.com.
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In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge.
You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/
Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives.
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With Paris as the organizing locus of his new book, Du moyen âge à nos jours, expériences et représentations de la folie à Paris [From the Middle Ages to Today, Experiences and Representations of Madness in Paris], Benoît Majerus uses an impressively wide range of visual sources, from religious images and architectural photographs to neuroleptic advertisements and administrative maps. These images are integrated into the text and function not only as illustrations, but also as images with their own story to tell. Majerus’ narrative arc follows the twists and turns of madness in a city long associated with mental pathogens and their cures and reveals how the history of psychiatry can be told differently through the lens of visual culture.
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McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with!
Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here.
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In Portraits in the Andes: Photography and Agency, 1900-1950 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), Jorge Coronado, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University, examines photography to further the argument that intellectuals grafted their own notions of indigeneity onto their subjects. He looks specifically at the Cuzco School of Photography (active in the southern Andes) to argue that photography, in its capacity as a visual and technological practice, can be a powerful tool for understanding and shaping what modernity meant in the region.
Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies.
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At the beginning of the 20th century, surrealists such as André Breton and Man Ray played a game called “Exquisite Corpse.” You can play it by drawing or by writing, and the rules are very simple. Let’s say you’re writing. You would write the beginning of a story or poem at the top of a piece of paper and, when you finished, fold the paper so that only the last line of the poem or story is visible. Then you’d hand the paper to another player, and this person would add to the story or poem knowing only that little bit of language. Then this play would fold the paper and pass it along. On the story or poem would go, jumping from topic to topic, from style to style, depending on how the next person added to it, until it’s done. That’s it.
The result is usually highly fragmented and often fascinating. Things that aren’t normally put together are suddenly combined. Poems, stories, and, in the case of drawings, images that seem impossible are suddenly on the page in front of you, asking you to consider them as a connected whole. The name of the game purportedly came from a phrase one of them wrote the first time the surrealists played it: “The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.” I’ve played it numerous times, and it’s always fascinating to see what emerges, but I’ve new understood why it’s so fascinating until I had the pleasure of reading Erin Edwards’ new book, The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). In her insightful study, Edwards examines the presence of the corpse in modernist literature and changes the ways we understand what a corpse is and even who and what counts as being fully alive.
I finished Edward’s book with the startling insight that “Exquisite Corpse,” far from being just an odd surrealist experiment, might be a more accurate way for art to capture our world and the things that live in it with us than more traditional stories, poems, and paintings. To say it another way, Edwards shows us that, in the work of modernist artists, the corpse, whether exquisite or not, might be the best way to show us what it really means to be alive.
Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at [email protected].
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Singular Spaces: From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments (Raw Vision, 2013) is an audacious tome. A comprehensive survey of 45 art environments on the Spanish mainland, it weighs just over eight and a half pounds and contains over 1300 color photographs (with over 4000 more plus site plans on the accompanying CD). Its author, Jo Farb Hernandez, is the Director of SPACES, a non-profit focused on art environments around the world. She first became interested in place-based creative constructions when she was an undergraduate in Wisconsin. In her introduction to Singular Spaces, she recounts how this particular book began: she and her husband were in the process of renovating an old farmhouse they’d purchased in Catalonia. They took a short road-trip to explore the area around their new home and chanced upon “the enormous roadside construction of Josep Pujiula I Vila, at that time one of the largest and most idiosyncratic art environments found worldwide” (16). Shortly thereafter Farb Hernandez began documenting Pujiula’s work while writing another book. In the process she came across more and more such endeavors that demanded her attention. Singular Spaces is devoted to those sites and like them, the book is the product of years of labor and dedication.
Singular Spaces features the work of 45 artists, all men. Alongside the photographs and descriptions of the art environments, Farb Hernandez also tells the stories of their creators’ lives, and details the history and development of each project. She also describes the challenges that many of the artists have faced, not least those posed by unhappy neighbors and unsympathetic municipal authorities. In fact, helping the men deal with local adversities has led to Farb Hernandez frequently taking on the role of advocate on behalf of her interlocutors.
A recent review in the Journal of American Folklore described Singular Spaces as “incredibly important for those who are interested in architecture, the politics of place and space, folk art and art in general, art and activism, the psychology of creativity, and relationships between tradition and the individual. Jo Farb Hernandez has written more than a survey of eccentric art spaces. She has opened a door to each artist and space so that they may be explored, analyzed, and, in some cases, loved by any who enjoy such contextual art forms.”
Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University.
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In the Arab world, photography is often tied to the modernizing efforts of imperial and colonial powers. However, indigenous photography was itself a major aspect of the cultural and social lives of Middle Eastern societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stephen Sheehi’s The Arab Imago: A Social History of Indigenous Photography 1860-1910 (Princeton University Press, 2016) tells that story, focusing primarily on portraiture and those that took portraits. Sheehi examines the formalism of portraits in relation to changing notions of class, questioning whether or not portrait photography were creating new forms of sociability or vice versa. But photography is also another way Arab modernity was in relation to Ottomanism: The Arab Imago looks at how portrait studios developed in Istanbul and beyond, often operated by Armenian and Greek Orthodox photographers. The Arab Imago integrates photography, modernity, and the banal to give us one of the first histories of photography in the Middle East.
Stephen Sheehi is the Sultan Qaboos bin Said Chair of Middle East Studies and Director of the Program of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (AMES) at the College of William and Mary. He is Professor of Arabic Studies as well, and holds a joint appointment in AMES and the Arabic Program in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. He did his doctorate at Michigan. His work largely examines cultural, intellectual, art history, and the political economy of the late Ottoman Empire and the Arab Renaissance (al-nahdah al-arabiyah).
Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.
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John Neel’s Focus in Photography: Master the Advanced Techniques That Will Change Your Photography Forever (Ilex Press, 2016) is both instructional manual and analysis on why focus is such an important artistic tool for photographers. Neel uses his own images to illustrate how focus works to directs viewers into and around an image. In his book Neel creates the first serious treatment of the topic in the digital age, by showing how mastery of the lens will greatly enhance the quality and “wow” factor of photographs.
John Neel is a graduate of the University of South Florida, School of Fine Arts and has an MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop SUNY. He has an interest in merging photography, design and illustration. Recently he has become interested in the relationship of synthesized sound and electronic images and became a member of the electronic band uforkestra as the group’s visual musician. His work is held in public and private galleries in both the US and Canada, including the George Eastman House, the Art Gallery of Ontario. In the 1990s John worked at Kodak Research Labs where he developed skills and knowledge on such subjects as stereo and immersive imaging, as well as new human interface technologies (such as haptic), augmented reality and experimental media. Besides his artistic pursuits and accomplishments, John holds numerous patents and patent applications regarding digital imaging.
Focus in Photography is available online at Ilex Press and through Amazon.
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In Horace Poolaw, Photographer of American Indian Modernity (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), Laura E. Smith, Assistant Professor of Art History at Michigan State University, unravels the compelling life story of Kiowa photographer Horace Poolaw (1906-84), one of the first professional Native American photographers. Born on the Kiowa reservation in Anadarko, Oklahoma, Poolaw bought his first camera at the age of fifteen and began taking photos of family, friends, and noted leaders in the Kiowa community, also capturing successive years of powwows and pageants at various fairs, expositions, and other events. Though Poolaw earned some income as a professional photographer, he farmed, raised livestock, and took other jobs to help fund his passion for documenting his community. Smith examines the cultural and artistic significance of Poolaw’s life in professional photography from 1925 to 1945 in light of European and modernist discourses on photography, portraiture, the function of art, Native American identity, and American Indian religious and political activism. Rather than through the lens of Native people’s inevitable extinction or within a discourse of artistic modernism, Smith evaluates Poolaw’s photography within art history and Native American history, simultaneously questioning the category of fine artist in relation to the creative lives of Native peoples.
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In her book, Death Makes the News: How the Media Censor and Display the Dead (NYU Press, 2017), Jessica M. Fishman examines how death is presented in the media. Researching how media outlets present images of death over the past 30 years, Fishman explores the controversial practice of picturing the dead. Fishman presents the varying ways the press selects the images they choose to use, the way they make decisions of what images they use, and why. Her research reveals that much of what we think we know about how dead bodies are, or are not, shown in the media is wrong. The tabloid press is less likely to show a dead body, media show dead foreign bodies more often than they show dead American bodies, and the exceptions to the rules the media uses to portray the dead are not often altered. Well researched, with knowledge from editors and photojournalists about the decisions made around images of death, Jessica Fishman’s work gives readers new ways to think about the ways death does, and does not, make the news.
Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in people’s lives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at [email protected].
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Hidden Mother by Laura Larson was published by Saint Lucy Press (January 2017), with 96 pages and 26 Color and black and white images.
Hidden Mother tells the story of the adoption of Larson’s daughter from Ethiopia as mapped through nineteenth-century hidden mother photographs. The term “hidden mother” refers to the widespread but little-known practice in 19th-century portrait photography of concealing a mother’s body as she supported and calmed her child during the lengthy exposures demanded by early photographic technology. In the final portrait of the child, the mother–often covered from head-to-toe in a black drop cloth–appears as an uncanny figure. A practical strategy deployed by the photographer unintentionally yielded an evocative representation of the mother; never meant to be seen, her presence nonetheless haunts these images. Part photography book, part essay, Hidden Mother enlists these strange and powerful images to present a lyrical account of becoming a mother through adoption.
Laura Larson is a photographer who has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally, including Art in General, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, SFCamerawork, Susanne Vielmetter/L.A. Projects, and Wexner Center for the Arts. Reviews of her exhibitions have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Time Out New York, and she has published artist projects in Cabinet, Documents, Open City and The Literary Review. She is the recipient of grants from Art Matters, Inc., New York Foundation of the Arts, and Ohio Arts Council, and of residency fellowships from MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Santa Fe Art Institute, and Ucross Foundation. Larson’s work is represented by Lennon, Weinberg Gallery in New York City. She earned a BA in English from Oberlin College, a MFA in Visual Art from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.
Hidden Mother is available online at the Saint Lucy bookstore.
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When the Sun comes back
And the first quail calls
Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd.
For the old man is a-waiting for to carry you to freedom
If you follow the Drinkin’ Gourd.
-“Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd” author unknown (possibly Peg Leg Joe)
They left in the middle of the night, often carrying little more than the knowledge to follow the North Star. Between 1830 and the end of the Civil War in 1865, an estimated one hundred thousand slaves became passengers on the Underground Railroad, a journey of untold hardship, in search of freedom. Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad (Princeton Architectural Press, 2017) presents a remarkable series of images following a route from the cotton plantations of central Louisiana, through the cypress swamps of Mississippi and the plains of Indiana, north to the Canadian border a path of nearly fourteen hundred miles.
The culmination of a ten-year research quest, Through Darkness to Light imagines a journey along the Underground Railroad as it might have appeared to any freedom seeker. A person who explores her photography in this work may get the feeling they were actually there during this tumultuous time in American history. Framing the powerful visual narrative is an introduction by the author; a foreword by noted politician, pastor, and civil rights activist Andrew J. Young; and essays by noted historian Fergus M. Bordewich, journalism professor Robert F. Darden, and black studies scholar Eric R. Jackson.
Author Jeanine Michna-Bales is a Dallas-based photographer. Her work explores the relationships between what has occurred, or is occurring, in a society and how people react to those events. She meticulously researches each topic considering different viewpoints, causes, and effects and political climates and often incorporates found or archival text and audio into her projects. Images from her Underground Railroad series have been exhibited throughout the United States and have appeared in numerous online and print publications. Her next book-length work will focus on the images and architecture of Cold War era nuclear fallout shelters in the United States.
James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at [email protected]
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No Plan B by David J. Carol was published by Peanut Press Books in 2017. The book is a retrospective of David’s work with 32 black and white images and an afterward by photojournalist Jason Eskenazi.
No Plan B is a David’s fifth book and is a culmination of images from David’s road trips from the Arctic Ocean to post-Soviet Russia, from the Mojave Desert to the streets of Istanbul taken between 1993 and 2016.
David was born in New York City, and attended the School of Visual Arts and The New School for Social Research, where he studied under Lisette Model. He was the first assignment photographer for The Image Bank photo agency (now part of Getty Images) at the age of 26. David has traveled the world taking pictures for himself and others for over thirty years.
David is a photographer first and foremost, he has most recently worked daily in the real world of commercial photography as the Director of Photography at Outfront Media (formerly CBS Outdoor). Currently he is Editor-in-Chief at Peanut Press Books, a new imprint that publishes high quality photography books. He is a contributing writer for Rangefinder Magazine and Photo District News, is a judge for the prestigious PDN Photo Annual, and reviews the work of developing photographers at Palm Springs Photo Festival, ASMP Fine Art, APA, Filter Photo Festival and at Savannah College of Art and Design. In his work as a curator, he has shaped shows at The Center for Fine Art Photography in Colorado, Darkroom Gallery in Vermont, and Lightbox Gallery in Oregon. He also serves on the Board of Advisers for the Center for Alternative Photography: Penumbra Foundation.
No Plan B is available in two bindings; the black trade edition, and a white limited edition, which includes a gelatin silver print signed and numbered by the artist. No Plan B is available for sale online at Peanut Press.
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Black is the Day, Black is the Night by Amy Elkins is self-published (2016), with an essay by Gregory J. Harris and C.F., unpaged, 80 color and black-and-white illustrations.
Black is the Day, Black is the Night started as an exploration into, what author and photographer has called, “extreme manifestations of masculinity,” but over time it evolved into a meditation on time and memory through personal correspondence with men serving life and death row sentences in some of the most maximum security prisons in the U.S., all of whom had served between 13-26 years at point of contact in 2009 when the project started.
“Out of our letters a collaboration unfolded. I constructed images using formulas specific to each of their stories, age and years incarcerated. Through these formulas their portraits became more unrecognizable and their memories became more muddled, regurgitated and fictional with the endless passing years of their sentence. Stripped of personal context and placed in solitary cells, their sense of identity, memory and time couldn’t help but mutate. I sent these images to them, they would critique them. This went on for years. Of the seven men I originally wrote, I remain in touch with one who has been in solitary confinement since 1995 for a crime committed at 16. One was released in 2010 at the age of 30 (after 15 years in prison), three eventually opted out, one was executed in 2009, another executed in 2012.” – Amy Elkins via LensCulture
The title of the book comes from poem excerpts written by a man who has been in prison since the age of 13. He was retried as an adult at 16 for attempting escape and was sentenced to life in solitary without the possibility of parole at a super-max prison. He taught himself to write poetry over this time.
Amy received her BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Elkins has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard, California; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; North Carolina Museum of Art; Light Work Gallery, Syracuse, New York; and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York, among many others. Her work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, Eyemazing, PDN, Harpers, NY Arts, Conveyor, and Contact Sheet, among others. Elkins has also been included in exhibition catalogues such as The Portrait. Elkins was an artist-in-residence at Light Work in 2011, and at Villa Waldberta, Munich, in 2012. In 2008, Elkins and Cara Phillips cofounded wipnyc.org, a platform for showcasing both established and emerging women in photography. Elkins is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York.
Amy Elkins is currently based near Los Angeles.
Black is the Day, Black is the Night is available through her website: http://www.amyelkins.com.
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27 Contexts –An Anecdotal History in Photography by Mark Alice Durant was published by Saint Lucy Books (January, 2017) with 288 pages and 90 Color and black and white images.
27 Contexts is a series of linked essays that examine how photographs are inextricably bound in our personal and collective histories. Beginning with the author’s childhood obsession with his parents’ wedding album through a lifetime making photographs, teaching, and writing about photography, Durant’s narrative weaves memoir with photographic history and theory.
Illustrated with a broad spectrum of images from family snapshots to Hubble space imagery, to the work of artists such as Josef Koudelka, Julia Margaret Cameron, Larry Sultan, Maya Deren, Odilon Redon, Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz and Chris Marker, 27 Contexts describes a life immersed in the quotidian, the political, and the enigmatic aspects of photography.
Durant has contributed to numerous catalogs, monographs and anthologies including The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire, The Gothic, Jimmie Durham and Marco Breuer: Early Recordings. He is author of McDermott and McGough: A History of Photography, Robert Heinecken: A Material History and co-author of Vik Muniz: Seeing is Believing and Dressed for Thrills: 100 Years of Halloween Costume and Masquerade. In 2005, Durant co-curated and co-authored Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology and the Paranormal. He has served on the faculties of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, UCLA, the University of New Mexico, Syracuse University, and the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College, he is now Professor of Photography at the University of Maryland School of Visual Arts.
27 Contexts – An Anecdotal History in Photography is available through the publisher’s website: https://saint-lucy.com/shop/27-contexts/ .
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From 1927 until his death in 1979, E.F. Joseph documented the daily lives of African Americans in the Bay Area. His images were printed in the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, but not widely published in his home community. A graduate of the American School of Photography in Illinois, Joseph photographed the likes of such celebrities and activists as Josephine Baker, Mahalia Jackson, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Thurgood Marshall. However, what is perhaps more compelling within these pages are the countless images of everyday citizens teaching, entertaining, worshipping, working, and serving their community and their nation. Emmanuel Francis (E. F.) Joseph (1900-1979) was born on November 8, 1900 in St. Lucia, West Indies. After graduating from the American School of Photography of Illinois, he moved to Oakland, California in 1924 where he served as an apprentice in a photography studio. He was the first professional African American photographer in the San Francisco Bay Area operating a commercial and studio photography business in his home initially at 1303 Adeline St. and then at 384 50th St. in Oakland. In 1980, Careth Reid purchased Josephs collection of negatives and personal papers, and nearly four decades later, a labor of love comes to fruition with the publication of The Picture Man: From the Collection of Bay Area Photographer E. F. Joseph (Arcadia, 2017). Ms. Reid, a lifelong educator and champion of community service in the Bay Area, partnered with longtime friend Ruth Beckford, a dancer, teacher, choreographer, actor, and author. Ms. Reid, a native of Berkeley, was the recipient of San Francisco State University’s Alumna of the Year Award in 1990 and is also a member of the university’s Hall of Fame. Ms. Beckford is featured in a downtown mural of the community’s artists and was also celebrated as an Outstanding Alumni of Oakland Technical High School in 2015. Together, they tell the story of the Bay Areas African American community through the eye and lens of one of its own. Ms. Beckford and Ms. Reid live in Oakland, California.
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The Americans by Car is Karl Baden’s latest book. An homage to Robert Frank’s The Americans and Lee Friedlander’s America by Car, Baden’s book “is a personal, more specific answer to the vague question of ‘how are we influenced,'” according to the artist. The photographs in the book were taken by Baden from his car and offer a snapshot of American life.
Karl Baden, a New York City native, he received his B.A. in Fine Arts at Syracuse University in 1974 and an M.F.A. in photography at University of Illinois at Chicago in 1979. Baden has taught at Boston College, Harvard, Clark University, and Rhode Island School of Design. He was Director of Photography at the Project Art Center, Cambridge, in the early 1980s, and served on the board and programming committee for the Photographic Resource Center, Boston. Baden has had numerous one person and group exhibitions and has received noteworthy fellowships.
Baden’s probably best known work is called “Every Day” which, this past February, marked thirty years since its start. In “Every Day,” Baden has taken a single photograph of his face every day. According to a recent interview, he’s only missed one day in the entire 30 years, 15 October 1991, It was a dumb moment of forgetfulness,” he said.
Karl currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is an Associate Professor of the Practice in the Morrissey College of Art and Science at Boston College. The Americans by Car is available through the photographer: [email protected].
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The Hereditary Estate by Daniel W. Coburn, is published by Kehrer Verlag (2015), with an essay by Karen Irvine, Curator and Associate Director at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and Kristen Pai Buck, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of New Mexico, 112 pages.
The Hereditary Estate is the first major monograph by photographer Daniel W. Coburn. It functions as a ten-year retrospective and as a conceptual work of art. Coburn’s work and research investigates the family photo album employed as the visual infrastructure for the flawed ideology of the American Dream. Frustrated by the lack of images that document the true and sometimes troubling nature of his own familial history, the photographer set out to create a new archive, a potent supplement to the broken family album that exists in the collection of many families. Using photographs made over the last decade, and altered amateur photographs, he weaves a family narrative that is simultaneously beautiful and terrifying. The careful sequencing of these images creates a powerful psychological dialogue designed to inspire an emotional and visceral response from the viewer. The international distribution of this book completes an essential conceptual component of this work, placing this supplementary album into family collections in countries all over the world. Daniel’s work and research investigates the family photo album as a form and narrative function. Selections from his body of work have been featured in exhibitions at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art and the Chelsea Museum of Art in New York. His prints are held in collections at the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), the University of New Mexico Art Museum, the Mulvane Art Museum, the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, and the Mariana Kistler-Beach Museum of Art. Daniel’s work has been published widely, most recently appearing in the International New York Times. Daniel currently lives in Lawrence, Kansas and is an Assistant Professor of Photo Media at the University of Kansas.
The Hereditary Estate is available through the photographer’s website, as well as Amazon.
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Photographer Leon Borensztein began Sharon (Kehrer Verlag, 2016), his most personal project, thirty years ago when his daughter was born: “Throughout my artistic career, I have been driven by the need to give voice to the unheard and unseen. This desire became a personal passion when my daughter Sharon was born. Just after her birth I felt there was something wrong, and slowly we learned that she was born with disabilities. I started photographing my daughter before she was born and I have never stopped.”
When Sharon was in her early teens, Leon gained full custody of her when he split with her mother. His book is certainly a unique opportunity to increase awareness about disability, but is also a love letter to Sharon. It is both human and heartbreaking, beautiful and bold. Filled with poetic metaphor, Sharon has no text, which provides an intriguing and emotional experience. It is a book that demands and deserves multiple viewings.
Leon Borenszstein earned his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1980. He was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987, and a grant from the California Council of the Humanities in 2003. His work has been exhibited internationally, e.g. at the Centre Nationale de la Photographie in Paris, and the Art Institute of Chicago, and is in important collections like the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His first monograph, One is Adam One is Superman, was published in 2004; his second, American Portraits, in 2011.
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Amani Willett: Disquiet by Amani Willett, is published by Damiani Factory (2013), with an afterward by Marvin Heiferman, 128 pages. “Disquiet’s cinematic look suggests the palpable spaces in which Willett pondered both the depth and fragility of social and family relationships. And as we become immersed in the work, we imagine or remember ourselves in similar places and situations. While many photographic projects about parents and children have, in recent years, adopted a decidedly cool stance to keep sentimentality at bay, Willett takes a risk by so openly acknowledging our reflex to love, desire to protect, and the vulnerability we face once we do. This is the core subject or his work, without apology.” – Marvin Heiferman, excerpted from the essay, “Beneath the Surface in Disquiet.”
New York-based photographer Amani Willett weaves intimate family pictures with broader portrayals of American society and its current economic and political instability in his book, Disquiet. Taken between 2010 and 2012, the portraits, landscapes and still lives is his book record the anxieties of starting a family in a time of social unrest, and with the societal challenges posed by the results of the 2016 election, his work takes on a new dimension. Amani draws on his work as a street photographer and visual storyteller to create the images and to construct the books overarching narrative.
Amani’s work has been featured in the books Street Photography Now (Thames and Hudson) and New York: In Color (Abrams). Willett’s pictures have been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including at the Howard Greenberg gallery and his work has been featured in such publications as American Photography, Newsweek and The New York Times. He has given talks about his work at institutions including the International Center of Photography. Willett received his MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts. Amani currently lives in Brooklyn with his family.
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Runaway slave Sojourner Truth gained fame in the nineteenth century as an abolitionist, feminist, and orator and earned a living partly by selling photographic carte de visite portraits of herself at lectures and by mail. Cartes de visite, similar in format to calling cards, were relatively inexpensive collectibles that quickly became a new mode of mass communication. Despite being illiterate, Truth copyrighted her photographs in her name and added the caption “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance. Sojourner Truth.”
Featuring the largest collection of Truth’s photographs ever published, Enduring Truths: Sojourners Shadows and Substance (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is the first book to explore how she used her image, the press, the postal service, and copyright laws to support her activism and herself.
A Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities at the University of California at Berkeley, the book’s author, Dr. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, specializes in 18th- through early 20th-century French and American art, visual and material culture, particularly in relation to the politics of race and colonialism. Dr. Grigsby writes on painting, sculpture, photography and engineering as well as the relationships among reproductive media and new technologies from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. Dr. Grigsby is also the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including two Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowships, a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, a History of Art Undergraduate Association Award for Outstanding Contribution to Art Historical Education, and The Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of California at Berkeley. Some of Dr. Grigsby’s previous works include Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France and Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower and Panama Canal. In addition to her teaching, Dr. Grigsby is currently conducting research for a book project tentatively titled Creole Looking: Portraying France’s Foreign Relations in the Nineteenth Century, which will examine France’s relationship to the Caribbean and Americas.
James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.
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Proof: Photographs from Four Generations of a Texas Family by Byrd Williams, with text by Byrd Williams IV, forward by Roy Flukinger and afterword by Anne Wilkes Tucker, is published by the University of North Texas Press, (2016). 224 pages.
The Byrd Williams Collection at the University of North Texas contains more than 10,000 prints and 300,000 negatives, accumulated by four generations of Texas photographers, all named Byrd Moore Williams. Beginning in the 1880s in Gainesville, the four Byrds photographed customers in their studios, urban landscapes, crime scenes, Pancho Villa’s soldiers, televangelists, and whatever aroused their unpredictable and wide-ranging curiosity. When Byrd IV sat down to choose a selection from this dizzying array, he came face to face with the nature of mortality and memory, his own and his family’s. In some cases, these photos are the only evidence remaining that someone lived and breathed on this earth.
The 193 photos selected here are organized into thematic sections such as “Landscapes,” “Violence and Religion,” and “Darkness.” They are significant not just for the range of subjects, but for the inclusion of a variety of examples of the evolving photographic technology from the 1880s to the present. This book is an unprecedented portrait of both photographic history and the history of Texas, as well as a record of one unique family.
BYRD M. WILLIAMS IV maintains a studio in Dallas and teaches photography at Collin County Community College. He provided the photographs for Fort Worth’s Legendary Landmarks and his work is in the collections of the Amon Carter Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
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Piksa Niugini by Stephen Dupont, with forward by Robert Gardner and essay by Bob Connolly, is published by the Peabody Press and Radius Books, (2013). Volume 1: 144 pages, 80 duotone, 6 color images. Volume 2: 144 pages, 120 color images.
Piksa Niugini records noted Australian photographer Stephen Dupont’s journey through some of Papua New Guinea’s most important cultural and historical zones – the Highlands, Sepik, Bougainville and the capital city Port Moresby. The project is contained in two volumes in a slipcase one of portraits of local people, and the second of personal diaries. This remarkable body of work captures one of the world’s last truly wild and unique frontiers.
Stephen’s work for this book was conducted with the support of the Robert Gardner Fellowship of Photography from Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The first volume of portraits reproduced in luscious duotone and 4 color; the second is an eclectic collection of the diaries, drawings, contact sheets and documentary photographs that Dupont created as he produced the project, which add to a broader understanding of the images in volume one.
Stephen Dupont has produced a remarkable body of visual work; hauntingly beautiful photographs of fragile cultures and marginalized peoples. He skillfully captures the human dignity of his subjects with great intimacy and often in some of the worlds most dangerous regions. His images have received international acclaim for their artistic integrity and valuable insight into the people, culture and communities that have existed for hundreds of years, yet are fast disappearing from our world.
Dupont’s work has earned him photography’s most prestigious prizes, including a Robert Capa Gold Medal citation from the Overseas Press Club of America; a Bayeux War Correspondents Prize; and first places in the World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, the Australian Walkleys, and Leica/CCP Documentary Award. In 2007, he was the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography for his ongoing project on Afghanistan, and in 2010 he received the Gardner Fellowship at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
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The New Yorkers by Robert Herman, with an introduction by Sean Corcoran, Curator of Prints and Photographs at the City Museum of New York, is published by Proof Positive Press (2015). Robert Herman is a photographer and author of two books of his work, The New Yorkers and The Phone Book (Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., 2015). Robert has been a street photographer since his days he started using his father’s Nikon F and a 50mm lens, and began by exploring the city as a means to connect with the people in his neighborhood and learn the craft of making images. Robert has a BFA in filmmaking from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and he received a masters degree in Digital Photography from the School of Visual Art. With his love of light and color, and a joy of making images that find the transcendent in the seemingly mundane, Robert’s images tell another story – that of his battle with bipolar disorder. Through the process of creating the work for The New Yorkers, Robert sought physical representation of the empathy he had for his subjects while struggling with his own sense of feeling as an outsider. Its this search for connection and connectedness in his images is what makes The New Yorkers of interest to all who know and love the city as well as those who want to know it. The New Yorkers is available through Roberts website.
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Since 2007, American photographer Jade Doskow has been documenting the remains of World’s Fair sites, once iconic global attractions that have often been repurposed for less noble aspirations or neglected and fallen into decay. Lost Utopias (Black Dog Publishing, 2016) brings together the substantial body of work that Doskow has completed over the past decade, including iconic monuments such as the Seattle Space Needle, the Eiffel Tower, Brussels Palais des Expositions and New York’s Unisphere. Doskow’s large-scale colorphotographs poignantly illustrate the utopian architecture and art that has surrounded the Worlds Fairs, across both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Presented in a large-scale hardback book, Doskow’s work carries a unique sense of both grandeur and dreaminess, whilst also reflecting upon the often temporary purposes that these structures once held. Jade Doskow is an award-winning photographer based in Peekskill, New York. She holds a BA in Philosophy of Art and Music from New York University and an MFA in Photography & Video from the School of Visual Arts. She is currently on the photography faculty of the School of Visual Arts and the International Center of Photography, and was named by ‘American Photo’ as ‘One to Watch’ in 2013.
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The Resolution of the Suspect by Israeli photographer Miki Kratsman, with text by Ariella Azoulay, is co-published by the Peabody Museum Press at Harvard and Radius Books of Santa Fe, NM (2016). Mr. Kratsman was the 2011 recipient of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography, an internationally recognized award given annually by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology to a photographer who has demonstrated great originality working in the documentary vein.
Through images created in the context of daily news, his tens of thousands of photographs have, in retrospect, taken on fascinating new meanings, as bystanders become protagonists and peripheral details move to the center. Isolated from the original frame, cropped, enlarged, and redisplayed, the reimagined images ask us to explore the limits of the observers gaze under conditions of occupation. These photographs look at both “wanted men”—individuals sought by the Israeli state– and the everyman and everywoman on the street who, by virtue of being Palestinian in a particular time and place, can be seen as a “suspect.” The work is both transgressive and banal, crossing boundaries between Israel and Palestine, wanted and innocent, street photography and surveillance imagery. Kratsman has also provoked vital, long-term interaction around the images on social media, creating a Facebook page on which viewers are invited to identify the individuals portrayed and comment on their “fate.” His complex project is chronicled in this book in more than 300 images that powerfully implicate the viewer as we follow the gaze of both occupier and occupied within a complex web of power relations around issues of life and death. Supported with thought-provoking text by Ariella Azoulay, she looks at various models of historical and civil construction of the gaze and explores the ways in which the shadow of death is an actual threat that hovers over Kratsman’s photographed persons and frames both individuals and the borrowed time within which they exist.
Miki Kratsman was born in Argentina and emigrated to Israel in 1971. He worked as a photojournalist for Hadashot and Ha’aretz until 2012. A photo educator for a number of years, Mr. Kratsman has taught at the Camera Obscura College of Photography and the School for Geographic Photography of Tel Aviv as well as in the Department of Art in Haifa University, he was also the head of the photography department at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design until 2014, when he retired.
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Nude Reagan (Spurl Editions, 2016) is John Brian King’s second book of photography. His first book, LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980-84, was published by Spurl Editions in 2015. For his most recent book, King photographed twenty-three nude female models with a Fujifilm Instax Mini 8 camera in an empty Palm Springs office space. Each model wore the same Ronald Reagan mask, striking any pose she liked. Deliberately unsettling, these photographs depict Reagan as a demon and specter haunting the modern world. Evoking the dead conservative president, the models wear the hideous dark-eyed mask anemic and wrinkled and morph into unerotic, freakish wraiths. The colors of the photographs accentuate these figures’ eerie qualities: the camera’s unpredictable flash turns the bland office backdrop alternately into a mold green, a muddy gray, a brilliant white, or a dense, all-encompassing black setting. The womens’ shadows are sometimes starkly present, and at other times disappear. King was influenced by such disparate sources as Conrad Veidt’s The Man Who Laughs; Reagan’s own frozen, Brylcreem-lathered countenance; artist Maurizio Cattelan’s sardonic approach to politics in art; and Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s Southern Gothic photographs of masked children.
JOHN BRIAN KING is a Los Angeles native who graduated with a degree in photography from the California Institute of the Arts. He designed the film titles for over thirty films, including Boogie Nights, Punch-Drunk Love,and The Ring. He wrote and directed the feature film Redlands, an examination of creativity and horror in relation to photography. His book LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980-84 was featured in the Los Angeles Times, Slate, Impose Magazine, LCeil de la Photographie, Yet Magazine, It’s Nice That, AnOther Magazine, and more. Nude Reagan is available through Spurl Editions.
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What’s Going On? 1969 -1974 (Lighted Square Media, 2015) is Ken Light‘s ninth book. Ken started his professional life as a photojournalist at his college newspaper in 1969 and has developed a career as a documentary photographer who tells stories about social and political life in the United States. Ken is the Reva and David Logan Professor of Photojournalism at the Graduate School of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley and director for its Center for Photography. He was also the co-founder of Fotovision and the International Fund for Documentary photography. What’s Going On? 1969 -1974 is project born out of Ken’s observations that many of the significant politically based movements of our time have their roots, and are mirrored, in the social and cultural landscape of the early 1970s – from the Occupy movement of 2011 to the riots in Ferguson, Missouri and the many forms that Black Lives Matter has taken since the hashtag was first used in 2013. The book combines Ken’s photographs with personal memoir and a timeline of events from 1969 – 1974. The timeline describes day by day, year by year the significant incidents that occurred in the United States and shaped Ken’s perception and experience of the time period.
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Jonathan M. Reynolds‘s new book looks carefully at how photographers, architects, and others wrestled with a postwar identity crisis as they explored and struggled with new meanings of tradition, home, and culture in modern Japan. Building on the work of Walter Benjamin, Allegories of Time and Space: Japanese Identity in Photography and Architecture (University of Hawaii Press, 2015) takes readers into a range of media in which writers and artists engaged with these questions. From photographs of rural inhabitants of the Snow Country of northern Japan to photobooks on Japanese architecture to special structures built to serve young female nomads in Tokyo, the objects of Reynolds’s study all served their makers as spaces for working through problems of identity, Japaneseness, and their transformations. It’s a fascinating study that beautifully integrates images as an integral part of the text, and it is well worth reading.
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Kathrin Yacavone‘s Benjamin, Barthes, and the Singularity of Photography (Bloomsbury, 2013) is an engaging study that explores connections between two of the most significant thinkers of the twentieth century: Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Roland Barthes (1915-1980). Considering Benjamin’s influence on Barthes’ later work on photography, the book also opens up the possibility of thinking of Barthes’ influence on how we think about and understand Benjamin in terms of the medium’s effects and significance in theoretical terms.
Divided into two parts, the book situates Benjamin and Barthes in their respective historical and political contexts while pursuing a series of themes through their work on photography: self and other, autobiography, memory, and redemption. It also looks closely at each author’s readings of particular photographs, and even establishes links between these. An intriguing postscript explores the continuing relevance of the ideas of these thinkers into the age of digitization. Listeners will find much in our conversation that illuminates the history and theory of photography, as well as the ideas and oeuvres of both Benjamin and Barthes more broadly.
In our interview, Kathrin and I speak about the book and also about her recent work editing a Summer 2014 issue of Nottingham French Studies on “Photography in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures”. Outlining the themes of the articles included in this recent collection, Kathrin offers some thoughts on the continuing vitality of the medium in present-day France.
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Ben Cawthra‘s Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz (University of Chicago, 2011) discusses the way images of jazz and the musicians who played it both reflected and influenced our racial perceptions during the period between the 1930s and 1960s. Cawthra reveals the complex interactions between socially conscious photographers, magazine editors, record producers, jazz critics and the musicians themselves. From swing to bebop to cool, to West Coast Jazz to hard bop, Cawthra’s book gives the reader fascinating photographic and biographical portraits of Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane among others. The photographers, too, including Charles Peterson, Gijon Mili, Francis Wolff, William Claxton, Herman Leonard, William Gottlieb, and Roy DeCarava had nuanced and unique photographic styles. Cawtha also gives insight as to how African-American jazz musicians such as Gillespie, Davis, and Rollins attempted to control their own economic and image destinies within the ever-changing political economy of the record industry. Cawthra also explains how Life Magazine, the development of the Long Playing Record (LP), and the concurrent milestones in civil rights all influenced the photographic culture of jazz – and there is a fascinating section on the very conscious marketing of “West Coast Jazz” to emerging white suburban markets in the 50s and 60s. The complex confluences of such a wide depth and breadth of social history is bound to stimulate much thinking and raise many additional questions. Rich, thought-provoking, and with images and insights that stay with you: read it, look at the photos and think long and hard…there’s no end to the combination and permutations of analyses….like jazz itself.
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Imagine a world wherein the people who wrote history books were artists, the books occasionally read like poetry, and the stories in them ranged from Monty Python skits to the natural history of chameleons to the making of classic sniper films. Pick up Hanna Rose Shell‘s new book, and you can imagine (for a few hours, at least) that you’ve stepped into such a world. Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance is a history of the visual and material practices of strategic concealment between the first publication of the Origin of Species and the end of WWII. Shell has structured the book around three historically and conceptually linked stages in the history of camouflage: static, serial, and dynamic. Each stage comes to us full of fascinating characters, from Abbott Thayer with his painted potatoes to Len Lye with his filmic tattoos of dancing color. The text is a fabric of words and images, interweaving reproductions of the photos and stencils and taxidermied creatures of Shell’s historical actors with her own work as a visual artist. There are tattoos. There are feather paintings. There is an overcoat owned by William James and there are aerial reconnaissance photos. This is an electric and surprising world, and one that is well worth visiting in the pages of Shell’s book.
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In Chapter 3 of Erin Haney’s excellent book Photography and Africa (Reaktion Books, 2010) there are seven photos taken in central Africa at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Six advertise progress – from the smartly dressed and armed native troops (though still barefoot) to a posed photograph of a caravan of ivory and a depiction of rubber tapping. These images were taken to show the success, the organization, and the wealth of the Congo to the people of Brussels, Antwerp and beyond. The seventh photo shows a man sitting silently next to two indistinct objects, with a bland backdrop of open ground and two or three palm trees. This photo was also taken to inform public opinion in Europe (mainly Britain), but in this case as part of a movement against Belgian interests (and atrocities) in the Congo. The two indistinct objects in front of the man, incidently, are the severed foot and hand of his murdered five year old daughter.
Not all of the photographs in Erin’s book are as politically charged as these. The book is remarkable for its variety, from a publicity self-portrait of a pioneer West African photographer taken in the 1890s to photojournalism from the last days of Apartheid and images of more than a century of industrial development on the continent.
I wasn’t sure whether an audio interview with the author of a book of photography would work, but I think it did. That’s partly thanks to Erin herself, and partly thanks to the book itself and the stories it has to tell. I hope you enjoy the interview!
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We should be skeptical of what is sometimes called “Jew counting” and all it implies. Yet it cannot be denied that Jews played a pivotal and (dare we say) disproportionate role in moving the West from a pre-modern to a modern condition. Take the media. Most people know that Jews, though hardly alone, built much of the film industry. Fewer people will know, however, that Jews–again, though hardly alone–were central to the birth of photojournalism. Robert Capa, arguably the most famous photojournalist of the last century, was, for example, born Endre Friedmann.
In his fine book Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (Rutgers University Press, 2010), historian David Shneer explores the ways in which Jews were instrumental in the creation of Soviet photojournalism and the ways in which their Jewishness–acknowledged or unacknowledged, accepted or completely rejected–affected the way they did their jobs and how they experienced what they saw and shot. The book is about identity as much as it is about photography (though it is about that as well). These pioneers of photojournalism were Jews whether they liked it or not. It said so on their passports. Yet they struggled with what that meant and how it should (or shouldn’t) influence their art. David does an excellent job in explaining how they negotiated Jewishness through revolution, socialism, Stalinism, world war, and the destruction of Eastern European Jewry itself.
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En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.
