Theories in Digital Composite Photographs: 12 Artists and Their Work presents a theoretical investigation of digital composite photographs through philosophical exploration of artists' concepts of reality. With an international cohort of contemporary digital composite artists, this book presents twelve cases studies on artists' motivation, production process, and the relation of their worldview to theoretical interpretation. Author Yihui Huang situates each artists' work in the context of photographic theory and western aesthetics, including realism, expressionism, formalism and postmodernism. As creation of digital composites grows in popularity and influence, this is the first to integrate a philosophical and theoretical understanding of this unique art form. Featuring a wide range of international artists.

Photography: History and Theory introduces students to both the history of photography and critical theory. From its inception in the nineteenth century, photography has instigated a series of theoretical debates. In this new text, Jae Emerling therefore argues that the most insightful way to approach the histories of photography is to address simultaneously the key events of photographic history alongside the theoretical discourse that accompanied them.

Walter Benjamin's 1931 essay "A Short History of Photography" is a landmark in the understanding and criticism of the medium, offering surprising new takes on such photographic pioneers as David Octavius Hill and Nicéphore Niépce and their aesthetic and technical achievements.             On Photography presents a new translation of that essay along with a number of other writings by Benjamin, some of them presented in English for the first time. Translator and editor Esther Leslie sets Benjamin's work in context with prefaces to each piece and contributes a substantial introduction that considers Benjamin's engagement with photography in all its forms, including early commercial studio photography, the uses of photography in science, and much more.

"In Rediscovering Jacob Riis Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom offer a fresh look at the Progressive-era social reformer, journalist, and pioneer photographer who publicized the conditions of the desperately poor in turn-of-the century New York. Drawing on a wide range of archival, photographic, and manuscript sources, the book reassesses Jacob Riis's career and influence as a crusader for improved housing, as a prototypical muckraking journalist, and as a precursor of documentary photography. Czitrom explores Riis's reporting and activism within the gritty specifics of Gilded Age New York: its new immigrants, its political machines, its fiercely competitive journalism, its evangelical reformers, and its labor movement. Yochelson presents the first thorough study of Riis's photographs, reevaluating Riis's significance at a critical juncture in the history of photography."

After Augusto Pinochet rose to power in Chile in 1973, his government abducted, abused, and executed thousands of his political opponents. The Insubordination of Photography is the first book to analyze how various collectives, organizations, and independent media used photography to expose and protest the crimes of Pinochet's authoritarian regime.

Table of Contents: Let There Be Light and the Military Talking Picture / Noah Tsika -- Death in Life -- Documenting Survival after Hiroshima / Franny Nudelman -- I Saw It! -- Photographic Witness of Barefoot Gen / Laura Wexler -- Speculative Ecology -- Rachel Carson's Environmentalist Documentaries / Daniel Worden -- Participatory Documentary -- Recording the Sound of Equality in the Southern Civil Rights Movement / Grace Elizabeth Hale -- After the Fact -- Postwar Dissent and the Art of Documentary / Sara Blair -- Working Photography -- Labor Documentary and Documentary Labor in the Neoliberal Age / Joseph B. Entin -- Counterdocuments -- Undocumented Youth Activists, Documentary Media, and the Politics of Visibility / Rebecca M. Schreiber -- At Berkeley -- Documenting the University in an Age of Austerity / Leigh Raiford

Portraits in the Andes examines indigenous and mestizo self-representation through the medium of photography from the early to mid twentieth century. As Jorge Coronado reveals, these images offer a powerful counterpoint to the often-slanted, predominant view of indigenismo produced by the intellectual elite. Photography offered an inexpensive and readily available technology for producing portraits and other images that allowed lower- and middle-class racialized subjects to create their own distinct rhetoric and vision of their culture. The powerful identity-marking vehicle that photography provided to the masses has been overlooked in much of Latin American cultural studies--which have focused primarily on the elite's visual arts. Coronado's study offers close readings of Andean photographic archives from the early- to mid-twentieth century, to show the development of a consumer culture and the agency of marginalized groups in creating a visual document of their personal interpretations of modernity

Invented during a period of anxiety about the ability of human memory to cope with the demands of expanding knowledge, photography not only changed the way the Victorians saw the world, but also provided them with a new sense of connection with the past and a developing language with which to describe it. Analysing a broad range of texts by inventors, cultural critics, photographers, and novelists, Victorian Photography, Literature, and the Invention of Modern Memory: Already the Past argues that Victorian photography ultimately defined the concept of memory for generations to come -including our own. In addition to being invaluable for scholars working within the emerging field of research at the intersection of photographic and literary studies, this book will also be of interest to students of Victorian and modernist literature, visual culture and intellectual history.

A comprehensive resource that will prove invaluable to fashion historians, this book presents a detailed exploration of the breadth of visually arresting, consumer-driven styles that have emerged in America since the 20th century.

Table of Contents: 1. Type and the Gaze: Racial Photography as Scientific Evidence, 1876--1918 -- 2. Racial Photographs from Icons to Schemes: The "Case" of Central and Eastern European Jews, 1880--1927 -- 3. Serialization as Construction of Meaning: The Photographic Practice of Hans F. K. Gunther in Context -- 4. Racial Photographs as "Thought Experiments": The Photographic Method of Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß -- 5. Racial Photography in Palestine

Table of Contents: 1. Just A Toy -- 2. Intimate, One Of A Kind -- 3. Polaroid And Digital -- 4. Polaroid Attractions -- 5. Polaroid Values -- 6. Just For Snapshots?.

The Chatter of the Visible examines the paradoxical narrative features of the photomontage aesthetics of artists associated with Dada, Constructivism, and the New Objectivity. While montage strategies have commonly been associated with the purposeful interruption of and challenge to narrative consistency and continuity, McBride offers a historicized reappraisal of 1920s and 1930s German photomontage work to show that its peculiar mimicry was less a rejection of narrative and more an extension or permutation of it-a means for thinking in narrative textures exceeding constraints imposed by "flat" print media (especially the novel and other literary genres).

Imagine the twentieth century without photography and film. Its history would be absent of images that define historical moments and generations: the death camps of Auschwitz, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Apollo lunar landing. It would be a history, in other words, of just artists' renderings and the spoken and written word. To inhabitants of the twenty-first century, deeply immersed in visual culture, such a history seems insubstantial, imprecise, and even, perhaps, unscientific. Documenting the World is about the material and social life of photographs and film made in the scientific quest to document the world. Drawing on scholars from the fields of art history, visual anthropology, and science and technology studies, the chapters in this book explore how this documentation from the initial recording of images, to their acquisition and storage, to their circulation has altered our lives, our ways of knowing, our social and economic relationships, and even our surroundings.

Retro-spectacles : on the fictions of contemporary art photography -- Orphans : on émigrés and images in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz -- Just drawings : on photographs, fun home and the pencil of nature -- Time regained : on stasis and duration in contemporary video portraits

"Focusing on early nineteenth-century England-and on the works and texts of the inventor of paper photography, William Henry Fox Talbot-Singular Images, Failed Copies historicizes the conceptualization of photography in that era as part of a major historical change.Treating photography not merely as a medium or a system of representation but also as an epistemology, Vered Maimon challenges today's prevalent association of the early photograph with the camera obscura. Instead, she points to material, formal, and conceptual differences between those two types of images by considering the philosophical and aesthetic premises linked with early photography. Through this analysis she argues that the emphasis in Talbot's accounts on the removal of the "artist's hand" in favor of "the pencil of nature" did not mark a shift from manual to "mechanical" and more accurate or "objective" systems of representation.

Recent decades have seen a flourishing interest in and speculation about the origins of photography. Spurred by rediscoveries of 'first' photographs and proclamations of photography's death in the digital age, scholars have been rethinking who and what invented the medium. Photography and Its Origins reflects on this interest in photography's beginnings by reframing it in critical and specifically historiographical terms. How and why do we write about the origins of the medium? Whom or what do we rely on to construct those narratives? What's at stake in choosing to tell stories of photography's genesis in one way or another? And what kind of work can those stories do? Edited by Tanya Sheehan and Andrés Mario Zervigón, this collection of 16 original essays, illustrated with 32 colour images, showcases prominent and emerging voices in the field of photography studies. Their research cuts across disciplines and methodologies, shedding new light on old questions about histories and their writing.

Photography became a dominant medium in cultural life starting in the late nineteenth century. As it happened, viewers increasingly used their reactions to photographs to comment on and debate public issues as vital as war, national identity, and citizenship.   Cara A. Finnegan analyzes a wealth of newspaper and magazine articles, letters to the editor, trial testimony, books, and speeches produced by viewers in response to specific photos they encountered in public.

Robert Hirsch's Exploring Color Photography is the thinking photographer's guide to color imagemaking. Now in its sixth edition, this pioneering text clearly and concisely instructs students and intermediate photographers in the fundamental aesthetic and technical building blocks needed to create thought-provoking digital and analog color photographs. Taking both a conceptual and pragmatic approach, the book avoids getting bogged down in complex, ever-changing technological matters, allowing it to stay fresh and engaging. Known as the Bible of Color Photography, its stimulating assignments encourage students to be adventurous and to take responsibility for learning and working independently. The emphasis on design and postmodern theoretical concepts stresses the thought process behind the creation of intriguing images.

"In the wake of Glasgow’s transformation in the nineteenth-century into an industrial powerhouse — the "Second City of the Empire" — a substantial part of the old town of Adam Smith degenerated into an overcrowded and disease-ridden slum. The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, Thomas Annan’s photographic record of this central section of the city prior to its demolition in accordance with the City of Glasgow Improvements Act of 1866, is widely recognized as a classic of nineteenth-century documentary photography. Annan’s achievement as a photographer of paintings, portraits and landscapes is less widely known. Thomas Annan of Glasgow: Pioneer of the Documentary Photograph offers a handy, comprehensive and copiously illustrated overview of the full range of the photographer’s work.

"Holocaust Representations in History is an introduction to critical questions and debates surrounding the depiction, chronicling and memorialization of the Holocaust through the historical analysis of some of the most provocative and significant works of Holocaust representation.In a series of chronologically presented case studies, the book introduces the major themes and issues of Holocaust representation across a variety of media and genres, including film, drama, literature, photography, visual art, television, graphic novels, and memorials. The case studies presented not only include well-known, commercially successful, and canonical works about the Holocaust, such as the film Shoah and Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, but also controversial examples that have drawn accusations of profaning the memory of the genocide. Each work's specific historical and cultural significance is then discussed to provide further insight into the impact of one of the most devastating events of the twentieth century and the continued relevance of its memory.

Photography: A Critical Introduction was the first introductory textbook to examine key debates in photographic theory and place them in their social and political contexts, and is now established as one of the leading textbooks in its field. Written especially for students in higher education and for introductory college courses, this fully revised edition provides a coherent introduction to the nature of photographic seeing. Individual chapters cover: Key debates in photographic theory and history Documentary photography and photojournalism Personal and popular photography Photography and the human body Photography and commodity culture Photography as art.

This book is a compilation of interviews and essays that cover a broad range of photographers and photographic disciplines. Each photographer profiled made a living by concentrating on a specific aspect of the craft, but in doing so transcended their livelihood to become recognized for more than the type of images they created. Each had a distinct "style," creative approach, dedication to the craft, point of view about themselves and the world. These interviews were conducted during a seminal period in the shift from film to digital and from print reproduction to global distribution on the Internet.

Lens of War grew out of an invitation to leading historians of the Civil War to select and reflect upon a single photograph. Each could choose any image and interpret it in personal and scholarly terms. The result is a remarkable set of essays by twenty-seven scholars whose numerous volumes on the Civil War have explored military, cultural, political, African American, women's, and environmental history. The essays describe a wide array of photographs and present an Sycamore Libraryectic approach to the assignment, organized by topic: Leaders, Soldiers, Civilians, Victims, and Places. Readers will rediscover familiar photographs and figures examined in unfamiliar ways, as well as discover little-known photographs that afford intriguing perspectives.

In this richly illustrated book, Robert Macieski examines Lewis W. Hine's art and advocacy on behalf of child laborers as part of the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) between 1909 and 1917. A "social photographer" -- as he called himself -- Hine created images that documented children at work throughout New England, making the case for their exploitation in the North as he had for rural working children in the South. Hine staged his images, highlighting particular types of labor in specific places: the "newsies" in Connecticut cities; sardine canners in Eastport, Maine; cranberry pickers in Cape Cod bogs; industrial homeworkers in Boston and Providence; and cotton textile workers throughout the region. His association with the NCLC connected him to a network of local and national reformers, social workers, and child welfare professionals, a broad coalition he supported in their fight to end this unethical labor practice. Macieski also chronicles Hine's efforts to mount major exhibitions that would help move public opinion against child labor. In Picturing Class, Macieski explores the historical context of Hine's photographs and the social worlds of his subjects. He offers a detailed analysis of many of the images, unearthing the stories behind the creation of these photographs and the lives of their subjects. In telling the story of these photographs, their creation, and their reception, Macieski demonstrates how Hine worked to advance an unvarnished picture of a rapidly changing region and the young workers at the center of this important shift.