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Title:
Dark mirrors

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$50.00
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Summary:
''Dark mirrors'' assembles sixteen essays by photographer and critic Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa focusing on contemporary fine art photographic and video practices that are principally, though not exclusively, rooted in the United States, written between 2015 and 2021. Wolukau-Wanambwa analyses the image’s relationship to the urgent and complex questions that define our era, through the lens of artistic practices and works which insightfully engage with the ongoing contemporaneity of disparate histories and the ever-changing status of the visual in social life. The book sets out an argument that one of the most dynamic sites of artistic invention in photographic practice over the past decade has been the photographic book, and thus many of the essays in the volume assess artistic works as they are bodied forth in that form. Among the recurrent themes that emerge from these rigorous, probing essays are the complex interrelationship of anti-blackness and visuality, the fragility and complexity of embodied difference in portraiture, the potency of verbal and visual media as social forms, and the politics of attention.

Title:
Indeterminacy: Thoughts on time, the image and race(ism)

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$28.00
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Summary:
In a series of written exchanges, David Campany and Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa consider the options for photography in resisting the oppressive orthodoxies of racial capital, conservative history, and neoliberal visual culture. How does the essential indeterminacy of photography square with the need to work out alternative practices? How is visibility achieved beyond the consensual categories of the mass media and the commodification of art? What models are there for the making and reception of photographic books and exhibitions that might cultivate an active spectatorship beyond boutique consumerism? These urgent questions and more are discussed in a spirit of speculation and possibility, in the light of signal events that have shaped the recent past.

Title:
The lives of images, vol. 1 : repetition, reproduction and circulation

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$34.00
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Summary:
''The lives of images,'' edited by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, is a set of contemporary thematic readers designed for educators, students, practicing photographers, and others interested in the ways images function within a wider set of cultural practices. The series tracks the many movements and 'lives' of images—their tendency to accumulate, circulate, and transform through different geographies, cultures, processes, institutions, states, uses, and times. Volume 1 of the series, ''Repetition, reproduction, and circulation,'' addresses the multiple life cycles of the image—its modes of dispersion, reception, consumption, and aggregation—and the significance of technological reproduction for contemporary forms of social, cultural, and political life. The image is considered as both a tool for liberation and a means of repression within the evolving structures of modern life. The essays consider the implications of the nature and effect of the reproducible image on the categories, shapes, and aims of contemporary art and society. Further grounded by two interviews with practitioners in the field, ''Repetition, reproduction, and circulation'' promises to be an accessible, rigorous, and timely resource for all students, educators, and practitioners of photography.

Title:
The lives of images, vol. 2 : analogy, attunement and attention

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$34.00
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Summary:
This volume addresses the complex relationships that the reproducible image creates with its viewers, their bodies, their minds, and their sense of the physical and metaphysical world. The selection addresses the image’s role in the social constitution of individual and collective identity, in social practices of resistance to the structural violences of racism, or in relation to state exercises of power. Of particular importance in this volume are questions of our changing relationship to space and to selfhood as mediated by the image and by the many networked technologies and norms built around it. Essays in the volume ask: what modes of attention are required of us as viewers and agents of image circulation? The question of how image technologies provide us with an array of freedoms is here combined with and read against the many ways images are deployed to reorient, repress, or reduce our field of vision—thus affecting our capacity to see and to act in social space.