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When Andy Grundberg landed in New York in the early 1970s as a budding writer, photography was at the margins of the contemporary art world. By 1991, when he left his post as critic for the New York Times, photography was at the vital center of artistic debate. Grundberg writes eloquently and authoritatively about photography’s 'boom years,' chronicling the medium’s(...)
How photography became contemporary
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When Andy Grundberg landed in New York in the early 1970s as a budding writer, photography was at the margins of the contemporary art world. By 1991, when he left his post as critic for the New York Times, photography was at the vital center of artistic debate. Grundberg writes eloquently and authoritatively about photography’s 'boom years,' chronicling the medium’s increasing role within the most important art movements of the time, from Earth Art and Conceptual Art to performance and video. He also traces photography’s embrace by museums and galleries, as well as its politicization in the culture wars of the 80s and 90s.
Theory of Photography
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Even as the media environment has changed dramatically in recent years, one thing at least remains true: photographs are everywhere. From professional news photos to smartphone selfies, images have become part of the fabric of modern life. And that may be the problem. Even as photography bears witness, it provokes anxieties about fraudulent representation; even as it(...)
Theory of Photography
November 2016
The public image: photography and civic spectatorship
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Even as the media environment has changed dramatically in recent years, one thing at least remains true: photographs are everywhere. From professional news photos to smartphone selfies, images have become part of the fabric of modern life. And that may be the problem. Even as photography bears witness, it provokes anxieties about fraudulent representation; even as it evokes compassion, it prompts anxieties about excessive exposure. Parents and pundits alike worry about the unprecedented media saturation that transforms society into an image world. And yet a great news photo can still stop us in our tracks, and the ever-expanding photographic archive documents an era of continuous change. By confronting these conflicted reactions to photography, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites make the case for a fundamental shift in understanding photography and public culture. In place of suspicions about the medium’s capacity for distraction, deception, and manipulation, they suggest how it can provide resources for democratic communication and thoughtful reflection about contemporary social problems.
Theory of Photography
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Photography is one of the principal filters through which we engage the world. The contributors to this volume focus on Walter Benjamin's concept of the optical unconscious to investigate how photography has shaped history, modernity, perception, lived experience, politics, race, and human agency. In essays that range from examinations of Benjamin's and Sigmund Freud's(...)
Photography and the optical unconscious
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Photography is one of the principal filters through which we engage the world. The contributors to this volume focus on Walter Benjamin's concept of the optical unconscious to investigate how photography has shaped history, modernity, perception, lived experience, politics, race, and human agency. In essays that range from examinations of Benjamin's and Sigmund Freud's writings to the work of Kara Walker and Roland Barthes's famous Winter Garden photograph, the contributors explore what photography can teach us about the nature of the unconscious. They attend to side perceptions, develop latent images, discover things hidden in plain sight, focus on the disavowed, and perceive the slow. Of particular note are the ways race and colonialism have informed photography from its beginning. The volume also contains photographic portfolios by Zoe Leonard, Kelly Wood, and Kristan Horton, whose work speaks to the optical unconscious while demonstrating how photographs communicate on their own terms. The essays and portfolios in Photography and the Optical Unconscious create a collective and sustained assessment of Benjamin's influential concept, opening up new avenues for thinking about photography and the human psyche.
Theory of Photography
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As the boundaries that separate photography from other forms of artistic production are increasingly fluid, Solomon-Godeau, a pioneering feminist and politically engaged critic, argues that the relationships between photography, culture, gender, and power demand renewed attention. In her analyses of the photographic production of Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Susan(...)
Photography after photography: gender, genre, history
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As the boundaries that separate photography from other forms of artistic production are increasingly fluid, Solomon-Godeau, a pioneering feminist and politically engaged critic, argues that the relationships between photography, culture, gender, and power demand renewed attention. In her analyses of the photographic production of Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Susan Meiselas, Francesca Woodman, and others, Solomon-Godeau refigures the disciplinary object of photography by considering these practices through an examination of the determinations of genre and gender as these shape the relations between photographers, their images, and their viewers.
Theory of Photography
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n 1954, the French writer, politician, and publisher André Malraux (1901–1976) posed at home for a photographer from the magazine Paris Match, surrounded by pages from his forthcoming book Le musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale. The enchanting metaphor of the musée imaginaire (imaginary museum) was built upon that illustrated art book, and Malraux was one of its(...)
The book on the floor: André Malraux and the imaginary museum
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n 1954, the French writer, politician, and publisher André Malraux (1901–1976) posed at home for a photographer from the magazine Paris Match, surrounded by pages from his forthcoming book Le musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale. The enchanting metaphor of the musée imaginaire (imaginary museum) was built upon that illustrated art book, and Malraux was one of its greatest champions. Drawing on a range of contemporary publications, he adopted images and responded to ideas. Indeed, Malraux’s book on the floor is a variation of photographer André Vigneau’s spectacular Encyclopédie photographique de l’art, published in five volumes from 1935 on—years before Malraux would enter this field. Both authors were engaged in juxtaposing artworks via photographs and publishing these photographs by the hundreds, but Malraux was the better sloganeer. Starting from a close examination of the photograph of Malraux in his salon, art historian Walter Grasskamp takes the reader back to the dawn of this genre of illustrated art book. He shows how it catalyzed the practice of comparing works of art on a global scale. He retraces the metaphor to earlier reproduction practices and highlights its ubiquity in contemporary art, ending with an homage to the other pioneer of the “museum without walls,” the unjustly forgotten Vigneau.
Theory of Photography
Photography and Germany
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The meeting of photography and Germany evokes pioneering modernist pictures from the Weimar era and colossal digital prints that define the medium’s art practice today. It also recalls horrifying documents of wartime atrocity and the relentless surveillance of East German citizens. This publication broadens these perceptions by examining photography’s multi-faceted(...)
Photography and Germany
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The meeting of photography and Germany evokes pioneering modernist pictures from the Weimar era and colossal digital prints that define the medium’s art practice today. It also recalls horrifying documents of wartime atrocity and the relentless surveillance of East German citizens. This publication broadens these perceptions by examining photography’s multi-faceted relationship with Germany’s turbulent cultural, political and social history. It shows how many of the same phenomena that helped generate the country’s most recognizable photographs also led to a range of lesser-known pictures that similarly documented or negotiated Germany’s cultural identity and historical ruptures.
Theory of Photography
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In 1978, Zofia Rydet (1911–97) began work on a monumental project that would come to be known as her ''Sociological Record'': photographing the people of Poland at their homes, she produced an extraordinary archive of around twenty thousand negatives. The undertaking consumed Rydet so completely that she was never able to give it final shape through a book or an art show.(...)
Object lessons: Zofia Rydet's 'Sociological record'
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In 1978, Zofia Rydet (1911–97) began work on a monumental project that would come to be known as her ''Sociological Record'': photographing the people of Poland at their homes, she produced an extraordinary archive of around twenty thousand negatives. The undertaking consumed Rydet so completely that she was never able to give it final shape through a book or an art show. ''Object Lessons'', a new volume of essays inspired by an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, helps to dispel the myths that have formed around the project in recent years and introduces the photographer to a new global audience. Rydet herself remained unresolved over the question of how to define her work, leaving the viewer to ponder whether her magnum opus is a piece of art or science. What does remain undisputed is that ''Sociological Record'' is a striking testimony of its time.
Theory of Photography
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L’administration des Monuments historiques a rassemblé aux 19e et 20e siècles une collection photographique qui compte à l’heure actuelle au moins quinze millions de négatifs et quatre millions de tirages. Après la Mission héliographique de 1851, première commande photographique de l’État, la collection se développe véritablement à partir de 1875 et va peu à peu s’étendre(...)
Photographier le patrimoine aux 19e et 20e siècles
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L’administration des Monuments historiques a rassemblé aux 19e et 20e siècles une collection photographique qui compte à l’heure actuelle au moins quinze millions de négatifs et quatre millions de tirages. Après la Mission héliographique de 1851, première commande photographique de l’État, la collection se développe véritablement à partir de 1875 et va peu à peu s’étendre à tous les domaines des arts. Le Gray et Baldus y côtoient Mieusement et Marville, Atget et Nadar, pour ne citer que quelques-uns des plus célèbres photographes représentés. Avec la première guerre mondiale et la création de la Section photographique et cinématographique de l'Armée, c’est une nouvelle dimension qui est abordée, celle de l’actualité de guerre. Cette histoire est celle des nombreux services et des personnes qui se sont attachés à constituer ces fonds de photographies, à les préserver, à les développer pour répondre aux besoins d’inventaire et de rayonnement de notre patrimoine national. La Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine assume désormais la charge de cette collection photographique inestimable, sans doute l’une des plus riches d’Europe. Publié à l’occasion du vingtième anniversaire de la MAP, l’ouvrage d’Anne Fourestié et Isabelle Gui retrace cent cinquante ans d’histoire de la photographie en s’appuyant sur des fonds d’archives méconnus.
Theory of Photography
Photography and doubt
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Recent decades have seen photography’s privileged relationship to the real come under question. Spurred by the postmodern critique of photography in the 1980s and the rise of digital technologies soon thereafter, scholars have been asking who and what built this understanding of the medium in the first place. "Photography and doubt" reflects on this interest in(...)
Theory of Photography
January 2017
Photography and doubt
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Recent decades have seen photography’s privileged relationship to the real come under question. Spurred by the postmodern critique of photography in the 1980s and the rise of digital technologies soon thereafter, scholars have been asking who and what built this understanding of the medium in the first place. "Photography and doubt" reflects on this interest in photography’s referential power by discussing it in rigorously historical terms. How was the understanding of photographic realism cultivated in the first place? What do cases of staged and manipulated photography reveal about that realism’s hold on audiences across the medium’s history? Have doubts about photography’s testimonial power stimulated as much knowledge as its realism?
Theory of Photography
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This influential text by French historian and theorist François Brunet considers the invention and history of photography as the birth of an idea, rather than a new type of image. This ''idea photography'' combines a logical theme- that of an art without artistry- and the democratic political promise of an art for all. Officially endorsed by the 1839 French law on the(...)
The birth of the idea of photography
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This influential text by French historian and theorist François Brunet considers the invention and history of photography as the birth of an idea, rather than a new type of image. This ''idea photography'' combines a logical theme- that of an art without artistry- and the democratic political promise of an art for all. Officially endorsed by the 1839 French law on the daguerreotype, this idea reverberated throughout the nineteenth century in Europe and America. Brunet shows how emerging image technologies and practices in France and Britain were linked to this logical/political construction of photography, from the earliest researches of Nicéphore Niépce, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, and Henry Fox Talbot up to the turn of the twentieth century. The parallel development of the Kodak camera and Alfred Stieglitz's ''straight'' vision in the United States then fulfilled, while also depreciating, the utopian promise of photography for all.
Theory of Photography