Cruel Radiance

Susie Linfield addresses the issue of whether photographs depicting past scenes of violence & cruelty are voyeuristic, arguing that if we do not look & understand that we are seeing at people, rather than depersonalised acts of inhumanity, our hopes of curbing political violence today are probably limited.

This introductory essay uses William Eggleston as the point of entry to preview the entire photography issue and includes striking photographs from Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Susan Harbage Page—as well as exploring the stunning work of Paul Kwilecki. "Photography in its finest and most decisive moments is about those tired or ignored or unseen parts of our lives, the mundane and worn paths that sit before us so firmly that we cease to notice. It is, we might say, about rebuilding our sight in the face of blindness, of recovering our collective vision." This article appears in the Summer 2011 issue of Southern Cultures: The Photography Issue.

When Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone was published in 2007, it soared to the top of bestseller lists, becoming an instant classic: a harrowing account of Sierra Leone’s civil war and the fate of child soldiers that “everyone in the world should read” (The Washington Post). Now Beah, whom Dave Eggers has called “arguably the most read African writer in contemporary literature,” has returned with his first novel, an affecting, tender parable about postwar life in Sierra Leone. At the centre of Radiance of Tomorrow are Benjamin and Bockarie, two longtime friends who return to their hometown, Imperi, after the civil war. The village is in ruins, the ground covered in bones. As more villagers begin to file back, Benjamin and Bockarie try to forge a new community by taking up their former posts as teachers, but they’re beset by obstacles: a scarcity of food; a rash of murders, thievery, rape, and retaliation; and the depredations of a foreign mining company intent on sullying the town’s water supply and blocking its paths with electric wires. As Benjamin and Bockarie search for a way to restore order, they’re forced to reckon with the pain of their past and the uncertainty of their future. With the gentle lyricism of a dream and the moral clarity of a fable, Radiance of Tomorrow is a powerful novel about preserving what means the most to us, even in uncertain times. It marks the start of an exciting new chapter for Ishmael Beah.

Los Angeles is a city of dualities--sunshine and noir, coastline beaches and urban grit, natural beauty and suburban sprawl, the obvious and the hidden. Both Sides of Sunset: Photographing Los Angeles reveals these dualities and more, in images captured by master photographers such as Bruce Davidson, Lee Friedlander, Daido Moriyama, Julius Shulman and Garry Winogrand, as well as many younger artists, among them Matthew Brandt, Katy Grannan, Alex Israel, Lise Sarfati and Ed Templeton, just to name a few. Taken together, these individual views by more than 130 artists form a collective vision of a place where myth and reality are often indistinguishable. Spinning off the highly acclaimed Looking at Los Angeles (Metropolis Books, 2005), Both Sides of Sunset presents an updated and equally unromantic vision of this beloved and scorned metropolis. In the years since the first book was published, the artistic landscape of Los Angeles has flourished and evolved. The extraordinary Getty Museum project Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980 focused global attention on the city's artistic heritage, and this interest has only continued to grow. Both Sides of Sunset showcases many of the artists featured in the original book--such as Lewis Baltz, Catherine Opie, Stephen Shore and James Welling--but also incorporates new images that portray a city that is at once unhinged and driven by irrepressible exuberance. Proceeds from the sale of the book will benefit Inner-City Arts--an oasis of learning, achievement and creativity in the heart of Los Angeles' Skid Row that brings arts education to elementary, middle and high school students.

Riley has crossed the bridge into the afterlife—a place called Here, where time is always Now. She has picked up life where she left off when she was alive, living with her parents and dog in a nice house in a nice neighborhood. When she's summoned before The Council, she learns that the afterlife isn't just an eternity of leisure. She's been assigned a job, Soul Catcher, and a teacher, Bodhi, a possibly cute, seemingly nerdy boy who's definitely hiding something. They return to earth together for Riley's first assignment, a Radiant Boy who's been haunting a castle in England for centuries. Many Soul Catchers have tried to get him to cross the bridge and failed. But all of that was before he met Riley . . . Radiance is the first book in the Riley Bloom series from bestselling author Alyson Noël.

In A Short History of Photography Criticism; or, Why Do Photography Critics Hate Photography?, Susie Linfield contends that by looking at images of political violence and learning to see the people in them, we engage in an ethically and politically necessary act that connects us to our modern history of violence. For many years, Linfield’s acute analysis of photographs—from events as wide-ranging as the Holocaust, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and recent acts of terrorism—has explored a complex connection between the practices of photojournalism and the rise of human rights ideals. By asking how photography should respond to the darker shadows of modern life, Linfield insists on the continuing moral relevance of photojournalism, while urging us not to avert our eyes from what James Agee once labeled “the cruel radiance of what is.”

A lively intellectual history that explores how prominent midcentury public intellectuals approached Zionism and then the State of Israel itself and its conflicts with the Arab world In this lively intellectual history of the political Left, cultural critic Susie Linfield investigates how eight prominent twentieth-century intellectuals struggled with the philosophy of Zionism, and then with Israel and its conflicts with the Arab world. Constructed as a series of interrelated portraits that combine the personal and the political, the book includes philosophers, historians, journalists, and activists such as Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, I. F. Stone, and Noam Chomsky. In their engagement with Zionism, these influential thinkers also wrestled with the twentieth century’s most crucial political dilemmas: socialism, nationalism, democracy, colonialism, terrorism, and anti-Semitism. In other words, in probing Zionism, they confronted the very nature of modernity and the often catastrophic histories of our time. By examining these leftist intellectuals, Linfield also seeks to understand how the contemporary Left has become focused on anti-Zionism and how Israel itself has moved rightward.

Between 1936 and 1941 Walker Evans and James Agee collaborated on one of the most provocative books in American literature, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). While at work on this book, the two also conceived another less well-known but equally important book project entitled Many Are Called. This three-year photographic study of subway passengers made with a hidden camera was first published in 1966, with an introduction written by Agee in 1940. Long out of print, Many Are Called is now being reissued with a new foreword and afterword and with exquisitely reproduced images from newly prepared digital scans. Many Are Called came to fruition at a slow pace. In 1938, Walker Evans began surreptitiously photographing people on the New York City subway. With his camera hidden in his coat—the lens peeking through a buttonhole—he captured the faces of riders hurtling through the dark tunnels, wrapped in their own private thoughts. By 1940-41, Evans had made over six hundred photographs and had begun to edit the series. The book remained unpublished until 1966 when The Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhibition of Evans’s subway portraits. This beautiful new edition—published in the centenary year of the NYC subway—is an essential book for all admirers of Evans’s unparalleled photographs, Agee’s elegant prose, and the great City of New York.