Message From The Darkroom

When it was first published in 1999, Crimes Against Humanity called for a radical shift from diplomacy to justice in international affairs. In vivid, non-legalese prose, leading human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson made a riveting case for holding political and military leaders accountable in international courts for genocide, torture, and mass murder. Since then, fearsome figures such as Charles Taylor, Laurent Gbagbo, and Ratko Mladic have been tried in international criminal court, and a global movement has rallied around the human rights framework of justice. Any such legal framework requires constant evolution in order to stay relevant, and this newly revised and expanded volume brings the conversation up to date. In substantial new chapters, Robertson covers the protection of war correspondents, the problem of piracy, crimes against humanity in Syria, nuclear armament in Iran, and other challenges we are grappling with today. He criticizes the Obama administration’s policies around “targeted killing” and the trials of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other “high value” detainees. By rendering a complex debate accessible, Robertson once again provides an essential guide for anyone looking to understand human rights and how to work toward a more complete blueprint for justice.

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE From the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author of Backlash, comes In the Darkroom, an astonishing confrontation with the enigma of her father and the larger riddle of identity consuming our age. “In the summer of 2004 I set out to investigate someone I scarcely knew, my father. The project began with a grievance, the grievance of a daughter whose parent had absconded from her life. I was in pursuit of a scofflaw, an artful dodger who had skipped out on so many things—obligation, affection, culpability, contrition. I was preparing an indictment, amassing discovery for a trial. But somewhere along the line, the prosecutor became a witness.” So begins Susan Faludi’s extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of identity in the modern world and in her own haunted family saga. When the feminist writer learned that her 76-year-old father—long estranged and living in Hungary—had undergone sex reassignment surgery, that investigation would turn personal and urgent. How was this new parent who identified as “a complete woman now” connected to the silent, explosive, and ultimately violent father she had known, the photographer who’d built his career on the alteration of images? Faludi chases that mystery into the recesses of her suburban childhood and her father’s many previous incarnations: American dad, Alpine mountaineer, swashbuckling adventurer in the Amazon outback, Jewish fugitive in Holocaust Budapest. When the author travels to Hungary to reunite with her father, she drops into a labyrinth of dark histories and dangerous politics in a country hell-bent on repressing its past and constructing a fanciful—and virulent—nationhood. The search for identity that has transfixed our century was proving as treacherous for nations as for individuals. Faludi’s struggle to come to grips with her father’s metamorphosis takes her across borders—historical, political, religious, sexual--to bring her face to face with the question of the age: Is identity something you “choose,” or is it the very thing you can’t escape?

The Experimental Darkroom is a book focused on traditional black & white photographic materials—darkroom chemistry and silver gelatin paper—now used in many non-traditional ways. The book starts with a comprehensive digital negatives chapter. Topics are divided into five sections: cameraless experimentation, camera experimentation, printing experimentation, finished print experimentation, and a section highlighting contemporary photographers who use these approaches today. Each process under discussion is accompanied by photographic examples and a step-by-step method written in a “Just the facts, ma’am” style. Topics included are: Photograms and clichés verre Lumen prints Chemigrams Pinhole and zoneplate Holgas Chromo Liquid emulsion and modern tintype Lith printing Sabattier Mordançage Bleaching and bleachout Toning, traditional to experimental Applied color and abrasion tone Encaustic, photomontage, and collage Bromoil The Experimental Darkroom encourages taking risks and having fun. Over 400 images and 71 artists are included in its 276 pages. The outcome will be an expansion of creative options for the silver gelatin print. The options are engaging and now more accessible with digital negatives. Images are no longer solely captured in camera or on analog film. The darkroom is no longer always dark. The print is no longer a pristine and accurate rendition of what the camera sees. Photographers are pushing the boundaries of black & white photographic practice. It is an exciting time to get into the darkroom and play!

THE DARKROOM contains the script for Duras' 1977 radically experimental film Le camion (The Truck), as well as four manifesto-like propositions in which Duras protests that most movies "beat the imagination to death" because they "are the same every time they are played." She also accuses the gatekeepers of traditional cinema of treating intelligence as if it were a "class phenomenon" and distinguishes her own approach: a cinema based on ideas and sensory experience. In the dialogue with Michelle Porte at the end of the book, Duras further describes her filmmaking style, discussing everything from her biography to her critique of Marxism. Much of the film consists of the sounds and images of a truck rumbling through an industrial landscape dotted with dilapidated, immigrant shantytowns. Periodically, the images of the truck are interrupted by cutaways of Duras and Gérard Depardieu sitting in Duras' living room, reading from a script that includes a dialogue between a staunchly communist truck driver and an anonymous, ethnically-unidentifiable woman who stands in as an alter-ego for Duras and at the same time is a substitute for "everyone." Neither of the characters are ever shown on-screen. Via an afterimage effect, the juxtaposed voice-over text and cutaways help the film's audience members project their own images of the truck driver and hitchhiker onto the screen. The truck driver quickly decides the hitchhiker is "a reactionary" suffering from some kind of "mental disturbance." Using the "mad," uneducated woman (who, is, nevertheless, interested in everything from the position of the earth in the universe to politics to such august personalities as Proust, Corneille, and Marx), Duras criticizes the invasion of Prague by the Soviets in 1968 and its support by the French Communist Party. Between the images of the truck, juxtaposed voice-overs, and cutaways to Duras and Depardieu, the art of film becomes the art of opening audience members to the possibility of engaging multiple faculties-not only the visual and the aural, but also memory, imagination, and desire.

Anne Marsh's treatise on the art of photography traces its theoretical underpinning from the early debates between the rationalists and the fantasists, through psychoanalytical interpretations, to the theatre of desire. She investigates the role of photography in ghostly performances', the masking of desire' and high camp aesthetics' - through to performance art' and the role of the photographer as a gender terrorist' - as in the work of Del LaGrace Volcano. The study concludes with notable examples of postmodern photography as they have occurred in the Australian context. This ground-breaking work by a leading Monash University academic will interest all students of photography and followers of recent trends in art and art theory.

The author tells her story of being a Latina in the Jim Crow South.