Photography S Last Century

Beginning with Paul Strand’s landmark From the Viaduct in 1916 and continuing through the present day, Photography’s Last Century examines defining moments in the history of the medium. Featuring nearly 100 masterworks from one of the most important private holdings of photography, the book includes works by Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Walker Evans, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, and Cindy Sherman, as well as a diverse group of important lesser-known practitioners. A fascinating interview with Ann Tenenbaum provides a personal account of the works, while the main text offers an essential history of photography that addresses the implications of calling this period the medium’s “last” century.

This beautiful and informative photographic history includes images from 1900 to 1999. Many are often seen (bullet piercing the apple, splashing crown of milk, Sophia Loren looking askance at Jayne Mansfield's plunging decollete, and Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother); but most are probably unknown, because the photos were selected not only for their visual and cognitive qualities but also for their importance to the history and development of photographic technique and usage. The century is divided into thirds for explanation's sake, and there is at least one photograph for every year. While this is a picture book, the accompanying text provides informative introductions to the uses and abuses of perhaps the century's most important medium. The book is companion to the PBS series. Oversize: 12.5x9.5". Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

The Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography is the first comprehensive encyclopedia of world photography up to the beginning of the twentieth century. It sets out to be the standard, definitive reference work on the subject for years to come. Its coverage is global – an important ‘first’ in that authorities from all over the world have contributed their expertise and scholarship towards making this a truly comprehensive publication. The Encyclopedia presents new and ground-breaking research alongside accounts of the major established figures in the nineteenth century arena. Coverage includes all the key people, processes, equipment, movements, styles, debates and groupings which helped photography develop from being ‘a solution in search of a problem’ when first invented, to the essential communication tool, creative medium, and recorder of everyday life which it had become by the dawn of the twentieth century. The sheer breadth of coverage in the 1200 essays makes the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography an essential reference source for academics, students, researchers and libraries worldwide.

"Examines three projects in late nineteenth-century scientific photography: the endeavors of Alphonse Bertillon, Francis Galton, and Etienne-Jules Marey. Develops new theoretical perspectives on the history of photographic technology, as well as the history of scientific imaging more generally"--

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 and Its Origins will serve as a valuable resource for students and scholars in art history, visual and media studies, and the history of science and technology.

Photography has revolutionized the way in which we see the world, both on a personal level (in allowing us directly to record our family histories), and in a wider way (we can "watch" events as they unfold, and from multiple perspectives). It has also shaped the very way that we look at things, and profoundly affected what we choose to look at. Twentieth-century Photography celebrates this remarkable art form, providing a comprehensive guide to some 70 of the world's best-known, and most influential, photographers and their work, from the early pioneers to today's experimental artists. Arranged alphabetically, each entry contains an incisive appreciation of the photographer and their art, a biographical fact panel, and a selection of their greatest or most interesting work. From Bernice Abbott to Cartier-Bresson, and from Man Ray to Weegee, Twentieth-century Photography gives unique insights into the mix of styles and techniques that have ensured the diversity of this art form, from the earliest prints to modern digital images.

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: Today we observe a development in which the role of language is steadily decreasing whereas the impact of pictures is increasing. This goes hand in hand with a development in which information relies more and more on visual concepts. More and more language takes the part of explaining how to read the visual presentations, more and more language takes the part of providing the background information which is necessary to understand the meaning of the visual foreground. Kress and van Leeuwen (1998) argue that Today, we seem to move towards a decrease of control over language (e.g. the greater variety of accents allowed on the public media, the increasing poblems in enforcing normative spelling), and towards an increase in codification and control over the visual (e.g. the use of image banks from which ready-made images can be drawn for the constuction of visual texts, and, generally, the effect of computer imaging technology). Although we may be aware of this tendency, we have not been taught in school how to read visual concepts and so most of us share some degree of illiteracy concerning a critical reading of information presented by images. This is remarkable because we all agree about their influence on our lives but at the same time when we do not develop analytical tools for describing what kinds of strategies, what kinds of concepts are working in visual presentations of information. We tend to overlook the importance of visual concepts simply because we generally do not know enough about their code. This paper analyses photos and language which are parts of ads, which have definitely been designed for transferring messages because they have been made to advertise one specific product. Images and the text of advertisements never are casual products like family pictures. Although the photo in the family album is coded its coding is less elaborated than the coding of pictures in ads. We have to keep in mind that many people, experts in advertising, experts in public relations were involved in the process of designing an ad before we can look at the final result. This is why ads are definitely conceptually designed because they are meant to create a specific meaning in the viewer s mind. It is a truism that no visual concept, no photo of an ad was chosen by chance. Photographs and language of ads are more likely to have been carefully constructed and selected according to the meaning they are supposed to create. This is [...]

Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian is the most ambitious photographic and ethnographic record of Native American cultures ever produced. Published between 1907 and 1930 as a series of twenty volumes and portfolios, the work contains more than two thousand photographs intended to document the traditional culture of every Native American tribe west of the Mississippi. Many critics have claimed that Curtis's images present Native peoples as a "vanishing race," hiding both their engagement with modernity and the history of colonial violence. But in this major reappraisal of Curtis's work, Shamoon Zamir argues instead that Curtis's photography engages meaningfully with the crisis of culture and selfhood brought on by the dramatic transformations of Native societies. This crisis is captured profoundly, and with remarkable empathy, in Curtis's images of the human face. Zamir also contends that we can fully understand this achievement only if we think of Curtis's Native subjects as coauthors of his project. This radical reassessment is presented as a series of close readings that explore the relationship of aesthetics and ethics in photography. Zamir's richly illustrated study resituates Curtis's work in Native American studies and in the histories of photography and visual anthropology.