Photography Vision And The Production Of Modern Bodies

Lalvani argues that modernity represents the powerful privileging of vision and the introduction of a paradigm of seeing that is historically distinctive. Taking the introduction of photography in the nineteenth century as a crucial development in the expansion of modern vision, he draws on the writings of Alan Sekula, John Tagg, Jonathan Crary, Norman Bryson and Martin Jay to examine in a comprehensive manner how photography functioned to organize a set of relations between knowledge, power, and the body. However, in taking a broad cultural studies approach Lalvani situates the practices of photography within the larger visual order of the nineteenth century. He demonstrates how the new lines of visibility formed not only by photography but by new urban spaces and new modes of transportation resulted in a particular organizing of the social order, of subjectivity and social relations.

Visual images, artifacts, and performances play a powerful part in shaping U.S. culture. To understand the dynamics of public persuasion, students must understand this "visual rhetoric." This rich anthology contains 20 exemplary studies of visual rhetoric, exploring an array of visual communication forms, from photographs, prints, television documentary, and film to stamps, advertisements, and tattoos. In material original to this volume, editors Lester C. Olson, Cara A. Finnegan, and Diane S. Hope present a critical perspective that links visuality and rhetoric, locates the study of visual rhetoric within the disciplinary framework of communication, and explores the role of the visual in the cultural space of the United States. Enhanced with these critical editorial perspectives, Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture provides a conceptual framework for students to understand and reflect on the role of visual communication in the cultural and public sphere of the United States. Key Features and Benefits Five broad pairs of rhetorical action—performing and seeing; remembering and memorializing; confronting and resisting; commodifying and consuming; governing and authorizing—introduce students to the ways visual images and artifacts become powerful tools of persuasion Each section opens with substantive editorial commentary to provide readers with a clear conceptual framework for understanding the rhetorical action in question, and closes with discussion questions to encourage reflection among the essays The collection includes a range of media, cultures, and time periods; covers a wide range of scholarly approaches and methods of handling primary materials; and attends to issues of gender, race, sexuality and class Contributors include: Thomas Benson; Barbara Biesecker; Carole Blair; Dan Brouwer; Dana Cloud; Kevin Michael DeLuca; Anne Teresa Demo; Janis L. Edwards; Keith V. Erickson; Cara A. Finnegan; Bruce Gronbeck; Robert Hariman; Christine Harold; Ekaterina Haskins; Diane S. Hope; Judith Lancioni; Margaret R. LaWare; John Louis Lucaites; Neil Michel; Charles E. Morris III; Lester C. Olson; Shawn J. Parry-Giles; Ronald Shields; John M. Sloop; Nathan Stormer; Reginald Twigg and Carol K. Winkler "This book significantly advances theory and method in the study of visual rhetoric through its comprehensive approach and wise separations of key conceptual components." —Julianne H. Newton, University of Oregon

Photography became a dominant medium in cultural life starting in the late nineteenth century. As it happened, viewers increasingly used their reactions to photographs to comment on and debate public issues as vital as war, national identity, and citizenship. Cara A. Finnegan analyzes a wealth of newspaper and magazine articles, letters to the editor, trial testimony, books, and speeches produced by viewers in response to specific photos they encountered in public. From the portrait of a young Lincoln to images of child laborers and Depression-era hardship, Finnegan treats the photograph as a locus for viewer engagement and constructs a history of photography's viewers that shows how Americans used words about images to participate in the politics of their day. As she shows, encounters with photography helped viewers negotiate the emergent anxieties and crises of U.S. public life through not only persuasion but action, as well.

Exploring contemporary theory and practice in photography, this textbook moves beyond introductory studies to cover more advanced concepts for the upper-level student. Building on a foundational understanding of photography, it addresses recent theoretical debates and more complex ideas to enable students to acquire the tools and confidence to develop the independent thinking and analytical skills needed for this level of study.Contemporary Photography and Theory analyses five key topics: identity, place, the politics of looking, psychoanalysis and the event. Its conceptual approach encourages students to apply theoretical texts to a range of issues and themes, both in their own work and that of others. Each topic is broken down into three chapters to address the central concept in detail, supported by the following features: - Troubleshooting footnotes to flag up and clarify common misunderstandings - Detailed case studies to show how theoretical concepts can be applied to artists' work - Further examples and reading suggestions from an international range of photographers and thinkersThe chapters are designed to be a suitable length for assigned weekly readings, making this the ideal resource for in-class discussion, as well as the perfect starting place for dissertation research.

Surveying the spectrum of photography from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, Photography: A Critical Introductionis the first book to examine key debates in photographic theory and place them in their proper social and political contexts. While most histories of photography invariably focus on the works of the "great photographers," this book is written especially to provide a coherent introduction to the nature of photographic seeing and its personal and cultural significance through history. Contributors lucidly examine a range of major photographic theories, histories, genres and issues, covering such topics as key debates in photographic theory and history; documentary photography and photojournalism; personal and popular photography; photography and commodity culture; photography and the human body; photography as art; and photography in the age of electronic imaging. This completely revised and updated second edition includes detailed case studies; key references, biographies of key thinkers, and margin notes; a full glossary of terms, comprehensive end-of-chapter bibliographies, and resource information, including guides to public archives and useful web sites. The lavish illustrations include images by Bill Brandt, Lee Friedlander, Hannah Hoch, Roshini Kempadoo, Dorothea Lange, Lee Miller, Alexander Rodchenko, Jacob Riis, Sebastio Salgado, Andres Serrano and Jo Spence.

In Mina Loy, Twentieth-Century Photography, and Contemporary Women Poets, Linda A. Kinnahan explores the making of Mina Loy’s late modernist poetics in relation to photography’s ascendance, by the mid-twentieth century, as a distinctively modern force shaping representation and perception. As photography develops over the course of the century as an art form, social tool, and cultural force, Loy’s relationship to a range of photographic cultures emerging in the first half of the twentieth century suggests how we might understand not only the intriguing work of this poet, but also the shaping impact of photography and new technologies of vision upon modernist poetics. Framing Loy’s encounters with photography through intersections of portraiture, Surrealism, fashion, documentary, and photojournalism, Kinnahan draws correspondences between Loy’s late poetry and visual discourses of the body, urban poverty, and war, discerning how a visual rhetoric of gender often underlies these mappings and connections. In her final chapter, Kinnahan examines two contemporary poets who directly engage the camera’s modern impact –Kathleen Fraser and Caroline Bergvall – to explore the questions posed in their work about the particular relation of the camera, the photographic image, and the construction of gender in the late twentieth century.

Nineteenth-century Iran was an ocularcentered society predicated on visuality and what was seen and unseen, and photographs became liminal sites of desire that maneuvered "betwixt and between" various social spaces—public, private, seen, unseen, accessible, and forbidden—thus mapping, graphing, and even transgressing those spaces, especially in light of increasing modernization and global contact during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of primary interest is how photographs negotiated and coded gender, sexuality, and desire, becoming strategies of empowerment, of domination, of expression, and of being seen. Hence, the photograph became a vehicle to traverse multiple locations that various gendered physical bodies could not, and it was also the social and political relations that had preceded the photograph that determined those ideological spaces of (im)mobility. In identifying these notions in photographs, one may glean information about how modern Iran metamorphosed throughout its own long durée or resisted those societal transformations as a result of modernization.

The Handbook of Photography Studies is a state-of-the-art overview of the field of photography studies, examining its thematic interests, dynamic research methodologies and multiple scholarly directions. It is a source of well-informed, analytical and reflective discussions of all the main subjects that photography scholars have been concerned with as well as a rigorous study of the field’s persistent expansion at a time when digital technology regularly boosts our exposure to new and historical photographs alike. Split into five core parts, the Handbook analyzes the field’s histories, theories and research strategies; discusses photography in academic disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts; draws out the main concerns of photographic scholarship; interrogates photography’s cultural and geopolitical influences; and examines photography’s multiple uses and continued changing faces. Each part begins with an introductory text, giving historical contextualization and scholarly orientation. Featuring the work of international experts, and offering diverse examples, insights and discussions of the field’s rich historiography, the Handbook provides critical guidance to the most recent research in photography studies. This pioneering and comprehensive volume presents a systematic synopsis of the subject that will be an invaluable resource for photography researchers and students from all disciplinary backgrounds in the arts, humanities and social sciences.