The City As Photographic Text

The City as Photographic Text offers the first comprehensive presentation of photography on São Paulo. But more than just a study of one city’s photographic legacy, this book is a manual for how to understand and talk about Latin American photography in general. Focusing on major figures and referencing widely available books of their work, David William Foster offers a unique analysis of how photographers have contributed to our understanding of the megalopolis São Paulo has become. Eschewing a conventional historical approach, Foster explores how best to interpret visual urban life. In turn, by focusing interest on the photographic text and the ways in which it creates an interpretive meaning for the city, rather than rehearsing the circumstances under which the photographs were taken, this study provides a model for productive comment on urban photography as a project of visual meaning with important artistic attributes. As a unique entry in the inventory of scholarly writing on São Paulo, The City as Photographic Text adds to our understanding of the enormous cultural significance this city holds as a world-class urban center.

Photographs display attitudes, agency and vision in the way cities are documented and imagined. Cities and Photography explores the relationship between people and the city, visualized in photographs. It provides a visually focused examination of the city and urbanism for a range of different disciplines: across the social sciences and humanities, photography and fine art. This text offers different perspectives from which to view social, political and cultural ideas about the city and urbanism, through both verbal discussion and photographic representation. It provides introductions to theoretical conceptions of the city that are useful to photographers addressing urban issues, as well as discussing themes that have preoccupied photographers and informed cultural issues central to a discussion of city. This text interprets the city as a spatial network that we inhabit on different conceptual, psychological and physical levels, and gives emphasis to how people operate within, relate to, and activate the city via construction, habitation and disruption. Cities and Photography aims to demonstrate the potential of photography as a contributor to commentary and analytical frameworks: what does photography as a medium provide for a vision of ‘city’ and what can photographs tell us about cities, histories, attitudes and ideas? This introductory text is richly illustrated with case studies and over 50 photographs, summarizing complex theory and analysis with application to specific examples. Emphasis is given to international, contemporary photographic projects to provide provide focus for the discussion of theoretical conceptions of the city through the analysis of photographic interpretation and commentary. This text will be of great appeal to those interested in Photography, Urban Studies and Human Geography.

Cities and Photography discusses the relationship between people and the city, visualized in photographs. It explores how photographs display attitudes, agency and vision in the way a city is documented and imagined. It provides a visually focused examination of the city and urbanism for a range of different disciplines - across the social sciences and humanities, photography and fine art. This book offers different perspectives from which to view social, political and cultural ideas about the city. It provides introductions to the theories useful to photographers addressing issues relating to urbanism, and to key photographic themes that inform cultural issues central to a discussion of urbanism (e.g. the street, the everyday, social conditions). A series of case studies, featuring international and contemporary photographic projects, provides a means with which to examine a range of issues, for example: regeneration and displacement, power and the institution, visions of modernity and post-modernity, psycho-geographical space. Cities and Photography interprets the city as a space that we inhabit on different conceptual and physical levels, and gives emphasis to how people operate within, relate to, and activate the city via construction, habitation and disruption.

The first readily-accessible and completely up to date survey of the Jewish inscriptions of Western Europe.

Thought-provoking case studies on cities, photographs and booksPhotographic books are almost as old as photography itself, and the city is one of their first and more recurring themes. Cities have been, and they continue to be, intensely photographed under a wide variety of forms, materialities, intentions and genres. This volume examines how a city can be moulded through the particularities of a photographic book, suggesting how urban portraits configure an overlooked, yet quite specific, photo-textual practice. Ranging from early photography to contemporary works, Paper Cities gathers thought-provoking case studies from several international contexts, providing new insights into art, material culture, history, heritage and memory, while simultaneously illuminating the debate on cities, photographs and books. Contributors: Steven Jacobs (Ghent University), Simon Dell (University of East Anglia), Hugh Campbell (University College Dublin), Steven Humblet (LUCA School of Arts), Chris Balaschak (Flagler College), Annarita Teodosio (University of Salerno), Cecile Laly (Université Paris I), Mónica Pacheco (University College London), Douglas Klahr (University of Texas), Johanna M. Blokker (Bamberg University), Philip Goldswain (University of Western Australia).

Mina Loy, Twentieth-Century Photography, and Contemporary Women Poets- Front Cover -- Mina Loy, Twentieth-Century Photography, and Contemporary Women Poets -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of figures -- Acknowledgements -- Permissions -- Introduction -- Notes -- Chapter 1: Loy among the photographers: poetry, perception, and the camera -- Portraits and photographers -- Julien Levy and the modern photograph -- Islands in the Air and the figure of the photographer -- Vision and poetry -- Notes -- Chapter 2: Surrealism and the female body: economies of violence -- Surrealist contexts and contextualized Surrealism -- Surrealist cameras -- Loy and the female body of Surrealism -- The Surrealist mannequin -- Hans Bellmer, bodies, and war -- Notes -- Chapter 3: Portraits of the poor: the Bowery poems and the rise of documentary photography -- The 1930s and the rise of documentary -- Urban documentary and the visual rhetoric of poverty -- Portraits of the poor -- "Hot Cross Bum" and the tabloids: Sequence as portrait -- Notes -- Chapter 4: From patriotism to atrocity: the war poems and photojournalism -- Patriotism and the poetics of the mural photo-exhibit -- The rise of photojournalism -- The female gaze and the gendered body -- Atrocity and the female body -- Photographing the bomb -- Notes -- Chapter 5: Gendering the camera: Kathleen Fraser and Caroline Bergvall -- Kathleen Fraser and visual reassembly: "[T]he screen was carried inside her"--Caroline Bergvall's rearticulated bodies: Photography and the graphic page -- Coda: Looking back to Loy -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Elana Shohamy is a professor and chair of the language education program at the School of Education, Tel Aviv University, where she teaches, researches and writes about multiple issues relating to multilingualism: language policy, language testing and language in the public space. --

Paris and the Cliché of History traces the changing historical meanings of photographs of this city during a century marked by urban renovation, war, occupation, liberation, and visual documentation. Challenging the idea that photographs merely document the past, it calls for new methods of reading photos as material objects with histories of their own and sheds insight on the capital's reduction to an image in the twentieth century.