The Selfie Temporality And Contemporary Photography

This book is a theoretical examination of the relationship between the face, identity, photography, and temporality, focusing on the temporal episteme of selfie practice. Claire Raymond investigates how the selfie’s involvement with time and self emerges from capitalist ideologies of identity and time. The book leverages theories from Katharina Pistor, Jacques Lacan, Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson, and Hans Belting to explore the ways in which the selfie imposes a dominant ideology on subjectivity by manipulating the affect of time. The selfie is understood in contrast to the self-portrait. Artists discussed include James Tylor, Shelley Niro, Ellen Carey, Graham MacIndoe, and LaToya Ruby Frazier. The book will be of interest to scholars working in visual culture, history of photography, and critical theory. It will also appeal to scholars of philosophy and, in particular, of the intersection of aesthetic theory and theories of ontology, epistemology, and temporality.

This collection explores the cultural fascination with social media forms of self-portraiture, "selfies," with a specific interest in online self-imaging strategies in a Western context. This book examines the selfie as a social and technological phenomenon but also engages with digital self-portraiture as representation: as work that is committed to rigorous object-based analysis. The scholars in this volume consider the topic of online self-portraiture—both its social function as a technology-driven form of visual communication, as well as its thematic, intellectual, historical, and aesthetic intersections with the history of art and visual culture. This book will be of interest to scholars of photography, art history, and media studies.

Emphasizing the medium’s reception among several Chinese constituencies, this book explores photography’s impact within new discourses on science, as well as its effects in social life, visual modernity and the media during China’s transition from imperial to republican government. General knowledge and academic teaching of early modern Chinese visual culture stops short of fitting photography into the larger context of visual practices and theories. This study redraws the boundaries by making photography the central concern within changing priorities of visual representation and its functions during a period of major cultural and political change. No other study draws on such intimate familiarity with the early glamour of photography as science, commerce and communication in the various local conditions of China’s cities and towns. Joining a body of critical writing that examines photography’s histories outside the familiar confines of the West, this book looks beyond the tourist and imperialist gazes of photographer-adventurers from the Western powers and Japan. It defines instead the Chinese priorities of photographic vision that are abundantly evident in surviving photographs as well as in records as various as technical manuals and personal inscriptions. Local practices and local knowledge are the keys to explain the highly successful indigenization of a medium as globalizing as photography with reference to Chinese society’s own terms and practices. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in art and visual culture, the history of photography and Asian art.

This book offers an analysis of the socio-historical conditions of the rise of postwar Italian photography, considers its practices, and outlines its destiny. Antonella Russo provides an incisive examination of Neorealist photography, delineates its periodization, traces its instances and its progressive popularization and subsequent co-optation that occurred with the advent of the industrialization of photographic magazines. This volume examines the ethno(photo)graphic missions of Ernesto De Martino in the deep South of Italy, the key role played by the Neorealist writer and painter Carlo Levi as "ambassador of international photography", and the journeys of David Seymour, Henry Cartier Bresson, and Paul Strand in Neorealist Italy. The text includes an account the formation and proliferation of Italian photographic associations and their role in institutionalizing and promoting Italian photography, their link to British and other European photographic societies, and the subsequent decline of Neorealism. It also considers the inception of non-objective photography that thrived soon after the war, in concurrence with the circulation of Neorealism, thus debunking the myth identifying all Italian postwar photography with the Neorealist image. This book will be particularly useful for scholars and students in the history and theory of photography, and Italian history.

By analysing the philosophical lineage of notions of representation, time, being, light, exposure, image, and truth, this book argues that photography is the visual manifestation of the philosophical account of how humans encounter beings in the present. Daniel Rubinstein argues that traditional understandings of photography are determined by the notions of verisimilitude and representation, and this limits our understanding of photographic materiality. It is suggested that the photographic image must be closely read not for the objects, events and situations represented in it, but for the insights it affords into the structure of contemporary consciousness. The book will be of interest to scholars working in photography, media studies, philosophy, fine art, and art history.

Through a variety of case studies by global scholars from diverse academic fields, this book explores photographic-album practices of historically marginalized figures from a range of time periods, geographic locations, and socio-cultural contexts. Their albums' stories span various racial, ethnic, gender and sexual identities; nationalities; religions; and dis/abilities. The vernacular albums featured in this volume present narratives that move beyond those reflected in our existing histories. Essays examine the visual, material, and aural strategies that album-makers have used to assert control over the presentation of their histories and identities, and to direct what those narratives have to say, a point of special relevance as these albums move out of private domestic space and into public archives, institutions, and digital formats. This book does not consider photographic albums and scrapbooks as separate genres, but as a continuum of modern creative practices of photographic and mass-print collage aimed at self-expression and narrative-building that co-evolved and were readily accessible. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, history of photography, visual culture, material culture, media studies, and cultural studies.

This book is devoted to the phenomenon of removal of people declared "public enemies" from group photographs in Stalin’s Russia. The book is based on long-term empirical research in Russian archives and includes 57 photographs that are exceptional in terms of historical interest: all these images bear traces of editing in the form of various marks, such as blacking-out, excisions or scratches. The illustrative materials also include a group of photographs with inscriptions left by officers of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. To approach this extensive visual material, Denis Skopin draws on a wealth of Stalin-era written sources: memoirs, diaries and official documents. He argues that this kind of political iconoclasm cannot be confused with censorship nor vandalism. The practice in question is more harrowing and morally twisted, for in most cases the photos were defaced by those who were part of victim’s intimate circle: his/her colleagues, friends or even close family members. The book will be of interest to scholars working in history of photography, art history, visual culture, Russian studies and Russian history and politics.

This volume explores the selfie not only as a specific photographic practice that is deeply rooted in digital culture, but also how it is understood in relation to other media of self-portrayal. Unlike the public debate about the dangers of 'selfie-narcissism', this anthology discusses what the practice of taking and sharing selfies can tell us about media culture today: can the selfie be critiqued as an image or rather as a social practice? What are the technological conditions of this form of vernacular photography? By gathering articles from the fields of media studies; art history; cultural studies; visual studies; philosophy; sociology and ethnography, this book provides a media archaeological perspective that highlights the relevance of the selfie as a stereotypical as well as creative practice of dealing with ourselves in relation to technology.