Photographs, Histories, and Meanings

ISBN-13: 9780230617704 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 258 str.

Jeanne Perreault

Opis

Photographs have shaped public perception and social meaning for the last one hundred and fifty years or more. This collection reexamines photographs and their social history, exploring the ideological, ethical, political, and aesthetic forces that inflect interpretation. The authors here trace shifting historical contexts, intentional or accidental interpretive distortions, and ambiguous and multiple meanings. Collectively, they seek to know how images can be believed, given our awareness of the uncertainty of meaning. The contributors in this collection believe the histories they convey are the stories of our lives. To know the photographs is to know ourselves - with all our ambiguities, distortions, and complexities on display.

Recenzje

"The collection is a compelling exploration of the ambiguities, distortions, and shifts in photographic interpretation and meaning." - Archivaria

"What is taken with the photograph?What remains?In these essays a series of iconic documentary imagesare the focus of interdisciplinary enquiry that responds to one of the central issues for scholarly work in the humanities today: the power of visual representations, their haunting effects, and their capacity to perform small acts of cultural translation that challenge what we see and know of others and ourselves." - Gillian Whitlock, Author of Soft Weapons:Autobiography in Transit

Spis treści

Introduction: Ambiguities, Distortions, Shifts; M.Kadar , J. Perreault & L.Warley Not so Innocent: Vision and Culpability in Weegee's Photographs of Children; C.Blinder Strange Birth: Reading Hands, Reflecting Race in Richard Wright's Twelve Million Black Voices; P.Dreiser Documenting Disaster: Rothstein's 'Steer Skull' and the Use of Photographic Evidence in Environmental and Political Narratives; J. Hewitson Something is Happening: Seeing It; J.Perreault Ambivalent Image: Twisted Use; M.Kadar Visualizing the Rising: Photography, Memory and the Visual Economy of the 1916 Easter Rebellion; J.Carville The Promise of Public Housing: Photographs and the History of the Chicago Housing Authority; B.Hunt , M.Ensdorf & K.Pilat "More than an observer": Emmy Andriesse, Dutch Underground Photographer; C.Steenman-Marcusse & C.Verduyn Between the Officer and the Artist: Arnold Odermatt's Aesthetic-Forensic Project; T.Stubblefield Passionate Protest: Lynching Photography and Appropriative Counter-Performances of the Lynching Ritual; Z.Trodd Captured Childhoods: Photographs in Indian Residential School Memoir; L.Warley Returning to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: The Tower of Faces Ten Years Later; L.Levitt

O autorze

JEANNE PERREAULT is Professor in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Canada.
 
MARLENE KADAR is Professor in Humanities and Women's Studies, and Interim Director of the Graduate Program in Interdisciplinary Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada.
 
LINDA WARLEY is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language& Literature at the University of Waterloo, Canada.