Fotografia

Kenneth W. Harrow offers a new critical approach to African cinema one that requires that we revisit the beginnings of African filmmaking and the critical responses to which they gave rise, and that we ask what limitations they might have contained, what price was paid for the approaches then taken, and whether we are still caught in those limitations today.

Using i ek, Badiou, and a range of Lacanian and postmodern-based approaches, Harrow attempts to redefine the possibilities of an African cinematic practice one in which fantasy and desire are placed within a more expansive...

In the year that photography was introduced to the world, 1839, a cartoon in a French broadside showed a gallows for the draftsmen and engravers who would be put out of work by the new medium. This was only the beginning of a long tradition of amused, and amusing, depictions of photography, a practice now reviewed in Heinz and Bridget Henisch's new book.

Positive Pleasures explores the humorous commentary about photography that emerged in the medium's first seventy-five years, providing a panorama of photographic comedy in its many aspects, both pictorial and literary. The...

The World of Francis Cooper is a biographical exploration of Francis Cooper, who practiced photography as an aesthetic recreation while a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania. It offers an unusual perspective on turn-of-the century American photography by examining the work of an unknown avocational photographer.

Cooper was a native Philadelphian of sufficient means to indulge in several recreations: competitive shooting, bicycling, and photography. From 1896 to 1901 he traveled to the Pennsylvania countryside to hunt, fish, bicycle, court his wife, and...

Penn State Press interview with Margaret Morton, March 2004.

Your books--The Tunnel; Fragile Dwelling; Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives; and now Glass House--always use a place in their titles and often present photographs of sites throughout New York City. Why these titles? Why so many photographs of the places where the homeless gather to find shelter?

From the beginning, my work was devoted not to despair but rather to the courage and imagination with which people face...

Since the production of the first negative by William Henry Fox Talbot in Wiltshire's Lacock Abbey in 1835, English photography has played a central role in revolutionizing the production of images, yet it has largely evaded critical attention. The Making of English Photography investigates this new enterprise--and specifically how professional photographers shaped a strange aesthetic for their practice.

The Making of English Photography examines the development of English photography as an industrial, commercial, and (most problematically) artistic enterprise....

David Perlmutter examines concerns over the interplay of pictures in the press, elite decision-making and public opinion on foreign policy. His focus is on certain celebrated, indelible images that, it is said, sum up famous events, provoke moral outrage, mobilize public opinion, and spur government action: the icons of outrage. Discourse elites thrust greatness upon such images as well as frame their meaning and interpretation. The public only plays a marginal role in making icons; ordinary readers and viewers are, however, often resistant or indifferent to elite interpretation and...

The developments in narrative experimentation that marked the modernist period in Europe and the United States provide an interesting crossroads with the development of visual representation during the same time. In this collection of fourteen original essays, scholars from a variety of disciplines explore the ways in which the photograph became a vital emblem of the transformative processes of modernism, offering a new aesthetic and psychological model for the new zeitgeist. The interdisciplinary methodology of "Literary Modernism and Photography" melds literary, cultural, and...

Internationally acclaimed for his portraits of powerful and accomplished people and women of great beauty, Richard Avedon was one of the twentieth century's greatest photographers--but perhaps not the most obvious choice to create a portrait of ordinary people of the American West. Yet in 1979, the Amon Carter Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, daringly commissioned him to do just that.

The resulting 1985 exhibition and book, In the American West, was a milestone in American photography and Avedon's most important body of work. His unflinching portraits of oilfield and...