The first anthology of its kind, Illuminations presents a comprehensive selection of women's writings on photography. It proposes a new and different history by demonstrating the ways in which women's perspectives have advanced photographic criticism over the last 150 years.
Extraordinarily wide-ranging in its scope, this collection chronicles the role of women in photography as critics, historians, and practitioners. Readers will find Julia Margaret Cameron's bold description of her photographic method, Rosalind Krauss's exploration of what the camera means for Surrealism, Margaret...

How and why did experience and knowledge become separated? Is it possible to talk of an infancy of experience, a "dumb" experience? For Walter Benjamin, the "poverty of experience" was a characteristic of modernity, originating in the catastrophe of the First World War. For Giorgio Agamben, the Italian editor of Benjamin's complete works, the destruction of experience no longer needs catastrophes: daily life in any modern city will suffice.

Agamben's profound and radical exploration of language, infancy, and everyday life traces concepts of experience through Kant, Hegel, Husserl and...

This is a survey of Western accounts of Oriental despotism in the 17th and 18th centuries. It focuses particularly on portrayals of the Ottoman empire and the supposedly enigmatic structure of the despot's court - the seraglio - with its viziers, janissaries, mutes, dwarfs, eunuchs and countless wives.