1st Edition
Global Photography A Critical History
This innovative text recounts the history of photography through a series of thematically structured chapters. Designed and written for students studying photography and its history, each chapter approaches its subject by introducing a range of international, contemporary photographers and then contextualizing their work in historical terms.
The book offers students an accessible route to gain an understanding of the key genres, theories and debates that are fundamental to the study of this rich and complex medium. Individual chapters cover major topics, including: · Description and Abstraction · Truth and Fiction · The Body · Landscape · War · Politics of Representation · Form · Appropriation · Museums · The Archive · The Cinematic · Fashion Photography
Boxed focus studies throughout the text offer short interviews, curatorial statements and reflections by photographers, critics and leading scholars that link photography's history with its practice. Short chapter summaries, research questions and further reading lists help to reinforce learning and promote discussion. Whether coming to the subject from an applied photography or art history background, students will benefit from this book's engaging, example-led approach to the subject, gaining a sophisticated understanding of international photography in historical terms.
Introduction
Heather Diack, Erina Duganne, and Terri Weissman
I. Realisms
Erina Duganne
1. Description and Abstraction
Nature
The Body Process
Focus Box: The Helsinki School
Timothy Persons
2. Truth and Fiction
Focus Box: DAILY, IN A NIMBLE SEA
Barry Stone
Staging Painting Constructions
II. Evidence
Terri Weissman
3. Measuring the Body
(Radical) Ethnography
Self and Body
Focus Box: Photography of the Minamata Disaster
Namiko Kunimoto
Labor
4. Mapping the Land
Borders
Ecology
Focus Box: Ecocritical Voices
Subhankar Banerjee
T.J.Demos and Charlotte Cotton
History
III. Ethics
Heather Diack
5. Politics of Representation
Visual Signs
Absence
Identification and Dislocation
Focus Box: Documents and Documentary
Martha Rosler
6. Pictures of War
The Politics of Proximity Afterimages Bearing Witness
Focus Box: Images of War or War of Images?
Khaled Barakeh
IV. Art Heather Diack
7. Form
The Shape of Vision
The Unexpected in the Ordinary
Hybridity and Objecthood
Focus Box: Abstract Labor
Drew Sawyer
8. Appropriation
Iconic Images
Altered Histories
Ownership, Authorship and Originality
Focus Box: Advertisement Extraction: An interview with Juan David Laserna Montoya
Juan David Laserna Montoya, Gina McDaniel Tarver, and Erina Duganne
V. Collections
Erina Duganne
9. Museums
The Judgment Seat
African Agency
Focus Box: Correspondence and Annotation: An interview with Raqs Media Collective
Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and Amy L. Powell
Everyday Pictures
10. Archives Collections
Focus Box: The Surface of Things: A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast
Prita Meier
Memory Time
VI. Expanded Field
Terri Weissman
11. Celebrity Style, the Publicity Shot, and the Maverick
Language of Fashion
Celebrity Design and the Editorial Layout
Focus Box: Owning Beauty
Stephanie Baptist
The Politics and Power of Dress
12. Photography and the Cinematic
An Uncertain Perception: Stilled Movement and Staged Stillness
Focus Box: Moving Stills
Marta Zarzycka
Extended Time in Still and Moving Images Projection
Biography
Erina Duganne is Associate Professor of Art History in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University where she teaches courses on modern and contemporary art, photography, and visual culture. She is the author of The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography, was a co-curator, a co-editor, and an essayist for the exhibition and accompanying publication, Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (2007).
Heather Diack is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Miami. She is the author of Documents of Doubt: The Photographic Conditions of Conceptual Art (2020).
Terri Weissman is Associate Professor of Art History in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she teaches modern and contemporary art history, the history of photography and the history of design. She is also affiliated with the University of Illinois's Unit for Criticism and Interpretative Theory. She is the author of The Realisms of Berenice Abbott: Documentary Photography and Political Action and was co-curator and co-author for the exhibition and accompanying publication American Modern: Documentary Photographs by Abbott, Evans, and Bourke-White (2010).
"Global Photography boldly answers the calls to expand and reframe the grand narrative that scholars constructed for photography in the twentieth century. The book broadens the geographic and temporal scope of traditional surveys, integrates multiple voices, and places history into productive dialogue with the present—all while remaining critical of its own choices and cultural biases, and skeptical of any text that claims to represent the whole story of photography."
Tanya Sheehan, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art, Colby College