James Elkins
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What Photography Is
In What Photography Is, James Elkins examines the strange and alluring power of photography in the same provocative and evocative manner as he explored oil painting in his best-selling What Painting Is. In the course of an extended imaginary dialogue with Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Elkins...
Published April 25th 2011 by Routledge
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How to Use Your Eyes
"... visually stunning and mentally stimulating."—Scientific American "…the author of What Painting Is (1998) has written a fascinating new book filled with gorgeous illustrations that would inspire us ‘to learn to see anything.’ It's a tall order, to be sure, but one that the author pulls off...
Published September 28th 2008 by Routledge
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Visual Literacy
What does it mean to be visually literate? Does it mean different things in the arts and the sciences? In the West, in Asia, or in developing nations? If we all need to become "visually literate," what does that mean in practical terms? The essays gathered here examine a host of issues surrounding...
Published October 17th 2007 by Routledge
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On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art
Can contemporary art say anything about spirituality? John Updike calls modern art "a religion assembled from the fragments of our daily life," but does that mean that contemporary art is spiritual? What might it mean to say that the art you make expresses your spiritual belief? On the Strange...
Published September 14th 2004 by Routledge
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Pictures and Tears
A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings
Art Does art leave you cold? And is that what it's supposed to do? Or is a painting meant to move you to tears? Hemingway was reduced to tears in the midst of a drinking bout when a painting by James Thurber caught his eye. And what's bad about that? In Pictures and Tears, art historian James...
Published February 22nd 2004 by Routledge
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Visual Studies
A Skeptical Introduction
In his latest book, James Elkins offers a road map through the field of visual studies, describing its major concerns and its principal theoretical sources. Then, with the skill and insight that have marked his successful books on art and visuality, Elkins takes the reader down a side road where...
Published August 7th 2003 by Routledge
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Stories of Art
Stories of Art is James Elkins's intimate history of art. Concise and original, this engaging book is an antidote to the behemoth art history textbooks from which we were all taught. As he demonstrates so persuasively, there can never be one story of art. Cultures have their own stories - about...
Published September 26th 2002 by Routledge
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What Painting Is
Unlike many books on painting that usually talk about art or painters, James Elkins’ compelling and original work focuses on alchemy, for like the alchemist, the painter seeks to transform and be transformed by the medium. In What Painting Is, James Elkins communicates the experience of painting...
Published March 28th 2000 by Routledge
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Our Beautiful, Dry and Distant Texts
Art History as Writing
Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts examines art historical writing as an expressive medium, capable of emotion and reflection - and therefore deserving of serious consideration for its own sake, as the testament of art history and of individual historians. Elkins asks such questions as: How do...
Published February 9th 2000 by Routledge
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Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?
On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity
With bracing clarity, James Elkins explores why images are taken to be more intricate and hard to describe in the twentieth century than they had been in any previous century. Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? uses three models to understand the kinds of complex meaning that pictures are thought to...
Published January 27th 1999 by Routledge