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A collection of travel writing by some of the genre’s finest authors, from Paul Theroux to Sara Wheeler, voyaging from Mississippi to Malawi and Thailand. The New Granta Book of Travel Writing represents a sea change in writers’ approaches to the craft. The 1980s were the culmination of a golden age, when writers including Bruce Chatwin, James Hamilton-Paterson and James Fenton set out to document life in largely unfamiliar territory, bringing back tales of the beautiful, the extraordinary and the unexpected. By the mid 1990s, travel writing seemed to change, as a younger generation of writers appeared in the magazine, making journeys for more complex and often personal reasons. Decca Aitkenhead reported on sex tourism in Thailand, and Wendell Steavenson moved to Iraq as a foreign correspondent. What all these pieces have in common is a sense of engagement with the places they describe, and a belief that whether we are in Birmingham or Belarus, there is always something new to be discovered.
The declaration that a work of art is “about sex” is often announced to the public as a scandal after which there is nothing else to say about the work or the artist-controversy concludes a conversation when instead it should begin a new one. Moving beyond debates about pornography and censorship, Jennifer Doyle shows us that sex in art is as diverse as sex in everyday life: exciting, ordinary, emotional, traumatic, embarrassing, funny, even profoundly boring. Sex Objects examines the reception and frequent misunderstanding of highly sexualized images, words, and performances. In chapters on the “boring parts” of Moby-Dick, the scandals that dogged the painter Thomas Eakins, the role...
John Riddy's photographs are distinguished by a combination of poetic delicacy and formal precision which has been evident since his earliest pictures made in London in the late 1980s. Working consistently in series, Riddy has created collective studies of urban architecture and rural landscapes in countries as disparate as Japan, Italy, South Africa and the United States, in every case exploiting the capacity for still images to render the everyday both factual and transcendent. The starting point for much of his work has been the relationship between photography and the history of art and architecture, such as John Ruskin's autobiography, Hokusai's woodblock prints and Gustave Le Gray's ph...
Granta Magazine has published some of the best writing about family relationships in the English language. This is a collection of pieces about every member of the family.
A Granta magazine anthology, featuring brilliant writing about every member of the family.
He referred to them as "isolated sketches", but the were part of his formative experience. Colour might have been considered vulgar, then ,and not the medium of serious photography, but for Tony Ray-Jones it expressed the excitement of the country in a way that black and white did not. "I found America a very colour-conscious country", he said. "Colour is very much part of theit culture, and they use it in crazy ways. You look down Madison Avenue at lunchtime and the colours just vibrate. He arrived in America in 1961 on a scholarship to Yale to study graphic art and he returned to England four years later. It was in America that he learned to be a photographer. Among New York's street parad...
Since the mid nineties, the Northern Irish photographer Hannah Starkey has dedicated her work to a labyrinth of ideas surrounding the female experience and the medium of photography. Recognised for her artfully constructed mise-en-scenes in which women of different generations take centre stage, Starkey's colour photographs often arise from close collaborations with actresses, friends or acquaintances she meets on site. Her images combine the subtlest of gazes and gestures with sophisticated forms of lighting, framing, colour and composition, to build multiple narratives that explore the psychological complexity of women. Challenging the aggressive ways in which the media often fetishize and...
Since its initial publication, Policing Desire has proved to be an unparalleled analysis of 'the cacophony of voices which sounds through every institution of our society on the subject of AIDS.' For the third edition Simon Watney has provided a new preface, a compelling new concluding essay, and a resource directory for AIDS information.
By carefully conceptualising the domestic in relation to the self and the photographic, this book offers a unique contribution to both photography theory and criticism, and life-narrative studies. Jane Simon brings together two critical practices into a new conversation, arguing that artists who harness domestic photography can advance a more expansive understanding of the autobiographical. Exploring the idea that self-representation need not equate to self-portraiture or involve the human form, artists from around the globe are examined, including Rinko Kawauchi, Catherine Opie, Dayanita Singh, Moyra Davey, and Elina Brotherus, who maintain a personal gaze at domestic detail. By treating the representation of interiors, domestic objects, and the very practice of photographic seeing and framing as autobiographical gestures, this book reframes the relationship between interiors and exteriors, public and private, and insists on the importance of domestic interiors to understandings of the self and photography. The book will be of interest to scholars working in photographic history and theory, art history, and visual studies.
Presenting a first-class and much needed introduction to the theory and applications of metaphor in text analysis, Introducing Metaphor affords students a clear, coherent overview of important issues in this widely studied area.