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The award-winning art historian and founder of Vision & Justice uncovers a pivotal era in the story of race in the United States when Americans came to ignore the truth about the false foundations of the nation’s racial regime. In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation’s racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen—until now. The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War—the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided...
Scholarship on photography’s earliest years has tended to focus on daguerreotypes on metal or on the European development of paper photographs made from glass or paper negatives. But Americans also experimented with negative-positive processes to produce photographic images on a variety of paper formats in the early decades of the medium. Paper Promises: Early American Photography presents this rarely studied topic within photographic history. The well-researched and richly detailed texts in this book delve into the complexities of early paper photography in the United States from the 1840s to 1860s, bringing to light a little-known era of American photographic appropriation and adaptation...
Essays exploring how reformers and charities used the “magic lantern” to raise public awareness of poverty. Public performances using the magic or optical lantern became a prominent part of the social fabric of the late nineteenth century. Drawing on a rich variety of primary sources, Screen Culture and the Social Question, 1880-1914 investigates how the magic lantern and cinematograph, used at public lectures, church services, and electoral campaigns, became agents of social change. The essays examine how social reformers and charitable organizations used the “art of projection” to raise public awareness of the living conditions of the poor and the destitute, as they argued for reform and encouraged audiences to work to better their lot and that of others.
The compulsion to dwell on historyÑon how it is recorded, stored, saved, forgotten, narrated, lost, remembered, and made publicÑhas been at the heart of artistsÕ engagement with the photographic medium since the late 1960s. Uncertain Histories considers some of that work, ranging from installations that incorporate vast numbers of personal and vernacular photographs by Christian Boltanski, Dinh Q. L�, and Gerhard Richter to confrontations with absence in the work of Joel Sternfeld and Ken Gonzales-Day. Projects such as these revolve around a photographic paradox that hinges equally on knowing and not knowing, on definitive proof coupled with uncertainty, on abundance of imagery being me...
An unprecedented and eye-opening examination of the early career of one of America’s most celebrated photographers One of the most influential photographers of his generation, Ansel Adams (1902–1984) is famous for his dramatic photographs of the American West. Although many of Adams’s images are now iconic, his early work has remained largely unknown. In this first monograph dedicated to the beginnings of Adams’s career, Rebecca A. Senf argues that these early photographs are crucial to understanding Adams’s artistic development and offer new insights into many aspects of the artist’s mature oeuvre. Drawing on copious archival research, Senf traces the first three decades of Adams’s photographic practice—beginning with an amateur album made during his childhood and culminating with his Guggenheim-supported National Parks photography of the 1940s. Highlighting the artist’s persistence in forging a career path and his remarkable ability to learn from experience as he sharpened his image-making skills, this beautifully illustrated volume also looks at the significance of the artist’s environmentalism, including his involvement with the Sierra Club.
"Coauthored by the literary scholar Sara Blair and the art historian Eric Rosenberg, this volume of the Defining Moments in American Photography series offers new ways to understand the work of the famous Farm Security Administration photographers by exploring an expanded and much more variable idea of the documentary than what New Dealers proposed. The coauthors follow in the line of scholars who have, on the one hand, looked critically at the FSA photography project and identified its goals, biases, contradictions, and ambivalences and, on the other hand, discerned strikingly independent directions among its photographers. But what distinguishes their work from that of others is their wres...
This introduction to contemporary historical theory and practice shows how issues of identity have shaped how we write history. Stefan Berger charts how a new self-reflexivity about what is involved in the process of writing history entered the historical profession and the part that historians have played in debates about the past and its meaningfulness for the present. He introduces key trends in the theory of history such as postmodernism, poststructuralism, constructivism, narrativism and the linguistic turn and reveals, in turn, the ways in which they have transformed how historians have written history over the last four decades. The book ranges widely from more traditional forms of history writing, such as political, social, economic, labour and cultural history, to the emergence of more recent fields, including gender history, historical anthropology, the history of memory, visual history, the history of material culture, and comparative, transnational and global history.
This volume discusses globalising processes from the perspective of the humanities and social sciences. It focuses on the ‘global south’, notably the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Densely researched case studies examine a variety of approaches for their potential to understand connecting processes on different scales. The studies seek to overcome the main traps of the ‘globalisation’ paradigm, such as its occidental bias, its notion of linear expansion, its simplifying dichotomy between ‘local’ and ‘global’, and an often-found lack of historical depth. They elaborate the asymmetries, mobilities, opportunities and barriers involved in globalising processes. Their new perspective on these processes is captured by the concept of ‘translocality’, which aims at integrating a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches from different disciplines.
Imaging Culture is a sociohistorical study of the meaning, function, and aesthetic significance of photography in Mali, West Africa, from the 1930s to the present. Spanning the dynamic periods of colonialism, national independence, socialism, and democracy, its analysis focuses on the studio and documentary work of professional urban photographers, particularly in the capital city of Bamako and in smaller cities such as Mopti and Ségu. Featuring the work of more than twenty-five photographers, it concentrates on those who have been particularly influential for the local development and practice of the medium as well as its international popularization and active participation in the contemporary art market. Imaging Culture looks at how local aesthetic ideas are visually communicated in the photographers' art and argues that though these aesthetic arrangements have specific relevance for local consumers, they transcend geographical and cultural boundaries to have value for contemporary global audiences as well. Imaging Culture is an important and visually interesting book which will become a standard source for those who study African photography and its global impact.
While all history has the potential to be political, public history is uniquely so: public historians engage in historical inquiry outside the bubble of scholarly discourse, relying on social networks, political goals, practices, and habits of mind that differ from traditional historians. Radical Roots: Public History and a Tradition of Social Justice Activism theorizes and defines public history as future-focused, committed to the advancement of social justice, and engaged in creating a more inclusive public record. Edited by Denise D. Meringolo and with contributions from the field’s leading figures, this groundbreaking collection addresses major topics such as museum practices, oral his...