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Greater American Camera
An engaging investigation of how the relationships between four U.S. photographers and Mexican artists forged new developments in modernism Photographers Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Paul Strand, and Helen Levitt were among the U.S. artists who traveled to Mexico during the interwar period seeking a community more receptive to the radical premises of modern art. Looking closely at the work produced by these four artists in Mexico, this book examines the vital role of exchanges between the expatriates and their Mexican contemporaries in forging a new photographic style. Monica Bravo offers fresh insights concerning Weston’s friendship with Diego Rivera; Modotti’s images of labor, which she published alongside the writings of the Stridentists; Strand’s engagement with folk themes and the work of composer Carlos Chávez; and the influence of Manuel Álvarez Bravo on Levitt’s contributions to a New World surrealism. Exploring how these dialogues resulted in a distinct kind of modernism characterized by inter-American interests, the book reveals the ways in which cross-border collaboration shaped a new “greater American” aesthetic.
Gyorgy Kepes
How Gyorgy Kepes, the last disciple of Bauhaus modernism, became the single most significant artist within a network of scientific experts and elites. Gyorgy Kepes (1906–2001) was the last disciple of Bauhaus modernism, an acolyte of László Moholy-Nagy and a self-styled revolutionary artist. But by midcentury, transplanted to America, Kepes found he was trapped in the military-industrial-aesthetic complex. In this first book-length study of Kepes, John Blakinger argues that Kepes, by opening the research laboratory to the arts, established a new paradigm for creative practice: the artist as technocrat. First at Chicago's New Bauhaus and then for many years at MIT, Kepes pioneered interdi...
The Night Albums
We live in an era of abundant photography. Is it then counterintuitive to study photographs that disappear or are difficult to discern? Kate Palmer Albers argues that it is precisely this current cultural moment that allows us to recognize what has always been a basic and foundational, yet unseen, condition of photography: its ephemerality. Through a series of case studies spanning the history of photography, The Night Albums takes up the provocations of artists who collectively redefine how we experience visibility. From the protracted hesitancies of photography’s origins, to conceptual and performative art that has emerged since the 1960s, to the waves of technological experimentation flourishing today, Albers foregrounds artists who offer fleeting, hidden, conditional, and future modes of visibility. By unveiling how ephemerality shapes the photographic experience, she ultimately proposes an expanded framework for the medium.
Aleksandr Rodchenko
Through the lens of Aleksandr Rodchenko's photography, a new and provocative understanding emerges of the troubled relationship between technology, modernism, and state power in Stalin's Soviet Union Tracing the shifting meanings of photography in the early Soviet Union, Aglaya K. Glebova revises the relationship between art and politics during what is usually considered the end of the critical avant-garde. Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956) was a highly versatile Russian artist and one of Constructivism's founders. His photographic work between 1928, when Stalin rose to power, and the late 1930s reveals a wide-ranging search for a different pictorial language in the context of the extreme tran...
Politics Unseen
In Politics Unseen, Ellen Macfarlane radically reframes the "pure photographs" of California art photography society Group f.64, known for depicting Western landscapes, fruits and vegetables, flowers, and faces. By foregrounding f.64 members’ and their prints’ alliances across commercial, political, and artistic domains, the book shatters entrenched understandings of the group as disinterested in contemporary events and unseats conceptions of its prints as icons of modernist purity. Instead, Politics Unseen argues the politics of f.64’s photographs become visible when interwar ideas about "purity" in the areas of eugenics, racial essence, nutrition, colonialism, and horticulture are interrogated. Ultimately, Politics Unseen alters perceptions not only of f.64, but also of what constituted a political image in 1930s America.
Survey Practices and Landscape Photography Across the Globe
This edited volume considers the many ways in which landscape (seen and unseen) is fundamental to placemaking, colonial settlement, and identity formation. Collectively, the book’s authors map a constellation of interlocking photographic histories and survey practices, decentering Europe as the origin of camera-based surveillance. The volume charts a conversation across continents - connecting Europe, Africa, the Arab World, Asia, and the Americas. It does not segregate places, histories, and traditions but rather puts them in dialogue with one another, establishing solidarity across ever-shifting national, linguistic, racial, religious, and ethnic. Refusing the neat organization of survey...
Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia
A study of British and American Utopian writing of the 1800s in the context of developments in real architectural, political, and cultural life. The book studies utopian visions published in the UK and the USA in the 1800s by writers such Robert Owen, James Silk Buckingham, Edward Bellamy, and William Morris.
The Fruits of Empire
The Fruits of Empire is a history of American expansion through the lens of art and food. In the decades after the Civil War, Americans consumed an unprecedented amount of fruit as it grew more accessible with advancements in refrigeration and transportation technologies. This excitement for fruit manifested in an explosion of fruit imagery within still life paintings, prints, trade cards, and more. Images of fruit labor and consumption by immigrants and people of color also gained visibility, merging alongside the efforts of expansionists to assimilate land and, in some cases, people into the national body. Divided into five chapters on visual images of the grape, orange, watermelon, banana, and pineapple, this book demonstrates how representations of fruit struck the nerve of the nation’s most heated debates over land, race, and citizenship in the age of high imperialism.
The Decisive Network
Since its founding in 1947, the legendary Magnum Photos agency has been telling its own story about photographers who were witnesses to history and artists on the hunt for decisive moments. Based on unprecedented archival research, The Decisive Network unravels Magnum’s mythologies to offer a new history of what it meant to shoot, edit, and sell news images after World War II. Nadya Bair shows that between the 1940s and 1960s, Magnum expanded the human-interest story to global dimensions while bringing the aesthetic of news pictures into new markets. Working with a vast range of editorial and corporate clients, Magnum made photojournalism integral to postwar visual culture. But its photogr...
Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean
The Islamic world's artistic traditions experienced profound transformation in the 19th century as rapidly developing technologies and globalizing markets ushered in drastic changes in technique, style, and content. Despite the importance and ingenuity of these developments, the 19th century remains a gap in the history of Islamic art. To fill this opening in art historical scholarship, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean charts transformations in image-making, architecture, and craft production in the Islamic world from Fez to Istanbul. Contributors focus on the shifting methods of production, reproduction, circulation, and exchange artists faced as they worked in fields such as photography, weaving, design, metalwork, ceramics, and even transportation. Covering a range of media and a wide geographical spread, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean reveals how 19th-century artists in the Middle East and North Africa reckoned with new tools, materials, and tastes from local perspectives.
