ART 338 - History of Photography / Gao, Victoria

During the 1930s, the world of photography was unsettled, exciting, and boisterous. John Raeburn's "A Staggering Revolution" recreates the energy of the era by surveying photography's rich variety of innovation, exploring the aesthetic and cultural achievements of its leading figures, and mapping the paths their pictures blazed public's imagination. While other studies of thirties photography have concentrated on the documentary work of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), no previous book has considered it alongside so many of the decade's other important photographic projects. "A Staggering Revolution" includes individual chapters on Edward Steichen's celebrity portraiture; Berenice Abbott's Changing New York project; the Photo League's ethnography of Harlem; and, Edward Weston's western landscapes, made under the auspices of the first Guggenheim Fellowship awarded to a photographer. It also examines Margaret Bourke-White's industrial and documentary pictures, the collective undertakings by California's Group f.64, and the fashion magazine specialists, as well as the activities of the FSA and the Photo League. Raeburn's expansive study explains how the democratic atmosphere of thirties photography nourished innovation and encouraged new heights of artistic achievement. It also produced the circumstances that permitted artful photography to become such a thriving public enterprise during the decade. "A Staggering Revolution" offers an illuminating analysis of the sociology of photography's art world and its galleries and exhibitions, but also demonstrates the importance of the novel venues created by impresarios and others that proved essential to photography's extraordinary dissemination. These new channels, including camera magazines and annuals, volumes of pictures enhanced by text, and omnibus exhibitions in unconventional spaces, greatly expanded photography's cultural visibility. They also made its enthusiastic audience larger and more heterogeneous than ever before - or since.

A Comprehensive Overview -- available in digital and print formats History of Modern Art is a visual comprehensive overview of the modern art field. It traces the trends and influences in painting, sculpture, photography and architecture from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. The seventh edition deepens its discussions on social conditions that have affected the production and reception of modern and contemporary art. Learning Goals Upon completing this book, readers should be able to: Understand the origins of modern art Provide an analysis of artworks based on formal and contextual elements Recognize the influences of social conditions on modern art

"In 1906 there arrived at Lame Deer, Montana, on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, a petite, teenage bride named Julia Tuell. With her school-master husband she would live among the Cheyennes, then briefly among the Sac and Fox tribe in Oklahoma and finally (for more than a decade) with the Lakota (Sioux) on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. Realizing the fleeting beauty of Plains Indian culture, a beauty fading before her eyes, Julia chose for her constant companion an 8 x 10 Kodak camera and indelibly preserved on its glass plates the treasures in this book. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, warriors who had fought General Custer still lived. Women who had sheltered and nourished their children among the darkest days of Plains Indian life still survived. The most sacred religious ceremonies of the tribes, the Sun Dance and the Massaum, were still regularly practiced (when reservation officials allowed it). Julia Tuell understood that all facets of Plains Indian culture were precious and endangered, so she photographed both the mundane and the magnificent, both day-to-day tasks such as food preparation and striking portraits of chiseled faces that exude character."

Seeing through Race is a boldly original reinterpretation of the iconic photographs of the black civil rights struggle. Martin A. Berger's provocative and groundbreaking study shows how the very pictures credited with arousing white sympathy, and thereby paving the way for civil rights legislation, actually limited the scope of racial reform in the 1960s. Berger analyzes many of these famous images--dogs and fire hoses turned against peaceful black marchers in Birmingham, tear gas and clubs wielded against voting-rights marchers in Selma--and argues that because white sympathy was dependent on photographs of powerless blacks, these unforgettable pictures undermined efforts to enact--or even imagine--reforms that threatened to upend the racial balance of power.

A brilliant, clear-eyed new consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects Watching the evening news offers constant evidence of atrocity--a daily commonplace in our "society of spectacle." But are viewers inured -or incited--to violence by the daily depiction of cruelty and horror? Is the viewer's perception of reality eroded by the universal availability of imagery intended to shock? In her first full-scale investigation of the role of imagery in our culture since her now-classic book On Photography defined the terms of the debate twenty-five years ago, Susan Sontag cuts through circular arguments about how pictures can inspire dissent or foster violence as she takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity--from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and Dachau and Auschwitz to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and New York City on September 11, 2001. As John Berger wrote when On Photography was first published, "All future discussions or analysis of the role of photography in the affluent mass-media societies is now bound to begin with her book." Sontag's new book, a startling reappraisal of the intersection of "information", "news," "art," and politics in the contemporary depiction of war and disaster, will be equally essential. It will forever alter our thinking about the uses and meanings of images in our world.

Now in its 7th edition, Communication in History reveals how media has been influential in both maintaining social order and as powerful agents of change. Thirty-eight contributions from a wide range of voices offer instructors the opportunity to customize their courses while challenging students to build upon their own knowledge and skill sets. From stone-age symbols and early writing to the Internet and social media, readers are introduced to an expansive, intellectually enlivening study of the relationship between human history and communication media.

In Photography and Anthropology, Christopher Pinney presents a provocative and readable account of the strikingly parallel histories of the two disciplines, as well as a polemical narrative and overview of the use of photography by anthropologists from the 1840s to the present. Walter Benjamin suggested that photography "make[s] the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable," and Pinney here explores photography as a divinatory practice that prompted anthropologists to capture the "primitive" lives of those they studied. Early anthropology celebrated photography as a physical record, whose authority and permanence promised an escape from the lack of certainty in speech. But later anthropologists faulted photography for failing to capture movement and process. Anthropology as a practice of "being there" has thus found itself entwined in an intimate engagement with photography as metaphor for the collection of evidence. Through numerous examples from the annals of anthropological photography, Photography and Anthropology examines the history of anthropology's enchantment with photography alongside the anthropological theory of photography and documentation.

First published in 1967, Visual Anthropology has become a classic in its field, invaluable not only for anthropologists but for anyone using photography, film, and video to understand human behavior and culture. This completely revised and expanded edition brings the technical information up to date and includes the insights the Colliers have gained from nearly thirty-five additional years of collective teaching and research experience since the first edition.

A wide-ranging and refreshingly up-to-date anthology of primary readings, Critical Theory: A Reader for Literary and Cultural Studies presents a provocative mix of contemporary and classic essays in critical theory. From the foundational ideas of Marx and Freud to key writings by Fanon and Foucault, the essays in this collection represent the most influential ideas in modern critical thought and in the contemporary interpretation of literature and culture. This collection of seminal readings invites students to join in the ongoing debates and controversies of critical discussion, reading, writing, and interpretation.

"Critical Theory Since 1965 is a collection of theoretical writing of the last twenty years by thirty-eight contemporary theorists and, as background, eighteen important intellectual precursors. It is by far the most complete representation of recent critical theory available, including phenomenologists, structuralists, deconstructionists, Marxists, feminists, reader - response critics, dissenters, and eccentrics, and supplying the background texts necessary for a working understanding of contemporary critical vocabulary and thought."

"This Reader introduces the key readings in critical and cultural theory. It guides students through the tradition of thought, from Saussure's early writings on language to contemporary commentary on world events by theorists such as Baudrillard and Zizek."