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Photography, both in the form of contemporary practice and that of historical material, now occupies a significant place in the citadels of Western art culture. It has an institutional network of its own, embedded within the broader art world, with its own specialists including academics, critics, curators, collectors, dealers and conservators. All of this cultural activity consolidates an artistic practice and critical discourse of photography that distinguishes what is increasingly termed 'art photography' from its commercial, scientific and amateur guises. But this long-awaited recognition of photography as high art brings new challenges. How will photography's newly privileged place in the art world affect how the history of creative photography is written?Modernist claims for the medium as having an aesthetic often turned on precedents from painting. Postmodernism challenged a cultural hierarchy organized around painting. 19th century photographs move between the symbolic spaces of the gallery wall and the archive: de-contextualised for art and re-contextualised for history. But what of the contemporary writings, images, and practices that negotiated an aesthetic status for 'the photographic'? Photography and the Arts revisits practices both celebrated and elided by the modernist and postmodernist grand narratives of art and photographic history in order to open up new critical spaces. Written by leading scholars in the fields of photography, art and literature, the essays examine the metaphorical as well as the material exchanges between photography and the fine, graphic, reproductive and sculptural arts.

Greg Battye focuses on the storytelling power of a single image by providing a wide-ranging account of the narrative properties of photographs. He applies contemporary research and theories to the analysis of photographs, using forensic photographs to argue for the centrality of the perception and representation of time in photographic narrativity.

As Documentary Photographers increasingly introduce the collaborative and participatory methodologies common to socially engaged art practices into their projects (particularly those that are activist in nature, seeking to catalyse socialchange agendas and policies through image making and sharing), there is an increased tension between the process of production and the photographicrepresentation that is created. Over the course of the last five years I have utilised these methodologies of co-authorship. This article contextualizes this kind of transdisciplinary work, and examines the ways in which the integration of collaborative strategies and co-authored practice in projects that are explicitly designed to be of benefit to a primary audience (the participants, collaborators and producers) might be usefully disseminated to a secondary audience (the general public, the ‘art world’, critics etc.) through analysis of my projects Red Light Dark Room; Sex, lives and stereotypes made in Melbourne, Australia, and The King School Portrait Project made in Portland, Oregon, America.

Siegfried Kracauer was a leading intellectual figure of the Weimar Republic and one of the foremost representatives of critical theory. Best known for a wealth of writings on sociology and film theory, his influence is felt in the work of many of the period's preeminent thinkers, including his friends, the critic Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, who once claimed he owed more to Kracauer than any other contemporary. This volume brings together for the first time all of Kracauer's essays on photography that he wrote between 1927 and 1933 as a journalist for the Frankfurter Zeitung, as well as an essay that appeared in the Magazine of Art after his exile in America, where he would spend the last twenty-five years of his life. The texts show Kracauer as a pioneering thinker of the photographic medium in addition to the important historian, and theorist, of film that he is acknowledged to have been. His writings here build a cohesive theory on the affinities between photography, memory and history. With a foreword by Philippe Despoix offering insights into Kracauer's theories and the historical context, and a Curriculum vitae in pictures, photographs from the Kracauer estate annotated by Maria Zinfert.

Materiality, performance and mobility have recently attracted increasing interdisciplinary interest and called for new approaches to landscape. In most cases, however, these remain limited to the first meaning of landscape, as a complex of material/ visual forms in a given geographic area. By contrast, the second meaning of landscape, as a representation on different media, has remained out of such a debate. This article proposes a reconcep-tualization of landscape representations as travelling objects at once visual and material. It does so through the example of nineteenth-century panoramas. Part of a broader history of performative representation, these are approached on the one hand as optical devices participating in the construction of a 'new kind of observer', and on the other as material objects travelling across space and time, through different cultural contexts and changing accordingly. In their various manifestations, panoramas and other optical devices paralleled and complemented formal geographical education, but they also constituted terminals in the nineteenth-century geographical web of perception comparable to the TV, the internet or video cell-phones in our contemporary world.

Poised between hope and despair for a humanity facing an urgent communication crisis, this work by Vilém Flusser forecasts either the first truly human, infinitely creative society in history or a society of unbearable, oppressive sameness, locked in a pattern it cannot change. Into the Universe of Technical Images outlines the history of communication technology as a process of increasing abstraction.

Over the past twenty-five years, photography has moved to centre-stage in the study of visual culture and has established itself in numerous disciplines. This trend has brought with it a diversification in approaches to the study of the photographic image. Photography: Theoretical Snapshots offers exciting perspectives on photography theory today from some of the world’s leading critics and theorists. It introduces new means of looking at photographs, with topics including: a community-based understanding of Spencer Tunick’s controversial installations the tactile and auditory dimensions of photographic viewing snapshot photography the use of photography in human rights discourse. Photography: Theoretical Snapshots also addresses the question of photography history, revisiting the work of some of the most influential theorists such as Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, and the October group, re-evaluating the neglected genre of the carte-de-visite photograph, and addressing photography’s wider role within the ideologies of modernity. The collection opens with an introduction by the editors, analyzing the trajectory of photography studies and theory over the past three decades and the ways in which the discipline has been constituted. Ranging from the most personal to the most dehumanized uses of photography, from the nineteenth century to the present day, from Latin America to Northern Europe, Photography: Theoretical Snapshots will be of value to all those interested in photography, visual culture, and cultural history. J. J. Long is Professor of German at Durham University. He is the author of The Novels of Thomas Bernhard and of W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity , and has published widely on German literature and photography. He was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2005. Andrea Noble is Professor of Latin American Studies at Durham University, author of Mexican National Cinema and co-editor of Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative . Edward Welch is Senior Lecturer in French at Durham University, and author of François Mauriac: The Making of an Intellectual . His research interests include post-war French visual culture and documentary photography, and he is a regular contributor to Source photography journal. List of Figures Introduction A Small History of Photography Studies Edward Welch and J. J. Long 1. Mindless Photography John Tagg 2. Thinking Photography beyond the Visual? Elizabeth Edwards 3. On Snapshot Photography: Rethinking Photographic Power In Public And Private Spheres Catherine Zuromskis 4. Family Photography and the Global Drama of Human Rights Andrea Noble 5. Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-De-Visite and the Bourgeois Imagination Geoffrey Batchen 6. Race and Reproduction in Camera Lucida Shawn Michelle Smith 7. Benjamin, Atget, and the ‘Readymade’ Politics of Postmodern Photography Studies Kelly Dennis 8. Being Exposed: Thinking Photography and Community in Spencer Tunick’s Naked World Through the Lens of Jean-Luc Nancy Louis Kaplan 9. ‘And in This Fairy World of Labour See A Type Of What The Actual World Should Be’: Plato’s Dilemma Donald Preziosi Notes on Contributors Bibliography Index