Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
1,210
result(s) for
"Photographic criticism."
Sort by:
Reading photographs : an introduction the theory and meaning of images
'Reading Photographs' is a clear and inspiring introduction to theories of representation and visual analysis and how they can be applied to photography. Introducing the development of photography and different approaches to reading images, the book looks at elements such as identity, gaze, psychoanalysis, voyeurism and aesthetics.
Book
Exile and subjectivity: words and images in the writings of Sadakichi Hartmann
I will look in greater detail at Hartmann's language, as well as at the book on Japanese art he published in 1904, later in the context of his art criticism. Here I want to pursue what I have been presenting as the instability surrounding Hartmann's identity. Scholars have noted an insecure quality to Hartmann's selfhood. 'Hartmann's entire life seems to have been an impassioned search for identity', writes the literary critic George Knox.24 His shifts of selfhood were often extreme. Hartmann himself listed the dizzying options in religion alone inherited from his immediate ancestors, not only a free-thinking father, but also a stepmother who 'was a Catholic', 'one of my aunts ... a French Jewess', and 'my mother presumably ... a Buddhist'.25 The author of a recent PhD thesis is able to treat Hartmann as one amongst a number of Japanese-Americans whose lives and work were marked by their status as 'subjects estranged both from the country of origin (Japan) and the country where they lived and worked (the US)'.26 In what follows I consider the subjectivity that featured so fundamentally in Hartmann's aesthetic theory as it emerged in the early twentieth century in relation to the experience of his own exiled strangeness, and the fluidity and intensity of his self-fashioning, as well as its excessive or outrageous character. I go further, to read these relationships in the context of the fragile connections between word and image. The Symbolist aesthetic Hartmann elaborated in his work as a critic and historian of painting and photography brought with it a consciousness of the suspect and depleted power of words and of their capacity to reflect the world and experience not through exactitude but through suggestion and imprecision instead. Hartmann the poet worked with that quality of perception in the early part of his career, and the consequences for the potential of language to conjure the world, and of the visual to do the same, provides a further theme in his oeuvre that is also coloured by the fluctuating sense of exile and 'strangeness', by 'the vanity of the alien ... to show his mastery'
Journal Article
Good pictures : a history of popular photography
A picture-rich field guide to American photography, from daguerreotype to digital. We are all photographers now, with camera phones in hand and social media accounts at the ready. And we know which pictures we like. But what makes a \"good picture\"? And how could anyone think those old styles were actually good? Soft-focus yearbook photos from the '80s are now hopelessly—and happily—outdated, as are the low-angle portraits fashionable in the 1940s or the blank stares of the 1840s. From portraits to products, landscapes to food pics, Good Pictures proves that the history of photography is a history of changing styles. In a series of short, engaging essays, Kim Beil uncovers the origins of fifty photographic trends and investigates their original appeal, their decline, and sometimes their reuse by later generations of photographers. Drawing on a wealth of visual material, from vintage how-to manuals to magazine articles for working photographers, this full-color book illustrates the evolution of trends with hundreds of pictures made by amateurs, artists, and commercial photographers alike. Whether for selfies or sepia tones, the rules for good pictures are always shifting, reflecting new ways of thinking about ourselves and our place in the visual world.
eBook
Photography
Photography: History and Theory introduces students to both the history of photography and critical theory.
From its inception in the nineteenth century, photography has instigated a series of theoretical debates. In this new text, Jae Emerling therefore argues that the most insightful way to approach the histories of photography is to address simultaneously the key events of photographic history alongside the theoretical discourse that accompanied them.
While the nineteenth century is discussed, the central focus of the text is on modern and contemporary photographic theory. Particular attention is paid to key thinkers, such as Baudelaire, Barthes and Sontag. In addition, the centrality of photography to contemporary art practice is addressed through the theoretical work of Allan Sekula, John Tagg, Rosalind Krauss, and Vilém Flusser. The text also includes readings of many canonical photographers and exhibitions including: Atget, Brassai, August Sander, Walker Evans, The Family of Man, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Cindy Sherman, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sebastaio Salgado, Jeff Wall, and others.
In addition, Emerling provides close readings of key passages from some major theoretical texts. These glosses come between the chapters and serve as a conceptual line that connects them. Glosses include:
Roland Barthes, \"The Rhetoric of the Image\" (1964)
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (2002)
Michel Foucault on the archive (1969)
Walter Benjamin, \"Little History of Photography\" (1931)
Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983)
A substantial glossary of critical terms and names, as well as an extensive bibliography, make this the ideal book for courses on the history and theory of photography.
eBook
Photography
Photography: History and Theory is a new text book on the history of photography and critical theory.
eBook
