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Women Photographers and Feminist Aesthetics makes the case for a feminist aesthetics in photography by analysing key works of twenty-two women photographers, including cis- and trans-woman photographers. Claire Raymond provides close readings of key photographs spanning the history of photography, from nineteenth-century Europe to twenty-first century Africa and Asia. She offers original interpretations of well-known photographers such as Diane Arbus, Sally Mann, and Carrie Mae Weems, analysing their work in relation to gender, class, and race. The book also pays close attention to the way in which indigenous North Americans have been represented through photography and the ways in which contemporary Native American women photographers respond to this history. Developing the argument that through aesthetic force emerges the truly political, the book moves beyond polarization of the aesthetic and the cultural. Instead, photographic works are read for their subversive political and cultural force, as it emerges through the aesthetics of the image. This book is ideal for students of Photography, Art History, Art and Visual Culture, and Gender.
Twenty years after cultivating a new orientation for aesthetics via the concept of non-photography, François Laruelle returns, having further developed his notion of a non-standard aesthetics. Published for the first time in a bilingual edition, Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics expounds on Laruelle’s current explorations into a photographic thinking as an alternative to the worn-out notions of aesthetics based on an assumed domination of philosophy over art. He proposes a new philosophical photo-fictional apparatus, or philo-fiction, that strives for a discursive mimesis of the photographic apparatus and the flash of the Real entailed in its process of image making. “A bit like if an artisan, to use a Socratic example, instead of making a camera based off of diagrams found in manuals, on the contrary had as his or her project the designing of a completely new apparatus of philo-fiction, thus capable of producing not simply photos, but photo-fictions.” One must enter into a space for seeing the vectorial and the imaginary number. Laruelle’s philo-fictions become not art installations, but “theoretical installations” calling for the consideration of the possibility of a non-standard aesthetics being of an equal or superior power to art and philosophy, an aesthetics in-the-last-instance that is itself an inventive and creative act of the most contemporary kind.
In his profoundly original and innovative reflection on the medium, Van Lier takes note of photography's formal peculiarities and its position and function in human and social life.
Reimagines photography through the long history of ideas of expression The end of the nineteenth century saw massive developments and innovations in photography at a time when the forces of Western modernity—industrialization, racialization, and capitalism—were quickly reshaping the world. The Unintended slows down the moment in which the technology of photography seemed to speed itself—and so the history of racial capitalism—up. It follows the substantial shifts in the markets, mediums, and forms of photography during a legally murky period at the end of the nineteenth century. Monica Huerta traces the subtle and paradoxical ways legal thinking through photographic lenses reinscribed a particular aesthetics of whiteness in the very conceptions of property ownership. The book pulls together an archive that encompasses the histories of performance and portraiture alongside the legal, pursuing the logics by which property rights involving photographs are affirmed (or denied) in precedent-setting court cases and legal texts. Emphasizing the making of “expression” into property to focus our attention on the failures of control that cameras do not invent, but rather put new emphasis on, this book argues that designations of control’s absence are central to the practice and idea of property-making. The Unintended proposes that tracking and analyzing the sensed horizons of intention, control, autonomy, will, and volition offers another way into understanding how white supremacy functions. Ultimately, its unique historical reading practice offers a historically-specific vantage on the everyday workings of racial capitalism and the inheritances of white supremacy that structure so much of our lives.
New perspectives on Belgian Surrealism and the photographic practices of Marcel Mariën Marcel Mariën (1920–1993) was a key figure of Belgian post-war Surrealism. He is widely acknowledged for his landmark work on Belgian Surrealism and his collaboration with future Situationists like Guy-Ernest Debord in his journalLes Lèvres nues. Nevertheless, Mariën’s texts, collages, photographs, film, and objects have to date remained understudied. This is the first volume devoted to Mariën's photographic work. Through a series of close readings, Mieke Bleyen connects the collage and photographic practices of Mariën with his wider oeuvre, particularly with his archival and editorial activities. By applying Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of the ‘minor’, this book proposes an alternative reading of Mariën’s anti-aesthetics and focuses on the affective range of his work. The figure of Mariën also serves as a case study that offers new perspectives on Belgian Surrealism's relation to mainstream Surrealism and the role of photography within Surrealism. This volume, moreover, raises a critique on ‘major’ art history's conception of time as linear progression and argues instead for twisted and extended temporalities in the case of Marcel Mariën. With previously unpublished images from Mariën's private archive.
Theorists critique photography for ÒobjectifyingÓ its subjects and manipulating appearance for the sake of art. In this bold counterargument, John Roberts recasts photographyÕs violating powers and aesthetic technique as part of a complex Òsocial ontologyÓ that exposes the hierarchies, divisions, and exclusions behind appearances. Photography must Òarrive unannouncedÓ and Òget in the way of the world,Ó Roberts argues, committing to the truth-claims of the spectator over the self-interests and sensitivities of the subject. Yet even though the violating capacity of the photograph results from external power relations, the photographer is still faced with an ethical choice: whether to advance photographyÕs truth-claims on the basis of these powers or to diminish or veil these powers to protect the integrity of the subject. PhotographyÕs acts of intrusion and destabilization constantly test the photographer at the point of production, in the darkroom, and at the computer, especially in our 24-hour digital image culture. RobertsÕs refunctioning of photographyÕs place in the world is therefore critically game-changing, as it politically and theoretically restores the reputation of the art.
By offering a new way of thinking about the role of politically engaged art, Susan Best opens up a new aesthetic field: reparative aesthetics. The book identifies an innovative aesthetic on the part of women photographers from the southern hemisphere, who against the dominant modes of criticality in political art, look at how cultural production can be reparative. The winner of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand best book award in 2017, Reparative Aesthetics contributes an entirely new theory to the interdisciplinary fields of aesthetics, affect studies, feminist theory, politics and photography. Conceptually innovative and fiercely original this book will move us beyond old political and cultural stalemates and into new terrain for analysis and reflection.
Photographs are ubiquitous in our lives. Most of us contribute to making some of the billions of photographs produced each year. A small number of these have qualities that capture and sustain aesthetic interest. What distinguishes such photographic art from all the other kinds of photograph? What constitutes the distinctive value of photographic art?
As anyone who has wielded a camera knows, photography has a unique relationship to chance. It also represents a struggle to reconcile aesthetic aspiration with a mechanical process. Robin Kelsey reveals how daring innovators expanded the aesthetic limits of photography in order to create art for a modern world.
It's easy to forget there's a war on when the front line is everywhere encrypted in plain sight. Gathered in this book's several chapters are dispatches on the role of photography in a War Universe, a space and time in which photographers such as Hilla Becher, Don McCullin and Eadweard Muybridge exist only insofar as they are a mark of possession, in the sway of larger forces. These photographers are conceptual personae that collectively fabulate a different kind of photography, a paraphotography in which the camera produces negative abyssal flashes or 'endarkenment.' In his Vietnam War memoir, Dispatches, Michael Herr imagines a 'dropped camera' receiving 'jumping and falling' images, images which capture the weird indivisibility of medium and mediated in a time of war. The movies and the war, the photographs and the torn bodies, fused and exchanged. Reporting from the chaos at the middle of things, Herr invokes a kind of writing attuned to this experience. Photography in the Middle, eschewing a high theoretical mode, seeks to exploit the bag of tricks that is the dispatch. The dispatch makes no grand statement about the progress of the war. Cultivating the most perverse implications of its sources, it tries to express what the daily briefing never can. Ports of entry in the script we're given, odd and hasty little glyphs, unhelpful rips in the cover story, dispatches are futile, dark intuitions, an expeditious inefficacy. They are bleak but necessary responses to an indifferent world in which any action whatever has little noticeable effect.As luck would have it, Photography in the Middle begins with some nasty accidents, and extracts from the wreckage a few lessons learned. Dusting itself off, it ships out and puts up with a bunch of battle scarred, big gun photojournalists in the Holiday Inn of a typical world city. Later, it immerses itself within the leaked files of an enigmatic police cabal which detail the surveillance of conceptual photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, an operation that even extends to the duo's dreams. Further back in time, in 1897, we are invited to an inflammatory, yet patchily documented public lecture given by the Titan, Muybridge.More than any other, it is William Burroughs, conceived here as a war photographer, who is our tutelary figure, hovering over all these pages in his attempt to map emergent vectors of mediation, ever more intimate forms of control and accelerants of planetary catastrophe. Burroughs believed that it was necessary to both keep pace with and formulate new vectors, vectors that might act as intersections with a nonhuman outside. Photography has an agency of its own, one that scrambles the patterns and refrains of mediation upon which human life is based, glitching the human and provoking relations with external coordinates. With Burroughs, and other inspirations such as J.G. Ballard, Georges Bataille, Tom McCarthy and Eugene Thacker, our notion of the dispatch does not offer positive knowledge of something that we can reconcile with existing rational explanations, but rather the revelation of a nightside, our redundancy in a photography that suspends all operations in a general blindness.