Refracted Visions

Refracted Visions PDF Author: Karen Strassler
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822391546
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
A young couple poses before a painted backdrop depicting a modern building set in a volcanic landscape; a college student grabs his camera as he heads to a political demonstration; a man poses stiffly for his identity photograph; amateur photographers look for picturesque images in a rural village; an old woman leafs through a family album. In Refracted Visions, Karen Strassler argues that popular photographic practices such as these have played a crucial role in the making of modern national subjects in postcolonial Java. Contending that photographic genres cultivate distinctive ways of seeing and positioning oneself and others within the affective, ideological, and temporal location of Indonesia, she examines genres ranging from state identification photos to pictures documenting family rituals. Oriented to projects of selfhood, memory, and social affiliation, popular photographs recast national iconographies in an intimate register. They convey the longings of Indonesian national modernity: nostalgia for rural idylls and “tradition,” desires for the trappings of modernity and affluence, dreams of historical agency, and hopes for political authenticity. Yet photography also brings people into contact with ideas and images that transcend and at times undermine a strictly national frame. Photography’s primary practitioners in the postcolonial era have been Chinese Indonesians. Acting as cultural brokers who translate global and colonial imageries into national idioms, these members of a transnational minority have helped shape the visual contours of Indonesian belonging even as their own place within the nation remains tenuous. Refracted Visions illuminates the ways that everyday photographic practices generate visual habits that in turn give rise to political subjects and communities.

Refracted Visions

Refracted Visions PDF Author: Karen Strassler
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822391546
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book Here

Book Description
A young couple poses before a painted backdrop depicting a modern building set in a volcanic landscape; a college student grabs his camera as he heads to a political demonstration; a man poses stiffly for his identity photograph; amateur photographers look for picturesque images in a rural village; an old woman leafs through a family album. In Refracted Visions, Karen Strassler argues that popular photographic practices such as these have played a crucial role in the making of modern national subjects in postcolonial Java. Contending that photographic genres cultivate distinctive ways of seeing and positioning oneself and others within the affective, ideological, and temporal location of Indonesia, she examines genres ranging from state identification photos to pictures documenting family rituals. Oriented to projects of selfhood, memory, and social affiliation, popular photographs recast national iconographies in an intimate register. They convey the longings of Indonesian national modernity: nostalgia for rural idylls and “tradition,” desires for the trappings of modernity and affluence, dreams of historical agency, and hopes for political authenticity. Yet photography also brings people into contact with ideas and images that transcend and at times undermine a strictly national frame. Photography’s primary practitioners in the postcolonial era have been Chinese Indonesians. Acting as cultural brokers who translate global and colonial imageries into national idioms, these members of a transnational minority have helped shape the visual contours of Indonesian belonging even as their own place within the nation remains tenuous. Refracted Visions illuminates the ways that everyday photographic practices generate visual habits that in turn give rise to political subjects and communities.

Picturing American Modernity

Picturing American Modernity PDF Author: Kristen Whissel
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822391457
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In Picturing American Modernity, Kristen Whissel investigates the relationship between early American cinema and the experience of technological modernity. She demonstrates how between the late 1890s and the eve of the First World War moving pictures helped the U.S. public understand the possibilities and perils of new forms of “traffic” produced by industrialization and urbanization. As more efficient ways to move people, goods, and information transformed work and leisure at home and contributed to the expansion of the U.S. empire abroad, silent films presented compelling visual representations of the spaces, bodies, machines, and forms of mobility that increasingly defined modern life in the United States and its new territories. Whissel shows that by portraying key events, achievements, and anxieties, the cinema invited American audiences to participate in the rapidly changing world around them. Moving pictures provided astonishing visual dispatches from military camps prior to the outbreak of fighting in the Spanish-American War. They allowed audiences to delight in images of the Pan-American Exposition, and also to mourn the assassination of President McKinley there. One early film genre, the reenactment, presented spectators with renditions of bloody battles fought overseas during the Philippine-American War. Early features offered sensational dramatizations of the scandalous “white slave trade,” which was often linked to immigration and new forms of urban work and leisure. By bringing these frequently distant events and anxieties “near” to audiences in cities and towns across the country, the cinema helped construct an American national identity for the machine age.

Vision, Race, and Modernity

Vision, Race, and Modernity PDF Author: Deborah Poole
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691006451
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Although the book specifically documents the depictions of Andean peoples, Poole's findings apply to the entire colonized world of the nineteenth century."--BOOK JACKET.

Potential Images

Potential Images PDF Author: Dario Gamboni
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 9781861891495
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
In Potential Images Dario Gamboni explores ambiguity in modern art, considering images that rely to a great degree on a projected or imaginative response from viewers to achieve their effect. Ambiguity became increasingly important in late 19th- and early 20th-century aesthetics, as is evidenced in works by such artists as Redon, Cezanne, Gauguin, Ensor and the Nabis. Similarly, the Cubists subverted traditional representational conventions, requiring their viewers to decipher images to extract their full meanings. The same device was taken up in the various experiments leading to abstraction. For example, it was Kandinsky's intention that his work could be interpreted in both figurative and non-figurative ways, and Duchamp's Readymades suggested the radical conclusion that 'it is the beholder who makes the picture'. These invitations to viewers to participate in the process of artistic communication had social and political implications, as they accorded artist and beholder symmetrical, almost interchangeable, roles.

Modernity in Black and White

Modernity in Black and White PDF Author: Rafael Cardoso
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781108680356
Category : Art and race
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"The book provides a deeper understanding of modern art in the Brazilian context, moving the focus away from the self-declared avant-gardes and towards a broad panorama of modernizing tendencies throughout the period, 1890 to 1945. The backdrop of sertão, favelas, carnival and samba - often left out of accounts that restrict readings of modernism to erudite arenas like literature, fine art or architecture - are foregrounded in an attempt to situate artistic discourses within the social and political struggles of the period. Race, class and ideological conflict are given priority as tools for deconstructing complex debates, too often taken at face value or misread as merely reflexive of European phenomena. The anthropophagic movement (Antropofagia) rates special attention in teasing out the meanings of primitivism in the Brazilian context. The book examines a range of visual cultural materials including paintings, periodicals, graphics and photographs, revealing a hidden archive that calls into question the very essence of how modernism is usually perceived in Brazil. The enduring presence of archaism and violence behind an appearance of modernity reveals itself to be not an anomaly, but rather a product of the tensions inherent to the enduring oligarchical structures of Brazilian culture and society"--

W.G. Sebald

W.G. Sebald PDF Author: Jonathan James Long
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231145121
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Uses the problem of modernity to explore various themes in Sebald's work.

Images of the Modern Woman in Asia

Images of the Modern Woman in Asia PDF Author: Shoma Munshi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136120580
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
In examining the links between gender and the media, this volume asks questions involving the relationship between global media flows, gender and modernity in the region.

Foto

Foto PDF Author: Matthew S Witkovsky
Publisher: Thames and Hudson
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
A brilliantly illustrated survey of modernist photography in Central Europe, published in association with the National Gallery of Art. In the 1920s and 1930s, photography became an immense phenomenon across Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, and Poland. Through magazines and books, in advertisements and at exhibitions, from amateur clubs to avant-garde schools, photographs emerged as a key vehicle of modern consciousness. This book presents the work of approximately one hundred individuals whose creations exemplify the potential of photography in Central Europe between the two World Wars. Foto brings together for the first time works by recognized masters such as the Russian El Lissitzky, the Hungarian László Moholy-Nagy, and the German Hannah Hóch—all of whom developed their photographic ideas in Germany—with contemporaries like Karel Teige and Jaromír Funke (Czechoslovakia), Kazimierz Podsadecki (Poland), Károly Escher (Hungary), and Trude Fleischmann (Austria), who are less well known today. Organized thematically, the book explores topics from photomontage and war to gender identity, modern living, and the spread of Surrealism. It shows the shared experience of modernity in the region, whereby recently founded nations and dismantled empires alike sought their place within the new world order established in the aftermath of World War I. The illustrations, drawn from more than seventy collections in America and abroad, include several previously unpublished works as well as many others never before available in high-quality reproductions.

Living Pictures, Missing Persons

Living Pictures, Missing Persons PDF Author: Mark B. Sandberg
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691238278
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
In the late nineteenth century, Scandinavian urban dwellers developed a passion for a new, utterly modern sort of visual spectacle: objects and effigies brought to life in astonishingly detailed, realistic scenes. The period 1880-1910 was the popular high point of mannequin display in Europe. Living Pictures, Missing Persons explores this phenomenon as it unfolded with the rise of wax museums and folk museums in the largest cities of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Mark Sandberg asks: Why did modernity generate a cultural fascination with the idea of effigy? He shows that the idea of effigy is also a portal to understanding other aspects of visual entertainment in that period, including the widespread interest in illusionistic scenes and tableaux, in the "portability" of sights, spaces, and entire milieus. Sandberg investigates this transformation of visual culture outside the usual test cases of the largest European metropolises. He argues that Scandinavian spectators desired an unusual degree of authenticity--a cultural preference for naturalism that made its way beyond theater to popular forms of museum display. The Scandinavian wax museums and folk-ethnographic displays of the era helped pre-cinematic spectators work out the social implications of both voyeuristic and immersive display techniques. This careful study thus anticipates some of the central paradoxes of twentieth-century visual culture--but in a time when the mannequin and the physical relic reigned supreme, and in a place where the contrast between tradition and modernity was a high-stakes game.

Modernity At Large

Modernity At Large PDF Author: Arjun Appadurai
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9781452900063
Category : Civilization, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description