John Heartfield and the Agitated Image

John Heartfield and the Agitated Image PDF Author: Andrés Mario Zervigón
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226981789
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Get Book Here

Book Description
Working in Germany between the two world wars, John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld, 1891–1968) developed an innovative method of appropriating and reusing photographs to powerful political effect. As a pioneer of modern photomontage, he sliced up mass media photos with his iconic scissors and then reassembled the fragments into compositions that utterly transformed the meaning of the originals. In John Heartfield and the Agitated Image, Andrés Mario Zervigón explores this crucial period in the life and work of a brilliant, radical artist whose desire to disclose the truth obscured by the mainstream press and imperial propaganda made him a de facto prosecutor of Germany’s visual culture. Zervigón charts the evolution of Heartfield’s photomontage from an act of antiwar resistance into a formalized and widely disseminated political art in the Weimar Republic. Appearing on everything from campaign posters to book covers, the photomonteur’s notorious pictures challenged well-worn assumption and correspondingly walked a dangerous tightrope over the political, social, and cultural cauldron that was interwar Germany. Zervigón explains how Heartfield’s engagement with montage arose from a broadly-shared dissatisfaction with photography’s capacity to represent the modern world. The result was likely the most important combination of avant-garde art and politics in the twentieth century. A rare look at Heartfield’s early and middle years as an artist and designer, this book provides a new understanding of photography’s role at this critical juncture in history.

John Heartfield and the Agitated Image

John Heartfield and the Agitated Image PDF Author: Andrés Mario Zervigón
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226981789
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Get Book Here

Book Description
Working in Germany between the two world wars, John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld, 1891–1968) developed an innovative method of appropriating and reusing photographs to powerful political effect. As a pioneer of modern photomontage, he sliced up mass media photos with his iconic scissors and then reassembled the fragments into compositions that utterly transformed the meaning of the originals. In John Heartfield and the Agitated Image, Andrés Mario Zervigón explores this crucial period in the life and work of a brilliant, radical artist whose desire to disclose the truth obscured by the mainstream press and imperial propaganda made him a de facto prosecutor of Germany’s visual culture. Zervigón charts the evolution of Heartfield’s photomontage from an act of antiwar resistance into a formalized and widely disseminated political art in the Weimar Republic. Appearing on everything from campaign posters to book covers, the photomonteur’s notorious pictures challenged well-worn assumption and correspondingly walked a dangerous tightrope over the political, social, and cultural cauldron that was interwar Germany. Zervigón explains how Heartfield’s engagement with montage arose from a broadly-shared dissatisfaction with photography’s capacity to represent the modern world. The result was likely the most important combination of avant-garde art and politics in the twentieth century. A rare look at Heartfield’s early and middle years as an artist and designer, this book provides a new understanding of photography’s role at this critical juncture in history.

Avant-Garde Art in Everyday Life

Avant-Garde Art in Everyday Life PDF Author: Matthew S. Witkovsky
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300166095
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description


Photography and Its Origins

Photography and Its Origins PDF Author: Tanya Sheehan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317578953
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
Recent decades have seen a flourishing interest in and speculation about the origins of photography. Spurred by rediscoveries of ‘first’ photographs and proclamations of photography’s death in the digital age, scholars have been rethinking who and what invented the medium. Photography and Its Origins reflects on this interest in photography’s beginnings by reframing it in critical and specifically historiographical terms. How and why do we write about the origins of the medium? Whom or what do we rely on to construct those narratives? What’s at stake in choosing to tell stories of photography’s genesis in one way or another? And what kind of work can those stories do? Edited by Tanya Sheehan and Andrés Mario Zervigón, this collection of 16 original essays, illustrated with 32 colour images, showcases prominent and emerging voices in the field of photography studies. Their research cuts across disciplines and methodologies, shedding new light on old questions about histories and their writing. Photography and Its Origins will serve as a valuable resource for students and scholars in art history, visual and media studies, and the history of science and technology.

Postcards

Postcards PDF Author: David Prochaska
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN:
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examines postcards as images that are carriers of text, and textual correspondence that circulate images across boundaries of class, gender, nationality and race. Discusses issues concerning the concrete practices of production, consumption, collection and appropriation.

A Companion to Photography

A Companion to Photography PDF Author: Stephen Bull
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405195843
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 568

Get Book Here

Book Description
The study of photography has never been more important. A look at today's digital world reveals that a greater number of photographs are being taken each day than at any other moment in history. Countless photographs are disseminated instantly online and more and more photographic images are earning prominent positions and garnering record prices in the rarefied realm of top art galleries. Reflecting this dramatic increase in all things photographic, A Companion to Photography presents a comprehensive collection of original essays that explore a variety of key areas of current debate around the state of photography in the twenty-first century. Essays are grouped and organized in themed sections including photographic interpretation, markets, popular photography, documents, and fine art and provide comprehensive coverage of the subject. Representing a diversity of approaches, essays are written by both established and emerging photographers and scholars, as well as various experts in their respective areas. A Companion to Photography offers scholars and professional photographers alike an essential and up-to-date resource that brings the study of contemporary photography into clear focus.

Photography and Doubt

Photography and Doubt PDF Author: Sabine T. Kriebel
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317427408
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Get Book Here

Book Description
Recent decades have seen photography’s privileged relationship to the real come under question. Spurred by the postmodern critique of photography in the 1980s and the rise of digital technologies soon thereafter, scholars have been asking who and what built this understanding of the medium in the first place. Photography and Doubt reflects on this interest in photography’s referential power by discussing it in rigorously historical terms. How was the understanding of photographic realism cultivated in the first place? What do cases of staged and manipulated photography reveal about that realism’s hold on audiences across the medium’s history? Have doubts about photography’s testimonial power stimulated as much knowledge as its realism? Edited by Sabine T. Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón, Photography and Doubt is the first multi-authored collection specifically designed to explore these questions. Its 13 original essays, illustrated with 73 color images, explore cases when the link between the photographic image and its referent was placed under stress, and when photography was as attuned to its myth-making capabilities as to its claims to authenticity. Photography and Doubt will serve as a valuable resource for students and scholars in art history, visual and media studies, philosophy, and the history of science and technology.

Poisoned Abstraction

Poisoned Abstraction PDF Author: Graham Bader
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300257082
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
A definitive resource, full of fresh insights and new revelations, on one of the most influential interwar artists This richly illustrated book offers a definitive new assessment of the oeuvre of Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), a central figure of the interwar European avant-garde. Active as an artist, designer, publisher, performer, critic, poet, and playwright, Schwitters is best known for intimately scaled, materially rich collages and assemblages made from found objects--often refuse--that the artist described as having lost all contact with their role and history in the world at large. Considering works reaching from Schwitters's earliest collage-based pieces of 1918-19, through his 1920s advertising designs, to his seminal environmental installation the Merzbau, Graham Bader carefully unpacks the meaning behind such projects and sheds new light on the tumultuous historical conditions in which they were made. In the process, he reveals a new Schwitters--aesthetically committed and politically astute--for our time. This authoritative account reframes our understanding of Schwitters's multifaceted artistic practice and explores the complex entwinement of art, politics, and history in the modern period.

Postcards from the Trenches

Postcards from the Trenches PDF Author: Irene Guenther
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350015776
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
German art student Otto Schubert was 22 years old when he was drafted into the Great War. As the conflict unfolded, he painted a series of postcards that he sent to his sweetheart, Irma. During the battles of Ypres and Verdun, Schubert filled dozens of military-issued 4” x 6” cards with vivid images depicting the daily realities and tragedies of war. Beautifully illustrated with full-color reproductions of his exquisite postcards, as well as his wartime sketches, woodcuts, and two lithograph portfolios, Postcards from the Trenches is Schubert's war diary, love journal, and life story. His powerful artworks illuminate and document in a visual language the truths of war. Postcards from the Trenches offers the first full account of Otto Schubert, soldier-artist of the Great War, rising art star in the 1920s, prolific graphic artist and book illustrator, one of the “degenerate” artists defamed by the Nazis, and a man shattered by the Second World War and the Cold War. Created in the midst of enormous devastation, Schubert's haunting visual missives are as powerful and relevant today as they were a century ago. His postcards are both a young man's token of love and longing and a soldier's testimony of the Great War.

Photography and the Optical Unconscious

Photography and the Optical Unconscious PDF Author: Shawn Michelle Smith
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822372991
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 430

Get Book Here

Book Description
Photography is one of the principal filters through which we engage the world. The contributors to this volume focus on Walter Benjamin's concept of the optical unconscious to investigate how photography has shaped history, modernity, perception, lived experience, politics, race, and human agency. In essays that range from examinations of Benjamin's and Sigmund Freud's writings to the work of Kara Walker and Roland Barthes's famous Winter Garden photograph, the contributors explore what photography can teach us about the nature of the unconscious. They attend to side perceptions, develop latent images, discover things hidden in plain sight, focus on the disavowed, and perceive the slow. Of particular note are the ways race and colonialism have informed photography from its beginning. The volume also contains photographic portfolios by Zoe Leonard, Kelly Wood, and Kristan Horton, whose work speaks to the optical unconscious while demonstrating how photographs communicate on their own terms. The essays and portfolios in Photography and the Optical Unconscious create a collective and sustained assessment of Benjamin's influential concept, opening up new avenues for thinking about photography and the human psyche. Contributors. Mary Bergstein, Jonathan Fardy, Kristan Horton, Terri Kapsalis, Sarah Kofman, Elisabeth Lebovici, Zoe Leonard, Gabrielle Moser, Mignon Nixon, Thy Phu, Mark Reinhardt, Shawn Michelle Smith, Sharon Sliwinski, Laura Wexler, Kelly Wood, Andrés Mario Zervigón

Dreaming in Dark Times

Dreaming in Dark Times PDF Author: Sharon Sliwinski
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452953899
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Get Book Here

Book Description
What do dreams manage to say—or indeed, show—about human experience that is not legible otherwise? Can the disclosure of our dream-life be understood as a form of political avowal? To what does a dream attest? And to whom? Blending psychoanalytic theory with the work of such political thinkers as Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, Sharon Sliwinski explores how the disclosure of dream-life represents a special kind of communicative gesture—a form of unconscious thinking that can serve as a potent brand of political intervention and a means for resisting sovereign power. Each chapter centers on a specific dream plucked from the historical record, slowly unwinding the significance of this extraordinary disclosure. From Wilfred Owen and Lee Miller to Frantz Fanon and Nelson Mandela, Sliwinski shows how each of these figures grappled with dream-life as a means to conjure up the courage to speak about dark times. Here dreaming is defined as an integral political exercise—a vehicle for otherwise unthinkable thoughts and a wellspring for the freedom of expression. Dreaming in Dark Times defends the idea that dream-life matters—that attending to this thought-landscape is vital to the life of the individual but also vital to our shared social and political worlds.