Photography and Politics in America

Photography and Politics in America PDF Author: Lili Corbus Bezner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Although critics defended the trend, arguing that truly visionary art transcended politics, Bezner notes that the cold war era effectively silenced some of the most socially engaged photographers in American society."--BOOK JACKET.

Photography and Politics in America

Photography and Politics in America PDF Author: Lili Corbus Bezner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Although critics defended the trend, arguing that truly visionary art transcended politics, Bezner notes that the cold war era effectively silenced some of the most socially engaged photographers in American society."--BOOK JACKET.

Photography & Politics in America

Photography & Politics in America PDF Author: liz corbus bezner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Exposing Slavery

Exposing Slavery PDF Author: Matthew Fox-Amato
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190663952
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Within a few years of the introduction of photography into the United States in 1839, slaveholders had already begun commissioning photographic portraits of their slaves. Ex-slaves-turned-abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass had come to see how sitting for a portrait could help them project humanity and dignity amidst northern racism. In the first decade of the medium, enslaved people had begun entering southern daguerreotype studios of their own volition, posing for cameras, and leaving with visual treasures they could keep in their pockets. And, as the Civil War raged, Union soldiers would orchestrate pictures with fugitive slaves that envisioned racial hierarchy as slavery fell. In these ways and others, from the earliest days of the medium to the first moments of emancipation, photography powerfully influenced how bondage and freedom were documented, imagined, and contested. By 1865, it would be difficult for many Americans to look back upon slavery and its fall without thinking of a photograph. Exposing Slavery explores how photography altered and was, in turn, shaped by conflicts over human bondage. Drawing on an original source base that includes hundreds of unpublished and little-studied photographs of slaves, ex-slaves, free African Americans, and abolitionists, as well as written archival materials, it puts visual culture at the center of understanding the experience of late slavery. It assesses how photography helped southerners to defend slavery, enslaved people to shape their social ties, abolitionists to strengthen their movement, and soldiers to pictorially enact interracial society during the Civil War. With diverse goals, these peoples transformed photography from a scientific curiosity into a political tool over only a few decades. This creative first book sheds new light on conflicts over late American slavery, while also revealing a key moment in the relationship between modern visual culture and racialized forms of power and resistance.

Life's America

Life's America PDF Author: Wendy Kozol
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781566391528
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
As the first periodical to present news stories through photographs, Life appealed to middle-class Americans as they faced the conflicts and the rapid changes of Cold War society. Life's photo-essays rendered such pressing concerns as world and domestic politics, labor disputes, civil rights protests, and social and economic mobility as human interest stories. By focusing on families, these stories portrayed major social issues in terms of personal achievement and adherence to particular values.Shaping a reassuring portrait of America, Life depicted the ideal family as white, suburban, and middle-class. For one representative feature story, the cover photograph shows an unfinished house in which a kneeling woman embraces two blond girls, and a man in a business suit protectively holds a toddler. The caption reads, "Family Buys 'Best $15,000 House.'" The cost of the house suggests this is a middle-class family with a bright future. The celebratory picture of this family with a bright future reveals no hint of the political and economic instability of the era.Wendy Kozol's readings of such photographs and their accompanying texts show how Life normalized the affluent nuclear family and supported middle-class consumption by defining the family as much by their possessions as by their conformity to traditional gender roles. Photo-essays about other social groups also focused on nuclear families and the quest for the "American Dream"; minimizing the differences between social groups and experiences in this way enabled the magazine to present middle-class culture as a nationally shared ideal.Using feminist and cultural studies perspectives, Kozol considers how layout, composition, lighting, framing, and subject matter influenced Life's representation of domestic ideology. Life's America examines the production of visual images that for generations captured the essence of American culture and shaped photojournalism. Author note: Wendy Kozol is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Oberlin College.

On Photography

On Photography PDF Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Photography, Artistic
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Between the Eyes

Between the Eyes PDF Author: David Levi Strauss
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
David Levi Strauss is a writer whose visual and intellectual sensibilities are both acute and expansive. His trenchant writings on photography and photographers have been collected for this volume from a broad range of magazines, including "Aperture," "Artforum" and "The Nation." In "Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics," Strauss tackles subjects as diverse as "Photography and Propaganda," the imagery of dreams, Sebastiao Salgado's epic social documents and the deeply personal photographic revelations of Francesca Woodman. The timely issue of photographic legitimacy is addressed in the essay "Photography and Belief," and in "The Highest Degree of Illusion," Strauss discusses the media frenzy surrounding the events of September 11. As our world is shaped more and more by images and their slipperiness, what he calls a media "pandemonium" in its root meaning of "the place of all howling demons," we need a mind and voice like Levi Strauss' to bring clarity to our vision.

Co-Illusion

Co-Illusion PDF Author: David Levi Strauss
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262043548
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
Reports from America's political crisis, exposing a new “iconopolitics,” in which words and images lose their connection to reality. The political crisis that sneaked up on America—the rise of Trump and Trumpism—has revealed the rot at the core of American exceptionalism. Recent changes in the way words and images are produced and received have made the current surreality possible; communication through social media, by design, maximizes attention and minimizes scrutiny. In Co-Illusion, the noted writer on art, photography, and politics David Levi Strauss bears witness to the new “iconopolitics” in which words and images lose their connection to reality. The collusion that fueled Trump's rise was the secret agreement of voters and media consumers—their “co-illusion”—to set aside the social contract. Strauss offers dispatches from the epicenter of our constitutional earthquake, writing first from the 2016 Democratic and Republican conventions and then from the campaign. After the election, he switches gears, writing in the voices of the regime and of those complicit in its actions—from the thoughts of the President himself (“I am not a mistake. I am not a fluke, or a bug in the system. I am the System”) to the reflections of a nameless billionaire tech CEO whose initials may or may not be M. Z. Finally, Strauss shows us how we might repair the damage to the public imaginary after Trump exits the scene. Photographs by celebrated documentary photographers Susan Meiselas and Peter van Agtmael accompany the texts.

Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare

Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare PDF Author: Leigh Raiford
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807834300
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
In Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare, Leigh Raiford argues that over the past one hundred years activists in the black freedom struggle have used photographic imagery both to gain political recognition and to develop a different visual vocabulary abou

The Civil Contract of Photography

The Civil Contract of Photography PDF Author: Ariella Azoulay
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1935408372
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Book Description
In this groundbreaking work, Ariella Azoulay thoroughly revises our understanding of the ethical status of photography. It must, she insists, be understood in its inseparability from the many catastrophes of recent history. She argues that photography is a particular set of relations between individuals and the powers that govern them and, at the same time, a form of relations among equals that constrains that power. Anyone, even a stateless person, who addresses others through photographs or occupies the position of a photograph’s addressee, is or can become a member of the citizenry of photography. The crucial arguments of the book concern two groups that have been rendered invisible by their state of exception: the Palestinian noncitizens of Israel and women in Western societies. Azoulay’s leading question is: Under what legal, political, or cultural conditions does it become possible to see and show disaster that befalls those with flawed citizenship in a state of exception? The Civil Contract of Photography is an essential work for anyone seeking to understand the disasters of recent history and the consequences of how they and their victims are represented.

Photography as a strategic tool in political communication. A comparative study of Barack Obama and Donald Trump

Photography as a strategic tool in political communication. A comparative study of Barack Obama and Donald Trump PDF Author: Benedikt Weingärtner
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668487154
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 18

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject Communications - Media and Politics, Politic Communications, grade: 15,5/20 ("sehr gut"), , language: English, abstract: For both, Obama and Trump, the political communication via official photographs serves the purpose to convey and reinforce their political core messages. Still, both take a very different approach since they also have very different key messages to send out. In the case of Donald Trump the official photographs can be considered as to be set in a broader political "communicative context" to underline his core message of him being the central figure to solve America’s problems. For Obama, this applies in particular to his unifying and optimistic message ("Yes we can") of the United States of America as well as to his image as a young, agile President from a new generation of politicians.