What Do Pictures Want?

What Do Pictures Want? PDF Author: W. J. T. Mitchell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022624590X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
Why do we have such extraordinarily powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even lead us astray? According to W. J. T. Mitchell, we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects that convey meaning but as animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. What Do Pictures Want? explores this idea and highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting. Opening new vistas in iconology and the emergent field of visual culture, he also considers the importance of Dolly the Sheep—who, as a clone, fulfills the ancient dream of creating a living image—and the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, which, among other things, signifies a new and virulent form of iconoclasm. What Do Pictures Want? offers an immensely rich and suggestive account of the interplay between the visible and the readable. A work by one of our leading theorists of visual representation, it will be a touchstone for art historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and philosophers alike. “A treasury of episodes—generally overlooked by art history and visual studies—that turn on images that ‘walk by themselves’ and exert their own power over the living.”—Norman Bryson, Artforum

What Do Pictures Want?

What Do Pictures Want? PDF Author: W. J. T. Mitchell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022624590X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 419

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why do we have such extraordinarily powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even lead us astray? According to W. J. T. Mitchell, we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects that convey meaning but as animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. What Do Pictures Want? explores this idea and highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting. Opening new vistas in iconology and the emergent field of visual culture, he also considers the importance of Dolly the Sheep—who, as a clone, fulfills the ancient dream of creating a living image—and the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, which, among other things, signifies a new and virulent form of iconoclasm. What Do Pictures Want? offers an immensely rich and suggestive account of the interplay between the visible and the readable. A work by one of our leading theorists of visual representation, it will be a touchstone for art historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and philosophers alike. “A treasury of episodes—generally overlooked by art history and visual studies—that turn on images that ‘walk by themselves’ and exert their own power over the living.”—Norman Bryson, Artforum

Snapshot Photography

Snapshot Photography PDF Author: Catherine Zuromskis
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262544113
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
An examination of the contradictions within a form of expression that is both public and private, specific and abstract, conventional and countercultural. Snapshots capture everyday occasions. Taken by amateur photographers with simple point-and-shoot cameras, snapshots often commemorate something that is private and personal; yet they also reflect widely held cultural conventions. The poses may be formulaic, but a photograph of loved ones can evoke a deep affective response. In Snapshot Photography, Catherine Zuromskis examines the development of a form of visual expression that is both public and private. Scholars of art and culture tend to discount snapshot photography; it is too ubiquitous, too unremarkable, too personal. Zuromskis argues for its significance. Snapshot photographers, she contends, are not so much creating spontaneous records of their lives as they are participating in a prescriptive cultural ritual. A snapshot is not only a record of interpersonal intimacy but also a means of linking private symbols of domestic harmony to public ideas of social conformity. Through a series of case studies, Zuromskis explores the social life of snapshot photography in the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century. She examines the treatment of snapshot photography in the 2002 film One Hour Photo and in the television crime drama Law and Order: Special Victims Unit; the growing interest of collectors and museum curators in “vintage” snapshots; and the “snapshot aesthetic” of Andy Warhol and Nan Goldin. She finds that Warhol’s photographs of the Factory community and Goldin’s intense and intimate photographs of friends and family use the conventions of the snapshot to celebrate an alternate version of “family values.” In today’s digital age, snapshot photography has become even more ubiquitous and ephemeral—and, significantly, more public. But buried within snapshot photography’s mythic construction, Zuromskis argues, is a site of democratic possibility.

The Lives of Images, Vol. II: Analogy, Attunement, and Attention

The Lives of Images, Vol. II: Analogy, Attunement, and Attention PDF Author: Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa
Publisher: Lives of Images
ISBN: 9781597115070
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
"Analogy, Attunement, and Attention brings together a uniquely contemporary and diverse set of voices to address the complex sets of relationships that the photograph creates between its viewers and their bodies, minds, and sense of the physical and metaphysical world. This volume examines our changing relationship to space and selfhood as mediated by the lens, the print, the screen, the computer, and the multitude of networked technologies built around the image"--

Lives of Indian Images

Lives of Indian Images PDF Author: Richard H. Davis
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400844428
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
For many centuries, Hindus have taken it for granted that the religious images they place in temples and home shrines for purposes of worship are alive. Hindu priests bring them to life through a complex ritual "establishment" that invokes the god or goddess into material support. Priests and devotees then maintain the enlivened image as a divine person through ongoing liturgical activity: they must awaken it in the morning, bathe it, dress it, feed it, entertain it, praise it, and eventually put it to bed at night. In this linked series of case studies of Hindu religious objects, Richard Davis argues that in some sense these believers are correct: through ongoing interactions with humans, religious objects are brought to life. Davis draws largely on reader-response literary theory and anthropological approaches to the study of objects in society in order to trace the biographies of Indian religious images over many centuries. He shows that Hindu priests and worshipers are not the only ones to enliven images. Bringing with them differing religious assumptions, political agendas, and economic motivations, others may animate the very same objects as icons of sovereignty, as polytheistic "idols," as "devils," as potentially lucrative commodities, as objects of sculptural art, or as symbols for a whole range of new meanings never foreseen by the images' makers or original worshipers.

Unforgettable

Unforgettable PDF Author: Peter Davenport
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 9780811839617
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
The Hindenberg disaster. Andy Warhol's Campbells Soup Can. Marilyn Monroe standing over the subway grating. The first step onto the Moon. These powerful images have left an indelible impression in our collective mind's eye. This mesmerizing little volume celebrates these and hundreds of other artistic and cultural touchstoneswithout actually reproducing them. Each page is devoted to a single image, with a caption providing its title or description and the date that it was created. Just that information evokes the image vividly. The page itself is blank. Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother. The album cover of Sgt. Pepper. A man facing a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square. Arranged in chronological order from 1900 to the present, these images are a testament to the enduring impact of photography, art, and the imageas well as to the graphic precision of our shared memory bank. It's also a great pop quiz on cultural literacy.

Advertising Myths

Advertising Myths PDF Author: Anne Cronin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135141495
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
Advertising is often portrayed negatively, as corrupting a mythically pure relationship between people and things. In Advertising Myths Anne Cronin argues that it is better understood as a 'matrix of transformation' that performs divisions in the social order and arranges classificatory regimes. Focusing on consumption controversies, Cronin contends that advertising is constituted of 'circuits of belief' that flow between practitioners, clients, regulators, consumers and academics. Controversies such as those over tobacco and alcohol advertising, she argues, distil these beliefs and articulate with programmes of social engineering aimed at altering consumption patterns. This book will be essential reading for students and academics of advertising and consumption.

Biennale Fu ̈r Aktuelle Fotografie

Biennale Fu ̈r Aktuelle Fotografie PDF Author: David Campany
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783868289718
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description


Owl

Owl PDF Author: Paul Bannick
Publisher: Mountaineers Books
ISBN: 9781594858000
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"For anyone who appreciates wild things and wild places, each of Paul Bannick's stunning photographs is worth ten thousand words." - Ted Williams, Audubon--Moira Macdonald "The Birding Wire"

Edward Steichen

Edward Steichen PDF Author: Todd Brandow
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
By far the most lavish, thoughtfully selected, and beautifully produced book of Steichen s work.

The Lives of Others

The Lives of Others PDF Author: Simon Watson
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
ISBN: 0847869008
Category : House & Home
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
A privileged invitation into a world of beauty--from a seventeenth-century Italian palace and retreats in the Swiss Alps and Morocco to artists' studios and noble residences in Austria and Spain. Simon Watson takes the reader into highly personal environments that reveal the creativity and personality of their esteemed inhabitants. Since the 1990s, Watson has been one of the most prolific chroniclers of remarkable interiors and portraits, gracing the pages of W magazine, Vanity Fair, AD, and T Magazine. From hard-edged modernity and historical exoticism to pure classicism, the photographer has documented rooms of note in cities, atop mountains, and by the sea. Complementing his masterful images, Watson gives an intimate description of each location. On this journey with the photographer, one experiences the Duchess of Alba's Palacio Liria in Madrid, filled with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century masterpieces; interior designer Roberto Peregalli's splendid riad in Tangier; the magnificent and vast Castello Gardena in the Italian Alps owned by the Franchetti clan; Guinness heir Garech de Brun's hillside retreat in County Wicklow, Ireland; the Renaissance Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne in Rome, designed by Baldassarre Peruzzi in the sixteenth century; shoe designer Christian Louboutin's fanciful Parisian apartment; and many other splendid places around the world.