Photography, Trace, and Trauma

Photography, Trace, and Trauma PDF

Author: Margaret Iversen

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-02-27

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 022637033X

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Photography is often associated with the psychic effects of trauma: the automatic nature of the process, wide-open camera lens, and light-sensitive film record chance details unnoticed by the photographer—similar to what happens when a traumatic event bypasses consciousness and lodges deeply in the unconscious mind. Photography, Trace, and Trauma takes a groundbreaking look at photographic art and works in other media that explore this important analogy. Examining photography and film, molds, rubbings, and more, Margaret Iversen considers how these artistic processes can be understood as presenting or simulating a residue, trace, or “index” of a traumatic event. These approaches, which involve close physical contact or the short-circuiting of artistic agency, are favored by artists who wish to convey the disorienting effect and elusive character of trauma. Informing the work of a number of contemporary artists—including Tacita Dean, Jasper Johns, Mary Kelly, Gabriel Orozco, and Gerhard Richter—the concept of the trace is shown to be vital for any account of the aesthetics of trauma; it has left an indelible mark on the history of photography and art as a whole.

Photography, Trace, and Trauma

Photography, Trace, and Trauma PDF

Author: Margaret Iversen

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-02-23

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 022637016X

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Exposure -- Indexicality: a trauma of signification -- Analogue: on Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean -- Rubbing, casting, making strange -- Index, diagram, graphic trace -- The "unrepresentable"--Invisible traces: postscript on Thomas Demand

Touching Photographs

Touching Photographs PDF

Author: Margaret Olin

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2012-05-21

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0226626466

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Photography does more than simply represent the world. It acts in the world, connecting people to form relationships and shaping relationships to create communities. In this beautiful book, Margaret Olin explores photography’s ability to “touch” us through a series of essays that shed new light on photography’s role in the world. Olin investigates the publication of photographs in mass media and literature, the hanging of exhibitions, the posting of photocopied photographs of lost loved ones in public spaces, and the intense photographic activity of tourists at their destinations. She moves from intimate relationships between viewers and photographs to interactions around larger communities, analyzing how photography affects the way people handle cataclysmic events like 9/11. Along the way, she shows us James VanDerZee’s Harlem funeral portraits, dusts off Roland Barthes’s family album, takes us into Walker Evans and James Agee’s photo-text Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and logs onto online photo albums. With over one hundred illustrations, Touching Photographs is an insightful contribution to the theory of photography, visual studies, and art history.

Traces of Trauma

Traces of Trauma PDF

Author: Boreth Ly

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2019-11-30

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0824856090

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How do the people of a morally shattered culture and nation find ways to go on living? Cambodians confronted this challenge following the collective disasters of the American bombing, the civil war, and the Khmer Rouge genocide. The magnitude of violence and human loss, the execution of artists and intellectuals, the erasure of individual and institutional cultural memory all caused great damage to Cambodian arts, culture, and society. Author Boreth Ly explores the “traces” of this haunting past in order to understand how Cambodians at home and in the diasporas deal with trauma on such a vast scale. Ly maintains that the production of visual culture by contemporary Cambodian artists and writers—photographers, filmmakers, court dancers, and poets—embodies traces of trauma, scars leaving an indelible mark on the body and the psyche. Her book considers artists of different generations and family experiences: a Cambodian-American woman whose father sent her as a baby to the United States to be adopted; the Cambodian-French filmmaker, Rithy Panh, himself a survivor of the Khmer Rouge, whose film The Missing Picture was nominated for an Oscar in 2014; a young Cambodian artist born in 1988—part of the “post-memory” generation. The works discussed include a variety of materials and remnants from the historical past: the broken pieces of a shattered clay pot, the scarred landscape of bomb craters, the traditional symbolism of the checkered scarf called krama, as well as the absence of a visual archive. Boreth Ly’s poignant book explores obdurate traces that are fragmented and partial, like the acts of remembering and forgetting. Her interdisciplinary approach, combining art history, visual studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, religion, and philosophy, is particularly attuned to the diverse body of material discussed, including photographs, video installations, performance art, poetry, and mixed media. By analyzing these works through the lens of trauma, she shows how expressions of a national trauma can contribute to healing and the reclamation of national identity.

Inadvertent Images

Inadvertent Images PDF

Author: Peter Geimer

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-03-14

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 022647190X

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As an artistic medium, photography is uniquely subject to accidents, or disruptions, that can occur in the making of an artwork. Though rarely considered seriously, those accidents can offer fascinating insights about the nature of the medium and how it works. With Inadvertent Images, Peter Geimer explores all kinds of photographic irritation from throughout the history of the medium, as well as accidental images that occur through photo-like means, such as the image of Christ on the Shroud of Turin, brought into high resolution through photography. Geimer’s investigations complement the history of photographic images by cataloging a corresponding history of their symptoms, their precarious visibility, and the disruptions threatened by image noise. Interwoven with the familiar history of photography is a secret history of photographic artifacts, spots, and hazes that historians have typically dismissed as “spurious phenomena,” “parasites,” or “enemies of the photographer.” With such photographs, it is virtually impossible to tell where a “picture” has been disrupted—where the representation ends and the image noise begins. We must, Geimer argues, seek to keep both in sight: the technical making and the necessary unpredictability of what is made, the intentional and the accidental aspects, representation and its potential disruption.

Photography and September 11th

Photography and September 11th PDF

Author: Jennifer Good

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-09-13

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1000211304

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It is all but impossible to think of September 11th 2001 and not, at the same time, recall an image. The overwhelmingly visual coverage in the world's media pictured a spectacle of terror, from images of the collapsing towers, to injured victims and fatigued firefighters. In the days, weeks and months that followed, this vast collection of photographs continued to circulate relentlessly. This book investigates the psychological impact of those photographs on a stunned American audience. Drawing on trauma theory, this book asks whether the prolonged exposure of audience to photographs was cathartic or damaging. It explores how first the collective memory of the event was established in the American psyche and then argues that through repetitive use of the most powerful pictures, the culture industry created a dangerously simple 9/11 metanarrative. At the same time, people began to reclaim and use photography to process their own feelings, most significantly in 'communities' of photographic memorial websites. Such exercises were widely perceived as democratic and an aid to recovery. This book interrogates that assumption, providing a new understanding of how audiences see and process news photography in times of crisis.

Spectral Evidence

Spectral Evidence PDF

Author: Ulrich Baer

Publisher: Mit Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 9780262524476

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An original analysis of the parallels between the arrested moment in photography and in the traumatized psyche.

Trauma and Documentary Photography of the FSA

Trauma and Documentary Photography of the FSA PDF

Author: Sara Blair

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2012-05-01

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 0520265653

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"Coauthored by the literary scholar Sara Blair and the art historian Eric Rosenberg, this volume of the Defining Moments in American Photography series offers new ways to understand the work of the famous Farm Security Administration photographers by exploring an expanded and much more variable idea of the documentary than what New Dealers proposed. The coauthors follow in the line of scholars who have, on the one hand, looked critically at the FSA photography project and identified its goals, biases, contradictions, and ambivalences and, on the other hand, discerned strikingly independent directions among its photographers. But what distinguishes their work from that of others is their wrestling with a specific term often applied to the Depression era: trauma. If it was the case that documentary, as a genre, and FSA photographs, as an umbrella project, came to prominence during a time of trauma and in the hands of socially minded photographers was meant to address and publicize trauma, the coauthors of this volume seek to understand how trauma and photography mixed and how, in the volatility of that mixture, the competing ideas for documentary took shape. Among the key figures they study are some of the most beloved in American photography, including Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and Aaron Siskind"--Provided by publisher.

Reparative Aesthetics

Reparative Aesthetics PDF

Author: Susan Best

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-10-20

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1472525752

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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.

The Public Image

The Public Image PDF

Author: Robert Hariman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-11-07

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 022634293X

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In this book, Hariman and Lucaites provide an account of how photojournalism creates a distinctive and valuable way of understanding the modern world, plus example of how the public spectator can think about and with photographs in order to develop that understanding. Coming off the banner success of their No Caption Needed (2007), The Public Image takes that book forward with the express purpose of promoting visual literacy as a civic skill. In the end they aim to enlarge the conceptual scope of photography as a mode of experience, a medium for social thought, and a public art. Public thought needs both good writing and good photography, and this indicates the contemporary shift in talk about photography from what photographs are to a more direct concern with what photographs do. The authors take up a series of Big Issues, such as the recorded image as real and as artifice, the tangle of photography with modernity (here they touch on digitization and globalization), the manner in which the photograph operates as a medium for social thought, the photograph s intimate relationship with warfare, and they conclude with a chapter on the supersaturation of the image world (abundance is an important theme, and characteristic sign of cultural vitality)."