Lanterna Rally
eBook PDF Download Digital Library
Points of View, the Stereograph in America
Author: Howard Saul Becker
Publisher: Visual Studies Workshop
Published: 1979
Total Pages: 128
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Seaway to the Future
Author: Alexander Missal
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Published: 2009-02-01
Total Pages: 282
ISBN-13: 0299229432
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Realizing the century-old dream of a passage to India, the building of the Panama Canal was an engineering feat of colossal dimensions, a construction site filled not only with mud and water but with interpretations, meanings, and social visions. Alexander Missal’s Seaway to the Future unfolds a cultural history of the Panama Canal project, revealed in the texts and images of the era’s policymakers and commentators. Observing its creation, journalists, travel writers, and officials interpreted the Canal and its environs as a perfect society under an efficient, authoritarian management featuring innovations in technology, work, health, and consumption. For their middle-class audience in the United States, the writers depicted a foreign yet familiar place, a showcase for the future—images reinforced in the exhibits of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition that celebrated the Canal’s completion. Through these depictions, the building of the Panama Canal became a powerful symbol in a broader search for order as Americans looked to the modern age with both anxiety and anticipation. Like most utopian visions, this one aspired to perfection at the price of exclusion. Overlooking the West Indian laborers who built the Canal, its admirers praised the white elite that supervised and administered it. Inspired by the masculine ideal personified by President Theodore Roosevelt, writers depicted the Canal Zone as an emphatically male enterprise and Chief Engineer George W. Goethals as the emblem of a new type of social leader, the engineer-soldier, the benevolent despot. Examining these and other images of the Panama Canal project, Seaway to the Future shows how they reflected popular attitudes toward an evolving modern world and, no less important, helped shape those perceptions. Best Books for Regional Special Interests, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association “Provide[s] a useful vantage on the world bequeathed to us by the forces that set out to put America astride the globe nearly a century ago.”—Chris Rasmussen, Bookforum
Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory
Author: Francis Xavier Blouin
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2007-08-02
Total Pages: 516
ISBN-13: 9780472032709
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Essays exploring the importance of archives as artifacts of culture
The Art of Stereography
Author: Douglas Heil
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2017-02-02
Total Pages: 355
ISBN-13: 147662724X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Three-dimensional stereoviews were wildly popular in the mid-19th century. Yet public infatuation fueled highbrow scorn, and even when they fell from favor, critics retained their disdain. Thus a dazzling body of photographic work has unjustly been buried. This book explores how compelling images were made by carefully combining subject matter, composition, lighting, tonality, blocking and depth. It draws upon the fine arts, the mass media, humanities, history, and even geology. Throughout, overlooked photographers are celebrated, such as the one who found extraordinary visual parallels within nature, anticipating Cezanne and Seurat--or the one who refused to play favorites during a bitter war and found humanity on both sides--or the one who took a favorite American glen and found menace all about. Stereographers were actually more like film directors or television producers than large format photographers: the best ones fused artistry with commercial appeal.
Postcard America
Author: Jeffrey L. Meikle
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2016-01-20
Total Pages: 521
ISBN-13: 0292726619
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →From the Great Depression through the early postwar years, any postcard sent in America was more than likely a “linen” card. Colorized in vivid, often exaggerated hues and printed on card stock embossed with a linen-like texture, linen postcards celebrated the American scene with views of majestic landscapes, modern cityscapes, roadside attractions, and other notable features. These colorful images portrayed the United States as shimmering with promise, quite unlike the black-and-white worlds of documentary photography or Life magazine. Linen postcards were enormously popular, with close to a billion printed and sold. Postcard America offers the first comprehensive study of these cards and their cultural significance. Drawing on the production files of Curt Teich & Co. of Chicago, the originator of linen postcards, Jeffrey L. Meikle reveals how photographic views were transformed into colorized postcard images, often by means of manipulation—adding and deleting details or collaging bits and pieces from several photos. He presents two extensive portfolios of postcards—landscapes and cityscapes—that comprise a representative iconography of linen postcard views. For each image, Meikle explains the postcard’s subject, describes aspects of its production, and places it in social and cultural contexts. In the concluding chapter, he shifts from historical interpretation to a contemporary viewpoint, considering nostalgia as a motive for collectors and others who are fascinated today by these striking images.
Landscape in American Guides and View Books
Author: Herbert Gottfried
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2013
Total Pages: 153
ISBN-13: 0739176080
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Landscape in American Guides and View Books: Visual History of Touring and Travel is vested in the American relationship to landscape and the role guidebooks and view books played in touring and travel experiences, including immigration. Early in the history of the republic, the relationship to landscape turns visual, that is, landscapes inspire artistic responses in the form of written descriptions and visual representations. The predominant element is the scene. From the 1820s on scenic thinking, within an emerging industrial economy, characterizes a major cultural and social development. As immigration increases, within the country and from abroad, publishers and trade groups create souvenir guidebooks and view books to facilitate the movement of people, and to encourage economic expansion and tourism. Guide and view book analysis centers on pictures of landscape transformations and includes the cultural basis of scenes changing from pastoral and picturesque expressions to the documentation of managed views. The general acceptance of managed views as replacements for romantic ones illustrates a commitment to landscapes that denote utility and the influence of commercial and industrial urban centers on American life. Guidebook and view book imagery, composed of durable schemas, promotes visual thinking across social classes and time. The primary medium for souvenirs is the photograph, which printing methods, like photolithography, transform into printed products. The visual history of touring and travel is part of America's first visual culture, as well as the social formation of landscape, the emergence of a collective vision among souvenir producers and consumers, and the role visual information plays in landscape commentary, which is the literary context for printed souvenirs.
Critical Issues In American Art
Author: Mary Ann Calo
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-02-12
Total Pages: 408
ISBN-13: 0429980833
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This anthology of essays on different critical approaches and methodologies for the analysis and interpretation of American art and artists is designed for students and teachers in American art history and American studies programs. It contains twenty selections from academic journals on American art from colonial times to 1940. Mary Ann Calo provides an introduction to the anthology, explaining its purpose and organization, and each selection has a brief introduction about its main focus and scholarly approach. These case studies show the diversity of scholarly thinking about interpreting American works of art, which should be useful for teachers and comprehensible and interesting for students.This anthology contains twenty articles on American art from colonial times to 1940. The selections are mainly from academic journals and aim to provide the student and teacher with different critical approaches and methodologies for the analysis and interpretation of American art and artists. Mary Ann Calo's preface to the anthology explains its purpose and organization, and each article will have a brief introduction about its main focus and scholarly approach.This text meets the need in American art history studies for an anthology of essays on critical approaches and methodologies.
Before the Crash
Author: Mark J. P. Wolf
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2012-06-15
Total Pages: 270
ISBN-13: 0814337228
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Contributors examine the early days of video game history before the industry crash of 1983 that ended the medium’s golden age.
The Material Unconscious
Author: Bill Brown
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 1996
Total Pages: 358
ISBN-13: 9780674553811
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Within the ephemera of the everyday--old photographs, circus posters, iron toys--lies a challenge to America's dominant cultural memory. What this memory has left behind, Bill Brown recovers in the "material unconscious" of Stephen Crane's work, the textual residues of daily sensations that add up to a new history of the American 1890s. As revealed in Crane's disavowing appropriation of an emerging mass culture--from football games and freak shows to roller coasters and early cinema--the decade reappears as an underexposed moment in the genealogy of modernism and modernity. Brown's story begins on the Jersey Shore, in Asbury Park, where Crane became a writer in the shadow of his father, a grimly serious Methodist minister who vilified the popular amusements his son adored. The coastal resorts became the stage for debates about technology, about the body's visibility, about a black service class and the new mass access to leisure. From this snapshot of a recreational scene that would continue to inspire Crane's sensational modernism, Brown takes us to New York's Bowery. There, in the visual culture established by dime museums, minstrel shows, and the Kodak craze, he exhibits Crane dramatically obscuring the typology of race. Along the way, Brown demonstrates how attitudes toward play transformed the image of war, the idea of childhood and nationhood, and the concept of culture itself. And by developing a new conceptual apparatus (with such notions as "recreational time," "abstract leisure," and the "amusement/knowledge system"), he provides the groundwork for a new politics of pleasure. A crucial theorization of how cultural studies can and should proceed, The Material Unconscious insists that in the very conjuncture of canonical literature and mass culture, we can best understand how proliferating and competing economies of play disrupt the so-called "logic" and "work" of culture.
