Author: Christopher Pinney Publisher: Reaktion Books ISBN: 1780230117 Category : Photography Languages : en Pages : 176
Book Description
Photography and anthropology share strikingly parallel histories. Christopher Pinney's provocative and eminently readable account provides a polemical narrative of anthropologists' use of photography from the 1840s to the present. Walter Benjamin suggested that photography 'make[s] the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable, ' and Pinney here explores photography as a divinatory practice. Though viewed as modern and rational, this quality of photography in fact propelled anthropologists towards the 'primitive' lives of those they studied. Early anthropology celebrated photography as a physical record, whose authority and permanence promised an escape from the lack of certainty in speech. For later anthropologists, this same quality became grounds to critique an imaging practice that failed to capture movement and process. But throughout these twists and turns, anthropology as a practice of 'being there' has found itself entwined in an intimate engagement with photography as metaphor for the collection of evidence. Photography and Anthropology reveals how anthropology provides the tools to re-imagine the power and magic of all photographic practices. It presents both a history of anthropology's seduction by photography and the anthropological theory of photography. This thoroughly researched book draws upon an intimate knowledge of the history of anthropology, photography and the world's major anthropological practitioners.
Author: Mr Christopher Morton Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. ISBN: 1409492125 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 540
Book Description
Photography, Anthropology and History examines the complex historical relationship between photography and anthropology, and in particular the strong emergence of the contemporary relevance of historical images. Thematically organized, and focusing on the visual practices developed within anthropology as a discipline, this book brings together a range of contemporary and methodologically innovative approaches to the historical image within anthropology. Importantly, it also demonstrates the ongoing relevance of both the historical image and the notion of the archive to recent anthropological thought. As current research rethinks the relationship between photography and anthropology, this volume will serve as a stimulus to this new phase of research as an essential text and methodological reference point in any course that addresses the relationship between anthropology and visuality.
Author: Elizabeth Edwards Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000181294 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 207
Book Description
Photographs have had an integral and complex role in many anthropological contexts, from fieldwork to museum exhibitions. This book explores how approaching anthropological photographs as 'history' can offer both theoretical and empirical insights into these roles. Photographs are thought to make problematic history because of their ambiguity and 'rawness'. In short, they have too many meanings. The author refutes this prejudice by exploring, through a series of case studies, precisely the potential of this raw quality to open up new perspectives. Taking the nature of photography as her starting point, the author argues that photographs are not merely pictures of things but are part of a dynamic and fluid historical dialogue, which is active not only in the creation of the photograph but in its subsequent social biography in archive and museum spaces, past and present. In this context, the book challenges any uniform view of anthropological photography and its resulting archives. Drawing on a variety of examples, largely from the Pacific, the book demonstrates how close readings of photographs reveal not only western agendas, but also many layers of differing historical and cross-cultural experiences. That is, photographs can 'spring leaks' to show an alternative viewpoint. These themes are developed further by examining the dynamics of photographs and issues around them as used by contemporary artists and curators and presented to an increasingly varied public. This book convincingly demonstrates photographs' potential to articulate histories other than those of their immediate appearances, a potential that can no longer be neglected by scholars and institutions.
Author: Hans Belting Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400839785 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 216
Book Description
A compelling theory that places the origin of human picture making in the body In this groundbreaking book, renowned art historian Hans Belting proposes a new anthropological theory for interpreting human picture making. Rather than focus exclusively on pictures as they are embodied in various media such as painting, sculpture, or photography, he links pictures to our mental images and therefore our bodies. The body is understood as a "living medium" that produces, perceives, or remembers images that are different from the images we encounter through handmade or technical pictures. Refusing to reduce images to their material embodiment yet acknowledging the importance of the historical media in which images are manifested, An Anthropology of Images presents a challenging and provocative new account of what pictures are and how they function. The book demonstrates these ideas with a series of compelling case studies, ranging from Dante's picture theory to post-photography. One chapter explores the tension between image and medium in two "media of the body," the coat of arms and the portrait painting. Another, central chapter looks at the relationship between image and death, tracing picture production, including the first use of the mask, to early funerary rituals in which pictures served to represent the missing bodies of the dead. Pictures were tools to re-embody the deceased, to make them present again, a fact that offers a surprising clue to the riddle of presence and absence in most pictures and that reveals a genealogy of pictures obscured by Platonic picture theory.
Author: Christopher Pinney Publisher: Reaktion Books ISBN: 1780231520 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 329
Book Description
A wedding couple gazes resolutely at viewers from the wings of a butterfly; a portrait surrounded by rose petals commemorates a recently deceased boy. These quiet but moving images represent the changing role of photographic portraiture in India, a topic anthropologist Christopher Pinney explores in Camera Indica. Studying photographic practice in India, Pinney traces photography's various purposes and goals from colonial through postcolonial times. He identifies three key periods in Indian portraiture: the use of photography under British rule as a quantifiable instrument of measurement, the later role of portraiture in moral instruction, and the current visual popular culture and its effects on modes of picturing. Photographic culture thus becomes a mutable realm in which capturing likeness is only part of the project. Lavishly illustrated, Pinney's account of the change from depiction to invention uncovers fascinating links between these evocative images and the society and history from which they emerge.
Author: Christopher Pinney Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 9780822331131 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
Richly illustrated with over 100 images, this volume explores the role of photography in raising historical consciousness from a variety of geographic, cultural, and historical perspectives. 128 photos.
Author: Marcus Banks Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226036634 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 426
Book Description
Made to be Seen brings together leading scholars of visual anthropology to examine the historical development of this multifaceted and growing field. Expanding the definition of visual anthropology beyond more limited notions, the contributors to Made to be Seen reflect on the role of the visual in all areas of life. Different essays critically examine a range of topics: art, dress and body adornment, photography, the built environment, digital forms of visual anthropology, indigenous media, the body as a cultural phenomenon, the relationship between experimental and ethnographic film, and more. The first attempt to present a comprehensive overview of the many aspects of an anthropological approach to the study of visual and pictorial culture, Made to be Seen will be the standard reference on the subject for years to come. Students and scholars in anthropology, sociology, visual studies, and cultural studies will greatly benefit from this pioneering look at the way the visual is inextricably threaded through most, if not all, areas of human activity.
Author: Konstantinos Kalantzis Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 025303714X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 342
Book Description
Sfakians on the island of Crete are known for their distinctive dress and appearance, fierce ruggedness, and devotion to traditional ways. Konstantinos Kalantzis explores how Sfakians live with the burdens and pleasures of maintaining these expectations of exoticism for themselves, for their fellow Greeks, and for tourists. Sfakian performance of masculine tradition has become even more meaningful for Greeks looking to reimagine their nation's global standing in the wake of stringent financial regulation, and for non-Greek tourists yearning for rootedness and escape from the post-industrial north. Through fine-grained ethnography that pays special attention to photography, Tradition in the Frame explores the ambivalence of a society expected to conform to outsiders' perception of the traditional even as it strives to enact its own vision of tradition. From the bodily reenactment of historical photographs to the unpredictable, emotionally-charged uses of postcards and commercial labels, the book unpacks the question of power and asymmetry but also uncovers other political possibilities that are nested in visual culture and experiences of tradition and the past. Kalantzis explores the crossroads of cultural performance and social imagination where the frame is both empowerment and subjection.
Author: Karen Strassler Publisher: Duke University Press Books ISBN: 9781478004691 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
The end of authoritarian rule in 1998 ushered in an exhilarating but unsettled period of democratization in Indonesia. A more open political climate converged with a rapidly changing media landscape, yielding a vibrant and volatile public sphere within which Indonesians grappled with the possibilities and limits of democracy amid entrenched corruption, state violence, and rising forms of intolerance. In Demanding Images Karen Strassler theorizes image-events as political processes in which publicly circulating images become the material ground of struggles over the nation's past, present, and future. Considering photographs, posters, contemporary art, graffiti, selfies, memes, and other visual media, she argues that people increasingly engage with politics through acts of making, circulating, manipulating, and scrutinizing images. Demanding Images is both a closely observed account of Indonesia's turbulent democratic transition and a globally salient analysis of the work of images in the era of digital media and neoliberal democracy. Strassler reveals politics today to be an unruly enterprise profoundly shaped by the affective and evidentiary force of images.
Author: Christopher Pinney
Author: Mr Christopher Morton
Author: Elizabeth Edwards
Author: Elizabeth Edwards
Author: Hans Belting
Author: Christopher Pinney
Author: Christopher Pinney
Author: Marcus Banks
Author: Konstantinos Kalantzis
Author: Karen Strassler