A celebrated writer on contemporary art and queer culture argues that Andy Warhol’s films enable us to see differently, and to see a different world.
A reconsideration of Chris Marker’s famous film, examining its treatment of time, its use of sound, the influence of the comic book form, and other topics.
Science and engineering research must be communicated within the research community and to the general public, and a crucial element of that communication is visual. In Envisioning Science, science photographer Felice Frankel provides a guide to creating dynamic and compelling photographs for journal submissions and scientific presentations to funding agencies, investors, and the general public. The book is organized from the large to small—from photographing laboratory equipment to capturing new material and biological structures at the microscopic level.
In this classic of French cultural studies, Georges Didi-Huberman traces the intimate and reciprocal relationship between the disciplines of psychiatry and photography in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the immense photographic output of the Salpetriere hospital, the notorious Parisian asylum for insane and incurable women, Didi-Huberman shows the crucial role played by photography in the invention of the category of hysteria.
This is a book about the public display of death in contemporary culture. It consists of a series of essays on specific cases in which death is displayed in museums and in photography. The essays focus mainly on representations of violence and death in events in recent Israeli history, including the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian Intifada, and on the visual presence of traumatic events in Israeli culture throughout the twentieth century. They show how images of these events both shape and aestheticize the viewer's experience of death.
Bernd and Hilla Becher have profoundly influenced the international photography world over the past several decades. Their unique genre, which falls somewhere between topological documentation and conceptual art, is in line with the aesthetics of such early-twentieth-century masters of German photography as Karl Blossfeldt, Germaine Krull, Albert Renger-Patzsch, and August Sander.
In this remarkable contribution to photographic criticism and psychoanalytic literature, Ulrich Baer traces the hitherto overlooked connection between the experience of trauma and the photographic image. Instead of treating trauma as a photographic "theme," Baer examines the striking parallel between those moments arrested mechanically by photography and those arrested experientially by the traumatized psyche—moments that bypass normal cognition and memory.
Not until the fall of the communist regime in 1989 and the end of Czechoslovakia's cultural isolation did the world begin to appreciate the Czech avant-garde photographers of the first half of the twentieth century. This first survey of Czech avant-garde photography introduces the important work of František Drtikol, Jaromir Funke, Jaroslav Rössler, Jindøich Štyrský, Josef Sudek, and numerous others whose work made Czech photography synonymous with visions of modernity.
The avant-garde movements of Central Europe were an integral part of modernism’s evolution as it reached its peak throughout the continent during the 1920s. Written documents—manifestos, artists' statements, and reviews—were the lifeblood of these movements and, during the periods when political events conspired to isolate them, one of their few means of communication and exchange. Much of this crucial evidence has become lost to us, and the artistic avant-gardes of Central Europe have been a blind spot of modernist studies.
Central European Avant-Gardes presents the first interpretive overview of the complex webs of interaction among the artists and intellectuals of early twentieth-century Central Europe. The key stylistic transformation of the period was from Expressionism to Constructivism, as artists and writers, against a volatile background of war and revolution, saw the opportunity literally to construct a new world through their work.
In Each Wild Idea, Geoffrey Batchen explores a wide range of photographic subjects, from the timing of the medium's invention to the various implications of cyberculture. Along the way, he reflects on contemporary art photography, the role of the vernacular in photography's history, and the Australianness of Australian photography.
In Snap to Grid, an idiosyncratic guide to the interactive, telematic era, Peter Lunenfeld maps out the trajectories that digital technologies have traced upon our cultural imaginary. His clear-eyed evaluation of new media includes an impassioned discussion—informed by the discourses of technology, aesthetics, and cultural theory—of the digital artists, designers, and makers who matter most. "Snap to grid" is a command that instructs the computer to take hand-drawn lines and plot them precisely in Cartesian space.
Powerful photographs of the grand exteriors and crumbling interiors of America’s abandoned state mental hospitals.
A celebrated writer on contemporary art and queer culture argues that Andy Warhol’s films enable us to see differently, and to see a different world.
How science consultants make movie science plausible, in films ranging from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Finding Nemo.
A reconsideration of Chris Marker’s famous film, examining its treatment of time, its use of sound, the influence of the comic book form, and other topics.
A new perspective on the enormously influential but insufficiently understood work of San Francisco-based artist Bruce Conner (1933–2008).
