Eduardo Cadava

Sara Nadal-Melsio

Politically Red

Liz Jobey

Fazal Sheik

Erasure

"A collection of essays on photography as part of a wider art historical, political and philosophical meditation on the relevance of the image"--

Paper Graveyards

How reading and writing are collective acts of political pedagogy, and why the struggle for change must begin at the level of the sentence. “Reading is class struggle,” writes Bertolt Brecht. Politically Red contextualizes contemporary demands for social and racial justice by exploring the shifting relations between politics and literacy. Through a series of creative readings of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Fredric Jameson, and others, it casts light on history as an accumulation of violence and, in doing so, suggests that it can become a crucial resource for confronting the present insurgence of inequality, racism, and fascism. Reading between the lines, as it were, and even behind them, Cadava and Nadal-Melsió engage in an inventive mode of activist writing to argue that reading and writing are never solitary tasks, but always collaborative and collective, and able to revitalize our shared political imagination. Drawing on what they call a “red common-wealth”—an archive of vast resources for doing political work and, in particular, anti-racist work—they demonstrate that sentences, as dynamic repositories of social relations, are historical and political events.

Gabriela Nouzeilles

Thomas Keenan

Joan Fontcuberta

Valeria González

John Mraz

Mauricio Lissovsky

"This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition The Itinerant Languages of Photography, Princeton University Art Museum, September 7, 2013-January 19, 2014"--Title page verso.

The Itinerant Languages of Photography

This book brings together a wide range of materials from history, religion, philosophy, horticulture, and meteorology to argue that Emerson articulates his conception of history through the language of the weather. Focusing on Emerson's persistent use of climatic and meteorological metaphors, the book demonstrates that Emerson's reflections on the weather are inseparable from his preoccupation with the central historical and political issues of his day. The author suggests that Emerson's writings may be read as both symptomatic and critical of the governing rhetorics through which Americans of his day thought about the most important contemporary issues, and that what has often been seen as Emerson's retreat from the arena of history into the domain of spirit is in fact an effort to re-treat or rethink the nature of history in terms of questions of representation. What distinguishes this book from the work of other critics who are reassessing Emerson's relation to history is its attempt to think through the way in which the figures of Emerson's rhetoricfigures (like frost, snow, the auroras, and nature in general) which often seem to have nothing to do with either history or politicsare themselves traversed by the conflictual histories of slavery, race, destiny, revolution, and the meaning of America. It differs, that is, in proposing a textual model for reading Emerson that measures his engagement with changing historical and political relations in terms of the way he works to revise the language he inherits. There can be no reading of Emerson, the author suggests, that does not trace the movement of his figures and tropes as they become something else, as they open onto questions of history.

Emerson and the Climates of History

Here Eduardo Cadava demonstrates that Walter Benjamin articulates his conception of history through the language of photography. Focusing on Benjamin's discussions of the flashes and images of history, he argues that the questions raised by this link between photography and history touch on issues that belong to the entire trajectory of his writings: the historical and political consequences of technology, the relation between reproduction and mimesis, images and history, remembering and forgetting, allegory and mourning, and visual and linguistic representation. The book establishes the photographic constellation of motifs and themes around which Benjamin organizes his texts and thereby becomes a lens through which we can begin to view his analysis of the convergence between the new technological media and a revolutionary concept of historical action and understanding. Written in the form of theses--what Cadava calls "snapshots in prose"--the book memorializes Benjamin's own thetic method of writing. It enacts a mode of conceiving history that is neither linear nor successive, but rather discontinuous--constructed from what Benjamin calls "dialectical images." In this way, it not only suggests the essential rapport between the fragmentary form of Benjamin's writing and his effort to write a history of modernity but it also skillfully clarifies the relation between Benjamin and his contemporaries, the relation between fascism and aesthetic ideology. It gives us the most complete picture to date of Benjamin's reflections on history.

Theses on the Photography of History

Words of Light

Richard Ross

All photographs are to some extent about light. The eighty-five stunning color photographs in this book are a masterful exploration not only of the light falling on objects or filling spaces but of the very act of seeing. Whether he is photographing in a museum storage room in Washington, D.C., or a shrine in Myanmar, Richard Ross has an uncanny ability to distill the space and the moment, whether it is profane or sacred, into its essence. These photographs are deceptively simple in their subtle examination of the world as revealed in a single burst of light. "There are fewer kinds of light in the world than there are places and times. The same lights repeat themselves across oceans and decades. Ross's photographs teach us the language of light."Alain de Button, author of How Proust Can Change Your Life. "I have seen rather too much 'creativity' in photographs lately, and it makes me appreciate the sobriety, skill, and--yes--imagination I find in these photographs by Richard Ross. He allows us to discover not just his photographs but the places, thoughts, and experiences they encompass with such extraordinary, if self-effacing technique."--Mark Haworth-Booth, Victoria and Albert Museum

Gathering Light

Kristen Lubben

Ariella Azoulay

Marianne Hirsch

Susan Meiselas

Corey Keller

Işın Önol

This exhaustive monograph of Susan Meiselas will be released in occasion of the retrospective that will take place at Tàpies Foundation in Barcelone, Jeu de Paume in Paris and SFMOMA in San Francisco. Mediations is published by Damiani/Jeu de Paume/Fondation Tàpies. This exhibition and monograph propose a selection of works from the 1970s to today which reveal the particular approach of Susan Meiselas toward to the underlying reasons for making photographs, how the image concerns it's subject as much as the photographer and the role that these images can have at different levels in society and particularly in photojournalism. She questions the relationship between the image and the subject in such a way as to include the people portrayed in the image in the process of the making. There is nothing systematic in her approach: each work expresses in a very strong manner that context is vital to the understanding of photography. Therefore her work is specific to the persons portrayed, to the notion of community to which they belong and to the locality of the geographic and political territories that the artist addresses. The way of the showing the work is equally a part of the thought process. How does the spectator behold the artwork? It is often comprised of many parts, made in different media: each "layer" is used to document a level of meaning. For Meiselas one should be able to grasp why the image was taken. Both the subject of the image and the context in which the images are shown are taken into account in the elaboration of each project.

Mediations

Jean-Luc Nancy

Peter Connor

Who Comes After the Subject offers the most comprehensive overview to date of contemporary French thinking on the question of the "subject." Nineteen philosophers and critics offer diverse perspectives on the subject as it has manifested itself in our modern discourses: the subject of philosophy, of the State, of history, of psychoanalysis. Each contribution asks What has become of the subject? or What has the subject become? in the wake of its critiques and deconstructions .

Who Comes After the Subject?

Martin Parr

Marcelo Brodsky

Manel Esclusa

Cassio Vasconcellos

Pablo Ortiz Monasterio

Paola Cortés Rocca

" ... a manifesto of six artists who present their work as a cornerstone of the new avant-garde" --P [4] of cover.

Correspondencias visuales

Eduardo Cadava

Books

Your next favorite book is out there