Shamoon Zamir

Patrizia Di Bello

Colette Wilson

The photograph found a home in the book before it won for itself a place on the gallery wall. Only a few years after the birth of photography, the publication of Henry Fox Talbot's "The Pencil of Nature" heralded a new genre in the history of the book, one in which the photograph was the primary vehicle of expression and communication, or stood in equal if sometimes conflicted partnership with the written word. In this book, practicing photographers and writers across several fields of scholarship share a range of fresh approaches to reading the photobook, developing new ways of understanding how meaning is shaped by an image's interaction with its text and context and engaging with the visual, tactile and interactive experience of the photobook in all its dimensions. Through close studies of individual works, the photobook from fetishised objet d'art to cheaply-printed booklet is explored and its unique creative and cultural contributions celebrated.

From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond

The Photobook

Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian is the most ambitious photographic and ethnographic record of Native American cultures ever produced. Published between 1907 and 1930 as a series of twenty volumes and portfolios, the work contains more than two thousand photographs intended to document the traditional culture of every Native American tribe west of the Mississippi. Many critics have claimed that Curtis's images present Native peoples as a "vanishing race," hiding both their engagement with modernity and the history of colonial violence. But in this major reappraisal of Curtis's work, Shamoon Zamir argues instead that Curtis's photography engages meaningfully with the crisis of culture and selfhood brought on by the dramatic transformations of Native societies. This crisis is captured profoundly, and with remarkable empathy, in Curtis's images of the human face. Zamir also contends that we can fully understand this achievement only if we think of Curtis's Native subjects as coauthors of his project. This radical reassessment is presented as a series of close readings that explore the relationship of aesthetics and ethics in photography. Zamir's richly illustrated study resituates Curtis's work in Native American studies and in the histories of photography and visual anthropology.

Portraiture and Time in Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian

The Gift of the Face

Gerd Hurm

Anke Reitz

The Family of Man is the most widely seen exhibition in the history of photography. The book of the exhibition, still in print, is also the most commercially successful photobook ever published. First shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955, the exhibition travelled throughout the United States and to forty-six countries, and was seen by over nine million people. Edward Steichen conceived, curated and designed the exhibition. He explained its subject as `the everydayness of life' and `the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world'. The exhibition was a statement against war and the conflicts and divisions that threatened a common future for humanity after 1945. The popular international response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Many critics, however, have dismissed the exhibition as a form of sentimental humanism unable to address the challenges of history, politics and cultural difference.This book revises the critical debate about The Family of Man, challenging in particular the legacy of Roland Barthes's influential account of the exhibition. The expert contributors explore new contexts for understanding Steichen's work and they undertake radically new analyses of the formal dynamics of the exhibition. Also presented are documents about the exhibition never before available in English. Commentaries by critical theorist Max Horkheimer and novelist Wolfgang Koeppen, letters from photographer August Sander, and a poetic sequence on the images by Polish poet Witold Wirpsza enable and encourage new critical reflections. A detailed survey of audience responses in Munich from 1955 allows a rare glimpse of what visitors thought about the exhibition. Today, when armed conflict, environmental catastrophe and economic inequality continue to threaten our future, it seems timely to revisit The Family of Man.

Photography in a Global Age

The Family of Man Revisited

Robert Edward Duncan

Amy Evans

Eric Mottram

Robert Duncan was a defining figure of twentieth-century American poetry. Eric Mottram was a pioneer in the ﬁeld of American Studies in the UK and a key contributor to the British Poetry Revival. In the 1970s the two men conducted a wide-ranging dialogue on poetry, politics and the religious through an exchange of intense and often expansive letters. Mottram continued the dialogue in two substantive critical examinations of Duncan's work. The Unruly Garden presents an annotated edition of the complete available correspondence along with the two essays. The ﬁrst essay was heavily edited when originally published and is included here in its restored form. The second essay appeared in a small press magazine and now receives the wider circulation it deserves.

Robert Duncan and Eric Mottram, Letters and Essays

The Unruly Garden

Dark Voices is the first sustained examination of the intellectual formation of W. E. B. Du Bois, tracing the scholar and civil rights leader's thought from his undergraduate days in the 1880s to the 1903 publication of his masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, and offering a new reading of his work from this period. Bringing to light materials from the Du Bois archives that have not been discussed before, Shamoon Zamir explores Du Bois's deep engagement with American and European philosophy and social science. He examines the impact on Du Bois of his studies at Harvard with William James and George Santayana, and shows how the experience of post-Reconstruction racism moved Du Bois from metaphysical speculation to the more instrumentalist knowledge of history and the new discipline of sociology, as well as toward the very different kind of understanding embodied in the literary imagination. Providing a new and detailed reading of The Souls of Black Folk in comparison with Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, Zamir challenges accounts that place Du Bois alongside Emerson and James, or characterize him as a Hegelian idealist. This reading also explores Du Bois's relationship to African American folk culture, and shows how Du Bois was able to dramatize the collapse of many of his hopes for racial justice and liberation. The first book to place The Souls of Black Folk in its intellectual context, Dark Voices is a case study of African American literary development in relation to the broader currents of European and American thought.

W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888-1903

Dark Voices

W. E. B. Du Bois was the pre-eminent African American intellectual of the twentieth century. As a pioneering historian, sociologist and civil rights activist, and as a novelist and autobiographer, he made the problem of race central to an understanding of the United States within both national and transnational contexts; his masterwork The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is today among the most widely read and most often quoted works of American literature. This Companion presents ten specially commissioned essays by an international team of scholars which explore key aspects of Du Bois's work. The book offers students a critical introduction to Du Bois, as well as opening new pathways into the further study of his remarkable career. It will be of interest to all those working in African American studies, American literature, and American studies generally.

Shamoon Zamir

Books

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