Disillusioned

Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject

Häftad, Engelska, 2016

448 kr

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Beskrivning

How do photographs compel belief and endow knowledge? To understand the impact of photography in a given era, we must study the adjacent forms of visual persuasion with which photographs compete and collaborate. In photography’s early days, magic shows, scientific demonstrations, and philosophical games repeatedly put the visual credulity of the modern public to the test in ways that shaped, and were shaped by, the reality claims of photography. These venues invited viewers to judge the reliability of their own visual experiences. Photography resided at the center of a constellation of places and practices in which the task of visual discernment—of telling the real from the constructed—became an increasingly crucial element of one’s location in cultural, political, and social relations. In Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject, Jordan Bear tells the story of how photographic trickery in the 1850s and 1860s participated in the fashioning of the modern subject. By locating specific mechanisms of photographic deception employed by the leading mid-century photographers within this capacious culture of discernment, Disillusioned integrates some of the most striking—and puzzling—images of the Victorian period into a new and expansive interpretive framework.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2016-09-15
Mått:178 x 254 x 15 mm
Vikt:590 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:216
Förlag:Pennsylvania State University Press
ISBN:9780271065021

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Mer om författaren

Jordan Bear is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto.

Recensioner i media

“In an impressive and timely counterpoint to recent emphasis on the archival appropriations of photography, Jordan Bear turns conventional assumptions about belief in photographic realism on their head, showing that, throughout the nineteenth century, claims for photographic verisimilitude were greeted with doubt, distrust, disappointment, and even ridicule, opening the way to other photographic practices—and, indeed, as exemplified by Disillusioned, to another history of photographic production and consumption and to important new insights into the historical formation of the discerning liberal subject.”—John Tagg, Binghamton University

Innehållsförteckning

ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. The History of Photography and the Problem of KnowledgeOne. See for Yourself: Visual Discernment and Photography’s Appearance Two. Shadowy Organization: Combination Photography, Illusion, and ConspiracyThree. Same Time Tomorrow: Serial Photographs and the Structure of Industrial VisionFour. Hand in Hand: Gender and Collaboration in Victorian PhotographyFive. Signature Style: Francis Frith and the Rise of Corporate Photographic Authorship Six. Indistinct Relics: Discerning the Origins of PhotographySeven. The Limits of Looking: The Tiny, Distant, and Rapid Subjects of PhotographyConclusion. “Normal” Photography: The Legacy of a HistoryNotesBibliographyIndex