François Brunet - Böcker

As American settlement expanded westward in the 1860s, the U.S. government undertook large-scale investigations of its new territories. "Images of the West: Survey Photography in French Collections, 1860-1880" presents memorable glass-plate photographs from these federal surveys. The selection includes breathtaking views of such iconic sites as yosemite, as well as lesser-known ethnographic portraits taken by Timothy H. O'Sullivan, William H. Jackson, and William Bell, among others. The accompanying essays discuss how the photographs were used to promote white settlement, how their distribution at home and abroad contributed to the aggrandizement of the American West, and how the exploitative ideology underlying the use of photography extended to attitudes toward both American landscapes and American Indians. The images are all drawn from French public collections, which hold an astonishing number of these U.S. survey photographs. Accompanying an exhibition at the Musee d'Art Americain Giverny, "Images of the West" provides a critical new examination of a bygone era.

As a category in art history, circulation is rooted in the contemporary context of Internet culture and the digital image. Yet circulation, as a broader concept for the movement of art across time and space in vastly different cultural and media contexts, has been a factor in the history of the arts in the United States since at least the eighteenth century. The third volume in the Terra Foundation Essays series, Circulation brings together an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars, including Thierry Gervais, Tom Gunning, J. M. Mancini, Frank Mehring, and Hela ne Valance, who map the multiple planes where artistic meaning has been produced by the circulation of art from the eighteenth century to the present. The book looks at both broad historical trends and the successes and failures of particular works of art from a wide variety of artists and styles. Together, the contributions significantly expand the conceptual and methodological terrain of scholarship on American art.

Roland Barthes, one of photography’s most influential critics, once described the ‘trouble’ introduced by the advent of photography. Studies of literature and photography tend to assess the literary effects of photography, with literature seen as the older, broader, more established cultural form, and photography the new, alien upstart. Photography and Literature instead reverses the angle of vision to examine photo­graphy’s encounters with literature from the point of view of photography, providing a new way of understanding its interplay with literature and the printed page.François Brunet begins by showing how photography’s invention and its publication were shaped by written culture, both scientific and literary. In turn he examines its early and durable incarnation in the book format, the ongoing and often repetitive ‘discovery’ of photography by writers, and, finally, how, in the twentieth century, photography and literature are seen to trade tools and even merge formats. He also focuses on writings by photo­g­raphers, from William Henry Fox Talbot’s groundbreaking exploration of photography in The Pencil of Nature of the 1840s, to Raymond Depardon's correspondence or Sophie Calle’s projects with Jean Baudrillard and Paul Auster. Ultimately, Brunet argues that the histories of photography and literature since 1840 have been drawing closer together, and that their convergence has provided recent writing with a new ‘photo-textual’ genre.Offering a wealth of examples from autobiography, manifestos and fiction, and a fascinating variety of images from the mid-­nineteenth century to the twenty-first, Photography and Literature will be of interest to anyone passionate about the historic relationship of text and image.