Exposures – serie

The ticklish subject of humour is often on the sidelines of writing about photography, yet photos often entertain us with their wit and visual jokes. Photography and Humour remedies this situation by providing a history of photographic laughter, gathering together over one hundred images. In this first survey to look at the history of photography through the lens of humour, Louis Kaplan reviews some of the important ways photographers from the mid-1800s to today have found humour in the world, and how viewers have found amusement in photographs.Kaplan focuses on key aspects of photographic humour that are closely connected to human experience – our identity, social situations, and death. He exposes readers to the key genres of photographic humour, whether making fun of photography’s role in identity and identification, mocking the social function of photography or scoffing at the association of photography and death. The images range from stereographic domestic comedies to the biting political satires of photomontage, from conceptual artistic pratfalls to Surrealist humour noir, from the doubles of trick photography to amusing optical distortions, from the decisively funny moments of photojournalism to the parodies and masquerades of contemporary art photography. Illustrations bring together classics from renowned photographers, including Jacques Henri Lartigue, Elliott Erwitt, Weegee, Cindy Sherman and Martin Parr, as well as hidden gems of vernacular photography. This is a unique collection of the deadpan, the witty and the downright absurd.

Mysterious and magnificent, Tibet has for centuries been a source of fascination for outsiders and a captivating yet troublesome subject for photographers. The country is both geographically and politically challenging, and access has never been easy. Even today, photography of Tibet often remains embroiled in debates about the country’s past, present and future. This book is the first historical survey of photography in Tibet and the Himalayas, and it offers remarkable new insights into the attempts of both foreign and Tibetan photographers to document the region.Leading Tibetologist Clare Harris combines the results of extensive research in museums and archives with her own fieldwork in Tibetan communities to present material that has never been made public or discussed before. This includes the earliest known photographs taken in Tibet, dating to 1863, the experimental camerawork of senior Tibetan monks – including the 13th Dalai Lama – and the creations of contemporary Tibetan photographers and artists. With every image she examines the complex religious, political and cultural climate in which it was produced. Featuring stunning photographs throughout, Photography and Tibet will appeal to anyone interested in the history of Tibet and its unique entanglement with aesthetics and modernity.

There are countless books on war photography, most of these focusing on dramatic images made by photojournalists in combat zones. Photography and War instead proposes a radically expanded notion of war photography, one that encompasses a far broader terrain of geographies, chronologies, practices and viewpoints. Pippa Oldfied considers photography’s fundamental role in military reconnaissance, propaganda and protest, exposure of war crimes, and the memorialisation of war, among other themes. While iconic images by well-known names such as Roger Fenton and Robert Capa are included, the viewpoints of people who have historically been overlooked - women and photographers from diasporic and non-Western backgrounds - are forcefully present. As a result, this book offers a nuanced and more inclusive understanding of war as a far-reaching undertaking in which anyone might be implicated and affected. Richly illustrated, with some photos published for the first time, this book offers an accessible and well-rounded introduction to photography’s perhaps most contested, complex and emotive subject.

With its moving landscapes and famously independent cultural traditions, Australia is uniquely suited to having its national narrative told through visual documentation. Helen Ennis gathers here a selection of photographs that recount the story of Australia, and through this visual chronicle she uncovers a distinctively Australian visual culture.The striking images featured in Photography and Australia, in the new ‘Exposures’ series, documents the iconic sights of the rugged Australian landscape such as the imposing Uluru, or Ayers Rock, as well as documentary photographs, wilderness shots, post-mortem studies of bushrangers and other images both quotidian and extraordinary. A leading Australian photography historian, Ennis argues that the colonial experience is a central element of these visual testaments, and embedded within this experience are the tumultuous relations between white settlers and Aboriginal peoples.Her analysis explores how the photographs reveal the racial, social and political tensions woven throughout Australian history, ranging from modern works by Aboriginal photographers to archival photographs of desolate mining towns and the peoples who eked out their living from the brutal terrain. The photographers’ personal perspectives are also embedded in the images, Photography and Australia argues, and the book examines how photographers’ responses to place, modernity and globalization were expressed through their works. Photography and Australia unearths an original and engaging perspective on Australian history, weaving a wealth of images into a compelling, informative account.

Can film capture what our eyes can’t see? There are many examples - both historical and contemporary - of photographs of spirits or ‘ghosts’. These images have been both derided as hoaxes or, at the other extreme, held up as irrefutable proof of the otherworld. One of two books in Reaktion's new series ‘Exposures’, Photography and Spirit examines these tantalizingly blurred images of phantoms, psychical emanations and religious apparitions.Drawing on eighty images taken between 1860 and today, John Harvey explores spirit photography from the various perspectives of religion, science and art. Some of the photographs were taken by scientists, others by amateur and commercial photographers or mediums, and still others by robotic surveillance devices. The diverse origins of spirit photographs have inspired a multiplicity of interpretations and engendered, in some cases, high levels of scepticism. Harvey’s analysis probes the connections between the images, human imagination, larger cultural traditions and scientific thought. Photography and Spirit transforms what are often fringe objects of kitsch into revelatory artifacts of cultural history, drawing from them thought-provoking insights into the historical connections between the material and spiritual worlds, representations of grief, and human culture’s enduring fascination with the supernatural.Uniquely blending art, science and human imagination, photo images of ethereal spirits blur the border between what is real and what is fantastic. Photography and Spirit challenges our preconceived notions and offers an intriguing new perspective on the nature of photography.

Photography and Flight charts the rich and varied history of aerial photography, which has been used for everything from geographic exploration to secret spy missions. Beginning with early images taken from hot-air balloons and fixed platforms, Denis Cosgrove and William Fox then explain how military reconnaissance was instrumental in catalysing innovations in the field. They examine pivotal historical moments when aerial photography began to establish itself as an essential tool, such as in Second World War military strategies, high-altitude photography taken from postwar rockets and aircraft, and the extensive implementation of aerial photography during the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The book also explores the advancement of geographic scholarship through aerial photography, ranging from military excursions into remote areas like Antarctica to the images of the curvature of the earth taken during the Apollo space missions.While digital technology and remote sensing have changed the landscape of photography, Photography and Flight argues that they have not diminished the significance of aerial photography in providing images of the earth. Rather, new technologies and resulting innovations such as Google Earth have enabled the mass-democratization of access to such information.

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.

From Ansel Adams to Carleton Watkins, Diane Arbus to Weegee, Richard Avedon to James VanDerZee, American photographers have recorded their vast, multicultural nation in images that, for more than a hundred years, have come to define the USA.In Photography and the USA, Mick Gidley explores not only the medium of photography and the efforts to capture key events and moments through photographs, but also the many ways in which the medium has played a formative role in American culture. Photography and the USA encompasses the major movements, figures and works that are crucial to understanding American photography, but also pays attention to more obscure aspects of photography’s history. Focusing on works that reveal many different facets of America, its landscapes and its people, Gidley explores the ambiguities of American history and culture. We encounter images that range from an anti-lynching demo in 1934 to Dorothea Lange’s poster All races serve the crops in California; an early photographic view of Niagara Falls against the painstaking detail of Edward Weston’s Pepper, No. 30; a fireman’s fight in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 to the Ground Zero images of 2001 by Joel Meyerowitz; an 1890s ‘Wanted’ image to Elliot Erwitt’s shot of the Nixon-Kruschchev ‘Kitchen Debate’. Organizing his narrative around the themes of history, technology, the document and the emblem, Mick Gidley not only presents a history of photography, but also reveals the complexities inherent in reading photographs themselves.A concise yet comprehensive overview of photography in the United States, this book is an excellent introduction to the subject for American Studies or visual arts students, or for anyone interested in US history or culture.