Exposures – serie

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.

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.