Full Description
With newly commissioned essays by some of the leading writers on photography today, this companion tackles some of the most pressing questions about photography theory's direction, relevance, and purpose.
This book shows how digital technologies and global dissemination have radically advanced the pluralism of photographic meaning and fundamentally transformed photography theory. Having assimilated the histories of semiotic analysis and post-structural theory, critiques of representation continue to move away from the notion of original and copy and towards materiality, process, and the interdisciplinary. The implications of what it means to 'see' an image is now understood to encompass, not only the optical, but the conceptual, ethical, and haptic experience of encountering an image. The 'fractal' is now used to theorize the new condition of photography as an algorithmic medium and leads us to reposition our relationship to photographs and lend nuances to what essentially underlies any photography theory — that is, the relationship of the image to the real world and how we conceive what that means.
Diverse in its scope and themes, The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory is an indispensable collection of essays and interviews for students, researchers, and teachers. The volume also features extensive images, including beautiful colour plates of key photographs.
Contents
List of figures
List of plates
List of contributors
Introduction
Mark Durden and Jane Tormey
PART I - AESTHETICS
1. Feeling in photography, the affective turn, and the history of emotions
Thy Phu, Elspeth H. Brown, and Andrea Noble
2. Jacques Rancière: aesthetics and photography
David Bate
3. Ambiguity, accident, audience: Minor White's photographic theory
Todd Cronan
4. Testing humanism: the transactions of contemporary documentary photography
Mark Durden
5. Jeff Wall speaks with David Campany
Jeff Wall and David Campany
6. Deleuze and the simulacrum: simulation and semblance in Public Order
Sandra Plummer
7. Five versions of the photographic act: archival logic in the work of Andrea Robbins and Max Becher
Shep Steiner
8. Jean Baudrillard's photography—a vision of his own strange world
Gerry Coulter
9. Visual episodic memory and the neurophenomenology of digital photography
Jill Bennett
PART II - POLITICS
10. Seeing the public image anew: photography exhibitions and civic spectatorship
Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites
11. Still images on the move: theoretical challenges and future possibilities
Marta Zarzycka
12. Interview with Ariella Azoulay
Ariella Azoulay and Justin Carville
13. Human rights practice and visual violations
Ruthie Ginsburg
14. Love the bomb: picturing nuclear explosion
Paula Rabinowitz
15. Twice captured: the work of atrocity photography
Molly Rogers
16. Presenting the unrepresentable: confrontation and circumvention
Jane Tormey
17. The eco-anarchist potential of environmental photography: Richard Misrach and Kate Orff's Petrochemical America
Conohar Scott
18. Counter-forensics and photography
Thomas Keenan
PART III - THEORIES
19. Derrida and photography theory
Malcolm Barnard
20. Image, affect, and autobiography: Roland Barthes' photographic theory in light of his posthumous publications
Kathrin Yacavone
21. Ideation and photography: a critique of François Laruelle's concept of abstraction
John Roberts
22. Fractal photography and the politics of invisibility
Daniel Rubinstein
23. Photographic apparatus in the era of tagshot culture
Mika Elo
24. Artistic representation and politics: an exchange between Victor Burgin and Hilde Van Gelder
Victor Burgin and Hilde Van Gelder
25. Decentering the photographer: authorship and digital photography
Daniel Palmer
26. Out of language: photographing as translating
Nancy Ann Roth
27. Habitual photography: time, rhythm, and temporalization in contemporary personal photography
Martin Hand and Ashley Scarlett
Index
