Photography: The Unfettered Image.
Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2018. 8vo. [ca 203 pp.]. Near Fine. First Edition. Soft Cover. Printed pictorial wraps. B&W plates. Scarce. ISBN 9781138782556.
Takes our present moment of ‘ubiquitous photography’ to trace back to the early history of the medium, emphasising the playfulness of early photography and bringing history to life for students.
References a range of photographers from early experimental artists, such as Lazlo Maholy Nagy to contemporary artists with an interest in the everyday and street photography, such as Gary Winograd: all of these works are easily accessible to students.
Drawing on new media studies, art history, critical theory and anthropology, this book will be accessible to students from a variety of backgrounds.
Summary
We live in a time in which photographs have become extraordinarily mobile. They can be exchanged and circulated at the swipe of a finger across a screen. The digital photographic image appears and disappears with a mere gesture of the hand.
Yet, this book argues that this mobility of the image was merely accelerated by digital media and telecommunications. Photographs, from the moment of their invention, set images loose by making them portable, reproducible, projectable, reduced in size and multiplied. The fact that we do not associate analogue photography with such mobility has much to do with the limitations of existing histories and theories of photography, which have tended to view photographic mobility as either an incidental characteristic or a fault.
Photography : The Unfettered Image traces the emergence of these ways of understanding photography, but also presents a differently nuanced and materialist history in which photography is understood as part of a larger development of media technologies. It is situated in much broader cultural contexts: caught up in the European colonial ambition to "grasp the world" and in the development of a new, artificial "second nature" dependent on the large-scale processing of animal and mineral materials. Focussing primarily on Victorian and 1920s–30s practices and theories, it demonstrates how photography was never simply a technology for fixing a fleeting reality. Item #18-2909
Price: $50.00