Photography matters, writes Jerry Thompson, because of how it works -- not only as an artistic medium but also as a way of knowing. With this provocative observation, Thompson begins a wide-ranging and lucid meditation on why photography is unique among the picture-making arts. He constructs an argument that moves with natural logic from Thomas Pynchon (and why we read him for his vision and not his command of miscellaneous facts) to Jonathan Swift to Plato to Emily Dickinson (who wrote "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant") to detailed readings of photographs by Eugène Atget, Garry Winogrand, Marcia Due, Walker Evans, and Robert Frank. Forcefully and persuasively, he argues for photography as a medium whose business is not constructing fantasies pleasing to the eye or imagination, but describing the world in the toughest and deepest way.

Product Description: Ghost Image is made up of sixty-three short essays—meditations, memories, fantasies, and stories bordering on prose poems—and not a single image. Hervé Guibert’s brief, literary rumination on photography was written in response to Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, but its deeply personal contents go far beyond that canonical text...read more

Product Description: Glamour subverts convention. Models, images, and even landscapes can skew ordinary ways of seeing when viewed through the lens of photography, suggesting new worlds imbued with fantasy, mystery, sexuality, and tension.In Old Fields, John Stilgoe―one of the most original observers of his time―offers a poetic and controversial exploration of the generations-long effort to portray glamour...read more

Product Description: This new edition of The Photographic Image in Digital Culture explores the condition of photography after some 20 years of remediation and transformation by digital technology. Through ten especially commissioned essays, by some of the leading scholars in the field of contemporary photography studies, a range of key topics are discussed including: the meaning of software in the production of photograph; the nature of networked photographs; the screen as the site of photographic display; the simulation of photography in the videogame; photography, ubiquitous computing and technologies of ambient intelligence; developments in vernacular photography and social media; the photograph and the digital archive; the curation and exhibition of the networked photograph; the dominance of the image bank in commercial and advertising photography; the complexities of citizen photojournalism...read more

Product Description: Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography presents two of the most important intellectual figures of the twentieth century in a new comparative light. Pursuing hitherto unexplored aspects of Benjamin's and Barthes's engagement with photography, it provides new interpretations of familiar texts and analyzes material which has only recently become available...read more

Product Description: This comprehensive critique examines three dialectical systems, Hegel, Benjamin, and Derrida, and their respective engagement with photography for the unfolding of the system's self-conception.

Product Description: Photography, Life, and the Opposites, with a foreword by Robert Coles, is about what makes for beauty not only in Len Bernstein's chosen art, but in all the arts. And it is about life, and how art can teach us to live it. The author's critical approach is based on this historic principle stated by Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism: All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves...read more

Product Description: Book annotation not available for this title.Title: Minor PhotographyAuthor: Bleyen, Mieke (EDT)Publisher: Cornell Univ PrPublication Date: 2012/10/19Number of Pages: 198Binding Type: PAPERBACKLibrary of Congress:

Product Description: In 2003, Mexican artist Iñaki Bonillas (born 1981) began to incorporate his grandfather’s photographic archive into his own work. This volume assembles various theoretical and literary digressions by writers, philosophers and poets, on 20 of the works that Bonillas has generated through the archive...read more

Product Description: Two events in particular occasion this volume on the philosophy of photography: the blurring of boundaries that many took to demarcate photographic technology and practices from other representational and artistic technologies and the invention of digital photography...read more

Product Description: Poised between hope and despair for a humanity facing an urgent communication crisis, this work by Vilém Flusser forecasts either the first truly human, infinitely creative society in history or a society of unbearable, oppressive sameness, locked in a pattern it cannot change...read more

Product Description: From the very invention of photography in the early part of the nineteenth century right up through the most recent developments in photography through digital technology, theorists have never stopped asking whether there is in fact any truth at all in photography...read more

Product Description: This book makes available for the first time in English―and for the first time in its entirety in any language―an important yet little-known interview on the topic of photography that Jacques Derrida granted in 1992 to the German theorist of photography Hubertus von Amelunxen and the German literary and media theorist Michael Wetzel...read more

Product Description: This anthology offers a fresh approach to the philosophical aspects of photography. The essays, written by contemporary philosophers in a thorough and engaging manner, explore the far-reaching ethical dimensions of photography as it is used today...read more

Product Description: In What Photography Is, James Elkins examines the strange and alluring power of photography in the same provocative and evocative manner as he explored oil painting in his best-selling What Painting Is. In the course of an extended imaginary dialogue with Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Elkins argues that photography is also about meaninglessness--its apparently endless capacity to show us things that we do not want or need to see--and also about pain, because extremely powerful images can sear permanently into our consciousness...read more