Studio Art: Photography

Curated by renowned London-based curator, Mark Sealy MBE, the FotoFest Biennial 2020, 'African Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Other' brings together over 30 artists from around the globe whose works challenge traditional notions of Blackness and transnational histories in relation to concepts of liberty, rights, and representation. Taking its cues from John Coltrane's avant-garde jazz oeuvre, wherein formal modernisms of the past are made complex by radical imagination and black-futurity, this presentation of diverse ideas, artistic approaches, and material histories proposes a cosmological exploration of Africa and the contemporary African diaspora. In their unique practices, the featured artists turn an eye to social, cultural, and political conditions that inform and influence concepts of representation as they pertain to image production and circulation in Africa and beyond. These artists question the ways in which subjectivity is constructed and deconstructed by the camera, and in the process, reveal legacies of resistance by those who defy traditional ideas of sexual, racial, gender-based, and other marginalized identities.

This comprehensive new survey places American photography in its cultural context for the first time. Prize-winning author, Miles Orvell, examines this fascinating subject through portraiture and landscape photography, family albums and memory, analyzing the particular way in which American photographers view the world around them - from Alfred Stieglitz to Walker Evans, Andy Warhol to Cindy Sherman.

An award-winning psychologist and professional photographer join forces in writing this unique creative guide to exploring and understanding your life: who you are, what you value, and what you wish to achieve. A Creative Guide to Exploring Your Life brims with imaginative exercises and examples that use the power of photography, art, and writing as tools for self-discovery. It provides clear and accessible guidance on how to explore different parts of your identity: take a photograph of yourself in a role you don't typically play, draw a visual timeline of your life and consider its key turning points; explore your sense of place in history by writing about a major historical event that has changed your life. Exercises are accompanied by searching questions for self-reflection, and are complemented by examples of each exercise to provoke ideas and inspiration.

From the advent of early colonial photography in the 19th century to contemporary 'white savior' social-media images, photography continues to play an integral role in the maintenance of white sovereignty. As various scholars have shown, the technology of the camera is not innocent, and nor are the images it produces. In this way, the invention and continuance of the 'white race' is not just a political, social and legal phenomenon, it is also a complexly visual one. In a time of revivified fascisms, from Donald Trump to Tommy Robinson, we must attempt to locate the image of whiteness anew, so that we can better understand its nonsensical construction. What does whiteness look like, and how might we begin to trace an anti-racist history of artistic resistance that works against it? 'The Image of Whiteness' seeks to introduce its reader to some important extracts from the troubling story of whiteness, to describe its falsehoods, its paradoxes and its oppressive nature, and to highlight some of the crucial work photographic artists have done to subvert and critique its image.

Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography' surveys the expansive field of vernacular photography, the vast archive of utilitarian images created for bureaucratic structures, commercial usage and personal commemoration, as opposed to elite aesthetic purposes. As a crucial extension of its ongoing investigation of vernacular photography, The Walther Collection has collaborated with key scholars and critical thinkers in the history of photography, women's studies, queer theory, Africana studies and curatorial practice to interrogate vernacular's theoretical limits, as well as to conduct case studies of a striking array of objects and images, many from the collection's holdings.

Through individual profiles of more than eighty photographers from the early history of the photographic medium to the present, Elizabeth Ferrer introduces readers to Latinx portraitists, photojournalists, and documentarians and their legacies. She traces the rise of a Latinx consciousness in photography in the 1960s and '70s and the growth of identity-based approaches in the 1980s and '90s. Ferrer argues that in many cases a shared sense of struggle has motivated photographers to work purposefully, driven by a deep sense of resistance, social and political commitments, and cultural affirmation, and she highlights the significance of family photos to their approaches and outlooks. Works range from documentary and street photography to narrative series to conceptual projects.

On Writing with Photography explores what happens to texts-and images-when they are brought together. From the mid-nineteenth century to the present, this collection addresses a wide range of genres and media, including graphic novels, children's books, photo-essays, films, diaries, newspapers, and art installations. Examining the works of Herman Melville, Don DeLillo, Claude McKay, Man Ray, Dare Wright, Guy Debord, Zhang Ailing, and Roland Barthes, among others, the essays trace the relationship between photographs and "reality" and describe the imaginary worlds constructed by both, discussing how this production can turn into testimony of personal and collective history, memory and trauma, gender and sexuality, and ethnicity. Together, these essays help explain how writers and photographers-past and present-have served as powerful creative resources for each other.

In PHOTOGRAPHIC RETURNS Shawn Smith sets out to examine works of contemporary art, only to find that many of the works refer back to the past, to photography's many intersections with the history of racial justice in the U.S. Smith focuses on flashpoints in that history -- spanning from the abolitionist movement, to the Civil War, lynching, and mass incarceration-- to mark the roles that photography has played in documenting the exigencies of Black life, and as a tool for resisting those racial regimes. For each of these moments, Smith shows how contemporary photographers utilize their medium as a way to recall, revise, or amplify the relationship between racial politics in the past and in the present. She argues that the tendency of African-American photographers and other artists to return to the archive of early photography does not simply point to the usefulness of early photography as document of the past, but to the recursive nature of photography itself.

In ten thematic, chronological sections, Tate Modern curator Emma Lewis explores the vital role women artists have played in shaping the ever-evolving medium of photography. Lewis has compiled work from more than 200 different women and nonbinary photographers along with short essays on 75 different artists, many informed by her interviews with the subjects. From the studio portraiture of the late nineteenth century to the photojournalism of Dorothea Lange and Lee Miller in the early twentieth--and from second-wave feminist critiques of gender roles to contemporary selfies and social media personae--this volume examines different genres, styles, and approaches to photography from the 1800s to the present.

Over the past decade, historical studies of photography have embraced a variety of cultural and disciplinary approaches to the medium, while shedding light on non-Western, vernacular, and “other” photographic practices outside the Euro-American canon. Photography, History, Difference brings together an international group of scholars to reflect on contemporary efforts to take a different approach to photography and its histories. The contributors to the volume explore these and other questions through historical case studies; interpretive surveys of recent historiography, criticism, and museum practices; and creative proposals to rethink the connections between photography, history, and difference. A thought-provoking collection of essays that represents new ways of thinking about photography and its histories.

In this volume, leading scholars of photography and media examine photography's vital role in the evolution of media and communication in the nineteenth century. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the introduction of telegraphy, the development of a cheaper and more reliable postal service, the rise of the mass-circulation press, and the emergence of the railway dramatically changed the way people communicated and experienced time and space. Concurrently, photography developed as a medium that changed how images were produced and circulated. The essays look at the emergence and early history of photography in the context of broader changes in the history of communications; the role of the nascent photographic press in photography's infancy; and the development of photographic techniques as part of a broader media culture that included the mass-consumed novel, sound recording, and cinema.

In Picturing Disability, Bogdan and his collaborators gather over 200 historical photographs showing how people with disabilities have been presented and exploring the contexts in which they were photographed. Rather than focus on the subjects, Bogdan turns his gaze on the people behind the camera. He examines the historic and cultural environment of the photographs to decipher the relationship between the images and the perspectives of the picture makers. In analyzing the visual rhetoric of these photographs, Bogdan identifies the wide variety of genres, from sideshow souvenirs to clinical photographs. Ranging from the 1860s, when photographs first became readily available, to the 1970s, when the disability rights movement became a force for significant change, Bogdan chronicles the evolution of disability image creation.

At the heart of the model minority myth--often associated with Asian Americans--is the concept of civility. In this groundbreaking book, Picturing Model Citizens, Thy Phu exposes the complex links between civility and citizenship, and argues that civility plays a crucial role in constructing Asian American citizenship. Featuring works by Arnold Genthe, Carl Iwasaki, Toyo Miyatake, Nick Ut, and others, Picturing Model Citizens traces the trope of civility from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Through an examination of photographs of Chinese immigrants, Japanese internment camps, the Hiroshima Maidens project, napalm victims, and the SARS epidemic, Phu explores civility's unexpected appearance in images that draw on discourses of intimacy, cultivation, apology, and hygiene. She reveals how Asian American visual culture illustrates not only cultural ideas of civility, but also contests the contradictions of state-defined citizenship.

Exploring the ways in which female identity is constructed and mediated through the art of photography is the central theme of this fascinating, fully illustrated book, published to accompany a major exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. This book features the work of two generations of artists whose portraiture, self-portraiture, and narrative photographs have indelibly inflected our understanding of gender and identity over the past thirty years. More specifically, it focuses on how role models and role-playing have been central to the art, meaning, and social function of contemporary photography.

Through a Native Lens offers a refreshing, new perspective by highlighting the active contributions of North American Indians, both as patrons who commissioned portraits and as photographers who created collections. In this richly illustrated volume, Nicole Dawn Strathman explores how indigenous peoples throughout the United States and Canada appropriated the art of photography and integrated it into their lifeways. The photographs she analyzes date to the first one hundred years of the medium, between 1840 and 1940. Moving beyond studies of Native Americans as photographic subjects, this groundbreaking book demonstrates how indigenous peoples took control of their own images and distinguished themselves as pioneers of photography.