Photographs, Histories, and Meanings

by Perreault, Jeanne; Kadar, Marlene; Warley, Linda

• ISBN13: 9780230617704
• ISBN10: 0230617700
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-12-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Photographs in the public eye have shaped public perception and social meaning for the last one hundred and fifty years or more. This collection reexamines photographs and their social history, the ideological, ethical, political, and aesthetic forces that inflect interpretation. The authors here trace shifting historical contexts, intentional or accidental interpretive distortions, and ambiguous and multiple meanings. This collection of essays wishes to knowhowimages can be believed, given our awareness of the uncertainty of meaning. The contributors in this collection believe the histories they convey are the stories of our lives. To know the photographs is to know ourselves with all our ambiguities, distortions, and shifts available for the looking.

Author Biography

Marlene Kadar is Professor in Humanities and Women’s Studies, and Interim Director of the Graduate Program in Interdisciplinary Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada.  She is the Editor of the Life Writing Series, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, and Literary Editor of Canadian Woman Studies. Previous works include the reader, Reading Life Writing, and the collection, Essays on Life Writing. She co-edited Tracing the Autobiographical with Perreault, Warley, and Susanna Egan.

Jeanne Perreault is Professor in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Canada. Previous works include Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography; coedited collections: Tracing the Autobiographical and Writing the Circle: Native Women of Western Canada, An Anthology.

Linda Warley is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language & Literature at the University of Waterloo, Canada. She is co-editor of Tracing the Autobiographical with Perreault, Kadar, and Susanna Egan.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: Ambiguities, Distortions, Shifts	p. 1
Not So Innocent: Vision and Culpability in Weegee's Photographs of Children	p. 9
Strange Birth: Reading Hands, Reflecting Race in Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices	p. 25
Documenting Disasters: Rothstein's "Steer Skull" and the Use of Photographic Evidence in Environmental and Political Narratives	p. 43
Something Is Happening: Seeing It	p. 59
Ambivalent Image: Twisted Use	p. 73
Visualizing the Rising: Photography, Memory, and the Visual Economy of the 1916 Easter Rising	p. 91
The Promise of Public Housing: Photographs and the History of the Chicago Housing Authority	p. 111
"More than an Observer": Emmy Andriesse, Dutch Underground Photographer	p. 139
Between the Officer and the Artist: Arnold Odermatt's Asethetic-Forensic Project	p. 167
Passionate Protest: Lynching Photography and Appropriative Counter-Performances of the Lynching Ritual	p. 185
Captured Childhoods: Photographs in Indian Residential School: Memoir	p. 201
Returning to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: The Tower of Faces Ten Years Later	p. 223
List of Contributors	p. 245
Index	p. 249
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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