16 Ways of Looking at a Photograph Contemporary Theories

by Raymond, Claire

• ISBN13: 9780190646233
• ISBN10: 0190646233
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2019-08-22
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Featuring an accessible and engaging writing style, 16 Ways of Looking at a Photograph: Contemporary Theories explores key concepts that have shaped the interpretation of photography and photography itself. It begins with two important inventions--the development of the photographic negative and the capability to produce multiple prints--and then considers various theories from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. The book concludes with an excursion into "post-photography" theory: the argument that in the digital era, photography as such is altered.

Author Biography

Claire Raymond is Lecturer of Art History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of several books, including The Photographic Uncanny (2019) and Women Photographers and Feminist Aesthetics (2017).

Table of Contents

List of Images
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Where to Look: Seeing Photographs, Reading Photographs
Art and History
Reading and Misreading
The Pleasure of the Photographic Text
1. The Photographic Negative: Uncanny Origins
2. Aesthetic Theory: Where the Image Is Not, and Is, All
3. A Little History of Light
4. Photography and the Crisis of Time
5. Walter Benjamin's Shadow: The Optical Unconscious and the Aura
6. Reticence or Symbolic Form
7. The Immediate Image: Are You Close Enough?
8. The Frame
9. The Question of Genius
10. Wonders: Photography of Estrangement
11. Psychic Numbing
12. The Punctum
13. Capitalism and t Traffic in Photographs
14. The Male Gaze: Gendering Photography
15. The Archive
16. Are We Post-Photography Yet?