Photography in America

by Orvell, Miles

• ISBN13: 9780199314225
• ISBN10: 0199314225
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2015-08-10
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

From scientific and documentary photography to the more purely aesthetic, the camera has become a part of American culture at every level. Photography in America explores the medium from a variety of angles--portrait, landscape, photojournalism, documentary, creative digital photography, and postmodern critique of the image--in order to help students understand its impact and meaning. Organized by genres and modes, this text traces the history of a medium considered central to American culture by examining its different uses, going back to its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century and looking forward to its future.

Author Biography

Miles Orvell is Professor of English and American studies at Temple University; and affiliated Professor of Art History, Tyler School of Art (Temple). He is the prize-winning author of The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940, which appeared in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition in 2014. He is also the author of After the Machine: Visual Arts and the Erasing of Cultural Boundaries (1995); John Vachon's America: Photographs and Letters from the Depression to World War II (2003); and The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community (2012). Orvell served as Editor in Chief of the Encyclopedia of American Studies Online, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, from 2004 to 2011. In 2009, he received the Bode-Pearson Prize for lifetime achievement, awarded by the American Studies Association.

Table of Contents

Each chapter ends with Key Terms and Key Names.
Preface
Timeline
1. Introduction: Understanding Photography
Evolution of the Camera
TECHNIQUES, FORMATS, AND EQUIPMENT
--Pinhole Photography
TECHNIQUES, FORMATS, AND EQUIPMENT
--The Daguerreotype and Ambrotype
TECHNIQUES, FORMATS, AND EQUIPMENT
--Wet Plate to Dry Plate
Photography and the Other Arts
How to Read a Photograph
Writing about Photography
TECHNIQUES, FORMATS, AND EQUIPMENT
--The Parts of a Camera
I. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
2. Presenting the Self: The Portrait
TECHNIQUES, FORMATS, AND EQUIPMENT
--Photographic Formats
The Private Portrait
TECHNIQUES, FORMATS, AND EQUIPMENT
--Albumen and Gelatin Printing
The Public Portrait
The Scientific Portrait
TECHNIQUES, FORMATS, AND EQUIPMENT
--The Mug Shot
The Portrait in the Twentieth Century
MOVEMENTS AND TRENDS
--George Eastman and the Growth of Amateur Photography
The Portrait in the Twentieth Century
3. Viewing the Landscape
MOVEMENTS AND TRENDS
--Approaches to Landscape Photography
View Photography
TECHNIQUES, FORMATS, AND EQUIPMENT
Panorama
TECHNIQUES, FORMATS, AND EQUIPMENT
The Stereograph
The Survey Photograph
LIVES IN PHOTOGRAPHY
--O'Sullivan and Jackson
The Aesthetic Landscape
MOVEMENTS AND TRENDS
--Rephotographing the West
Ansel Adams
MOVEMENTS AND TRENDS
--Group f.64
4. Seeing and Believing: Photography as Documentary
Photography in the Civil War
MOVEMENTS AND TRENDS
--War Photography
Photography in the Popular Press
LIVES IN PHOTOGRAPHY
--Eadweard Muybridge
TECHNIQUES, FORMATS, AND EQUIPMENT
--Fine Art Printing: From Calotype to Photogravure
Riis, Hine, and Social Documentary Photography
MOVEMENTS AND TRENDS
--Lewis Wickes Hine's Promotion of "Photography in the School"
The Information Environment
5. A Photographic Art 71
Pictorialism
The Photo-Secession
MOVEMENTS AND TRENDS
--Photo-Secession
Alfred Stieglitz
LIVES IN PHOTOGRAPHY
Stieglitz and Camera Work
MOVEMENTS AND TRENDS
Cubism and Photography
Paul Strand
LIVES IN PHOTOGRAPHY
Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946)
and Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986)
MOVEMENTS AND TRENDS 85
--Neue Sachlichkeit
Modern Photography: Abstraction Versus the Object
TECHNIQUES, FORMATS, AND EQUIPMENT
--The Cyanotype and the Photogram
Edward Weston
Modernism After World War II
II. The Twentieth Century
6. Photography and Society
Documentary in the 1930s
The Farm Security Administration
MOVEMENTS AND TRENDS
--The Documentary Photo Book
Picture Magazines
LIVES IN PHOTOGRAPHY
--Weegee
The Family of Man
Robert Frank
Street Photography
Exposing the Other America
TECHNIQUES, FORMATS, AND EQUIPMENT
--Large-Format Cameras
America Seen from the Outside
Photographing Urban Decay: Vergara and Moore
America in a Global Context
7. Photography as Life Narrative
The Autobiographical Mode: Family Albums
LIVES IN PHOTOGRAPHY
--Novak's Collected Visions, a Global Family Album
Transforming the Family Snapshot
Expanding the Self-Portrait
TECHNIQUES, FORMATS, AND EQUIPMENT
--Photo Booth
MOVEMENTS AND TRENDS
--Mapplethorpe and the Culture Wars
Letting the Subject Speak
Defining Communities
MOVEMENTS AND TRENDS
--Motorcycles and the Open Road
Diane Arbus
Nan Goldin and Catherine Opie
8. African Americans and Photography
Beginnings
The Universal Exposition in Paris in 1900
Photography in the Harlem Renaissance
The 1930s and 1940s
MOVEMENTS AND TRENDS
--Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices
Photography and Civil Rights
DeCarava and Kamoinge
Contemporary Black Photographers
MOVEMENTS AND TRENDS
--Kamoinge
III. Contemporary Photography
9. Contemporary Landscape Photography
The Sublime Tradition
Conceptual Landscapes
The Man-Altered Landscape
MOVEMENTS AND TRENDS
--The New Topographics
Aerial Photography: The Man-Altered Landscape Seen from the Air
TECHNIQUES, FORMAT, AND EQUIPMENT
--Aerial Photography
The Landscape of Destruction
10. Bearing Witness
Iconic Images
War Photography
TECHNIQUES, FORMATS, AND EQUIPMENT
--The Leica Camera/35 mm Format
Vietnam
MOVEMENTS AND TRENDS
--Magnum Photos
MOVEMENTS AND TRENDS
--The Vietnam War and American Culture
Documenting the Unthinkable
The Iraqi Wars
Atomic Photography
Natural Disasters
11. Photography and the Image World
Photography and Consumer Culture
TECHNIQUES, FORMATS, AND EQUIPMENT
--Industrial Photography
Celebrity
Fame and Infamy
TECHNIQUES, FORMATS, AND EQUIPMENT
--Clandestine Photography
The Postmodern World of Images
Media Imagery as Found Art
TECHNIQUES, FORMATS, AND EQUIPMENT
--Appropriating Images
Contemporary Photography and the Archive
12. Photographing Fictions
A. D. Coleman: Revising the History of Photography
MOVEMENTS AND TRENDS
--Photographing Ghosts and Spirits
Early Creative Photography
Duane Michals
MOVEMENTS AND TRENDS
--Surrealism and Contemporary Photography
Joel-Peter Witkin and Andres Serrano
Cindy Sherman
Constructing Scenes, Fabricating Images
Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall
13. Conclusion: Digital Truth
TECHNIQUES, FORMATS, AND EQUIPMENT
Digital Cameras
Biographies
Glossary
Museums and Websites
Index