Documenting the world : film, photography, and the scientific record / edited by Gregg Mitman and Kelley Wilder.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Mitman, Gregg, editor.

Wilder, Kelley E. (Kelley Elizabeth), 1971- editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Photography--Scientific applications.

Photography.

Photography--Scientific applications--History.

Photography--History.

History.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

285 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Summary:

Imagine the twentieth century without photography and film. Its history would be absent of images that define historical moments and generations: the death camps of Auschwitz, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Apollo lunar landing. It would be a history, in other words, of just artists' renderings and the spoken and written word. To inhabitants of the twenty-first century, deeply immersed in visual culture, such a history seems insubstantial, imprecise, and even, perhaps, unscientific.Documenting the World is about the material and social life of photographs and film made in the scientific quest to document the world. Drawing on scholars from the fields of art history, visual anthropology, and science and technology studies, the chapters in this book explore how this documentation from the initial recording of images, to their acquisition and storage, to their circulation has altered our lives, our ways of knowing, our social and economic relationships, and even our surroundings. Far beyond mere illustration, photography and film have become an integral, transformative part of the world they seek to show us.

Contents:

Introduction / Gregg Mitman and Kelley Wilder

Moving pictures: photographs on trial in the Sir Roger TIchborne affair / Jennifer Tucker

The colors of evidence: picturing the past in photography and film / Peter Geimer

Mars in the making: digital documentary practices in contemporary planetary science / Janet Vertesi

Uncertain knowledge: photography and the turn-of-the-century anthropological document / Elizabeth Edwards

A journey without maps: film, expeditionary science, and the growth of development / Gregg Mitman

Archival exposure: disability, documentary, and the making of counternarratives / Faye Ginsburg

Reverse

cardboard

print: the materiality of the photographic archive and its function / Stefanie Klamm

Photographic cataloguing / Kelley Wilder

The excess of the archive / Estelle Blaschke.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780226129112

022612911X

OCLC:

920017413