Photography and its shadow / Hagi Kenaan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kenaan, Hagi, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Photography--Psychological aspects.

Photography.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (236 pages)

Place of Publication:

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2020]

Summary:

Photography and Its Shadow argues that the invention of photography marked a rupture in our relation to the world and what we see in it. The dominant theoretical and artistic paradigm for understanding the invention has been the tracing of shadows. But what photography really inaugurated was the shadow's disappearance—a disappearance that irreversibly changed our relationship to nature and the real, to time and to death. A way of negotiating impermanence, photography was marked from the start by an inherent contradiction. It conflated two incompatible configurations of the visible: an embodied human eye, deeply sensitive to nature, and a machine vision that aimed to reify the instant and wallow in images alone. Photography's history is replete with efforts to conceal the mystery of its paradoxical constitution. Born in the century of Nietzsche's "death of God," it long enacted the fraught subjectivity of its age. Anxious, haunted by a void, it used an array of strategies to take on ever-new identities. Challenging the hitherto most influential accounts of the practice and taking us from its origins to the present, Hagi Kenaan shows us how photography has been transformed over time, and how it transforms us.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I. Photography’s Nature: The Picture

Part II. The Butades Complex

Part III. Photography and the Death of God

Part IV. Photography’s Goodbyes

Notes

Bibliography

Illustration Credits

Index

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781503611382

1503611388

OCLC:

1119740994