Appearances – Studies in Visual Research
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Edited by:
Tim Allender
Images today are everywhere, and anyone can try their hand at being a documentary photographer. But how do we make sense of this visual revolution in the long history of using visuals to communicate? Recently, historians and social scientists have begun to situate themselves at the intersection of visual and material studies. In particular, research has focused on the fact that images themselves have a history, or social biography. Images are reproduced, circulated, and consumed in ways that could not be predicted at the time of their original production.
Images are included and inscribed in different contexts; they move from cameras, canvas, papers to albums, plaques, museums, frames, boxes, walls, cards, books, journals, popular magazines, catalogues, pamphlets, and almost any imaginable surface, including the screens that are deployed by digital and social media. The material and social history of photography suggests that images should be analyzed as social objects. This involves approaching them from two interconnected research perspectives, focusing on both their material and their social-relational qualities. Visual technologies as material practices imply an impetus for reproduction and dissemination where images assume a hermeneutical role based on their physicality and presentational form (e.g. print size, cropping and enlarging, image configuration and order, combinations of images and texts, paper and print quality, etc.). Images are reproducible and mobile objects that never cease to reach out to audiences and gather a large variety of intertwined relationships and meanings over time. The material and social qualities of images are therefore inseparable; both refer to processes of meaning-making in chains of reproduction, remediation, and re-contextualization, with images assuming active roles as connectors and communicators.
Considering the social-material quality of images therefore raises questions about intermedia relationships, the life and death of images, technologies of reproduction, hybrid media, and media and humans as meaning-making collectives in the digital age. It also stimulates reflection on what has been inscribed by whom, when, and where in the (digital) archive, and how a particular visual memory has been produced, defied, challenged, and transformed.
The aim of the book series is to initiate and encourage debates and scholarly exchanges on images and films as complex material and social objects in the humanities and social sciences. This objective will be achieved by regarding images as objects to think with, by problematizing them as signs or traces of complex entanglements with both the past and the present.
The book series will be peer reviewed.
Series editors:
Karin Priem (Managing Editor) , Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, University of Luxembourg, karin.priem@uni.lu
Tim Allender, University of Sydney, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, tim.allender@sydney.edu.au
Inés Dussel, Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute, Cinvestav, Mexico City, idussel@gmail.com
Ian Grosvenor, University of Birmingham, School of Education, i.d.grosvenor@bham.ac.uk
Editorial board:
Cathy Burke, University of Cambridge, UK
Richard Clay, University of Newcastle, UK
Marc Depaepe, KU Leuven, Belgium
Robert Hariman, Northwestern University, USA
Frederik Herman, University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland, Solothurn, Switzerland
Sylvain Lesage, University of
Author / Editor information
Tim Allender, University of Sydney
Sandra Camarda, Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History
Inés Dussel, National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico City
Ian Grosvenor, University of Birmingham
Karin Priem (Managing Editor), Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History
Topics
Rome was an empire of images, especially images that bolstered their imperial identity. Visual and material items portraying battles, myths, captives, trophies, and triumphal parades were particularly important across the Roman empire. But where did these images originate and what shaped them? Empire of Images explores the development of the Roman visual language of power in the Republic in Iberian Peninsula, the Gallic provinces, and Greece and Macedonia, centering the development of imperial imagery in overseas conquest. Drawing on a range of material evidence, this book argues that Roman imperial imagery developed through prolonged interaction with and adaptation by subjugated peoples. Despite their starring role in Roman imagery, the populations of Rome’s provinces continuously reinterpreted and reimagined Roman images of power to navigate their membership in the new imperial community, and in doing so, contributed to the creation of a universal visual language that continues to shape how Rome is understood.
"He used his camera like a doctor would use a stethoscope in order to diagnose the state of the heart. His own was vulnerable.", Cartier-Bresson wrote about David Seymour, who liked to be called Chim.
Chim is best known as one of the cofounders of photojournalism’s famous cooperative Magnum Photos. Weaving Chim’s life and work, this book discovers this empathetic photographer who has been called "The First Human Rights Photographer".
In 1947, Chim was one of the four cofounders of the Magnum Photos cooperative with Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Rodger. He also wrote Magnum’s 1955 bylaws, which are still in effect today. But he is the only one of those famous photographers who does not have a full biography to his name. This book examines his life and work from Poland to France to the Spanish Civil War, his work for British intelligence during World War II, his reportage on Europe’s children after the war, his reportages on Italian actors, illiteracy and religious festivals in Southern Italy, his coverage of Israel’s beginnings before his 1956 death during the Suez war. His complex itinerary is emblematic of the displacements and passages of the XXth century.
This volume discusses a broad range of themes and methodological issues around images, photography and film. It is about sharing a fascination about the visual history of education and how images became the most influential (circulating) media within the field of education on local, regional, national and international levels. Within this volume images are primarily analyzed as presenters, mediators, and means of observation. Images are seen as mobile reproducible media which play an active role within the public and educational sphere. They are means of observation and storytelling, they shape identities by presenting models of how we should act in and perceive the world, they circulate though different contexts and media, all of which impacts their meanings.
The analysis of UNESCO’s audio-visual archives for their digitization has brought to light a forgotten album of 38 contact sheets and accompanying texts by Magnum photographer, David “Chim” Seymour – a reportage made in 1950 for UNESCO on the fi ght against illiteracy in Italy’s southern region of Calabria. A number of his photographs appeared in the March 1952 issue of UNESCO Courier in an article written by Carlo Levi, who had gained worldwide fame with his novel Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945).
L’analyse des archives audio-visuelles de l’UNESCO en vue de leur numérisation a permis de découvrir un album oublié comprenant 38 planches-contact et des textes d’accompagnement du photographe de Magnum David « Chim » Seymour – un reportage réalisé en 1950 pour l’UNESCO sur la bataille contre l’analphabétisme en Calabre, une région du sud de l’Italie. Un certain nombre de ses photographies ont été publiées dans le numéro de mars 1952 du Courrier de l’UNESCO avec un article de Carlo Levi, dont le roman Le Christ s’est arrêté à Eboli (1945) lui avait valu une renommée internationale
