Faculty Books

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  Eugenics, 'Aristogenics', Photography: Picturing Privilege

  Kris Belden-Adams

  This is the first study to explore the connections between late-19th-century university/college composite class portraits and the field of Eugenics – which first took hold in the United States at Harvard University. Eugenics, 'Aristogenics', Photography takes a closer look at how composite portraiture documented an idealized “reality” of the New England social-caste experience and explains how, when positioned in relation to the individual stories and portraits of members of the class, the portraits reveal points of non-conformity and rebellion with their own rhetoric.

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  Bodies and Maps: Early Modern Personifications of the Continents

  Maryanne Cline Horowitz and Louise Arizzoli

  Since antiquity, artists have visualized the known world through the female (sometimes male) body. In the age of exploration, America was added to figures of Europe, Asia, and Africa who would come to inhabit the borders of geographical visual imagery. In the abundance of personifications in print, painting, ceramics, tapestry, and sculpture, do portrayals vary between hierarchy and global human dignity? Are we witnessing the emergence of ethnography or of racism? Yet, as this volume shows, depictions of bodies as places betray the complexity of human claims and desires. Bodies and Maps: Early Modern Personifications of the Continents opens up questions about early modern politics, travel literature, sexualities, gender, processes of making, and the mobility of forms and motifs. Contributors are: Louise Arizzoli, Elisa Daniele, Hilary Haakenson, Elizabeth Horodowich, Maryanne Cline Horowitz, Ann Rosalind Jones, Paul H. D. Kaplan, Marion Romberg, Mark Rosen, Benjamin Schmidt, Chet Van Duzer, Bronwen Wilson, and Michael Wintle.

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  Time Warped: Photography, Temporality, and Modernity

  Kris Belden-Adams

  This book examines the photography’s unique capacity to represent time with a degree of elasticity and abstraction. Part object-study, part cultural/philosophical history, it examines the medium’s ability to capture and sometimes "defy" time, while also traveling as objects across time-and-space nexuses. The book features studies of understudied, widespread, practices: studio portraiture, motion studies, panoramas, racing photo finishes, composite college class pictures, planetary photography, digital montages, and extended-exposure images. A closer look at these images and their unique cultural/historical contexts reveals photography to be a unique medium for expressing changing perceptions of time, and the anxiety its passage provokes.

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  Photography and Failure: One Medium's Entanglement with Flops, Underdogs and Disappointments

  Kris Belden-Adams

  Throughout photography's history, failure has played an essential, recurring part in the development and perceived value of this medium. Exploring a range of failures – individual and institutional, technological and historiographical – Photography and Failure asks what it means to fail and considers how this narrative of failure has shaped our understanding of photography. From the trial-and-error beginnings of photochemistry to poor business decisions influenced by fickle public opinion and taste, the founders and early practitioners of photography frequently faced bankruptcy and ignominy. Alongside these individual 'failures', this collection of essays examines the role of museums in rediscovering, preserving and presenting photographs within institutions, as well as technological limitations, such as the problematic panoramic lens or the digital, archival failures of Snapchat. Moving beyond the physical photograph and these processes, the book also investigates the limitations of photographs themselves, as purveyors of truth, time, space, documentary realism and social change, whether these failures are used to effect or not. Finally, the book probes the historiographical failures affecting the discipline, drawing on key debates, such as the perceived over-emphasis on European and American photography, and the place of photography theory in contemporary art practice. Blurring the boundaries between traditional binaries of art and non-art photography, amateur and professional practice, and individual and corporate perspectives, Photography and Failure presents a new approach to understanding and evaluating photographic history.