Photography

The 2011 revolution put Egypt at the centre of discussions around radical transformations in global photographic cultures. But Egypt and photography share a longer, richer history rarely included in western accounts of the medium. Decolonizing images focuses on the country’s local visual heritage, continuing the urgent process of decolonizing the canon of photography. It presents a new account of the visual cultures produced and exhibited in Egypt by interpreting the camera’s ability to conceal as much as it reveals. The book moves from the initial encounters between local knowledge and western-led modernity to explore how the image intersects with the politics of representation, censorship, activism and aesthetics. It overturns Eurocentric understandings of the photograph through a compelling narrative of contemporary Egypt’s indigenous visual culture.

This volume sets out to challenge and ultimately broaden the category of the ‘photobook’. It critiques the popular art-market definition of the photobook as simply a photographer’s book, proposing instead to show how books and photos come together as collective cultural productions. Focusing on North American, British and French photobooks from 1920 to the present, the chapters revisit canonical works – by Claudia Andujar and George Love, Mohamed Bourouissa, Walker Evans, Susan Meiselas and Roland Penrose – while also delving into institutional, digital and unrealised projects, illegal practices, DIY communities and the poetic impulse. They throw new light on the way that gendered, racial or colonial assumptions are resisted. Taken as a whole, the volume provides a better understanding of how the meaning of a photobook is collectively produced both inside and outside the art market.

In 2008, Manchester decided to embark on a counter-cyclical project, much as the city fathers had done in the last great recession, and invest significantly in two civic buildings, two buildings that were cornerstones of the making of the first modern industrialised city: Manchester Town Hall Extension and Manchester Central Library.

Early on in this major redevelopment project, artists Dan Dubowitz and Alan Ward were given privileged and open access to witness this transformational period in the life of these two iconic buildings. Through large-format photographs and interviews taken and conducted over a period of eighteen months, they captured the moment when the city’s citizens and workers had been locked out and the spaces were being stripped bare; revealing both a glimpse of what they had been and what they might become.

The artwork provides insights on the reciprocal relationship between people and place, and reveals how the refurbishment of a building can go far beyond physical refurbishment, questioning the relationships between a city, its citizens and place.

In his previous book City Gorged with Dreams (2002), Ian Walker challenged established ideas about Surrealist photography by emphasising the key role played by documentary photographs in Parisian Surrealism. Now Walker turns his attention to the arrival of Surrealism in England in 1936. Examining for the first time the surprising relationship between Surrealism and English documentary photography and film, the book shows that some of the most interesting work of the period was made in the ambiguous spaces between them.

One of the key themes in this book is the relationship between the ‘homely’ and the ‘exotic’, in the innovative mix of poetry and ethnography in Mass-Observation for example, or the shadowed England constructed in the work of Bill Brandt.

Based on extensive archival research, interviews and visits to sites where the photographs were made, this book is rich in detailed analysis yet written in an accessible and often witty style.

Photographic realism: Late twentieth-century aesthetics provides an accessible and useful introduction to uses of photography in art practice, and relates them to wider cultural ideas. Focusing on conceptual and political projects between 1970 and the turn of the century, it draws parallels between issues discussed in theory and those displayed visually in practice. Tormey discusses a dynamic era in photography’s history, which follows the influences of conceptual art and shifts in thinking about representation and subjectivity. The author moves away from the preoccupations of modernist photography to outline a photographic aesthetic that signals a direction for development in the twenty-first century, exampled here by the complex practices of Chinese photography. This book emphasises how photographs construct ideas, make comments and promote thought – philosophically, culturally and politically.

Julia Margaret Cameron's 'fancy subjects' is the first study of Cameron's allegorical photographs and the first to examine the intellectual connections of this imagery to British culture and politics of the 1860s and 1870s. In these photographs, Cameron depicted passages from classical mythology, the Old and New Testament, and historical and contemporary literature. She costumed her friends, domestic help, and village children in dramatic poses, turning them into goddesses and nymphs, biblical kings and medieval knights; she photographed young women in the style of the Elgin marbles, making sculpture come alive, and re-imagined scenes depicted in the poetry of Byron and Tennyson.

Cameron chose allegory as her primary artistic device because it allowed her to use popular iconography to convey a latent or secondary meaning. In her photographs, a primary meaning is first conveyed by the title of the image; then, social and political ideas that the artist implanted in the image begin to emerge, contributing to and commenting on the contemporary cultural, religious and political debates of the time. Cameron used the term 'fancy subjects' to embed these moral, intellectual and political narratives in her photographs. This book reconnects her to the prominent minds in her circle who influenced her thinking, including Benjamin Jowett, George Grote and Henry Taylor, and demonstrates her awareness and responsiveness to popular graphic art, including textiles and wall paper, book illustrations and engravings from period folios, cartoons from Punch and line drawings from the Illustrated London News, cabinet photographs and autotype prints.

Now available for the first time in paperback, Photography and social movements is the first thorough study of photography’s interrelationship with social movements. Focusing on photographic production and dissemination during the student and worker uprising in Paris in May 1968, the Zapatista rebellion, and the anti-capitalist protests in Genoa in 2001, the book argues that at times of political uprisings, photographic documentations, often contradictory, strive to prevail in the public domain, extending the political or economic struggle to a representational level. Photography plays a central role in this representational conflict, by either reproducing or challenging stereotypical narratives of protest. This groundbreaking interdisciplinary analysis of a wide range of practices - amateur and professional - and of previously unpublished archival material will add considerably to students’, researchers’ and scholars’ knowledge of both the visual imagery of political movements and the developing history of photographic representation.

Ancoats, in Manchester, was once unimaginably different. One of the world's earliest industrial suburbs, it was dark and dense, noisy, frenetic, violent and unhealthy. It was also vibrant and creative. It had a striking vapour, sound and feel.

The area today has undergone a striking regeneration. New streets, pavements and civic spaces have been laid down. A series of installations, known as The Peeps, have been created for the area. Built into the fabric of the buildings, the brass peep holes offer a fleeting glimpse of a walled-in space, a tunnel, a disused toilet, a bell tower, a gauge.

Dan Dubowitz, given the title of 'cultural masterplanner', records through photographs, interviews, commentary and contemporaneous texts, the recent past and the current regeneration of the suburb. It is a fascinating, beautifully illustrated and designed volume that eloquently depicts the common narrative of industrialisation, slow decay and rebirth.

Lee Miller: Photography, surrealism, and beyond offers a major new critical discussion of the work of one of the most significant twentieth-century photographers. Applying art-theoretical analyses and insights afforded by previously unseen material in archives and collections, Patricia Allmer undertakes revisionary readings of many of Miller’s works, including Portrait of Space, Severed Breast from Radical Mastectomy and the famous series of war photographs produced for Vogue. At the same time she sheds new light on Miller’s relations with surrealist groups and American avant-gardes, on her experiences in Paris, Egypt and World War II Europe and on her critically neglected post-war activities. Above all, Lee Miller: Photography, surrealism, and beyond focuses critical attention on the works themselves. As a result it will be of great interest to students and scholars of twentieth-century photography, modernism and surrealism.