Photography

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. It will be particularly useful in post-graduate courses on fine art and photography, but it will also appeal to students and lecturers of art history, visual culture and media studies.

Born into a civil service family in India in 1907, Helen Muspratt was a lifelong communist, a member of the Cambridge intellectual milieu of the 1930s, and a working mother at a time when such a role was unusual for women of her class. She was also a pioneering photographer, creating an extraordinary body of work in many different styles and genres. In partnership with Lettice Ramsey she made portraits of many notable figures of the 1930s in the fields of science and culture. Her experimental photography, using techniques such as solarisation and multiple exposure, bears comparison with the innovations of Man Ray and Lee Miller.

This book reproduces some of Helen Muspratt's most important photographic images, including documentary records of the Soviet Union and the Welsh valleys. The accompanying text by Jessica Sutcliffe is an intimate and revealing memoir of her mother that offers a fascinating insight into her life, work and politics.

Nominated for the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History 2017.

The Victorians admired Julia Margaret Cameron for her evocative photographic portraits of eminent men like Tennyson, Carlyle and Darwin. However, Cameron also made numerous photographs that she called 'Fancy subjects', depicting scenes from literature, personifications from classical mythology, and Biblical parables from the Old and New Testament. This book is the first comprehensive study of these works, examining Cameron's use of historical allegories and popular iconography to embed moral, intellectual and political narratives in her photographs. A work of cultural history as much as art history, this book examines cartoons from Punch and line drawings from the Illustrated London News, cabinet photographs and autotype prints, textiles and wall paper, book illustrations and lithographs from period folios, all as a way to contextualise the allegorical subjects that Cameron represented, revealing connections between her 'Fancy subjects' and popular debates about such topics as Biblical interpretation, democratic government and colonial expansion.

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.