Edited by Thy Phu, Andrea Noble, and Erina Duganne
Durham: Duke University Press, 2022
Cold War Camera explores the visual mediation of the Cold War and illuminates photography’s role in shaping the ways it was prosecuted and experienced. The contributors show how the camera stretched the parameters of the Cold War beyond dominant East-West and US-USSR binaries and highlight the significance of photography from across the global South. Among other topics, the contributors examine the production and circulation of the iconic figure of the “revolutionary Vietnamese woman” in the 1960s and 1970s; photographs connected with the coming of independence and decolonization in West Africa; family photograph archives in China and travel snapshots by Soviet citizens; photographs of apartheid in South Africa; and the circulation of photographs of Inuit Canadians who were relocated to the extreme Arctic in the 1950s. Highlighting the camera’s capacity to envision possible decolonialized futures, establish visual affinities and solidarities, and advance calls for justice to redress violent proxy conflicts, this volume demonstrates that photography was not only crucial to conducting the Cold War, it is central to understanding it.
Contributors. Ariella Azoulay, Jennifer Bajorek, Erina Duganne, Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Eric Gottesman, Tong Lam, Karintha Lowe, Ángeles Donoso Macaya, Darren Newbury, Andrea Noble, Sarah Parsons, Gil Pasternak, Thy Phu, Oksana Sarkisova, Olga Shevchenko, Laura Wexler, Guigui Yao, Donya Ziaee, Marta Ziętkiewicz
Edited by Erina Duganne and Abigail Satinsky
Design by IN-FO.CO
Co-published by Inventory Press and Tufts University Art Galleries
Art for the Future illuminates the formative 1980s activist campaign, Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America. Published on the occasion of a pathbreaking exhibition of the same name at the Tufts University Art Galleries, this bilingual English-Spanish catalogue surveys Artists Call’s mobilization of writers, artists, activists, and artist organizations and looks at the group’s legacy today.
Art for the Future features critical essays that reflect on the campaign’s influence and place its art and activism within a wider visual, historical, and socio-political context. Contributors include exhibition curators Erina Duganne and Abigail Satinsky as well as Kency Cornejo, Lucy Lippard, Yansi Pérez, and Josh Rios. The catalogue highlights interviews with Artists Call participants, including Doug Ashford, Fatima Bercht, Josely Carvalho, Daniel Flores y Ascencio, Kimiko Hahn, Jerry Kearns, Sabra Moore, and Juan Sánchez.
The catalogue also includes contributions by a dynamic selection of artists and activists—Antena Aire and Tierra Narrative, Jerri Allyn, Maria Thereza Alves, and Hans Haacke as well as newly commissioned work by Beatriz Cortez, Muriel Hasbun, Josh MacPhee, Naeem Mohaiemen, and Antonio Serna. Art for the Future is at once an archive, historical document, and critical text that fills a gap in the examination of political and aesthetic actions across the Americas, both then and now.
This innovative text, co-authored with Heather Diack and Terri Weissman, recounts the history of photography through a series of thematically structured chapters. Designed and written for students studying photography and its history, each chapter approaches its subject by introducing a range of international, contemporary photographers and then contextualizing their work in historical terms. The book offers an accessible route to gain an understanding of the key genres, theories, and debates that are fundamental to the study and history of this rich and complex medium.
The book is divided into six sections, with individual chapters covering major topics with global relevance both today and in the past. Beginning with a section dedicated to “Realisms,” the opening chapters address “Description and Abstraction” as well as “Truth and Fiction.” Section II, “Evidence,” contains chapters dedicated to “Measuring the Body” and “Mapping the Land.” Section III titled “Ethics” comprises chapters on “The Politics of Representation” and “Pictures of War.” This is followed by a section focused explicitly on “Art,” with a chapter on “Form” and one on “Appropriation.” In section IV, “Collections,” the chapters examine “Museums” and “Archives.” The book’s sixth and final section investigates the “Expanded Field” of photography, with one chapter on “Fashion” and the final chapter on “Cinema.”
Boxed focus studies throughout the text offer short interviews, curatorial statements, and reflections by photographers, critics, and leading scholars that link photography's history with its practice. Short chapter summaries, research questions, and further reading lists help to reinforce learning and promote discussion. Whether coming to the subject from an applied photography or art history background, students will benefit from this book's engaging, thematic, and global approach that connects international contemporary photographic practices with their relevant historical antecedents.
The Self in Black and White is a fascinating and original study of the ways in which notions about race and the self were formed, perpetuated, and contested in American photography during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, with an emphasis on images of the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty. Author Erina Duganne opens with a discussion of the Kamoinge Workshop, an African American photographers’ collective from the 1960s. She goes on to discuss the 1965 government-sponsored photography exhibition Profile of Poverty which sought to stir up emotional support for the War on Poverty via “documentary” images of poverty and race. She analyzes the complex interconnections of race and artistic subjectivity through a comparison of the careers of Bruce Davidson, who was often praised for the artistic merit of his civil rights images, and Roy DeCarava, who was singled out for the “authenticity” of his Harlem photographs. The Self in Black and White is a compelling interdisciplinary consideration of the eye behind the camera and the formative power it wields.
Drawing on works from advertising, photojournalism, art photography, and conceptual art, Beautiful Suffering (edited by Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne) features reproductions of all the pieces in the Williams College Museum of Art exhibition that shares its name—including portrayals of AIDS sufferers, Abu Ghraib prisoners, refugees, and casualties of war. It also includes five critical essays that engage the works themselves as well as the larger issues the exhibition confronts: Is it inherently problematic to seek aesthetic pleasure in a rendering of pain? And if so, why? These essays, composed by scholars in fields as diverse as art history and political science, are perfect complements to the powerful images of suffering that probe some of the most pressing issues we face today.
