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Title:
Forget me not : photography and remembrance

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$23.95
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Summary:
Since its invention, photography has always been inextricably tied up with remembrance: photographs recall family, beloved friends, special moments, trips and other events, speaking across time and place to create an emotional bond between subject and viewer. "Forget me not" focuses on this relationship between photography and memory, and explores the curious and centuries-old practice of strengthening the emotional appeal of photographs by embellishing them—with text, paint, frames, embroidery, fabric, string, hair, flowers, bullets, cigar wrappers, butterfly wings, and more — to create strange and often beautiful hybrid objects. This spellbinding book features color photographs of eighty such objects, extraordinary works of art — part memento, part Joseph Cornell — created by ordinary people from the mid-19th to mid-20th century. In addition, "Forget me not" offers an alternative way to look at the history of photography, a history that effectively excludes most of the photographs — candid views, family snapshots, and the like — taken since the invention of the camera. Photography historian Geoffrey Batchen adopts a different tone in this book — a personal and speculative voice that speaks to the objects rather than about them while offering a visual treasure chest of both mysterious and beautiful images.

Title:
Picturing atrocity: photography in crisis

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$48.00
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Summary:
Ever since the landmark publication of Susan Sontag’s On Photography, it has been impossible to look at photographs, particularly those of violence and suffering, without questioning our role as photographic voyeur. Are we desensitized by the proliferation of these images, and does this make it easier to be passive and uninvolved? Or do the images immediately stir our own sense of justice and act as a call to arms? Are we consuming the suffering of others as a form of intrigue? Or is it an act of empathy? To answer these questions, Picturing Atrocity brings together writers and critics on photography today to offer close readings of images that reveal the realities behind the photographs, the subjects, and the photographers. From the massacre of the Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee to the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, from famine in China to apartheid in South Africa, Picturing Atrocity examines a broad spectrum of photographs. Each of the essays focuses specifically on an iconic image, offering a distinct approach and context, in order to enable us to look again—and this time more closely—at the picture. In addition, four photo-essays showcase the work of photographers involved in the making of photographs of brutality as well as the artists’ own reflections on these images.