Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000 - Softcover

Sobieszek, Robert A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262692287 ISBN 13: 9780262692281

Publisher: Mit Pr, 1999

Synopsis

Ghost in the Shell takes as its premise the idea that the outer person is a reflection of the inner. Tracing the modern photographic portrait over the past 150 years, the book reveals the many ways the photographic arts have investigated, represented, interpreted, and subverted the human face and, consequently, the human spirit. Artists have used the genre not only to convey familiar emotions such as fear, love, sadness, and anger, but also to explore complex subjective states such as passionate individuality and psychological withdrawal. Different avant-garde movements have enlisted farce, masks, and masquerade in their charting of the human character, and many postmodern works employ irony and ambiguity to deal with issues of identity, gender, and dissociation.

The book, which accompanies an exhibition opening at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in October 1999, is organized roughly chronologically around the traditional, modernist, and postmodernist views of the face, although the primary approach of one period often appears in the others. The artists discussed include, among others, Diane Arbus, Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Curtis, Salvador Dali, Duchenne de Boulogne, Dorothea Lange, Annie Leibowitz, Bruce Nauman, Orlan, William Parker, Irving Penn, Lucas Samaras, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, and Edward Weston.

Published in cooperation with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"In this book Sobieszek presents a wide-ranging study of the camera portrait as a reflection and catalyst of cultural beliefs about human nature. He demonstrates that photographed faces over the past 150 years - whether on silver plates, in fashion shots, or in video stills - raise questions of essence and appearance that also lie behind activities as varied as philosophy, fiction, painting, psychiatry, film, forensics, anthropology, masquerade, gender studies, and plastic surgery."--BOOK JACKET. "The book's three essays explore traditional, modern, and postmodern approaches to the camera portrait. "'Gymnastics of the Soul': The Clinical Aesthetics of Duchenne de Boulogne" investigates the nineteenth-century certainty that, in the words of Arthur Schopenhauer, "the outer person is a picture of the inner." This belief was pursued in physiognomy, phrenology, and pathognomy, popular pseudosciences of the day that were the culmination of a long tradition including the work of Giambauista della Porta, Charles Le Brun, and Johann Kaspar Lavater. Modernism brought an apparent end to these pursuits through a new awareness of the subjectivity inherent in the use of the camera. In "'Tolerances of the Human Face': The Affectless Surfaces of Andy Warhol, " the author places Warhol's photo-silkscreened portraits in the modern contexts of social and anthropological classification and the symbolism of fame, but suggests that physiognomy has not been entirely silenced. Finally, "'Abstract Machines of Faciality': The Dramaturgical Identities of Cindy Sherman" explores the theatrical aspects of portraiture, tracing a continuum that links Sherman's work to the demonstrations of hysteria staged by thenineteenth-century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, Surrealist masks, performance art, and the use of schizophrenia and multiple selves as metaphors for the postmodern human condition."--BOOK JACKET. "The photographs collected here - works by Diane Arbus, Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Curtis, Salvador Dali, Dorothea Lange, Annie Leibowitz, Bruce Nauman, Orlan, William Parker, Irving Penn, Lucas Samaras, Edward Weston, and many others - show how vividly the photographic arts have kept up with the motions of the human soul and contributed to our perception of being."--BOOK JACKET.

About the Author:

Robert A. Sobieszek is Curatorial Co-Chair and Curator of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0262692287
• ISBN 13: 9780262692281
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 324