Photography and Its Origins - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 041572290X ISBN 13: 9780415722902

Publisher: Routledge, 2014

Synopsis

Recent decades have seen a flourishing interest in and speculation about the origins of photography. Spurred by rediscoveries of ‘first’ photographs and proclamations of photography’s death in the digital age, scholars have been rethinking who and what invented the medium.

Photography and Its Origins reflects on this interest in photography’s beginnings by reframing it in critical and specifically historiographical terms. How and why do we write about the origins of the medium? Whom or what do we rely on to construct those narratives? What’s at stake in choosing to tell stories of photography’s genesis in one way or another? And what kind of work can those stories do?

Edited by Tanya Sheehan and Andrés Mario Zervigón, this collection of 16 original essays, illustrated with 32 colour images, showcases prominent and emerging voices in the field of photography studies. Their research cuts across disciplines and methodologies, shedding new light on old questions about histories and their writing.

Photography and Its Origins will serve as a valuable resource for students and scholars in art history, visual and media studies, and the history of science and technology.

About this title

About the Author

Tanya Sheehan is Associate Professor in the Department of Art at Colby College, where she teaches American art history and the history of photography. She is the author of Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (2011) and editor of Photography, History, Difference (2014). Andrés Mario Zervigón is Associate Professor of the History of Photography in the Art History Department at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He is author of John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage (2012).

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 041572290X
• ISBN 13: 9780415722902
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 254
• Editor: Sheehan Tanya, Zervigon Andres