Photography and Cyprus (International Library of Modern and Contemporary Art)

Formerly a British colony, the island of Cyprus is now a divided country, where histories of political and cultural conflicts, as well as competing identities, are still contested. Cyprus provides the ideal case study for this innovative exploration, extensively illustrated, of how the practice of photography in relation to its political, cultural and economic contexts both contributes and responds to the formation of identity. Contributors from Cyprus, Greece, the UK and the USA, representing diverse disciplines, draw from photography theory, art history, anthropology and sociology to explore how the island and its people have been represented photographically. They reveal how the different gazes- colonial, political, gendered, and within art photography- contribute to the creation of individual and national identities and, by extension, to the creation and re-creation of imagery of Cyprus as place. While Photography and Cyprus focuses on one geographical and cultural territory, the questions this book asks and the themes and arguments it follows apply also to other places characterized by their colonial heritage. The intriguing example of Cyprus thus serves as a fitting test-ground for current debates relating to photography, place and identity.

Liz Wells is a distinguished writer, researcher, teacher and curator in photography. Her publications include "Land Matters, Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity" (I.B. Tauris, 2011) and she is Editor of "The Photography Reader" (2003) and "Photography: A Critical Introduction" (2009, 4th ed.). She is a Co-editor for the photographies journal and since 2010 she has collaborated on several projects with Cypriot curators. She is Professor in Photographic Culture at the Faculty of Arts, University of Plymouth, UK. Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert is a photographer, visual sociologist and museologist. She is the Co-editor of "Re-envisioning Cyprus." She is an Assistant Professor at the School of Fine and Applied Arts of the Cyprus University of Technology and the coordinator of the 'Visual Sociology and Museum Studies Lab'. Nicos Philippou is a photographer, visual ethnographer and author of the books "Off the Map" and "Coffee House Embellishments." He is a Co-editor of "Re-envisioning Cyprus." He is currently lecturing at the Communications Department of the University of Nicosia, Cyprus.