Photography Performing Humor

Despite the ubiquitous presence of photographic humor in art and popular media, the phenomenon has as yet received very little scholarly attention. Focusing on staged humor rather than on comic effects of snapshot photography, this volume brings together leading scholars in the field addressing humor performed in front of the camera, often specifically created for the camera, and the performative joke-work done by the medium itself. A first section explores how photography, due to its "shattering" qualities, turns into a privileged medium for eliciting humorous effects and how humor can be discerned within the photographic event. A second section discusses the toolbox of photographic trickery (photomontage, double exposure and cinematic movement) that allows photography to mock itself. The book closes with a section on photographic wit in conceptual art, both in canonized and more locally distinct practices.

With artists' pages from Paulien Oltheten, Lieven Segers and David Helbich.

Contributors: Kevin Atherton (National College of Art and Design, Dublin), Anna Corrigan and Susana S. Martins (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa), Hilde D'haeyere (KASK School of Arts of University College Ghent), Heather Diack (University of Miami), Louis Kaplan (University of Toronto), Ann Kristin Krahn (Braunschweig University of the Arts), Sandra Križić Roban (Institute of Art History, Zagreb), Esther Leslie (Birkbeck University of London), Johan Pas (Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp), Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

Mieke Bleyen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, Art and Visual Culture and the Institute for Cultural Studies at the KU Leuven. She is the author of Minor Aesthetics: The Photographic Work of Marcel Mariën.

Liesbeth Decan teaches theory and history of photography at LUCA School of Arts Brussels, where she is also the coordinator of the research group Photography Expanded. She is the author of Conceptual, Surrealist, Pictorial: Photo-Based Art in Belgium (1960s – early 1990s).