Picturing America: Photography and the Sense of Place

Picturing America: Photography and the Sense of Place argues that photography is a prevalent practice of making American places. Its collected essays epitomize not only how pictures situate us in a specific place, but also how they create a sense of such mutable place-worlds. Understanding photographs as prime sites of knowledge production and advocates of socio-political transformations, a transnational set of scholars reveals how images enact both our perception and conception of American environments. They investigate the power photography yields in shaping our ideas of self, nation, and empire, of private and public space, through urban, landscape, wasteland and portrait photography. The volume radically reconfigures how pictures alter the development of American places in the past, present, and future.

Kerstin Schmidt Ph.D. (Freiburg 2005) and P.D. (Munich 2010), is Professor of English and Chair of American Studies at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany.

Julia Faisst, Ph.D. (Harvard University 2009), is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany.