Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self

ISBN 10: 0810946351 / ISBN 13: 9780810946354

Published by Harry N. Abrams, 2003

About this Item

Used - Acceptable: All pages and the cover are intact, but shrink wrap, dust covers, or boxed set case may be missing. Pages may include limited notes, highlighting, or minor water damage but the text is readable. Item may be missing bundled media.

Seller Inventory # 3O6S10000AC4_ns

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self
• Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810946351
• ISBN 13: 9780810946354
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: acceptable

About this title

Synopsis

Exploring the role of photography in shaping modern ideas about race, nation, and selfhood, this critical study--enhanced by three hundred full-color images that reflect an array of genres and movements--assesses the impact of photography on race and racial identity.

Reviews

From its very beginnings, photography has been inextricably linked with racial typography, pornography, commodification and exploitation. This deeply questioning collection of 300 color photos and illustrations, along with essays, accompanies a national touring exhibition curated by the International Center of Photography's Wallis and artist Fusco (The Bodies that Were Not Ours). The collection exhumes and re-examines the "dark" underbelly of American race relations as related by historical photographs, and along the way makes valuable re-discoveries, including that the "Migrant Mother" in Dorothea Lange's celebrated Depression-era photograph, Florence Thompson, was of Cherokee descent. Aleta M. Ringlero relates how one response to her research on "Prairie Pinups," erotic photographs of American Indian women, was "we like to forget those kinds of photographs are in our collection." Demonstrating the book's intent to raise questions, not bury them, the contributors are allowed to disagree with each other: Kobena Mercer ultimately finds that Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of black men "can be seen as a subversive deconstruction of the hidden racial and gendered axioms of the nude," while Lauri Firstenberg finds them "a contemporary example of photography's categorization and classification of subjects by stereotype." Despite their number, however, the images are underplayed-sparsely scattered through texts and printed small, they are left largely unexplained (in fact, the footnotes, placed directly underneath the photographs, are easily mistaken for captions) and photographs cited in the texts often seem not included. It will be a disappointment to many readers that the actual photographic evidence, difficult as it is to look at, is not an equal partner in this much-needed examination of the painful histories behind American identity.
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