The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography

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About this book: When the editor Carol Squiers compiled this book it was because there was a lack of a substantial body of writing on contemporary photography treating the entire spectrum of photographic practice as a process of signification - a study that would include an examination of all institutional production of photography, from newspaper and magazine photojournalism to images taken for purposes of surveillance to commercial wedding photography and amateur snapshooting. The goal of this book is to bring together writings on contemporary practice in photography that address a number of issues, from why certain photographic images are made, and to what ends they are put by those who commission them, to the way that feminist theory is being rethought in relation to woman-as-viewer. One guiding principle in selecting essays to reproduce and authors to commission - nearly half the essays were specially written for the book - was to enlist a wide range of theoretical and critical approaches. This sometimes meant looking outside the immediate community of writers who specialize in photography to find peopel who had considered related issues of representation. Chapters: Introduction by Carol Squiers; A Note on Photography and the Simulacral by Rosalind Krauss; Photojournalism in the Age of Computers by Fred Ritchin; The Pleasures of Looking - The Attorney General's Commission on Pornography versus Visual Images by Carole S. Vance; Living with Contradictions: Critical Practices in the Age of Supply-Side Aesthetics by Abigail Solomon-Godeau; On the Dissecting Table: The Unnatural Coupling of Surrealism and Photography by Andy Grundberg; Krzysztof Wodiczko's Homeless Projection and the Site of Urban "Revitalization" by Rosalyn Deutsche; Picturing Scandal - Iranscam, the Reagan White House, and the Photo Opportunity by Carol Squiers; Playing with Dolls by Silvia Kolbowski; Photography and Fetish by Christian Metz; Newton's Gravity by Victor Burgin; etc