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Beyond Portraiture: Recent Writing on Photography James Elkins, What Photography Is (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), xiii + 222 pp. Liz Wells, Land Matters. Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 333 pp.

Beyond Portraiture: Recent Writing on Photography James Elkins, What Photography Is (New York and... : Recent Writing on Photography KATHRIN YACAVONE James Elkins, What Photography Is (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), xiii + 222 pp. Liz Wells, Land Matters. Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 333 pp. More than any other twentieth-century writers, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag are associated with the theory of photography.1 Even after the emergence of digital image technologies in the 1990s, and their impact on photographic theory,2 one book especially, Camera Lucida by Barthes, continues to be perhaps the key point of reference for any theoretical discussion of photographic images, analogue or digital. This is despite the unapologetic realist position Barthes adopts, anchored in the psychological reality effects of the photograph's indexicality (that is, the physical-causal relation between the object and its representation, according to C. S. Peirce's semiotic theory), effects which have been seen as weakened or mediated in digital image-making. Barthes's book, concerned as much with themes of absence, mourning, death and pain, filtered through the lens of autobiography (and published shortly before his own death in 1980), as on the nature of the photographic medium, has been criticized by art historians for its exclusive focus on portrait http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Paragraph Edinburgh University Press

Beyond Portraiture: Recent Writing on Photography James Elkins, What Photography Is (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), xiii + 222 pp. Liz Wells, Land Matters. Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 333 pp.

Paragraph , Volume 37 (3): 403 – Nov 1, 2014

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References (1)

Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Copyright
© Edinburgh University Press 2014
Subject
Literary Studies
ISSN
0264-8334
eISSN
1750-0176
DOI
10.3366/para.2014.0137
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

: Recent Writing on Photography KATHRIN YACAVONE James Elkins, What Photography Is (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), xiii + 222 pp. Liz Wells, Land Matters. Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 333 pp. More than any other twentieth-century writers, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag are associated with the theory of photography.1 Even after the emergence of digital image technologies in the 1990s, and their impact on photographic theory,2 one book especially, Camera Lucida by Barthes, continues to be perhaps the key point of reference for any theoretical discussion of photographic images, analogue or digital. This is despite the unapologetic realist position Barthes adopts, anchored in the psychological reality effects of the photograph's indexicality (that is, the physical-causal relation between the object and its representation, according to C. S. Peirce's semiotic theory), effects which have been seen as weakened or mediated in digital image-making. Barthes's book, concerned as much with themes of absence, mourning, death and pain, filtered through the lens of autobiography (and published shortly before his own death in 1980), as on the nature of the photographic medium, has been criticized by art historians for its exclusive focus on portrait

Journal

ParagraphEdinburgh University Press

Published: Nov 1, 2014

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