Photography, Reconstruction and the Cultural History of the Postwar European City

Photography, Reconstruction and the Cultural History of the Postwar European City

Author: Tom Allbeson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-11-16

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1000181790

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Examining imagery of urban space in Britain, France and West Germany up to the early 1960s, this book reveals how photography shaped individual architectural projects and national rebuilding efforts alike. Exploring the impact of urban photography at a pivotal moment in contemporary European architecture and culture, this book addresses case studies spanning the destruction of the war to the modernizing reconfiguration of city spaces, including ruin photobooks about bombed cities, architectural photography of housing projects and imagery of urban life from popular photomagazines, as well as internationally renowned projects like UNESCO’s Paris Headquarters, Coventry Cathedral and Berlin’s Gedächtniskirche. This book reveals that the ways of seeing shaped in the postwar years by urban photography were a vital aspect of not only discourses on the postwar city but also debates central to popular culture, from commemoration and modernization to democratization and Europeanization. This book will be a fascinating read for researchers in the fields of photography and visual studies, architectural and urban history, and cultural memory and contemporary European history.


Photography, Reconstruction and the Cultural History of the Postwar European City

Photography, Reconstruction and the Cultural History of the Postwar European City

Author: Tom Allbeson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-11-16

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1000184978

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Examining imagery of urban space in Britain, France and West Germany up to the early 1960s, this book reveals how photography shaped individual architectural projects and national rebuilding efforts alike. Exploring the impact of urban photography at a pivotal moment in contemporary European architecture and culture, this book addresses case studies spanning the destruction of the war to the modernizing reconfiguration of city spaces, including ruin photobooks about bombed cities, architectural photography of housing projects and imagery of urban life from popular photomagazines, as well as internationally renowned projects like UNESCO’s Paris Headquarters, Coventry Cathedral and Berlin’s Gedächtniskirche. This book reveals that the ways of seeing shaped in the postwar years by urban photography were a vital aspect of not only discourses on the postwar city but also debates central to popular culture, from commemoration and modernization to democratization and Europeanization. This book will be a fascinating read for researchers in the fields of photography and visual studies, architectural and urban history, and cultural memory and contemporary European history.


Photography and Making Bedouin Histories in the Naqab, 1906-2013

Photography and Making Bedouin Histories in the Naqab, 1906-2013

Author: Emilie Le Febvre

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-12-22

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1003817599

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Introducing a novel anthropological study of photography in the Middle East, Emilie Le Febvre takes us to the Naqab Desert where Bedouin use photographs to make, and respond to, their own histories. She argues Bedouin presentations of the past are selective but increasingly reliant on archival documents such as photographs which spokespersons treat as evidence of their local histories amid escalating tensions in Israel. These practices shape Bedouin visual historicity, that is the diverse ways people produce their pasts in the present with images. This book charts these processes through the afterlives of six photographs (c. 1906–2013) as they circulate between the Naqab’s entangled visual economies – a transregional landscape organised by cultural ideals of proximity and assemblages of Bedouin iconography. Le Febvre illustrates how representational contentions associated with tribal, civic, and Palestinian-Israeli politics influence how images do history work in this society. She concludes Bedouin visual historicity is defined by acts of persuasion during which photographs authenticate alternating history projects. Here, Bedouin value photographs not because they evidence singular narratives of the past. Rather, the knowledges inscribed by photography are multifarious as they support diverse constructions of history and society with which members mediate a wide range of relationships in southern Israel. This book bridges studies of anthropology, photography, Palestinian-Israeli politics, and Bedouin Middle East history.


Photography, Bearing Witness and the Yugoslav Wars, 1988-2021

Photography, Bearing Witness and the Yugoslav Wars, 1988-2021

Author: Paul Lowe

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-09-27

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1000181839

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Combining case studies with theoretical and philosophical insights, this book explores the role of photography in representing conflict and genocide, both during and after the break-up of Yugoslavia. Concentrating on the photographer, this book considers the practice of photojournalism rather than simply in terms of its consumption and use by the media. The experiences and working methods of photographers in the field are analysed, showing how practitioners conceptualised their work and responded to larger questions about neutrality and moral responsibility. Presenting this ‘active’ form of witness, author Paul Lowe investigates a crucial ethical paradox faced by photojournalists. Moving beyond the end of the Yugoslav Wars in 2001, this book also considers the therapeutic and validating potential of photography for survivors, featuring photographers whose work centres on memory and reconciliation. Based on archival research, close reading and discourse analyses of photographs, and interviews with a range of international photographers, this book explores how photography from this period has been used and remediated in editorial photojournalism, fine art documentary and advocacy photography. This book will be of interest to scholars in the history of photography, art and visual culture, and photojournalism.


Photographs and the Practice of History

Photographs and the Practice of History

Author: Elizabeth Edwards

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-12-16

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1350120677

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What is it to practice history in an age in which photographs exist? What is the impact of photographs on the core historiographical practices which define the discipline and shape its enquiry and methods? In Photographs and the Practice of History, Elizabeth Edwards proposes a new approach to historical thinking which explores these questions and redefines the practices at the heart of this discipline. Structured around key concepts in historical methodology which are recognisable to all undergraduates, the book shows that from the mid-19th century onward, photographs have influenced historical enquiry. Exposure to these mass-distributed cultural artefacts is enough to change our historical frameworks even when research is textually-based. Conceptualised as a series of 'sensibilities' rather than a methodology as such, it is intended as a companion to 'how to' approaches to visual research and visual sources. Photographs and the Practice of History not only builds on existing literature by leading scholars: it also offers a highly original approach to historiographical thinking that gives readers a foundation on which to build their own historical practices.


British Indian Picture Postcards in Bengaluru

British Indian Picture Postcards in Bengaluru

Author: Emily Stevenson

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-12-18

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1003809596

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Combining ethnographic and archival research, this book examines the lives of colonial-period postcards and reveals how they become objects of contemporary historical imagination in India. Picture postcards were circulated around the world in their billions in the early twentieth century and remained, until the advent of social media, unmatched as the primary means of sharing images alongside personal messages. This book, based on original research in Bengaluru, shows that their lives stretch from their initial production and consumption in the early 1900s into the present where they act as visual and material mediators in postcolonial productions of history, locality, and heritage against a backdrop of intense urban change. The book will be of interest to photographic historians, visual anthropologists, and art historians.


Photography, Architecture, and the Modern Italian Landscape

Photography, Architecture, and the Modern Italian Landscape

Author: Lindsay Harris

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-11-19

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 1040256716

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Photography, Architecture, and the Modern Italian Landscape explores the impact of photography at a pivotal moment in Italian architecture and culture, focusing on the period between 1910 and the mid-1970s. The book analyzes architectural photographs taken by Italian cultural figures who helped transform the Italian landscape into what we know today. This study charts the oscillation of Italians’ ideas about what progress signified. For example, the book demonstrates that for writers and artists familiar with ancient ideas about civilization in 1910, the Roman countryside exemplified the contradictions inherent in primitivism. On the one hand, their photographs praised the region’s primordial beauty, yet their images condemned the crudeness of local living conditions. More broadly, it traces the history of primitivism and photography in Italy to show how cultural leaders’ alarm at the nation’s pre-modern living conditions, their aspiration to modernize them, and their grasp of photography to catalyze the process helped forge the modern Italian landscape—its monuments, housing, infrastructure, and natural environments. At the same time, it explores a vibrant period in photographic history when the advent of photographic reproduction as a commercial process developed into a medium with its own visual style capable of shaping ideas about modernity. This new image-making and reproduction technology empowered Italy’s cultural leaders not simply to represent the Italian landscape through photography but to determine how it developed. Of interest to researchers and students from a range of disciplines, modern architecture, photography, and Italian studies, this book demonstrates the power of art to transform society and to reformulate our ideas of progress.


Photography and the Cultural History of the Postwar European City

Photography and the Cultural History of the Postwar European City

Author: Tom Allbeson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts

Published: 2020-09-17

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9781474234962

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In 1945, civilians of the cities and towns of postwar Europe faced the daunting task of urban reconstruction and recovery. Through a broad range of case studies, from publicly-circulating aerial photography to press coverage of the opening of UNESCO headquarters, this book explores the impact of urban photography at a critical moment in European architectural history. Tracing how images trafficked between conceptual, media and material spaces in France, Britain and Germany, the book reveals how photography shaped the architecture of each country, reflecting each nation's attitudes to the past and vision of its future. Fascinating reading for historians of visual and urban culture, this is the first volume to analyse how official publications and the illustrated popular press pictured and promoted pivotal ideas and perspectives on the city, nationhood and Western Europe.


Postwar

Postwar

Author: Tony Judt

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2006-09-05

Total Pages: 1000

ISBN-13: 9780143037750

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Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award • One of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year “Impressive . . . Mr. Judt writes with enormous authority.” —The Wall Street Journal “Magisterial . . . It is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive, authoritative, and yes, readable postwar history.” —The Boston Globe Almost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world's most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all in one integrated, enthralling narrative. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details, Postwar is a rare joy. Judt's book, Ill Fares the Land, republished in 2021 featuring a new preface by bestselling author of Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates.


Three Cities After Hitler

Three Cities After Hitler

Author: Andrew Demshuk

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2021-09-21

Total Pages: 601

ISBN-13: 0822988577

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Three Cities after Hitler compares how three prewar German cities shared decades of postwar development under three competing post-Nazi regimes: Frankfurt in capitalist West Germany, Leipzig in communist East Germany, and Wrocław (formerly Breslau) in communist Poland. Each city was rebuilt according to two intertwined modern trends. First, certain local edifices were chosen to be resurrected as “sacred sites” to redeem the national story after Nazism. Second, these tokens of a reimagined past were staged against the hegemony of modernist architecture and planning, which wiped out much of whatever was left of the urban landscape that had survived the war. All three cities thus emerged with simplified architectural narratives, whose historically layered complexities only survived in fragments where this twofold “redemptive reconstruction” after Nazism had proven less vigorous, sometimes because local citizens took action to save and appropriate them. Transcending both the Iron Curtain and freshly homogenized nation-states, three cities under three rival regimes shared a surprisingly common history before, during, and after Hitler—in terms of both top-down planning policies and residents’ spontaneous efforts to make home out of their city as its shape shifted around them.