Picturing Empire
Picturing Empire

Author: James R. Ryan

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2013-06-01

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1780231636

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Coinciding with the extraordinary expansion of Britain's overseas empire under Queen Victoria, the invention of photography allowed millions to see what they thought were realistic and unbiased pictures of distant peoples and places. This supposed accuracy also helped to legitimate Victorian geography's illuminations of the "darkest" recesses of the globe with the "light" of scientific mapping techniques. But as James R. Ryan argues in Picturing Empire, Victorian photographs reveal as much about the imaginative landscapes of imperial culture as they do about the "real" subjects captured within their frames. Ryan considers the role of photography in the exploration and domestication of foreign landscapes, in imperial warfare, in the survey and classification of "racial types," in "hunting with the camera," and in teaching imperial geography to British schoolchildren. Ryan's careful exposure of the reciprocal relation between photographic image and imperial imagination will interest all those concerned with the cultural history of the British Empire.

Camera Indica
Camera Indica

Author: Christopher Pinney

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2013-06-01

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1780231520

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A wedding couple gazes resolutely at viewers from the wings of a butterfly; a portrait surrounded by rose petals commemorates a recently deceased boy. These quiet but moving images represent the changing role of photographic portraiture in India, a topic anthropologist Christopher Pinney explores in Camera Indica. Studying photographic practice in India, Pinney traces photography's various purposes and goals from colonial through postcolonial times. He identifies three key periods in Indian portraiture: the use of photography under British rule as a quantifiable instrument of measurement, the later role of portraiture in moral instruction, and the current visual popular culture and its effects on modes of picturing. Photographic culture thus becomes a mutable realm in which capturing likeness is only part of the project. Lavishly illustrated, Pinney's account of the change from depiction to invention uncovers fascinating links between these evocative images and the society and history from which they emerge.

Picturing History at the Ottoman Court
Picturing History at the Ottoman Court

Author: Emine Fetvacı

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 0253006783

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Traces the simultaneous crafting of political power, the codification of a historical record, and the unfolding of cultural change

Picturing Russia
Picturing Russia

Author: Valerie Ann Kivelson

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-01-01

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0300119615

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What can Russian images and objects—a tsar’s crown, a provincial watercolor album, the Soviet Pioneer Palace—tell us about the Russian people and their culture? This wide-ranging book is the first to explore the visual culture of Russia over the entire span of Russian history, from ancient Kiev to contemporary, post-Soviet society. Illustrated with more than one hundred diverse and fascinating images, the book examines the ways that Russians have represented themselves visually, understood their visual environment, and used visual images in social and political contexts. Expert contributors discuss images and objects from all over the Russian/Soviet empire, including consumer goods, architectural monuments, religious icons, portraits, news and art photography, popular prints, films, folk art, and more. Each of the concise and accessible essays in the volume offers a fresh interpretation of Russian cultural history. Putting visuality itself in focus as never before, Picturing Russia adds an entirely new dimension to the study of Russian literature, history, art, and culture. The book enriches our understanding of visual documents and shows the variety of ways they serve as far more than mere illustration.

Picturing Paul in Empire
Picturing Paul in Empire

Author: Harry O. Maier

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-10-24

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0567192709

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Pauline Christianity sprang to life in a world of imperial imagery. In the streets and at the thoroughfares, in the market places and on its public buildings and monuments, and especially on its coins the Roman Empire's imperial iconographers displayed imagery that aimed to persuade the Empire's diverse and mostly illiterate inhabitants that Rome had a divinely appointed right to rule the world and to be honoured and celebrated for its dominion. Harry O. Maier places the later, often contested, letters and theology associated with Paul in the social and political context of the Roman Empire's visual culture of politics and persuasion to show how followers of the apostle visualized the reign of Christ in ways consistent with central themes of imperial iconography. They drew on the Empire's picture language to celebrate the dominion and victory of the divine Son, Jesus, to persuade their audiences to honour his dominion with praise and thanksgiving. Key to this imperial embrace were Colossians, Ephesians, and the Pastoral Epistles. Yet these letters remain neglected territory in consideration of engagement with and reflection of imperial political ideals and goals amongst Paul and his followers. This book fills a gap in scholarly work on Paul and Empire by taking up each contested letter in turn to investigate how several of its main themes reflect motifs found in imperial images.

Empire of Pictures
Empire of Pictures

Author: Sönke Kunkel

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2015-12-01

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1782388435

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In Cold War historiography, the 1960s are often described as a decade of mounting diplomatic tensions and international social unrest. At the same time, they were a period of global media revolution: communication satellites compressed time and space, television spread around the world, and images circulated through print media in expanding ways. Examining how U.S. policymakers exploited these changes, this book offers groundbreaking international research into the visual media battles that shaped America's Cold War from West Germany and India to Tanzania and Argentina.

Visions of War
Visions of War

Author: David D. Perlmutter

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2014-05-27

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 1466872500

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Visions of War provides a historical survey, an anatomy, an interpretation, and a polemic about the ways human beings have created pictures of battle and conflict from the Stone Age to the Gulf War. From the dawn of time to the present, from the days of mammoth hunting to the era of Scud-busting, pictures of war constitute the most persistent genre of images human beings have created. In fact, human beings are the only creatures who engage in these two activities--organized violence and the making of pictorial images--and the author shows how both art and war emerge from the same source: the hunter's eye. David D. Perlmutter's Visions of War explores and analyzes the thirteen thousand-year legacy of pictures of war from various cultures over the centuries, from the Stone Age cave paintings and monumental sculpture of the ancient Near East to the art of the classical period and the Middle Ages, from pre-contact Mesoamerican imagery to Napoleonic propaganda and totalitarian art and on to the instantaneous images of the Gulf War.

Picturing the Bible
Picturing the Bible

Author: Jeffrey Spier

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 9780300116830

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition organized by the Kimbell Art Museum and shown there November 18, 2007 - March 30, 2008.

Picturing India
Picturing India

Author: John McAleer

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2017-10-03

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0295744502

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The British engagement with India was an intensely visual one. Images of the subcontinent, produced by artists and travelers in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century heyday of the East India Company, reflect the increasingly important role played by the Company in Indian life. And they mirror significant shifts in British policy and attitudes toward India. The Company’s story is one of wealth, power, and the pursuit of profit. It changed what people in Europe ate, what they drank, and how they dressed. Ultimately, it laid the foundations of the British Raj. Few historians have considered the visual sources that survive and what they tell us about the link between images and empire, pictures and power. This book draws on the unrivalled riches of the British Library—both visual and textual—to tell that history. It weaves together the story of individual images, their creators, and the people and events they depict. And, in doing so, it presents a detailed picture of the Company and its complex relationship with India, its people and cultures.

A People's History of American Empire
A People's History of American Empire

Author: Howard Zinn

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2008-04

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780805087444

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Adapted from the critically acclaimed chronicle of U.S. history, a study of American expansionism around the world is told from a grassroots perspective and provides an analysis of important events from Wounded Knee to Iraq.