Nick Waplington was born on Bikini Atol and lives and works in London. The Indecisive Memento is his fifth book, previous titles include Safety In Numbers 1997 and Other Edens 1993. He is currently riding his unicycle from London to Beijing to hightlight the plight of paparazzi photographers whose livelihood is being threatened by the advent of digital technology and overzealous protectionist new legislation.
Is the American West in Sergio Leone?s ?spaghetti westerns? the same American West we find in Douglas Coupland?s Generation X? In Jim Jarmusch?s movies? In Calexico?s music? Or is the American West, as this book tells us, a constantly moving, mutating idea within a complex global culture? And what, precisely (or better yet, imprecisely) does it mean? ø Using Gilles Deleuze and Fälix Guattari?s concept of the rhizome, Neil Campbell shows how the West (or west-ness) continually breaks away from a mainstream notion of American ?rootedness? and renews and transforms itself in various cultural forms. A region long traversed by various transient peoples (from tribes and conquerors to immigrants, traders, and trappers), the West reflects a mythic quest for settlement, permanence, and synthesis?even notions of a national or global identity?at odds with its rootless history, culture, and nature. Crossing the concept of ?roots? with ?routes,? this book shows how notions of the West?in representations ranging from literature and film to photography, music, and architectural theory?give expression to ideas about identity, nationhood, and belonging in a world increasingly defined by movement across time and borders. The Rhizomatic West offers a new vision of the American West as a hybrid, performative space, a staging place for myriad intersecting and constantly changing identities.
New media, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, cybernetics: are the latest technologies push back the very limits of 'reality'. The nature of the real in the digital age is ever more hotly debated and the place of these debates in visual culture can hardly be overstated. Innovative and provocative, this book brings together the latest research on 'the state of the real' by practitioners and commentators across the disciplines of photography, film, media studies, critical theory and fine art. Engaging with the work of critics and thinkers as varied as Linda Nochlin, Lev Manovich and Donna Harroway, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Barthes, "The State of the Real" looks first at the different ways in which 'realism' and reality have been understood in recent art history, with a particular focus on debates about the real within photography. Emphasising the role of art in shaping, as well as reflecting, notions of the real, the book features contributions from a number of contemporary artists and showcases a new photoessay by artist Andrew Lee. The collection looks finally towards advanced technologies and the virtual world in a section which concludes with a specially commissioned contribution by acclaimed thinker Slavoj Zizek. This is an indispensable volume for students of 'the digital age' across the fields of art and photography, film, media studies and critical and visual theory.
Fiction. Daniel King's short story collection cycles through the shadowy landscapes of death, gnarled relationships, the slippery side of human nature, even the contemporary lure of cosmetic surgery pushed to a surprising extreme. Philosophically pointed with a surreal bite, the characters of these stories wrestle with existence and each other as profound questions scatter them. King's stories have been widely published and praised in Australia and overseas, and this compilation was Highly Commended in the 2010 Interactive Publications Picks Award for Best Fiction.
Celebrating its 15th anniversary as America's premiere journal of the trendy and hip, "Paper" issues the ultimate guide to the icons, people, threads and sounds of the past two decades. 200 photos, 150 in color.
Cities and Photography discusses the relationship between people and the city, visualized in photographs. It explores how photographs display attitudes, agency and vision in the way a city is documented and imagined. It provides a visually focused examination of the city and urbanism for a range of different disciplines - across the social sciences and humanities, photography and fine art. This book offers different perspectives from which to view social, political and cultural ideas about the city. It provides introductions to the theories useful to photographers addressing issues relating to urbanism, and to key photographic themes that inform cultural issues central to a discussion of urbanism (e.g. the street, the everyday, social conditions). A series of case studies, featuring international and contemporary photographic projects, provides a means with which to examine a range of issues, for example: regeneration and displacement, power and the institution, visions of modernity and post-modernity, psycho-geographical space. Cities and Photography interprets the city as a space that we inhabit on different conceptual and physical levels, and gives emphasis to how people operate within, relate to, and activate the city via construction, habitation and disruption.
