TAMST 210: American Cultures and Perspectives: Class, Ethnicity, Gender, and Race: Searching for photographs
Digital Collections to Search
- Library of Congress Photos, Prints, and Drawings
The Library of Congress has digitized more than 1 million photos and prints. Not all images are open access, but item result pages include a "Rights Advisory" with relevant details.
Print books of photography
Signs of the Times : the visual politics of Jim Crow by
Signs of the Times traces the career of Jim Crow signs--simplified in cultural memory to the "colored/white" labels that demarcated the public spaces of the American South--from their intellectual and political origins in the second half of the nineteenth century through their dismantling by civil rights activists in the 1960s and '70s. In this beautifully written, meticulously researched book, Elizabeth Abel assembles a variegated archive of segregation signs and photographs that translated a set of regional practices into a national conversation about race. Abel also brilliantly investigates the semiotic system through which segregation worked to reveal how the signs functioned in particular spaces and contexts that shifted the grounds of race from the somatic to the social sphere.
Call Number: E185.61 .A164 2010ISBN: 9780520261174Publication Date: 2010
The Urban Spectator by
The Urban Spectator is a lively and utterly fascinating exploration of the ways in which technologies have influenced our collective conception of the American city, as well as our relationship with urban space and architecture. Eric Gordon argues that the city, developing late and in conjunction with a range of modern media, produced a particular way of seeing--what he labels "possessive spectatorship." Lacking the historical rootedness of European cities, the American city was open to individual interpretation, definition, and ownership. Beginning with the White City of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the efforts to commodify the concept city through photography, Gordon shows how the American city has always been a product of the collision between the dominant conceptualization, shaped by contemporary media, and the spectator. From the viewfinder of the Kodak camera, to the public display of early cinema, to the speculative desire of network radio, all the way to machine-age utopianism, nostalgia, and America's "rerun" culture, the city is an amalgam of practice and concept. All of this comes to a head in the "database city" where urban spectatorship takes on the characteristics of a Google search. In new urban developments, the spectator searches, retrieves, and combines urban references to construct each experience of the city.
Call Number: HT121 .G67 2010ISBN: 9781584658030Publication Date: 2010
The Corporate Eye by
In the late nineteenth century, corporate managers began to rely on photography for everything from motion studies to employee selection to advertising. This practice gave rise to many features of modern industry familiar to us today: consulting, "scientific" approaches to business practice, illustrated advertising, and the use of applied psychology. In this imaginative study, Elspeth H. Brown examines the intersection of photography as a mass technology with corporate concerns about efficiency in the Progressive period. Discussing, among others, the work of Frederick W. Taylor, Eadweard Muybridge, Frank Gilbreth, and Lewis Hine, Brown explores this intersection through a variety of examples, including racial discrimination in hiring, the problem of photographic realism, and the gendered assumptions at work in the origins of modern marketing. She concludes that the goal uniting the various forms and applications of photographic production in that era was the increased rationalization of the modern economy through a set of interlocking managerial innovations, technologies that sought to redesign not only industrial production but the modern subject as well.
Call Number: TR581 .B76 2005ISBN: 0801880998Publication Date: 2005
Shadows of a Fleeting World by
Pictorialism emerged in the early twentieth century as a prominent style of fine art photography. Artists engaged in this style were interested in the effects of transient light and Japanese compositional elements. They developed innovative darkroom techniques to create unique soft-focus photographs that reflected contemporary painting styles. Historically, pictorial photography was narrowly defined by certain characteristics that gave an inaccurate assessment of its important contributions to the medium. Recent rediscoveries from American regional camera clubs, including the Seattle Camera Club (SCC), reveal that the movement was broader and more individualist than previously thought. Shadows of a Fleeting World provides a rare glimpse into the regional Pictorialist movement. It documents the lives and artistic accomplishments of the SCC photographers. The SCC was one of the most active and successful in the United States, and, fortunately, preservation of its works and history allow for a rich interpretation of its art. Japanese immigrants formed the club's core, and their work routinely blended Pictorialist methods with Japanese aesthetic traditions. The Japanese-influenced Pictorialist works of the SCC made a unique contribution to the international art movement. The book is generously illustrated with images and prints from SCC artists, many of which have never been published before.
Call Number: TR653 .M366 2011ISBN: 9780295990859Publication Date: 2011
American Photography and the American Dream by
James Guimond's powerful study reveals how documentary photographers have expressed or contested the idea of the American Dream throughout the twentieth century. In Guimond's formulation issues like growth, equality, and national identity came under the rubric of the Dream as it has been used to measure how well the nation is living up to its social and political ideals. A pathbreaking book, American Photography and the American Dream examines the most important photographers and developments in the documentary genre during this century. It encompasses the reform-era images of Francis Benjamin Johnston and Lewis Hine; the work of Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange during both the 1930s and 1940s after the FSA photography unit broke up; the American-Way-of-Life pictures published by Life, Look, and the United States Information Agency during the 1940s and 1950s; the iconoclastic images of William Klein, Diane Arbus, and Robert Frank; and the work of four photographers of the 1970s and 1980s: Bill Owens, Chauncey Hare, Susan Meiselas, and Michael Williamson. Guimond pays close attention to the specific historical circumstances in which the pictures were made, to the roles the photographers played in making their images, to their intentions, stated and unstated, and to the original contexts in which the images were published or exhibited. These images, he shows, are not merely pictures on museum walls but revelations that can help us understand how we as Americans have seen ourselves, one another, and the world around us.
Call Number: TR820.5 .G82 1991ISBN: 0807819468Publication Date: 1991
