What Photography Is
James Elkins
Routledge
English
Softcover
240 pages
213 x 138 mm
2011
ISBN 9780415995696
In What Photography Is, James Elkins examines the strange and alluring power of photography in the same provocative and evocative manner as he explored oil painting in his best-selling What Painting Is. In the course of an extended imaginary dialogue with Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Elkins argues that photography is also about meaninglessness–its apparently endless capacity to show us things that we do not want or need to see–and also about pain, because extremely powerful images can sear permanently into our consciousness. Extensively illustrated with a surprising range of images, the book demonstrates that what makes photography uniquely powerful is its ability to express the difficulty–physical, psychological, emotional, and aesthetic–of the act of seeing.
(source: https://www.routledge.com/What-Photography-Is/Elkins/p/book/9780415995696)
About the Author
James Elkins is an American art historian and art critic. He is E.C. Chadbourne Chair of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
(source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Elkins_(art_historian))
About the Publisher
Routledge is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals and online resources in the fields of humanities, behavioural science, education, law, and social science.
routledge.com
(source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Routledge)
