Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video
Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics Details
From Publishers Weekly In her recent book Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag concludes that an aesthetic reaction is part of the viewer's experience of even shots of extreme pain or violence. Written more than 10 years ago, the lead piece of these 18 essays on photography weighs in on aestheticization and also finds that, even in "social documentary" photographs, "aestheticization" is one of the ways that disparate peoples recognize themselves in one another." Yet despite the similar subject matter and terminology, poet and critic Levi Strauss carves out unique and convincing critical terrain in this follow-up to Between Dog and Wolf, his previous collection of critical meditations. Most of these pieces were written during the '90s and published as review essays on the work of Ania Bien, Miguel Rio Branco, Alfredo Jaar, Joel-Peter Witkin, Francesca Woodman and others; also included are an interview with painter Leon Golub (who works from photographs) and an introduction from critical eminence John Berger. "Photography and Propaganda," a study of the work and deaths in '80s Central America of photojournalists Richard Cross and John Hoagland, should be required reading in the age of embeddedness, and "Photography and Belief" is a terrific meditation on truth in the age of digital manipulation, which leads to an investigation of why many people thought images of September 11 "looked like a movie." Thoughtful and firm, these reflections seem more vital than ever. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more About the Author David Levi Strauss is a writer and critic in New York, where his essays and reviews appear regularly in Artforum and Aperture. His collection of essays on art and politics are Between Dog and Wolf and Broken Wings: The Legacy of Landmines. Read more
Reviews
This is a phenomenal book that every photographer should read before even touching a camera again."Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics" by David Levi Strauss is a collection of writings, most of which came out during the '90s to review works by photographers and artists such as Alfredo Jaar, Francesca Woodman, Witkin, Miguel Rio Branco and Ania Bien. The very well argued points that the author makes across the book, range from Photography and Propaganda and the imagery of dreams to Sebastiao Salgado's social documents, all the way to the very personal photographic research that the troubled artist who was Francesca Woodman created in her time. A chapter titled "Photography and Belief" revolves around the issue of photographic legitimacy, while another chapter named "The Highest Degree of Illusion" deals with the media obsession with some major events such as the terrible happenings of September 11th. All of these essays have been published on major outlets around the world, such as Aperture, Artforum and The Nation.I strongly suggest this book for anyone that deals with images, which, nowadays as the book argues, is everyone since we are all navigating through the Pandemonium of photos that we are constantly exposed to. Just like Walter Benjamin's Flaneur who walks the streets of Paris and is flooded by all the visual input of all the shop windows that he sees but that he can't retain, today we are constantly exposed to a visual noise that we very much need to understand how to filter in order to make sense of the images we see. This book is a great way to move the first steps towards such understanding that can lead us to a more informed processing of the visual world.