This innovative collection demonstrates the profound effects of feeling on our experiences and understanding of photography. It includes essays on the tactile nature of photos, the relation of photography to sentiment and intimacy, and the ways that affect pervades the photographic archive. Concerns associated with the affective turn-intimacy, alterity, and ephemerality, as well as queerness, modernity, and loss-run through the essays. At the same time, the contributions are informed by developments in critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and feminist theory. As the contributors bring affect theory to bear on photography, some interpret the work of contemporary artists, such as Catherine Opie, Tammy Rae Carland, Christian Boltanski, Marcelo Brodsky, Zoe Leonard, and Rea Tajiri. Others look back, whether to the work of the American Pictorialist F. Holland Day or to the discontent masked by the smiles of black families posing for cartes de visite in a Kodak marketing campaign. With more than sixty photographs, including twenty in color, this collection changes how we see, think about, and feel photography, past and present.

Contributors. Elizabeth Abel, Elspeth H. Brown, Kimberly Juanita Brown, Lisa Cartwright, Lily Cho, Ann Cvetkovich, David L. Eng, Marianne Hirsch, Thy Phu, Christopher Pinney, Marlis Schweitzer, Dana Seitler, Tanya Sheehan, Shawn Michelle Smith, Leo Spitzer, Diana Taylor


About the Author
Elspeth H. Brown is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929.

Thy Phu is Associate Professor of English at Western University in London, Ontario. She is the author of Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture.

Reviews
"I found it a fascinating read. To my knowledge, the book is unique in its coverage of this perspective on photography, and I would recommend this book for anyone interested in photography and visual culture on a theoretical level. Very useful for undergraduate and graduate studies in fine arts, visual culture, gender studies, and, obviously, photography." -- Sandra Cowan * ARLIS/NA Reviews *
"The collection offers some very useful ways of thinking about the emerging field of affect theory and its applications to the broad domain of photography. ... [Brown and Phu's] anthology ... substantially broadens the terrain beyond photojournalism and documentary-currently, the core concerns of the literature on photography and the affective turn." -- Susan Best * CAA Reviews *
"Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu's Feeling Photography is an exciting contribution to the field of photography theory.... This collection will be of interest to a very wide range of scholars in the humanities, and not just those that study photography - the book offers a range of ways to think about the function of photography as it often exists unanalyzed at the margins of a variety of social and cultural phenomena." -- Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst * Reviews in Cultural Theory *
"This volume presents a significant contribution to photographic criticism and affect theory, adding to recent scholarship...the collection will be of interest to researchers of affect, visual culture and media, with relevance to documentary film." -- Emily Bullock * Media International Australia *
"It's visual studies and affect theory in one space, and with contributors like Kimberly Juanita Brown, Ann Cvetkovich, and Dana Seitler, it's a powerhouse collection." -- Melissa Chadburn * Literary Hub *



Book Information
ISBN 9780822355410
Author Elspeth H. Brown
Format Paperback
Page Count 408
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 771g