As the prototypical exemplar of modern visual technology, photography was once viewed as a way to enable vision to bypass imagination, producing more reliable representations of reality. But as an achievement of technological modernity, photography can also be seen as a way to realize a creation of the imagination more vividly than can painting or drawing. Photography and Imagination investigates, from diverse points of view focusing on both theory and practice, the relation between these two terms. The book explores their effect on photography’s capacity, through various forms and modalities of imaginative investments and displacements, to affect even reality itself.

Not much is known about how the coming of photography changed visual discourse or affected people's lives. Through a selection of 32 essays, each illustrated with archival photographs, this volume looks at the camera in the colonial era and in post-independent India to reveal both: history through photographs and the history of photographs in India.

The advent of photography opened up new worlds to 19th century viewers, who were able to visualize themselves and the world beyond in unprecedented detail. But the emphasis on the photography's objectivity masked the subjectivity inherent in deciding what to record, from what angle and when. This text examines this inherent subjectivity. Drawing on photographs that come from personal albums, corporate archives, commercial photographers, government reports and which were produced as art, as record, as data, the work shows how the photography shaped and was shaped by geographical concerns.

"This book results from research which was begun with all the casualness, but inherent seriousness, of the nineteenth-century amateur. I had the privilege of frequent access to the archives of the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House and began to go through the nineteenth-century photographs in a systematic way. I wanted to go beyond the clichés of the history of photography as a series of often-reproduced masterworks and to find out something about the history of seeing, or at least of thinking about, images in the nineteenth century."--Préface.

"For more than forty years, Olivia Parker's poetic and alluring photographs have transformed the everyday and made the familiar strange. In deceptively simple still lives and complex, dreamlike constructions that incorporate a rich variety of found objects, her photographs create unexpected juxtapositions that provoke uncertainty and delight. Parker's longstanding fascination with flux and change extends to her most recent series, a powerful meditation on the devastating loss of her husband to Alzheimer's disease. This volume, the definitive study of Parker's career, includes curator Sarah Kennel's detailed artistic biography and poet and essayist Rachel Hadas's reflections on art's ability to offer solace amidst grief. More than one hundred beautifully illustrated works, many of which are published here for the first time, are accompanied by Parker's lyrical reflections on her art and process. This publication accompanies the exhibition Order of Imagination: The Photographs of Olivia Parker on view at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, from July 13 to November 11, 2019. Formerly The Byrne Family Curator of Photography at the Peabody Essex Museum, Sarah Kennel is the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta"--

A richly illustrated exploration of the imagination in photography featuring the work of over sixty international artists.

Overzicht van het werk van Nederlandse en Belgische fotografen.