From privacy concerns regarding Google Street View to surveillance photography’s association with terrorism and sexual predators, photography as an art has become complex terrain upon which anxieties about public space have been played out. Yet the photographic threat is not limited to the image alone. A range of social, technological and political issues converge in these rising anxieties and affect the practice, circulation, and consumption of contemporary public photography today. The Culture of Photography in Public Space collects essays and photographs that offer a new response to these restrictions, the events and the anxieties that give rise to them.

From privacy concerns regarding Google Street View to surveillance photography s association with terrorism and sexual predators, photography as an art has become complex terrain upon which anxieties about public space have been played out. Yet the photographic threat is not limited to the image alone. A range of social, technological, and political issues converge in these rising anxieties and affect the practice, circulation, and consumption of contemporary public photography today. "The Culture of Photography in Public Space" collects essays and photographs that offer a new response to these restrictions, the events, and the anxieties that give rise to them."

Photography is a ubiquitous part of the public sphere. Yet we rarely stop to think about the important role that photography plays in helping to define what and who constitute the public. Photography and Its Publics brings together leading experts and emerging thinkers to consider the special role of photography in shaping how the public is addressed, seen and represented.This book responds to a growing body of recent scholarship and flourishing interest in photography's connections to the law, society, culture, politics, social change, the media and visual ethics.Photography and Its Publics presents the public sphere as a vibrant setting where these realms are produced, contested and entwined. Public spheres involve yet exceed the limits of families, interest groups, identities and communities. They are dynamic realms of visibility, discussion, reflection and possible conflict among strangers of different race, age, gender, social and economic status. Through studies of photography in South America, North America, Europe and Australasia, the contributors consider how photography has changed the way we understand and locate the public sphere. As they address key themes including the referential and imaginative qualities of photography, the transnational circulation of photographs, online publics, social change, violence, conflict and the ethics of spectatorship, the authors provide new insight into photography's vital role in defining public life.

Examining imagery of urban space in Britain, France and West Germany up to the early 1960s, this book reveals how photography shaped individual architectural projects and national rebuilding efforts alike. Exploring the impact of urban photography at a pivotal moment in contemporary European architecture and culture, this book addresses case studies spanning the destruction of the war to the modernizing reconfiguration of city spaces, including ruin photobooks about bombed cities, architectural photography of housing projects and imagery of urban life from popular photomagazines, as well as internationally renowned projects like UNESCO’s Paris Headquarters, Coventry Cathedral and Berlin’s Gedächtniskirche. This book reveals that the ways of seeing shaped in the postwar years by urban photography were a vital aspect of not only discourses on the postwar city but also debates central to popular culture, from commemoration and modernization to democratization and Europeanization. This book will be a fascinating read for researchers in the fields of photography and visual studies, architectural and urban history, and cultural memory and contemporary European history.

Photography is a ubiquitous part of the public sphere. Yet we rarely stop to think about the important role that photography plays in helping to define what and who constitute the public. Photography and Its Publics brings together leading experts and emerging thinkers to consider the special role of photography in shaping how the public is addressed, seen and represented.This book responds to a growing body of recent scholarship and flourishing interest in photography's connections to the law, society, culture, politics, social change, the media and visual ethics.Photography and Its Publics presents the public sphere as a vibrant setting where these realms are produced, contested and entwined. Public spheres involve yet exceed the limits of families, interest groups, identities and communities. They are dynamic realms of visibility, discussion, reflection and possible conflict among strangers of different race, age, gender, social and economic status. Through studies of photography in South America, North America, Europe and Australasia, the contributors consider how photography has changed the way we understand and locate the public sphere. As they address key themes including the referential and imaginative qualities of photography, the transnational circulation of photographs, online publics, social change, violence, conflict and the ethics of spectatorship, the authors provide new insight into photography's vital role in defining public life.

We typically take public space for granted, as if it has continuously been there, yet public space has always been the expression of the will of some agency (person or institution) who names the space, gives it purpose, and monitors its existence. And often its use has been contested. These new essays, written for this volume, approach public space through several key questions: Who has the right to define public space? How do such places generate and sustain symbolic meaning? Is public space unchanging, or is it subject to our subjective perception? Do we, given the public nature of public space, have the right to subvert it? These eighteen essays, including several case studies, offer convincing evidence of a spatial turn in American studies. They argue for a re-visioning of American culture as a history of place-making and the instantiation of meaning in structures, boundaries, and spatial configurations. Chronologically the subjects range from Pierre L'Enfant's initial majestic conceptualization of Washington, D.C. to the post-modern realization that public space in the U.S. is increasingly a matter of waste. Topics range from parks to cities to small towns, from open-air museums to airports, encompassing the commercial marketing of place as well as the subversion and re-possession of public space by the disenfranchised. Ultimately, public space is variously imagined as the site of social and political contestation and of aesthetic change.

The Handbook of Photography Studies is a state-of-the-art overview of the field of photography studies, examining its thematic interests, dynamic research methodologies and multiple scholarly directions. It is a source of well-informed, analytical and reflective discussions of all the main subjects that photography scholars have been concerned with as well as a rigorous study of the field’s persistent expansion at a time when digital technology regularly boosts our exposure to new and historical photographs alike. Split into five core parts, the Handbook analyzes the field’s histories, theories and research strategies; discusses photography in academic disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts; draws out the main concerns of photographic scholarship; interrogates photography’s cultural and geopolitical influences; and examines photography’s multiple uses and continued changing faces. Each part begins with an introductory text, giving historical contextualization and scholarly orientation. Featuring the work of international experts, and offering diverse examples, insights and discussions of the field’s rich historiography, the Handbook provides critical guidance to the most recent research in photography studies. This pioneering and comprehensive volume presents a systematic synopsis of the subject that will be an invaluable resource for photography researchers and students from all disciplinary backgrounds in the arts, humanities and social sciences.