By carefully conceptualising the domestic in relation to the self and the photographic, this book offers a unique contribution to both photography theory and criticism, and life-narrative studies. Jane Simon brings together two critical practices into a new conversation, arguing that artists who harness domestic photography can advance a more expansive understanding of the autobiographical. Exploring the idea that self-representation need not equate to self-portraiture or involve the human form, artists from around the globe are examined, including Rinko Kawauchi, Catherine Opie, Dayanita Singh, Moyra Davey, and Elina Brotherus, who maintain a personal gaze at domestic detail. By treating the representation of interiors, domestic objects, and the very practice of photographic seeing and framing as autobiographical gestures, this book reframes the relationship between interiors and exteriors, public and private, and insists on the importance of domestic interiors to understandings of the self and photography. The book will be of interest to scholars working in photographic history and theory, art history, and visual studies.

This study presents the history of the Market Photo Workshop (MPW) in Johannesburg and works produced by its new generation of photography students. Founded in 1989 by internationally renowned documentary photographer David Goldblatt, the MPW has reflected upon South African political struggles and sociocultural changes since its creation. Its foundation parallels a moment in time when photography was considered a ‘truth telling’ genre and an essential source of documents deployed against the apartheid regime. This book reflects on the evolution of the MPW in the post-apartheid era and explores how its new generation of students engages the photographic tradition of this institution and the revolutionary times that accompanied its creation to question their present moment. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, photography, African studies, cultural studies and post-colonial studies.

Through a series of case studies from the mid-eighteenth century to the start of the twenty-first, this collection of essays considers the historical insights that ethno/auto/biographical investigations into the lives of individuals, groups and interiors can offer design and architectural historians. Established scholars and emerging researchers shed light on the methodological issues that arise from the use of these sources to explore the history of the interior as a site in which everyday life is experienced and performed, and the ways in which contemporary architects and interior designers draw on personal and collective histories in their practice. Historians and theorists working within a range of disciplinary contexts and historiographical traditions are turning to biography as means of exploring and accounting for social, cultural and material change - and this volume reflects that turn, representing the fields of architectural and design history, social history, literary history, creative writing and design practice. Topics include masters and servants in eighteenth-century English kitchens; the lost interiors of Oscar Wilde's 'House Beautiful'; Elsa Schiaparelli's Surrealist spaces; Jean Genet, outlaws, and the interiors of marginality; and architect Lina Bo Bardi's 'Glass House', S?Paulo, Brazil.

This edited collection explores the complex ways in which photography is used and interpreted: as a record of evidence, as a form of communication, as a means of social and political provocation, as a mode of surveillance, as a narrative of the self, and as an art form. What makes photographic images unsettling and how do the re-uses and interpretations of photographic images unsettle the self-evident reality of the visual field? Taking up these themes, this book examines the role of photography as a revelatory medium underscored by its complex association with history, memory, experience and identity.

In this book, Osborne demonstrates why and how photography as photography has survived and flourished since the rise of digital processes, when many anticipated its dissolution into a generalised system of audio-visual representations or its collapse under the relentless overload of digital imagery. He examines how photography embodies, contributes to, and even in effect critiques how the contemporary social world is now imagined, how it is made present and how the concept and the experience of the Present itself is produced. Osborne bases his discussions primarily in cultural studies and visual cultural studies. Through an analysis of different kinds of photographic work in distinct contexts, he demonstrates how aspects of photography that once appeared to make it vulnerable to redundancy turn out to be the basis of its survival and have been utilised by much important photographic work of the last three decades.

"An essential guide."--Seattle Post-Intelligencer