Throughout Germany’s tumultuous twentieth century, photography was an indispensable form of documentation. Whether acting as artists, witnesses, or reformers, both professional and amateur photographers chronicled social worlds through successive periods of radical upheaval. The Ethics of Seeing brings together an international group of scholars to explore the complex relationship between the visual and the historic in German history. Emphasizing the transformation of the visual arena and the ways in which ordinary people made sense of world events, these revealing case studies illustrate photography’s multilayered role as a new form of representation, a means to subjective experience, and a fresh mode of narrating the past.

Seeing Whole: Toward an Ethics and Ecology of Sight explores the ways in which seeing as an embodied process is always a multivalent, ambiguous, and holistic undertaking. Looking at an image entails the mobilization of a range of affordances that together produce sight and insight as a phenomenological experience, namely cultural predispositions, geographical situatedness, medium specificity, personal biography, socio-political relationality, and corporeal affectibility. In their own diverse ways, the essays in this book suggest that acts of seeing make up a visual ecology that, in turn, introduces a new ethical horizon distinct from, but in continuous interaction with ,conventional ethics. Spanning a great variety of media forms – from painting and photography to film, video, literature, fashion, graffiti, and installation art – this interdisciplinary collection offers a thorough reconceptualization of the relation between the aesthetics and the ethics of images and represents an innovative addition to the field of visual culture studies.

An indispensable guide to visual ethics, this book addresses the need for critical thinking and ethical behavior among students and professionals responsible for a variety of mass media visual messages. Written for an ever-growing discipline, authors Paul Martin Lester, Stephanie A. Martin, and Martin Rodden-Smith give serious ethical consideration to the complex field of visual communication. The book covers the definitions and uses of six philosophies, analytical methods, cultural awareness, visual reporting, documentary, citizen journalists, advertising, public relations, typography, graphic design, data visualizations, cartoons, motion pictures, television, computers and the web, augmented and virtual reality, social media, the editing process, and the need for empathy. At the end of each chapter are case studies for further analysis and interviews with thoughtful practitioners in each field of study, including Steven Heller and Nigel Holmes. This second edition has also been fully revised and updated throughout to reflect on the impact of new and emerging technologies. This book is an important resource for students of photojournalism, photography, filmmaking, media and communication, and visual communication, as well as professionals working in these fields.

"This is quintessential MacCannell. It is quirky, brilliant, profound, and thought provoking. There are new insights on almost every page. A great read." —Edward Bruner, author of Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel "This is an extraordinary, engaging, and provocative work by one of the distinctive leaders in what has become a lively intellectual field. It also speaks to much broader questions about culture, economy, social life, and experience than the touristic – this is powerful social theory in transit." —Don Brenneis, co-editor of Law and Empire in the Pacific “The Ethics of Sightseeing is vintage MacCannell. It draws together topics—some of which have already appeared as separate papers—in an analytical whole in the same way he did in his original 1976 book The Tourist. And like The Tourist, this book is full of brilliant insights drawn from personal experiences, anecdotes, and a wide knowledge of the humanistic and social science literature. It is eye-opening and pushes the boundaries of knowledge and disciplines. It will go well beyond academic and classroom audiences in providing a new twist to cultural studies interpretations of modern society.” —Nelson Graburn, co-editor of Multiculturalism in the New Japan

Ethics and Integrity in Visual Research Methods aims to unpack the multiple considerations for ethics and integrity that accompany research methods involving visual data generation and analysis.

The act of bearing witness can reveal much, but what about the figure of the witness itself? As contemporary culture is increasingly dominated by surveillance, the witness--whether artist, historian, scientist, government official, or ordinary citizen--has become empowered in realms from art to politics. In Seeing Witness, Jane Blocker challenges the implicit authority of witnessing through the examination of a series of contemporary artworks, all of which make the act of witnessing visible, open to inspection and critique.

In this groundbreaking work, Ariella Azoulay thoroughly revises our understanding of the ethical status of photography. It must, she insists, be understood in its inseparability from the many catastrophes of recent history. She argues that photography is a particular set of relations between individuals and the powers that govern them and, at the same time, a form of relations among equals that constrains that power. Anyone, even a stateless person, who addresses others through photographs or occupies the position of a photograph’s addressee, is or can become a member of the citizenry of photography. The crucial arguments of the book concern two groups that have been rendered invisible by their state of exception: the Palestinian noncitizens of Israel and women in Western societies. Azoulay’s leading question is: Under what legal, political, or cultural conditions does it become possible to see and show disaster that befalls those with flawed citizenship in a state of exception? The Civil Contract of Photography is an essential work for anyone seeking to understand the disasters of recent history and the consequences of how they and their victims are represented.