Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography

DOWNLOAD

Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography

by John Hannavy

Supported by an international board of advisors and contributors, editor Hannavy has produced an impressive and authoritative, albeit somewhat expensive, resource encompassing the photographers, techniques, equipment, theories, literature, exhibitions, history, and organizations involved in photography during its early development. There are also regional and country overviews. Along with the alphabetical list of entries, entries are grouped into 12 thematic areas: “Companies,” “Formats,” etc. Entry length ranges “from shorter 200 word entries that provide snapshots of photographic figures and other key elements of nineteenth century photography to large, 5,000 word entries that provide detailed, analytical scholarship.” Some 850 of the approximately 1,200 signed entries treat people—photographers, inventors, patrons, and critics. Many entries have see also and further-reading references. Both volumes contain the detailed 64-page index. Illustrations are few and far between but do include unique, seldom-seen images. They are not always next to an appropriate entry. The list of contributors does not include their affiliations. This is wonderful set to browse as well as to search for information on the obscure as well as the famous photographers of the period. Information sometimes refers back to photography’s predecessors and forward to lives that extended into the twentieth century. As with any large, comprehensive work, there is missing information, which some readers will notice. When comparing the finished work with the planned list of entries published in 2005, it is apparent that some did not attract contributors, others were added, and editorial decisions were made, as the planned one volume grew to two substantial ones. However, the wealth of information found here, and in no comparable work, will be used by photographers (including instructors, experimenters, and students); historians of art, science, and technology; genealogists studying old family images; and interested general readers for many years to come. This a fine reference work deserving inclusion in all libraries having large art/photography collections. --Linda Loos Scarth

Archaeological Chemistry

DOWNLOAD

Archaeological Chemistry

by Mark A. Pollard, Carl Heron (Authors)

Mark Pollard and Carl Heron have set out to produce a text that will bring together an interdisciplinary readership in the fields of chemical conservation, restoration, archaeological excavation, historical provenancing, and chemical analysis. It is perhaps the latter area that will appeal most to chemists, but it must be appreciated that the application of chemical analytical procedures to artefacts and archaeological materials has several unique restraints which demand, in particular, minimal sampling, or preferably non-invasive and non-destructive analysis. These pose major challenges for analytical chemists due to the special nature of the specimens presented.
One of the first chemists to analyze ancient pigments was Sir Humphry Davy, who published his results from the analysis of wall paintings from Pompeii in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1815; this paper stands as the first example of the application of chemical analysis to ancient art and archaeology. Even then, Davy appreciated the fact that his analyses completely destroyed the valuable specimens presented to him. In the 1920s, a seminal study of English porcelains by Eccles and Rackham produced some very important analytical information but again at the expense of the sacrifice of whole items of chinaware, such as plates, cups and saucers. These analytical protocols would just not be acceptable today.
Many of these aspects are addressed in this book and it will provide a fascinating introduction to experienced analytical chemists interested in applications of their techniques in new areas. It will also be a source book for experienced archaeologists and conservators who are interested in information about the use of ancient materials and their degradation in the depositional environment using modern analytical techniques. This book is also highly recommended for students across a range of chemistry and archaeological science degree courses.

Nazi Cinema as Enchantment

DOWNLOAD

Nazi Cinema as Enchantment: The Politics of Entertainment in the Third Reich (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

by Mary-Elizabeth O'Brien

ReviewO'Brien carries the reader into the world of Babelsberg, the German Hollywood, where the reader sees Nazi filmmaking as a form of amusement that carries the Nazi message. CHOICE The readings are integrated within a larger, compelling argument about the function of entertainment within the framework of Nazi culture so that the focus convincingly broadens the understanding of the complexities in this crucial period of German film history. MONATSHEFTE O'Brien's book is the product of extensive archival research and provides numerous services to the reader... (Her) readings convincingly show how films not generally viewed as propaganda films were produced with explicit ideological goals in mind. GERMAN QUARTERLY clearly structured, ... the film interpretations are embedded in well-summarized historical contexts.... The book's eminent readability makes it enjoyable and accessible to the non-specialist. GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW Product DescriptionHitler's regime not only terrorized its citizens; it also seduced them, offering stability, a traditional value system, a sense of belonging, and hope of a better standard of living. Nazi cinema was part of this seduction, expressing positive social fantasies and promoting the enchantment of reality, so that one would want to share in the dream at any price. This interdisciplinary study, based on exhaustive research in German archives, examines how thirteen films from five genres -- the historical musical, the foreign adventure film, the home-front film, the melodrama, and the problem film -- enchanted audiences and enacted shared stories that can tell us much about how family, community, history, the nation, and the war were imagined in Nazi Germany. MARY-ELIZABETH O'BRIEN is associate professor of German at Skidmore College.

The Opera Lover's Companion

DOWNLOAD

The Opera Lover's Companion

by Charles Osborne

Review"'A loving and expert guide to the great operas in the repertoire, written from many years of experience. A must for all opera lovers young and old. I love it.' Dame Joan Sutherland 'An erudite, instructive and unpretentious guide.' Michael Kennedy, The Sunday Telegraph 'This book is exactly what the title claims: an opera lover's companion. Reading it is like going to the opera with a knowledgeable friend who tells you enough to make you want to see the piece but not so much you're drowned in superfluous detail.' Richard Fawkes, Opera Now" Review
"A loving and expert guide to the great operas in the repertoire, written from many years of experience. A must for all opera lovers young and old. I love it."—DAME JOAN SUTHERLAND

Walter Benjamin - The Arcades Project

DOWNLOAD

The Arcades Project

by Walter Benjamin

"Quite simply, the Passagen-Werk is one of the twentieth century's great efforts at historical comprehension--some would say the greatest." --T. J. Clark, author of The Painting of Modern Life The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin "To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas." Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris--glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age. The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

Herzog on Herzog

DOWNLOAD

Herzog on Herzog

by Paul Cronin (Editor), Werner Herzog (Author)

An invaluable set of career-length interviews with the German genius hailed by François Truffaut as “the most important film director alive”Most of what we’ve heard about Werner Herzog is untrue. The sheer number of false rumors and downright lies disseminated about the man and his films is truly astonishing. Yet Herzog’s body of work is one of the most important in postwar European cinema.His international breakthrough came in 1973 with Aguirre, The Wrath of God, in which Klaus Kinski played a crazed Conquistador. For The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Herzog cast in the lead a man who had spent most of his life institutionalized, and two years later he hypnotized his entire cast to make Heart of Glass. He rushed to an explosive volcanic Caribbean island to film La Soufrière, paid homage to F. W. Murnau in a terrifying remake of Nosferatu, and in 1982 dragged a boat over a mountain in the Amazon jungle for Fitzcarraldo. More recently, Herzog has made extraordinary “documentary” films such as Little Dieter Needs to Fly. His place in cinema history is assured, and Paul Cronin’s volume of dialogues provides a forum for Herzog’s fascinating views on the things, ideas, and people that have preoccupied him for so many years.

A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama

DOWNLOAD

A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama (Concise Companions to Literature and Culture)

by Nadine Holdsworth, Mary Luckhurst (Editors)

Focusing on major and emerging playwrights, institutions, and various theatre practices this Concise Companion examines the key issues in British and Irish theatre since 1979. Written by leading international scholars in the field, this collection offers new ways of thinking about the social, political, and cultural contexts within which specific aspects of British and Irish theatre have emerged and explores the relationship between these contexts and the works produced. The collection analyses key issues such as globalization, genocide, migration, and national identity, forms such as verbatim theatre and site-specific performance, the use of new technologies, and the practice of physical theatre. It investigates why particular issues and practices have emerged as significant in the theatre of this period.

Artists in Exile

DOWNLOAD

Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts

by Joseph Horowitz

Decades of war and revolution in Europe forced an "intellectual migration" during the last century, relocating thousands of artists and thinkers to the United States. For many of Europe's premier performing artists, America proved to be a destination both strange and opportune.
Featuring the stories of George Balanchine, Kurt Weill, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and many others, Artists in Exile explores the impact that these famous newcomers had on American culture, and that America had on them.

Contesting the Logic of Painting

DOWNLOAD

Contesting the Logic of Painting (Visualising the Middle Ages) [ILLUSTRATED]

by C.E. Barber

Drawing on a range of philosophical and theological writings produced in eleventh-century Byzantium, this book offers a reading of the icon and Byzantine aesthetics that not only expands our understanding of these topics but challenges our assumptions about the work of art itself.

Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography

DOWNLOAD

Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography

by Lynne Warren

Product DescriptionPhotography is an international cultural form, practice, and profession. Encompassing art, advertising, journalism, fashion, commercial, political, and everyday photography, the field of photography also includes chemical processes, mechanical inventions, equipment, industries, movements, techniques, terms and concepts. In addition, photography has a considerable presence in public forums of all kinds, such as museums, archives, galleries, and publications.The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography brings together this rich history in three volumes. It explores the vast international scope of twentieth-century photography and explains that history with a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary manner. This unique approach covers the aesthetic history of photography as an evolving art and documentary form, while also recognizing it as a developing technology and cultural force. This three volume Encyclopedia presents the important developments, movements, photographers, photographic institutions, and theoretical aspects of the field along with information about equipment, techniques, and practical applications of photography. To bring this history alive for the reader, the set is illustrated in black and white throughout, and each volume contains a color plate section. A useful glossary of terms is also included.

Fredric Jameson The Modernist Papers

DOWNLOAD

The Modernist Papers

by Fredric Jameson

Fredric Jameson, one of America's finest cultural critics, offers his dynamic insight into modernist literature and art. A companion to the classic A Singular Modernity, this stunning tour de force looks at the innovative literary experiments of Joyce and Proust, the poetry of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein and the writing of Kafka, Mann and Mallarmé, to provide a distinct perspective on the culture of new beginnings and avant-garde endeavors.

Underground Humour in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945

DOWNLOAD

Underground Humour in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945

by Dr Hillenbrand

Underground Humour in Nazi Germany: 1933-1945, F. K. M. Hillenbrand compiles a collection of jokes, stories and cartoons representing covert popular opposition which took humorous form. Even this was dangerous, as an ill-judged moment of wit could lead to the camps; but the Nazis themselves recognized the impossibility of stopping anti-Nazi jokes.Although wonderfully entertaining, Underground Humour in Nazi Germany:1933-45 is not a joke book, but a serious study of the uses of humor and word play, supplemented always with full translations and explanations when a joke is retold. Hillebrand explains not only how humor could be used subversively in the Third Reich, but also suggests the ways that people resist under any totalitarian conditions, not exclusively Nazi Germany.

Greek Comedy and Ideology

DOWNLOAD

Greek Comedy and Ideology

by David Konstan

In comedy, happy endings resolve real-world conflicts. These conflicts, in turn, leave their mark on the texts in the form of gaps in plot and inconsistencies of characterization. Greek Comedy and Ideology analyzes how the structure of ancient Greek comedy betrays and responds to cultural tensions in the society of the classical city-state. It explores the utopian vision of Aristophanes' comedies--for example, an all-powerful city inhabited by birds, or a world of limitless wealth presided over by the god of wealth himself--as interventions in the political issues of his time. David Konstan goes on to examine the more private world of Menandrean comedy (including two adaptations of Menander by the Roman playwright Terence), in which problems of social status, citizenship, and gender are negotiated by means of elaborately contrived plots. In conclusion, Konstan looks at an imitation of ancient comedy by Moliere, and the way in which the ideology of emerging capitalism transforms the premises of the classical genre.

Myth and Metamorphosis: Picasso's Classical Prints of the 1930s

DOWNLOAD

Myth and Metamorphosis: Picasso's Classical Prints of the 1930s

by Lisa Florman

Previous studies of Picasso's involvement with the classical have tended to concentrate on the period immediately following the First World War, and to attribute that involvement to both the rise of political conservatism in France and the domesticating influence of the artist's marriage to Olga Koklova. Focusing instead on the later, classicizing prints of the 1930s, this book offers a radically different view of Picasso and the "classical"--a view that aligns his work much more closely with Surrealist, and specifically Bataillean, revisions of antiquity. The book's argument is built around detailed analyses of several separate print series: Picasso's illustrations for Ovid's Metamorphoses, the etchings of the Vollard Suite, and The Minotauromachy. Common to all of them, the book shows, is a strong engagement not only with the classical, but with the viewer. In the latter, Picasso's prints are clearly at odds with the understanding of the relationship between classical art and its audience that prevailed throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--an understanding that held the work's purported autonomy to mirror the viewer's own. By exposing that autonomy as a fantasy, Picasso opens the "classical" work and its viewer alike to the entanglements of desire and the dissolution of boundaries it inevitably brings. Much of the argument turns on close readings of key Surrealist texts by Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, and Roger Caillois. Even more important, however, are the prints' numerous references, heretofore unnoticed, to specific works by, among others, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Goya. These references effectively create an alternative "classical" tradition out of which Picasso's etchings can be seen to have emerged.

The Geometry of Modernism

DOWNLOAD

The Geometry of Modernism: The Vorticist Idiom in Lewis, Pound, H.D., and Yeats (Literary Modernism Series)

by Miranda B. Hickman

Addressing both the literature and the visual arts of Anglo-American modernism, The Geometry of Modernism recovers a crucial development of modernism's early years that until now has received little sustained critical attention: the distinctive idiom composed of geometric forms and metaphors generated within the early modernist movement of Vorticism, formed in London in 1914. Focusing on the work of Wyndham Lewis, leader of the Vorticist movement, as well as Ezra Pound, H.D., and William Butler Yeats, Hickman examines the complex of motives out of which Lewis initially forged the geometric lexicon of Vorticism—and then how Pound, H.D., and Yeats later responded to it and the values that it encoded, enlisting both the geometric vocabulary and its attendant assumptions and ideals, in transmuted form, in their later modernist work.
Placing the genesis and appropriation of the geometric idiom in historical context, Hickman explores how despite its brevity as a movement, Vorticism in fact exerted considerable impact on modernist work of the years between the wars, in that its geometric idiom enabled modernist writers to articulate their responses to both personal and political crises of the 1930s and 1940s. Informed by extensive archival research as well as treatment of several of the least-known texts of the modernist milieu, The Geometry of Modernism clarifies and enriches the legacy of this vital period.

Agamemnon in Performance: 458 BC to AD 2004

DOWNLOAD

Agamemnon in Performance: 458 BC to AD 2004

by Fiona Macintosh, Pantelis Michelakis, Edith Hall, Oliver Taplin (Editors)

Aeschylus' Agamemnon, the first play in the Oresteia trilogy, is one of the most influential theatrical texts in the global canon. In performance, translation, adaptation, along with sung and danced interpretations, it has been familiar in the Greek world and the Roman empire, and from the Renaissance to the contemporary stage. It has been central to the aesthetic and intellectual avant-garde as well as to radical politics of all complexions and to feminist thinking. Contributors to this interdisciplinary collection of eighteen essays on its performance history include classical scholars, theatre historians, and experts in English and comparative literature. All Greek and Latin has been translated; the book is generously illustrated, and supplemented with the useful research aid of a chronological appendix of performances.

The Arcades Project - Walter Benjamin

DOWNLOAD

The Arcades Project

by Walter Benjamin

"Quite simply, the Passagen-Werk is one of the twentieth century's great efforts at historical comprehension--some would say the greatest." --T. J. Clark, author of The Painting of Modern Life The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin "To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas." Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris--glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age. The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

A Handbook of Ornament

DOWNLOAD

A Handbook of Ornament

by Franz, Sales Meyer

From simple patterns to the most intricate ornamentation, hand-drawn decoration was a vital part of 19th-century design. Originally published in 1888, this beautiful and highly detailed volume collects over 3000 examples of contemporary decorative figures, including designs inspired by oriental tiling, heraldic pomp and the sinuous curves of Art Nouveau. Covering the full range from basic geometric patterns and borders to complex, lifelike renderings of natural forms, Franz Sales Meyer's clear line drawings provide both guidance for the drawing student and a fascinating treasury of period decoration.

William Faulkner and the Tangible Past: The Architecture of Yoknapatawpha

DOWNLOAD

William Faulkner and the Tangible Past: The Architecture of Yoknapatawpha (California Studies in the History of Art)

by Thomas S. Hines

The world of William Faulkner is seen from a new perspective in Thomas Hines's imaginative and many-faceted study. Hines assesses the impact of the built environment on Faulkner's consciousness and shows how the architecture of the writer's fictional county of Yoknapatawpha reflects the actual architecture of Oxford, Mississippi, and neighboring areas. Over 110 distinctive photographs, in both color and black-and-white, beautifully complement the text, making this book both a reading and viewing pleasure. Much has been written on the role of nature in Faulkner's work, but architecture and the built environmentthe opposite of naturehave been virtually ignored. Arguing that nature and architecture are of equal importance in Faulkner's cosmos, Hines examines the writer's use of architectural modes primitive, classical, gothic, and modernto demarcate caste and class, to convey mood and ambience, and to delineate character. Hines provides not only another way of understanding Faulkner's work but also a means of appreciating the power of architecture to reflect what Faulkner called "the comedy and tragedy of being alive." Hines's gifts as an architectural historian and photographer and his intimate knowledge of Faulkner country are evident throughout this handsome book. Combining cultural, intellectual, architectural, and literary history, William Faulkner and the Tangible Past will take Faulkner lovers, as well as lovers of architecture, on a fascinating tour of Yoknapatawpha County.

Mosaics of Hagia Sophia, Istanbul

Download

Mosaics of Hagia Sophia, Istanbul: The Fossati Restoration and the Work of the Byzantine Institute (Dumbarton Oaks Other Titles in Byzantine Studies)

by Natalia B. Teteriatnikov

Drawing on material in the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Photograph and Fieldwork Archives, this catalogue records two periods of work that uncovered the mosaics of Hagia Sophia, hidden by whitewash and plaster for 400 years. The photographs and drawings record the procedures used in the restoration and the results of these projects carried out in 1848-49 by the architects Gaspare and Giuseppe Fossati and later in 1931-49 by the Byzantine Institute.