The Routledge Companion to Photography and Visual Culture is a seminal reference source for the ever-changing field of photography. Comprising an impressive range of essays and interviews by experts and scholars from across the globe, this book examines the medium’s history, its central issues and emerging trends, and its much-discussed future. The collected essays and interviews explore the current debates surrounding the photograph as object, art, document, propaganda, truth, selling tool, and universal language; the perception of photography archives as burdens, rather than treasures; the continual technological development reshaping the field; photography as a tool of representation and control, and more. One of the most comprehensive volumes of its kind, this companion is essential reading for photographers and historians alike.

Including work by leading scholars, artists, scientists and practitioners in the field of visual culture, The Routledge Companion to Photography, Representation and Social Justice is a seminal reference source for the new roles and contexts of photography in the twenty-first century. Bringing together a diverse set of contributions from across the globe, the volume explores current debates surrounding post-colonial thinking, empowerment, identity, contemporary modes of self-representation, diversity in the arts, the automated creation and use of imagery in science and industry, vernacular imagery and social media platforms and visual mechanisms for control and manipulation in the age of surveillance capitalism and deep fakes, as well as the role of imagery in times of crisis, such as pandemics, wars and climate change. The analysis of these complex themes will be anchored in existing theoretical frameworks but also include new ways of thinking about social justice and representation and how to cope with our daily image tsunami. Individual chapters bring together a diverse set of contributions, featuring essays, interviews, conversations and case studies by artists, scientists, curators, scholars, medical doctors, astrophysicists and social activists, who all share a strong interest in how lens-based media have shaped our world in recent years. Expanding on contemporary debates within the field, the Companion is essential reading for photographers, scholars and students alike.

With newly commissioned essays by some of the leading writers on photography today, this companion tackles some of the most pressing questions about photography theory’s direction, relevance, and purpose. This book shows how digital technologies and global dissemination have radically advanced the pluralism of photographic meaning and fundamentally transformed photography theory. Having assimilated the histories of semiotic analysis and post-structural theory, critiques of representation continue to move away from the notion of original and copy and towards materiality, process, and the interdisciplinary. The implications of what it means to ‘see’ an image is now understood to encompass, not only the optical, but the conceptual, ethical, and haptic experience of encountering an image. The 'fractal' is now used to theorize the new condition of photography as an algorithmic medium and leads us to reposition our relationship to photographs and lend nuances to what essentially underlies any photography theory — that is, the relationship of the image to the real world and how we conceive what that means. Diverse in its scope and themes, The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory is an indispensable collection of essays and interviews for students, researchers, and teachers. The volume also features extensive images, including beautiful colour plates of key photographs.

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.

This book uses intermedial theories to study collage and montage, tracing the transformation of visual collage into photomontage in the early avant-garde period. Magda Dragu distinguishes between the concepts of collage and montage, as defined across several media (fine arts, literature, music, film, photography), based on the type of artistic meaning they generate, rather than the mechanical procedures involved. The book applies theories of intermediality to collage and montage, which is crucial for understanding collage as a form of cultural production. Throughout, the author considers the political implications, as collages and montages were often used for propagandistic purposes. This book combines research methods used in several areas of inquiry: art history, literary criticism, analytical philosophy, musicology, and aesthetics.

In this companion, a diverse, international and interdisciplinary group of contributors and editors examine the rapidly expanding, far-reaching field of mobile media as it intersects with art across a range of spaces—theoretical, practical and conceptual. As a vehicle for—and of—the everyday, mobile media is recalibrating the relationship between art and digital networked media, and reshaping how creative practices such as writing, photography, video art and filmmaking are being conceptualized and practised. In exploring these innovations, The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Art pulls together comprehensive, culturally nuanced and interdisciplinary approaches; considerations of broader media ecologies and histories and political, social and cultural dynamics; and critical and considered perspectives on the intersections between mobile media and art. This book is the definitive publication for researchers, artists and students interested in comprehending all the various aspects of mobile media art, covering digital media and culture, internet studies, games studies, anthropology, sociology, geography, media and communication, cultural studies and design.

This companion demonstrates how art, craft, and visual culture education activate social imagination and action that is equity- and justice-driven. Specifically, this book provides arts-engaged, intersectional understandings of decolonization in the contemporary art world that cross disciplinary lines. Visual and traditional essays in this book combine current scholarship with pragmatic strategies and insights grounded in the reality of socio-cultural, political, and economic communities across the globe. Across three sections (creative shorts, enacted encounters, and ruminative research), a diverse group of authors address themes of histories, space and land, mind and body, and the digital realm. Chapters highlight and illustrate how artists, educators, and researchers grapple with decolonial methods, theories, and strategies—in research, artmaking, and pedagogical practice. Each chapter includes discursive questions and resources for further engagement with the topics at hand. The book is targeted towards scholars and practitioners of art education, studio art, and art history, K-12 art teachers, as well as artist educators and teaching artists in museums and communities.

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.

As a coherent field of research, the field of music and visual culture has seen rapid growth in recent years. The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture serves as the first comprehensive reference on the intersection between these two areas of study, an ideal introduction for those coming to the field for the first time as well as a useful source of information for seasoned researchers. This collection of over forty entries, from musicologists and art historians from the US and UK, delineate the key concepts in the field in five parts: Starting Points Methodologies Reciprocation – the musical in visual culture and the visual in musical culture Convergence –in metaphor, in conception, and in practice Hybrid Arts This reference work speaks to the important questions concerning this burgeoning field of research –what are the established approaches to studying musical and visual cultures side by side? What have been the major points of contact between these two areas and what kind of questions can this interdisciplinary research address moving forward? The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture is an indispensable guide for anyone interested in the field of music and visual culture.