Some Ideas About Surfing (2010)

A magazine.

Author’s email: jcolover at hotmail dot com

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PDF (updated on 2013-11-22)

Victor Burgin (ed.): Thinking Photography, 2nd ed. (1982)

Seminal collection of essays on photography.

Contents:
The Author as Producer – Walter Benjamin
Critique of the Image – Umberto Eco
Photographic Practice and Art Theory – Victor Burgin
On the Invention of Photographic Meaning – Allan Sekula
The Currency of the Photograph – John Tagg
Looking at Photographs – Victor Burgin
Making Strange: The Shattered Mirror – Simon Watney
Photography, Phantasy, Function – Victor Burgin

Edition 2
Publisher Macmillan, 1982
Communications and culture
Volume 38 of Etudes de Radio-Television
ISBN 0333271955, 9780333271957
239 pages

google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-18)

Rosalind Williams: Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination, new ed. (2008)

The underground has always played a prominent role in human imaginings, both as a place of refuge and as a source of fear. The late nineteenth century saw a new fascination with the underground as Western societies tried to cope with the pervasive changes of a new social and technological order. In Notes on the Underground, Rosalind Williams takes us inside that critical historical moment, giving equal coverage to actual and imaginary undergrounds. She looks at the real-life invasions of the underground that occurred as modern urban infrastructures of sewers and subways were laid, and at the simultaneous archaeological excavations that were unearthing both human history and the planet’s deep past. She also examines the subterranean stories of Verne, Wells, Forster, Hugo, Bulwer-Lytton, and other writers who proposed alternative visions of the coming technological civilization.

Williams argues that these imagined and real underground environments provide models of human life in a world dominated by human presence and offer a prophetic look at today’s technology-dominated society. In a new afterword written for this edition, Williams points out that her book traces the emergence in the nineteenth century of what we would now call an environmental consciousness—an awareness that there will be consequences when humans live in a sealed, finite environment. Today we are more aware than ever of our limited biosphere and how vulnerable it is. Notes on the Underground, now even more than when it first appeared, offers a guide to the human, cultural, and technical consequences of what Williams calls “the human empire on earth.”

New Edition
With a new afterword by the author
Publisher The MIT Press, 2008
ISBN 0262731908, 9780262731904
283 pages

Publisher
Google books

PDF (updated on 2014-9-5)