Pierre Bourdieu: Photography: A Middle-brow Art (1965/1990)

The everyday practice of photography by millions of amateur photographers – the family snapshots, the holiday prints, the wedding portraits – may seem to be a spontaneous and highly personal activity. But Bourdieu and his associates show that few cultural activities are more structured and systematic than the social uses of this ordinary art.

This perceptive and wide-ranging analysis of the practice of photography brings out the logic implicit in this cultural field. The norms which define the occasions and the objects of photography serve to display the socially differentiated functions of, and attitudes towards, the photographic image and act. For some social groups, photography is primarily a means of preserving the present and reproducing the euphoric moments of collective celebration, whereas for other groups it is the occasion of an aesthetic judgement, in which photos are endowed with the dignity of works of art.

With Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude Chamboredon, and Dominique Schnapper
First published in French as Un art moyen by Les Editions de Minuit, 1965
Translated by Shaun Whiteside
Publisher Polity Press, in association with Blackwell Publishers, 1990
ISBN 0745605230, 0745617158
218 pages

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Marshall Berman: All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982–) [EN, ES]

The political and social revolutions of the nineteenth century, the pivotal writings of Goethe, Marx, Dostoevsky, and others, and the creation of new environments to replace the old-all have thrust us into a modern world of contradictions and ambiguities. In this fascinating book, Marshall Berman examines the clash of classes, histories, and cultures, and ponders our prospects for coming to terms with the relationship between a liberating social and philosophical idealism and a complex, bureaucratic materialism.From a reinterpretation of Karl Marx to an incisive consideration of the impact of Robert Moses on modern urban living, Berman charts the progress of the twentieth-century experience. He concludes that adaptation to continual flux is possible and that therein lies our hope for achieving a truly modern society.

First published by Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1982
This edition with a new preface published in Penguin Books, 1988
ISBN 0140109625, 9780140109627
383 pages

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All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (English, 1982/1988)
Todo lo solido se desvanece en el aire: La experiencia de la modernidad (Spanish, trans. Andrea Morales Vidal, 3rd ed., 1988/1989, added on 2014-6-2)

Jacques Ellul: The Technological Society (1954/1964)

As insightful and wise today as it was when originally published in 1954, Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society has become a classic in its field, laying the groundwork for all other studies of technology and society that have followed. Ellul offers a penetrating analysis of our technological civilization, showing how technology–which began innocuously enough as a servant of humankind–threatens to overthrow humanity itself in its ongoing creation of an environment that meets its own ends. No conversation about the dangers of technology and its unavoidable effects on society can begin without a careful reading of this book.

Originally published in French as La technique ou l’enjeu du siècle by Librairie Armand Colin, 1954.
Translated by John Wilkinson
With an introduction by Robert K. Merton
Publisher Vintage Books, a divisio of Random House, New York, 1964
449 pages

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