Hollis Frampton: Circles of Confusion. Film/Photography/Video Texts 1968-1981 (1983)

Hollis Frampton is most well known as an independent filmmaker, but has been lecturing and writing about photography, film and video for a long time and in many places and publications. Circles of Confusion assembles eleven articles from exhibition catalogs and from October and Artforum. What Frampton does as a critic is much like what he does as a filmmaker, which is to strip the creative process down to its basic elements, then arrange and display the components..

Framptont’s role in this is critic-as-conjurer . He prestidigitates ideas and illusions from everywhere–history, psychology, philosophy, literature, even archaeology, whatever might apply. However much he may circle, though, he always comes back to basic ontological questions. What is photography? Film? Video? What are the properties that make them unique? What has film to do with narrative? Photography with space and time? Beyond a king these questions Frampton also conjectures about the possible ways of asking them and the likelihood of getting an answer. He also plays the role of critic-as-authoritative-voice, but by exposing the jagged mechanisms of thought makes the reader much more than a participant in the process than is usually the case.

Foreword by Annette Michelson
Publisher Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983
ISBN 0898220203, 9780898220209
200 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-7-14)

Laikwan Pang: The Distorting Mirror: Visual Modernity in China (2007)

“The Distorting Mirror analyzes the multiple and complex ways in which urban Chinese subjects saw themselves interacting with the new visual culture that emerged during the turbulent period between the 1880s and the 1930s. The media and visual forms examined include lithography, photography, advertising, film, and theatrical performances. Urbanites actively engaged with and enjoyed this visual culture, which was largely driven by the subjective desire for the empty promises of modernity—promises comprised of such abstract and fleeting concepts as new, exciting, and fashionable.

Detailing and analyzing the trajectories of development of various visual representations, Laikwan Pang emphasizes their interactions. In doing so, she demonstrates that visual modernity was not only a combination of independent cultural phenomena, but also a partially coherent sociocultural discourse whose influences were seen in different and collective parts of the culture. The work begins with an overall historical account and theorization of a new lithographic pictorial culture developing at the end of the nineteenth century and an examination of modernity’s obsession with the investigation of the real. Subsequent chapters treat the fascination with the image of the female body in the new visual culture; entertainment venues in which this culture unfolded and was performed; how urbanites came to terms with and interacted with the new reality; and the production and reception of images, the dynamics between these two being a theme explored throughout the book.

Modernity, as the author shows, can be seen as spectacle. At the same time, she demonstrates that, although the excessiveness of this spectacle captivated the modern subject, it did not completely overwhelm or immobilize those who engaged with it. After all, she argues, they participated in and performed with this ephemeral visual culture in an attempt to come to terms with their own new, modern self.”

Publisher University of Hawaii Press, 2007
ISBN 0824830938, 9780824830939
280 pages

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PDF (updated on 2013-8-26)

Susan Sontag: On Photography (1977-) [EN, ES, PL]

One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, On Photography first appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as “a progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs.” It begins with the famous “In Plato’s Cave” essay, then offers five other prose meditations on this topic, and concludes with a fascinating and far-reaching “Brief Anthology of Quotations.”

Originally published in 1977
Publisher Rosetta Books, New York, 2005
ISBN 0795326998

Review (Clive Joinson, Art Book, 2010)

Wikipedia (EN)
Publisher (EN)

On Photography (English, updated on 2012-12-27)
Sobre la fotografía (Spanish, trans. Carlos Gardini, 1981, added on 2012-12-27)
O fotografii (Polish, trans. Slawomir Magala, 1986, added on 2012-12-27)