Caren Kaplan: Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (2018)

“From the first vistas provided by flight in balloons in the eighteenth century to the most recent sensing operations performed by military drones, the history of aerial imagery has marked the transformation of how people perceived their world, better understood their past, and imagined their future. In Aerial Aftermaths Caren Kaplan traces this cultural history, showing how aerial views operate as a form of world-making tied to the times and places of war. Kaplan’s investigation of the aerial arts of war—painting, photography, and digital imaging—range from England’s surveys of Scotland following the defeat of the 1746 Jacobite rebellion and early twentieth-century photographic mapping of Iraq to images taken in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Throughout, Kaplan foregrounds aerial imagery’s importance to modern visual culture and its ability to enforce colonial power, demonstrating both the destructive force and the potential for political connection that come with viewing from above.”

Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, 2018
Next Wave: New Directions in Women’s Studies series
ISBN 9780822370086, 0822370085
xiv+298 pages
via André

Publisher
WorldCat

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Lev Manovich: Instagram and Contemporary Image (2017)

“This in-depth study of Instagram combines methods from art history, media studies, and data science, and draws on computational analysis of 16 million Instagram photos shared in 17 global cities since 2012. The data collection and analysis were performed in Manovich’s Cultural Analytics Lab in the Qualcomm Institute (UCSD Division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology). ”

Self-published September 2017
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License
148 pages

Author

PDF, PDF (13 MB)

Eikoh Hosoe, Yukio Mishima: 薔薇刑 / Killed by Roses (1963–) [Japanese, English]

The legendary photobook Barakei — Killed by Roses is a collaboration between photographer Eikoh Hosoe and writer Yukio Mishima. Hosoe used props, personal belongings and backgrounds readily available in Mishima’s house to cast the renowned writer as his subject in a sequence of surreal scenery.

“The photos that make up the body of the book are inky, sometimes high-contrast gravures that bleed right to the edge of the page and often extend across the entire open spread, giving extra impact to images that are already quite arresting. Even if the subject of Hosoe’s photographs weren’t the author Yukio Mishima, the book would be remarkable for its humid mix of eroticism and myth, queer kitsch and high art. But Mishima, Japan’s most celebrated and controversial modern novelist, was also a brilliant provocateur and his presence here turns ‘Killed By Roses’ into a charged collaboration between artists testing one another’s limits. Hosoe’s first meeting with Mishima, in September 1961, was at the writer’s house. That first day, Mishima, already dressed only in a loincloth, ended up wrapped in a garden hose and standing on the marble mosaic zodiac on his lawn. The resulting surreal images are among the book’s most famous; though Hosoe saw them as ‘the destruction of a myth’. Mishima’s ritual suicide in 1970 was seen as his final artistic act.” (Andrew Roth, “The Book of 101 Books”, p 164)

Photography by Eikoh Hosoe (細江英公)
Model and introduction by Yukio Mishima (三島由紀夫)
Publisher Shueisha (集英社刊), Tokyo, 25 March 1963
104 pages
via Harper’s Books, HT Bint Bint

English edition
Preface by Yukio Mishima
The Photographer’s Note by Eikoh Hosoe
Afterword by Mark Holborn
Publisher Aperture, 1985
ISBN 0893811696
[96] pages
via grza

Commentary: Eikoh Hosoe (ASX, 2010).

Wikipedia-JP
Reprint (JP, 2008)
Publisher (EN)
WorldCat (EN)

薔薇刑 / Killed by Roses (Japanese, PDF, 7 MB; JPGs)
Ba-ra-kei: Ordeal by Roses (English, 1985, 153 MB, added on 2017-10-25)