Leshu Torchin: Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the Internet (2012)

“Since the beginning of the conflict in 2003, more than 300,000 lives have been lost in Darfur. Players of the video game Darfur Is Dying learn this sobering fact and more as they endeavor to ensure the survival of a virtual refugee camp. The video game not only puts players in the position of a struggling refugee, it shows them how they can take action in the real world.

Creating the Witness examines the role of film and the Internet in creating virtual witnesses to genocide over the past one hundred years. The book asks, how do visual media work to produce witnesses—audiences who are drawn into action? The argument is a detailed critique of the notion that there is a seamless trajectory from observing an atrocity to acting in order to intervene. According to Leshu Torchin, it is not enough to have a camera; images of genocide require an ideological framework to reinforce the messages the images are meant to convey. Torchin presents wide-ranging examples of witnessing and genocide, including the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust (engaging film as witness in the context of the Nuremburg trials), and the international human rights organization WITNESS and its sustained efforts to use video to publicize human rights advocacy and compel action.

From a historical and comparative approach, Torchin’s broad survey of media and the social practices around it investigates the development of popular understandings of genocide to achieve recognition and response—both political and judicial—ultimately calling on viewers to act on behalf of human rights.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2012
Visible Evidence series, Volume 26
ISBN 0816676224, 9780816676224
296 pages

Author’s discussion of the book
Publisher

PDF (updated on 2021-1-24)

Henry Bond: Lacan at the Scene (2009)

“What if Jacques Lacan–the brilliant and eccentric Parisian psychoanalyst–had worked as a police detective, applying his theories to solve crimes? This may conjure up a mental film clip starring Peter Sellers in a trench coat, but in Lacan at the Scene, Henry Bond makes a serious and provocative claim: that apparently impenetrable events of violent death can bemore effectively unraveled with Lacan’s theory of psychoanalysis than with elaborate, technologically advanced forensic tools. Bond’s exposition on murder expands and develops a resolutely Zizekian approach. Seeking out radical and unexpected readings, Bond unpacks his material utilizing Lacan’s neurosis-psychosis-perversion grid.

Bond places Lacan at the crime scene and builds his argument through a series of archival crime scene photographs from the 1950s–the period when Lacan was developing his influential theories. It is not the horror of the ravished and mutilated corpses that draws his attention; instead, he interrogates seemingly minor details from the everyday, isolating and rephotographing what at first seems insignificant: a single high heeled shoe on a kitchen table, for example, or carefully folded clothes placed over a chair. From these mundane details he carefully builds a robust and comprehensive manual for Lacanian crime investigation that can stand beside the FBI’s standard-issue Crime Classification Manual.”

With a Foreword by Slavoj Zizek
Publisher MIT Press, 2009
Short Circuits series
ISBN 0262300095, 9780262300094
233 pages

Review: Daniel Hourigan (Metapsychology, 2010).

Wikipedia
Publisher

PDF

László Moholy-Nagy: Painting, Photography, Film (1925–) [DE, EN]

This book presents Moholy-Nagy’s photograms, X-rays, super-wide-angle fisheye pictures, double prints, collages, montages, and the Bauhaus artist’s thoughts on the interrelationship of type, audio, and visual perception.

From the English edition: “The layout of the pages designed by Moholy-Nagy in 1927–bold sans-serif captions surrounded by lots of white space; compositions composed of arrows, dots, photographs, and heavy ruled lines — is much more like a movie storyboard or a musical score. It conveys a suggestion of imploding optical and retinal phenomena, much like driving down the Los Angeles Freeway at 70 mph or jolting through Philadelphia on the Metroliner.. This edition is a translation and facsimile of the second German edition of Malerei, Fotographie, Film published in 1927 by the Bauhaus Press; and it serves as a valuable reminder of the graphic design pioneered at the Bauhaus by Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer..”

“Gropius had invited the twenty-eight-year-old Hungarian phenom onto the Bauhaus faculty in 1923, and Malerei Fotografie Film is Moholy-Nagy’s first attempt to lay out his entire theory and program for photography, and ultimately, for the transformation of human vision.. The book’s bold typography and design enacted Moholy’s concept of ‘typofoto,’ involving the integration of type and images, which was further elaborated in his two later theoretical works, Von Material zu Architektur and Vision in Motion..” (Randell Roth)

Contains photographs by Alfred Steiglitz, Albert Renger-Pazsch, L. Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Lucia Moholy, Hannah Hoch and others.

Publisher Albert Langen, Munich, 1925
Volume 8 of Bauhausbücher series
Second edition, 1927
140 pages
via Bibliothèque Kandinsky

English edition
With a Note by Hans M. Wingler, and a Postcript by Otto Stelzer
Translated by Janet Seligman
Publisher Lund Humphries, London, 1969
150 pages
via Sorin Danut

Moholy-Nagy at Monoskop wiki

Malerei, Fotografie, Film (German, 2nd ed., 1925/1927, 131 MB, via Bibliothèque Kandinsky, updated on 2022-4-13)
Malerei, Fotografie, Film (German, 2nd ed., 1925/1927, PDF, JPG, in Heidelberg U Library, added on 2019-7-7)
Painting, Photography, Film (English, trans. Janet Seligman, 1969, added on 2014-8-17)

See also other titles in Bauhaus Books series.