alternative canons
The field of writing on the topic of photography and visual culture is constantly expanding, and yet there is a rigidly established canon of literature that remains a consistent source of assignments in the classroom. The purpose of this guide is to provide further and alternative readings. Though the canonical texts remain relevant and important, this guide contains literature that addresses similar themes, providing an opportunity to address contemporary engagement with these ideas. We also have a Global Survey guide intended to examine the history of photography throughout the world, with a focus on locations outside of Europe and North America. This page is by no means exhaustive and we welcome suggestions for additional relevant texts. Where possible, we have included links to help you purchase books locally, but we also recommend checking library holdings through WorldCat.
Topics include: War photography, images of suffering, photography and ethics, truth and photography, objectivity and subjectivity, photography and violence, colonialism
CONSIDER ASSIGNING
Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography
Kimberly Juanita Brown, Regarding the Pain of the Other: Photography, Famine, and the Transferrence of Affect (in Feeling Photography)
Zahid Chaudhary, Phantasmagoric Aesthetics
Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret
Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley, Ambivalent: Photography and Visibility in African History
Patricia Hill Collins, Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controlling Images (in Black Feminist Thought)
Mark Sealy, Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time
Krista A. Thompson, Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice
Krista A. Thompson, An Eye For The Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque
Topics include: photography and memory, photography and mourning, literary musings
CONSIDER ASSIGNING
James Baldwin, The Creative Process (in The Price of the Ticket)
Walead Beshty, 33 Texts: 93,614 Words: 581,035 Characters: Selected Writings
Jacqueline Goldsby, The High And The Low Tech Of It
Audre Lorde, Afterimages
Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right To Look
Fred Moten, Black Mo’nin’ (in Loss: The Politics of Mourning)
Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
Topics include: photography and history, archives, framing of history, truth and photography, truth and imagery, truth and the archive
Consider Assigning
Sophie Berrebi, The Shape of Evidence: Contemporary Art and the Document
Rodney G.S. Carter, Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence*
Lily Cho, Anticipating Citizenship: Chinese Head Tax Photographs (in Feeling Photography)
Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art
bell hooks, Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination (in Displacing Whiteness)
Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture
Topics include: photographic history, relevant photographic artists from the inception of the medium, European and American photographic canon
Consider Assigning
Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums
Christopher Pinney & Nicholas Peterson, Photography’s Other Histories
Antwaun Sargent, The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion
Sasha Wolf (ed)., PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice
Topics include: epistemology and photography, image versus object, truth and photography, signified and signifier, photography and sociality
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The “Blackness of Blackness”
Saidiya Hartman, Venus in Two Acts
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Krista Thompson, Art, Fiction, History