Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images

Publication details

Hardcover and e-book, 174 x 246 x 19.05mm | 454g, 204 pages, 47 B/W Illustrations and 12 colour
ISBN 9780815374299

Author and/or Editor name/s

Editors: Donna West Brett and Natalya Lusty

Chapter authors: Andrés Mario Zervigón, Donna West Brett, Katherine Biber, Peter Doyle, Shawn Michelle Smith, Natalya Lusty, John Di Stefano, Jane Simon, Toni Ross, Daniel Palmer, Blake Stimson

Author and/or Editor bio/s

Donna West Brett is an Associate Professor in Art History and Curatorial Studies at the University of Sydney. She is author of Photography and Place: Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945 (Routledge, 2016); and co-editor with Natalya Lusty, Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images, (Routledge, 2019). Brett is Research Leader for the Photographic Cultures Research Group, and Editorial Member for the Visual Culture and German Contexts Series, Bloomsbury.

Natalya Lusty is Professor of Cultural Studies and an ARC Future Fellow (2018-2021) at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2017); Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History, co-authored with Helen Groth (Routledge, 2013); Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images, co-edited with Donna West Brett (Routledge, 2019); and the edited volume, Modernism and Masculinity (Cambridge University Press, 2014). She is an editorial board member of Australian Feminist Studies.

Year of publication

2019

Publisher

Routledge, New York

Abstract

This edited collection explores the complex ways in which photography is used and interpreted: as a record of evidence, as a form of communication, as a means of social and political provocation, as a mode of surveillance, as a narrative of the self, and as an art form. What makes photographic images unsettling and how do the re-uses and interpretations of photographic images unsettle the self-evident reality of the visual field? Taking up these themes, this book examines the role of photography as a revelatory medium underscored by its complex association with history, memory, experience and identity.