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9780271081113 Add to Cart Academic Inspection Copy

Study in Black and White:

Photography, Race, Humor
  • ISBN-13: 9780271081113
  • Publisher: PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
    Imprint: PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
  • By Tanya Sheehan
  • Price: AUD $64.99
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 14/08/2020
  • Format: Paperback 216 pages Weight: 0g
  • Categories: Photography & photographs [AJ]
Description
Table of
Contents
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In this volume, Tanya Sheehan takes humor seriously in order to trace how photographic comedy was used in America and transnationally to express evolving ideas about race, black emancipation, and civil rights in the mid-1800s and into the twentieth century.
 
Sheehan employs a trove of understudied materials to write a new history of photography, one that encompasses the rise of the commercial portrait studio in the 1840s, the popularization of amateur photography around 1900, and the mass circulation of postcards and other photographic ephemera in the twentieth century. She examines the racial politics that shaped some of the most essential elements of the medium, from the negative-positive process to the convention of the photographic smile. The book also places historical discourses in relation to contemporary art that critiques racism through humor, including the work of Genevieve Grieves, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, and Fred Wilson.
 
By treating racial humor about and within the photographic medium as complex social commentary, rather than a collectible curiosity, Study in Black and White enriches our understanding of photography in popular culture. Transhistorical and interdisciplinary, this book will be of vital interest to scholars of art history and visual studies, critical race studies, U.S. history, and African American studies.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Strange Effects and Photographic Pleasures: Race, Science, and Early Photography

2. The Darkey Photographer: Camera Comedy and the Minstrel Stage

3. Look Pleasant, Please! A Social History of the Photographic Smile

4. Writing the Self Through Others: Racial Humor and the Photographic Postcard

5. Revival and Subversion: Snapshot Performances from Kodak to Kara Walker

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index



“Ubiquitous and often insidious, racial humor is a pervasive form of American cultural expression. Tanya Sheehan’s insightful and well-researched Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor moves beyond the laughs to examine how humor in the photographic medium has been employed and deployed as an agent, a conduit, and a dog whistle in America’s complex negotiation of race and representation.”

—Adrienne L. Childs, Associate, W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University

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