In 1963, Warren Langford, a Second World War air force veteran and career public servant, travelled through Europe, North America, and Africa as part of the National Defence College's curriculum of Cold War training. During this time he bought a camera and produced some 200 slides of his travels. InA Cold War Tourist and His Camerahis art historian daughter and political scientist son bring his photographs - an unexpected combination of iconic images of Cold War dangers and touristic snapshots - back into view. Martha Langford and John Langford examine their fat photographic experience, revealing the complexity of both the images and their creator.A Cold War Tourist and His Camerastages the family slide show as you've never seen it before.

Martha Langford and John Langford examine their father's apparently innocuous photographic experience, revealing the complexity of both the images and their creator. An intelligent and personal look at the ways that the historical and the private are represented and remembered, A Cold War Tourist and His Camera stages the family slide show as you've never seen it before.

Cold War Camera explores the visual mediation of the Cold War and illuminates photography’s role in shaping the ways it was prosecuted and experienced. The contributors show how the camera stretched the parameters of the Cold War beyond dominant East-West and US-USSR binaries and highlight the significance of photography from across the global South. Among other topics, the contributors examine the production and circulation of the iconic figure of the “revolutionary Vietnamese woman” in the 1960s and 1970s; photographs connected with the coming of independence and decolonization in West Africa; family photograph archives in China and travel snapshots by Soviet citizens; photographs of apartheid in South Africa; and the circulation of photographs of Inuit Canadians who were relocated to the extreme Arctic in the 1950s. Highlighting the camera’s capacity to envision possible decolonialized futures, establish visual affinities and solidarities, and advance calls for justice to redress violent proxy conflicts, this volume demonstrates that photography was not only crucial to conducting the Cold War, it is central to understanding it. Contributors. Ariella Azoulay, Jennifer Bajorek, Erina Duganne, Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Eric Gottesman, Tong Lam, Karintha Lowe, Ángeles Donoso Macaya, Darren Newbury, Andrea Noble, Sarah Parsons, Gil Pasternak, Thy Phu, Oksana Sarkisova, Olga Shevchenko, Laura Wexler, Guigui Yao, Donya Ziaee, Marta Ziętkiewicz

Whether pasted into an album, framed or shared on social media, the family photograph simultaneously offers a private and public insight into the identity and past of its subject. Long considered a model for understanding individual identity, the idea of the family has increasingly formed the basis for exploring collective pasts and cultural memory. Picturing the Family investigates how visual representations of the family reveal both personal and shared histories, evaluating the testimonial and social value of photography and film.Combining academic and creative, practice-based approaches, this collection of essays introduces a dialogue between scholars and artists working at the intersection between family, memory and visual media. Many of the authors are both researchers and practitioners, whose chapters engage with their own work and that of others, informed by critical frameworks. From the act of revisiting old, personal photographs to the sale of family albums through internet auction, the twelve chapters each present a different collection of photographs or artwork as case studies for understanding how these visual representations of the family perform memory and identity. Building on extensive research into family photographs and memory, the book considers the implications of new cultural forms for how the family is perceived and how we relate to the past. While focusing on the forms of visual representation, above all photographs, the authors also reflect on the contextualization and ‘remediation’ of photography in albums, films, museums and online.

The Handbook of Photography Studies is a state-of-the-art overview of the field of photography studies, examining its thematic interests, dynamic research methodologies and multiple scholarly directions. It is a source of well-informed, analytical and reflective discussions of all the main subjects that photography scholars have been concerned with as well as a rigorous study of the field’s persistent expansion at a time when digital technology regularly boosts our exposure to new and historical photographs alike. Split into five core parts, the Handbook analyzes the field’s histories, theories and research strategies; discusses photography in academic disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts; draws out the main concerns of photographic scholarship; interrogates photography’s cultural and geopolitical influences; and examines photography’s multiple uses and continued changing faces. Each part begins with an introductory text, giving historical contextualization and scholarly orientation. Featuring the work of international experts, and offering diverse examples, insights and discussions of the field’s rich historiography, the Handbook provides critical guidance to the most recent research in photography studies. This pioneering and comprehensive volume presents a systematic synopsis of the subject that will be an invaluable resource for photography researchers and students from all disciplinary backgrounds in the arts, humanities and social sciences.

This book is the first to question both why and how the colonialist mythologies represented by the work of photographer Eliot Elisofon persist. It documents and discusses a heterogeneous practice of American coloniality of power as it explores Elisofon’s career as war photographer-correspondent and staff photographer for LIFE, filmmaker, author, artist, and collector of “primitive art” and sculpture. It focuses on three areas: Elisofon’s narcissism, voyeurism, and sexism; his involvement in the homogenizing of Western social orders and colonial legacies; and his enthused mission of “sending home” a mass of still-life photographs, annexed African artifacts, and assumed vintage knowledge. The book does not challenge his artistic merit or his fascinating personality; what it does question is his production and imagining of “difference.” As the text travels from World War II to colonialism, postcolonialism, and the Cold War, from Casablanca to Leopoldville (Kinshasa), it proves to be a necessarily strenuous and provocative trip.

What can photographs reveal about Canada’s nuclear footprint? The Bomb in the Wilderness contends that photography is central to how we interpret and remember nuclear activities. The impact and global reach of Canada’s nuclear programs have been felt ever since the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. But do photographs alert viewers to nuclear threat, numb them to its dangers, or actually do both? John O’Brian’s wide-ranging and personal account of the nuclear era presents and discusses over a hundred photographs, ranging from military images to the atomic ephemera of consumer culture. His fascinating analysis ensures that we do not look away.

What does it mean to live in a post-atomic world? Photography and contemporary art offer a provocative lens through which to comprehend the by-products of the atomic age, from weapons proliferation, nuclear disaster, and aerial surveillance to toxic waste disposal and climate change. Confronting cultural fallout from the dawn of the nuclear age, Through Post-Atomic Eyes addresses the myriad iterations of nuclear threat and their visual legacy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whether in the iconic black-and-white photograph of a mushroom cloud rising over Nagasaki in 1945 or in the steady stream of real-time video documenting the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, atomic culture - and our understanding of it - is inextricably constructed by the visual. This book takes the image as its starting point to address the visual inheritance of atomic anxieties; the intersection of photography, nuclear industries, and military technocultures; and the complex temporality of nuclear technologies. Contemporary artists contribute lens-based works that explore the consequences of the nuclear, and its afterlives, in the Anthropocene. Revealing, through both art and prose, startling new connections between the ongoing threat of nuclear catastrophe and current global crises, Through Post-Atomic Eyes is a richly illustrated examination of how photography shapes and is shaped by nuclear culture.

Written in the context of unprecedented dislocation and a global refugee crisis, this edited volume thinks through photography’s long and complex relationship to human migration. While contemporary media images largely frame migration in terms of trauma, victimhood, and pity, so much more can be said of photography’s role in the movement of people around the world. Cameras can document, enable, or control human movement across geographical, cultural, and political divides. Their operators put faces on forced and voluntary migrations, making visible hardships and suffering as well as opportunity and optimism. Photographers include migrating subjects who take pictures for their own consumption, not for international recognition. And photographs themselves migrate with their makers, subjects, and viewers, as the very concept of photography takes on new functions and meanings. Photography and Migration places into conversation media images and other photographs that the contributors have witnessed, collected, or created through their diverse national, regional, and local contexts. Developed across thirteen chapters, this conversation encompasses images, histories, and testimonies offering analysis of new perspectives on photography and migration today.

The study of photography has never been more important. A look at today's digital world reveals that a greater number of photographs are being taken each day than at any other moment in history. Countless photographs are disseminated instantly online and more and more photographic images are earning prominent positions and garnering record prices in the rarefied realm of top art galleries. Reflecting this dramatic increase in all things photographic, A Companion to Photography presents a comprehensive collection of original essays that explore a variety of key areas of current debate around the state of photography in the twenty-first century. Essays are grouped and organized in themed sections including photographic interpretation, markets, popular photography, documents, and fine art and provide comprehensive coverage of the subject. Representing a diversity of approaches, essays are written by both established and emerging photographers and scholars, as well as various experts in their respective areas. A Companion to Photography offers scholars and professional photographers alike an essential and up-to-date resource that brings the study of contemporary photography into clear focus.