Photography and anthropology book description drawing upon an intimate knowledge of the history of anthropology, photography, and the world's major anthropological practitioners, the book reveals how anthropology provides the tools to re-imagine the power and magic of all photographic practices

Oxford University Press Photography And Anthropology

PINNEY, CHRISTOPHER

Oxford University Press

Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs

A wedding couple gazes resolutely at viewers from the wings of a butterfly; a portrait surrounded by rose petals commemorates a recently deceased boy. These quiet but moving images represent the changing role of photographic portraiture in India, a topic anthropologist Christopher Pinney explores in Camera Indica. Studying photographic practice in India, Pinney traces photography's various purposes and goals from colonial through postcolonial times. He identifies three key periods in Indian portraiture: the use of photography under British rule as a quantifiable instrument of measurement, the later role of portraiture in moral instruction, and the current visual popular culture and its effects on modes of picturing. Photographic culture thus becomes a mutable realm in which capturing likeness is only part of the project. Lavishly illustrated, Pinney's account of the change from depiction to invention uncovers fascinating links between these evocative images and the society and history from which they emerge.

History

University of Chicago Press

A wedding couple gazes resolutely at viewers from the wings of a butterfly; a portrait surrounded by rose petals commemorates a recently deceased boy. These quiet but moving images represent the changing role of photographic portraiture in India, a topic anthropologist Christopher Pinney explores in Camera Indica. Studying photographic practice in India, Pinney traces photography's various purposes and goals from colonial through postcolonial times. He identifies three key periods in Indian portraiture: the use of photography under British rule as a quantifiable instrument of measurement, the later role of portraiture in moral instruction, and the current visual popular culture and its effects on modes of picturing. Photographic culture thus becomes a mutable realm in which capturing likeness is only part of the project. Lavishly illustrated, Pinney's account of the change from depiction to invention uncovers fascinating links between these evocative images and the society and history from which they emerge.

Though photography reaches as far back as the sixteenth-century’s camera obscura projects, it wasn’t until the British colonial period that amateur photographers introduced their technology to the Indian subcontinent. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, India was at the center of a representational revolution. Was photography in India simply a void, waiting to be filled by pre-existing cultural and historical practice? Or was it disruptive, throwing up new opportunities, prophesying new social formations, and bringing anxieties about formerly secluded events and practices into a newly visible sphere? The Coming of Photography in India transcends traditional cultural and technological narratives in order to present a subtle and compelling account of the limits, possibilities, and consequences of photography. Examining technology in order to explain the dynamic incarnation of photographic practice as cure, poison, and prophecy, Christopher Pinney presents a bold account that will reward anyone with an interest in India, photography, or the history of the book. Accompanied by beautiful illustrations and a large number of previously unpublished images, this volume presents a sophisticated account of the “disturbance” that photography has brought to all of our lives.

The Coming of Photography in India

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

British Library

Mirages have long astonished travelers of the sea and beguiled thirsty desert voyagers. Traditional Chinese and Japanese poetry and art depict the above-horizon, superior mirage, or fata morgana, as exhalations of clam-monsters. Indian sources relate mirages to the “thirst of gazelles,” a metaphor for the futility of desire. Starting in the late eighteenth century, mirages became a symbol in the West of Oriental despotism—a negative, but also enchanted, emblem. But the mirage motif is rarely simply condemnatory. More often, our obsession with mirages conveys a sense of escape, of fascination, of a desire to be deceived. The Waterless Sea is the first book devoted to the theories and history of mirages. Christopher Pinney navigates a sinuous pathway through a mysterious and evanescent terrain, showing how mirages have impacted politics, culture, science, and religion—and how we can continue to learn from their sublimity.

The Waterless Sea: A Curious History of Mirages

Science & Math

Earth Sciences

Reaktion Books

Camera Indica : Social Life of Indian Photographs

In Photography and Anthropology, Christopher Pinney presents a provocative and readable account of the strikingly parallel histories of the two disciplines, as well as a polemical narrative and overview of the use of photography by anthropologists from the 1840s to the present. Walter Benjamin suggested that photography “make[s] the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable,” and Pinney here explores photography as a divinatory practice that prompted anthropologists to capture the “primitive” lives of those they studied.
Early anthropology celebrated photography as a physical record, whose authority and permanence promised an escape from the lack of certainty in speech. But later anthropologists faulted photography for failing to capture movement and process. Anthropology as a practice of “being there” has thus found itself entwined in an intimate engagement with photography as metaphor for the collection of evidence.
Through numerous examples from the annals of anthropological photography, Photography and Anthropology examines the history of anthropology’s enchantment with photography alongside the anthropological theory of photography and documentation.

Photography and Anthropology (Exposures)

The extraordinary range of photography from South Asia dates back to the official birth of the medium - in the mid-19th century. This catalogue, published to accompany an exhibition at the Rubin Museum, offers an intimate survey of vintage images from the modern nations of India, Sri Lanka, Burma and Nepal.The three lead essays together with photographer biographies and techniques, present varied perspectives on photography's development of a unique vernacular culture. Ethnography, identity, integration and assimilation are some of the key notions that underlie practices of portraiture and domestic space - recording how an image may be perceived in our digital world today.Some of the leading photographers and studios presented are Felice Beato, Bourne & Shepherd, Johnnstone and Hoffmann, Gobind Ram Oodey Ram, Darogah Abba Ali, Raja Deen Dayal and Shapur Bhedwar.

Allegory and Illusion: Early Portrait Photography from South Asia (Alkazi Collection of Photography)

Allana, Rahaab

Citron, Beth

Mapin Publishing Gp Pty Ltd

Histories of photography, as presented through books or exhibitions in the twentieth century, have been dominated by Europe and America. This publication and the exhibition it accompanies, articulate the untold story of an equally significant history, as rich and as formally innovative, yet embedded in the culture and politics of South Asia. Where Three Dreams Cross traces the characteristics of contemporary photography through its historical precedents, revealing the roots of the medium's development over the past 150 years. Its starting point is the crucial moment when the power to hold a camera, frame and capture images was no longer exclusively the preserve of colonial or European photographers. Both the major upheavals of politics and technology and the quotidian events of family, culture and ritual have been captured through the lens of some 80 artists. Their work also demonstrates formal experimentation and aesthetic lines of enquiry that are indigenous yet of universal interest. With essays by Sabeena Gadihoke, Geeta Kapur and Christopher Pinney, among others.

Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh / 150 Jahre Fotografie aus Indien, Pakistan und Bangladesch (English and German Edition)

Kapur, Geeta

Gadihoke, Sabeena

Steidl

The extraordinary work of acclaimed photographer Karen Knorr and her poetic journey through the Indian Subcontinent. Karen Knorr began her ‘India Song’ series in 2008, after a life-changing trip through Rajasthan. These carefully crafted images take inspiration from the Indian tradition of personifying animals in literature and art, depicting scenarios that are at once otherworldly and surreal. Knorr’s work explores Rajput and Mughal cultural heritage and its contemporary relationship to questions of feminine subjectivity and animality. Knorr was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and was raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the 1960s, completing her education in Paris and London. She has taught, exhibited, and lectured internationally, including at Tate Britain, Tate Modern, The University of Westminster, Goldsmiths, Harvard and The Art Institute of Chicago. She studied at the University of Westminster in the mid-1970s, exhibiting photography that addressed debates in cultural studies and film theory concerning the ‘politics of representation’ practices which emerged during the late 1970s and early 1980s. She is currently Professor of Photography at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham, Surrey.

Karen Knorr: India Song

DALRYMPLE, WILLIAM

Individual Artists

Skira

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Books by PINNEY, CHRISTOPHER

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by PINNEY, CHRISTOPHER. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Oxford University Press Photography And Anthropology

Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs

Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs

The Coming of Photography in India

The Waterless Sea: A Curious History of Mirages

Camera Indica : Social Life of Indian Photographs

Photography and Anthropology (Exposures)

Allegory and Illusion: Early Portrait Photography from South Asia (Alkazi Collection of Photography)

Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh / 150 Jahre Fotografie aus Indien, Pakistan und Bangladesch (English and German Edition)

Karen Knorr: India Song