Seizing The Light

Seizing the light: a social history of photography (2nd edition) by Robert Hirsch is a new book that is now available for loan from the Learning Centre.

Contents:
CHAPTER ONE - Advancing toward Photography: The Birth of Modernity

• A Desire for Visual Representation
• Perspective
• Thinking of Photography
• Camera Vision
• The Demand for Picturemaking Systems
• Proto-Photographers: Chemical Action of Light
• Modernity: New Visual Realities
• Optical Devices
• Images through Light: A Struggle for Permanence
• Other Distinct Originators

CHAPTER TWO - The Daguerreotype: Image and Object

• What Is a Daguerreotype?
• The Daguerreotype Comes to America
• The Early Practitioners
• Early Daguerrean Portrait Making
• Technical Improvements
• Expanding U.S. Portrait Studios
• The Art of the Daguerrean Portrait
• Daguerrean Portrait Galleries and Picture Factories
• African-American Operators
• Rural Practice
• Post-Mortem Portraits
• The Daguerreotype and the Landscape
• The Daguerreotype and Science

CHAPTER THREE - Calotype Rising: The Arrival of Photography

• The Calotype
• Early Calotype Activity
• Calotypists Establish a Practice
• Calotype and Architecture: Mission Heliographique
• The End of the Calotype and the Future of Photography

CHAPTER FOUR - Pictures on Glass: The Wet-Plate Process

• The Albumen Process
• The New Transparent Look
• The Ambrotype
• Pictures on Tin
• The Carte-de-Visite and the Photo Album
• The Cabinet Photograph: The Picture Gets Bigger
• The Studio Tradition
• Retouching and Enlargements
• The Stereoscope
• The Stereo Craze

CHAPTER FIVE - Prevailing Events/Picturing Calamity

• Current Events
• Early War Coverage
• The American Civil War
• How Photographs Were Circulated

CHAPTER SIX - A New Medium of Communication

• Photography: Art or Industry?
• Discovering a Photographic Language
• Americans and the Art of Nature
• Positivism

CHAPTER SEVEN - Standardizing the Practice: A Transparent Truth

• Mechanical Photography
• The Traveling Camera
• Picturing Industrialization
• Urban Life
• The American West: The Narrative and the Sublime

CHAPTER EIGHT - New Ways of Visualizing Time and Space

• The Inadequacy of Human Vision
• Locomotion
• Transforming Aesthetics: Technical Breakthroughs
• The Hand-Held Camera and the Snapshot
• Time and Motion as an Extended Continuum
• Moving Pictures
• Color and Photography

CHAPTER NINE - Suggesting the Subject: The Evolution of Pictorialism

• Roots of Pictorialism
• Pictorialism and Naturalism
• The Development of Pictorial Effect
• The Secession Movement and the Rise of Photography Clubs
• The Aesthetic Club Movement
• Working Pictorially: A Variety of Approaches
• American Perspectives
• The Photo-Secession
• The Decadent Movement and Tonalism
• Women Pictorialists
• The Pictorial Epoch/The Stieglitz Group
• The Decline of Pictorialism

CHAPTER TEN - Modernism's Innovations

• Industrial Beauty
• Cubism
• High and Low Art
• Futurism
• Time, Movement, and the Machine
• Towards a Modern Practice: Distilling Form
• Dada
• Exploring Space and Time: The Return of the Photogram
• Surrealism
• Collage
• Suprematism
• Art, Technology, and a New Faith
• Paul Strand and Straight Photography: Purity of Use

CHAPTER ELEVEN - The New Culture of Light

• Teaching Modernism: The American Impulse
• Stieglitz's "Equivalents"
• Steichen Goes Commercial
• Form as Essence
• Straight, Modernistic Photography
• Film und Foto and New Objectivity
• Experimentally Modern
• New Vision
• Pathways of Light: Time, Space, and Form
• Surrealistic Themes

CHAPTER TWELVE - Social Documents

• An American Urge: Social Uplift
• Ethnological Approaches
• Emerging Ethnic Consciousness
• The Physiognomic Approach
• The Great Depression: The Economics of Photography
• The FAP Project: Changing New York
• The Photo Booth: Self-Portraits for All
• Mass Observation
• The Film and Photo League

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Nabbing Time

• Anticipating the Moment

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - From Halftones to Bytes

• Pictures and Printers Ink
• The Photo Magazine
• The Separation of Art and Commerce: Advertising and Fashion
• Newspapers
• War Reportage
• The New Subjective Journalism
• Bytes of News

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - The Atomic Age: New Light/Fresh Methods

• The Surrealistic Metaphor
• The Photograph as Spirit
• Photo Education as Self-Expression
• Family of Man
• Photography and Alienation
• Making a Big Jump
• The Subjective Documentary
• The Terror of Riches
  

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - New Frontiers: Expanding Boundaries

• Structuralism: Reading a Photograph
• The Found Image: The Beginnings of Postmodernism
• The Rise of Pop Art
• Challenging the Code
• The Social Landscape
• New Journalism
• Multiple Points of View
• The Rapid Growth of Photographic Education

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Changing Realities

• Alternative Visions
• Turning the Straight Photograph on Itself
• Personal Accounts: Documentary Fiction
• The Snapshot
• Post-Structuralism/New Topographics
• The Rephotographic Survey Project/Time Changes
• Color Rising
• Artists' Books
• Reconfiguring Information
• Expanding Markets
• Critical Writing

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Thinking About Photography

• Conceptual Art: The Act of Choosing
• Performance Art
• A Return to Typologies
• Postmodernism
• Deconstructing Myths
• Gender Issues
• Fabrication
• Altering Time and Space
• Investigating the Body
• Multiculturalism: Exploring Identity & History
• A Personal Cultural Landscape
• The Digital Future Is Now
• The Postphotographic Age
  

Bibliography -- Individual Artists -- Technology -- Sources of Artists Books -- Index