Picturing Ourselves: Photography and AutobiographyUniversity of Chicago Press, 1997 M12 8 - 286 páginas Photography has transformed the way we picture ourselves. Although photographs seem to "prove" our existence at a given point in time, they also demonstrate the impossibility of framing our multiple and fragmented selves. As Linda Haverty Rugg convincingly shows, photography's double take on self-image mirrors the concerns of autobiographers, who see the self as simultaneously divided (in observing/being) and unified by the autobiographical act. Rugg tracks photography's impact on the formation of self-image through the study of four literary autobiographers concerned with the transformative power of photography. Obsessed with self-image, Mark Twain and August Strindberg both attempted (unsuccessfully) to integrate photographs into their autobiographies. While Twain encouraged photographers, he was wary of fakery and kept a fierce watch on the distribution of his photographic image. Strindberg, believing that photographs had occult power, preferred to photograph himself. Because of their experiences under National Socialism, Walter Benjamin and Christa Wolf feared the dangerously objectifying power of photographs and omitted them from their autobiographical writings. Yet Benjamin used them in his photographic conception of history, which had its testing ground in his often-ignored Berliner Kindheit um 1900. And Christa Wolf's narrator in Patterns of Childhood attempts to reclaim her childhood from the Nazis by reconstructing mental images of lost family photographs. Confronted with multiple and conflicting images of themselves, all four of these writers are torn between the knowledge that texts, photographs, and indeed selves are haunted by undecidability and the desire for the returned glance of a single self. |
Contenido
Illumination and Obfuscation Mark Twains Photographic Autobiography | 29 |
Photographing the Soul August Strindberg | 81 |
The Angel of History as Photographer Walter Benjamins Berlin Childhood around 1900 | 133 |
The Lost Photo Album of Christa Wolfs Patterns of Childhood | 189 |
Conclusion | 231 |
Notes | 239 |
261 | |
271 | |
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Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography Linda Haverty Rugg Sin vista previa disponible - 1997 |
Términos y frases comunes
Albert Bigelow Paine Andrack appears argue August Strindberg aura auto autobio autobiographical text Barthes Barthes's becomes Benja Benjamin n.d. Berlin Childhood biography body body's Budd camera captions cenotaph child Christa Wolf cinematic Clemens constructed context create cultural daguerreotype death deconstruction depicted Eakin essay experience figure film frame gaze German Gersau graphic graphs illusion imagine Jewish John Eakin Lenka little hunchback look Manfred Schneider Mark Twain memory metaphor mother narrative narrator's nature Nelly Nelly's object observes Oscar Rejlander particular past Patterns of Childhood person perspective photographed subject photographic flash photographic image picture portrait pose position present reader reading reference referentiality Rejlander represents reveals Roland Barthes Samuel Clemens scene seems segment self-image sense signs situation Stasi stereoscopic surveillance takes textual things tion tographs Vexierbild viewer vision visual voyeurism voyeuristic W. J. T. Mitchell Walter Benjamin word writing
Pasajes populares
Página 5 - Now he is scattered among a hundred cities And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections; To find his happiness in another kind of wood And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living.
Página 24 - The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
Página 17 - To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.