ABSTRACT

As the prototypical exemplar of modern visual technology, photography was once viewed as a way to enable vision to bypass imagination, producing more reliable representations of reality. But as an achievement of technological modernity, photography can also be seen as a way to realize a creation of the imagination more vividly than can painting or drawing. Photography and Imagination investigates, from diverse points of view focusing on both theory and practice, the relation between these two terms. The book explores their effect on photography’s capacity, through various forms and modalities of imaginative investments and displacements, to affect even reality itself.

part 1|1 pages

Techniques of the Imagination

chapter 1|12 pages

Cat in the Window?

A Closer Look at How People Try to Have a Closer Look

chapter 3|16 pages

Radiant Matter

X-Ray Photography and the Visual Imagination of Sigmund Freud and Thomas Mann

chapter 4|17 pages

The Artemidorus Papyrus

Imagination and the Digital-Photographic Archaeology of Pictures

chapter 5|11 pages

Photography’s Imagination

The Visible and the Invisible

part 2|1 pages

Imagining and Encountering Others

chapter 6|19 pages

Photography and the Imagination of Authorship

Karl May’s Picture Cards from 1896 1

chapter 8|15 pages

Attentiveness and Visual Imagination in Looking and Photographing

A Gay Liberation Rally in Chicago 1970

chapter 9|14 pages

The Performative Index

James VanDerZee, Roland Barthes, Lorna Simpson, and the Photographic Imagination

part 3|1 pages

Images of a New World

chapter 11|15 pages

Queering Imagination, Queering Futurity

A Methodological Approach to Military Photography

chapter 12|17 pages

The Idol of Imagination: Manhatta

chapter |6 pages

Epilogue

Photography and the Question of the Image