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How should we look at the world?

How can we live our lives fully?

In How to Look at Everything, acclaimed photographer David Finn turns his keen focus on how to experience the world around us in greater depth. The author of Abrams' best-selling books How to Look at Sculpture, How to Look at ...

How should we look at the world?

How can we live our lives fully?

In How to Look at Everything, acclaimed photographer David Finn turns his keen focus on how to experience the world around us in greater depth. The author of Abrams' best-selling books How to Look at Sculpture, How to Look at Photographs, and How to Visit a Museum here turns to the problem of developing an enriched way of seeing. In a thoughtful series of essays, he offers a personal view of how to enjoy more fully the pleasures that make life truly worth living: beautiful sights, fascinating objects, shared experiences, and warm companionship.

Nancy Shawcross places Barthes' thought on photography in the context of his developing ideas about semiology, tracking origins, rejections, and departures. She shows Barthes' affinities with and distinction from other theorists of photography such as Baudelaire and Benjamin and examines his thought ...

Nancy Shawcross places Barthes' thought on photography in the context of his developing ideas about semiology, tracking origins, rejections, and departures. She shows Barthes' affinities with and distinction from other theorists of photography such as Baudelaire and Benjamin and examines his thought in the context of postmodern discussions of photography that followed it. Barthes enjoyed a long and shifting relationship with photography, first using it as metaphor, then exploring its use in movies, film stills, political campaigns, and popular photographic essays, and finally confronting it anew upon the death of his mother. Though his last book, Camera Lucida, has enormously influenced the study of visual images in the arts and humanities, this is the first examination in English of Barthes' work on the visual arts. Shawcross brings together and analyzes for the first time - in any language - all of Barthes' writings, both direct and indirect, about visual media in their many forms.

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 ...

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.