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Picturing the Past
Media, History, and Photography
Edited by Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt
Paper978-0-252-06769-3
$25.00
| Pub Date: | 1999 |
| Pages: | 280 pages |
This wide-ranging collection explores the relations between photojournalism and history, investigating how photographs shape both what we remember and how we remember. Contributors discuss dramatic changes in the press's coverage of presidential death from McKinley through Kennedy and examine the selective use of picture postcards in World War I to support the particular image of the war effort that the government wished to cultivate. Other essays examine divergent public reactions to Edward Steichen's Family of Man exhibition and the curious distillation of enormous collections of war photographs—from the Civil War, the Holocaust, and other cataclysmic events—into a handful of images that have become cultural icons.
Ranging from the rise of photojournalism in the 1930s and its idealization of American life to the issue of authenticity in documentary photography, Picturing the Past provides valuable insight into how photographs influence collective memory, generate a sense of national community, and reinforce prevailing social, cultural, and political values.
"This volume expertly draws together many different perspectives to construct the visual environment in which the photographer / journalist's cultural work is done. These thoroughly researched essays offer sophisticated contact points with wider realms of scholarship. Varying in viewpoint and scope of analysis, they enlist students of visual culture and communication in the common enterprise of viewing representations of the past."--Eric Sandeen, author of Picturing an Exhibition: The Family Man and 1950s American
"A fine addition to the literature in visual communication, media and cultural history, critical theory, qualitative methodology, and historiography. . . . We definitely need more of this sort of work."--Charles Lewis, Mankato State University
Bonnie Brennen is an associate professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia. Hanno Hardt, professor of journalism and mass communications at the University of Iowa, is the author of Critical Communication Studies: Communication, History, and Theory in America. They are coeditors of Newsworkers: Towards a History of the Rank and File.
Series:
The History of Communication
Subjects:
Communications & Journalism / History, Am.: 20th C. / Photography / History, European
