Flash!
Photography, Writing, and Surprising Illumination
Published on 30. November 2017
Book
Hardback
416 pages
978-0-19-880826-8 (ISBN)
Description
Flash! presents a fascinating cultural history of flash photography, from its mid-nineteenth century beginnings to the present day. All photography requires light, but the light of flash photography is quite distinctive: artificial, sudden, shocking, intrusive, and extraordinarily bright. Associated with revelation and wonder, it has been linked to the sublimity of lightning. Yet it has also been reviled: it's inseparable from anxieties about intrusion and violence, it creates a visual disturbance, and its effects are often harsh and create exaggerated contrasts.
Flash! explores flash's power to reveal shocking social conditions, its impact on the representation of race, its illumination of what would otherwise remain hidden in darkness, and its capacity to put on display the most mundane corners of everyday life. It looks at flash's distinct aesthetics, examines how paparazzi chase celebrities, how flash is intimately linked to crime, how flash has been used to light up - and interrupt - countless family gatherings, how flash can 'stop time' allowing one to photograph rapidly moving objects or freeze in a strobe, and it considers the biggest flash of all, the atomic bomb.
Examining the work of professionals and amateurs, news hounds and art photographers, photographers of crime and of wildlife, the volume builds a picture of flash's place in popular culture, and its role in literature and film. Generously illustrated throughout, Flash! brings out the central role of this medium to the history of photography and challenges some commonly held ideas about the nature of photography itself.
Flash! explores flash's power to reveal shocking social conditions, its impact on the representation of race, its illumination of what would otherwise remain hidden in darkness, and its capacity to put on display the most mundane corners of everyday life. It looks at flash's distinct aesthetics, examines how paparazzi chase celebrities, how flash is intimately linked to crime, how flash has been used to light up - and interrupt - countless family gatherings, how flash can 'stop time' allowing one to photograph rapidly moving objects or freeze in a strobe, and it considers the biggest flash of all, the atomic bomb.
Examining the work of professionals and amateurs, news hounds and art photographers, photographers of crime and of wildlife, the volume builds a picture of flash's place in popular culture, and its role in literature and film. Generously illustrated throughout, Flash! brings out the central role of this medium to the history of photography and challenges some commonly held ideas about the nature of photography itself.
Reviews / Votes
A substantial addition to our understanding of how a history of photography might be undertaken and articulated... Flash! leaves a bedazzlement of the senses and an inspiring model for those scholars about to delve into the many other histories of photography still waiting to be written. * Geoffrey Batchen, Source Magazine * [A] rich and compelling cultural history of flash photography Flash! should reach a wide and appreciative audience. * Peter Buse, New Formations * Offers an opportunity to reflect on the various changing meanings of flash photography. * Kitty Hauser, Apollo * FLASH! is an engrossing book, full of strange nuggets of history, absorbing descriptions of photographic technology and gems of extraordinary people and events from early photographs to contemporary work. It is a well-supported and enjoyable cultural exploration; Flint's analysis is --appropriately--truly illuminating. * Patricia Baker-Cassidy, Photomonitor * This cultural history of flash photography from the mid-19th century to the present day will have a special appeal for professional and amateur photographers. * Robert Tanitch, Mature Times * ... the book is a brave attempt to establish a specialised account of photographic history and, simultaneously, secure a place for the subject in modern culture at a time when electronic imaging is forcing new ways to undertake photography where the ambient light is non-existent. * Dr R M Callender, Photographica World * The book offers an expanded way through which to navigate the many ways that flash has been used and to contemplate its place in the twenty-first century. * Fiontan Moran, The Burlington Magazine *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
145 halftones
Dimensions
Height: 264 mm
Width: 193 mm
Thickness: 28 mm
Weight
1134 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-880826-8 (9780198808268)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Person
Kate Flint is Provost Professor of Art History and English at the University of Southern California. She has published The Woman Reader, 1837-1914 (Oxford University Press, 1993), The Victorians and The Visual Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and The Transatlantic Indian 1776-1930 (Princeton University Press, 2008), edited The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature (2012), and written widely on Victorian and modernist fiction, Victorian and early twentieth-century painting and photography, and cultural history.
Content
Prologue
1: Flashes of Light
2: Lightning Flashes
3: Flash Memory
4: Stopping Time
5: Throwing Light
6: Light Skinned
7: Death by Exposure
8: Theatrical Light
9: The Modernity of Flash
10: Flash's Aesthetics
1: Flashes of Light
2: Lightning Flashes
3: Flash Memory
4: Stopping Time
5: Throwing Light
6: Light Skinned
7: Death by Exposure
8: Theatrical Light
9: The Modernity of Flash
10: Flash's Aesthetics