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Jerald C. Maddox 'How much is a photograph worth?' Afterimage 2, no. 8 (February 1975): 6-8 https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1975.2.8.6 Historical distance can provide a helpful perspective on things and circumstances that have [...]

Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography THE GETTY CENTER LOS ANGELES APRIL 14-SEPTEMBER 6, 2015 Today's digital photographers can produce prints with the crisp resolution and range of values of anything [...]

Kodak has announced plans to discontinue the production of black and white photographic paper. However, it will continue to produce black and white film and processing chemicals. In an additional [...]

Photo Revolution: Andy Warhol to Cindy Sherman: Worcester Art Museum. Worcester, MA: November 6, 2019-February 16, 2020. Worcester Art Museum's recent exhibition Photo Revolution: Andy Warhol to Cindy Sherman allowed [...]

That poor guy up there is not me. Nor is the one on the opposite page. But they both capture something about high school that I can't really articulate with [...]

Submit papers: To The Journal of Artists' Books (JAB), founded in 1994 to provide a forum for the lively and critical debate about artists' books and their contents. JAB publishes [...]

After a four-year absence, Oriental New Seagull paper is once again available. A favorite of many fine art photographers for its rich blacks, pure whites and long tonal range, this [...]

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has awarded $550,000 in grants to 22 local media centers and national media organizations. The awards were made to media centers in [...]

This paper takes, as provocation, Robert Nixon's proposition that the effects of ecological instances of 'slow violence'--that is, brutalities that manifest incrementally across time and space--elude visible registers, and, as a corollary, are rendered image-weak in the context of today's saturated mediascape. Specifically, through drawing on burgeoning scholarship focusing on the representation of slow violence and its resistance, in conjunction with nascent theory on 'mediated forensics' and 'militant evidence,' this article positions the devastating manifestations of slow violence in relation to other forms of neocolonial brutality which, it is argued, are likewise systematically structured to impact marginalized communities whose perspectives are persistently underrepresented in the mainstream. Proceeding from this conviction, the representational challenges issued by Nixon over a decade ago are taken up afresh: Eyal Weizman's calls to explore the rhetorical potentials of the forensic are addressed through an examination of how the emergence of new digital technologies of image production and distribution are reshaping the ways in which ecological activism is practiced in contexts of crises that adhere, at least on first sight, to Nixon's definition of slow violence. Analysis is foregrounded in the case study of 'Death Alley' (once known as 'Cancer Alley'), an eighty-five-mile stretch of land which, snaking alongside the Mississippi River in Louisiana, is currently populated by the densest constellation of chemical facilities in the Western Hemisphere, leading it to become the subject of Forensic Architecture's 2021 investigation Environmental Racism in Death Alley, Louisiana. KEYWORDS slow violence, forensic media, environmental racism, Death Alley, INTRODUCTION We are presented with a stylized vision of an industrial cityscape. In the foreground, a plume of dark smoke billows from columnar chimneys, dispersing into the deep blue hues [...]

Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism, edited by Mira Dayal and Josephine Heston. Paper Monument, 2023. 256 pp./$19.00 (sb) ISBN 1736507915. A meme I've posted in my college classroom [...]

This paper looks at new articulations of the subject found in documentary films about the Indignado or 15-M (15 May) movement and the Occupy Wall street movement in 2011. These movements rejected representation in favor of a call for direct democracy on a political level. The paper suggests that their rejection had significant implications for documentary film, forcing makers to embrace new routes to portraying thought and action in a collective context. The paper uses the work of theorists of affect including Franco Berardi and Brian Massumi, as well as of political theorists and social scientists including Jodi Dean and Zeynap Tufekci to suggest that the groups that rose up in the aftermath of the Great recession of 2008 were reacting specifically to a rise of an attention economy, an economic system that depends on the exploitation of the 'immaterial labor' of human affect and attention to extract profit. The paper shows how the film Tres Instantes, Un Grito (Three Moments, One Cry, 2013) by Chilean-Spanish filmmaker Cecilia Barriga uses various strategies to avoid typical narrative approaches to character identification and development, and focuses instead on the shared space of discussion where a collective understanding is produced, and demonstrates how this strategy is appropriate for the depiction of a self-organizing movement. Other films emerging from the Occupy Wall Street and 15-M movements are analyzed to show how approaches using filmic rhythm and bodily entrainment give a sense of how these movements create new affective protocols for shared political action. I suggest finally that affective logics deployed in these films offer a way of understanding how films, specifically political documentaries, function beyond representation per se to help open a new kind of shared political space. KEYWORDS Indignado movement, affect theory film, political documentary, Occupy Wall Street media, The Plaza del Sol in Madrid. May, 2011. The clock strikes midnight and we see thousands of wiggling hands, without voices. Then the crowd calls out, 'Que no! Que no! [...]

While the HBO show Westworld (2016-present, created by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan) has gained much critical attention for its byzantine plotting and philosophical conundrums, the present discussion focuses instead on the basic premise on which the titular park operates, namely that the algorithms that govern human behavior can be disclosed by studying how human beings behave toward image beings. Under the guise of a tactile experience of a make-believe past, the park attractions clandestinely function as a large behavioral sensor, extracting actionable data from the guests who reveal their inner drives when interacting with the host environment. Taking its cue from the opening titles of the first season, the argument pivots on the master trope of the series: the machine-readable scroll of perforated paper that commands the automated performance of the player piano. This motif is examined through a double-pronged approach that aligns the anthropology of images developed by Hans Belting, which understands the relation between humans and images as the interactions between 'hosts' and 'guests,' with the archaeology of media and its dominant concern to uncover the prehistory of the automated control systems of the computer age. While Westworld proffers a timely allegory of biopolitical capture along the digital frontier, the show ultimately testifies to the failure to constructively engage with the precarious relation between hosts and guests that to an equal extent defines our contemporary moment. The initial problem raised by Westworld, the ethics of killing virtual beings, thus gives rise to a broader historical inquiry that concerns the inability of human societies to face the past and deal with the images they inherit. KEYWORDS Westworld, animation, automation, Hans Belting, William Gaddis, living image, media archaeology, player piano, surveillance capitalism, During the final month of the campaign for the United States Presidency in the fall of 2016, the first season of the HBO franchise Westworld made its screen debut. As [...]

From 1975 to 1978, the Belgian artist Guillaume Bijl produced a set of designs on paper, titled Treatments. Treatments took on 'Church, Education, Army, Traveling, Building, Craving for Recognition, Sex, [...]

Consider these markings. A sea of red paper poppies worn on lapels by tens of thousands annually. Mounds of cellophane-wrapped flowers, stuffed animal toys, candles, and notes laid in front [...]

Can Cinema, Narrative, and Images Contribute to Changing Minds About Climate Dangers? Climate-related media reports pile up. And, as still a reader (and clipper) of paper versions of newspapers, I [...]

MoMA also opened the Sherman Fairchild Center for Works on Paper and Photograph Conservation in January. The center is dedicated to the preservation of one million works on paper from [...]

Throughout four decades of experimentation with photography, the German artist Annegret Soltau has defied the typical experience of a photograph--as an individual, pure, paper rectangle with an illusionistic window. Her [...]

In this Afterword, Leslie Espinoza and Angela Harris identify some of the submerged themes of this Symposium and reflect on LatCrit theory more generally. Professor Harris argues that LatCrit theory reveals tensions between scholars wishing to transcend the "black-white paradigm" and proponents of "black exceptionalism." Professor Espinoza argues that the papers presented in this Symposium often reproduce in their critiques the very problems they have identified with race theory, illustrating the proposition that race in the United States is a "Tar-Baby." Professor Harris argues that LatCrit theory's value lies in its insistence that questions of language, culture and nation are inextricably intertwined with questions of race. Professor Espinoza, placing LatCrit theory in the broader context of critical theory, expresses hope that storytelling as a method of scholarship will allow us to "re-story" the past and "re-imagine" the future.

A central puzzle for scholarship on the life and career of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes has been the tension between his generally deferential theory of judicial review, premised on his acquiescence to majoritarian legislative power, and his role as the founder of modern First Amendment jurisprudence, a source of significant limitation on legislative sovereignty. Professor White reexamines this puzzle in the light of the increased availability of Holmes' private papers, using techniques drawn from biography, intellectual history, and doctrinal analysis. His reexamination of Holmes' free speech decisions casts doubt on a major premise of recent Holmesian commentary--that "positivism," or any ideological encapsulation, is a helpful label for characterizing Holmes' perspective as a jurist. The shift in Holmes' First Amendment jurisprudence is best explained by his personal experiences and relationships, which made him receptive to the ideas of progressive intellectuals as he pursued his interest in disassociating free speech from the jurisprudential underpinnings of "liberty of contract." Holmes' free speech opinions do not conform to a single coherent theoretical pattern because they were not meant to serve as conventional doctrinal formulations that provide guidance for the consistent interpretation of constitutional provisions. Rather, they were meant to serve as vehicles for conveying Holmes' broader philosophical views to the world. In the history of his free speech opinions, he is seen as a resonant intellectual figure, a "lightning rod" for cultural and ideological messages in the first thirty years of the twentieth century. It is his use of language to this end that the source of Holmes' eminence is to be found.

Beginning with the 1985 Supreme Court decision in Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, the judiciary has pit the interests of the press, biographers, historians, and their readers against the interests of diarists, letter writers, and manuscript drafters in controlling access to unpublished papers. The Article summarizes the judicial decisions, copyright legislation, scholarly criticism, and trade publishing practices during the succeeding fifteen years. The first thesis is that "loaded" judicial rhetoric used to bolster a few hard judgments, and subsequent courts' reliance on that dicta, has subjected to the property-rights regime of copyright nearly every bit of expression written by an individual, without regard to the individual's interest in the expression or its value to the public. The second thesis is that the judicial rhetoric has inspired and now sustains a private law of publishing that essentially bars the unlicensed quotation of any unpublished writings. This private law disserves readers' interests in accuracy and reasoned debate about texts, events, and characters. The third thesis is that the courts' inability to acknowledge privacy-like interests within the traditional utilitarian rhetoric of American copyright law has contributed to the "loaded" rhetoric. Together, these three theses suggest that judicial rhetoric deserves greater attention because it can generate "doctrine" as enduring as any "holding."

ACTION/INTERACTION: BOOK/ARTS COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO CENTER FOR BOOK AND PAPER ARTS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 8-10, 2007 The Action/Interaction: Book/Arts conference consisted of a major invitational exhibition, three keynote conference speakers, [...]

I. When I was still very young, my father used to write the names of deceased relatives on long narrow pieces of rice paper for the annual memorial ceremonies With [...]

Since September 13, clusters of postage-stamp portraits of those who died on September 11 have been published in the pages of The New York Times, as the paper gives little [...]

Now in Paper An Anthology of Artists' Writings edited by Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson 'This volume performs the much-needed task of mapping the multiple trajectories of artists committed to [...]

Now in Paper Reflections on Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida edited by Geoffrey Batchen 'Photography Degree Zero will no doubt become a portable authority on Barthes and visual-arts scholarship.' -- Erik [...]

RECYCLED REALITIES by John Willis and Tom Young. University of Chicago Press/80 pp./$45.00 (hb). Photographers John Willis and Tom Young have teamed up to make pictures of trash, specifically paper [...]

STAND AND DELIVER: ENGINEERING SCULPTURE INTO A BOOK FORMAT CENTER FOR BOOK & PAPER ARTS COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO CHICAGO, ILLINOIS SEPTEMBER 16-OCTOBER 28, 2005 In 'Stand and Deliver: Engineering Sculpture [...]

The Pew Fellowships in the Arts has awarded 13 Philadelphia artists with Fellowships in the areas of fiction and creative nonfiction, media arts and works on paper. This year's recipients [...]

Wolf Vostell: De-coll/age Is Your Life, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA. January 20-May 5, 2024. How might aesthetic strategies of destruction and assembly incite us to actively witness the precarity [...]

This article looks at the photography of Kris Graves and the circulation of the artist's images on his social media accounts as a way of promoting social progress and racial justice, with a focus on his 2016 A Bleak Reality photoseries for Vanity Fair. The series consists of eight images that address the haunting specters of police brutality against eight African American male citizens who lost their lives at the hands of the state. Looking at Instagram, I posit a threefold claim about the social media photograph. First, I argue against the association of the social photo with the everyday. I examine a photoseries that initially participated in an economy of art but then migrated across a network of social relations in order to enhance its visibility--its dissemination ushering in the social life of the photograph that undergirds Black Lives Matter. Second, I suggest that the affective residues of Instagram's content linger in an indexical trace that transcends the transplatform network's digitally composited, modified, duplicated, and distributed images. This dual focus illuminates how social media function, on the one hand, as a technology of race while they allow Graves, on the other hand, to document instances of police brutality against African Americans. Third, in so doing, this article locates A Bleak Reality within a genealogy of civic media in order to explore how the co-optation of photography's reproductive affordances by African American photographers, artists, scholars, intellectuals, and abolitionists has allowed them to construct a counter-archive of Black cultural production around historical movements for racial justice. KEYWORDS photography, social media, Black Lives Matter, memory, archive, indexicality, What does a black square signify? On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old African American man, died in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after police officer Derek Chauvin had knelt on his [...]

Meggan Gould: Sorry, No Pictures. Aurora PhotoCenter at Tube Factory Artspace, Indianapolis, Indiana. December 1, 2023-January 15, 2024. Meggan Gould's recent exhibition took its name from the stickers that photographic [...]

Transversal media move. They move with ease across a variety of interfaces, formats, materials, software, hardware, uses, and communities of practice. (1) In this article, transversal media is an umbrella term used to classify media objects with the same underlying form that takes shape across a variety of materialities through freeze and flow states. Specific to 3D data, 3D transversal media are a distinct media type that have emerged from the development and proliferation of 3D media technologies, specifically the 3D printer, 3D scanner, and extended reality (XR) devices. The central characteristic of 3D transversal media is the ability to move back and forth across digital and atomic forms. Transversality offers an alternative to understanding and speaking of the digital and atomic as opposites, while also acknowledging the differences and similarities across those material transmutations. For instance, the same 3D transversal media object can be many things simultaneously: an animation on a screen, an object inside a virtual reality experience, a 3D-printed plastic figurine, a projected hologram, and more. This article tracks the complexities of 3D transversal media when they move across their individual and networked states, and moreover, the linked cultural and technological significance of that movement. This approach reveals how technology and media can inherit and reproduce hegemonic cultural ideologies and practices--whether intentional or not. To concretize this, the article concludes with a case study on Thutmose's well-known bust of Nefertiti, now a 3D transversal object, and how its transversal affordances converge and interact with global cultural politics--specifically in this case, those related to colonialism and imperialism. KEYWORDS 3D media, format, materiality, 3D printing, 3D scanning, You are taken with my form which I admit is beautiful,' says the girl, 'but know that this form you see is not necessary but contingent, sometimes I am a [...]

Joanna Heatwole and Tate Shaw 'Big Fish in a Very Small Pond: Interview with Joan Lyons' Afterimage 32, no. 5 (March/April 2005): 8-9 https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2005.32.5.8 and https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2005.32.5.9 In the March/April 2005 [...]

Andrea Fraser 'On the Post-Partum Document' (review of Post-Partum Document by Mary Kelly with a foreword by Lucy Lippard, and a conversation between Mary Kelly and Laura Mulvey) Afterimage 13, [...]

Doug Ischar 'Parallel Oppressions: The Ideal and the Abject in Gay Representation' Afterimage 16, no. 7 (February 1989): 10-11 https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1989.16.7.10 Doug Ischar's 1989 Afterimage article 'Parallel Oppressions: The Ideal and [...]

Catherine Lord 'A Critical Circular' Afterimage 11, nos. 1 & 2 (Summer 1983): 4-5 https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1983.11.1-2.4 There's not much money in art criticism. Some publications, like this one, don't pay. It [...]

David Trend 'Letters and Characters' (review of the exhibition Letterism and Hypergraphics: The Unknown Avant-Garde, 1945-1985) Afterimage 13, no. 6 (January 1986): 6-8 https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1986.13.6.6 David Trend's 'Letters and Characters,' a [...]

Alan Klotz 'We Are Living in the Age of the Machine' Afterimage 1, no. 3 (October 1972): 2-3 https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1972.1.3.2 With each technological revolution, we are confronted anew with questions about [...]

Direct Contact: Cameraless Photography Now. Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, Bloomington, Indiana. February 16-July 2, 2023. That five billion digital photographs are taken every day lies beyond comprehension. [...]

This article explores the rise of deepfake satire as one of the most vibrant subgenres of experimentation within the expanding field of AI art. A combination of 'deep learning' and the word 'fake,' deepfake videos depict people doing or saying things that they never did or said. While deepfakes have been used to deceive and harm individuals as well as a mass audience, they have also been used toward alternative ends. Deepfake satire offers artful social critique, interrogating the individuals and institutions it portrays as much as the technology used to create it and the platforms on which it circulates. Videos range from snarky jabs at entertainment industry personalities to hard-hitting takedowns of tech entrepreneurs and authoritarian leaders. This speculative form of social imagining makes threatening and seemingly untouchable figures appear weak, vulnerable, and exposed, which can help envision a more equitable and just future. Close examination of specific projects within a broader media ecology leads to a nuanced understanding of both the menace and progressive possibilities of synthetic media--beyond simple 'utopia'/'dystopia' binaries--in addition to expanding the grammar of computational art. KEYWORDS satire, AI, deepfake, synthetic media, media industries, Over the last ten years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have increasingly shaped the production and circulation of moving image media across a wide range of platforms. No form of AI-enabled [...]

I first came across Tarrah Krajnak's work in the winter 2021 issue of Aperture magazine. A portfolio of ruminative, shadowy images from Krajnak's series 1979: Contact Negatives (2019) that reflects [...]