Between Amateur and Aesthete


Book Description

The first thorough investigation of the part played by the amateur photographer and of the struggle to legitimize photography as art.




Amateur Cinema


Book Description

From the very beginning of cinema, there have been amateur filmmakers at work. It wasn’t until Kodak introduced 16mm film in 1923, however, that amateur moviemaking became a widespread reality, and by the 1950s, over a million Americans had amateur movie cameras. In Amateur Cinema, Charles Tepperman explores the meaning of the “amateur” in film history and modern visual culture. In the middle decades of the twentieth century—the period that saw Hollywood’s rise to dominance in the global film industry—a movement of amateur filmmakers created an alternative world of small-scale movie production and circulation. Organized amateur moviemaking was a significant phenomenon that gave rise to dozens of clubs and thousands of participants producing experimental, nonfiction, or short-subject narratives. Rooted in an examination of surviving films, this book traces the contexts of “advanced” amateur cinema and articulates the broad aesthetic and stylistic tendencies of amateur films.




Clarence H. White and His World


Book Description

Restoring a gifted art photographer to his place in the American canon and, in the process, reshaping and expanding our understanding of early 20th-century American photography Clarence H. White (1871–1925) was one of the most influential art photographers and teachers of the early 20th century and a founding member of the Photo-Secession. This beautiful publication offers a new appraisal of White’s contributions, including his groundbreaking aesthetic experiments, his commitment to the ideals of American socialism, and his embrace of the expanding fields of photographic book and fashion illustration, celebrity portraiture, and advertising. Based on extensive archival research, the book challenges the idea of an abrupt rupture between prewar, soft-focus idealizing photography and postwar “modernism” to paint a more nuanced picture of American culture in the Progressive era. Clarence H. White and His World begins with the artist’s early work in Ohio, which shares with the nascent Arts and Crafts movement the advocacy of hand production, closeness to nature, and the simple life. White’s involvement with the Photo-Secession and his move to New York in 1906 mark a shift in his production, as it grew to encompass commercial portraiture and an increasing commitment to teaching, which ultimately led him to establish the first institutions in America to combine instruction in both technical and aesthetic aspects of photography. The book also incorporates new formal and scientific analysis of White’s work and techniques, a complete exhibition record, and many unpublished illustrations of the moody outdoor scenes and quiet images of domestic life for which he was revered.




Emerging Aesthetic Imaginaries


Book Description

Emerging Aesthetic Imaginaries considers aesthetic imaginaries as they constitute and are constituted by and in our shared realities. With contributions from twelve scholars working in the fields of literary studies, visual studies, anthropology, cultural studies, and digital culture, this book takes a multidisciplinary approach to “aesthetic imaginaries,” which tests the conceptual potential from an array of perspectives and methodologies. It probes into the continuous creation and re-creation of figures for the future that invariably nod to their pasts, whether with a spirit of respect, disgust, hope, or play. It is particularly in the intersections between ideas and formations of “shared realities” and what Ranjan Ghosh has called “entangled figurations” that the full and intricate promise of the aesthetic imaginary as analytic and conceptual prism comes into its own. As the chapters in this collection demonstrate, “knots” of various aesthetic imaginaries disseminate and manifest variously and across place and time, to weave and interweave again, and to offer themselves in each instance as contours-so-far of cultural and aesthetic histories.




Aesthetic Deviations


Book Description

"SOV horror can be as simplistic, challenging, or offensive as any audience perceives it to be. It can also be enlightening, terrifying, and revealing...These are films that compare to no others in existence, and for that reason alone it’s long past time to accord them some measure of serious consideration." Long considered the dead-end of genre cinema, Shot-On-Video (SOV) horror finally gets its due as a serious filmmaking practice. Using classic fanzines, promotional materials, and especially the theories of several important film scholars, Vincent Albarano brings SOV horror into critical focus for the first time in print. Prior to this moment, Video Violence, Twisted Issues, Alien Beasts, and more have never been mentioned in the same breath as André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, despite their common ground. AESTHETIC DEVIATIONS delves deep into the most famous SOV horror titles to give credit for their unique and singular contributions to independent genre cinema. Informed equally by a fan’s passion and the studied approaches of scholarly analysis, Albarano offers the first-ever detailed examination of the SOV horror cycle, proving that this strain of amateur filmmaking is deserving of proper appraisal. Sure to enlighten and provoke thought among fans and converts to the unique charms of SOV cinema, as well as inspire newcomers, Albarano’s book proves an invaluable resource for a neglected area of cinematic inquiry.




Computer Vision -- ECCV 2012. Workshops and Demonstrations


Book Description

The three volume set LNCS 7583, 7584 and 7585 comprises the Workshops and Demonstrations which took place in connection with the European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2012, held in Firenze, Italy, in October 2012. The total of 179 workshop papers and 23 demonstration papers was carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. They where held at workshops with the following themes: non-rigid shape analysis and deformable image alignment; visual analysis and geo-localization of large-scale imagery; Web-scale vision and social media; video event categorization, tagging and retrieval; re-identification; biological and computer vision interfaces; where computer vision meets art; consumer depth cameras for computer vision; unsolved problems in optical flow and stereo estimation; what's in a face?; color and photometry in computer vision; computer vision in vehicle technology: from earth to mars; parts and attributes; analysis and retrieval of tracked events and motion in imagery streams; action recognition and pose estimation in still images; higher-order models and global constraints in computer vision; information fusion in computer vision for concept recognition; 2.5D sensing technologies in motion: the quest for 3D; benchmarking facial image analysis technologies.




ACS(I) Textbook on Cutaneous & Aesthetic Surgery


Book Description

The new edition of this two volume set has been fully revised to provide dermatosurgeons with the latest developments and techniques in the field. The book has been expanded to eighteen sections and 152 chapters, all falling under subspecialties of dermatosurgery, aesthetics, lasers, and practice management. Each technique includes discussion on historical background, indications, contraindications, instrumentation, procedures, adverse effects, complications, and references. The second edition features 81 new chapters on topics such as body shaping, microneedle RF, new laser and energy technologies, platelets rich plasma, regional surgeries, and training in dermatosurgery. The text is enhanced by nearly 2000 clinical photographs and diagrams and also includes text boxes, tables and keynotes in each chapter. Key points Fully revised, second edition of two volume set providing latest techniques in cutaneous and aesthetic surgery Expanded text with 81 new chapters Features nearly 2000 clinical photographs and diagrams Previous edition (9789350258903) published in 2012




Emerging Visions of the Aesthetic Process


Book Description

Emerging Visions of the Aesthetic Process explores the processes underlying aesthetics and play from the perspectives of psychologists, philosophers, and semiologists. It reveals the different ways in which scholars think about the following questions: (1) What is the origin of the creative process? (2) How do biological, social, and cognitive processes shape the activities of artists and the responses of viewers? (3) How does literary activity draw on our experiences of everyday life and how is it tied to other kinds of media? (4) How does play affect the process of growth from childhood to adulthood? The contributors consider artistic, literary, and play activity from its most biological roots through individual cognitive and emotional processing to its expression at the social level. Emerging Visions of the Aesthetic Process offers a stimulating basis for the discussion of aesthetic processes and will serve as an integrative, comprehensive treatise on the topic for researchers and students.




The Origins of Modern Critical Thought: German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism from Lessing to Hegel


Book Description

An exceptional resource, this 1988 book provides a comprehensive anthology in English of the major texts of German literary and aesthetic theory between Lessing and Hegel. The texts are crucial to an understanding not only of the Romantic period itself, but also of the foundational arguments of literary theory.




Computational Approaches in the Transfer of Aesthetic Values from Paintings to Photographs


Book Description

This book examines paintings using a computational and quantitative approach. Specifically, it compares paintings to photographs, addressing the strengths and limitations of both. Particular aesthetic practices are examined such as the vista, foreground to background organisation and the depth planes. These are analysed using a range of computational approaches and clear observations are made. New generations of image-capture devices such as Google goggles and the light field camera, promise a future in which the formal attributes of a photograph are made available for editing to a degree that has hitherto been the exclusive territory of painting. In this sense paintings and photographs are converging, and it therefore seems an opportune time to study the comparisons between them. In this context, the book includes cutting-edge work examining how some of the aesthetic attributes of a painting can be transferred to a photograph using the latest computational approaches.




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