The Life and Death of Images


Book Description

The 1990s witnessed a return to aesthetics, but one that stressed the independent claims of beauty in reaction to its perceived suppression by ethical and political imperatives. Beauty, however, is just one aspect of the aesthetic. In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to the ways in which aesthetics and ethics are intertwined. In The Life and Death of Images some of the world's leading cultural thinkers engage in dialogue with one another concerning this [beta]new[gamma] aesthetics. In provocative and accessible fashion, they demonstrate its relevance to a range of disciplines including analytic and continental philosophy, art history, theory and practice, cultural history and visual culture, rhetoric and comparative literature.




The Life and Death of Buildings


Book Description

Buildings inhabit and symbolize time, giving form to history and making public space an index of the past. Photographs are made of time; they are literally projections of past states of their subjects. This visually striking meditation on architecture in photography explores the intersection between these two ways of embodying the past. Photographs of buildings, Joel Smith argues, are simultaneously the agents, vehicles, and cargo of social memory. In The Life and Death of Buildings photographers as canonical as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Laura Gilpin, Lewis W. Hine, and William Henry Fox Talbot enter into visual dialogue with amateurs, architects, propagandists, and insurance adjusters. Rather than examine photographers' aims in isolation, Smith considers how their images reflect and inflect the passage of time. Much as a building's shifting function and circumstances substantially alter its significance, a photograph comes to be coauthored by history, growing layers of meaning to which its maker had no access.




Mexico


Book Description

In his masterful photo series Harvey Stein explores a country of incredible contrasts and contradictions.




The Little Book of Life and Death


Book Description

In this book the author of On Having No Head investigates the most poignant problem our life poses - what lies at the end of it. He asks us to check four things. First, that to discover whether we are perishable, we must first discover what we are. Second, that outsiders are in no position to tell us this: they can only tell us what we look like at a distance. Third, that what we are is obvious as soon as we dare to look. And fourth, that we turn out to be in all respects the opposite of what we had been told. This revolutionary conclusion is arrived at by doing the nine "tests for Immortality" that form the backbone of the book. Then, our identity and immortality having been firmly established, we apply this knowledge to the fact of ageing and of dying itself, thus realizing their infinite potential for joy. Finally, the book explores in detail the true resurrection life - life lived in a Heaven which is none other than this earthly scene perceived as it is. 'The "open secret" is no longer secret. Douglas Harding's Little Book of Life nd Death makes the insights of the sages accessible to all. Courageous, personal and inspiring, this book asks the most difficult questions about life and death, and to our - and apparently even the author's - amazemnt, answers them. Like Harding's classic book On Having No Head, this work is written in a down-home, heartfelt syle. Read this book. Do the "experiments" which are Harding's unique and powerful contribution to what might be called the technology of enlightenment. Get ready to die, and to live anew.' Rober W. Fuller. Former president, Oberlin College. 'The literature on dying will never be the same again.' Ram Dass




The Death and Life of the Great Lakes


Book Description

New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Award "Nimbly splices together history, science, reporting and personal experiences into a taut and cautiously hopeful narrative.… Egan’s book is bursting with life (and yes, death)." —Robert Moor, New York Times Book Review The Great Lakes—Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario, and Superior—hold 20 percent of the world’s supply of surface fresh water and provide sustenance, work, and recreation for tens of millions of Americans. But they are under threat as never before, and their problems are spreading across the continent. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes is prize-winning reporter Dan Egan’s compulsively readable portrait of an ecological catastrophe happening right before our eyes, blending the epic story of the lakes with an examination of the perils they face and the ways we can restore and preserve them for generations to come.




Beautiful Death


Book Description

A collection of photographs from the burial grounds of Europe explores the beauty of cemeteries and the emotions the survivors of the dead placed into the making of the tombs.




Sparrow


Book Description




Death and the Moving Image


Book Description

Exploring gender, race, nation and narration, this groundbreaking study isolates how mainstream cinema works to bestow value upon certain lives and specific socio-cultural identities in a hierarchical and partisan way. Dedicated to the popular, to the pol




The Art of Life and Death


Book Description

The Art of Life and Death explores how the world appears to people who have an acute perspective on it: those who are close to death. Based on extensive ethnographic research, Andrew Irving brings to life the lived experiences, imaginative lifeworlds, and existential concerns of persons confronting their own mortality and non-being. Encompassing twenty years of working alongside persons living with HIV/AIDS in New York, Irving documents the radical but often unspoken and unvoiced transformations in perception, knowledge, and understanding that people experience in the face of death. By bringing an "experience-near" ethnographic focus to the streams of inner dialogue, imagination, and aesthetic expression that are central to the experience of illness and everyday life, this monograph offers a theoretical, ethnographic, and methodological contribution to the anthropology of time, finitude, and the human condition. With relevance well-beyond the disciplinary boundaries of anthropology, this book ultimately highlights the challenge of capturing the inner experience of human suffering and hope that affect us all--of the trauma of the threat of death and the surprise of continued life.




The Death and Life of Main Street


Book Description

For more than a century, the term "Main Street" has conjured up nostalgic images of American small-town life. Representations exist all around us, from fiction and film to the architecture of shopping malls and Disneyland. All the while, the nation has become increasingly diverse, exposing tensions within this ideal. In The Death and Life of Main Street, Miles Orvell wrestles with the mythic allure of the small town in all its forms, illustrating how Americans continue to reinscribe these images on real places in order to forge consensus about inclusion and civic identity, especially in times of crisis. Orvell underscores the fact that Main Street was never what it seemed; it has always been much more complex than it appears, as he shows in his discussions of figures like Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Frank Capra, Thornton Wilder, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans. He argues that translating the overly tidy cultural metaphor into real spaces--as has been done in recent decades, especially in the new urbanist planned communities of Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany--actually diminishes the communitarian ideals at the center of this nostalgic construct. Orvell investigates the way these tensions play out in a variety of cultural realms and explores the rise of literary and artistic traditions that deliberately challenge the tropes and assumptions of small-town ideology and life.