Kafka geht ins Kino

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Geoffrey Batchen

In an 1828 letter to his partner Nicephore Niepce, Louis Daguerre wrote, "I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature." In this book, Geoffrey Batchen analyzes the desire to photograph as it emerged within the philosophical and scientific milieus that preceded the actual invention of photography. Recent accounts of photography's identity tend to divide between the postmodern view that all identity is determined by context and a formalist effort to define the fundamental characteristics of photography as a medium. Batchen critiques both approaches by way of a detailed discussion of photography's conception in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this refiguring of the traditional story of photography's origins, Batchen examines the output of the various nominees for "first photographer," then incorporates this information into a mode of historical criticism informed by the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The result is a way of thinking about photography that persuasively accords with the medium's undeniable conceptual, political, and historical complexity.

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Joshua Shannon

A revealing look at the irrevocable change in art during the 1960s and its relationship to the modern culture of fact This refreshing and erudite book offers a new understanding of the transformation of photography and the visual arts around 1968. Author Joshua Shannon reveals an oddly stringent realism in the period, tracing artists' rejection of essential truths in favor of surface appearances. Dubbing this tendency factualism, Shannon illuminates not only the Cold War's preoccupation with data but also the rise of a pervasive culture of fact. Focusing on the United States and West Germany, where photodocumentary traditions intersected with 1960s politics, Shannon investigates a broad variety of art, ranging from conceptual photography and earthworks to photorealist painting and abstraction. He looks closely at art by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Robert Bechtle, Vija Celmins, Douglas Huebler, Gerhard Richter, and others. These artists explored fact's role as a modern paradigm for talking, thinking, and knowing. Their art, Shannon concludes, helps to explain both the ambivalent anti-humanism of today's avant-garde art and our own culture of fact.

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Linn Howard and Mary Jane Pool

The annual installation of the Christmas tree at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, is an event cherished by visitors and scholars alike. The Baroque base of the majestic tree supports a landscape in which vivid eighteenth-century Neapolitan creche figures reenact the events of Christ's Nativity. Magi, dressed in sumptuous robes, are surrounded by their retainers and animals. Exotic travelers, townspeople, and shepherds throng to Bethlehem to view the Christ Child lying in the manger. Above the infant and the graceful figures of Mary and Joseph, a glory of angels hovers in adoration. The tradition of re-creating the events at the manger became a national passion in eighteenth-century Naples. Leading artists were commissioned to create extravagant panoramas containing hundreds of figures, many shown dressed in current fashion and attending to their trades. They offer a wealth of information about the costumes and customs of the day. Loretta Hines Howard gave her collection of creche figures, including the magnificent group called the Adoration of Angels, to the Metropolitan Museum in 1965. For many years she installed it personally, and now her work is being carried on by her daughter, Linn Howard. Together with Mary Jane Pool, noted author and long-time editor-in-chief of House and Garden magazine, Linn Howard tells about the Neapolitan tradition of creche making, and about the Metropolitan's collection in particular. The authors also provide a fascinating glimpse into the care and conservation of the figures; thumbnail biographies of the artists to whom particular figures can be attributed; a glossary; and the story of how Loretta Hines Howard began her collecting. A special feature of the book is "The Christmas Story," in which the Gospels are illustrated with pictures of the creche. The magnificent photography that makes this book a work of art was created especially for it by Elliott Erwitt, whose work can be found in major galleries and museums around the world. The Angel Tree: A Christmas Celebration is truly a book for the entire family, a joyous retelling of the story of the Nativity.

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Sharon Kinsella

"Adult Manga describes and analyses the rise and fall of the mammoth Japanese comic book industry since the 1960s and the complex new attitudes towards manga in Japan since the 1980s. Topics covered include the recent revival of manga censorship and the moral panic surrounding manga otaku, the repression of the amateur manga subculture and the promotion of certain genres of manga by educational and cultural institutions, changes in the intellectual relationship between manga artists and publishing company editors, and the assimilation of manga into national culture. This provocative and timely book shows how manga's status in Japanese society is linked to changes in the balance of power between artists and editors."--BOOK JACKET.