THE CAMERA AS HISTORIAN by Elizabeth Edwards ( 9780822350903 )

Item Details

Title:

THE CAMERA AS HISTORIAN
AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHERS AND HISTORICAL IMAGINATION, 1885-1918

By:

Elizabeth Edwards

Format:

Hardback

List price:

£95.00

Our price:

£85.50

Discount:

10% off

You save:

£9.50

ISBN 10:

0822350904

ISBN 13:

9780822350903

Availability:

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Stock:

Currently 0 available

Publisher:

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Pub. date:

11 April, 2012

Series:

Objects/Histories

Pages:

344

Description:

Photographic historian Edwards looks at the popularity of the amateur photographic survey movement in England between the mid-1880s and the end of World War I, when over a thousand amateur photographers took well over 50,000 photographs documenting nearby churches, cottages, and other local features. Edwards sees this movement as a form of popular history.

Synopsis:

In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, hundreds of amateur photographers took part in the photographic survey movement in England. They sought to record the material remains of the English past so that it might be preserved for future generations. In The Camera as Historian, the groundbreaking historical and visual anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards works with an archive of nearly 55,000 photographs taken by 1,000 photographers, mostly unknown until now. She approaches the survey movement and its social and material practices ethnographically. Considering how the amateur photographers understood the value of their project, Edwards links the surveys to concepts of leisure, understandings of the local and the national, and the rise of popular photography. Her examination of how the photographers negotiated between scientific objectivity and aesthetic responses to the past leads her to argue that the survey movement was as concerned with the conditions of its own modernity and the creation of an archive for an anticipated future as it was nostalgic about the imagined past. Including more than 120 vibrant images, The Camera as Historian offers new perspectives on the forces that shaped Victorian and Edwardian Britain, as well as on contemporary debates about cultural identity, nationality, empire, material practices, and art.

Illustrations:

121 photographs (duotones), 1 table

Publication:

Imprint:

Duke University Press

Returns:

Returnable

Some other items by this author:

A HISTORY OF BOURNEMOUTH (HB)

A RECORD OF ENGLAND (HB)

ACTS OF FAITH (PB)

BEAUMARIS BAY AND OTHER POEMS (PB)