ENG / RUS
140x215 (60x90/16)paperback, ill., 192 pp., 2011
ISBN 978-5-86793-898-7
World rights available
Empire of Light is the name of a painting by the Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte. Under a daytime sky dotted with white clouds we see a street at night – a house with glowing windows, a lamp in front of the house giving off rays of light, and the dark silhouettes of trees. One might say that this picture is a detailed metaphor of vision, and in the case of photography this metaphor is applicable in a much more systematic fashion.
Oksana Gavrishina's book is devoted to the diverse forms of photographic 'vision', which is historically determined and can be discerned within photographs themselves, rather than in their accompanying texts. Gavrishina analyzes works by Russian, Lithuanian and American photographers, and the theoretical and chronological framework of her research is the age of "Modernity," beginning in the 1930s. The book tracks the formation of the artistic canon in photography in the early 20th century, in avant-garde art. How was photography perceived, how was it evaluated in the context of art theory, and how was the understanding of 'semblance' intertwined with the reflections imprinted in a photograph? Gavrishina seeks answers to these questions in her book.
Oksana Gavrishina is a cultural historian and works at the Russian State University of the Humanities. She is the author of academic works on the cultural history of the 20th century and the history of photography in the 19th and 20th centuries.
In a sense this is of course a book about the cultivation of the gaze, which occurred without a moral framework, without being dictated, without preconceived goals. More precisely it is about the techniques of cultivation. And about how at the foundations of various historical epochs there are, among other foundations, specific ways of seeing, which are no less important. O. Balla
The book is small, but a lot has been packed inside, from analysis of specific images to theoretical discussions. It is a genuine conceptual cycle of texts that support each other and communicate among themselves.
What do Soviet studio photographs from the 1930s to 1950s and the American photographer Ralph Meatyard (acclaimed for photographing people and objects inside old, abandoned houses in the Southern states in the middle of the last century) have in common? Or Lithuanian passport photos from the end of the 1940s and anthropological pictures of U.S. criminals made during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt? Carefully examining these shots and analyzing their social and historical context, Gavrishina provides a fascinating discussion about the determinants of photographic ways of seeing, the problem of semblance, and the multiplication of meanings. A. Miroshkin
