This innovative collection demonstrates the profound effects of feeling on our experiences and understanding of photography. It includes essays on the tactile nature of photos, the relation of photography to sentiment and intimacy, and the ways that affect pervades the photographic archive. Concerns associated with the affective turn-intimacy, alterity, and ephemerality, as well as queerness, modernity, and loss-run through the essays. At the same time, the contributions are informed by developments in critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and feminist theory. As the contributors bring affect theory to bear on photography, some interpret the work of contemporary artists, such as Catherine Opie, Tammy Rae Carland, Christian Boltanski, Marcelo Brodsky, Zoe Leonard, and Rea Tajiri. Others look back, whether to the work of the American Pictorialist F. Holland Day or to the discontent masked by the smiles of black families posing for cartes de visite in a Kodak marketing campaign. With more than sixty photographs, including twenty in color, this collection changes how we see, think about, and feel photography, past and present.
Contributors. Elizabeth Abel, Elspeth H. Brown, Kimberly Juanita Brown, Lisa Cartwright, Lily Cho, Ann Cvetkovich, David L. Eng, Marianne Hirsch, Thy Phu, Christopher Pinney, Marlis Schweitzer, Dana Seitler, Tanya Sheehan, Shawn Michelle Smith, Leo Spitzer, Diana Taylor
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction / Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu 1
Part I. Touchy-Feely
1. Photography between Desire and Grief: Roland Barthes and F. Holland Day / Shawn Michelle Smith 29
2. Making Sexuality Sensible: Tammy Rae Carland's and Catherine Opie's Queer Aesthetic Forms / Dana Seitler 47
3. Sepia Mutiny: Colonial Photography and Its Others in India / Christopher Pinney 71
4. Skin, Flesh, and the Affective Wrinkles of Civil Rights Photography / Elizabeth Abel 93
Part II. Intimacy and Sentiment
5. Looking Pleasant, Feeling White: The Social Politics of the Photographic Smile / Tanya Sheehan 127
6. Anticipating Citizenship: Chinese Head Tax Photographs / Lily Cho 159
7. Regarding the Pain of the Other: Photography, Famine, and the Transference of Affect / Kimberly Juanita Brown 181
8. Accessible Feelings, Modern Looks: Irene Castle, Ira L. Hill, and Broadway's Affective Economy / Marlis Schweitzer 204
Part III. Affective Archives
9. Trauma in the Archive / Diana Taylor 239
10. School Photos and Their Afterlives / Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer 252
11. Photographing Objects as Queer Archival Practice / Ann Cvetkovich 273
12. Topographies of Feeling: On Catherine Opie's American Football Landscapes / Lisa Cartwright 297
13. The Feeling of Photography, the Feeling of Kinship / David L. Eng 325
Epilogue / Thy Phu and Elspeth H. Brown 349
Bibliography 357
Contributors 385
Index 389
