ASIA 1111-04 – Hollywood Hanoi: Narrating the Vietnam War: Images Resources

Cameras, and what they capture, forever changed our perception of the world, and of ourselves. Few inventions have had the impact of this ingenious, elegant, and deceptively simple device. This gorgeous cornerstone volume, created in collaboration with the world-famous George Eastman House, celebrates the camera and the art of the photograph. It spans almost two hundred years of progress, from the first faint image ever caught to the instantaneous pictures snapped by today’s state-of-the-art digital equipment. The informative narrative by Todd Gustavson traces the camera’s development, the lives of its brilliant but often eccentric inventors, and the artists behind the lens. Images and highly descriptive captions for more than 350 cameras from the George Eastman House Collection, plus more than 100 historic photos, ads, and drawings, complement the text. A foreword by the George Eastman House Director Anthony Bannon, and insightful essays by Steve Sasson, inventor of the digital camera, and Alexis Gerard, visionary founder and president of Future Image Inc., completes this illuminating study of one of the greatest modern technological achievements.  

Looking beyond the impact photographs have on the perpetuation and expression of social norms and stereotypes, and the influence of the act of taking a photograph, this new collection brings together international scholars to examine the camera itself as an actor.　 Bringing the camera back into view, this volume furthers our understanding of how, and in what ways, imaging technology shapes us, our lives, and the representations out of which we fashion knowledge, base our judgments and ultimately act. Through a broad range of case studies, the authors in this collection make the convincing claim that the camera is much more than a mechanical device brought to life by the photographer.　 This book will be of interest to scholars in photography, visual culture, anthropology and the history of photography.

Containing 30 essays that embody the history of photography, this collection includes contributions from Niepce, Daguerre, Fox, Talbot, Poe, Emerson, Hine, Stieglitz, and Weston, among others.

This book is the first of a two-volume study of photography that challenges both how photography has been theorized and how it has been historicized.