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Lens Culture is an online magazine celebrating international contemporary photography, art, media, and world cultures. Discover photography from all continents and various points of view: documentary, fine art, photojournalism, poetic, personal, abstract, human, and street photography. Read essays, analysis and criticism about photography and culture. Listen to audio interviews with photographers. Enjoy reviews of exhibitions and photo books. Buy very cool 21st century photography at our new online store. Lens Culture attracts visitors from more than 100 countries every day.

Lens Culture is an online magazine celebrating international contemporary photography, art, media, and world cultures. Discover photography from all continents and various points of view: documentary, fine art, photojournalism, poetic, personal, abstract, human, and street photography. Read essays, analysis and criticism about photography and culture. Listen to audio interviews with photographers. Enjoy reviews of exhibitions and photo books. Buy very cool 21st century photography at our new online store. Lens Culture attracts visitors from more than 100 countries every day.

Photographies seeks to construct a new agenda for theorising photography as a heterogeneous medium that is changing in an ever more dynamic relation to all aspects of contemporary culture. Photographies aims to further develop the history and theory of photography, considering new frameworks for thinking and addressing questions arising from the present context of technological, economic, political and cultural change. Photographies will investigate the contemporary condition and currency of the photographic within local and global contexts. The editors seek research papers and innovative visual essays, shorter papers engaging new debates, review essays evaluating publications, cultural events, key developments, exhibitions and conferences. Photographies aims to: - establish a sustained and dynamic forum for the development of the history and theory of photography, - consider new frameworks for thinking and addressing questions arising from digital technologies and economic, political and cultural change, - examine contemporary uses and currencies of the photographic within local and global contexts, - identify, develop and discuss emergent critical debates and practices, - publish work in the humanities and social sciences which has a bearing upon our understanding of photography thereby locating debate within a wider community.

"There is an unmistakable seriousness as well as a handsome hospitality in the range of method and morality, topic and topography on show." Times Higher Education Supplement The past two decades have witnessed an explosion of interest, research and writing on visual culture within the humanities and social sciences. journal of visual culture is an international, refereed journal which is a site for astute, informative and dynamic thought on the visual. The journal publishes work from a range of methodological positions, on various historical moments and across diverse geographical locations. It promotes research, scholarship and critical engagement with visual cultures.

Aims & Scope Visual Studies is a major international peer-reviewed journal published on behalf of the International Visual Sociology Association. The journal publishes visually-oriented articles across a range of disciplines, and represents a long-standing commitment to empirical visual research, studies of visual and material culture, the development of visual research methods and the exploration of visual means of communication about social and cultural worlds. Visual Studies is a key resource for all disciplines that engage with images, society and culture, and sets the standard for the scholarly use of visual material. The multidisciplinary character of the journal is reflected in its attention to visually-based research in sociology, anthropology, cultural and media studies, documentary film and photography, information technology, education, communication studies as well as other fields concerned with image-based study. The aims of Visual Studies are to: * Provide an international forum for the development of visual research. * Promote acceptance and understanding of a wide range of methods, approaches and paradigms that constitute image-based research. * Reduce the disparity in emphasis between visual and written studies in the social sciences. * Promote an interest in developing visual research methodology in all its various forms. * Encourage research that employs a mixture of visual methods and analytical approaches within one study. * Critically reflect and contribute to the dialogue surrounding 'the visual' across the social sciences and humanities. * Provide an arena for in-depth exploration of various approaches, particular methods, themes and visual phenomena. Most articles published in the journal are accompanied by appropriate visual material, and the journal encourages visually-led submissions.

Aims & Scope Third Text is an international scholarly journal dedicated to providing critical perspectives on art and visual culture. The journal examines the theoretical and historical ground by which the West legitimises its position as the ultimate arbiter of what is significant within this field. Established in 1987, the journal provides a forum for the discussion and (re)appraisal of theory and practice of art, art history and criticism, and the work of artists hitherto marginalised through racial, gender, religious and cultural differences. Dealing with diversity of art practices - visual arts, sculpture, installation, performance, photography, video and film - Third Text addresses the complex cultural realities that emerge when different worldviews meet, and the challenge this poses to Eurocentrism and ethnocentric aesthetic criteria. The journal aims to develop new discourses and radical interdisciplinary scholarships that go beyond the confines of eurocentricity.

THEORY: "Through a Glass, Darkly: Photography and Cultural Memory" Through a Glass, Darkly: Photography and Cultural Memory By: Alan Trachtenberg, Social Research, Saturday, March 22, 2008 "I don't know why a Replicant would collect photos - maybe they were like Rachel - they needed memories." In the role of the bounty hunter Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott's 1982 cult classic, Blade Runner, Harrison Ford utters these words with a bitter edge. Assigned to "terminate" the beautiful Rachel, an "android" especially menacing because she's almost (almost!) indistinguishable from a "real" person, Deckard lusts after her and wants to be sure she's human, not machine-made, before bedding her. Based on Phillip K. Dick's brilliant science fiction novel of 1968, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the film adds the bit of sentiment about collecting photographs to the otherwise unmitigated darkness of Phillip Dick's vision of a near future. The year is 2021, and by means of mechanical replication--the electric sheep of Dick's title--warm-blooded animal life has been all but totally replaced by replicants, copies or duplications of almost forgotten originals. Memories of real sheep and toads and living human flesh are struggling against the irresistible tide of a programmed second-order reality unburdened by personal or cultural memory.

Journalistic ethics still matter even in a corporate media culture Sometimes there needs to be a distinction between what people believe to be an ethical decision and a matter of taste. There are lots of disturbing images that may be distasteful to some, but not unethical to run in a newspaper or online. Cultural values and taste, not ethics, increasingly play a significant role in the decisions being made today about what picture see the light of day. There is a tremendous amount of self-censorship going on in the news today. Many papers will not run disturbing images, not because they are afraid to tell the truth, but simply because of the push-back they get from advertisers and the public.

THEORY: "The ethics of seeing: Susan Sontag and visual culture studies" The ethics of seeing: Susan Sontag and visual culture studies By Marc Furstenau There are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. --Susan Sontag

For two hectic weeks between the US presidential election and the inauguration, one photographer was invited to make portraits of every member of Obama's new incoming administration. The result is a series of 52 unlikely semi-formal portraits that reveal a refreshingly diverse, young, energetic group of the people who will be key to helping forward Obama's agenda. This series of portraits originally appeared in The New York Times Magazine, in print and online. Now, for the first time anywhere, an exhibition of life-size prints of these images will go on display (not in America) but in Birmingham, UK. UK-based photographer Nadav Kander talks with Jim Casper of Lens Culture about how this daunting project came into being, and provides some very interesting personal observations about his brief encounters with the new power-brokers of America. See some of the images, and listen to the interview, here in Lens Culture.

FotoFest® created the first international Biennial of Photography and Photo-related Art in the United States. FotoFest ® is an international non-profit photographic arts and education organization based in Houston, Texas. FotoFest's purpose is to promote the exchange of art and ideas through international programs and the presentation of photographic art. Our programs work globally and locally, bringing together an international vision of art and cross-cultural exchange with a commitment to community involvement and the enrichment of Houston's cultural resources. In addition to its internationally known Biennial, FotoFest sponsors Inter-Biennial programs - exhibitions, international exchange programs, and publications. In grades 3-12, FotoFest operates a year-round classroom education program, Literacy Through Photography, using photography to strengthen writing skills, visual literacy, and cognitive learning.

The Research Center Collections are central to the VSW mission to support the "creation, presentation, collection, preservation and education" of media based arts. VSW's focus on the aesthetics, cultural history of media, and social use of images has developed a collections policy which includes both creative work and vernacular images, as well as items that represent the history of media use. The Independent Press Archive has 5000 artist's books -- the largest collection of artists' books in upstate New York. This Archive is complemented by the Illustrated Book Collection, which contains illustrated books published from 1694 to the present day that display all aspects of engraving and photo-engraving practices and all forms of imaging technologies from wood engraving to xerography. These collections are supported by a Research Library of 20,000 books concentrating on the areas of photography, filmmaking, video, bookmaking, media studies, and the cultural practices of image making. The Photograph Collections contain 27,000 original photographic or photo-mechanical prints made by 2,200 known photographers and more than 600,000 examples of vernacular or anonymous images in the form of lantern slides, stereo cards, snapshots, postcards and news agency photographs. These collections hold examples of every type of photographic practice from the family snapshot to the fine art print and include work of every era from the daguerreotypes of the 1840s to digital prints from the present day.

The Visual Studies Workshop is committed to expanding the potential of the media arts, and their impact on visual culture, through innovative programs in education, research, production and community service. We are an internationally recognized center for media studies, including photography, visual books, digital imaging, film and video, located in two historic buildings, comprising 44,000 feet of space in Rochester's museum and cultural district. We serves visual artists and the general public with diversified programming in education and exhibitions.

Death's Showcase The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy Ariella Azoulay This is a book about the public display of death in contemporary culture. It consists of a series of essays on specific cases in which death is displayed in museums and in photography. The essays focus mainly on representations of violence and death in events in recent Israeli history, including the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian Intifada, and on the visual presence of traumatic events in Israeli culture throughout the twentieth century. They show how images of these events both shape and aestheticize the viewer's experience of death.

"On the Internet, everybody is a millenarian. Internet journalism, according to those who produce manifestos on its behalf, represents a world-historical development-not so much because of the expressive power of the new medium as because of its accessibility to producers and consumers. That permits it to break the long-standing choke hold on public information and discussion that the traditional media-usually known, when this argument is made, as "gatekeepers" or "the priesthood"-have supposedly been able to maintain up to now. "Millions of Americans who were once in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff-and that many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession," Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who operates one of the leading blogs, Instapundit, writes, typically, in his new book, "An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths." The rhetoric about Internet journalism produced by Reynolds and many others is plausible only because it conflates several distinct categories of material that are widely available online and didn't use to be. One is pure opinion, especially political opinion, which the Internet has made infinitely easy to purvey. Another is information originally published in other media-everything from Chilean newspaper stories and entries in German encyclopedias to papers presented at Micronesian conferences on accounting methods-which one can find instantly on search and aggregation sites. Lately, grand journalistic claims have been made on behalf of material produced specifically for Web sites by people who don't have jobs with news organizations. According to a study published last month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, there are twelve million bloggers in the United States, and thirty-four per cent of them consider blogging to be a form of journalism. That would add

Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism is a publication of the Visual Studies Workshop, a non-profit media arts center located in Rochester, New York. For the over 30 years, Afterimage has been an important voice in the photography, film, video and visual book community. Along with feature articles, books and exhibition reviews, essays and news, every issue of Afterimage also includes over 300 free notices for jobs, call-for-work, exhibitions and screenings.

lens culture: contemporary photography links

David Goldblatt has photographed his native South Africa since the early 1970's, carefully observing the social, cultural and economic divides that characterise the country. His first publication, On the Mines, examined gold-mining in the East Rand area of the country. In Boksburg documented a small town which he sees as "shaped by white dreams and white properties" but which is ultimately "nondescript and elusive". Goldblatt often creates webs of likenesses and contrasts across an image, such as seen and seeing; young and old.

Geo-mapping how much we value photographs as tokens of "buzz" The proliferation of online photography and geo-tagging allows researchers to visualize and define a "geography of buzz". A new study of time-stamped, geo-tagged photos uploaded to the internet equates quantities and clusters of images as photographic tokens of cultural value. How will urban developers and event marketers tap into these power centers highlighted by stock photo agencies and citizen photographers uploading images to Flickr and Twitter? Very interesting reading in the New York Times, and the original research paper.

Since 2004, Lens Culture has recorded audio interviews and conversations with some of the most interesting and thought-provoking photographers around the world. It's great to hear these articulate artists speaking directly about their own work - and sharing their ideas about photography in general. Enjoy!