Feeling Photography

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

“"This volume presents a significant contribution to photographic criticism and affect theory, adding to recent scholarship...the collection will be of interest to researchers of affect, visual culture and media, with relevance to documentary film."”

"Feeling Photography is a major book. I don't know of any other collection quite like it. In rigorous, passionate, provocative, and cogent essays, the contributors provide a new way of thinking about visual culture as an affective, and not just ocular, experience." - Elizabeth Freeman, author of Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories "This fascinating, important collection of essays by eminent thinkers is a timely one, sure to appeal to the many scholars interested in theories of affect and the history and theory of photography. I truly admire this book, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it." - Carol Mavor, author of Black and Blue: The Bruised Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetee, Sans Soleil, and Hiroshima Mon Amour

Elspeth H. Brown is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884–1929.

Thy Phu is Associate Professor of English at Western University in London, Ontario. She is the author of Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture.

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