Photography and the Optical Unconscious
Shawn Michelle Smith is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the author of At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen and Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture, both also published by Duke University Press.
Sharon Sliwinski is Associate Professor of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario and author of Mandela's Dark Years: A Political Theory of Dreaming and Human Rights in Camera.
Shawn Michelle Smith is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the author of At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen and Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture, both also published by Duke University Press.
Sharon Sliwinski is Associate Professor of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario and author of Mandela's Dark Years: A Political Theory of Dreaming and Human Rights in Camera.
Vietnamese Photography and the Look of Revolution
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Published:May 2017
Focusing on select works by Vietnamese socialist photographers, this chapter examines revolutionary forms of looking. The photographers’ approach to revolutionary looking by turns affirms and complicates the discourse of enablement that, Phu contends, lies at the core of Walter Benjamin’s concept of the optical unconscious. Attending to the work of socialist photographers shows how the camera could be enlisted for the purposes of promoting revolution. By examining oral histories and archival documents, Phu provides a critical description of revolutionary looking, and consider how it entails overcoming conditions of deprivation and violence—the result of asymmetrical warfare—in order to produce photographs, exhibiting...
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