1800s
1900s
A01=Linda Haverty Rugg
academic
art
artwork
Author_Linda Haverty Rugg
autobiographical
being
camera
Category=AJCD
Category=DNBM1
Category=JMS
childhood
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
film
framing
historical
history
identity
illustrated
illustrations
image
literary
literature
mirroring
national
nazi
observation
photograph
photographer
photographs
photos
pictures
political
politics
realistic
research
scholarly
socialist
true story
writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780226731469
- Weight: 680g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 08 Dec 1997
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Photography has transformed the way we picture ourselves. Although photographs seem to "prove" our existence at a given point in time, they also demonstrate the impossibility of framing our multiple and fragmented selves. As the author of this study aims to show, photography's double-take on self-image mirrors the concerns of autobiographers, who see the self as simultaneously divided (in observing/being) and unified by the autobiographical act. The book tracks photography's impact on the formation of self-image through the study of four literary autobiographers concerned with the transformative power of photography. Obsessed with self-image, Mark Twain and August Strindberg both attempted (unsuccessfully) to integrate photographs into their autobiographies. While Twain encouraged photographers, he was wary of fakery and kept a fierce watch on the distribution of his photographic image. Strindberg, believing that photographs had occult power, preferred to photograph himself. Because of their experiences under National Socialism, Walter Benjamin and Christa Wolf feared the dangerously objectifying power of photographs and omitted them from their autobiographical writings.
Yet Benjamin used them in his photographic conception of history, which had its testing ground in his often-ignored "Berliner Kindheit um 1900". And Christa Wolf's narrator in "Patterns of Childhood" attempts to reclaim her childhood from the Nazis by reconstructing mental images of lost family photographs. Confronted with multiple and conflicting images of themselves, all four of these writers are torn between the knowledge that texts, photographs, and indeed selves are haunted by undecidability and the desire for the returned glance of a single self.
