Photography was invented between the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx and Frederick Engels's The Communist Manifesto. Taking the intertwined development of capitalism and the camera as their starting point, the essays in Capitalism and the Camera investigate the relationship between capitalist accumulation and the photographic image, and ask whether photography might allow us to refuse capitalism's violence-and if so, how? Drawn together in productive disagreement, the essays in this collection explore the relationship of photography to resource extraction and capital accumulation, from 1492 to the postcolonial; the camera's potential to make visible critical understandings of capitalist production and society, especially economies of class and desire; and propose ways that the camera and the image can be used to build cultural and political counterpublics from which a democratic struggle against capitalism might emerge. With essays by Ariella Aisha Azoulay, Siobhan Angus, Kajri Jain, Walter Benn Michaels, T. J. Clark, John Paul Ricco, Blake Stimson, Chris Stolarski, Tong Lam, and Jacob Emery.

John Berger, one of the world's most celebrated storytellers and writers on art, tells a personal history of art from the prehistoric paintings of the Chauvet caves to 21st century conceptual artists. Berger presents entirely new ways of thinking about artists both canonized and obscure, from Rembrandt to Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock to Picasso. Throughout, Berger maintains the essential connection between politics, art and the wider study of culture. The result is an illuminating walk through many centuries of visual culture, from one of the contemporary world's most incisive critical voices.

"Gartel has so superbly captured...the essence of erotic desire. In an age of sex being turned into merely a forbidden behavior and a troublesome medical condition, Gartel has rallied and preserved sexual teasing, seduction, and allure into its rightful pleasurable position by his commendable artistic photographic journaling. In my thirty years as a Sexologist, it is nice to see sex education, preservation, and permission for sexual expression and fun so alive in his work." -Dr. Gil Eriksen, Director of Research at the Institute for Reality Studies Renowned digital media artist Laurence M. Gartel records the world of Fetish in his own inimitable style. As an artist he brings his own creative input and adds his twist to the storyline, becoming a participant through the creative process of working with the imagery. This book is loaded with Gartel's provocative art, including 103 set pieces plus many of the posters and other graphic art for which Gartel has received such acclaim. This work will entertain and confront, as all great art will do. And in the end the reader will be left to ponder the creative mind that brought these images into being. An aesthetic and erotic adventure awaits.

This title was first published in 2000: In their stunning simplicity, George Romney's portraits of eighteenth-century gentry and their children are among the most widely recognised creations of his age. A rival to Reynolds and Gainsborough, Romney was born in 1734 on the edge of the Lake District, the landscape of which never ceased to influence his eye for composition and colour. He moved in 1762 to London where there was an insatiable market for portraits of the landed gentry to fill the elegant picture galleries of their country houses. Romney's sitters included William Beckford and Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton. An influential figure, one of the founding fathers of neo-classicism and a harbinger of romanticism, Romney yearned to develop his talents as a history painter. Countless drawings bear witness to ambitious projects on elemental themes which were rarely executed on canvas. Richly illustrated, this is the first biography of Romney to explore the full diversity of his oeuvre.

Vivienne Maricevic's desire to reveal, challenge, and transform the imbalance between the frequent representation of the naked female form and the rarity of male nudity is led to more than three decades spent devoted to the unadorned male form. While capturing scores of male subjects, she discovered that the majority had never been photographed by a female; the men all welcomed the role-reversal and the opportunity to confront the disparity it suggested. Included in this compendium are more than 150 images from three of Maricevic's most distinct periods: 1975-2005's "Naked Men," all taken in the subjects' homes; 1994-2002's "Me & Men," with Maricevic cleverly engaging her subjects by inserting a piece of herself into the frame; and 2001-2005's "Strip-to-Strip," an homage to Eadweard Muybridge's iconic "Horse in Motion." Her bold, creative synergy solidified a career built on intimate photographs of men au naturel. They are, at times, playful, erotic, or controversial - but always beautiful.

Representations of Renaissance monarchy analyses the portraits and personal imagery of Francis I, one of the most frequently portrayed rulers of sixteenth-century Europe. The distinctive likeness of the Valois king was widely disseminated and perceived by his French subjects, and Tudor and Habsburg rivals abroad. Complementing studies on the representation of Henry VIII, this book makes a dynamic contribution to scholarship on the enterprise of royal image-making in early-modern Europe. The discussion not only highlights the inventiveness of the visual arts in Renaissance France but also alludes to the enduring politics of physical appearance and seductive power of the face and body in modern visual culture. Coinciding with the five hundredth anniversary of Francis I's accession, this book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval and Renaissance art, the history of portraiture or anyone interested in images of monarchy and the history of France. -- .

Girl With Two Fingers is an edited day to day account of life as a subject of eight portraits by Lucian Freud. '...diaries and letters are a form of time travel. They transport the future reader back to the moment the words were written.' In 1999, a young woman writer returns to London from living in Paris, having been hit by a bus. The accident is a wake-up call: what should she do with her life, how to continue writing? Having known Lucian Freud over a decade, and having previously declined to have a portrait painted by him, she writes asking if he still needs someone to work from Something to do while thinking what to do next. Writer and painter meet for dinner and an after hours visit to the National Gallery, and agree to start painting the following week. The studio in Holland Park is unchanged, except everyone's ten years older. The puppy, Pluto, is an old girl now. The writer has travelled, written, grown up.'Now I look for the adult in me, instead of the child.' She keeps a diary, as she always has, until it becomes too much of a chore. After a few weeks, she begins to write to an imaginary confidante instead. 'Every thing, be it glamorous or mundane, has a particularity of its own. Seeing and recording that particularity is what a writer does. And it's a form of protest. Because it's the loudest voice that tells you how to see, and the smallest voice that sees and hears the most.' As an act of independence she rejects the offered chair and stands for her picture, standing up to the artist. She records, 'For now, my place on the planet is in this studio, my small space the shapes of my feet carved into the floor.' The writer's under no illusion that the picture will be flattering. 'I'm simply a body for him to paint, one of many bodies. And a face. Another one of many.' She won't connect to the finished image.'I'm not going to recognise myself, or connect with this image. It'll just be a work of art.' But writer and painter do connect. This becomes a painting relationship, one picture leads to seven more. Leading to night time phone calls and the painter saying 'I'm beginning to depend on you.' 'It feels a bit like Shakespeare's The Tempest up here. The studio our island. Lucian as Prospero, with 'art to enchant'. The shopper as Ariel, and me as a stand-in Miranda.' But not everybody's happy with this painting relationship. And it's proving too much for the subject herself. Despite being committed to the painter's work, she's keen to regain her freedom. 'I think he knows I'm starting to want to break free. That's a kind of magnetic energy for him.' Face to face: writer and painter, woman and man, the seer and the seen. And the unseen. Because that's the joy of writing: it's seeing what can't be depicted in paint. On a trip to New York May 2000, standing unnoticed in a gallery between two of the portraits of herself, the writer looks in to the pictures she's - depicted as - looking out from, and asks if the images are more about the painter than the painted: '...his view, his space, his paint, his colours, his brushes, his language, his desire to control and portray. His feelings. His life events. And the distortions, the freuding, are his signature. They are autobiographical naked portraits of Lucian. Hiding in plain sight.' 'The stories that bring a fixed portrait into being are much more fun than the finished thing itself.' 'What's lovely about (a friend),' says Lucian 'and you do it too, is you describe people by what they say.' 'What do you mean?' 'Well you repeat what it was they said.' Beautifully written, poignant and evocative, testament to the world of the studio, witness to the act of portraiture. 'Historically, men make images of women. Men tell us how to see and understand those images. They narrate them. And then they market what they have made. So the images of women are about men.' Girl With Two Fingers is the female gaze, a detailed subject's account of the making of eight works of art.

Erotic encounters have been celebrated by artists from the beginning of time. This irresistible volume presents 120 of the most engagingly erotic paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings from diverse eras and cultures, coupled with revealing commentaries about their sexual and aesthetic content. Organised unlike any other collection of erotic images, The Art of Arousal traces the course of a sensual relationship. It begins by examining the elements of eroticism, and then progresses from flirtation and seduction through kisses and other foreplay before ultimately arriving at consummation and blissful exhaustion. The irrepressible Dr. Ruth explores every element of sexuality in these provocative works of art, including the pleasures of looking, creative fantasising, and the effects on male and female pleasure of the various positions depicted. All the works in this book have been chosen to meet two essential criteria: everyone portrayed must be having a good time, and each image must satisfy the high aesthetic standards of Dr. Ruth and an art historian friend, who writes with witty scholarship about the artistic and biographical aspects of these remarkable images. Now available in a revised edition that includes stimulating new works by contemporary creators, The Art of Arousal is the perfect gift for your lover who loves art.

From Renaissance fresco painters to contemporary graphic novel artists, the ability to draw clothed figures from one's imagination has always been crucial to artists - and exceptionally difficult to attain. With over 220 illustrations, The Art of Drawing Folds: An Illustrator's Guide to Drawing the Clothed Figure reveals the logic and patterns in folds, enabling the reader to more easily predict the behavior of cloth when creating folds in their own drawings and paintings. Addressing folds in clothing systematically, the author provides a clear, concise approach to the analysis, classification and visualization of convincingly naturalistic folds. Starting with the nature of fabric and its geometry, this book methodically explores the reasons for fold behavior based on the construction of clothing and the shapes and actions of the human figure. An essential guide and reference for animators, illustrators, storyboard artists, comic-book artists, 3D modelers, sculptors, fashion designers and students, The Art of Drawing Folds simplifies one of the most complex and important aspects of drawing the clothed figure.

Focusing on images of or produced by well-to-do nineteenth-century European women, this volume explores genteel femininity as resistant to easy codification vis-A -vis the public. Attending to various iterations of the public as space, sphere and discourse, sixteen essays challenge the false binary construct that has held the public as the sole preserve of prosperous men. By contrast, the essays collected in Women, Femininity and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789-1914 demonstrate that definitions of both femininity and the public were mutually defining and constantly shifting. In examining the relationship between affluent women, femininity and the public, the essays gathered here consider works by an array of artists that includes canonical ones such as Mary Cassatt and FranAois Gerard as well as understudied women artists including Louise Abbema and Broncia Koller. The essays also consider works in a range of media from fashion prints and paintings to private journals and architectural designs, facilitating an analysis of femininity in public across the cultural production of the period. Various European centers, including Madrid, Florence, Paris, Brittany, Berlin and London, emerge as crucial sites of production for genteel femininity, providing a long-overdue rethinking of modern femininity in the public sphere.

Digital artist Zheng Wei Gu (AKA Guweiz) shares his anime-inspired world in this beautifully produced and insightful book, leading you through his fantasy world with a portfolio packed with gritty detail and a surreal vibe. Guweiz began drawing when he was 17, inspired by an anime art tutorial on YouTube. Discovering a natural talent, he carried on drawing and quickly amassed a fan-base for his edgy illustration style. Throughout this book, readers will discover his artistic journey from the very beginning, with behind-the-scenes details about how some of his most popular pieces were created. He reveals his secrets for turning influences into truly original digital art, including that all-important narrative that takes drawing and painting beyond the purely visual. Step-by-step tutorials share techniques and tips to help you create these sorts of effects in your art, resulting in images with the depth of detail and intrigue that Guweiz has made his trademark. The artist's unique urban take on the popular manga/anime style is gripping right from the first page, from the surreal take on Japanese lifestyle to the urban fantasy he creates.

This book reveals how art and sex promoted the desire for the genetically perfect body. Its eight chapters demonstrate that before eugenics was stigmatized by the Holocaust and Western histories were sanitized of its prevalence, a vast array of Western politicians, physicians, eugenic societies, family leagues, health associations, laboratories and museums advocated, through verbal and visual cultures, the breeding of 'the master race'. Each chapter illustrates the uncanny resemblances between models of sexual management and the perfect eugenic body in America, Britain, France, Communist Russia and Nazi Germany both before and after the Second World War. Traced back to the eighteenth-century anatomy lesson, the perfect eugenic body is revealed as athletic, hygienic, 'pure-blooded' and sexually potent. This paradigm is shown to have persisted as much during the Bolshevik sexual revolution, as in democratic nations and fascist regimes. Consistently posed naked, these images were unashamedly exhibitionist and voyeuristic. Despite stringent legislation against obscenity, not only were these images commended for soliciting the spectator's gaze but also for motivating the spectator to act out their desire. An examination of the counter-archives of Maori and African Americans also exposes how biologically racist eugenics could be equally challenged by art. Ultimately this book establishes that art inculcated procreative sex with the Corpus Delecti - the delectable body, healthy, wholesome and sanctioned by eugenicists for improving the Western race.

Drawing and Painting People - A Fresh Approach is about confident and defiant art. Written by a practising artist and tutor, it contains inspiring examples, thought-provoking insights and practical advice about how to become more expressive and adventurous with your work. It is a book for people who are serious about painting and want to develop work that is personal and exceptional in quality. An unpretentious, non-academic approach to painting and drawing Avoiding 'painting by numbers' Strategies for independent working, building confidence and taking risks Examples from notable artists The body as an inspiring muse

With just under a thousand portraits of Queen Elizabeth II, the National Portrait Gallery boasts some of the most treasured and famous official portraits of the Queen captured at key historic moments, as well as day-to-day images of the monarch at home and with family, following her journey from childhood, to princess and Queen, mother and grandmother. This publication highlights the most important portraits of Elizabeth II from the Gallery's Collection. Paintings and photographs from the birth of Elizabeth II to the present will take readers on a visual journey through the life of Britain's foremost icon. The book will reflect on the Queen's life, presenting family photographs alongside important formal portraits to explore how, as her reign became record-breaking, she became an iconic figure in modern British culture and history. The publication features works by key artists depicting the Queen from 1926 to the present day, including Baron, Cecil Beaton, Dorothy Wilding, Patrick Lichfield, Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz and David Bailey. This book features an introductory essay by Alexandra Shulman, exploring how the collected portraits depict the Queen throughout her life and reign, and a timeline of key historical events and moments from Elizabeth II's life.

In 2011, adhering to his mentor Henri Cartier-Bresson's mantra to 'photograph the truth', animation filmmaker Ishu Patel embarks on a photographic journey in southeast Asia. Abandoning moving images to secure a series of still images that capture a uniquely human gesture or powerful thought-provoking story, he prowls both urban and rural areas armed only with a Leica M9 with 35 and 50mm fast lenses. The result is a collection of elusive still images - photographs, mainly in black and white, that tell a story, seize a moment in life or are a witness to joy, struggle or human dignity. Never political or judgmental, the collection comprises Patel's homage to the unsung lives of ordinary Asians, many of whom are increasingly overlooked in today's fast- changing world. Patel also contributes thoughtful essays on the various countries and peoples he has so powerfully photographed.

Losing Your Head: Abjection, Aesthetic Conflict, and Psychoanalytic Criticism looks at the subject of beheading in art as a trope of the destruction of the mind. This book discusses both psychoanalytic theory and art criticism. It addresses critics, readers, and spectators interested in the keys of interpretation that psychoanalysis can offer, and analysts who are curious to know if artists can help them refine the tools they use every day. It asks whether artists have something to say about the concepts of reverie and negative reverie or about change as aesthetic transformation, and about aesthetic experience as a paradigm of what is most true and most profound in analysis. Why write about beheading? Many art galleries feature paintings of heroines performing this cruel act: Delilah, Salome, Judith, Yael, and others. At the antithesis to this, there is another theme to be found in painting that consistently garners attention: namely, the so-called "Sacred Conversation," in which the Madonna holds a small child in her lap and their gazes cross. The first scene depicts how a mind is destroyed, the second how it is born. Losing Your Head analyzes well-known artwork from classical literature, cinema, and contemporary art to enhance psychoanalytic understanding.

Portraits of Queen Marie Leszczinska (1703-1768) were highly visible in eighteenth-century France. Appearing in royal chateaux and, after 1737, in the Parisian Salons, the queen's image was central to the visual construction of the monarchy. Her earliest portraits negotiated aspects of her ethnic difference, French gender norms, and royal rank to craft an image of an appropriate consort to the king. Later portraits by Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Carle Van Loo, and Jean-Marc Nattier contributed to changing notions of queenship over the course of her 43 year tenure. Whether as royal wife, devout consort, or devoted mother, Marie Leszczinska's image mattered. While she has often been seen as a weak consort, this study argues that queenly images were powerful and even necessary for Louis XV's projection of authority. This is the first study dedicated to analyzing the queen's portraits. It engages feminist theory while setting the queen's image in the context of portraiture in France, courtly factional conflict, and the history of the French monarchy. While this investigation is historically specific, it raises the larger problem of the power of women's images versus the empowerment of women, a challenge that continues to plague the representation of political women today.