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Books > Arts & Architecture > Photography & photographs > Special kinds of photography
In 1942, Bill Manbo (1908-1992) and his family were forced from
their Hollywood home into the Japanese American internment camp at
Heart Mountain in Wyoming. While there, Manbo documented both the
bleakness and beauty of his surroundings, using Kodachrome film, a
technology then just seven years old, to capture community
celebrations and to record his family's struggle to maintain a
normal life under the harsh conditions of racial imprisonment.
Colors of Confinement showcases sixty-five stunning images from
this extremely rare collection of color photographs, presented
along with three interpretive essays by leading scholars and a
reflective, personal essay by a former Heart Mountain internee. The
subjects of these haunting photos are the routine fare of an
amateur photographer: parades, cultural events, people at play,
Manbo's son. But the images are set against the backdrop of the
barbed-wire enclosure surrounding the Heart Mountain Relocation
Center and the dramatic expanse of Wyoming sky and landscape. The
accompanying essays illuminate these scenes as they trace a
tumultuous history unfolding just beyond the camera's lens, giving
readers insight into Japanese American cultural life and the stark
realities of life in the camps. Also contributing to the book are:
Jasmine Alinder is associate professor of history at the University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she coordinates the program in public
history. In 2009 she published Moving Images: Photography and the
Japanese American Incarceration (University of Illinois Press). She
has also published articles and essays on photography and
incarceration, including one on the work of contemporary
photographer Patrick Nagatani in the newly released catalog Desire
for Magic: Patrick Nagatani--Works, 1976-2006 (University of New
Mexico Art Museum, 2009). She is currently working on a book on
photography and the law. Lon Kurashige is associate professor of
history and American studies and ethnicity at the University of
Southern California. His scholarship focuses on racial ideologies,
politics of identity, emigration and immigration, historiography,
cultural enactments, and social reproduction, particularly as they
pertain to Asians in the United States. His exploration of Japanese
American assimilation and cultural retention, Japanese American
Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and
Festival, 1934-1990 (University of California Press, 2002), won the
History Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies
in 2004. He has published essays and reviews on the incarceration
of Japanese Americans and has coedited with Alice Yang Murray an
anthology of documents and essays, Major Problems in Asian American
History (Cengage, 2003). Bacon Sakatani was born to immigrant
Japanese parents in El Monte, California, twenty miles east of Los
Angeles, in 1929. From the first through the fifth grade, he
attended a segregated school for Hispanics and Japanese. Shortly
after Pearl Harbor, his family was confined at Pomona Assembly
Center and then later transferred to the Heart Mountain Relocation
Center in Wyoming. When the war ended in 1945, his family relocated
to Idaho and then returned to California. He graduated from Mount
San Antonio Community College. Soon after the Korean War began, he
served with the U.S. Army Engineers in Korea. He held a variety of
jobs but learned computer programming and retired from that career
in 1992. He has been active in Heart Mountain camp activities and
with the Japanese American Korean War Veterans.
Drawing on unprecedented access to the video archives of B'Tselem,
an Israeli NGO that distributes cameras to Palestinians living in
the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, Liat Berdugo
lays out an argument for a visual studies approach to videographic
evidence in Israel/Palestine. Using video stills as core material,
it discusses the politics of videographic evidence in
Israel/Palestine by demonstrating that the conflict is one that has
produced an inequality of visual rights. The book highlights visual
surveillance and counter surveillance at the citizen level, how
Palestinians originally filmed to "shoot back" at Israelis, who
were armed with shooting power via weapons as the occupying force.
It also traces how Israeli private citizens began filming back at
Palestinians with their own cameras, including personal cell phone
cameras, thus creating a simultaneous, echoing counter
surveillance. Complicating the notion that visual evidence alone
can secure justice, the Weaponized Camera in The Middle East asks
how what is seen, but also who is seeing, affects how conflicts are
visually recorded. Drawing on over 5,000 hours of footage, only a
fraction of which is easily accessible to the public domain, this
book offers a unique perspective on the strategies and
battlegrounds of the Israel/Palestine conflict.
Two of the most stylized shots in cinema - the close-up and the
long shot - embody distinct attractions. The iconicity of the
close-up magnifies the affective power of faces and elevates film
to the discourse of art. The depth of the long shot, in contrast,
indexes the facts of life and reinforces our faith in reality. Each
configures the relation between image and distance that expands the
viewer's power to see, feel, and conceive. To understand why a
director prefers one type of shot over the other then is to explore
more than aesthetics: It uncovers significant assumptions about
film as an art of intervention or organic representation. Close-ups
and Long Shots in Modern Chinese Cinemas is the first book to
compare these two shots within the cultural, historical, and
cinematic traditions that produced them. In particular, the global
revival of Confucian studies and the transnational appeal of
feminism in the 1980s marked a new turn in the composite cultural
education of Chinese directors whose shot selections can be seen as
not only stylistic expressions, but ethical choices responding to
established norms about self-restraint, ritualism, propriety, and
female agency. Each of the films discussed - Zhang Yimou's Red
Sorghum, Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, Hou Hsiao-Hsien's The Assassin,
Jia Zhangke's I Wish I Knew, and Wei Desheng's Cape No. 7 -
represents a watershed in Chinese cinemas that redefines the
evolving relations among film, politics, and ethics. Together these
works provide a comprehensive picture of how directors
contextualize close-ups and long shots in ways that make them
interpretable across many films as bellwethers of social change.
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