Photography is a ubiquitous part of the public sphere. Yet we rarely stop to think about the important role that photography plays in helping to define what and who constitute the public. Photography and Its Publics brings together leading experts and emerging thinkers to consider the special role of photography in shaping how the public is addressed, seen and represented.This book responds to a growing body of recent scholarship and flourishing interest in photography's connections to the law, society, culture, politics, social change, the media and visual ethics.Photography and Its Publics presents the public sphere as a vibrant setting where these realms are produced, contested and entwined. Public spheres involve yet exceed the limits of families, interest groups, identities and communities. They are dynamic realms of visibility, discussion, reflection and possible conflict among strangers of different race, age, gender, social and economic status. Through studies of photography in South America, North America, Europe and Australasia, the contributors consider how photography has changed the way we understand and locate the public sphere. As they address key themes including the referential and imaginative qualities of photography, the transnational circulation of photographs, online publics, social change, violence, conflict and the ethics of spectatorship, the authors provide new insight into photography's vital role in defining public life.

Over the past twenty-five years, photography has moved to centre-stage in the study of visual culture and has established itself in numerous disciplines. This trend has brought with it a diversification in approaches to the study of the photographic image.

Photography: Theoretical Snapshots offers exciting perspectives on photography theory today from some of the world s leading critics and theorists. It introduces new means of looking at photographs, with topics including:

• a community-based understanding of Spencer Tunick s controversial installations
• the tactile and auditory dimensions of photographic viewing
• snapshot photography
• the use of photography in human rights discourse.

Photography: Theoretical Snapshots also addresses the question of photography history, revisiting the work of some of the most influential theorists such as Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, and the October group, re-evaluating the neglected genre of the carte-de-visite photograph, and addressing photography s wider role within the ideologies of modernity. The collection opens with an introduction by the editors, analyzing the trajectory of photography studies and theory over the past three decades and the ways in which the discipline has been constituted.

Ranging from the most personal to the most dehumanized uses of photography, from the nineteenth century to the present day, from Latin America to Northern Europe, Photography: Theoretical Snapshots will be of value to all those interested in photography, visual culture, and cultural history.

Over the past twenty-five years, photography has moved to centre-stage in the study of visual culture and has established itself in numerous disciplines. This trend has brought with it a diversification in approaches to the study of the photographic image.

Photography: Theoretical Snapshots offers exciting perspectives on photography theory today from some of the world s leading critics and theorists. It introduces new means of looking at photographs, with topics including:

• a community-based understanding of Spencer Tunick s controversial installations
• the tactile and auditory dimensions of photographic viewing
• snapshot photography
• the use of photography in human rights discourse.

Photography: Theoretical Snapshots also addresses the question of photography history, revisiting the work of some of the most influential theorists such as Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, and the October group, re-evaluating the neglected genre of the carte-de-visite photograph, and addressing photography s wider role within the ideologies of modernity. The collection opens with an introduction by the editors, analyzing the trajectory of photography studies and theory over the past three decades and the ways in which the discipline has been constituted.

Ranging from the most personal to the most dehumanized uses of photography, from the nineteenth century to the present day, from Latin America to Northern Europe, Photography: Theoretical Snapshots will be of value to all those interested in photography, visual culture, and cultural history.

Photography is a ubiquitous part of the public sphere. Yet we rarely stop to think about the important role that photography plays in helping to define what and who constitute the public. Photography and Its Publics brings together leading experts and emerging thinkers to consider the special role of photography in shaping how the public is addressed, seen and represented.This book responds to a growing body of recent scholarship and flourishing interest in photography's connections to the law, society, culture, politics, social change, the media and visual ethics.Photography and Its Publics presents the public sphere as a vibrant setting where these realms are produced, contested and entwined. Public spheres involve yet exceed the limits of families, interest groups, identities and communities. They are dynamic realms of visibility, discussion, reflection and possible conflict among strangers of different race, age, gender, social and economic status. Through studies of photography in South America, North America, Europe and Australasia, the contributors consider how photography has changed the way we understand and locate the public sphere. As they address key themes including the referential and imaginative qualities of photography, the transnational circulation of photographs, online publics, social change, violence, conflict and the ethics of spectatorship, the authors provide new insight into photography's vital role in defining public life.

How did the Honorable Miss E. St. Leger become a Freemason? Did Lord Byron meet a hippopotamus, or was it only a tapir? Whence the popular prejudice against redheads? These were among the topics discussed in the pages of Notes and Queries, a weekly magazine founded in London in 1849 as "a medium of inter-communication for literary men, artists, antiquaries, genealogists, etc." Its motto was "When found, make a note of" a saying of Captain Cuttle, the hook-handed old salt of Dickens's Dombey and Son. Some subscribers to Notes and Queries contributed brief notes on curious facts they had uncovered; others sent in arcane queries to be answered. The result was rather like an erudite Internet discussion board, complete with its flame wars and trolls. This book anthologizes the most interesting exchanges from the First Series of Notes and Queries (1849 55). Here, ordered by subject with judicious footnotes, of course are delightfully pedantic remarks on the daily life and amusements of olden times, the doings of faeries, revolting folk remedies, strange forgotten, poetry good and bad, and oddities of natural history, among many other things. Also included is a selection of advertisements from the magazine, for such products as Grosjean's Celebrated Trowsers, Rimmel's Toilet Vinegar (good for several purposes), and the Rev. Edmund Saul Dixon's treatise on Ornamental and Domestic Poultry: Their History and Management. Original drawings add an extra touch of humor throughout, and a lively introduction describes the history and workings of Notes and Queries. Full of useless information and Victorian fustiness, Captain Cuttle's Mailbag will fascinate trivia buffs and time travelers alike.

The look and feel of metropolitan France has been a notable preoccupation of French literary and visual culture since the 1980s. Numerous writers, filmmakers and photographers have been drawn to articulate France's contrasting spatial qualities, from infrastructural installations such as roads, rail lines and ports, to peri-urban residential developments and isolated rural enclaves. In doing so, they explore how the country's acute sense of national identity has been both asserted and challenged in topographic terms. This wide-ranging collection of essays explores how the contemporary concern with space in France has taken shape across a range of media, from recent cinema, documentary filmmaking and photographic projects through to television drama and contemporary fiction, and examines what it reveals about the state of the nation in a post-colonial and post-industrial age. The impact of global flows of capital, trade and migration can be mapped through attention to the specificities of place and topography. Investigation of liminal locations, from seaboard cities and abandoned industrial sites to refugee camps and peasant smallholdings, interrogates the assertion of a national territory (and, by extension, a national identity) through the figure of the hexagon, and highlights the fluidities, instabilities and lines of flight which render it increasingly unsettled.