Verwandte Artikel zu A Box of Photographs

A Box of Photographs - Hardcover

Grenier, Roger

 
9780226308319: A Box of Photographs
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0226308316 ISBN 13: 9780226308319
Verlag: UNIV OF CHICAGO PR, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Most attempts to generalize about photography as a medium run up against our experience of the photographs themselves. We live with photos and cameras every day, and philosophies of the photographic image do little to shake our intimate sense of how we produce photographs and what they mean to us. In this book that is equal parts memoir and intellectual and cultural history, French writer Roger Grenier contemplates the ways that photography can change the course of a life, reflecting along the way on the history of photography and its practitioners.
 
Unfolding in brief, charming vignettes, A Box of Photographs evokes Grenier’s childhood in Pau, his war years, and his working life at the Gallimard publishing house in Paris. Throughout these personal stories, Grenier subtly weaves the story of a lifetime of practicing and thinking about photography and its heroes—Henri Cartier-Bresson, Weegee, Alfred Eisenstaedt, George Brassaï, Inge Morath, and others. Adding their own insights about photography to the narrative are a striking range of writers, thinkers, and artists, from Lewis Carroll, Albert Camus, and Arthur Schopenhauer to Susan Sontag, Edgar Degas, and Eugène Delacroix. Even cameras themselves come to life and take on personalities: an Agfa accompanies Grenier on grueling military duty in Algeria, a Voigtlander almost gets him killed by German soldiers during the liberation of Paris, and an ill-fated Olympus drowns in a boating accident. Throughout, Grenier draws us into the private life of photographs, seeking the secrets they hold for him and for us.
 
A valedictory salute to a lost world of darkrooms, proofs, and the gummed paper corners of old photo albums, A Box of Photographs is a warm look at the most honest of life’s mirrors.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Roger Grenier is a writer, journalist, and radio animator who is the author of nearly fifty novels, collections of short stories, and works of criticism, including The Difficulty of Being a Dog, also published by the University of Chicago Press and translated by Alice Kaplan, the John M. Musser Professor of French at Yale University. Kaplan is the author of several books, including French Lessons: A Memoir and Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

A Box of Photographs

By ROGER GRENIER, Alice Kaplan

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-30831-9

Contents

"Talking about photography ..."............................................3
Posing for Portraits.......................................................6
Baby Box...................................................................12
Agfa.......................................................................18
A Summer in the Lab........................................................19
Negative of a Nude.........................................................23
All That's Left Is the Smile...............................................25
Because of a Leica.........................................................26
A New Agfa.................................................................30
Backlighting...............................................................37
On the Téléphérique........................................................38
A Photo of the Train Station at Tarbes.....................................39
The Poor Man's Rollei......................................................41
A Victim of Heidegger......................................................43
The Curse of the Voigtländer...............................................46
Another Woman and a Leica..................................................50
One of the Fine Arts.......................................................52
Colors.....................................................................56
Forcing....................................................................58
The Jar....................................................................60
Charles Dullin's Bedroom...................................................61
Saint-Germain-des-Prés.....................................................64
The Saxophonist............................................................65
Destinies..................................................................68
One, Two, Three!...........................................................70
The Canon and the Photographer.............................................72
Atrocities.................................................................74
The Beach at Ostia.........................................................76
An Angel of the Streets....................................................78
News Photos................................................................84
Gisèle's Grudge............................................................86
Police Interference........................................................87
To Each His Photographer...................................................90
An Official Image..........................................................92
A Source...................................................................94
In Exile...................................................................100
The Swan Song of the Olympus...............................................101
Of Dogs and Goats..........................................................102
The Dialectic of the Portrait..............................................104
Translator's Note..........................................................107
Translator's Acknowledgments...............................................111

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

A Box of Photographs


TALKING ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHY is like paying off an old debt.I imagine some cynic saying, "Talk about photography all youlike, but spare me the clichés." I promise to try.

An anecdote to start. I knew an American, Marjorie Ferguson,whose family was straight out of a Henry James novel—very richpeople who hired a fellow named George Eastman to tutor theirchildren. One day this Eastman announced that he had inventeda new, practical kind of camera, sure to be widely used. He askedthem to invest. They refused. Eastman went elsewhere to financehis device, and the name he gave it sounds just like the click ofa shutter: Kodak.

The story brings to mind that of the unfortunate young manremembered by the engineer Charles-Louis Chevalier, a famousoptician from the early nineteenth century who later introducedNicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre to each other. Chevalierconstructed camera obscuras equipped with optical devices thatwere already quite elaborate. The young man came to see him tofind out how much it would cost him to order one. Alas, they werefar too expensive for him. It was really too bad, said the youngman, because he needed better equipment to perfect his invention."What kind of invention, exactly?" Chevalier asked. "I've managedto fix images from the camera obscura onto paper," the youngman said. Then he placed an image of Paris on the table. Couldyou call it a photograph? Or a photograph before photography?It occurred to the optician that this young man had found whatso many others were looking for. Then the poor wretch left hisshop. Chevalier never saw him again.

But doesn't photography really begin with the first child whosaw the sky, the trees, the prairies reflected in a drop of water? Orwith Aristotle, who, during an eclipse, pierced a tiny hole througha wall of a darkened room so he could observe a slice of the suncut off by the moon? Fixing the image afterwards was merely achemical detail.

In 1903, Alfred Jarry published a hilarious, blasphemous articlein Le Canard sauvage, the satirical newspaper he wrote for withFranc-Nohain and Charles-Louis Philippe. He described thePassion of Christ as a hilly bicycle race. In his tale, Veronica (veraicon, the true image) was the first photojournalist.

It would be an endless task to account for all the phenomenathat seemed to announce photography, so fervently was it anticipated.Nadar said of the illustrator Constantin Guys, who drewthe Crimean War in situ, "He discovered the snapshot beforewe did."

By 1852, a photographer had appeared as the hero of a novel.He was the young daguerreotypist Holgrave, in Hawthorne's TheHouse of Seven Gables.

On August 13, 1850, Delacroix noted in his diary that astronomersin Cambridge had photographed the sun, the moon, andthe stars, in particular the star Alpha in the constellation Lyra:"Since the star in the daguerreotype took twenty years to crossthe space that separated it from the earth, it follows that the rayof light that fixed itself on the plate had left its celestial spherelong before Daguerre discovered the procedure by which we'vejust become...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
UNIV OF CHICAGO PR
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0226308316
ISBN 13 
9780226308319
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
120
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar