Mark Durden is an artist, writer and academic. He has written extensively on contemporary art and photography. Recent books include Fifty Key Writers on Photography (2012) and Photography Today (2014). With Ian Brown and David Campbell, Durden regularly exhibits as part of the artist group Common Culture. With Campbell he also recently co-curated a number of substantial exhibitions on art and comedy: Double Act (Bluecoat, Liverpool and the MAC, Belfast in 2016) and The Laughable Enigma of Ordinary Life (Arquipélago, centro de artes contemporâneas, São Miguel in 2017). Durden is currently Professor of Photography and Director of the European Centre for Documentary Research at the University of South Wales, UK.

Jane Tormey is an Honorary Fellow of Loughborough University. Her writing focuses on the exchange of ideas between art practice and other disciplines, the conflict between aesthetics and political content, and the ways in which aesthetic traditions can be disturbed by and through photographic/filmic practices. Published work includes: "The Ghost in the Image" in Boelderl, Leisch-Kiesl (eds.) Die Zukunft gehört den Phantomen ([transcript], 2018); Photographic Realism: Late Twentieth-Century Aesthetics (2013) and Cities and Photography (2012). She is co-editor of Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer (forthcoming 2020)andthe book series Radical Aesthetics-Radical Art.

List of figures

List of plates

List of contributors

Introduction

Mark Durden and Jane Tormey

PART I - AESTHETICS

1. Feeling in photography, the affective turn, and the history of emotions

Thy Phu, Elspeth H. Brown, and Andrea Noble

2. Jacques Rancière: aesthetics and photography

David Bate

3. Ambiguity, accident, audience: Minor White's photographic theory

Todd Cronan

4. Testing humanism: the transactions of contemporary documentary photography

Mark Durden

5. Jeff Wall speaks with David Campany

Jeff Wall and David Campany

6. Deleuze and the simulacrum: simulation and semblance in Public Order

Sandra Plummer

7. Five versions of the photographic act: archival logic in the work of Andrea Robbins and Max Becher

Shep Steiner

8. Jean Baudrillard's photography-a vision of his own strange world

Gerry Coulter

9. Visual episodic memory and the neurophenomenology of digital photography

Jill Bennett

PART II - POLITICS

10. Seeing the public image anew: photography exhibitions and civic spectatorship

Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites

11. Still images on the move: theoretical challenges and future possibilities

Marta Zarzycka

12. Interview with Ariella Azoulay

Ariella Azoulay and Justin Carville

13. Human rights practice and visual violations

Ruthie Ginsburg

14. Love the bomb: picturing nuclear explosion

Paula Rabinowitz

15. Twice captured: the work of atrocity photography

Molly Rogers

16. Presenting the unrepresentable: confrontation and circumvention

Jane Tormey

17. The eco-anarchist potential of environmental photography: Richard Misrach and Kate Orff's Petrochemical America

Conohar Scott

18. Counter-forensics and photography

Thomas Keenan

PART III - THEORIES

19. Derrida and photography theory

Malcolm Barnard

20. Image, affect, and autobiography: Roland Barthes' photographic theory in light of his posthumous publications

Kathrin Yacavone

21. Ideation and photography: a critique of François Laruelle's concept of abstraction

John Roberts

22. Fractal photography and the politics of invisibility

Daniel Rubinstein

23. Photographic apparatus in the era of tagshot culture

Mika Elo

24. Artistic representation and politics: an exchange between Victor Burgin and Hilde Van Gelder

Victor Burgin and Hilde Van Gelder

25. Decentering the photographer: authorship and digital photography

Daniel Palmer

26. Out of language: photographing as translating