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In her provocative new book, Touching Photographs, Margaret Olin presents an innovative approach to visual and photographic studies. Her essays form interrelated and often fascinatingly oblique case studies pertaining to the use of photography and its metaphorical affect as tactility and touch. Olin offers deep embraces of photographic discourse in James Agee and Walker Evans’s New Deal-era text and photographic essay, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida; James VanDerZee's Harlem photographs produced during the 1920s and 1930s; photographic references in the writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and W. G. Sebald; "empowerment" projects such… Full Review

In 1953 German art historian Otto von Simson, writing in the pages of The Art Bulletin, heralded Rogier van der Weyden's Deposition (ca. 1435) in the Prado as "the birth of tragedy in Christian art" (Otto G. von Simson, “Compassio and Co-Redemptio in Roger van der Weyden’s Descent From the Cross,” The Art Bulletin 35, no. 1 [March 1953]: 9–16). Well-timed to coincide with post-war philosophy's Nietzsche revival, the claim was grounded in a conventional scholarly alignment of visual fact (the famous rhyme of Christ and Mary's bodies) and prevailing currents of religious culture (in particular the… Full Review

“How did images produce religious truth in the later Middle Ages?” Adam Kumler’s Translating Truth is an ambitious book that tries to answer this question through an examination of visual responses to the search for religious knowledge among the laity after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Kumler analyzes a series of exceptional manuscripts containing vernacular texts and images made for a lay clientele in France and England within the new “horizon of expectations” regarding education of the laity that emerged from the Fourth Lateran Council’s reform. Through the mediation of archbishops and bishops who supervised parochial clergy, the reformers sought… Full Review

In 1931, seeking to distinguish between a radically modern art and the flood of belle peinture that was submerging the French capital, the expatriate critic Carl Einstein unleashed an unsparing diagnosis in an essay entitled “The Little Picture Factory.” “In Paris,” he wrote, “the fabrication of pictures without worldview or risk is baser than the traffic in young women, for the facile dauber is rewarded by no punishment, only comfortable income” (Carl Einstein, “Kleine Bildefabrik,” Weltkunst 5 [April 1931]: 2–3). As Keith Holz sums up in “After Locarno: German Artists in the Parisian Picture Factory,” included in Academics, Pompiers, Official… Full Review

Born in Rockford, Illinois, in 1865, James Henry Breasted (d. 1935) became the most famous American Egyptologist of his generation. He was known not only for his historical scholarship, embodied in A History of Egypt (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), a massive book published in 1905, and the five volumes of Ancient Records of Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), published in 1906–07—achievements that led to his appointment to the first professorship in Egyptology in the United States, which he assumed at the University of Chicago in 1905. He was also widely known for many semi-popular and popular articles, guides… Full Review

Nigel Hiscock has devoted a substantial portion of his career to an exceedingly difficult study: the symbolism of medieval ecclesiastical architecture. As a result, he must wrestle with a frustrating historiography whose pendulum swings between the assumption and denial of meaning in medieval architectural form; a spotty documentary record whose contributors, little concerned with questions of interest to modern scholars, rarely reference subjects like architectural training or the symbolic intent of plans; and data collection and analysis that, until the arrival of digitization, meant painstaking manual measurement and calculation. The Symbol at Your Door, intended to complement Hiscock’s The… Full Review

Ariella Azoulay’s Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography encourages readers to imagine a new discourse for the study and treatment of photography. Expanding upon ideas found in her book The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008) (click here for review), Azoulay proposes to consider photography as an ongoing public event that began with the emergence of photographic consciousness in the early nineteenth century. Ever since, she asserts, the existence of photography and the awareness of its omnipresence have normalized and conditioned the physical and psychic behaviour of human beings to comply with the moral… Full Review

Carol Quirke’s Eyes on Labor is an assiduously researched and impressively crafted study that examines the depiction of workers and unions in American news photography, focusing on the 1930s and 1940s. During this era of rapid unionization, Quirke argues, photography became a key medium in the battle between labor and capital, as corporations, unions, and the news organizations that recorded the conflicts between them “sought to harness [photography’s] apparent objectivity to make competing claims about workers, unions, labor’s aspirations, and ideals for labor-management relations” (17). Quirke explores not so much how news photography reflected labor conflicts, but rather how photojournalism… Full Review

In What Photography Is, James Elkins sets out to write a kind of counter-narrative to Roland Barthes’s highly influential Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (trans. Richard Howard, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), in which Barthes sought to discover the essential nature of photography. Elkins is inspired by Barthes’s slim volume first published in English in 1981, admiring and echoing its non-academic style, yet is irritated by it as well. The emotional core of Camera Lucida is Barthes’s search for, and ultimately discovery of, the “essence” of his recently deceased mother in a photograph he finds of her… Full Review

The recent and controversial transfer of the Barnes Foundation to a new museum on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia has produced a surge of scholarly interest in the prodigious and quixotic group of Pierre-Auguste Renoir paintings known as “the late work.” The largest and most definitive collection of this amorphous body of painting and sculpture, ranging roughly from the artist’s Durand-Ruel career retrospective in 1892 to his death in 1919, was previously located in Dr. Albert Barnes’s original house museum and school in suburban Merion, Pennsylvania. The secluded location and limited access to this magisterial horde ensured the type… Full Review