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The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada is an invaluable contribution to critical scholarship on the social history of photography in Canada and, more broadly, to methodological and conceptual issues involved in researching photography. Editors Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard have produced a volume that is essential reading for scholars, curators, archivists, artists, and photographers studying the role of photography in the changing topography of national identity. The contributors examine collections of photographs in Canadian archives and galleries that have contributed to the visual legacies of Canada’s past and continue to shape the country’s “imagined geography” (a concept from Edward… Full Review

In the eleven essays contained within The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750: Visual Imagery before Orientalism, scholars address a longstanding issue in cultural history and the arts—the perception of different cultures in the Mediterranean and the representation of their peoples by Europeans in the early modern period. Early modern Westerners displayed difficulty in categorizing their non-European neighbors, as artists who traveled, as well as those who incorporated non-Westerners into their imagery at home, were influenced not only by the visual sources on which they based their compositions, but also by propagandistic literature, the geopolitics of their… Full Review

In Imprisoned Art, Complex Patronage: Plains Drawings by Howling Wolf and Zotom at the Autry National Center, Joyce M. Szabo traces the unique patronage of collector Eva Scott Muse Fényes (1849–1930) during her visits to the military prison at Fort Marion, Florida. This book and its unique focus are the legacy of a scholar who for decades has specialized in studying and publishing on the topic of Native American ledger art and other related visual topics. Szabo is also well known for curating several exhibitions on such work. Specifically, Szabo offers a glimpse into ledger art that… Full Review

The nude body—simultaneously manifest as classical ideal, titillating form, creative source, and condemned subject—is so central to the history of Renaissance and Baroque art that any study devoted to the topic at large risks the pitfalls of generalization. One way to avoid this snare is to focus more narrowly on the oeuvre of a single artist, a specific theme (like the representation of Christ’s body), or even a seminal individual example such as Jan van Eyck’s Adam and Eve panels from the Ghent Altarpiece (1424–35). Another option is to localize the reception of the nude within a certain geographical region… Full Review

Almost seventy years after World War II, amateur photographs and films about Nazis, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust remain a continued source of popular fascination. In 2008, for instance, The New Yorker published a feature story on a newly discovered photo album that once belonged to Karl Höcker, the adjutant to Richard Baer, the commandant of the Auschwitz I camp. The album shows SS men and women auxiliaries enjoying free time in the summer of 1944, precisely as the factory of death reached the peak of its murderous efficiency. To its creator, these snapshots represented fond memories of sunny… Full Review

Over the last decade there has been a quiet but persistent revolution in scholarship on photography. The growing popularity of the medium as a focus of academic study, coupled with the desire by some researchers to explore histories of photography beyond the mainstream, has seen a groundswell of work being undertaken in regions outside of the United States and Europe. Pushing beyond the limited and generally imperialistic boundaries still apparent in most world histories of photography, Australasian photo-historians are actively contributing to a more global understanding of the medium. This is most evident in Angela Wanhalla and Erika Wolf’s notable… Full Review

Well-written, magisterially conceived, and impeccably documented, this volume is both a superb introduction to Franz Radziwill, an intriguing figure almost unknown outside Germany, and an authoritative social history of art that thoroughly revises understandings of the world of modernism during the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. As he considers the ambiguities and contradictions of Radziwill’s art, politics, and self-presentation, James A. Van Dyke confronts issues of how to write about and exhibit the works of artists who were sympathetic toward or lived under National Socialism. Radically historicized accounts of “Weimar culture” and the Third Reich, Van Dyke argues,… Full Review

It is not farfetched to assume that theoretical reflections on photography will pay close attention to historical perspectives and that histories of photography will take into account theoretical issues. However, Jae Emerling has discovered that hardly any publications on photography have interwoven history and theory in a sustained fashion. Emerling’s Photography: History and Theory demonstrates how insightful this integrated approach can be. This same quality also characterizes Kathrin Yacavone’s Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography, also released in 2012. Almost every volume dealing with photography theory discusses the views of both Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes—often combined with… Full Review

Dichotomies have provided a convenient way to categorize practices and for affiliated architectural groups to contest positions. Prominent dichotomies range from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian to echoes in Kenzo Tange’s Yayoi and Jomon categories relating historic positions to post-World War II modern Japanese architecture, and from continued tensions between notions of modern and traditional as well as global and local. Related contestations shaping architectural production are evident in the Museum of Modern Art’s “What is Happening to Modern Architecture?” 1948 debate between modernists, Lewis Mumford, and Bay Area regionalists and more recent postmodern debates between the Whites and Grays… Full Review

Few today would dispute the fact that the Japanese collective Gutai Art Association (1954–1972) is the most renowned postwar avant-garde movement coming out of East Asia. If, on the one hand, Gutai’s assertively internationalist attitude ultimately paid off, on the other, its members often paid a high price for embracing internationalism when what was expected from a Japanese avant-garde collective was mainly the particular and exotic. Ming Tiampo’s excellent Gutai: Decentering Modernism, the first English-language monograph on Gutai, explores Gutai’s internationalism as a structuring element in the group’s long and diverse creative trajectory. In doing so, the book contributes… Full Review