The Lives of Images, Vol. Iii - The Aperture Reader Series

The Lives of Images, edited by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, is a set of contemporary thematic readers designed for educators, students, practicing photographers, and others interested in the ways images function within a wider set of cultural practices. The series tracks the many movements and "lives" of images-their tendency to accumulate, circulate, and transform through different geographies, cultures, processes, institutions, states, uses, and times.

Volume 3 in this series, Archives, Histories, and Memory, addresses the ways repositories of images are complexly bound up with the formation of histories, the perceptual limits of the photograph, the exercise of state power, and with subaltern practices of countermemory. The reemergence of the figure, subject, and methods of the archive in contemporary twenty-first-century artistic practices is considered, as are non-art engagements with archival production in the formation of counterhegemonic histories, whether in the heat of revolutionary struggle or as recuperative practice for marginalized subjects. Questions of imperialism's influence over archival practices and the contested state of the image and the document recur in varying contexts. Taken together, the essays in this volume probe what remains and persists through strategies of preservation, what the politics of preservation accommodate and disavow, what exceeds inscription within the photograph but persists as a ghosting of the image (or the archive), and what the limits of artistic strategies centered in the archive might tell us of our present moment.

Contributions by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Lara Baladi, Claire Bishop, Ann Cvetkovich, Saidiya Hartman, Marianne Hirsch, Julietta Singh, Katrina Sluis, John Tagg, and Jalal Toufic

About the author

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa is a photographer, writer, and graduate director of the photography MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. He is the author of a book of selected essays, Dark Mirrors (2021); and his most recent photographic publication, Hiding in Plain Sight (coauthored with fellow artist Ben Alper), was published by the Harun Farocki Institute in summer 2020. His work was recently exhibited at the International Center of Photography, New York, and in the Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie, Mannheim, Germany. He has contributed essays to catalogues and monographs by Rosalind Fox Solomon, George Georgiou, Paul Graham, Steve McQueen, and Vanessa Winship. Wolukau-Wanambwa has guest edited The Photobook Review and written for Aperture, FOAM, and for both the Barbican and the Photographers’ Gallery, London. He was an artist-in-residence at Light Work, Syracuse, New York, in 2015.

Summary

The Lives of Images, edited by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, is a set of contemporary thematic readers designed for educators, students, practicing photographers, and others interested in the ways images function within a wider set of cultural practices. The series tracks the many movements and “lives” of images—their tendency to accumulate, circulate, and transform through different geographies, cultures, processes, institutions, states, uses, and times.

Volume 3 in this series, Archives, Histories, and Memory, addresses the ways repositories of images are complexly bound up with the formation of histories, the perceptual limits of the photograph, the exercise of state power, and with subaltern practices of countermemory. The reemergence of the figure, subject, and methods of the archive in contemporary twenty-first-century artistic practices is considered, as are non-art engagements with archival production in the formation of counterhegemonic histories, whether in the heat of revolutionary struggle or as recuperative practice for marginalized subjects. Questions of imperialism’s influence over archival practices and the contested state of the image and the document recur in varying contexts. Taken together, the essays in this volume probe what remains and persists through strategies of preservation, what the politics of preservation accommodate and disavow, what exceeds inscription within the photograph but persists as a ghosting of the image (or the archive), and what the limits of artistic strategies centered in the archive might tell us of our present moment.

Contributions by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Lara Baladi, Claire Bishop, Ann Cvetkovich, Saidiya Hartman, Marianne Hirsch, Julietta Singh, Katrina Sluis, John Tagg, and Jalal Toufic

Foreword

Events:

Symposium – co-presented with George Eastman Museum or other partners

Press Plan:

Pursue major piece with an interview to Stanley for the all volumes published until now

Following up for book reviews with Bookforum, LA Review of Books, London Review of Books, NYT Book Review, and NYBR

Pitch trade publications: Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Shelf Awareness, and Kirkus

Influencers/Affiliates:

For each book, we’re going to tackle a series of influencers or affiliate profiles to share the news online:

eFlux

ICP / RISD

Hito Steyerl

Any/all of the contributors

Digital:

Video interview with Stanley discussing all three volumes

Publish interview from Vol 3. on aperture.org at launch

Pull out key questions from volume to use across social

Q&A with Stanley for Aperture Newsletter launch

To be included in seasonal paid social campaign in order to drive product awareness and sales

Product details

• Authors: Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa
• Assisted by: Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa (Editor), Wolukau-Wanambwa Stanley (Editor)
• Publisher: Aperture Publishers USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 31.12.2021
• EAN: 9781597115124
• ISBN: 978-1-59711-512-4
• Series: The Aperture Reader; The Aperture Reader Series; An Aperture Reader Series
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Photography, film, video, TV; Theory of art, Photography and photographs, Photography: subject-specific techniques and principles