Cloth: 978-0-226-48250-7 | Paper: 978-0-226-48251-4 | Electronic: 978-0-226-48252-1
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226482521.001.0001
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ABOUT THIS BOOK
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Susie Linfield has been an editor for American Film, the Village Voice, and the Washington Post and has written for a wide range of publications including the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the New York Times, Bookforum, the Village Voice, Aperture, Dissent, and the Nation. She is associate professor of journalism at New York University, where she directs the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program.
REVIEWS
“A profoundly thoughtful account of the role of photojournalism in an irremediably violent world, Linfield’s book is as much about conscience and empathy as it is about photography. Examining images from the Spanish Civil War to Rwanda, she accepts no easy, sweeping answers. Rather, with vivid common sense and with painstaking, often abashed humanity, she guides us through the moral minefield where horror meets art, and helps us to see.”—Claudia Roth Pierpont
— Claudia Roth Pierpont“This is a magnificent book. Susie Linfield has a good eye for the photographs and a good head for the politics. And she has the moral strength to look at these images of mutilation, death, and destruction, explain their value, and demand that we look at them, too.”
— Michael Walzer“The Cruel Radiance is a brilliant, lucid, and incisive exploration of photography and political violence. It looks deeply and unsparingly at how photographers have pictured war, genocide, and atrocities, and in so doing illuminates photography’s democratic promise. By making the world present to us even when we want to look away, photographs have the potential to make us think and question together, to draw us into a community of witnesses.”
— Kiku Adatto, author of Picture Perfect: Life in the Age of the Photo Op"A somber, heartfelt plea for readers to see the truth and acknowledge and understand the consequences of humans' potential for inhumanity. This should be required reading for students of journalism and political science and general readers with an interest in human-rights activism."
— Library Journal“Linfield’s great achievement is more than to shake up the orthodoxy that says, ‘Look away!’ It’s a call to arms, an incitement to look closely at the world via the medium of photography, and, implicitly, to do something about it.”
— New Humanist“Beautifully crafted, exquisitely written, and exceptionally powerful in its arguments.”--Design Observer
— Design ObserverTABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures
Preface: The Black Book
Part One: Polemics
1. A Little History of Photography Criticism; or, Why Do Photography Critics Hate Photography?
2. Photojournalism and Human Rights: The Calamity of the Kodak
Part Two: Places
3. Warsaw, Lodz, Auschwitz: In the Waiting Room of Death
4. China: From Malraux’s Dignity to the Red Guards’ Shame
5. Sierra Leone: Beyond the Sorrow and the Pity
6. Abu Ghraib and the Jihad: The Dance of Civilizations
Part Three: People
7. Robert Capa: The Optimist
8. James Nachtwey: The Catastrophist
9. Gilles Peress: The Skeptic
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index