Study in Black and White : : Photography, Race, Humor / / Tanya Sheehan.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Penn State University Press Complete eBook-Package 2018
• VerfasserIn: Sheehan, Tanya,
• Place / Publishing House: University Park, PA : : Penn State University Press, , [2021]; ©2018
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (216 p.) :; 80 color/12 b&w illustrations
• Other title: Frontmatter --; Contents --; Illustrations --; Acknowledgments --; Introduction --; 1. Strange Effects and Photographic Pleasures: Race, Science, and Early Photography --; 2. The Darkey Photographer: Camera Comedy and the Minstrel Stage --; 3. Look Pleasant, Please! A Social History of the Photographic Smile --; 4. Writing the Self Through Others: Racial Humor and the Photographic Postcard --; 5. Revival and Subversion: Snapshot Performances from Kodak to Kara Walker --; Notes --; Selected Bibliography --; Index
• Format: Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
• ISBN: 9780271082486; 9783110745221
• DOI: 10.1515/9780271082486?locatt=mode:legacy
• Access: restricted access
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: Tanya Sheehan.

In this volume, Tanya Sheehan takes humor seriously in order to trace how photographic comedy was used in America and transnationally to express evolving ideas about race, black emancipation, and civil rights in the mid-1800s and into the twentieth century.Sheehan employs a trove of understudied materials to write a new history of photography, one that encompasses the rise of the commercial portrait studio in the 1840s, the popularization of amateur photography around 1900, and the mass circulation of postcards and other photographic ephemera in the twentieth century. She examines the racial politics that shaped some of the most essential elements of the medium, from the negative-positive process to the convention of the photographic smile. The book also places historical discourses in relation to contemporary art that critiques racism through humor, including the work of Genevieve Grieves, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, and Fred Wilson. By treating racial humor about and within the photographic medium as complex social commentary, rather than a collectible curiosity, Study in Black and White enriches our understanding of photography in popular culture. Transhistorical and interdisciplinary, this book will be of vital interest to scholars of art history and visual studies, critical race studies, U.S. history, and African American studies.