Author: William D. Prigge File Type: pdf The 1959 purge of the Latvian national communists has long been cast in black-and-white terms Russification and resistance victimizers and victims. Conventional wisdom holds that Nikita Khrushchev was behind the purge. After all, he was the Soviet premier he stopped in Riga just a few weeks before even the leading victim of the purge, Eduards Berklavs, labeled Khrushchev the culprit. For the first time, William D. Prigges penetrating analysis challenges this view and untangles the intricacies of Soviet center-periphery relations like a political thriller. With each new chapter, a truer understanding of events comes into sharper focus - more complex and fascinating than could ever be imagined. Ultimately, the reverberations are felt all the way to the Kremlin and weaken what Khrushchev thought was his own firm footing. For the student of Soviet and Latvian history alike, this volume provides more than just the story of a purge - it is a unique snapshot into the political machinations of the Soviet Union and one of its republics.**

Author: Gerd Hurm File Type: pdf The Family of Man is the most widely seen exhibition in the history of photography. The book of the exhibition, still in print, is also the most commercially successful photobook ever published. First shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955, the exhibition travelled throughout the United States and to forty-six countries, and was seen by over nine million people. Edward Steichen conceived, curated and designed the exhibition. He explained its subject as the everydayness of life and the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world. The exhibition was a statement against war and the conflicts and divisions that threatened a common future for humanity after 1945. The popular international response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Many critics, however, have dismissed the exhibition as a form of sentimental humanism unable to address the challenges of history, politics and cultural difference. This book revises the critical debate about The Family of Man, challenging in particular the legacy of Roland Barthess influential account of the exhibition. The expert contributors explore new contexts for understanding Steichens work and they undertake radically new analyses of the formal dynamics of the exhibition. Also presented are documents about the exhibition never before available in English. Commentaries by critical theorist Max Horkheimer and novelist Wolfgang Koeppen, a letter from photographer August Sander, and a poetic sequence on the images by Polish poet Witold Wirpsza enable and encourage new critical reflections. A detailed survey of audience responses in Munich from 1955 allows a rare glimpse of what visitors thought about the exhibition. Today, when armed conflict, environmental catastrophe and economic inequality continue to threaten our future, it seems timely to revisit The Family of Man.**Reviewcode[The exhibition] was a real shock for me...they showed so much and they told so much these pictures, these photographs, told so much about modern life, my life. - Gerhard Richter,codeOf exhibitions of photography, The Family of Man is the one most deserving of renewed critical reflection and assessment. This volume offers exactly that, providing new perspectives and information in an effort to make us think again about what we imagined we already knew. Anyone interested in photographys history and creative possibilities will want to read it. - Geoffrey Batchen, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, `This anthology of contemporary essays and historical sources is an important contribution to the growing field of exhibition history. Through critical reevaluation of The Family of Man and analyses of its international reception, the book breaks new ground with varied accounts of the shows place in Postwar culture and detailed discussion of its curatorial construction and modes of presentation. - Bruce Altshuler, Director, Program in Museum Studies, New York University About the AuthorAnke Reitz is a photography curator at the Centre national de laudiovisuel (CNA) in Luxembourg and is in charge of the CNAs Steichen Collections The Family of Man and The Bitter Years. Her focus is on audiovisual arts, photographic history, and conservation, as well as art mediation. Gerd Hurm is a professor of American literature and the director of the Center for American Studies at the University of Trier, Germany. He has published widely in the fields of urban, media, and gender studies and researches the photography, aesthetics, and curatorial politics of Edward Steichen. Shamoon Zamir is an associate professor of literature and visual studies and the director of Akkasah Center for Photography at New York University Abu Dhabi. He works on American literature, photography, and intellectual history. He is the author of The Gift of the Face Portraiture and Time in Edward S. Curtiss The North American Indian (2014) and co-editor of The Photobook (I.B. Tauris, 2012).

Author: Adi Kuntsman File Type: pdf This collection reflects on the emerging phenomenon of selfie citizenship, which capitalises on individual visibility and agency, at the time when citizenship itself is increasingly governed through biometrics and large-scale dataisation. Today we are witnessing a global rise of politicised selfies photographs of individuals with handwritten notes or banners, various selfie memes and hashtag actions, spread on social media in actions of protest or social mobilistion. Contributions in this collection range from discussions of citizen engagement, to political campaigning, to selfies as forms of citizen witnessing, to selfies without a face. The chapters cover uses of selfies by activists, tourists and politicians, victims and survivors, adults and children, in a broad range of geopolitical locations China, Germany, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, the UK and the US. Written by an international and interdisciplinary group of authors, from senior professors to junior scholars, artists, graduate students and activist, the book is aimed at students, researchers, and media practitioners. **

Author: Robert P. Ellis File Type: pdf Around the time Shakespeare inaugurated the golden age of English drama, the young Francis Bacon proposed to take all knowledge to be my province. He soon realized the difficulty of that but in the process he posed two related questions, which he understood better than any other man of his time Can human beings respect and obey nature, and Can they also command nature? He asked many other questions considered useless and impractical in his time but vital in ours. After a busy career as an English parliamentarian, judge and advisor of King James I, Bacon published in his final years The Advancement of Learning, which included his New Atlantis, with its prescient vision of human accomplishments, many achieved only in the past century. The first important book of English essays, it is an investigation of civil and moral problems that continue to engage and perplex us.