Is photomontage over? Does the juxtaposition of recontextualised photographic fragments, once the mainstay of critical avant-garde practice and radical activism in the burgeoning media age, carry any cultural and aesthetic urgency in the paradigm of the digital? Does the medium still have the power to rattle, agitate, or even shock with its pictorial and conceptual disjunctions? This special issue of History of Photography confronts such questions by exploring the possibility that photomontage has indeed run its course; that it may no longer serve as a point of critical inquiry, a potent object of historical research, or a forceful contemporary practice.

Co-edited by Sabine Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón, our contributors include Charlie White, Jindrich Toman, Matthew Biro, Susan Laxton, Virginia McBride, and the late David Evans, to whom the issue is dedicated.

Find at History of Photography

Taylor & Francis
Publication year: 2020

Edited by Donna Gustafson (Zimmerli Museum/Rutgers) and Andrés Mario Zervigón (Developing Room/Rutgers)

Socio-documentary photography is one of the most emotional of all photographic genres. The clear pictorial language shows the passion of the photographer to bring about political and social change. This volume, related to an exhibtion of the same name at the Zimmerli Museum and a Developing Room symposium, assembles iconic works by photographers from the early 20th century to contemporary artists in large-format reproductions.

Socio-documentary photography established itself in the 20th century and focuses on the lives of socially disadvantaged people. Pioneers like Berenice Abbott, Max Alpert, Walker Evans, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Gordon Parks, Alexander Rodchenko, Sebastião Salgado and Weegee – to name but a few of the photographers featured in the book – used their powerful photos on behalf of those people whom society largely ignores. The volume demonstrates impressively how the genre developed, how it spread in the United States, the Soviet Union and in other political systems, and the influence of today’s social media.

Find at Hirmer Verlag

Zimmerli Museum/Hirmer Verlag
Publication Year:2017

Recent decades have seen photography’s privileged relationship to the real come under question. Spurred by the postmodern critique of photography in the 1980s and the rise of digital technologies soon thereafter, scholars have been asking who and what built this understanding of the medium in the first place.

Photography and Doubt reflects on this interest in photography’s referential power by discussing it in rigorously historical terms. How was the understanding of photographic realism cultivated in the first place? What do cases of staged and manipulated photography reveal about that realism’s hold on audiences across the medium’s history? Have doubts about photography’s testimonial power stimulated as much knowledge as its realism? 

Edited by Sabine T. Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón, Photography and Doubt is the first multi-authored collection specifically designed to explore these questions. Its 13 original essays, illustrated with 73 color images, explore cases when the link between the photographic image and its referent was placed under stress, and whenphotography was as attuned to its myth-making capabilities as to its claims to authenticity.

BUY
Photography and Doubt at Routledge

Routledge Books
Publication Year:2016

Recent decades have seen a flourishing interest in and speculation about the origins of photography. Spurred by rediscoveries of ‘first’ photographs and proclamations of photography’s death in the digital age, scholars have been rethinking who and what invented the medium.

Photography and Its Origins reflects on this interest in photography’s beginnings by reframing it in critical and specifically historiographical terms. How and why do we write about the origins of the medium? Whom or what do we rely on to construct those narratives? What’s at stake in choosing to tell stories of photography’s genesis in one way or another? And what kind of work can those stories do? Edited by Tanya Sheehan and Andrés Mario Zervigón, this collection of 16 original essays, illustrated with 32 colour images, showcases prominent and emerging voices in the field of photography studies. Their research cuts across disciplines and methodologies, shedding new light on old questions about histories and their writing. Photography and Its Origins will serve as a valuable resource for students and scholars in art history, visual and media studies, and the history of science and technology.

Routledge http://www.taylorandfrancis.com/books/details/9780415722902/

Publication Year: 2014

For World AIDS Day 2010 the Developing Room joined forces with the Johnson & Johnson Corporate Art Program to publish From Ethiopia to New Jersey: Photography and HIV/AIDS. This catalogue accompanied an exhibition of the same title held at the Johnson & Johnson World Headquarters Gallery (November 22, 2010 - January 13, 2011). Edited by Tanya Sheehan, it includes essays by Sheehan, Ashley Atkins, and Ellen Brueckner as well as artwork by Eric Gottesman and the Ethiopian collective Sudden Flowers.

To purchase a copy of From Ethiopia to New Jersey please contact us at developingroom@gmail.com.

CONTRIBUTORS

Foreward by Ashely Atkins
Johnson & Johnson Corporate Art Program

Introduction by Ellen Brueckner
Johnson & Johnson Corporate Art Program

Asking Questions Without Answers by Tanya Sheehan
Rutgers University

Artist Statement by Eric Gottesman

Artist Statement, Photographs & Art Works by Sudden Flowers

Photographs - Art Works by Rutgers University students

Johnson & Johnson World Headquarters Gallery
Publication Year:2010