Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000 : Essays on Camera Portraiture"In this book Sobieszek presents a wide-ranging study of the camera portrait as a reflection and catalyst of cultural beliefs about human nature. He demonstrates that photographed faces over the past 150 years - whether on silver plates, in fashion shots, or in video stills - raise questions of essence and appearance that also lie behind activities as varied as philosophy, fiction, painting, psychiatry, film, forensics, anthropology, masquerade, gender studies, and plastic surgery."--BOOK JACKET. "The book's three essays explore traditional, modern, and postmodern approaches to the camera portrait. "'Gymnastics of the Soul': The Clinical Aesthetics of Duchenne de Boulogne" investigates the nineteenth-century certainty that, in the words of Arthur Schopenhauer, "the outer person is a picture of the inner." This belief was pursued in physiognomy, phrenology, and pathognomy, popular pseudosciences of the day that were the culmination of a long tradition including the work of Giambauista della Porta, Charles Le Brun, and Johann Kaspar Lavater. Modernism brought an apparent end to these pursuits through a new awareness of the subjectivity inherent in the use of the camera. In "'Tolerances of the Human Face': The Affectless Surfaces of Andy Warhol, " the author places Warhol's photo-silkscreened portraits in the modern contexts of social and anthropological classification and the symbolism of fame, but suggests that physiognomy has not been entirely silenced. Finally, "'Abstract Machines of Faciality': The Dramaturgical Identities of Cindy Sherman" explores the theatrical aspects of portraiture, tracing a continuum that links Sherman's work to the demonstrations of hysteria staged by thenineteenth-century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, Surrealist masks, performance art, and the use of schizophrenia and multiple selves as metaphors for the postmodern human condition."--BOOK JACKET. "The photographs collected here - works by Diane Arbus, Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Curtis, Salvador Dali, Dorothea Lange, Annie Leibowitz, Bruce Nauman, Orlan, William Parker, Irving Penn, Lucas Samaras, Edward Weston, and many others - show how vividly the photographic arts have kept up with the motions of the human soul and contributed to our perception of being."--BOOK JACKET. |
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albumen print Andy Warhol Andy Warhol Foundation Angeles County Museum Antonin Artaud artist August Sander Avedon beauty Bertillon body Bruce Nauman camera character Charcot Charles Chicago Chromogenic-development print Cindy Sherman courtesy George Eastman criminals critic culture Cuthbertson trans Daguerreotype Darwin DECEMBRE 1993 ENTRE-DEUX depict Diane Arbus Disdéri Duchenne de Boulogne Duchenne's Mécanisme edition emotions engraving expres eyes facial expressions film France French Freud Gallery Gelatin-silver print George Eastman House grimaces human face hysteria hysterics Ibid identity images inner J. G. Ballard Johann Kaspar Lavater John L'Image accusatrice Lavater Lavater's Library London Los Angeles County masks modernist moral multiple muscles Musée Museum of Art OPPOSITE Orlan painting Paris Parsons Fund passions pathognomy personality photograph courtesy phrenology Physiognomy portraits portraiture postmodern quoted Rejlander Richard Robert Salpêtrière Salvador Dalí Science scientific Self-Portrait sion Sobieszek soul surface theater tion traditional Unidentified University Press Untitled William wrote York