Elizabeth Edwards

She's one of our most beloved political figures, and on the surface, seems to have led a charmed life. Beautiful family, thriving career, loving marriage. But she's no stranger to adversity. Many know of the strength she had shown after her son was killed in a car accident. She would exhibit this remarkable grace and courage again when the very private matter of her husband's infidelity became public fodder. And her own life has been on the line: days before the 2004 presidential election--when her husband was running for vice president--she was diagnosed with breast cancer. After much treatment the cancer went away--only to reoccur in 2007. On the campaign trail, Elizabeth met others who have had to contend with serious adversity, and here she draws on their experiences as well as her own, crafting an unsentimental and inspirational meditation on the gifts we can find among life's biggest challenges.--From publisher description.

reflections on the burdens and gifts of facing life's adversities

Resilience

Photographs, Anthropology and Museums

Raw Histories

Photography, Anthropology and History examines the complex historical relationship between photography and anthropology, and in particular the strong emergence of the contemporary relevance of historical images. Thematically organized, and focusing on the visual practices developed within anthropology as a discipline, this book brings together a range of contemporary and methodologically innovative approaches to the historical image within anthropology. Importantly, it also demonstrates the ongoing relevance of both the historical image and the notion of the archive to recent anthropological thought. As current research rethinks the relationship between photography and anthropology, this volume will serve as a stimulus to this new phase of research as an essential text and methodological reference point in any course that addresses the relationship between anthropology and visuality.

Expanding the Frame

Photography, Anthropology and History

Christopher Morton

The status of photographs in the history of museum collections is a complex one. From its very beginnings the double capacity of photography - as a tool for making a visual record on the one hand and an aesthetic form in its own right on the other - has created tensions about its place in the hierarchy of museum objects. While major collections of 'art' photography have grown in status and visibility, photographs not designated 'art' are often invisible in museums. Yet almost every museum has photographs as part of its ecosystem, gathered as information, corroboration or documentation, shaping the understanding of other classes of objects, and many of these collections remain uncatalogued and their significance unrecognised. This volume presents a series of case studies on the historical collecting and usage of photographs in museums. Using critically informed empirical investigation, it explores substantive and historiographical questions such as what is the historical patterning in the way photographs have been produced, collected and retained by museums? How do categories of the aesthetic and evidential shape the history of collecting photographs? What has been the work of photographs in museums? What does an understanding of photograph collections add to our understanding of collections history more broadly? What are the methodological demands of research on photograph collections? The case studies cover a wide range of museums and collection types, from art galleries to maritime museums, national collections to local history museums, and international perspectives including Cuba, France, Germany, New Zealand, South Africa and the UK. Together they offer a fascinating insight into both the history of collections and collecting, and into the practices and poetics of archives across a range of disciplines, including the history of science, museum studies, archaeology and anthropology.

Between Art and Information

Photographs, Museums, Collections

Photographs have had an integral and complex role in many anthropological contexts, from fieldwork to museum exhibitions. This book explores how approaching anthropological photographs as 'history' can offer both theoretical and empirical insights into these roles. Photographs are thought to make problematic history because of their ambiguity and 'rawness'. In short, they have too many meanings. The author refutes this prejudice by exploring, through a series of case studies, precisely the potential of this raw quality to open up new perspectives.Taking the nature of photography as her starting point, the author argues that photographs are not merely pictures of things but are part of a dynamic and fluid historical dialogue, which is active not only in the creation of the photograph but in its subsequent social biography in archive and museum spaces, past and present. In this context, the book challenges any uniform view of anthropological photography and its resulting archives. Drawing on a variety of examples, largely from the Pacific, the book demonstrates how close readings of photographs reveal not only western agendas, but also many layers of differing historical and cross-cultural experiences. That is, photographs can 'spring leaks' to show an alternative viewpoint. These themes are developed further by examining the dynamics of photographs and issues around them as used by contemporary artists and curators and presented to an increasingly varied public.This book convincingly demonstrates photographs' potential to articulate histories other than those of their immediate appearances, a potential that can no longer be neglected by scholars and institutions.

Janice Hart

This innovative volume explores the idea that while photographs are images, they are also objects, and this materiality is integral to their meaning and use. The case studies presented focus on photographs active in different institutional, political, religious and domestic spheres, where physical properties, the nature of their use and the cultural formations in which they function make their 'objectness' central to how we should understand them. The international contributors are drawn from disciplines including the history of photogarphy, visual anthropology and art history, and their pieces focus on areas ranging from the Netherlands, North America and Australia to Japan, Romania and Tibet. Each shows the methodological strategies they have developed in order to fully exploit the idea of the materiality of photographic images. Inspiring and instructive, the book can be used either as an overview of this exciting new area of investigation, or as a practical guide to the student or academic on how to understand photographs as objects in diverse contexts.

On the Materiality of Images

Photographs Objects Histories

Describes the role of community in the author's life, from her experiences on the campaign trail with her husband, presidential candidate John Edwards, to the 1996 death of their teenage son and her battle with breast cancer.

Finding Solace and Strength from Friends and Strangers

Saving Graces

Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum

Kamloops Art Gallery

Manuel Piña

Manuel Piña, Edward Poitras, Jorma Puranen, Jin-Me Yoon

Lost homelands

What is it to practice history in an age in which photographs exist? What is the impact of photographs on the core historiographical practices which define the discipline and shape its enquiry and methods? In Photographs and the Practice of History, Elizabeth Edwards proposes a new approach to historical thinking which explores these questions and redefines the practices at the heart of this discipline. Structured around key concepts in historical methodology which are recognisable to all undergraduates, the book shows that from the mid-19th century onward, photographs have influenced historical enquiry. Exposure to these mass-distributed cultural artefacts is enough to change our historical frameworks even when research is textually-based. Conceptualised as a series of 'sensibilities' rather than a methodology as such, it is intended as a companion to 'how to' approaches to visual research and visual sources. Photographs and the Practice of History not only builds on existing literature by leading scholars: it also offers a highly original approach to historiographical thinking that gives readers a foundation on which to build their own historical practices.

A Short Primer

Photographs and the Practice of History

Chris Gosden

Ruth Phillips

Anthropologists of the senses have long argued that cultures differ in their sensory registers. This groundbreaking volume applies this idea to material culture and the social practices that endow objects with meanings in both colonial and postcolonial relationships. It challenges the privileged position of the sense of vision in the analysis of material culture. Contributors argue that vision can only be understood in relation to the other senses. In this they present another challenge to the assumed western five-sense model, and show how our understanding of material culture in both historical and contemporary contexts might be reconfigured if we consider the role of smell, taste, touch and sound, as well as sight, in making meanings about objects.

Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture

Sensible Objects

The bestselling author of Saving Graces shares her inspirational message on the challenges and blessings of coping with adversity. She’s one of the most beloved political figures in the country, and on the surface, seems to have led a charmed life. In many ways, she has. Beautiful family. Thriving career. Supportive friendship. Loving marriage. But she’s no stranger to adversity. Many know of the strength she had shown after her son, Wade, was killed in a freak car accident when he was only sixteen years old. She would exhibit this remarkable grace and courage again when the very private matter of her husband's infidelity became public fodder. And her own life has been on the line. Days before the 2004 presidential election—when her husband John was running for vice president—she was diagnosed with breast cancer. After rounds of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation the cancer went away—only to reoccur in 2007. While on the campaign trail, Elizabeth met many others who have had to contend with serious adversity in their lives, and in Resilience, she draws on their experiences as well as her own, crafting an unsentimental and ultimately inspirational meditation on the gifts we can find among life’s biggest challenges. This short, powerful, pocket-sized inspirational book makes an ideal gift for anyone dealing with difficulties in their life, who can find peace in knowing they are not alone, and promise that things can get better.

Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life's Adversities

Sigrid Lien

Museums and the Work of Photographs

Uncertain Images

Anthropology and Photography, 1860-1920

Since its beginnings, photography has been a valuable resource for anthropologists in the recording of ethnographic data. This book, published in conjunction with the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) London, looks at the significance and relevance of still photography in British anthropology from about 1860 until 1920. It examines how photography provides evidence of the past and how this evidence is used in conjunction with more traditional forms of anthropological information. And it considers the reflexive and critical nature of the photographic way of seeing within anthropology. The book opens with five substantial essays on the nature of photography, visual perception, theoretical and historical approaches to anthropological photography, and the photograph as a document. These are followed by twenty shorter essays by leading anthropologists and historians with special interest in visual representation. The essays examine the content and historical contexts of a range of 157 remarkable photographs, drawn mainly from RAI collections, many reproduced for the first time. The book as a whole establishes the intellectual and anthropological frameworks for the analysis of specific photographs and articulates a body of ideas about photography and the way in which it was perceived in anthropology. The volume encompasses many ways of thinking from the theoretical to the ethnographic and from the historical to the 'post-modern'. This pluralist approach stresses the complex nature of the photographic message and its interpretation within anthropology in a way that is as relevant to modern material as it is to the historical.

Colonial Photography of Samoa, 1875 to 1925

Picturing Paradise

Almost all museums hold photographs in their collections, and museum professionals and their audiences engage with photographs in a myriad of ways. Yet despite some three decades of critical museology and photographic theory, and an extensive debate on the politics of representation, outside art museums, almost no critical attention has been given specifically to the roles, purposes and lives of these photographs within museums. This book brings into focus the ubiquitous yet entirely unconsidered work that photographs are put to in museums. The authors' argument is that there is an economy of photographs in museums which is integral to the processes of the museum, and integral to the understanding of museums. The international contributors, drawn from curators and academics, reflect a range of visual and museological expertise. After an introduction setting out the range of questions and problems, the first part addresses broad curatorial strategies and ways of thinking about photographs in museums. Shifting the emphasis from curatorial practices and anxieties to the space of the gallery, this is followed by a series of case studies of exhibitionary practices and the museum strategies that support them. The third section focuses on the role of photographs in the museum articulation of ’difficult histories’. A final section addresses photograph collections in a digital environment. New technologies and new media have transformed the management, address and purposing in photographs in museums, from cataloguing practices to streaming on social media. These growing practices challenge both traditional hierarchies of knowledge in museums and the location of authority about photographs. The volume emerges from PhotoCLEC, a HERA funded project on museums and the photographic legacy of the colonial past in a postcolonial and multicultural Europe.

Uncertain Images: Museums and the Work of Photographs

Traces the use of photography in British anthropological expeditions, and discusses the photograph as document

Kaushik Bhaumik

Vision is more than looking or seeing. It is integral to all human action. Visual Sense presents a series of readings which offer a range of alternatives to conventional psychological and social scientific approaches to the study of the ocular. The book highlights the multitude of ways in which vision is linked to the other senses by virtue of being embedded in complex cultural processes. Visual Sense introduces students to the analysis of a wide range of ways of experiencing sight across time and across cultures: from Renaissance Italy, Aztec Mexico and early Christian Europe, to Tibet, West Africa, Aboriginal Australia and South America, amongst others. It is arranged around broad themes of visual experience, ranging from navigating the sacred and ordering knowledge about the world to thinking creatively, socially and beyond vision into cyberspace and daydream. This unique approach allows cross-cultural and thematic connections to be made. A Guide to Further Reading allows students to expand their learning independently, and section introductions place the readings in context. Visual Sense expands the field of visual studies and explores the place of vision in the sensory world.

A Cultural Reader

Visual Sense

What is it to practice history in an age in which photographs exist? What is the impact of photographs on the core historiographical practices which define the discipline and shape its enquiry and methods? In Photographs and the Practice of History, Elizabeth Edwards proposes a new philosophy of history which explores these questions and redefines the practices at the heart of this discipline. Structured around key concepts in historical methodology which are recognisable to all undergraduates, the book shows that from the mid-19th century onward, photographs have influenced historical enquiry. Exposure to these mass-distributed cultural artefacts is enough to change our historical frameworks even when research is textually-based. Intended as a companion to 'how to' guides on visual research, Photographs and the Practice of History builds on existing literature by leading scholars and gives readers a foundation on which to build their own historical practices.

Elizabeth Edwards

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