Thy Phu

Photography and Vietnam

Warring Visions

civility in Asian American visual culture

Picturing model citizens

Elspeth H. Brown

This innovative collection demonstrates the profound effects of feeling on our experiences and understanding of photography. It includes essays on the tactile nature of photos, the relation of photography to sentiment and intimacy, and the ways that affect pervades the photographic archive. Concerns associated with the affective turn—intimacy, alterity, and ephemerality, as well as queerness, modernity, and loss—run through the essays. At the same time, the contributions are informed by developments in critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and feminist theory. As the contributors bring affect theory to bear on photography, some interpret the work of contemporary artists, such as Catherine Opie, Tammy Rae Carland, Christian Boltanski, Marcelo Brodsky, Zoe Leonard, and Rea Tajiri. Others look back, whether to the work of the American Pictorialist F. Holland Day or to the discontent masked by the smiles of black families posing for cartes de visite in a Kodak marketing campaign. With more than sixty photographs, including twenty in color, this collection changes how we see, think about, and feel photography, past and present. Contributors. Elizabeth Abel, Elspeth H. Brown, Kimberly Juanita Brown, Lisa Cartwright, Lily Cho, Ann Cvetkovich, David L. Eng, Marianne Hirsch, Thy Phu, Christopher Pinney, Marlis Schweitzer, Dana Seitler, Tanya Sheehan, Shawn Michelle Smith, Leo Spitzer, Diana Taylor

Feeling Photography

In Warring Visions, Thy Phu explores photography from dispersed communities throughout Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, both during and after the Vietnam War, to complicate narratives of conflict and memory. While the visual history of the Vietnam War has been dominated by American documentaries and war photography, Phu turns to photographs circulated by the Vietnamese themselves, capturing a range of subjects, occasions, and perspectives. Phu's concept of warring visions refers to contrasts in the use of war photos in North Vietnam, which highlighted national liberation and aligned themselves with an international audience, and those in South Vietnam, which focused on family and everyday survival. Phu also uses warring visions to enlarge the category of war photography, a genre that usually consists of images illustrating the immediacy of combat and the spectacle of violence, pain, and wounded bodies. She pushes this genre beyond such definitions by analyzing pictures of family life, weddings, and other quotidian scenes of life during the war. Phu thus expands our understanding of how war is waged, experienced, and resolved.

Erina Duganne

Andrea Noble

Cold War Camera

At the heart of the model minority myth—often associated with Asian Americans—is the concept of civility. In this groundbreaking book, Picturing Model Citizens, Thy Phu exposes the complex links between civility and citizenship, and argues that civility plays a crucial role in constructing Asian American citizenship. Featuring works by Arnold Genthe, Carl Iwasaki, Toyo Miyatake, Nick Ut, and others, Picturing Model Citizens traces the trope of civility from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Through an examination of photographs of Chinese immigrants, Japanese internment camps, the Hiroshima Maidens project, napalm victims, and the SARS epidemic, Phu explores civility's unexpected appearance in images that draw on discourses of intimacy, cultivation, apology, and hygiene. She reveals how Asian American visual culture illustrates not only cultural ideas of civility, but also contests the contradictions of state-defined citizenship.

Civility in Asian American Visual Culture

Picturing Model Citizens

Val Williams

Kathy Kubicki

Photography and Culture is at the forefront of new critical, reflective and analytical writing on photography. It is pluralistic in its approach and inter-disciplinary, embracing the historic and the contemporary and independent of any one prevailing theoretical critical model. It mirrors and debates new ways of thinking about photography as the photographic image becomes an ever more central player in our personal and public histories and lifestories. It seeks to become an important text for a new community of interest clustered around those who use reference, interpret or analyse photographic images within their chosen fields in arts and humanities, science and social science. * Aims to rebalance the over emphasis on art historical approaches, to look at vernacular and applied photography * Embraces the historical, technological, cultural and social aspects of photography, as well as all genres* Answers a clear need for a vehicle that fosters exchange about photography and culture across a wide range of disciplines and subfields* Strong interdisciplinary approach * Offers a forum for diverse voices in the field * Genuinely international, it seeks to open up the study of photography beyond traditional Eurocentric and Anglo-American perspectives * Gathers together the most thoughtful writers and thinkers about photography

Photography and Culture

Vinh Nguyen

Refugee States explores how the figure of the refugee and the concept of refuge shape the Canadian nation-state within a transnational context.

Thy Phu

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