Cold War Camera, by Thy Phu, Erina Duganne, and Andrea Noble (eds.)

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Here, I would cite important essays questioning the notion of critique in academia generally: Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 197–222; and Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 225–48. In the field of art history, one can point to several books that marked a shift toward collectivism: T. J. Demos, Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (London: Sternberg, 2013); Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); and Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012).

2 Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (London: Verso, 2015).

3 Joshua Shannon, The Recording Machine: Art and Fact during the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017).

4 Cold War Camera’s bibliography cites Azoulay’s most recent and popular book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019) as well as her The Civil Contract of Photography (London: Zone Books, 2008) and her Civil Imagination. As a whole, Cold War Camera more heavily relies on her writing on human rights and NATO, which is made most explicit in Potential History.

5 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1968), 214–18; Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 507–30; Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 2000); Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View,” Art Journal 42, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 311–19; and Leah Dickerman, “Camera Obscura: Socialist Realism in the Shadow of Photography,” October, no. 93 (Summer 2000): 138–53.

6 See especially Okwui Enwezor’s Snap Judgements: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (Göttingen: Steidl, 2006) and his “Archive Fever: Photography between History and the Monument,” in Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (Göttingen: Steidl, 2008). For background on Enwezor’s imbrication of art and postcolonial politics, see Enwezor, ed., The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa (1945–1994), exh. cat. (London: Prestel, 2002).

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Notes on contributors

Delinda Collier

Delinda Collier is professor of art history and dean of graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago [37 S. Wabash Avenue, Suite 817, Chicago, IL 60603].