Photography and Its Violations

John Roberts is professor of art and aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton and the author of The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography, and the Everyday, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade, and The Necessity of Errors. He has also contributed to the Oxford Art Journal, New Left Review, Radical Philosophy, Third Text, and Parallax.

• Acknowledgments Introduction: The Social Ontology of Photography Part I. The Document, the Figural, and the Index 1. Photography and Its Truth-Event 2. The Political Form of Photography Today 3. "Fragment, Experiment, Dissonant Prologue": Modernism, Realism, and the Photodocument 4. Two Models of Labor: Figurality and Nonfigurality in Recent Photography Part II. Abstraction, Violation, and Empathy 5. Photography After the Photograph: Event, Archive, and the Nonsymbolic 6. Photography, Abstraction, and the Social Production of Space 7. Violence, Photography, and the Inhuman Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Photography and Its Violations poses a world-transforming ethical challenge to photography's makers, subjects, and viewers alike: to reveal or conceal the exercise of power. Armed with John Roberts's insights into the often insidious, sometimes enfranchising, always intricate interplay of these two opposing violations, sensitive readers will be empowered and emboldened as they battle for position amid the tsunami of photographs that has come to define our world. -- Blake Stimson, University of Illinois at Chicago, author of The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation I know of no other work in photographic history or theory which takes such a wide survey of well-chosen examples in service of making profound and provocative sense of the whole field of photography. This book also successfully proposes a genuinely novel position from which to re-engage the most pressing, important, and persistent problems of photography. -- Tom Huhn, School of Visual Arts