This book can be described as an 'oblique memoir'. The central underlying and repeated themes of the book are exile and displacement; lives (and deaths) during the Third Reich; mother-daughter and sibling relationships; the generational transmission of trauma and experience; transatlantic reflections; and the struggle for creative expression. Stories mobilised, and people encountered, in the course of the narrative include: the internment of aliens in Britain during the Second World War; cultural life in Rochester, New York, in the 1920s; the social and personal meanings of colour(s). It also includes the industrialist and philanthropist, Henry Simon of Manchester, including his relationship with the Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen; the liberal British campaigner and MP of the 1940s, Eleanor Rathbone; reflections on the lives and images of spinsters. The text is supplemented and interrupted throughout by images (photographs, paintings, facsimile documents), some of which serve to illustrate the story, others engaging indirectly with the written word. The book also explains how forced exile persists through generations through a family history. It showcases the differences between English and American cultures. The book focuses on the incidence of cancers caused by exposure to radioactivity in England, and the impact it had on Anglo-American relations.
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For his project Temps mort [Dead Time] (2007–9, published in 2014), French-Algerian photographer Mohamed Bourouissa works secretly (because it is against the law in France) with his friend ‘Al’ who is in prison and taking photographs of the inside, which he sends to Bourouissa with his text messages alongside. The subsequent photobook version of this project, published by Kamel Mennour in 2014, represents an extraordinary transformation of the original exhibition of the photographs and videos (online and in the Kamel Mennour gallery in Paris). Put together with blank pages, selective quotations from Al’s elliptical text-messages and a highly stylised blurring of the images in the manner of Thomas Ruff, Bourouissa’s photobook Temps mort plays out the ‘dead time’ that being in prison represents. It shows the cryptic requests from Bourouissa to his friend, with the dates in bold, and selects images, instructions, hesitations and thoughts, from the 300 messages sent by Al. The suggestion is not only that Temps mort is a collectivist (rather than a simply collaborative) photo-text; but also, that, as part of a social and political commitment, it explores ways in which prisoners can remain in contact with the outside world, and can be mentally present while temporarily absent. Furthermore, Bourouissa’s (and Al’s?) photobook points to new options for today’s photobook design, in the era of social media and mobile phones.
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Part I: The photobook market
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Part II: Feminist self-fashioning. 1970–90
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Part III: Commitment and visibility
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Part IV: Institutional v. clandestine
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Part V: Memorialising the ephemeral
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Soaking up the rays
Light therapy and visual culture in Britain, c. 1890–1940
Soaking up the rays forges a new path for exploring Britain’s fickle love of the light by investigating the beginnings of light therapy in the country from c.1890-1940. Despite rapidly becoming a leading treatment for tuberculosis, rickets and other infections and skin diseases, light therapy was a contentious medical practice. Bodily exposure to light, whether for therapeutic or aesthetic ends, persists as a contested subject to this day: recommended to counter psoriasis and other skin conditions as well as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and depression; closely linked to notions of beauty, happiness and well-being, fuelling tourism to sunny locales abroad and the tanning industry at home; and yet with repeated health warnings that it is a dangerous carcinogen. By analysing archival photographs, illustrated medical texts, advertisements, lamps, and goggles and their visual representation of how light acted upon the body, Woloshyn assesses their complicated contribution to the founding of light therapy. Soaking up the rays will appeal to those intrigued by medicine’s visual culture, especially academics and students of the histories of art and visual culture, material cultures, medicine, science and technology, and popular culture.
Migrants shaping Europe, past and present
Multilingual literatures, arts, and cultures
This comparative volume examines the sustained contribution of migrants to Europe’s literatures, social cultures, and arts over centuries. Europe has never been a continent bounded by the seas that surround it. In premodern times, migrants imprinted the languages, arts, and literatures of the places where they settled. They contributed to these cultures and economies. Some were on the move in search of a better life; others were displaced by war, dispossessed, expelled; while still others were brought in servitude to European cities to work, enslaved. Today’s immigration flows in Europe are not exceptional but anchored in this longue durée process. Iberia/Maghreb, Sicily/Lampedusa, Calais are the three hotspots considered in this volume. These regions have been shaped and continue to be shaped by migrants; by their cultures; their Spanish, Arabic, Italian, and Somali; their French, English and Mandarin languages. They are also shaped by migrants’ struggles. The scholars and artists who wrote Migrants shaping Europe, past and present compose a new significant chapter in the cultural history of European migration by reflecting on the forces that have put people into motion since the premodern period and by examining the visual arts, literature, and multilingual social worlds fostered by migration. This historically expansive and multilingual approach to mobility and expressiveness makes a crucial contribution: migrants as a lifeblood of European cultures.