This fascinating, full-color volume brings together Meyer's photographs and his essays from ZoneZero, the international photography Web site he founded, along with other experts' commentary on his work. In one section, Meyer deconstructs some of his vivid, magical realist-style works, taking the reader inside his creative process. Students and admirers of Meyer's work, those interested in documentary photography or contemporary Mexico, and anyone interested in the timely intellectual questions he raises will be drawn to this engaging and beautiful book. Internationally regarded photographer Pedro Meyer began his career as a journalist and documentary photographer, and in many ways that is still his primary form of expression, although his work often crosses what others perceive as boundaries between truth and fiction. Meyer contends that photographers have always manipulated the truth to elicit certain responses. Sometimes, of course, the intent is to deceive, whether digitally through software programs like Photoshop, or by simply positioning the camera in a certain way to include or exclude parts of the picture, or in the darkroom, adjusting the lighting or cropping people in or out of a shot. At other times, Meyer argues, a transformed image can present a more profound truth than could be captured in a single exposure, just as fiction sometimes conveys more truth than simple reportage. The task for viewers says Meyer, is to question why and how images are made, and in the process uncover the real truth in those images.

The Real and the True, The Digital Photography of Pedro Meyer

Arts & Photography

Meyer, Pedro

Kaplan, Louis

Castellanos, Alejandro

Cruickshank, Douglas

Photography & Video

New Riders Pub

American Exposures: Photography and Community in the Twentieth Century

Photographs have the power to define and shape a community of people—for those who are revealed as well as for those who view them. Louis Kaplan addresses this phenomenon through a constellation of innovative essays that draw on the artistic renderings of national, ethnic, and global community. Spanning the twentieth century and profusely illustrated, American Exposures sheds light on a wide range of photographs, from Arthur Mole’s propagandistic “living photographs” of American icons and symbols to the exploration of contemporary subcultural communities by the Korean-born photographer and performance artist Nikki Lee, and asserts that the depiction of community is a central component to photography. Examining an eclectic collection of photographers, American Exposures deploys a number of critical concepts and theories developed by Jean-Luc Nancy in The Inoperative Community, as well as other philosophers, and applies them to the field of photography studies. Combining artistic and historical material with interdisciplinary theory, Kaplan moves beyond indexical thinking to demonstrate how an expository approach offers valuable resources with which to analyze visual communication. In doing so, he highlights the distinct powers of both community and photography as discourses of exposure. With an original approach to photography from Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition to Pedro Meyer and the rise of the digital image, Kaplan points to a new way to think about the intimate relationship among photography, American life, and the artistic imagination. Louis Kaplan is associate professor of history and theory of photography and new media in the Graduate Department of History of Art at the University of Toronto; he also coordinates the Visual Culture and Communication program at the University of Toronto at Mississauga. He is the author of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Biographical Writings.

Univ. of Minnesota Press

Photographs have the power to define and shape a community of people—for those who are revealed as well as for those who view them. Louis Kaplan addresses this phenomenon through a constellation of innovative essays that draw on the artistic renderings of national, ethnic, and global community. Spanning the twentieth century and profusely illustrated, American Exposures sheds light on a wide range of photographs, from Arthur Mole’s propagandistic “living photographs” of American icons and symbols to the exploration of contemporary subcultural communities by the Korean-born photographer and performance artist Nikki Lee, and asserts that the depiction of community is a central component to photography. Examining an eclectic collection of photographers, American Exposures deploys a number of critical concepts and theories developed by Jean-Luc Nancy in The Inoperative Community, as well as other philosophers, and applies them to the field of photography studies. Combining artistic and historical material with interdisciplinary theory, Kaplan moves beyond indexical thinking to demonstrate how an expository approach offers valuable resources with which to analyze visual communication. In doing so, he highlights the distinct powers of both community and photography as discourses of exposure. With an original approach to photography from Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition to Pedro Meyer and the rise of the digital image, Kaplan points to a new way to think about the intimate relationship among photography, American life, and the artistic imagination. Louis Kaplan is associate professor of history and theory of photography and new media in the Graduate Department of History of Art at the University of Toronto; he also coordinates the Visual Culture and Communication program at the University of Toronto at Mississauga. He is the author of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Biographical Writings.

Kaplan brings together Mumler's haunting images, his revealing memoir, and rich primary sources. He also contributes two extended essays, which offer a historical perspective of the Mumler phenomena and delve into the sociocultural and theoretical issues surrounding this vivid ghost story.

The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer

Individual Artists

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Biographical Writings

Marking the centenary of the birth of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), this book offers a new approach to the Bauhaus artist and theorist’s multifaceted life and work—an approach that redefines the very idea of biographical writing. In Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Louis Kaplan applies the Derridean deconstructivist model of the "signature effect" to an intellectual biography of a Constructivist artist. Inhabiting the borderline between life and work, the book demonstrates how the signature inscribed by "Moholy" operates in a double space, interweaving signified object and signifying matter, autobiography and auto-graphy. Through interpretative readings of over twenty key artistic and photographic works, Kaplan graphically illustrates Moholy’s signature effect in action. He shows how this effect plays itself out in the complex of relations between artistic originality and plagiarism, between authorial identity and anonymity, as well as in the problematic status of the work of art in the age of technical reproduction. In this way, the book reveals how Moholy’s artistic practice anticipates many of the issues of postmodernist debate and thus has particular relevance today. Consequently, Kaplan clarifies the relationship between avant-garde Constructivism and contemporary deconstruction. This new and innovative configuration of biography catalyzed by the life writing of Moholy-Nagy will be of critical interest to artists and writers, literary theorists, and art historians.

History & Criticism

Duke University Press Books

Marking the centenary of the birth of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), this book offers a new approach to the Bauhaus artist and theorist’s multifaceted life and work—an approach that redefines the very idea of biographical writing. In Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Louis Kaplan applies the Derridean deconstructivist model of the "signature effect" to an intellectual biography of a Constructivist artist. Inhabiting the borderline between life and work, the book demonstrates how the signature inscribed by "Moholy" operates in a double space, interweaving signified object and signifying matter, autobiography and auto-graphy. Through interpretative readings of over twenty key artistic and photographic works, Kaplan graphically illustrates Moholy’s signature effect in action. He shows how this effect plays itself out in the complex of relations between artistic originality and plagiarism, between authorial identity and anonymity, as well as in the problematic status of the work of art in the age of technical reproduction. In this way, the book reveals how Moholy’s artistic practice anticipates many of the issues of postmodernist debate and thus has particular relevance today. Consequently, Kaplan clarifies the relationship between avant-garde Constructivism and contemporary deconstruction. This new and innovative configuration of biography catalyzed by the life writing of Moholy-Nagy will be of critical interest to artists and writers, literary theorists, and art historians.

At Wit's End: The Deadly Discourse on the Jewish Joke

CHOICE: OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE A scholarly and thought-provoking work that places Jewish humor at the center of a discourse about Jewish and German relations through most of the twentieth century. At Wit's End explores the fascinating discourse on Jewish wit in the twentieth century when the Jewish joke became the subject of serious humanistic inquiry and inserted itself into the cultural and political debates among Germans and Jews against the ideologically charged backdrop of anti-Semitism, the Jewish question, and the Holocaust. The first in-depth study to explore the Jewish joke as a crucial rhetorical figure in larger cultural debates in Germany, author Louis Kaplan presents an engrossing and lucid work of scholarship that examines how "der jüdische Witz" (referring to both Jewish wit and jokes) was utilized differently in a number of texts, from the Weimar Republic to the rise of National Socialism, and how it was re-introduced into the public sphere after the Holocaust with the controversial publication of Salcia Landmann's collection of Jewish jokes in the reparations era (Wiedergutmachung). Kaplan reviews the claims made about the Jewish joke and its provocative laughter by notable writers from a variety of ideological perspectives, demonstrating how their reflections on this complex cultural trope enable a better understanding of German-Jewish intercultural relations and their eventual breakdown in the Third Reich. He also illustrates how selfcritical and self-ironic Jewish Witz maintained a fraught and ambivalent relationship with anti-Semitism. In reviewing this critical and traumatic moment in modern German-Jewish history through the deadly discourse on the Jewish joke, At Wit's End includes chapters on the virulent Austrian anti-Semitic racial theorist Arthur Trebitsch, the Nazi racial propagandist Siegfried Kadner, the German Marxist cultural historian Eduard Fuchs, the Jewish diasporic historian Erich Kahler, and the Jewish cabaret impresario Kurt Robitschek, among others. Shedding new light on anti-Semitism and on the Jewish question leading up to the Holocaust, At Wit's End provides readers with a unique perspective by which to gain important insights about this crucial historical period that reverberates into the present day, when potentially offensive humor coupled with a toxic political climate and xenophobia can have deadly consequences.

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Fordham University Press

Charles Fort collected the rejects and crackpots of science, classifying them in “real-unreal” zones: UFOs, living objects falling from the sky, phantom bullets, spontaneous combustion, showers of blood, the Super-Sargasso Sea, teleportation. Louis Kaplan brings new life to this posthum(or)ous and (foot)notable thinker.

The Damned Universe of Charles Fort

Biographies & Memoirs

Autonomedia

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kaplan, Louis. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Kaplan, Louis

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kaplan, Louis. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Real and the True, The Digital Photography of Pedro Meyer

American Exposures: Photography and Community in the Twentieth Century

American Exposures: Photography and Community in the Twentieth Century

The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer

The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Biographical Writings

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Biographical Writings

At Wit's End: The Deadly Discourse on the Jewish Joke

At Wit's End: The Deadly Discourse on the Jewish Joke

The Damned Universe of Charles Fort