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Photography as Power: Dominance and Resistance through the Italian Lens, edited by Marco Andreani and Nicoletta Pazzaglia, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019, xii + 277 pp., £61.99 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-5275-1812-4
Like any tool or technology, photography can be used to empower or to coerce. But unlike other technologies, photography expresses a lasting byproduct beyond the original click of the camera. Photography is a ‘trace-producing’ technology. Even when ‘framed’ the image continues to face us, soliciting our questions and promising revelations. If technology, as Heidegger argued, could be conceived as a revelation, photography is the ultimate embodiment of the technological promise ‘to reveal’, to bring forth. Here lies its staying power, its productive, anti-essential essence. What the photographic trace brings forth is the materiality of the world and the spatio-temporal cleavage expressing a historical relation to that materiality. For this reason, photography complicates any attempt to discipline it or wield it as a weapon.
Photography as Power: Dominance and Resistance through the Italian Lens explores photography's complex relation to power within the context of modern and contemporary Italian history and culture. The collection opens insightful conversations on photography and propaganda, draws on original research, and maps new objects of study, such as Martina Caruso's photography of the Resistance, or Pasquale Verdicchio's politics of the selfie. The topic is timely and touches on crucial theoretical and methodological questions. Regrettably, the volume is weakened by a lack of proofreading and careful oversight of the translations.
The book is divided into three sections, each exploring a theme through key historical moments. ‘The National Body and Its Others’ focuses on the use of photography in nineteenth- century anthropology and social science, as well as colonial war photography, to enforce national identity. ‘Images of Power and Propaganda’...