Gregg Mitman
WRITING // BOOKS
DOCUMENTING THE WORLD
FILM, PHOTOGRAPHY, AND THE SCIENTIFIC RECORD
With Kelley Wilder, eds. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2016
Imagine the twentieth century without photography and film. Its history would be absent of images that define historical moments and generations: the death camps of Auschwitz, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Apollo lunar landing. It would be a history, in other words, of just artists’ renderings and the spoken and written word. To inhabitants of the twenty-first century, deeply immersed in visual culture, such a history seems insubstantial, imprecise, and even, perhaps, unscientific.
Documenting the World is about the material and social life of photographs and film made in the scientific quest to document the world. Drawing on scholars from the fields of art history, visual anthropology, and science and technology studies, the chapters in this book explore how this documentation—from the initial recording of images, to their acquisition and storage, to their circulation—has altered our lives, our ways of knowing, our social and economic relationships, and even our surroundings. Far beyond mere illustration, photography and film have become an integral, transformative part of the world they seek to show us.
SELECT REVIEWS
History of Photography
“a volume that, over the course of nine individually authored chapters and an introduction coauthored by the editors, succeeds in documenting, if not the world, then a world of historically minded, archivally informed visual cultural scholarship. . . As an example of how collaborative projects in the humanities can produce results that are more than the sums of their parts, this book should also inspire more of us to keep working – together.
Peter Galison, Harvard University
“Too little attention is paid to what we gain when we pay attention to the history of photography and documentary film. Happily, editors Mitman and Wilder show us how still and moving images can significantly deepen our grasp of the evolution of scientific work; they have gathered together here an impressive group of distinguished scholars across the fields of science and visualization. We have needed a book like Documenting the World for many years—I have no doubt that it will prove to be an important addition to existing scholarship.”
WRITING // BOOKS
DOCUMENTING THE WORLD
FILM, PHOTOGRAPHY, AND THE SCIENTIFIC RECORD
With Kelley Wilder, eds. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2016
Imagine the twentieth century without photography and film. Its history would be absent of images that define historical moments and generations: the death camps of Auschwitz, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Apollo lunar landing. It would be a history, in other words, of just artists’ renderings and the spoken and written word. To inhabitants of the twenty-first century, deeply immersed in visual culture, such a history seems insubstantial, imprecise, and even, perhaps, unscientific. Documenting the World is about the material and social life of photographs and film made in the scientific quest to document the world. Drawing on scholars from the fields of art history, visual anthropology, and science and technology studies, the chapters in this book explore how this documentation—from the initial recording of images, to their acquisition and storage, to their circulation—has altered our lives, our ways of knowing, our social and economic relationships, and even our surroundings. Far beyond mere illustration, photography and film have become an integral, transformative part of the world they seek to show us.
SELECT REVIEWS
History of Photography
“a volume that, over the course of nine individually authored chapters and an introduction coauthored by the editors, succeeds in documenting, if not the world, then a world of historically minded, archivally informed visual cultural scholarship. . . As an example of how collaborative projects in the humanities can produce results that are more than the sums of their parts, this book should also inspire more of us to keep working – together.
Peter Galison, Harvard University
“Too little attention is paid to what we gain when we pay attention to the history of photography and documentary film. Happily, editors Mitman and Wilder show us how still and moving images can significantly deepen our grasp of the evolution of scientific work; they have gathered together here an impressive group of distinguished scholars across the fields of science and visualization. We have needed a book like Documenting the World for many years—I have no doubt that it will prove to be an important addition to existing scholarship.”
© 2019 Gregg Mitman