The Itinerant Languages of Photography

In this resonant volume, which accompanies an exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton professors Cadava and Nouzeilles examine how photography functions as a language that moves through history, borders, and mediums. Despite Cadava and Nouzeilles’s inclusion of scholars and artists from across the world, the book mainly focuses on Latin America and South America. Nonetheless, the volume offers a comprehensive, multidimensional look at photography’s peripatetic nature, through seven concise essays in the first half, followed by four sections of stunning, full-page images illustrating photography’s itinerancy in relation to archives: “Itinerant Photographs,” “Itinerant Revolutions,” “Itinerant Subjects,” and “Itinerant Archives.” The images in the essays and second half of the book also evoke transcendency: the surreal, muted body of actress Adela Legarreta Rivas after being struck by a Datsun in Mexico City in 1979; a pregnant woman from Pompeii preserved both as a human cast by Mt. Vesuvius and by the camera; the retrieval of the body of a person who drowned, with onlookers reflected in a lake. Emphasizing both individual and collective emotions, with precise and stirring essays about the social, political, and historical implications of photography, this essential book will change the way we interact with images, and with each another. 135 color and 70 duotone illus. (Oct.)