Photographs, histories, and meanings

We cite from the cover :
"Photographs have shaped public perception and social meaning for the last one hundred and fifty years or more. This collection reexamines photographs and their social history, exploring the ideological, ethical, political, and aesthetic forces that inflect interpretation. The authors here trace shifting historical contexts, intentional or accidental interpretive distortions, and ambiguous and multiple meanings. Collectively, they seek to know bow images can be believed, given our awareness of the uncertainty of meaning. The contributors in this collection believe the histories they convey are the stories of our lives. To know the photographs is to know ourselves—with all our ambiguities, distortions, and complexities on display."
CONTENTS
Introduction : Marlene Kadar, Jeanne Perreault, and Linda Warley - Ambiguities, Distortions, Shifts
Chapter One : Caroline Blinder : Not So Innocent: Vision and Culpability in Weegee's Photographs of Children
Chapter Two : Petra Dreiser - Strange Birth: Reading Hands, Reflecting Race in Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices
Chapter Three : James Hewitson - Documenting Disasters: Rothstein's "Steer Skull" and the Use of Photographic Evidence in Environmental and Political Narratives
Chapter Four : Jeanne Perreault - Something Is Happening: Seeing It
Chapter Five : Marlene Kadar - Ambivalent Image: Twisted Use
Chapter Six : Justin Carville - Visualizing the Rising: Photography, Memory, and the Visual Economy of the 1916 Easter Rising
Chapter Seven : D. Bradford Hunt, Michael Ensdorf, and Kathy M. Pilat - The Promise of Public Housing: Photographs and the History of the Chicago Housing Authority
Chapter Eight : Christi Verduyn and Conny Steenman-Marcuse - "More than an Observer": Emmy Andriesse, Dutch Underground Photographer
Chapter Nine : Thomas Stubhlefield - Between the Officer and the Artist: Arnold Odermatt's Aesthetic-Forensic Project
Chapter Ten : Zoe Trodd - Passionate Protest: Lynching Photography and Appropriative Counter-Performances of the Lynching Ritual
Chapter Eleven : Linda Warley - Captured Childhoods: Photographs in Indian Residential School Memoir
Chapter Twelve : Laura Levitt - Returning to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: The Tower of Faces Ten Years Later
Index