Camera Works: Photography and The Twentieth-Century Word - Contexts

Contexts

As the winner of the 2006 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize, Michael North's Camera Works is widely recognized as an important contribution to the emergent field of "new modernist studies." Beginning with its seemingly unwieldy premise, that photography, film, and sound technologies of the early twentieth century exposed paradoxes in, while casting doubt on, the authority of representation, mediation, and even perception in both old and new media, that the new, original, and present, for example, could also be standardized, deferred, and endlessly reproduced, and that it was this "complicat the process of representation" that inspired modernist experimentation and formal innovation as a means of repairing or renegotiating this break, Camera Works presents "a general theory of the aesthetics of modernity," one that "take very seriously the significant formal innovations provided by material history itself," through its scrupulously detailed account.

Like North's own earlier Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern, which might even be regarded as a companion piece to this study, Camera Works shows not only how fully modernism participated in the wider cultural and technological spheres of its day, but also how this participation actually produced much of what scholars consider "modern" about modernism.