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This deeply personal account of emotion and vulnerability draws upon anecdotes related to individual works of art to present a chronicle of how people have shown emotion before works of art in the past.
“When you first view Rose-Lynn Fisher’s photographs, you might think you’re looking down at the world from an airplane, at dunes, skyscrapers or shorelines. In fact, you’re looking at her tears. . . . [There’s] poetry in the idea that our emotional terrain bears visual resemblance to the physical world; that our tears can look like the vistas we see out an airplane window. Fisher’s images are the only remaining trace of these places, which exist during a moment of intense feeling—and then vanish.” —NPR “[A] delicate, intimate book. . . . In The Topography of Tears photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher shows us a place where language strains to express grief, longing, pride, frustration, joy, the confrontation with something beautiful, the confrontation with an onion.” —Boston Globe Does a tear shed while chopping onions look different from a tear of happiness? In this powerful collection of images, an award-winning photographer trains her optical microscope and camera on her own tears and those of men, women, and children, released in moments of grief, pain, gratitude, and joy, and captured upon glass slides. These duotone photographs reveal the beauty of recurring patterns in nature and present evocative, crystalline imagery for contemplation. Underscored by poetic captions, they translate the mysterious act of crying into an atlas mapping the structure and magnificence of our interior lives. Rose-Lynn Fisher is an artist and author of the International Photography Award-winning studies Bee and The Topography of Tears. Her photographs are exhibited in galleries, festivals, and museums across the world and have been featured by the Dr. Oz Show, NPR, Smithsonian, Harper’s, New Yorker, Time, Wired, Reader’s Digest, Discover, Brain Pickings, and elsewhere. She received her BFA from Otis Art Institute and lives in Los Angeles.
Art Does art leave you cold? And is that what it's supposed to do? Or is a painting meant to move you to tears? Hemingway was reduced to tears in the midst of a drinking bout when a painting by James Thurber caught his eye. And what's bad about that? In Pictures and Tears, art historian James Elkins tells the story of paintings that have made people cry. Drawing upon anecdotes related to individual works of art, he provides a chronicle of how people have shown emotion before works of art in the past, and a meditation on the curious tearlessness with which most people approach art in the present. Deeply personal, Pictures and Tears is a history of emotion and vulnerability, and an inquiry into the nature of art. This book is a rare and invaluable treasure for people who love art. Also includes an 8-page color insert.
In this intimate history, James Elkins demonstrates that there is - and can never be - only one story of art. He opens up the questions that traditional art history usually avoids.
Photographer Bruce Weber intended to create a book of fashion photographs, however, as he became more involved in the process, his intention evolved into the desire to chronicle how fashion can be seen in nature, architecture, and the human spirit.
In What Photography Is, James Elkins examines the strange and alluring power of photography in the same provocative and evocative manner as he explored oil painting in his best-selling What Painting Is. In the course of an extended imaginary dialogue with Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Elkins argues that photography is also about meaninglessness--its apparently endless capacity to show us things that we do not want or need to see--and also about pain, because extremely powerful images can sear permanently into our consciousness. Extensively illustrated with a surprising range of images, the book demonstrates that what makes photography uniquely powerful is its ability to express the difficulty--physical, psychological, emotional, and aesthetic--of the act of seeing.
On New Years Day of 2010, the American video artist and photographer Laurel Nakadate (born 1975) began a year-long performance in which she cried once every day. She documented these crying sessions in 365 photographs that record a ritualized intent to "deliberately take part in sadness each day." Drawing out the biological symptoms of human vulnerability with extraordinary persistence, with this project Nakadate updated the endurance strategies of 1970s conceptual and performance art (Marina Abramovic, Bas Jan Ader) for a new generation with a new relationship to the camera lens. As with the work of her predecessors, Nakadate's self-portraits of willed sadness arouse a range of conflicting emotions in the viewer, from embarrassment to compassion. 365 Days, A Catalogue of Tears reproduces the full set of photographs and examines their negotiation of intimacy, self-reflection, portraiture and the artist's relationship with her audience.
In his collection of poetry and prose , Bob has combined his love of nature, the ocean, lakes, and mountains with his desire to express our inner feelings, our daily life's journey. "Of Smiles and Tears" was then created.
