A Medium Seen Otherwise: Photography in Documentary Film - Paperback

by Roger Hallas (Author)

Through a new look at how political, historical, and art documentaries engage with photographic images, objects, and archives, A Medium Seen Otherwise argues that film allows us to better understand what people do with analog and digital photographs as material objects that enable social and political relations through multisensory experience. Moreover, as a time-based medium with sound, film can bring the event of photography into fuller view, demonstrating how no single participant in it (photographer, subject, camera, photograph, or viewer) has sovereignty over its affect, meaning, or value. The book thus explores the ways in which the innovative incorporation of photography into documentary film permits us to see both of these media otherwise. Photographs, whether professional or vernacular, are conventionally understood to furnish documentaries with indexical evidence and visual illustration of history, yet the spatio-temporal and aural dimensions of film permit documentaries to illuminate photography's wider capacities beyond the merely representational.

Author Biography

Roger Hallas is Associate Professor of English at Syracuse University, where he teaches Film, Visual Culture, and Queer studies. He is the author of Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image (2009), the co-editor of The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory, and Visual Culture (2007), and the editor of Documenting the Visual Arts (2020).