Camera Obscura

05/07/2022

Join Film Quarterly’s “Page Views Live” webinar tomorrow for a discussion of Lindsey B. Green Simms’ recent Camera Obscura book, Q***r African Cinemas. Mapping the complex space occupied by q***r films and filmmakers in Africa, this wide-ranging study reveals how these films transform homophobic or oppressive realities to explore new possibilities of q***r resistance. Moderated by FQ editor-in-chief B. Ruby Rich.

Register here for the Zoom Webinar tomorrow, July 6th @ 1pm EST/10am PST:
https://ucsc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_IRDLInFUQAeJOXmde69J4g

Bruno Guaraná’s interview with Lindsey B. Green-Simms appears in the Summer 2022 issue of Film Quarterly (Volume 75, Number 4). It is available online at the link below together with a PDF download of the introduction from Q***r African Cinemas, courtesy of Duke University Press.

Bruno Guaraná’s Interview: https://filmquarterly.org/2022/06/06/q***r-african-cinemas-a-conversation-with-lindsey-b-green-simms/

PDF download of Q***r African Cinemas introduction:
https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/3025/chapter/5441505/Registering-Resistance-in-Q***r-African-Cinemas

This content is made freely available by the publisher. It may not be redistributed or altered. All rights reserved.REFERENCESAbu-Lughod, Lila. 1990. “The Roman

05/07/2022

We are excited to announce that the latest issue of CAMERA OBSCURA is available at:
https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura

"Not New to This: A Genealogical Approach to Black Girls’ Media Production"
Ashleigh Greene Wade

"The Reserve Army of Affectivity: Unemployed Labor in William Greaves’s Psychodramatic Cinéma Vérité"
Alex Pittman

"Incestuous Wanderlust: 35 Shots of Rum’s Atmospheres of Circulation"
Iggy Cortez

"Pretty Gross: Dialectics of Desire and Disgust in the Reception of Pipilotti Rist"
Emily Watlington

"Looking for Something New: Antonioni’s La notte and Specters of Femininity"
Sławomir Masłoń

"Tumbling Backward: Scrolling, Temporality, and One Direction Fan Narratives on Tumblr"
Anne-Charlotte Mecklenburg

31/03/2022

Here is the recently published profile on Senior Executive Editor Ken Wissoker at Duke University Press in the New Yorker. It also includes the work of Camera Obscura editors Homay King and Bishnupriya Ghosh. You can read it here: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-editor-who-moves-theory-into-the-mainstream

Under Ken Wissoker, Duke University Press is one of the few academic publishers with crossover appeal.

04/02/2022

We are excited to announce the release of a new Camera Obscura series book! Congratulations to Fatimah Tobing Rony on her book, How Do We Look?: Resisting Visual Biopolitics, published by Duke University Press. To see more, visit: https://www.dukeupress.edu/how-do-we-look.

SubjectsGender and Sexuality > Feminism and Women’s Studies, Media Studies > Film, Asian Studies > Southeast Asia In How Do We Look? Fatimah Tobing Rony draws on transnational images of Indonesian women as a way to theorize what she calls visual biopolitics—the ways visual representation determi...

25/10/2021

We are thrilled to announce that a special issue of CAMERA OBSCURA is available at:
https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura

with a special co-edited dossier on Carolee Schneemann by Tess Takahashi and Kenneth White

Female Surrogate Labor and White Corporeal Debt
in Singin’ in the Rain

Anthea Kraut

Symmetry, Violence, and The Handmaiden’s Q***r Colonial Intimacies

Jasmine Hu

The Auto-Tuned Self: Modulating Voice and Gender in Digital Media Ecologies

Lisa Åkervall

Daughter of Saul, or Saul Leanya: The Gendered Place of Atrocity in László Nemes’s Son of Saul

Szidonia Haragos

In Practice

Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019)
Guest edited by Tess Takahashi and Kenneth White

Introduction: Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019)

Kenneth White

On Carolee

Yvonne Rainer

Carolee Schneemann’s Sonic Shadow

Peggy Phelan

American as Apple Pie

Erica Levin

Schneemann Sounding: Embodied Sonic Systems

Melissa Ragona

Breaking at the Edges: Carolee Schneemann’s Desires for Dance

Danielle Goldman

Christ, Santa Claus, Doctor Deliverer: For Carolee Schneemann

Soyoung Yoon

House Body House

Kenneth White

Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019): Portfolio

Kenneth White and Tess Takahashi

21/09/2021

Congratulations to Camera Obscura editor Homay King on her appointment as the Visiting Senior Fellow at the National Gallery of Art's Center for Advanced Study on the Visual Arts! To read more, see: https://www.brynmawr.edu/news/professor-homay-king-named-visiting-senior-fellow-national-gallery-art-s-center-advanced-study

Professor of History of Art Homay King has been named an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts this fall.

21/05/2021

We are thrilled to announce that a special issue of CAMERA OBSCURA is available at:
https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura

"Future Varda"
Edited by Rebecca J. DeRoo and Homay King

Introduction
Rebecca J. DeRoo and Homay King

Floating Roots: Agnès Varda's Uncle Yanco
Homay King

Agnès Varda, Jane Birkin, and Kung-fu Master!
Emma Wilson

She Listened: Vardian Self-Portraiture and Auto-Refrains of Sea, Wind, and Sand
Nadine Boljkovac

Passion, Commitment, Compassion: Les Justes au Panthéon by Agnès Varda
Sandy Flitterman Lewis

Agnès Varda, Producer
Kelley Conway

Agnès Varda and Le Collectif 50/50 en 2020: Power and Protest at the Cannes Film Festival
Rebecca J. DeRoo

From Cannes to Cardboard: The Circulation and Promotion of Visages Villages and the Auteur on Instagram
Matt St. John

Varda's Third Life
Dominique Bluher

In Practice

Agnès Varda: Photography and Early Creative Process
Rebecca J. DeRoo

"Virtual Varda": Sustainable Legacies, Digital Communities, and scholarly Postcards
Colleen Kennedy-Karpat

30/03/2021

We are delighted to announce the publication of a new book authored by editorial board member Lalitha Gopalan. "Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India" is now out with Palgrave Macmillan. You can find the book here: https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783030540951

25/01/2021

We are thrilled to announce the publication of Lingzhen Wang's Revisiting Women's Cinema: Feminism, Socialism, and Mainstream Culture in Modern China! You can find the book here: https://www.dukeupress.edu/revisiting-womens-cinema

SubjectsAsian Studies > East Asia, Gender and Sexuality > Feminism and Women’s Studies, Media Studies > Film In Revisiting Women’s Cinema, Lingzhen Wang ponders the roots of contemporary feminist stagnation and the limits of both commercial mainstream and elite minor cultures by turning to socia...

18/12/2020

We are excited to present a video interview featuring CO editor Patricia White and Bakirathi Mani. Mani is the author of Unseeing Empire, now available through Duke University Press.

Interview link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=video+conversation&utm_campaign=b-SM_Mani20_121720&v=JGMVqQ3ViOc&feature=youtu.be

This video was recorded in Philadelphia, PA on November 7, 2020 at the home of Patricia White.Camera: Saket SekhsariaEditing: Rubing ZhangBakirathi Mani, aut...

08/12/2020

You are invited to a virtual book talk for our latest release, Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America by Bakirathi Mani. Mani will be joined by artist Annu Palakunnathu Matthew and curator Jodi Throckmorton. We hope to see you there from 12-1 PM EST.

https://www.pafa.org/events/unseeing-empire-photography-representation-south-asian-america-120920?utm_content=bufferecaaf&utm_medium=social&utm_source=Facebook&utm_campaign=PAFA%2520Facebook&fbclid=IwAR1JVJ8CJsjUGBjIofJGGSJpPnGaQWENUft40jyaJndZzlEvJjh-4r_7Rn8

In her new book, Bakirathi Mani, Professor of English Literature at Swarthmore College, investigates how images of empire haunt contemporary Asian American visual cultures. Weaving close readings of fine art together with archival research and ethnographic fieldwork at museums and galleries across N...

03/12/2020

We are excited to announce that the latest issue of CAMERA OBSCURA is available at:
https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura

A Feminist Still: Documentary Form and Untimely Critique in Sheba Chhachhi's Protest Photography
Lakshmi Padmanabhan

Masturbatory Ecologies: Po*******hy, Ecosexuality, and Perverted Environmental Justice
Jeremy Chow

"I'm Washing My Dishes and Making a Movie": Anne Charlotte Robertson and World-Making as Women's Work
Anjo-marí Gouws

Wages for Face-Work: Black Mirror's "Nosedive" and Digital Reproductive Labor
Erin Greer

In Practice

When Are You Going to Catch Up with Me?
Shu Lea Cheang and Alexandra Juhasz

Making Space: Deborah Willis and the Archive of Black Visual Culture
Jasmine Nichole Cobb

Promoting the Image of Gender Equality in Swedish Film as the 2020 Deadline Expires
Ingrid Ryberg

The Unicorn and the Larva: In Conversation
Anuj Vaidya and Tejal Shah

03/12/2020

We are thrilled to announce the publication of a new Camera Obscura book. Bakirathi Mani's Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America is now in print!

21/09/2020

We are excited to announce that the latest issue of CAMERA OBSCURA is available at:
https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura

"How Pictures Make Bodies and Bodies Make Pictures: Gender as a Scopic System in Annie Leibovitz's Photography of Caitlyn Jenner for Vanity Fair and Pedro Almodóvar's La piel que habito"
Alanna Beroiza

"Framing Black Performance: Selma and the Poetics of Representation"
Courtney R. Baker

"Damsels Who Distress: Gender and the Acousmatic Voice in Video Games"
Liam Mitchell

"Q***r Film Settings as Sites of Resistance"
Serdar Küçük

"'Sometimes It Seems You're in Another World': Afrocentric Feminisms of the LA Rebellion"
Jamie Ann Rogers

In Practice

"Looking Back, Moving Forward: Retrospectives at the Melbourne Women in Film Festival"
Janice Loreck, Sian Mitchell, Whitney Monaghan, and Kirsten Stevens

"A Manifesto for the Broken Machine"
Sarah Sharma

07/05/2020

All issues of CAMERA OBSCURA are freely available through July 31st, 2020. The journal is featured on the Duke University Press "Labor and Precarity" Syllabus! https://www.dukeupress.edu/Explore-Subjects/Syllabi/Labor-and-Precarity-Syllabus.

25/04/2020

We are excited to announce that the latest issue of CAMERA OBSCURA is available at:
https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura

"Epistemology of the Answering Machine: Cher, Chaz, Mourning, and Some Trans Archives"
Lilia Kilburn

"Intimate Connections: Alternative Communication Threads in Nina Sobell's Video Performances and Installations (1974-82)
Cristina Albu

"Gendered Genocide: New Cambodian Cinema and the Case of Forced Marriage and R**e"
Raya Morag

"Ethical Whiteness and the Death Drive: White Women as the New War Hero"
Moon Charania

"Horror Cities: Contesting the Ruins of Capitalism in Contemporary Genre Cinema"
Benjamin Balthaser

02/12/2019

We are thrilled to announce that the latest issue of CAMERA OBSCURA is available at:
https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/issue/34/3.

Zhang Nuanxin and Social Commitment in 1980s Chinese Women’s Experimental Cinema
Lingzhen Wang

Sitting Closer to the Screen: Early Televisual Address, the Unsettling of the Domestic Sphere, and Close-Reading Historical TV
Josie Torres Barth

“Light Filtering through those Shutters”: Joyless Streets, Mnemic Symbols, and the Beginnings of Feminist Film Criticism
Jenelle Troxell

Three by Three: Lisa Cholodenko’s Attachment Trilogy
Lee Wallace

Whatever Happened to Janet Wood?: Women Story Editors in 1950s Television
Annie Berke

In Practice

Opening Statements: Theme Singing and Shifting Paradigms for Voicing Feminine Subjectivities as Television Music
Alyxandra Vesey

16/09/2019

The latest issue of CAMERA OBSCURA is available at https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/issue/34/2?fbclid=IwAR3f06fq-GiJr9gtqFrFQttAnEzlRNxZYdLSI6O5GrgWD6lFCg384wmJObA

"Beyoncé's Soft Power: Poetics and Politics of an Afro-Diasporic Aesthetics"
Ellen McLarney

"Sentimental Activism as Q***r-Feminist Documentary Practice; or, How to Make Love in a Room Full of People"
Feng-Mei Heberer

"'The Harder I Swim, the Faster I Sink': Top of the Lake's Female Detective in the Global Television Economy"
Alison Wielgus

"A Tale of Two Feminists?: Hannah Arendt Revisited by Margarethe von Trotta"
Yosefa Losh*tzky

"Not Your Mother's Melodrama: Three Twenty-First-Century Women's Films"
E.L. McCallum

"The Story of Untold Displacements: Buddhist-Muslim Intimacies and Visions of Ethnic Coexistence in a Thai Q***r-Feminist Filmic Archive"
Arnika Fuhrmann

IN PRACTICE

"Women with Cameras: The Invention of the Selfie in the Photography of Anne Collier"
Liz Linden

"Affronting Stardom/Confronting Sexual Violence"
Lynne Joyrich

16/04/2019

our Akerman issue out in the world!

Photo: Sandy Flitterman-Lewis

20/03/2019

We are ecstatic to announce that the latest issue of CAMERA OBSCURA is now available at:

https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/issue/34/1%20(100)

ON CHANTAL AKERMAN
ed. Patricia White for the Camera Obscura Editorial Collective

CONTENTS

Patricia White
"Camera Obscura and Chantal Akerman"

Ivone Marguiles
"Our Way of Working: A Conversation with Claire Atherton about Chantal Akerman"

Janet Bergstrom
"With Chantal in New York in the 1970s: An Interview with Babette Mangolte"

Jane Stein
"Hanging Out Yonkers: A Photographic Record"

Babette Mangolte
"NOW, Chantal Akerman's Last Work"

Sandy Flitterman-Lewis
"Souvenirs de Chantal"

Claire Atherton (trans. Felicity Chaplin)
Tribute to Chantal Akerman

Maureen Turim
"Next to Chantal Akerman: An Installation of Generations and the Shoah"

Brenda Longfellow
"The Matrixial Borderspace: The Complex Inscription of Trauma in Chantal Akerman's No Home Movie"

Kelley Conway
"Lyrical Akerman"

IN PRACTICE

Eva Kuhn and Ute Holl, eds.
"On the Difficulty of Forgetting: Recollections of the Basel Symposium on Chantal Akerman"

Michael Mazière
"Chantal Akerman in London"

Sandra Percival
"CHANTAL? A Dialogue with Sonia Wieder-Atherton"

Filmography

List of Installations

17/03/2019

from the Camera Obscura SCMS 2019 reception! Thanks to Martyr Sauce for hosting us and everyone who attended. Here’s to another hundred issues!

16/03/2019

tonight!

If you're in Seattle and/or at SCMS, please join Camera Obscura at a reception honoring our milestone 100th issue (on Chantal Akerman) and Pooja Rangan's Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary, which received the 2019 Harry Levin Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association!

SATURDAY, MARCH 16, 6-8PM
MARTYR SAUCE (102 South Jackson Street)
FOOD AND DRINK

Copies of Camera Obscura #100 will be available for purchase.

See you there!

CAMERA OBSCURA AT SCMS!

If you are attending SCMS in Seattle, please join us for a reception to celebrate the hundredth issue of Camera Obscura.

Saturday, March 16, from 6-8pm
Martyr Sauce (102 South Jackson Street)
Food and drink provided

We hope to see you there!

15/03/2019

Pooja Rangan's IMMEDIATIONS: THE HUMANITARIAN IMPULSE IN DOCUMENTARY, has won the 2019 Harry Levin Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association!

Read the introduction here:https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-0-8223-6371-2_601.pdf

08/03/2019

CAMERA OBSCURA AT SCMS!

If you are attending SCMS in Seattle, please join us for a reception to celebrate the hundredth issue of Camera Obscura.

Saturday, March 16, from 6-8pm
Martyr Sauce (102 South Jackson Street)
Food and drink provided

We hope to see you there!

03/12/2018

We are thrilled to announce that the latest issue of CAMERA OBSCURA is now available at:

https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/issue/33/3%20(99)

WOMEN'S FILM AUTHORSHIP IN NEOLIBERAL TIMES: REVISITING FEMINISM AND GERMAN CINEMA
ed. Hester Baer and Angelica Fenner

CONTENTS

Hester Baer and Angelica Fenner
"Introduction: Revisiting Feminism and German Cinema"

Faye Stewart
"Women of DEFA: Gender, Labor, and Precarity in (Post)Socialist Cinema"

Mary Hennessy
"Photography, Subjectivity, and the Politics of the Image from Helke Sander to Angela Schanelec"

Priscilla Layne
"All That Glitters Isn't Gold: Auma Obama's Nightmare of Postunification Germany"

Muriel Cormican
"Willful Women in the Cinema of Maren Ade"

IN PRACTICE

Hester Baer and Angelica Fenner
"Representation Matters: Tatjana Turanskyj on Women's Filmmaking and the Pro Quote Film Movement"

Sebastian Heiduschke
"Women's Interventions in the Contemporary German Film Industry"

13/11/2018

Camera Obscura's forthcoming 100th issue, "Chantal Akerman," is featured in Duke University Press' spring catalog!

It includes a rich collection of newly published photographs, scholarly essays by leading Akerman scholars, a filmography and installation list, and rare interviews with Akerman's close collaborators.

Out February 2019.

30/09/2018

We are thrilled to announce that the latest issue of CAMERA OBSCURA is now available at:

https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/issue/33/2%20(98)

CONTENTS

Jackie Stacey
"Love's Cosmopolitan Promise in Sally Potter's YES"

Marta Figlerowicz
"Inanimism: Nymphomaniac, Under the Skin, and Capitalist Late Style"

Ana Stevenson
"'Cast Off the Shackles of Yesterday': Women's Suffrage in Walt Disney's Mary Poppins"

Paul Flaig
"Yesterday's Hadaly: On Voicing a Feminist Media Archaeology"

Nick Salvato
"Q***r Structure, Animated Form, and Really Rosie"

Will Scheibel
"Working It: Gene Tierney, Laura, and Wartime Beautifcation"

IN PRACTICE
Pooja Rangan, Brett Story, and Paige Sarlin
"Humanitarian Ethics and Documentary Politics"

26/09/2018

ANNOUNCING:

TECHNICOLORED: REFLECTIONS ON RACE IN THE TIME OF TV

Ann DuCille

A Camera Obscura book on Duke University Press

From early sitcoms such as I Love Lucy to contemporary prime-time dramas like Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, African Americans on television have too often been asked to portray tired stereotypes of blacks as villains, vixens, victims, and disposable minorities. In Technicolored black feminist critic Ann duCille combines cultural critique with personal reflections on growing up with the new medium of TV to examine how televisual representations of African Americans have changed over the last sixty years. Whether explaining how watching Shirley Temple led her to question her own self-worth or how televisual representation functions as a form of racial profiling, duCille traces the real-life social and political repercussions of the portrayal and presence of African Americans on television. Neither a conventional memoir nor a traditional media study, Technicolored offers one lifelong television watcher's careful, personal, and timely analysis of how television continues to shape notions of race in the American imagination.

Available for purchase here:

https://www.dukeupress.edu/technicolored?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Buy&utm_campaign=b-SM_duCilleF18_092518