The Bible in Photography addresses the untold story of biblical subjects in photography, from work by William Henry Fox Talbot and Julia Margaret Cameron in the nineteenth century to David Mach and Bettina Rheims in the twenty-first. Landscapes, character portraits, stories and visionary imagery from the Bible are found to pervade photographic practices and ideas, across the worlds of advertising and tourist information, the book and the gallery, in theorists such as Roland Barthes and John Berger, and in artistic reflection.
The book first explores the critical space for thinking about religion and the Bible in photographs. It draws methodologies from biblical traditions of hermeneutics and also from visual culture criticism, asking how this most modern of visual media brings a language of belief into the frame.
The second part of the book is concerned with the cultural histories of photography, and introduces four themes for grouping biblical subjects: the index for landscape photographs such as Frith’s images of the Holy Land; the icon for portraits of Jesus and Mary such as by Gabriel Harrison and Lewis Hine; the tableau for instructional images, including those by Oscar Rejlander and Graystone Bird; and the vision for spirit photography and apocalyptic imagery, such as by Frederick Hudson and John Heartfield.
Throughout, the book is also illustrated with living photographers, drawing the ideas and ideologies of the past into the present day. What is revealed is a charged spirituality in photography. Far from telling a secular story, this is a history of the medium which exposes the religious, and particularly Christian understandings, which were and are held by many of its practitioners over nearly two centuries.
About the author:
Dr Sheona Beaumont is a writer and artist working with photography. Her books explore the religious heritage of Christianity in the arts and visual culture, from photobooks to scholarly monographs. She is a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London, and has held artist/writer residencies across the UK, most recently as the Bishop Otter Scholar in Chichester, West Sussex. www.shospace.co.uk
The Bible in Photography. Index, Icon, Tableau, Vision
Sheona Beaumont
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024
Hardback, 272 pages
£99, eBook £79.20
Details: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/bible-in-photography-9780567706539/
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