"Photography's Other Histories is an extremely interesting and important volume. It challenges both the canonical view of photographic value and importance and, in its cross-cultural concerns, the centrality of Euro-American theoretical constructs of photography. Throughout, the collection successfully argues for a reorientation in the critical debate."

--Elizabeth Edwards, Curator of Photographs and Lecturer in Visual Anthropology, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

"Photography's Other Histories is a quite remarkable collection of essays on widely ranging photographic practices around the world. In its attention to local cultural inflections to a global technology, to the recuperation of colonial images by their latterday Fourth World subjects, and to the provocative antirealist aesthetics characterizing much postcolonial photography, this volume marks a watershed in both art history, anthropology, and cultural studies."

--Lucien Taylor, The Film Study Center, Harvard University

Publisher Web Site, July 2005

Moving the critical debate about photography away from its current Euro-American center of gravity, Photography's Other Histories breaks with the notion that photographic history is best seen as the explosion of a Western technology advanced by the work of singular individuals. This collection presents a radically different account, describing photography as a globally disseminated and locally appropriated medium. Essays firmly grounded in photographic practice--in the actual making of pictures--suggest the extraordinary diversity of nonwestern photography

Richly illustrated with over one hundred images, Photography's Other Histories explores from a variety of geographic, cultural, and historic perspectives the role of photography in raising historical consciousness. It includes two first-person pieces by indigenous Australians and one by a Seminole/Muskogee/Dine' artist. Some of the essays analyze representations of colonial subjects--from the limited ways Westerners have depicted Navajos to Japanese photos recording the occupation of Manchuria and from the changing nature of the "contract" between Aboriginal subjects and photographers to the surprising range of cultural influences evident in the photographs colonialist F. R. Barton took in New Guinea in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Focusing on photographic self-fashioning and the development of vernacular modernisms, other essays highlight the visionary quality of much popular photography. Case studies centered in early-twentieth-century Peru and contemporary India, Kenya, and Nigeria chronicle the diverse practices that have flourished in postcolonial societies. Photography's Other Histories recasts popular photography around the world, as not simply reproducing culture but creating it.