Close-ups from Afar
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Paperback
22 x 28 cm, 324 pages
ISBN 978-1-915743-64-0
Published by MACK, May 2025
Sally Stein
50,00€
Sally Stein has long investigated the role of photography in relation to broader questions of culture and society. This first collection of her selected essays, Close-ups from Afar, brings together essential writings from over five decades, cumulatively demonstrating Stein’s distinctive critical approach to the history and proliferation of photography and its role within mass media and contemporary culture.
In this richly illustrated volume, Stein turns her astute eye to diverse topics including the rise of colour photography, the place of California in the history of the medium’s development, and women and photography between feminism’s ‘waves’, as well as insightful considerations of a host of photographers from Jacob Riis to Helmut Newton, Ansel Adams to Dorothea Lange, Susan Meiselas to Dawoud Bey. She has consistently sought to challenge readers to think afresh about the social uses of photography and their broader contexts and far-reaching effects.
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Dr. Sally Stein, Professor Emerita, Department of Art History, UC Irvine, is an independent scholar based in Los Angeles who continues to research and write about 20thcentury photography in the U.S. and its relation to broader questions of culture and society. She has written about New Deal FSA photographers—particularly Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano—as well as the contested image of FDR. She also has written numerous essays about popular mass media – Ladies Home Journal, Life and Look – along with continuing her study of the various aspects of the rise of color photography. The interrelated topics she most often engages concern the multiple effects of documentary imagery, the politics of gender, and the status and meaning of black and white and color imagery on our perceptions, beliefs, even actions asconsumers and citizens.
