Passionate Camera: Photography and the Bodies of Desire

FROM THE PUBLISHER

More than any other medium, photography creates and reinforces our ideals of gender and sexuality. From advertising and journalism to fashion and fine art, photographs show how "good bodies" and "bad bodies" look and behave.

The Passionate Camera assembles

over fifty artists, scholars and critics to examine the relationship between photography and sexuality. The contributors consider many issues including the importance of reinterpreting historical works by known homosexual photographers, contemporary photography and sexual diversity, and

the use and abuse of photographs of sexual subjects in current political campaigns and direct activism. The Passionate Camera features color and black and white illustrations of works by artists such as Ajamu, Catherine Opie, Lyle Ashton Harris, Yasumasa Morimura, John O'Reilly

and Sunil Gupta. For the first time, these works have been gathered together in a fresh and accessible critical context, making The Passionate Camera the preeminent source on queer and sex-radical photography at the end of twentieth century.

Contributors: Deborah Bright,

Kaucyila Brooke, Michael Anton Budd, David Deitcher, Linda Dittmar, Mark Alice Durant, Paul B. Franklin, Lyle Ashton Harris, Thomas Allen Harris, Carol Jacobsen, David Joselit, Liz Kotz, Catherine Lord, Richard Meyer, Jose Munoz, Mary Patten, Erica Rand, Mark A. Reid, Mysoon Rizk, James

Small, Alisa Solomon, Elizabeth Stephens, and Thomas Waugh.

an exceptional volume. The book has an inner consistency that is uncommon in anthologies; the different essays flow into one another in a productive and lyrical manner. The three sections are metered by provocative photo essays and end with pointed short stories by artist and writer

Catherine Lord (afterimage - March/April 1999)

introduction to the volume succeeds in its formidable task of making sense of the past 15 years of photography and queer cultural politics. . . . and through this furthers the emergence of queer studies in academia . . . . The Passionate Camera will surely be widely used as an

indespensible theoretical and historical document on queer visual culture at the end of the millennium. It has endless potential as a course textbook and library resource. The contributors' confident and committed collective gaze rests on a troubled past and on an unsettling present,

but they all reassert the besieged queer body of desire into the future (Afterimage - March 1999)

these multi-disciplinary studies map radical approaches to the pungent complexities of photographs that are sexually charged (Trevor Fairbrother, Deputy Director of Art, Seattle Art Museum)

book is a multifaceted exploration of the body, sexuality, and consensus culture that is theoretically smart, beautifully written, and a pleasure to peruse (Carol Squires, Senior Editor, American Photo magazine)