The Lives of Images, Vol. 3

Third volume in The Lives of Images, part of An Aperture Reader Series, built to meet the needs of today's students and practitioners of photography. Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa gathers essays by the most essential voices addressing the field's critical issues. A crucial broadening of perspectives on contemporary theories of photography.

Volume 3 in this series, Archives, Histories, and Memory, addresses the ways repositories of images are complexly bound up with the formation of histories, the perceptual limits of the photograph, the exercise of state power, and with subaltern practices of countermemory. The reemergence of the figure, subject, and methods of the archive in contemporary twenty-first-century artistic practices is considered, as are non-art engagements with archival production in the formation of counterhegemonic histories, whether in the heat of revolutionary struggle or as recuperative practice for marginalized subjects. Questions of imperialism's influence over archival practices and the contested state of the image and the document recur in varying contexts. Taken together, the essays in this volume probe what remains and persists through strategies of preservation, what the politics of preservation accommodate and disavow, what exceeds inscription within the photograph but persists as a ghosting of the image (or the archive), and what the limits of artistic strategies centered in the archive might tell us of our present moment.