Documenting the World

Download or read book Documenting the World written by Gregg Mitman and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine the twentieth century without photography and film. Its history would be absent of images that define historical moments and generations: the death camps of Auschwitz, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Apollo lunar landing. It would be a history, in other words, of just artists' renderings and the spoken and written word. To inhabitants of the twenty-first century, deeply immersed in visual culture, such a history seems insubstantial, imprecise, and even, perhaps, unscientific. 'Documenting the World' is about the material and social life of photographs and film made in the scientific quest to document the world.