Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures (Digital Media and Society)

Description

In
, James Elkins examines the strange and alluring power of photography in the same provocative and evocative manner as he explored oil painting in his best-selling
. In the course of an extended imaginary dialogue with Roland Barthes’s
, Elkins argues that photography is also about meaninglessness–its apparently endless capacity to show us things that we do not want or need to see–and also about pain, because extremely powerful images can sear permanently into our consciousness. Extensively illustrated with a surprising range of images, the book demonstrates that what makes photography uniquely powerful is its ability to express the difficulty–physical, psychological, emotional, and aesthetic–of the act of seeing.