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During the past decade, humanities scholars have brought increased attention to the cultural and affective practices that, along with political philosophies, legal policies, and social efforts to ameliorate suffering, comprise international human rights discourse. Given this challenge to the disciplinary dominance of the social sciences as well as broad media publicity surrounding atrocities in the twentieth century, it is notable that attention has been paid only recently to issues of visuality. New publications such as Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008) (click here for review) and Wendy Hesford’s Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights… Full Review

Few building types evoke more compelling insights into the relationship among architecture, nationalism, and modernity than the museum. Alice Tseng’s The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan is a thoughtful, nuanced book that illuminates how notions of national identity were shaped and reinforced through architectural form and aesthetic display in the new institution of the art museum in modern Japan. Tseng examines the development of the four national museums of Meiji (1868–1912) Japan as part of the larger story of the birth of the museum as a key institution of modernity. According to Tseng, these museums were “sites of constructed… Full Review

The “Exposures” series published by Reaktion Books highlights the relationship of photography to realms national, disciplinary, material, and metaphysical. Thus far the series includes books on photography and Australia, Japan, Italy, Ireland, the United States, archaeology, anthropology, literature, science, cinema, flight, spirit, and death. Although the topics suggest a refreshingly global approach to the history of photography, the two books under review here, Photography and Africa by Erin Haney and Photography and Egypt by Maria Golia, illuminate the Western bias of the series. The first title shoehorns all of Africa’s fifty-four plus nations (including Egypt) into one rather… Full Review

The frame, as object and concept, has attracted a fair amount of attention in recent years. Art historians, in particular, have explored the multiple (sometimes competing and conflicting) roles of the frame: its ability to draw attention to and away from the center; its capacity to open up or close in space; its efficacy as a visual or verbal sign; its status as a permanent or ornamental “supplement”; its formal and thematic relations to thresholds, such as windows and portals, to name but a few. Oleg Tarasov’s Framing Russian Art: From Early Icons to Malevich engages all these aspects of… Full Review

In his latest book, Academy Award-winning documentarian Errol Morris writes with genuine gusto: “It is often said that seeing is believing. But we do not form our beliefs on the basis of what we see; rather, what we see is often determined by our beliefs. Believing is seeing, not the other way around” (93). While these types of statements are common in documentary films, serving to summarize a complex subject or individual, they can sound trite in a book that asks to be read in the fields of art history, visual culture studies, anthropology, and philosophy. They attest to the… Full Review

In his preface to Crusader Art: The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1099–1291, Jaroslav Folda asserts that the story of the art of the Crusaders is far less well-known than their history: “To tell the story of Crusader Art adequately,” Folda writes, “a richly illustrated book is required” (11). This slim but sumptuously illustrated volume fulfills that requirement. It is, in many ways, an encapsulation of Folda’s scholarly oeuvre in that it presents a survey of the most significant works of art produced in the Holy Land between Crusader conquests of Jerusalem in 1099 and the… Full Review

In her brilliant and lavishly illustrated new book on the history of wall painting in Europe from 1927 to 1957, Romy Golan’s subject is artworks specifically designed for architectural installation. Although there are several monographs about mural paintings by individual artists, or by groups of artists within a single national context, few historians have investigated how wall painting played out across many different countries during this period, and none have brought Golan’s innovative and rigorous brand of scholarship to the topic. Concentrating on France and Italy, but looking across to Spain, the United Kingdom, the Americas, and India, Golan’s study… Full Review

Walter Ulbricht, the leader of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from its founding in 1949 to his eclipse from power in 1971, is hardly a household name in art history. He rarely appears in art-history texts as much more than a background figure. At most, he is referenced as the head of the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands [SED]) and the man who built the East German state and its repressive bureaucratic apparatus. So it may come as some surprise for art historians, even those who specialize in postwar German art, to discover that Ulbricht played a fairly influential… Full Review

Along with David Summers’s Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (New York: Phaidon, 2003) (click here for review), Whitney Davis’s A General Theory of Visual Culture is one of the most ambitious and potentially foundational books on art history in recent decades. It is unusually dense in logical argumentation, so it is more than a convention to say that it cannot helpfully be summarized. Because longer reviews will be needed to assess the book’s arguments, I want to use the generally shorter review length here in caa.reviews to raise two points about the… Full Review

In the fields of architecture and urbanism there are few issues as pressing, or as vexing, as the suburban question. To the young, the cosmopolitan, and the ecologically minded, suburbia counts among our most egregious follies. Since at least the fifties, many have characterized suburbia as tacky, dull, and homogenizing, a position still taken by popular critics such as James Howard Kunstler. More recent anxieties about consumption—especially in connection with the body, racial inequality, and ecology—have generated new arguments that suburbia is environmentally unsustainable, terrible for our waistlines, and an impediment to social, economic, and racial justice. Yet,… Full Review