Publisher's Synopsis
"Work and the Image" addresses a critical theme in contemporary social and cultural debates whose place in visual representation has been recently neglected. Offering a breadth of historical perspectives from Greek pottery to contemporary performance, the essays collected provide a challenging reconsideration of the image of work, the meaning of work process, and the complex issues around artistic activity as itself a form of work even as it offers a representation of labour.;The text is in two volumes, presented together here. The first volume, "Work, Craft and Labor: Visual Representations and Changing Histories" plots the changing fields of definitions of work as labor, craft, social relations and a source of historical identity, while analyzing the role of visual representation in their formation and transformation. The second is titled "Work in Modern Times: Visual Mediations and Social Processes" and, with a shared focus on the 20th century (the era of modernity and its postmodern aftermath) the essays examine the diverse ways in which the social relations of work in industrial societies from both capitalist and socialist spheres were publically and privately mediated by changing forms of visual representation. The authors balance the traditional analyses of the image of the worker with contemporary critical theories that address the question of the subjectivity of the worker in relation to class, gender, nationhood and the concept of modernity.
