Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance
240
Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance
240Hardcover
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Overview
Through a series of fascinating case studies, Shell uncovers three conceptually linked species of photographic camouflage — the static, the serial, and the dynamic — and shows how each not only reflects the type of photographic reconnaissance it was meant to counter, but also contains aspects of the previously developed species. Hide and Seek develops its argument from the material forms camouflage has left behind — photomontages, paper blankets, stuffed rabbits, ghillie suits, and instructional films.
Beginning in the domains of natural history and figurative art in the late nineteenth-century, continuing through the rise of aerial warfare in World War I, and onto the cinematic techniques designed to train snipers and civilians during World War II, this book is both a history and a theory of the drive to hide in plain sight.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781935408222 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Zone Books |
| Publication date: | 04/05/2012 |
| Series: | Zone Books |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Hanna Rose Shell is the Leo Marx Career Development Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT.
Table of Contents
Preface 9
Introduction 13
I Productive Mimesis and the Art of Disappearance: Instantaneous Photography and Abbott Thayer's Modeling of Invisibility in Nature and Man 25
II Mending the Net: Camouflage, Serial Photography, and the Suture of Self-Effacement and Reconnaissance 77
III How Not to Be Seen: Dynamic Camouflage and the Motion Films often Lye 127
iv Subject to Change: Skin as Screen 171
Acknowledgments 195
Color Plates 199
Notes 203
Index 231
What People are Saying About This
Funny, poetic, and scary by turns, Hide and Seek asserts it is not human vision that camouflage seeks to trick, but the gaze of the camera. The skin of emulsions, no less than the hides of humans and beasts, is ground for trickery and revelation in this remarkable book.
Hanna Rose Shell's Hide and Seek stands apart from other recent writings on the significance of camouflage; at the same time, her book blends in seamlessly. While partly a book about military camouflage in relation to reconnaissance photography and film, it encompasses far, far more than that. Replete with surprising connections, it stands apart because of the author's unerring research, engaging prose, and the thoughtfulness and originality of her conclusions.
Vital conversations on the meaning of the gaze have dominated the past quarter century and more in visual culture studies. Now, shifting our focus from being to not being seen, Hanna Rose Shell newly formulates and explicates a history of efforts in camouflage from the military in World War I to video artists in the presents, and reveals a deep human desire to disappear. No reader will forget Hide and Seek's genealogy of the 'chameleonic impulse,' the longing both to construct and to project a worldly skin that makes one functionally invisible. Beautifully written, brilliantly argued, and vividly illustrated, Hide and Seek is a paradigm-altering book, and the anatomy of a new kind of consciousness.
Vital conversations on the meaning of the gaze have dominated the past quarter century and more in visual culture studies. Now, shifting our focus from being to not being seen, Hanna Rose Shell newly formulates and explicates a history of efforts in camouflage from the military in World War I to video artists in the presents, and reveals a deep human desire to disappear. No reader will forget Hide and Seek's genealogy of the 'chameleonic impulse,' the longing both to construct and to project a worldly skin that makes one functionally invisible. Beautifully written, brilliantly argued, and vividly illustrated, Hide and Seek is a paradigm-altering book, and the anatomy of a new kind of consciousness.
—Laura Wexler, Professor of American Studies and Women's Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Director of the Photographic Memory Workshop, Yale University“Not content with interrogating the history of camouflage, the science of chromatophores, and the art of protective coloration, Shell explores their mutual intertwining in science and warfare in response to photography. Funny, poetic, and scary by turns, Hide and Seek asserts it is not human vision that camouflage seeks to trick, but the gaze of the camera. The skin of emulsions, no less than the hides of humans and beasts, is ground for trickery and revelation in this remarkable book.”— Caroline A. Jones, director of the History, Theory + Criticism section in the Department of Architecture at MIT and author of Eyesight Alone“Hanna Rose Shell’s Hide and Seek stands apart from other recent writings on the significance of camouflage; at the same time, her book blends in seamlessly. While partly a book about military camouflage in relation to reconnaissance photography and film, it encompasses far, far more than that. Replete with surprising connections, it stands apart because of the author’s unerring research, engaging prose, and the thoughtfulness and originality of her conclusions.”— Roy B. Behrens, author of False Colors: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage and Camoupedia: A Compendium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage
Hanna Rose Shell's Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance is a highly original and imaginative piece of scholarship, written economically and compellingly. Drawing on evidence from the history of science, military history, art history, and the histories of photography and cinema, Shell gives us a developmental narrative and theoretical formulation of camouflage between the mid-nineteenth century and the present.