Series:

Photography, History: History, Photography

2 total works

Cover of Photography and the Cultural History of the Postwar European City
In 1945, civilians of the cities and towns of postwar Europe faced the daunting task of urban reconstruction and recovery. Through a broad range of case studies, from publicly-circulating aerial photography to press coverage of the opening of UNESCO headquarters, this book explores the impact of urban photography at a critical moment in European architectural history. Tracing how images trafficked between conceptual, media and material spaces in France, Britain and Germany, the book reveals how photography shaped the architecture of each country, reflecting each nation's attitudes to the past and vision of its future. Fascinating reading for historians of visual and urban culture, this is the first volume to analyse how official publications and the illustrated popular press pictured and promoted pivotal ideas and perspectives on the city, nationhood and Western Europe.

Cover of Photography, Reconstruction and the Cultural History of the Postwar European City

Examining imagery of urban space in Britain, France and West Germany up to the early 1960s, this book reveals how photography shaped individual architectural projects and national rebuilding efforts alike.

Exploring the impact of urban photography at a pivotal moment in contemporary European architecture and culture, this book addresses case studies spanning the destruction of the war to the modernizing reconfiguration of city spaces, including ruin photobooks about bombed cities, architectural photography of housing projects and imagery of urban life from popular photomagazines, as well as internationally renowned projects like UNESCO's Paris Headquarters, Coventry Cathedral and Berlin's Gedachtniskirche. This book reveals that the ways of seeing shaped in the postwar years by urban photography were a vital aspect of not only discourses on the postwar city but also debates central to popular culture, from commemoration and modernization to democratization and Europeanization.

This book will be a fascinating read for researchers in the fields of photography and visual studies, architectural and urban history, and cultural memory and contemporary European history.