Silent History

Just as I started reading this volume, I went to the Don McCullin exhibition at Tate Britain. I was struck by the gestures and styles of attention of the crowds watching the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, as they were caught by McCullin’s camera. What is it to be of a moment and hold and present the body in social space and in time? How can the historical body and its everyday deportment, gesture and social meaning be excavated historically, and how might graphic forms, in particular photographs, be used to retrieve this? These are the central questions of this book by Peter K. Andersson. The book examines the making of the social and cultural body in the second half of the nineteenth century in three countries: Britain, Austria and Sweden. These integrated case-studies address European cultures with different, but overlapping, cultures of the body in differently paced modernities. Andersson marshals a huge amount of data, positioned in equally huge swathes of contextualising material. This is both the strength and the weakness of the book. Throughout, he uses nuanced detail inscribed in the photograph, and sometimes articulated in other graphic forms, to challenge overarching theories of visual modernities, as photographs inscribe multiple transgressions of theoretical assumption. Andersson attempts to read studio portraits as formal performances of identity. He considers, for instance, the moral implications of ‘bearing’ and dignity, and its relationship to photographic manuals for portrait photographers for producing the ideal, yet recognisable, self through the orchestration of gesture and stance

Aesthetics · Art · Body language · Identity (music · Linguistics · Nonverbal communication · Communication · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Philosophy · Psychology