Bøker av Sheona Beaumont

Sheona Beaumont addresses the untold story of biblical subjects in photography. She argues that stories, characters, and symbols from the Bible are found to pervade photographic practices and ideas, across the worlds of advertising and reportage, the book and the gallery, in theoretical discourse and in the words of photographers themselves. Beaumont engages interpretative tools from biblical reception studies, art history, and visual culture criticism in order to present four terms for describing photography's latent spirituality: the index, the icon, the tableau, and the vision. Throughout her journey she includes lively discussion of selected fine art photography dealing with the Bible in surprising ways, from images by William Henry Fox Talbot in the 19th century to David Mach in the 21st. Far from telling a secular story, photography and the conditions of its representations are exposed in theological depth.; Beaumont skillfully interweaves discussion of the images and theology, arguing for the dynamic and potent voice of the Bible in photography and enriching visual culture criticism with a renewed religious understanding.

Within ¿visual culture,¿ considered as everything that we experience visually, only images and text are creations that are produced exclusively for visual consumption. Their correlation in this regard is seen in this very study - reading and writing about images. Yet image and text are often treated as entirely separate entities. This is what W.J.T. Mitchell calls the ¿fault line of representation¿ (Picture Theory) when an all too easy (and deeply entrenched) divide separates theory from practice, reason from intuition, authenticity from illusion, etc. While trying to dissolve such a dualism, recent theoretical interest has overwhelmingly been in favour of the image ¿ raising the profile of ¿literate¿ pictures so that they are codified and understood. In this study, Sheona Beaumont considers the seemingly overlooked sphere of text when asked to speak on image¿s terms, as the evidence and experience of visually expressive text has largely gone without consideration. She considers two examples in detail: works by Rene Magritte and Marshall McLuhan, and she asks what happens when imagistic interpretation is brought to bear on the word.