Liz Wells

The impact of our industrialized culture on nature - including the exploitation of natural resources, global warming, and climate change - is one of the most crucial and urgent issues of our times. Environmental centers have developed within several scientific disciplines with a common global interest - trying to secure the future of our existence in the world as we know it. The book Broken sets out to investigate environmental change and explore our relation to nature. It also follows in the photographic tradition of raising awareness and supporting policymakers, politicians, researchers, environmentalists, and activists. Featuring texts by seminal environmental photographers and theorists, the book Broken re-evaluates early environmental photography and investigates new ways of experiencing and visualizing landscapes in an interdisciplinary context.

“In the World But Not of It” Offering a glimpse into a world largely misunderstood by mainstream society, this book documents the period of eight years that Jane Flynn practiced with Mennonites in two different Southern Illinois communities: Stonefort, and Mount Pleasant in Anna. Despite her status as an outsider, Flynn was welcomed and allowed to photograph the Mennonites in their homes, making applesauce, farming, and beekeeping. Escaping persecution from the Catholic Church in Europe, the Mennonites arrived in America in 1683, settling in what is now Pennsylvania. Today, they live in almost all 50 states, Canada, and South America. To reflect the Mennonites’ manual-labor lifestyle, Flynn processed her black-and-white photographs by hand and hand-printed them in a dark room. The imagery explores the Mennonites’ labors, leisure, and faith by documenting their homes, places of work and worship, and the Illinois Ozark landscape they inhabit. Similar to the Amish and the Quakers, Mennonites consider the Bible the supreme authority and insist on a separation between church and state. To enact that separation, they distinguish themselves from society in speech, dress, business, recreation, education, pacifism, and by refusing to participate in politics. They believe in nonconformity to the world, discipleship, and being born again through adult baptism. With Mennonites of Southern Illinois, Jane Flynn provides representation for these closed communities and illustrates the Mennonites’ struggle to find and maintain balance between rustic and modern life while remaining faithful to their religious beliefs.

This unique collection brings together the work of photography writer, curator, and lecturer, Liz Wells, reflecting on key themes of landscape, place, nationhood, and environmental concerns. A newly written introductory chapter contextualizes the collection. This is followed by an ‘in conversation’ with Martha Langford, Concordia University, Montreal, that brings together two leading figures in the field to respond to Wells’ thought and the themes that emerge in her writings. The essays included in this anthology draw on work from a variety of sources including artists’ photobooks, exhibition catalogues, magazines, academic books, and journals. Seventeen previously published articles, organized thematically in relation to Curation and Residency, Phenomena, Place, and Critical Reflections, demonstrate Wells’ critical and curatorial approach to research through photographic practices, reflecting a core view of art (at its best) operating to convey the implications of what is being explored and to evoke responses that are simultaneously sensory and intellectual. This collection will be essential reading for students and scholars of photography, visual culture, and art history, especially those examining landscape and environmental photography.

This unique collection brings together the work of photography writer, curator, and lecturer, Liz Wells, reflecting on key themes of landscape, place, nationhood, and environmental concerns. A newly written introductory chapter contextualizes the collection. This is followed by an ‘in conversation’ with Martha Langford, Concordia University, Montreal, that brings together two leading figures in the field to respond to Wells’ thought and the themes that emerge in her writings. The essays included in this anthology draw on work from a variety of sources including artists’ photobooks, exhibition catalogues, magazines, academic books, and journals. Seventeen previously published articles, organized thematically in relation to Curation and Residency, Phenomena, Place, and Critical Reflections, demonstrate Wells’ critical and curatorial approach to research through photographic practices, reflecting a core view of art (at its best) operating to convey the implications of what is being explored and to evoke responses that are simultaneously sensory and intellectual. This collection will be essential reading for students and scholars of photography, visual culture, and art history, especially those examining landscape and environmental photography.

The ‘other’ is a topic of great interest within and across contemporary photographic practice and theory, yet it remains neglected outside the now well-established field of postcolonial studies. This volume brings together photography and written essays that relate to aspects of otherness and visual work. Presented together, the images and critical writings work in concert to construct a new social perspective on questions of otherness and alterity and to highlight photography as a form of critical practice. In a departure from existing conceptions of otherness in postcolonial discourse, Photography as Critical Practice places emphasis on the human condition not as a liberal concept, but as something formed and framed by a broader dimension of social, sexual and cultural otherness. Including contributions by Elina Ruka, Katrin Kivimaa, Parveen Adams and Liz Wells, the book provides a fascinating new vista on the otherness of photography.

A"Tourists Who ShootA" (2009-2012) is a contemporary, nuanced look at how tourists use their cameras while on holiday. Influenced by the seminal work of photographer Martin Parr, A"Tourists Who ShootA" offers a playful glimpse at the sometimes bizarre world of the modern tourist striving to get the perfect shot. It includes an essay by renowned photography scholar Liz Wells and color photographs by Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert. Before the invention of the portable camera people behaved, moved and interacted differently. Tourist choreographies have evolved, and are still evolving, alongside changes in camera availability and technology. Photographer and photography theorist Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert explores tourist landscapes from New York to Cairo as performance spaces where the use of the camera has forced specific choreographies and behaviors upon tourists. With Stylianou-Lambert's deadpan sense of humor and her unerring eye for the critical detail that brings a photograph to life, A"Tourists Who ShootA" is a sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant reassessment of what it means to be a tourist.

In this major work on landscape photography, extensively illustrated in colour and black & white, Liz Wells is concerned with the ways in which photographers engage with issues about land, its representation and idealisation. She demonstrates how the visual interpretation of land as landscape reflects and reinforces contemporary political, social and environmental attitudes. She also asks what is at stake in landscape photography now through placing critical appraisal of key examples of work by photographers working in, for example, the USA, in Europe, Scandinavia and Baltic areas, within broader art historical and political concerns. This illuminating book will interest readers in photography and media, geography, art history and travel, as well as those concerned with environmental issues.