The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire

by Deborah Bright

The Passionate Camera brings together over fifty artists, scholars and critics to address a broad range of issues in photography and sexuality. The authors address the importance of reinterpreting historical works by known homosexual photographers, issues in contemporary photography and sexual diversity, and the use and abuse of photographs of sexual subjects in current political campaigns and direct activism. The Passionate Camera features color and black and white illustrations of works by artists such as Ajamu, Catherine Opie, Lyle Ashton, Yasumasa Morimura, John O'Reilly and Sunil Gupta. For the first time, these works have been gathered together in a lucid and accessible critical context, making The Passionate Camera the pre-eminent source on queer and sex-radical photography at the end of the twentieth century.

Genres: Art, Queer

496 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 1998

About the author

Deborah Bright was born in Washington, DC in 1950 and received her MFA from the University of Chicago in 1975. Her works have been shown internationally at the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Museet for Fotokunst, Copenhagen; Nederlands Foto Instituut, Rotterdam; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa; Cambridge Darkroom (UK); Vancouver Art Gallery. In the United States, her works can be found in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University; Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University; Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Cambridge, MA; Trustman Art Gallery, Simmons College, Boston, MA; University Art Museum at SUNY Binghamton; California Museum of Photography, Riverside; Illinois State Museum in Springfield, IL; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. She has received grants and fellowships from the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute, Radcliffe College; Art Matters; National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities; Lightwork; New England Foundation for the Arts; Massachusetts Cultural Council; Somerville Arts Council; Illinois Arts Council; Mellon Foundation; David and Reva Logan Foundation.

Bright’s groundbreaking collection of images and writings on photography and sexuality, The Passionate Camera: photography and bodies of desire (Routledge, 1998) was a finalist for the 1999 Lambda Book Award in Visual Arts. In addition, her essays on photography and cultural issues have appeared in Art Journal, Afterimage, exposure, Views, Michigan Quarterly. Since 1989, she has been a professor in the Photography and Art History Departments at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her photographic works are represented by the Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston, MA.

Reviews

[Andrew H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A provocative, insightful, and fascinating study of how the body can be viewed.

[Simon]

picked this up for the wojnarowicz article... i just want to say that intellectualist treatments of fetishism and sexuality is some of the dreariest shit to read. what if i just want to fuck weird?

i can't shit on any queer-centric work within art academia since i feel it's an important thing to approach but this is just sapiosexual pornog. not for me.

[Cecelia]

I had to read it for a class.