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Photocinema
The Creative Edges of Photography and Film
Edited by Neil Campbell and Alfredo Cramerotti
Intellect Books, 2013
Taking as its starting point the notion of photocinema—or the interplay of the still and moving image—the photographs, interviews, and critical essays in this volume explore the ways in which the two media converge and diverge, expanding the boundaries of each in interesting and unexpected ways. The book’s innovative approach to film and photography produces what might be termed a hybrid “third space,” where the whole becomes much more than the sum of its individual parts, encouraging viewers to expand their perceptions to begin to understand the bigger picture.
 
The latest edition in Intellect’s Critical Photography series, Photocinema represents a nuanced theoretical and practical exploration of the experimental cinematic techniques exemplified by artists like Wim Wenders and Hollis Frampton. In addition to new critical essays by Victor Burgin and David Campany, the book includes interviews with Martin Parr, Hannah Starkey, and Aaron Schumann, and a portfolio of photographs from various new and established artists.
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front cover of Under the Western Sky
Under the Western Sky
Essays on the Fiction and Music of Willy Vlautin
Neil Campbell
University of Nevada Press, 2018
This original collection of essays by experts in the field weave together the first comprehensive examination of Nevada-born Willy Vlautin’s novels and songs, as well as featuring 11 works of art that accompany his albums and books.

Brutally honest, raw, gritty, down to earth, compassionate and affecting, Willy Vlautin’s writing evokes a power in not only theme, but in methodology. Vlautin’s novels, The Motel Life, Northline, Lean on Pete and The Free (2006-2014) chart the dispossessed lives of young people struggling to survive in difficult economic times and in regions of the U.S. West and Pacific Northwest traditionally viewed as affluent and abundant. Yet as his work shows, are actually highly stratified and deprived.

Likewise, Vlauntin’s songs, penned as lead singer of the Americana band Richmond Fontaine chart a related territory of blue-collar landscapes of the American West and Northwest with a strong emphasis on narrative and affective soundscapes evocative of the similar worlds defined in his novels.

Featuring an interview with Vlautin himself, this edited collection aims to develop the first serious, critical consideration of the important novels and songs of Willy Vlautin by exploring relations between region, music, and writing through the lens of critical regionality and other interdisciplinary, cultural, and theoretical methodologies. In so doing, it will situate his work within its regional frame of the American New West, and particularly the city of Reno, Nevada and the Pacific Northwest, whilst showing how he addresses wider cultural and global issues such as economic change, immigration shifts, gender inequality, and the loss of traditional mythic identities.

The essays take different positions in relation to considerations of both novels and music, looking for links and relations across genres, always mindful of their specificity. Under the Western Sky shows how although apparently rooted in place, Vlautin’s work traces diverse lines of contemporary cultural enquiry, engaging in an effective and troubling examination of regional haunting.
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front cover of Worlding the Western
Worlding the Western
Contemporary US Western Fiction and the Global Community
Neil Campbell
University of Nevada Press, 2022
Worlding the Western views the fiction of the Western United States as a focal point for a reexamination of the consequences of the exceptionalism and closed borders of the Trump Era. At a time of bounded individualism, new nativism, climate emergency, and migration crises, author Neil Campbell argues that fiction offers opportunities to challenge the dark side of globalization. He proposes worlding as a different and more open form of politics.

Diversity, disparity, and opposition are central to the dynamic frictional fiction considered in this book. The American West provides a powerful test case in which these features are present and yet, historically, have often been masked or denied in the rush toward unanimity and nation building. Worlding is, therefore, a positive, critical concept through which to view the notion of a single world under pressure.
 
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front cover of Worlding the Western
Worlding the Western
Contemporary US Western Fiction and the Global Community
Neil Campbell
University of Nevada Press, 2022
Worlding the Western views the fiction of the Western United States as a focal point for a reexamination of the consequences of the exceptionalism and closed borders of the Trump Era. At a time of bounded individualism, new nativism, climate emergency, and migration crises, author Neil Campbell argues that fiction offers opportunities to challenge the dark side of globalization. He proposes worlding as a different and more open form of politics.

Diversity, disparity, and opposition are central to the dynamic frictional fiction considered in this book. The American West provides a powerful test case in which these features are present and yet, historically, have often been masked or denied in the rush toward unanimity and nation building. Worlding is, therefore, a positive, critical concept through which to view the notion of a single world under pressure.
 
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