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8 books match the query 'Unseen'

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All Things, Seen and Unseen

Poems: New and Selected, 1967-1997

Dan Masterson

University of Arkansas Press, 1997

With clarity and precise detail, Dan Masterson creates a narrative of how we live, love, and die. In blank verse and rhymed stanzas, in free verse and taut lyrics, he delivers the story of a woman trap ped in an avalanche, a husband daring himself to death in an ocean swim, or a son arranging the final affairs of his parents. There is always an edge to Masterson’s characters—they are everyday people, but we meet them on the one day when the stakes are highest.

He holds a reverence for the particulars of a place, for gardens and homes, for dresser drawers and work benches, for cabins in the Adirondacks, ponds, tree houses, and ornamental stones. The leavings of loved ones—strong boxes, pajamas, rosaries—are passed on as relics that both heal and trouble. In Masterson’s world, characters learn how to lose, how to change, and even how to survive their most painful memories.

Selected from thirty years of work, and including an eclectic selection of new poems, this book unfurls Masterson’s full canvas of abilities: his penchant for startling descriptions, his keen insight into our nobility and fallibility, and his skill at making us live his poems.

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At the Edge of Sight

Photography and the Unseen

Shawn Michelle Smith

Duke University Press, 2013

The advent of photography revolutionized perception, making visible what was once impossible to see with the human eye. In At the Edge of Sight, Shawn Michelle Smith engages these dynamics of seeing and not seeing, focusing attention as much on absence as presence, on the invisible as the visible. Exploring the limits of photography and vision, she asks: What fails to register photographically, and what remains beyond the frame? What is hidden by design, and what is obscured by cultural blindness? Smith studies manifestations of photography's brush with the unseen in her own photographic work and across the wide-ranging images of early American photographers, including F. Holland Day, Eadweard Muybridge, Andrew J. Russell, Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, and Augustus Washington. She concludes by showing how concerns raised in the nineteenth century remain pertinent today in the photographs of Abu Ghraib. Ultimately, Smith explores the capacity of photography to reveal what remains beyond the edge of sight.

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Black Women Legacies

Public History Sites Seen and Unseen

Alexandria Russell

University of Illinois Press, 2024

From Black clubwomen to members of preservation organizations, African American women have made commemoration a central part of Black life and culture. Alexandria Russell illuminates the process of memorialization while placing African American women at the center of memorials they brought into being and others constructed in their honor. Their often undocumented and unheralded work reveals the importance of the memorializers and public memory crafters in establishing a culture of recognition. Forced to strategize with limited resources, the women operated with a resourcefulness and savvy that had to meet challenges raised by racism, gender and class discrimination, and specific regional difficulties. Yet their efforts from the 1890s to the 2020s shaped and honed practices that became indispensable to the everyday life and culture of Black Americans.

Intersectional and original, Black Women Legacies explores the memorialization of African American women and its distinctive impact on physical and cultural landscapes throughout the United States.

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Invisible

The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen

Philip Ball

University of Chicago Press, 2015

If offered the chance—by cloak, spell, or superpower—to be invisible, who wouldn’t want to give it a try? We are drawn to the idea of stealthy voyeurism and the ability to conceal our own acts, but as desirable as it may seem, invisibility is also dangerous. It is not just an optical phenomenon, but a condition full of ethical questions. As esteemed science writer Philip Ball reveals in this book, the story of invisibility is not so much a matter of how it might be achieved but of why we want it and what we would do with it.

In this lively look at a timeless idea, Ball provides the first comprehensive history of our fascination with the unseen. This sweeping narrative moves from medieval spell books to the latest nanotechnology, from fairy tales to telecommunications, from camouflage to ghosts to the dawn of nuclear physics and the discovery of dark energy. Along the way, Invisible tells little-known stories about medieval priests who blamed their misdeeds on spirits; the Cock Lane ghost, which intrigued both Samuel Johnson and Charles Dickens; the attempts by Victorian scientist William Crookes to detect forces using tiny windmills; novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s belief that he was unseen when in his dressing gown; and military efforts to enlist magicians to hide tanks and ships during WWII. Bringing in such voices as Plato and Shakespeare, Ball provides not only a scientific history but a cultural one—showing how our simultaneous desire for and suspicion of the invisible has fueled invention and the imagination for centuries.

In this unusual and clever book, Ball shows that our fantasies about being unseen—and seeing the unseen—reveal surprising truths about who we are.

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Revealing the Unseen

New Perspectives on Qajar Art

Edited by Melanie Gibson and Gwenaëlle Fellinger

Gingko, 2022

Collected articles on Iranian art from the Qajar dynasty.

The thirteen articles in this volume were originally given as presentations at the symposium of the same name organized in June 2018 by the Musée du Louvre and the Musée du Louvre-Lens in conjunction with the exhibition The Empire of Roses: Masterpieces of 19th Century Persian Art. The exhibition explored the art of Iran in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while the nation was under the rule of the Qajar dynasty. The symposium set out to present research on previously unknown and unpublished objects from this rich period of art history.

This volume, published with the Louvre Museum in France, is divided into four sections. The first, “Transitions and Transmissions,” is dedicated to the arts of painting, illumination, and lithography. The focus of the second section, entitled “The Image Revealed,” also considers works on paper, looking at new themes and techniques. “The Material World” examines the use of materials such as textiles, carpets, and armor. The articles in the final section discuss the history of two groups of artifacts acquired by their respective museums.

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Studying Unmade, Unseen, and Unreleased Film and Television

Histories, Theories, Methods

James Fenwick and Kieran Foster

Intellect Books, 2026

A comprehensive study uncovering the hidden histories of film and television projects abandoned despite major investment.

Unmade, unseen, and unreleased film and television are a strikingly underexplored aspect of media history, even though significant financial investment and creative labor in these industries are devoted to projects that never reach production or distribution. This groundbreaking collection offers a comprehensive examination of this phenomenon, bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives from film history, gender and sexuality studies, industry studies, archival research, and creative practice.

Each chapter presents a state-of-the-art overview of a key theme, debate, method, or theory, drawing on illuminating case studies from different historical periods and global contexts. Together, the contributions define what it means for a work to remain unmade, unseen, or unreleased, while showcasing innovative research approaches and mapping the scale of unfinished projects in film and television. Serving as both a foundational text for students and a valuable reference for established researchers, the volume’s scope will offer an essential resource for anyone seeking to understand the hidden histories of the screen industries.

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Things Seen and Unseen

Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism

Harry D. Harootunian

University of Chicago Press, 1988

This long-awaited work explores the place of kokugaku (rendered here as "nativism") during Japan's Tokugawa period. Kokugaku, the sense of a distinct and sacred Japanese identity, appeared in the eighteenth century in reaction to the pervasive influence of Chinese culture on Japan. Against this influence, nativists sought a Japanese sense of difference grounded in folk tradition, agricultural values, and ancient Japanese religion. H. D. Harootunian treats nativism as a discourse and shows how it functioned ideologically in Tokugawa Japan.

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Traces of the Unseen

Photography, Violence, and Modernization in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America

Carolina Sá Carvalho

Northwestern University Press, 2023

Winner of the 2024 Roberto Reis Book Award
Winner of the LASA Environment Section Best Book of 2023
Winner of the LASA Amazonian Studies Section Best Book of 2024
Co-Winner of the LASA Book Award for the Visual Culture Studies 2024

A richly illustrated examination of photography as a technology for documenting, creating, and understanding the processes of modernization in turn-of-the-century Brazil and the Amazon

Photography at the turn of the twentieth century was not only a product of modernity but also an increasingly available medium to chronicle the processes of modernization. Traces of the Unseen: Photography, Violence, and Modernization in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America situates photography’s role in documenting the destruction wrought by infrastructure development and extractive capitalist expansion in the Amazon and outside the Brazilian metropole. Combining formal analysis of individual photographs with their inclusion in larger multimedia assemblages, Carolina Sá Carvalho explores how this visual evidence of violence was framed, captioned, cropped, and circulated. As she explains, this photographic creation and circulation generated a pedagogy of the gaze with which increasingly connected urban audiences were taught what and how to see: viewers learned to interpret the traces of violence captured in these images within the larger context of modernization.

Traces of the Unseen draws on works by Flavio de Barros, Euclides da Cunha, Roger Casement, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Mario de Andrade to situate an unruly photographic body at the center of modernity, in all its disputed meanings. Moreover, Sá Carvalho locates historically specific practices of seeing within the geopolitical peripheries of capitalism. What emerges is a consideration of photography as a technology through which modern aspirations, moral inclinations, imagined futures, and lost pasts were represented, critiqued, and mourned.