Anthony W. Lee

Examines early practices of staged photography in visualizing queer forms of relation. Body Language is the first in-depth study of the extraordinary interplay between George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa (Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret Hoening French). Nick Mauss and Angela Miller offer timely readings of how their practices of staging, collaboration, and psychological enactment through the body arced across the boundaries of art and life, private and public worlds, anticipating contemporary social media. Using the camera not to capture, but to actively perform, they renounced photography’s conventional role as mirror of the real, energizing forms of world-making via a new social framing of the self.

Almost immediately after the invention of photography, Scottish photographers took their clunky cameras on the road to capture the stories of peoples and communities touched by the forces of British imperialism. For the next thirty years, their journeys would take them far from their homes in the Lowlands to the Canadian wilderness and the treaty ports and rivers of China. The Global Flows of Early Scottish Photography is about the interplay between these photographers' ambitions and the needs and desires of the people they met. Anthony Lee tracks the work of several famous innovators of the art form, including the pioneering team of D.O. Hill and Robert Adamson in Edinburgh; Canada's first great photographers, the Scottish immigrants William Notman and Alexander Henderson in Montreal; the globetrotting John Thomson in Hong Kong; and Lai Afong, the first widely known Chinese photographer. Lee reveals their pictures in the context of migration and the social impact wrought by worldwide trade and competing nationalisms. A timely book, it tells of an era when cameras emerged to give shape and meaning to some of the most defining moments brought about by globalization in the nineteenth century. Beautifully written and richly illustrated in full colour, The Global Flows of Early Scottish Photography weaves stories together to show that even the earliest pictures were sites of fierce historical struggle.

On a June morning in 1870, seventy-five Chinese immigrants stepped off a train in the New England factory town of North Adams, Massachusetts, imported as strikebreakers by the local shoe manufacturer. They threaded their way through a hostile mob and then--remarkably--their new employer lined them up along the south wall of his factory and had them photographed as the mob fell silent. So begins A Shoemaker's Story. Anthony Lee seeks to understand the social forces that brought this now-famous photograph into being, and the events and images it subsequently spawned. He traces the rise of photography as a profession and the hopes and experiences of immigrants trying to find their place in the years following the Civil War. He describes the industrialization of the once-traditional craft of shoemaking, and the often violent debates about race, labor, class, and citizenship that industrialization caused. Generously illustrated with many extraordinary photographs, A Shoemaker's Story brings 1870s America to vivid life. Lee's spellbinding narrative interweaves the perspectives of people from very different walks of life--the wealthy factory owner who dared to bring the strikebreakers to New England, the Chinese workers, the local shoemakers' union that did not want them there, the photographers themselves, and the ordinary men and women who viewed and interpreted their images. Combining painstaking research with world-class storytelling, Lee illuminates an important episode in the social history of the United States, and reveals the extent to which photographs can be sites of intense historical struggle.

Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, and his 1945 photography book, "Naked City" - with its lurid tabloid-style images of Manhattan crime, crowds, and boisterous nightlife - changed prevailing journalistic practices almost overnight. In this volume, two art historians, Anthony W. Lee and Richard Meyer, bring markedly different outlooks on photography and modernism to their discussions of Weegee and his book. Meyer looks carefully at Weegee's pictures before and after they were collected and assesses how his practice of tabloid photography was inseparable from his own lowbrow appeal.Lee paints the vivid details of a leftist journalism world in 1930s and 1940s New York and shows how this world helped shape the photographer's vision. These essays restore the Naked City photographs to the mass circulation newspapers and magazines for which they were intended, and they trace the strange process by which the most famous of these pictures - suffused with blood, gore, and sensational crime - entered the museum.

Soon after Alexander Gardner's "Photographic Sketch Book" was published, in 1866, it became the Civil War's best-known visual record and helped define how viewers, then and in subsequent generations, would come to know the war. Gardner's classic also became foundational in the history of American photography, combining, for the first time, words and images in a sophisticated and moving account. This book, written by the art historian Anthony W. Lee and the literary scholar Elizabeth Young, interprets the story of the war as told by Gardner, unraveling his careful choice of words and images and the complicated play between them, and understanding them against the backdrop of the literary and photographic cultures of the American antebellum and Reconstruction eras. This book presents a unique study of a pivotal American historical document, approaching it from the perspective of visual studies as well as American literature and history.