Passages in Time

Offers a unique and critical witness to significant historic photographs, from the period of the inception of photography to the Edwardian era. Asserts historic photographs as vivid and lyrical artefacts which live both as a source of enrichment in contemporary artistic experience, and as documentary witness to our own age. Shows photography as an art in intimate cultural conjunction with painting and literature. We cannot travel back into the past! In the garish light of the blaze of contemporary `selfies' and of the digital editing of photographs, photography has lost contact with the abstract impact and the purity of dimension of historic photography. Historic photography offers, instead, a unique and vivid witness to the lived experience of the past - in our own age. In his new book Keith Steiner brings us face to face with historic photographs as both the camera's memories, and as definitive and enduring entities of the present. He explores how our perceptual dialogue with historic imagery is also an encounter with the bias rooted in our register of the literary, the optical, and the cultural. Keith Steiner's authoritative, perceptive, illuminating, and penetrating text focuses key examples of historic photography in their fullness of register as artistic, perceptual, philosophic and cultural jewels. These mysterious, haunting photographs are thus revealed by the author in the full light of our age as sometime lyrical, metaphorical encounters of prose and poetry; and equally, and eternally, as of the fabric and geometry of now.