{"title":"Ari J Blatt","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"france-in-flux-book-ari-j-blatt-9781786941787","title":"France in Flux","description":"The look and feel of metropolitan France has been a notable preoccupation of French literary and visual culture since the 1980s. Numerous writers, filmmakers and photographers have been drawn to articulate France’s contrasting spatial qualities, from infrastructural installations such as roads, rail lines and ports, to peri-urban residential developments and isolated rural enclaves. In doing so, they explore how the country’s acute sense of national identity has been both asserted and challenged in topographic terms.   This wide-ranging collection of essays explores how the contemporary concern with space in France has taken shape across a range of media, from recent cinema, documentary filmmaking and photographic projects through to television drama and contemporary fiction, and examines what it reveals about the state of the nation in a post-colonial and post-industrial age. The impact of global flows of capital, trade and migration can be mapped through attention to the specificities of place and topography. Investigation of liminal locations, from seaboard cities and abandoned industrial sites to refugee camps and peasant smallholdings, interrogates the assertion of a national territory (and, by extension, a national identity) through the figure of the hexagon, and highlights the fluidities, instabilities and lines of flight which render it increasingly unsettled.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49737063399697,"sku":"NGR9781786941787","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1786941783.jpg?v=1751378309"},{"product_id":"topographic-imaginary-book-ari-j-blatt-9781835537282","title":"The Topographic Imaginary","description":"Since the early 1980s, art photographers from metropolitan France have been training their lenses on ordinary landscapes throughout the country they call home. The Topographic Imaginary is the first book to study this important and flourishing trend. It examines work by artists who meld documentary and creative modes to attune viewers to places that mainstream culture tends to tune out, but which, as Ari J. Blatt argues, are in fact more meaningful than they initially appear. From views of building sites in Paris, peri-urban edgelands, or a tangle of trees in a forest, to those that ponder the play of light and shadow on roadside fields in Normandy or the tacky colors painted on dated village shopfronts, images that signal the emergence of a “topographic turn” in contemporary French photography constitute new ways of seeing and sensing France’s diverse national territory. As Blatt suggests, they also represent a visual laboratory through which to investigate how landscape “scapes” our understanding of French culture. In their efforts to reimagine a more traditional and  time-worn idea of France’s shared common space, topographic photographs animate  conversations about capital and class; cities and their peripheries; the  politics and impact of development; migration and borders; memory, history, and  affect; empire and postcolonialism; national identity; and the changing  environment. The Topographic Imaginary thus reveals how attending to place in pictures provides valuable insight into the disposition of a nation in flux.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51630033928465,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51630034125073,"sku":"NGR9781835537282","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1835537286.jpg?v=1751026394"},{"product_id":"pictures-into-words-book-ari-j-blatt-9780803238053","title":"Pictures Into Words","description":"The explosive proliferation of pictures in advertising and pop culture, mass media, and cyberspace following World War II, along with the profusion of critical thinking that tries to make sense of it, has had wide-ranging implications for cultural production as such. Pictures into Words explores how this proliferation of graphic images has profoundly affected narrative writing in France.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52740122247441,"sku":"NIN9780803238053","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780803238053.jpg?v=1763481522"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-ari-j-blatt.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}