The fundamental principles of optical holography for capturing the optical waves of physical objects, and its difference from photography, are described. A photograph can only record a single view of an object scene; a hologram is capable of capturing the entire optical wavefront that impinges on it. There should be little difference between observing a hologram and the physical object scene. Numerical generation of digital holograms, commonly known as computer-generated holography (CGH), is presented. Two important approaches in CGH, the point-based and the layer-based methods, are described. The point-based method is suitable for generating holograms of simple objects with a small number of object points; the layer-based method is preferred for an object scene with a large number of object points concentrated in a few depth planes. The method for recovering a 3-D scene image from a digital hologram is provided. Three different methods for capturing digital holograms of physical object scene are described. The first method is similar to the art of optical holography, but instead of a photographic film, a digital camera is used to record the holographic waves emitted from the scene. As a digital camera can only record intensity information, the method can only be employed to capture an off-axis, amplitude-only hologram. The other two methods, known as phase-shifting holography (PSH) and optical scanning holography (OSH), are capable of capturing both the magnitude and phase components of the holographic signals. PSH is faster in operation, while OSH can be used to capture holograms of large objects. A simplified version of OSH, known as non-diffractive optical scanning holography (ND-OSH), is presented. ND-OSH is similar in principle to OSH, but the complexity of the optical and electronic setups is reduced.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, ambrotype photographs profoundly altered American efforts to make apocalyptic violence resound. The wet-plate collodion negative, which comes into circulation as the Civil War begins, fractures the historiographical medium that conforms martial violence to narratives about historical progress. This paper adds to scholarship on 1860s responses to the early circulation of battlefield, hospital, and candid photographs. On the one hand, bodies on the ground and the material conditions of human scale are revealed with exhilarating clarity; on the other hand, the reproducible plates threaten prose conventions for suturing apocalyptic violence to national regeneration. Periodicals from the 1860s and 1870s record this ambivalence; early historians of the war often wrestled with the ambrotype’s claim to immediacy. This chapter asks where the early collodion plate archive fits in a larger history of American media for translating unthinkable violence into revelatory insight, or for severing that link.

Chapter 1 is concerned with the ethnographical leanings of Synge’s work. It focuses on the material culture which Synge chose for the production of his plays, Riders to the Sea especially, and highlights the degree to which Synge’s plays were aligned with a narrative of modernity and progress. It effectively reads Synge’s plays as cultural performances of modernity. By transposing to the Dublin stage objects conjuring rurality and by giving centre-stage to a commodity-poor culture, the plays contributed to generating and articulating a fundamental difference between the modern, urban audience of the Abbey Theatre and the agrarian or fishing communities, which the plays represented. Thus, they participated in the construction and display of cultural difference, which is so central to modernity’s agenda. The chapter pays special attention to Synge’s quest for, or recreation of, the authentic, and argues that this should be situated within the broader context of the commodity culture emerging in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland. It also relates Synge’s work for the theatre to other art practices ‒ notably, photography and more specifically Jane W. Shackleton’s ‒ that were similarly informed by an equally strong ethnographical desire to document the lives of putatively primitive people.

Chapter 8 focuses on Ida B. Wells’ transatlantic visits to Britain in 1893 and 1894. I argue that Wells, like Henson, exploited adaptive resistance in a new era, but this time redeployed its attention to the legacy of slavery, particularly lynching and racial violence. She sustained the Black protest tradition until the end of the nineteenth century and borrowed from it to create a successful tour in 1894, in particular. Learning from previous activists such as Frederick Douglass, Wells befriended newspaper editors, collected favorable coverage of her lectures, orchestrated interviews in numerous papers, and cultivated reformist networks to raise awareness of lynching. Wells also used a form of visual dissonance within her employment of adaptive resistance: she used photographs of lynched bodies to convince the British people of racial violence, and passed the image around at small meetings as a tool of truth to support her rhetoric. She intervened in traditional white spaces such as Parliament to sustain the Black American protest tradition and remind British audiences they lived and breathed a legacy of slavery.

Music, dance, film, and photography have been a consistent feature of J. M. Coetzee’s fiction. The importance of these ‘other arts’ has been reinforced by recent biographical and archive-based accounts of the author’s life and work, with further evidence of the creative energy given to possible and realized adaptations and collaborations with artists, composers, and film-makers. This chapter explores a selection of references to these other arts from across the Coetzee corpus, with particular attention to the representation of aesthetic experience, claims about the distinctive capacities of non-literary art forms, and the relationship of these other arts to writing, self-reflexivity, and the body. It concludes with a consideration of adaptations of the novels for film and opera.

In this chapter Jolyon Mitchell analyses how audiences, journalists and producers interact with media representations of violence. More precisely he examines the practices of revealing, representing, redacting, remembering, and responding to mediated images of violence, using a wide range of examples from different media. While recognizing the power of vivid journalistic written and verbal descriptions of violence, through this essay Mitchell primarily considers visual representations over the last two centuries, starting from the 1810s, in the decade before the first photograph (c.1826), to the present day, concentrating upon non-cinematic examples, such as photographic portrayals of non-fictional violence. Other practices such as hiding, selecting, overlooking, forgetting and recollecting are juxtaposed with these core practices of revealing, representing, redacting, remembering and responding. Mitchell argues that these related practices contribute to the way violence manifests itself around the circuit of communication, which begins with acts of creation and production of images of violence, and which is then followed by their dissemination, reception and recycling. Reflecting further on this circuit of communication and these related practices helps answer questions such as: Why do certain images of violence receive more attention than others? Why are some media representations of violence remembered and others easily forgotten?

Whitman adopted photography as a model for literary practice. By emulating the immediacy effects and truth claims of photography, Whitman developed an innovative style that aimed to endow his poems with the same qualities he valued in the new medium—particularly directness, accuracy, naturalness, and inclusiveness of representation—and the cumulative experience of these qualities by the beholder as a sense of authenticity, media transparency, and immediate encounter. Comparing the representational powers of photography and literature helped Whitman to gauge the spiritual, cultural, and political function of literature. The chapter presents Whitman’s turn towards immediacy as part of his attempt to renew and democratize American poetry. It argues that Whitman’s engagement with photography led him to create a poetic style that allowed him to address the particulars of time and place, to take the details of everyday life as his subject matter, and to invest them with an egalitarian ethos by staging the dynamics of literary communication as a model for democratic social interaction. In Whitman’s work, the appeal to immediacy thus gains a decidedly political momentum.

Commenting on the findings of the previous two chapters on Emerson’s and Whitman’s reflections on photographic immediacy, this chapter stresses the social, political, and media cultural context of their work. It argues that Emerson’s and Whitman’s romantic quest for immediacy was not an escapist endeavor that aimed to keep literature aloof from larger social and technological transformations. Instead, both writers creatively responded to the reshaping of American society under the pressures of budding industrialization and halting democratization processes by developing a poetics that sought to connect literary and social practices. Emerson’s and Whitman’s poetics of immediacy ground literary communication in the lived experience of writers and readers, make literature relevant to the concerns of everyday life (including social and sexual relations, spirituality, work, and politics), and seek to strengthen their readers’ active participation in the world.

The chapter analyzes how Don DeLillo’s novel Mao II critically refracts TV’s immediacy effects to explore the cultural function that literature performs within the increasingly commodified market dynamics of mass media communication. The chapter argues that DeLillo accomplishes a paradoxical feat: he tells the story of a retrograde writer who loses his life in a futile attempt to resist the commercialization of his work; yet DeLillo suffuses this allegorical tale about the death of an author in the age of mass media and consumer culture with detailed ekphrastic descriptions of TV news footage, photographs, and pop art that ultimately confirm the capacity of literature to respond in innovative ways to the predominance of visual media, the misapprehension of televisual images as real, and the increasing commodification of literature and art. Published as American culture was turning digital, the novel provides an apt terminus for my study of how American writers reworked the immediacy effects of analog new visual media to renew literary culture.

The chapter shows that Emerson and Whitman refined their poetics by probing the truth claims and reality effects of photography. It expands our understanding of American romantic literature by connecting the romantic concern with intuition, firsthand experience, and organic expression to the emergence of photography. Claims to authenticity and immediacy were central to the reform efforts of the transcendentalists because they enabled them to resist social conventions, to counter the commercialization of literary culture, and to renew literature’s democratic ethos. The chapter identifies photographic discourse as an important testing ground for this orientation. Emerson repeatedly reflected on photography to think through the relations between knowledge and mediation and to define the cultural role of literature. At first, he held that the camera’s capacity to record optical reality without distortion realized his ideal of intuitive insight and original expression. His attitude towards photography grew more ambivalent, however, as his commitment to a poetics of process deepened. Seeking to represent a world in flux, Emerson grew wary of photography’s stabilized records of reality.

Privacy law, especially in the form of the right to private life in Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights, has addressed police photography, biometrics, and filing systems, including when police identification images are taken in public, outside of the context of arrest. The law slowly came to recognise that the building of institutional identity databases was a meaningful and potentially objectionable practice because it could stigmatise people with information in those filing systems who had not been convicted. This chapter outlines the development of that legal constraint on profiling, as well as its limitations, such as expanding law enforcement intelligence practices. It argues that privacy becomes meaningful for government profiling only when the ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ test is abandoned, and with a focus on data processing, image identification, and ‘systematisation’.