Painting photography painting is the essential first collection of essays by critic and theorist Carol Armstrong, bringing together writings encompassing the many inflection points of her academic work, including French painting, early photography, feminist theory, and the representation of women and gender in the visual arts. In the book's titular essay, Armstrong asks of Ellen Gallagher's 2008 painting An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity, which depicts a barely-visible sea creature created out of ink, graphite, oil, varnish, and variously sliced paper, 'in what sense is this a painting exactly?' This enquiry into the very essence of the medium provides a thread that runs throughout the book's wide-ranging essays and ties together a variety of works on paper 'inscribed, drawn, printed, photographed, and variously pierced and punctured'.0Considering these various works, Painting Photography Painting provides a compelling path through Armstrong's decades of writing, weaving together figures from across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including Helen Frankenthaler, Paul Cezanne, Ellen Gallagher, Georges Seurat, Julia Margaret Cameron, Tina Modotti, and Diane Arbus in a single, illuminating volume. -- Back cover.
Introduction -- The reflexive and the possessive view : thoughts on Kertész, Brandt and the photographic nude -- Biology, destiny, photography : difference according to Diane Arbus -- Cupid's pencil of light : Julia Margaret Cameron and the maternalization of photography -- From Clementina to Käsebier : the photographic attainment of the "lady amateur" -- This photography which is not one : in the gray zone with Tina Modotti -- Cameraless : from natural illustrations and nature prints to manual and photogenic drawings and other botanographs -- Still life set piece -- Women on paper -- Automatism and agency intertwined : the spectrum of photographic intentionality -- Ellen Gallagher : Mythopoetics and materials -- Seurat's media : or, a matrix of materialities -- Painting photography painting : timelines and medium specificities -- Helen Frankenthaler's syzygy : line into color, color into line -- This Cézanne which is not one -- Ellen Gallagher : ecstatic draught of fishes -- Brandt's haptic eye : perspective of nudes -- Credits.