Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781935408222)

Camouflage is an adaptive logic of escape from photographic representation. In Hide and Seek, Hanna Rose Shell traces the evolution of camouflage as it developed in counterpoint to technological advances in photography, innovations in warfare, and as-yet-unsolved mysteries of natural history. Today camouflage is commonly thought of as a textile pattern of interlocking greens and browns. But in Hide and Seek it reveals itself as much more -- a set of institutional structures, mixed-media art practices, and permutations of subjectivity, that emerged over the course of the twentieth century in environments increasingly mediated by photographic and cinematic intervention.

Through a series of fascinating case studies, Shell uncovers three conceptually linked species of photographic camouflage -- the static, the serial, and the dynamic -- and shows how each not only reflects the type of photographic reconnaissance it was meant to counter, but also contains aspects of the previously developed species. Hide and Seek develops its argument from the material forms camouflage has left behind -- photomontages, paper blankets, stuffed rabbits, ghillie suits, and instructional films.

Beginning in the domains of natural history and figurative art in the late nineteenth-century, continuing through the rise of aerial warfare in World War I, and onto the cinematic techniques designed to train snipers and civilians during World War II, this book is both a history and a theory of the drive to hide in plain sight.

Author: Hanna Rose Shell
ISBN-10: 1935408224
ISBN-13: 9781935408222
Publisher: Zone Books
Language: English
Published: 04/05/2012
Pages: 240
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.20w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 05/15/2012 pg. 78