News + Events

Read about For All the World to See on Artnet in a news story by Artnet editor in chief, Walter Robinson:

"Two new books tackle the subject of art and politics, a topic that is of special interest in the Shepard Fairey era. Scholar Maurice Berger’s For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights is due from Yale University Press on Apr. 20, 2010. Six years in the making, the book looks at the role played by visual images, and the rise of television and picture magazines, in the struggle for civil rights in the U.S.

The publication coincides with an eponymous exhibition that opens at the International Center of Photography, May 21-Sept. 12, 2010, and subsequently appears at the two co-organizing institutions, the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., and the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in Baltimore . . ."

> Read the Artnet story, "Art and Politics, Between the Covers"

Here is a smart mini-review of FOR ALL THE WORLD TO SEE in the BOSTON GLOBE'S "The Find" column in its Sunday book review:

"In 1955, the photograph of Emmett Till’s mutilated body was for many African-Americans the visual equivalent of a knock-out punch. No mainstream newspaper or magazine published the photo, but the black press did. That single image played a powerful role in building the civil rights movement, we learn in Maurice Berger’s “For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights’’ (Yale University), being published April 20 to coincide with the opening of a touring exhibit co-presented by the Smithsonian. The book also looks beyond news headlines, analyzing Walt Disney’s “Song of the South,’’ Aunt Jemima, and the 1967 TV show “Julia,’’ in which racism was mainly a thing of the past . . . "

> Read the Review

FATWTS author Maurice Berger is the latest to be invited to take The Page 99 Test: "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you."--Ford Madox Ford:

"Page 99 of For All The World To See contains no text, and just a single photograph. But what a powerful image it is: a shot of a distraught Mamie Till Bradley as she views the casket of her fourteen-year old son, Emmett Till, murdered by white supremacists in Mississippi in August 1955. The photograph brings to life the book’s abiding issue: the crucial role that visual culture played in altering prevailing ideas about race, racism, and segregation in the period of the modern civil rights movement . . . "

> Read The Page 99 Test

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