Hide and seek camouflage photography and the media of reconnaissance reviews

Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance by Hanna Rose Shell (Author). Camouflage is an adaptive logic of escape from photographic representation. Inside Cover and Seek, Hanna Rose Shell traces the evolution of camouflage because it developed in counterpoint to technological advances in images, improvements in warfare, and as-yet-unsolved mysteries of pure history. Immediately camouflage is usually regarded as a textile pattern of interlocking greens and browns. However in Hide and Seek it reveals itself to be rather more--a set of institutional structures, mixed-media art practices, and permutations of subjectivity, that emerged over the course of the 20th century in environments increasingly mediated by photographic and cinematic intervention.

By means of a series of fascinating case research, Shell uncovers three conceptually linked species of photographic camouflage--the static, the serial, and the dynamic--and shows how each not only displays the type of photographic reconnaissance it was meant to counter, but in addition contains the points of the beforehand developed species. Conceal and Search develops its argument from the material forms camouflage has left behind: photomontages, paper blankets, stuffed rabbits, Ghillie suits, and instructional films. Beginning with pure historical past and figurative artwork in the late nineteenth-century, continuing via the rise of aerial warfare in World Battle I, and onto the cinematic methods designed to train snipers and civilians throughout World Conflict II, this guide is both a history and an idea of the drive to cover in plain sight.

Hide and Seek is an entertaining and deceptively deep exploration of the historical past and inventive context of camouflage. Hanna Rose Shell presents camouflage as a distinct new artistic medium by tracing its historical past, from the etymology of the term (invented in 1916) to its army makes use of, to the research that was performed (largely by artists and philosophers) to create it. Shell strikes effortlessly and entertainingly from artwork to philosophy, from army strategy to Monty Python, and from video video games to the muppets. Hide and Seek is a synthesis of deep analysis and cautious perception that establishes a brand new approach of looking at camouflage as a method of human expression, a pleasant and entertaining read. 

Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance 

 Hanna Rose Shell (Author)

240 pages

Zone Books (March 30, 2012)

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