Beauty and the Beast
Human-Animal Relations as Revealed in Real Photo Postcards, 1905-1935
by Arnold Arluke and Robert Bogdan
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Pub Date Oct 15 2010 | Archive Date Sep 01 2012
Description
From fairy tales to photography, nowhere is the complexity of human-animal relationships more apparent than in the creative arts. Art illuminates the nature and significance of animals in modern, Western thought, capturing the complicated union that has long existed between the animal kingdom and us. In Beauty and the Beast, authors Arluke and Bogdan explore this relationship through the unique lens of photo postcards. This visual medium offers an enormous and relatively untapped archive to document their subject compellingly.
The importance of photo postcards goes beyond their abundance. Recognized as the "people's photography," photo postcards were typically taken by photographers who were part of the community they were photographing. Their intimacy with the people and places they captured resulted in a vernacular record of the life and times of the period unavailable in other kinds of photography. Arluke and Bogdan use these postcards to tell the story of human-animal relations in the United States from approximately 1905 to 1935. During these years, Americans experienced profound changes that altered their connection with animals and influenced perceptions and treatment of them today. Wide-ranging in scope, Beauty and the Beast looks at the variety of roles animals played in society, from pets and laborers to symbols and prey. The authors discuss the contradictions, dualisms, and paradoxes of our relationship to animals, illustrating how animals were distanced and embraced, commoditized and anthropomorphized. With over 350 illustrations, this book presents a vivid chronicle of the deep cultural ambivalence that characterized human-animal relations in the early twentieth century and that continues today.
Authors
Arnold Arluke is professor of sociology and anthropology at Northeastern University and Senior Research Fellow at the Tufts Center for Animals and Public Policy. He has published numerous books including Between the Species and Just a Dog: Animal Cruelty and Ourselves.
Robert Bogdan is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Social Science and Education at Syracuse University. He is the author of several books dealing with photo postcards including Real Photo Postcard Guide: The People's Photography, published by Syracuse University Press.
For more information contact Mona Hamlin, Syracuse University Press Marketing Department
315 443-5547 mhamlin@syr.edu
Advance Praise
"Written and collected by one of the premier figures in the study of human-animalrelationships and one of the major names in visual sociology, Beauty and the Beast offers afascinating and often movinghistorical picture of America's ambivalent relationship with nonhuman animals.-
Clinton Sanders, University ofConnecticut Department of Sociology, Author of Understanding Dogs:Living and Working with Canine Companions (Temple University Press, 1999)
"Beauty and the Beast manages theexceptional feat of doing two separate things very well. It thoroughlydocuments Americans' relations with animals--loving, businesslike, fraught,complex--a century ago; and it demonstrates the exhaustive range of thereal-photo postcard, a hitherto neglected historical resource of unparalleledusefulness. It is a unique book--but it may go on to spawn its own school."
--Luc Sante, author of Folk Photography
" Beauty and the Beast is a uniquebook that is smart, visually stunning and beautifully written. The authors use the depiction of animals in early 20thcentury postcards to illustrate the diversity and importance of other speciesin our lives. But this is not just a picture book. The wonderful graphicsare accompanied by sophisticated analyses of topics ranging from the practiceof embalming pets, to backyard chicken raising, to how animals became corporateicons and political symbols. The book is sometimes funny and sometimestragic, but always fascinating and thought-provoking. Beauty and the Beast willappeal to anyone interested in the complicated, quirky, and paradoxical waysthat we relate to and think about the creatures we share the world with. I knowof no other book that covers the wide array of roles that animals play in ourlives in a manner that is as intellectually satisfying and entertaining as thisone. I loved it." - Hal Herzog, Professor of Psychology, Western Carolina University and the author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, and Some We Eat: Why It's So Hardto Think Straight About Animals.
" The human-animal bond is ready for its close-up and Arluke and Bogdandeliver. This provocative work uses the arresting images of historic "realphoto postcards" to examine the roles animals have played in our lives. Whatemerges are insights not only into the relationships of the past, but theenduring joys and tensions still at work today."
"Thorough and thoughtful, "Beauty and the Beast" will bust somepresent-day myths, chief among them that a sincere love of animals is a modern invention."- Vicki Constantine Croke, author of "The Lady and the Panda"
"With their specialized vision and sharp focus, Bogdan and Arluke have captured the immediacy of serendipitous early dayphotography, and through their choice of subject matter-locally made photopostcards-the intimacy of the images is amplified. Postcards have been part ofour daily lives for over a century. Mundane, perhaps, but thoughtfully select agroup of them on a common theme-look deeply as the authors encourage us todo-and the viewer is transported. Decades fade away, and we see with moreclarity the closeness as well as the distance between ourselves and the otheranimals."
-Lew Baer- writer, postcard aficionado, and editor of San Francisco Bay Area PostCard Club Publications
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9780815609810 |
| PRICE | 39.95 |
| PAGES | 344 |
