Whitney Davis

The material history of wax is a history of disappearance—wax melts, liquefies, evaporates, and undergoes innumerable mutations. Wax is tactile, ambiguous, and mesmerizing, confounding viewers and scholars alike. It can approximate flesh with astonishing realism and has been used to create uncanny h...

What is cultural about vision--or visual about culture? In this ambitious book, Whitney Davis provides new answers to these difficult and important questions by presenting an original framework for understanding visual culture. Grounded in the theoretical traditions of art history, A General Theory ...

The twelve interdisciplinary essays collected here explore what Whitney Davis calls replication in archaeology, art history, and psychoanalysis-the sequential production of similar artifacts or images substitutable for one another in specific contexts of use. Davis suggests that while archaeology de...

"... a valuable scholarly addition to any student of Freud or as research material in a library." ―HNet, H-CAACADavis argues that the visual dimension of Freud’s writing is crucial to understanding its structure and significance. He offers a new and challenging reading of Freud’s case study of Serge...

The meaning of late prehistoric Egyptian images has until now been tantalizingly mysterious, as little understood as the circumstances of their production. As a result, analyses of these images have been general and often incorrectly illustrated. Whitney Davis now provides a welcome remedy in this d...

From the beginning of Egyptian dynastic history (c. 3000 BC), Egyptian artists worked within a set of specific rules for image making. The system was established in order to depict and to justify the ambitions of the ancient Egyptian elite, and was so successful that virtually no other forms of imag...

Péter Forgács, based in Budapest, is best known for his award-winning films built on home movies from the 1930s to the 1960s that document ordinary lives soon to intersect with offscreen historical events. Cinema’s Alchemist offers a sustained exploration of the imagination and skill with which For...

The twelve interdisciplinary essays collected here explore what Whitney Davis calls replication in archaeology, art history, and psychoanalysis-the sequential production of similar artifacts or images substitutable for one another in specific contexts of use. Davis suggests that while archaeology de...