window of cultural convergence for Navajo womenworking in healthcare and education. Traditionalmatriarchal Navajo society connects womens lives inmany ways. But the bi-cultural window is a small portalthat admits only a few dimensions of Yolanda andDoreys life together in the interstices of a grindingcultural interface.

Thus Sun Kissed provides respectful and nuancedinsights into the complexity of modern Navajo lives inmarriages, households, schools, religions, generations,traditional culture, cross-cultural contexts, and evenacross history. It is beautifully shot and well edited,letting the story and themes emerge seamlessly,honouring all the voices. Maya Stark and Adi Lavy arenext in line for major awards.

Pedagogical uses of Sun Kissed are both challengingand potentially rewarding for teachers and students.For the past 25 years I have taught college studentsabout child development in the Navajo Nation,drawing upon organised educational exchanges withNavajo colleagues and my own work as programevaluator and consultant for STAR School (starschool.org), serving Navajo families in northern AZ. Twoprint sources (e.g., Alvord and Van Pelt 1999;Chisholm 1996) have been especially valuable culturalbridges for my students.

Even with such systematic cultural preparation, mycurrent students at rst found Sun Kissed dicult todiscuss. The emotional power and complexity of thislm can overwhelm reective and analytic thought. Mystudents could not discuss the lm immediately after ourviewing, instead sitting in stunned silence as they piecedtogether the elements of the lm and their experiences ofthem. I adjourned class. Two days later the studentswere surprisingly animated and nuanced in theirinquiries and analyses of Sun Kissed. They consideredvarious perspectives on episodes, issues, and people, andintegrated the lm with their other Navajo sources,enriching our shared understanding of the complexcultural dimensions of child development.

REFERENCES

Alvord, L., and E. Van Pelt. 1999. The Scalpel and the SilverBear. New York: Bantam Books.

Chisholm, J. 1996. Learning Respect for Everything: NavajoImages of Development. In Images of Childhood, editedby C. Hwang, M. Lamb, and I. Sigel, 167183. Mahwah,NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

2013 Derek Pricehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2013.830030

Images in spite of all: Four photographs fromAuschwitzby Georges Didi-Huberman, translated by Shane B. LillisChicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008, 232 pagesISBN: 9-780-2261-4817-5; ISBN-10: 0-226-14817-3(paperback) Price: $20.00Reviewed by Mafalda Dmaso, Goldsmiths, University ofLondon

Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitzis a two-part book. It begins with a text that waspublished in 2001 in the context of Photographies descamps de concentration et dextermination Nazi(19331999), Paris an exhibition of photographs ofthe concentration camps. In it, the author engagesthoroughly with four photographs taken in clandestinecircumstances by an Auschwitz prisoner in 19431944(the only surviving images representing the process ofmass killing) and discusses them as an act of resistance.In the second part of the book, Didi-Hubermanresponds in detail to the criticism by Grard Wajcmanand Elisabeth Pagnoux, among others, that followed theinitial publication of the text.

Central to this book is the authors highly pertinentsuggestion that rather than focusing on how images mightfail us, one should pay attention to what they reveal. Indeed,instead of evaluating the photographs as historical evidence,the art historian and curator stresses their singularity andproposes to view them as a form of testimony. This idea isassociated with the refutation of Auschwitz as unthinkableor unsayable, which Didi-Huberman shares with HannahArendt and Primo Levi, respectively. In this context, theauthor suggests an innovative methodology of engagementwith the visual that takes into account what he refers to asthe dual system of all images (32). Composed of fragmentsof truth and of obscurity, images are in a lacunary relationto the truth to which they bear witness (32) and demand acombination of formal and phenomenological approachesin their analysis.

This interesting attitude is further detailed inDidi-Hubermans response to his critics. The authorwrites that the sceptical denial of the pertinence of thefour photographs results from a dual intellectualoperation that makes the real absolute in order tobetter claim it and then makes the image absolute to better revoke it (59). On the contrary, drawingfrom Lacanian theory, he stresses that images areneither absolute speech (91) nor pure silence (104);they tell in spite of all that which is impossible to tellentirely (105). The result is an unequivocal oppositionto viewing images as mere illustrations of broaderarguments or theories. Instead, they successfully

288 Reviews

Dow

nloa

ded

by [M

afalda

Dam

aso]

at 09

:14 28

Octo

ber 2

013

emerge in this book as an alternative point ofdeparture to an historical inquiry into the Holocaust,which can undoubtedly be extended to other topicsand disciplines.

Combining a meticulous, generous engagement with thefour photographs with an extensive discussionconnecting ongoing debates in the elds of philosophy,visual cultures, Holocaust studies and others, Images inSpite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz is afundamental contribution to the existing literature onthe ethics and the politics of the image. Furthermore, thebook moves the discussion away from the alleged awsof images and toward the complex ways in which theywork, thereby exemplifying how a focus on the visualmay allow for a reframing of seemingly unresolvabledualisms and paradoxes. The result is a tour de forcethat will interest all scholars dealing with complex,elusive, challenging visual documents.

2013 Mafalda Dmasohttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2013.830011

Visuality/materiality: Images, objects and practicesedited by Gillian Rose and Divya P. Tolia-KellyFarnham: Ashgate, 2012, 195 pagesISBN: 9-781-4094-1222-9 (hardback) Price: 55.00Reviewed by Penelope Pitt, Deakin University

The cover image of Visuality/Materiality is striking. Anenlarged QR code in white and navy sits atop a palerblue background, giving the appearance of a digitalpatchwork quilt square. The enlargement of the QR codeto many times its original size invites the viewer to takein the complexity of detail in a digital pattern that wouldusually be overlooked in a phone users rush to scan theQR code and connect to a website. This is a very ttingcover image for a book which explores theinterrelationship of visuality and materiality.

Visuality/Materiality is a collection of essays edited bycultural geographers Gillian Rose and Divya P. Tolia-Kellywho in the opening chapter introduce visuality/materialityas a manifesto for practice (1) and as a conceptualframework for carrying out research at the intersection ofthe visual and the material. In their previous work, Roseand Tolia-Kelly have each traversed this intersection; Rose(2010) in her research of what women do with their familyphotographs, and Tolia-Kelly (2010) in her researchinvolving the material and visual cultures of South Asianmigrant women in Britain.

With this book, Rose and Tolia-Kelly join forces toargue in favour of understanding the visual and the

material as in continual dialogue and co-constitution(4) rather than as separate elds of research. Theymark out a space for work that embraces a movebeyond the disciplinary boundaries and intellectuallimits of visual culture or material culture respectively.They argue in favour of not thinking visuality assimply observation, nor considering the materialpurely as solid matter (4).

The nine chapters following the editors manifestoreport on an eclectic assortment of empirical studies thatreect the interdisciplinary ethos of visuality/materialityas research approach and practice. The authors workspans diverse elds including architecture, culturalstudies, sociology, geography, art history, and mediastudies. Rose and Tolia-Kelly state that these nine essayshave been included because they explore theinterrelationship between materiality and visuality, andfurther comment that each chapter involves researchpractices which hav[e] at their heart political integrityand innovation (3). Key themes explored areconsumption, translation, practice and ethics.

The visuality/materiality approach is realised in thechapters through a rich variety of practices, images,materials. For example, in Chapter 8, Jacobs, Cairns andStrebel materialise vision through a focus on the activeseeing happening around the site of the windows of ahigh-rise housing development. This chapter includesphotographs and sketches, and other chapters incorporateblack and white reproductions of images such as oilpaintings, speculative and representational drawings,photographs of installation art, advertisements andGoogle images of large structures, and focus on a varietyof materials including aluminium, algae, walls and steel.

The chapters that are most ground-breaking are those inwhich examination of the multi-layered entanglement ofthe visual and the material combines with sharp politicalengagement. A compelling example is Mimi Shellerssophisticated chapter on the history of aluminium whichtakes in aluminiums modes of visualisation, theinterrelation of visual and political economies, itsproduction through mining and its consumption. Shellerdetails how a mobile modern USA and a backwardCaribbean are co-constituted through the continuationand redeployment of colonial visual tropes within amodernizing material culture (13), and how modernityis being reinvented through the Caribbean peoplescreative reconguring of these visualities andmaterialities.

Whilst an engagement with ethical practice runsthroughout the book, the nal two chapters inparticular provide a welcome contribution in

Reviews 289

Dow

nloa

ded

by [M

afalda

Dam

aso]

at 09

:14 28

Octo

ber 2

013