Phototherapy Techniques: Exploring the Secrets of Personal Snapshots and Family Albums (2nd Edition) Review

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(More customer reviews)This book opened me up to a new world, where photos can be helpful in therapy - I am studying to be a counselor, and I also have a passion for photography. This book explains that using photos has nothing to do with beautiful pictures, but rather what has meaning for your clients in their therapy. It is a book that would be welcomed by all therapists.

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PhotoTherapy techniques use ordinary personal snapshots and family photos (and the feelings, memories, thoughts and information these evoke) as catalysts for therapeutic communication and personal healing, reaching areas inside a person that words alone cannot access."PhotoTherapy Techniques: Exploring the Secrets of Personal Snapshots and Family Albums" is the most comprehensive introduction to the field of PhotoTherapy available.Emphasizing the "what", "why", and "how" of these practical techniques, this book is an excellent substitute for a training workshop! Written by psychologist, art therapist, consultant, trainer, and PhotoTherapy pioneer Judy Weiser, this book (now in second edition) explains and demonstrates each of the major techniques involved, and provides theoretical rationale from both psychology and art therapy contexts. It also includes many photo-illustrated client examples, case transcripts, and practical experiential "starter" exercises so that readers can immediately begin using these techniques in their own practice.This book is about photography as "personally-symbolic communication", rather than "art" -- exploring what a photograph is about emotionally, in addition to what shows on its surface visually. Thus these techniques require no previous experience with cameras or photographic art -- andthey can therefore be used successfully by therapists of all theoretical orientations, work settings, or client specializations. Often used as a text for university courses as well as for "Continuing Education" licensing credits for numerous mental health professions, this book is a "must" for not only therapists and counselors, but also anyone interested in family communication, diversity/cross-cultural work, conflict resolution, special education and other classroom applications, grief and bereavement counseling, coaching, community development, media/cultural studies, visual literacy, visual anthropology/sociology, research, and even scrapbooking! [*For more information, see: www.phototherapy-centre.com]*TABLE OF CONTENTS*: 1) Photographs as Therapeutic Tools2) The Five Techniques of PhotoTherapy 3) The Projective Process: Using Photographic Images to Explore Client Perceptions, Values, and Expectations4) Working with Self-Portraits: Understanding the Images Clients Make of Themselves5) Seeing Other Perspectives: Examining Photographs of Clients Taken by Others6) Metaphors of Self-Construction: Reflecting on Photographs Taken or Collected by Clients7) Photo-Systems: Reviewing Family Albums and Photo-Biographical Collections8) Using PhotoTherapy to Promote Healing and Personal Growth**AUTHOR BIO**: Founder and Director of the PhotoTherapy Centre in Vancouver, Canada, and former Editor of the Journal Phototherapy, Judy Weiser is a licensed Psychologist and registered Art Therapist who has focused her thirty-plus years of therapy practice on using PhotoTherapy techniques to help her clients heal.She currently consults, lectures, and gives training workshops world-wide, teaching people how to use these techniques to improve their therapy practice -- and their lives.

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Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America Review

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(More customer reviews)I was interested to find "Sleeping Beauty" after reading about it on the webpage of the PBS documentary "Death In America," which was based on this book. Unfortunately, I discovered it was out of print, but managed to borrow a copy through an interlibrary loan. I found it to be utterly fascinating. Some of the photos were beautifully done, resembling quietly sleeping children, while others were quite disturbing as the subjects were very obviously deceased. Particularly shocking were a pair of photos, one of a little boy lying on a bed with his toy ball, staring sadly at the camera, and another of the same boy after death. It is a sad reminder of the fact that the infant mortality rate during this time was so high, and often these were the only portraits the family might have of a child. It is incredible to think that a family might treasure such mementos, but I think of the now fairly commonplace practice of photographing miscarried or stillborn babies, and understand to an extent the need to have "proof" that this person existed.

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Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain Review

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(More customer reviews)as someone with a doctorate in psychology who has retired to a life of intensive painting, i can say this book falls short in its fundamental premise: if we can identify a distinct visual capability in the brain, that capability forms the basis for visual esthetic judgments. that argument unfortunately goes nowhere, and the result is a thin book with its substantive content spread even thinner.
zeki's argument is roughly that the mind is an active creator of visual experience; that we create visual experience using a variety of "modular" cerebral functions (specific neighborhoods of the brain that detect edges, analyze movement, perceive color, recognize faces); and that art works which "appeal" to these modular capabilities provide the foundation for art. claims that art that becomes "great" if the mind is presented with ambiguous or multiple interpretations, provoking it to "actively create" varied interpretations from the work in view. in this way zeki hopes to reason his way toward a "neurological esthetics," a biologically based prescription of what is beautiful or compelling art.
well, where to begin ... because a brain function is invoked by a stimulus does not make it interesting or great; my review invokes your language capabilities, but that doesn't make my words poetry. a painting does not succeed by creating a variety of specific but competing interpretations, as zeki claims, but by reframing awareness into a realm where the mundane categorizations necessary for behavior are stretched by the exercise of the senses. what counts as beautiful cannot be determined from the quantitative activity of different brain regions. what counts as beautiful depends heavily on cultural expectations, not on physiology ... on and on the objections roll.
in the end, zeki's argument is highly parochial. his examples come from the "edge detection" art of the supremacists or the cubists; the "color perception" art of the fauves, the "movement perception" art of calder, and so on -- simplistic art for simplistic art theories. (someone should ask, where are the edges in monet or turner, the color in kline or velazquez, the movement in vermeer or van dyck?) on the philosophical side, zeki seems willing to cite plato or hegel as straw men to knock down, but seems completely unaware of the many philosophical or social psychological theorists who could enrich his "active construction" view of visual perception. finally, zeki seems not to have had a personal colloquy with practicing artists, who could disabuse him of his naive reading of western art and its traditions.
psychologists will find this book to be unexpectedly thin on the facts of recent neural research and cognitive function, and lacking in philosophical depth. artists will look at zeki's simplistic reading of art and art history, shrug and wonder, what is this guy talking about?

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Hospice: A Photographic Inquiry Review

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(More customer reviews)A book about a place where people go to die will not by definition be a easy book to pick up and glance through. The photographers, Nan Goldin et al, do a remarkable job bringing these people to us in a situation none of us would want to be in. There is compassion and dignity in these situations which can all too often lend themselves to the snap and run mentality of today's press coverage. It is worth buying especially if you have an interest in quality, non-sensational photography.

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Spectacular Bodies: The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now Review

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(More customer reviews)This is one of the most fascinating art books to cross my path in some time. The subject is the artistic representation of human anatomy.
This is the occasion for a fascinating tour of curiosa. Of course, you have a sequence of Dutch and American anatomy theatre group portraits. More interesting is the sculptures in wax of dissection, surgical, and anatomical models, handmade by what were apparently a group of mostly Italian scupltors. A fellow named Clemente Susini was apparently the Michaelangelo of this field. What makes these interesting is that they are not, as in the -Gray's Anatomy- images, merely displayed. Many are dramatically posed, in the overdone, theatrical poses of baroque painting. The image of them gesticulating as they spill their guts is mildly disconcerting.
There is an extensive discussion of écorché figures, flayed figures that display skinless human musculature. Collections of skeletons and bones, often arranged dramatically rather than clinically, are also featured. There is a large selection of ethnological portraits, and photographs of the insane.
The text is largely sympathetic to these forgotten creators who sought to combine art and science. Identity politics and post-structuralist hoodoo intrudes only slightly on the text, much less than you'd fear given these subjects. A fascinating book for those who are not easily disturbed.

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Forensic Digital Imaging and Photography Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a compact book (just 256 pages), for people who may need to get a general but complete idea of the matter.
And, as the matter is not that common, it's important to find in a single book so many arguments put together.
The step by step concept of the book allows beginners to start "thinking" as a forensic photographer.
The accompanying CD, with images and exercises, provides a basic and easy to understand introduction to the use of photographic elements used in legal / forensic investigations.
As a professional, I find this book too short and lacking in some details. Also, I think it's time for an updated / revised edition.

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