Carol Mavor is a professor of Art History and Visual Studies whose work delves into the rich landscape of visual culture and photography. Her writing is celebrated for its deep exploration of the hidden meanings within images and their profound connection to emotion, memory, and identity. Mavor approaches visual materials with a literary sensibility, uncovering subtle narratives and surprising connections that enrich our understanding of the world. Her analyses offer readers a fresh perspective on art and visual communication.
Drawing attention to the interplay between writing and vision, this book is stuffed with more than 200 images. It is a meditation on the threads that unite mothers and sons and the ways that certain writers and photographers take up those threads and create art that captures an irretrievable past.
Postwar French works that register disturbing truths about loss and regret, and violence and history, through aesthetic refinement anchor this exquisite, image-filled rumination on efforts to capture fleeting moments and comprehend the incomprehensible.
"A contemplative and lyrical memoir of early childhood, inheritance and loss. Carol Mavor blends encounters with the works of Piero della Francesca and Brueghel, Goya and Mann, alongside a synesthetic immersion in pre-linguistic memory. It is a scholarly and intimate look at grief and reparation, imagination and forgiveness, told by one of the most interesting and genre-defying essayists."--back cover
In Aurelia, Carol Mavor reads the world of literature and art through the lens of the fairy tale.
The sea, the sky, the veins of your hands, the earth when photographed from space--blue sometimes seems to overwhelm all the other shades of our world in its all-encompassing presence. The blues of Blue Mythologies include those present in the world's religions, eggs, science, slavery, gender, sex, art, the literary past, and contemporary film. Carol Mavor's engaging and elegiac readings in this beautifully illustrated book take the reader from the blue of a newborn baby's eyes to Giotto's frescoes at Padua, and from the films of Derek Jarman and Krzysztof Ki slowski to the islands of Venice and Aran. In each example Mavor unpicks meaning both above and below the surface of culture. In an echo of Roland Barthes's essays in Mythologies, blue is unleashed as our most familiar and most paradoxical color. At once historical, sociological, literary, and visual, Blue Mythologies gives us a fresh and contemplative look into the traditions, tales, and connotations of those somethings blue.