Ulrich Keller, who teaches in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at UCSB, will discuss and sign copies of his just-released book, The Ultimate Spectacle: A Visual History of the Crimean War (Gordon and Breach, 2001) at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, October 24 in the McCune Conference Room, 6020 Humanities & Social Sciences Building. Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, copies of The Ultimate Spectacle will be available for purchase and signing at this event.

"Thoughtfully conceived, satisfyingly researched...a mapping of the many ways in which the Crimea was produced as a spectacle for Victorian consumption". - Jennifer Green Lewis, Middlebury College, Vermont

Chloroform, telegraphy, steamships and rifles were distinctly modern features of the Crimean War (1853-1856). Covered by a large corps of reporters, illustrators and cameramen, it also became the first media war in history. For the benefit of the ubiquitous artists and correspondents, both the military and the domestic events were carefully staged, giving the Crimean War an aesthetically alluring, even spectacular character. With their exclusive focus on written sources, historians have consistently overlooked this visual dimension of the Crimean War. Photo-historian Ulrich Keller challenges the traditional literary bias by drawing on a wealth of pictorial materials from scientific diagrams to photographs, press illustration and academic painting. The result is a new and different historical account which emphasizes the careful aesthetic scripting of the war for popular mass consumption at home. Included in this media history of the Crimean War are elements of its still unwritten social history. In the Victorian era, the proliferation of lithography, press illustration, photography and other mass media gave various social groups a chance to circulate competing views of the war where, previously, monarchs had possessed a near monopoly on the pictorial representation of history. The broad range of visual sources included in the book thus documents not only the war between the British and the Russians in the Crimea but also the battle of representations which raged in the deeply divided society at home.

Since receiving a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Munich, Germany in 1969, Ulrich Keller has held research positions at several German and American institutions. In 1982 he joined the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Keller's research interests have ranged from Rembrandt to Caspar David Friedrich to Walker Evans and contemporary documentary photography. He is most interested in the relationships images have with technology and ideology. His publications include books on August Sander, Walker Evans, Rembrandt and others. His numerous awards include a Guggenheim Fellowhship and the Erich Stenger Award from the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie.

This event is sponsored by the UCSB Bookstore, Department of the History of Art & Architecture, and Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.