New perspectives on humor within photographyDespite the ubiquitous presenceof photographic humor in art and popular media, the phenomenon has as yetreceived very little scholarly attention. Focusing on staged humor rather thanon comic effects of snapshot photography, this volume brings together leadingscholars in the field addressing humor performed in front of the camera, oftenspecifically created for the camera, and the performative joke-work done by themedium itself. A first section explores how photography, due to its"shattering" qualities, turns into a privileged medium for eliciting humorouseffects and how humor can be discerned within the photographic event. A secondsection discusses the toolbox of photographic trickery (photomontage, doubleexposure and cinematic movement) that allows photography to mock itself. The bookcloses with a section on photographic wit in conceptual art, both in canonizedand more locally distinct practices.With artists' pagesfrom Paulien Oltheten, Lieven Segers and David HelbichThis publication isGPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).Contributors: Kevin Atherton (National College of Art and Design,Dublin), Anna Corrigan and Susana S. Martins (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa),Hilde D'haeyere (KASK School of Arts of University College Ghent), HeatherDiack (University of Miami), Louis Kaplan (University of Toronto), Ann KristinKrahn (Braunschweig University of the Arts), Sandra Križic Roban (Institute ofArt History, Zagreb), Esther Leslie (Birkbeck University of London), Johan Pas(Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp), Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans (VrijeUniversiteit Brussel)

Photographic analysis of the mining region's transition to culture and leisure economiesThe Nord-Pas-de-Calais mining region, bordering on Belgium, is part of northern Europe's historical centre of heavy industry, which extends as far as the Ruhr area in Germany. With the end of coal mining in the 1980s, the Lille region transitioned to new economic activities, particularly within the cultural and creative industries, taking advantage of its strategic location midway between Paris, London and Brussels. After de-industrialisation and the 1984 opening of the Lewarde Mining Museum—the first institution of its kind in France—the region took part in industrial heritage campaigns modelled on the Ruhr industrial region. Various historical sites in coal-mining areas in this region and in Belgium were classified as World Heritage Sites by UNESCO in 2012. Renaissance (2014) presents a photographic analysis of the epochal transition from industry to culture and leisure economies and is organised around eight groups of a varying numbers of photographs. It sheds a light on the Nord-Pas-de-Calais mining region's place in the European history of the capitalist nation-state. The artist Jorge Ribalta offers a contribution to the critique on the myths and utopian promises of cultural economies. His photographic work interrogates the correspondence between the decline of industrial economies in Europe and the crisis of the middle class. "For ten years, my work has been based on a desire to reinvent the documentary idea, by bringing historical density to that very idea, which is inseparable from the representation of work and the working classes. Documentary discourse can also contribute to an institutional critique right inside the art system through self-reflexivity that is to say through the documentary observation of artistic working conditions."Jorge Ribalta on his project "Renaissance".