Bøger af Harry Freemantle

The story of Sid Price is not a simple one. It explores notions of race and ethnicity while at the same time demonstrating family respect and warmth, combined with a mix of acceptance and rejection for and by Sid. His story, and the recounting of it by those people who knew him, crosses the artificial boundaries drawn on the map of what it means to be Australian, of what it means to be aboriginal, of what it means to be German and the way nationalist sentiments attach themselves to stereotypical images that are not in the service of doing good. In the centre is an officially and unofficially adopted man who rejects his birth family and culture and joins a family of third generation German and English immigrants on farming country in Victoria. Serving in WW2 he is captured by the German army during the battle for Greece. He escapes at least three times, once from Stalag VIIB, and eventually joins Mihailovic's forces in Yugoslavia. By the time Sid was involved with the Yugoslavian partisans the English were morally, and by 1943 crucially, materially supporting Tito who was fighting against Mihailovic, as well as the Germans and Italians. Sid and his mates were eventually re-captured and interred in Stalag 344, Lamsdorf. Luckily he was repatriated before the infamous Lamsdorf Death March. After the war Sid returned to Australia and took up where he left off with the Borneman family. He remained an essential part of the family fabric until his death in 1989.

In Seeing the Social Harry Freemantle looks closely at the early moments of visibility technologies like perspective, lenses (especially microscopes), the camera obscura, The Encyclopédie, the balloon, the lithograph, the diorama and photography, including the accompanying metaphors, in order to draw out how the visual aspects of seeing inform the articulable at particular moments in history. How these visibilities shift and change over time can then be charted against larger social movements. Such visibility technologies formed part of the epistemological conditions of the observer, underlay the discourse and contributed to how early writers on the social saw the emerging social world. Seeing the Social is historically rigorous and where possible relies on primary texts. What is different about what it does with these moments is the attempt to tie these technologies to seeing the social and allowing the narrative, sometimes in dialogue form, to convey the story. The author moves away from the idea that grand philosophical or theoretical knowledge accounts tell the complete story, preferring rather to allow some minor actors to shed light on the subject. The book also attempts to steer away from being theory or theorist driven. Rather it allows these early moments of surprise and wonderment to be heard. This approach hopefully opens up visual spaces for the reader and encourages further research and reading.