Title: Postmodernism - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics
Headings: Postmodernism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism: Philosophical Aspects
Postmodernism in Sociology
Postmodernism in Geography
Postmodernism: Methodology
2.4 Relativism and Questioning Postmodernists
Photographic image issues
Postmodernism defined
Archaeology
Conclusion
Art History
5 Methodological Pluralism
Organizations
Museum
Family Systems
Narrative family therapy
Warfare and Military Studies, Overview
The Postmodern Military

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URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B0080430767006926
Photographic image issues
Margot Note, in Managing Image Collections, 2011
Postmodernism defined
Postmodernism “eschews metanarrative, those sweeping interpretations that totalize human experience in some monolithic way … anything that reflects the past or present ‘hegemony’ of dead white males” (Cook 2001, 15). The postmodern stance “is one of doubtfulness, of trusting nothing at face value, of always looking behind the surface, of upsetting conventional wisdom” ( Cook 1994, 317). Influenced by Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and other theoretical models, it is opposed to a formalist agenda, seeing it as both intellectually fruitless and politically conservative. As a philosophy, postmodernism rejects concepts of rationality, objectivity, and universal truth. Instead, it emphasizes the diversity of human experience and multiplicity of perspectives. In many ways, a postmodernist perspective is well suited to the utilization of photographic records, because it questions traditional notions of truth and the concept that records can have only one possible meaning. Academic disciplines have contended with the challenges of postmodernism since the 1970s. Information professionals as well have questioned their own traditional stances of neutrality. The increase in archives and special collection repositories, graduate education programs, the impact of technology, and the greater emphasis on nontextual materials have given impetus to a re-evaluation of traditional principles and practices.