Atomic Afterimages

This article examines the recirculation of Robert Del Tredici's photographs of the Cold War nuclear weapons complex. Originally published in his groundbreaking book, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb (1987), a number of Del Tredici's photographs have been republished in a series of post‐Cold War US Department of Energy reports. The article examines the post‐Cold War circulation of Del Tredici's images in these official government reports and analyzes shifts in their meaning across different historical periods. Ultimately, this paper raises questions about the critical stance of Del Tredici's photographs as they are republished in government reports and examines ways in which the meaning of his photographs responds to both Cold War and post‐Cold War contexts.     

George Shiras and the Circulation of Wildlife Photography

This article examines the circulation of George Shiras 3rd's Midnight Series of deer photographs. The photographs were taken in 1896 as part of Shiras's experiments with night‐time flash photography and were part of the North American practice of camera hunting. The article traces the photograph's circulation from their display at the 1900 Paris Exposition through their publication in National Geographic Magazine. It argues that the meaning of the images shifted as the moved through these different contexts, ultimately helping to frame the genre of wildlife photography.     

Citizen Photography in Fouad Elkoury’s Beyrouth Aller-Retour

This article examines Fouad Elkoury’s Beyrouth aller-retour[Beirut round-trip] (1984), a collection of black-and-white photographs taken during the civil war in Lebanon. Contrary to the images of death and destruction that circulated in the international media at the time, Elkoury’s photographs of Beirut focus on the survival of the inhabitants of a city in which “the future was always in the conditional.” The article argues that the images in Beyrouth aller-retour instantiate a set of civic relations that are otherwise foreclosed by urban warfare and the dominant news media representations that are complicit with its violence. As is shown, Elkoury’s unconventional take on street photography offers a space in which citizens appear in public, come before each other, and enter into forms of civic dialogue by means of images. This essay builds on recent theorizations of photography as a public art through which subjects exercise citizenship and negotiate the terms of collective life.     

A new scheme for ID‐based cryptosystems and signatures

Abstract

This paper proposes a new ID‐based cryptographic scheme for implementing public‐key cryptosystems and signatures. Instead of generating and publishing a public key for each user, the ID‐based scheme permits each user to choose his name or network address as his public key. This eliminates the need of a large public‐file and the exchange of private or public keys. The major advantage of the ID‐based cryptosystems is that the number of users can be exteneded to t*L users without decreasing the system security when users conspire, where L is the number of the system's secrets and t is the number of factors in p ‐ 1.     

Weegee's Jewishness

A New York photojournalist who specialised in scenes of crime and disaster, Weegee also made photographs reflecting his Jewish heritage, among them being pictures focusing upon assimilation, social justice and anti-Semitism. By discussing a number of such photographs, many of them published in Weegee's first books, Naked City (1945) and Weegee's People (1946), this article describes how the photographer's religiocultural inheritance influenced his imagery. At the same time, the article provides a model for future analyses of how Jewish descent affected the work of other influential Jewish-American photographers.     

Strand's world

Abstract

Paul Strand's photographs are always a pleasure to look at, just as Calvin Tompkins' writing is always a pleasure to read. Aperture, the sine qua non of American photographic book publishing, has recently brought out yet another volume of Strand's photographs, this time pairing them with a critical essay by Calvin Tompkins and adding what is perhaps the most interesting element of all, a section entitled, ‘excerpts from correspondence, interviews and other documents’. The book is a stunning contribution to photographic literature. The pictures themselves are beautifully and faithfully reproduced. Tompkins' interpretive historical essay, altered very little from its first appearance in The New Yorker (16th September 1974), is graceful and informative. The book is executed with the high degree of taste associated with Aperture, thoroughly befitting the intelligence of Strand's photographs. By publishing more pages on Strand than on any other photographer, Aperture had made its own contribution to the Strand legend. This includes the recent, charming article by Catherine Duncan (‘The Garden: Vines and Leaves’, in Aperture, No. 78) and, of course, the monumental two-volume catalogue (also issued in a single volume version) which served as an accompaniment to the Strand retrospective exhibition organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1971.     

The Dysfunctional Leica

Abstract

Winding up the estate of somebody is a sad task, only sustained by the hope of unexpected finds or definitive proof of one's preconceived opinions. There is no difference in this between one's own grandmother and a contemporary like Lucia Moholy. While executing this task I naturally came across various documents that shifted my vague assumptions about this versatile woman in different directions. I saw photographs from her private life that enlightened me about her social relations but, in the end, I was disappointed at not havlng been able to get closer to a person I thought I knew quite well, even if from a certain distance.¹     

The Gernsheim Collection

This article focuses on the photographs of public sculptures used on belle époque picture postcards of Brussels. The subject is approached from two perspectives. Firstly, we analyse the conventions of in situ photography of public sculpture in light of the genre’s reliance on painterly and photographic traditions, as well as its adoption of visual strategies derived from amateur and snapshot photography. Secondly, we explore the role of the photographic mise-en-scène of picture postcards in constructing an ideological as well as visual perspective on public monuments and the cityscape. The in situ photography of urban statues for picture postcards can be regarded as a photographic genre at the intersection of documentary art reproduction practices and amateur photography of the city. Moreover, the picture postcards discussed in this essay confirm and propagate dominant discourses on the monument and the cityscape, even if at the same time such visions were challenged. In the case of Brussels, the postcards demonstrate a preference for a monumental, impressive cityscape, worthy of representing the Belgian nation and capable of legitimising it through views of sculpture as a grand art, serving the worship of grands hommes.     

Lost Somewhere in the Mountains: Wilhelm Angerer and Austrian Heimat Photography

This article examines the Austrian Homeland or Heimat movement through an investigation of Wilhelm Angerer's 1942 book of poems and photographs, A Song Sweeps Down from the Mountains (Ein Lied rauscht von den Bergen). The multifaceted, widespread regionalist or homeland movement infiltrated all areas of visual culture, from tourist postcards and popular films to high‐quality picture books and exhibition prints. In considering the book by Angerer, this article highlights an intersection of modernity with tradition, defined in terms of a popular visual culture that formed a distinct and complex concept of the Austrian Heimat.     

Sadakichi artmann,essayist and critic

Abstract

During the last two years of his life, Ralph Eugene Meatyard assembled a series of photographs into a book titled The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater. The album's main subject is his wife Madelyn Meat yard who wore one mask for the title role of Lucybelle Crater, and appeared in sixtyfour photographs accompanied in each by a different person wearing one other mask. Madelyn Meat yard's mask, an opaque representation of a grotesque hag, is described as resembling ‘Mammy Yokum from Outer Space’.¹ The other mask is transformed by its wearer, for it is a translucent representation of an androgynous older person. Only two images are titled, and the real names of the masked people are revealed in a listing at the end of the book.     

Walker Evans' American Photographs

Abstract

It is an article of faith among photographers and scholars that Walker Evans' American Photographs is a sequence of pictures rather than a simple collection or anthology; that is to say that the photographs should be looked at in the order in which they are given. Indeed the book is often spoken of as innovative and influential in precisely that respect (among others). Some years ago I set out to learn more about the origin of Evans' sequence in the context of a broader investigation of American Photographs.¹ That study (which remained unpublished) has now been superseded in many ways by Alan Trachtenberg's insightful discussion in the book Reading American Photographs, which appeared in 1989.² Nevertheless some of my original material remains useful and I offer it here largely intact, with only a small number of revisions and additions.     

Female Spectatorship and the Masquerade: Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills

Since the late 1970s Cindy Sherman has been one of the most prominent artists in the USA. She is a cult figure because of her chameleon-like masquerade in a female imagery reminiscent of American and European cinema and western art. Her dramatic metamorphosis began with Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980), in which she acted out a variety of female roles from Hollywood and European movies. In the early 1980s she gradually transformed her image into horrific monsters and decaying matter. In the late 1980s Sherman assumed different male and female personas based on old master paintings. Since then, the subject matter of her pictures has increasingly been taken up by hybrid dolls with surreal or grotesque connotations. This paper attempts to venture back into the terrain of Untitled Film Stills that inaugurated Sherman's artistic career. This series of photographs has become one of the most prominent landmarks of feminist/postmodern art. I will propose a new interpretation against the grain of the established feminist readings of these photographs.     

F. Holland day

Abstract

Research Into F. Holland Day's æuvre has begun to provide a framework for interpreting the content found in his photographs, and the host of literary, artistic, and spiritual sources that often seem to have informed has aesthetic decision making. For while Day's work is here considered in the context of photographic history, he is no less part of the intricate network of writers, poets, artists, and socialites whose often controversial expression comprise the fin de siècle that ruptured Brahmin society in Boston. Incited by Estelle Jussim's resistance to discussing either homosexuahty or the homoerotic content manifest in Day's Images of the male nude (figure 1; see also figure 14, Curtis, ‘F. Holland Day: The Poetry of Photography’, in this issue.), scholars have been vigorously asserting the centrality of these issues as a means for understanding Day's life and career.¹ While it is evident that many of his photographs of the male nude possess a casual relationship to the profusion of gay male erotica circulating in both England and the United States, the issues that may explicate the sexual ambiguities of male-male relationships during this period are far more complex than what has emerged 10 the literature on Day.² It can be said, moreover, that the male nude photographs by Day have received disporportionate attention from scholars, and thus have suppressed discussions about the diversity of his repertoire, and the important role that other images play in the photographer's æuvre.     

Lorene Squire’s Psychical Landscapes of Colonial/Modern Gender in the Canadian North

From 1937 to 1939, Lorene Squire was commissioned by The Beaver (the company magazine of the Hudson’s Bay Company) and Canadian Airways to produce photographs of the Canadian North suitable for their publications, focused on her specialisation in wildfowl photography, as well as landscapes, planes, and people. This article focuses on her 1938 commissions, and in particular two photographs of Indigenous women and two self-portraits. When these photographs are considered alongside photographs of white settler women, her correspondence, and her book Wildfowling With A Camera (1938), I argue that they offer insights into gender as a colonial concept (what María Lugones calls the ‘colonial/modern gender system’). I contend that the setting of the ‘North’ as a psychical landscape makes Squire’s contestations possible. Squire’s photographs resist common ways of depicting white and Indigenous women in the 1930s, but they do so in a way that is paradoxical and leaves intact the colonial/modern gender system. In addition to providing biographical information about Squire, this article contributes to theoretical and historical scholarship on the meaning of photographs of Indigenous people in Canada for projects of nation-building and northern economic development, as well as on how the North functions as a reference point for Canadian identity.     

The Album of Camille Silvy

Abstract

Camille Silvy (1834-1910), an elusive figure in the history of photography, was very successful in the brief 11 years that he produced photographs. He has been primarily known for his beautifully toned cartes-de-visite, in addition to larger images, most prominently River Scene, France. Recently, much attention has been given to this Silvy masterpiece, which has been the subject of a book and an exhibition.¹ The book, intensively researched by Mark Haworth-Booth, sheds considerable light on Silvy's life and career. One of the items that Haworth-Booth uncovered was an album or scrapbook that belonged to Silvy and now belongs to Silvy's descendants in Paris. This album served as a scrapbook or memory book and provides clues and insights into Silvy's life. It reflects his inspirations and early training, his interests, his professional accomplishments, events in his life, and his lifelong interest in documentation.     

Alfred Stieglitz's apples

Abstract

I have long been astonished by the silliness of Stieglitz's photographs of women with apples, despite the desperate attempts to suggest that somehow they prove him as American as apple pie. Coming across Erika and Fritz Kempe's Die Kunst der Camera im Jugendstil (Frankfurt: Umschau 1986), an excellent piece of pictorialist sourcehunting, I suddenly realized from Theodor and Oskar Hofmeister's ‘Apfelemte’ (1897) that Stieglitz was drawing upon a stock subject from German genre painting (see pl. 129). The inanities of O'Keeffe with a basket of apples next to her head and Engelhard awkwardly clutching apples to her body are just two attempts by Stieglitz to submit the two Georgias to generic fantasy.     

Publications Received

At the turn of the twentieth century, landscape photography began to emerge as a new way to represent nature in Korea. Landscape photographs of the Korean peninsula were printed in modern media, such as the daily newspaper Maeilsinbo, the public cultural magazine Cheongchun, and picture postcards. This article explores the photographic representation of nature in Korea in the 1910s. Landscape images of the period were rooted in the visual regime of the camera obscura, and they often borrowed techniques and themes from Korean traditional landscape painting, or sansuhwa. The photographic medium was important in shaping new perceptions, aesthetic experiences, and discourses on nature. This article examines several categories of landscape photography, including images of scenic and historical places, idyllic and bucolic scenes, and urban parks. These categories were common in Korean western-style landscape painting and art photography of the 1920s, and continue to be seen to this day in Korean visual culture.     

MINIATURE LANDSCAPES

This visual essay examines Sharqi, a collection of 27 polaroid photographs that are the result of Nicos Philippou’s decade-long photographic and theoretical investigation of Cypriot topography. The essay explores the ways in which Sharqi challenges existing photographic representations of Cyprus, produced mainly in the early-to-mid twentieth century by photographers, by travellers and by the state itself, while raising relevant questions about how: (a) Cypriot landscape photography often carries a romanticized and orientalizing gaze that attests as much to the island’s specific colonial past as to photography’s ties to imperialism, and (b) photography has often become a vehicle for perpetuating a Greek-Cypriot nationalism on the island. Finally, the essay addresses the documentary, autobiographical and self-referential nature of polaroid photography by discussing specific photographs from the Sharqi series. This article also looks at Sharqi in relation to relevant historic examples from the work of Ed Ruscha and Walker Evans.     

Jules Itier,Daguerreotypist

Abstract

Jules Itier's work with daguerreotypes is a recent discovery¹. A group of 40 examples has been acquired by the Musée de Bièvres (Essonne), and about 80 plates have been traced to a private collection. This body of work conveys the idea of travel photography as it was practised during the 1840s, although only a few examples of the genre survive². E. Lacan, a critic for La Lumière, commented at the time: ‘the application of daguerreotypy to travel offered more than one practical difficulty, and did not respond to the great need of our century, which was/or popuiarization’³. In the first place, the transportation of a considerable number of silvered plates during a long journey was cumbersome and costly and, above all, the images that were finally brought hack ⁴ were unique. It was possible to make an admirable private collection, but there was no practical way to share with the general public the fascinating views that had been captured in faraway places, often at great expense and with great effort.