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.     

Kurt Tucholsky,John Heartfield and Deutschland,Deutschland über Alles

This essay analyses Kurt Tucholsky and John Heartfield's 1929 Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles. In this ‘picture‐book’ right‐wing nationalism, the military, the democratic system, and capitalism were trenchantly criticized. This essay argues, however, that Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles is as much about the role of photography in society as it is about Weimar's political situation. The late 1920s are generally seen as a period of medium optimism in which the new photography was in the forefront. Yet a close analysis of the use of photography in Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles nuances the so‐called optimism of Weimar visual culture and its sudden disruption by the advent of fascism in the 1930s. While from the early 1910s onwards, Tucholsky had promoted the polemical power of photography, his position shifted by the end of the 1920s. An ambivalence marked Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles: on the one hand the photographic medium was used as a critical tool; on the other, the book reflects an underlying critique of and frustration with photojournalism and its association with urban modernity.     

Alfred Stieglitz

Abstract

Several recent projects devoted to Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) reveal current trends in scholarship regarding this key figure in twentiethcentury cultural history. Two new publications focus primarily upon the myriad significant contributions he made to the ali and culture of the United States. For the historian of photography, these works offer useful insights conceming the intellectual and altistic climate that informed Stieglitz, md which can be productively applied to discussions of his photographic oeuvre. Venturing off the printed page, a documentary film revisits the Stieglitz biography and lauds his photography as one of the major artistic achievements of the twentieth century. Those looking for a comprehensive assessment of Alfred Stieglitz's endeavours as a photographer, however, will have to wait a little longer. The National Gallery of Art in Washington intends to publish a major catalogue, Stieglitz, in 2002, in conjunction with an exhibition featuring a selection of Stieglitz's photographs drawn from their collection. I await this publication with great anticipation. Meanwhile, the National Gallery has developed an innovative website that previews their undertaking.     

Michael Fried's Modernist Theory of Photography

This essay critically analyses Michael Fried's book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. It examines the relevance of Fried's categories of absorption and theatricality to contemporary photography and his assumption that photography is an inherently modernist art. In his book Fried explains the shift to large-scale colour photographs in the 1980s as signalling a return to problems of beholding, which dominated painting since the 1750s and 1760s. In contrast, this essay argues that this shift reveals the importance of the legacy of conceptualism and minimalism to recent photography and, in particular, the role of the conceptual ‘document’ within contemporary artistic practices.     

Edward Linley Sambourne (1844–1910)

Abstract

Edward Linley Sam bourne worked as a Punch cartoonist from 1867 until his death in 1910.¹ Beginning his 43-year association with the magazine as a freelance contributor he then joined the permanent staff in 1871 as Cartoon Junior (to Tenniel who was Cartoonist-in-Chief). His rise through the Punch ranks meant a commensurate increase in his workload and, because of this, he took up photography in the early 1880s to assist his productivity and to satisfy his demand for accuracy. Sometimes Sam bourne copied the entire photograph, occasionally he even traced it; or else he used elements of a photograph or several photographs to construct the picture for the final drawing. Gradually, Sam bourne the Cartoonist became Sambourne the Photographer as his interest in drawing was supplanted by a fascination with photography; he developed an enthusiasm for the medium in an amateur way, joining the Camera Club in April 1893 and slowly amassing an enormous archive comprising some 30,000 images. To follow Sambourne's development as a photographer involves looking at how and why he used photography, and what his private as well as his public attitude was towards the medium.     

The Reception of Albert Renger-Patzsch's Die Welt ist schön

Abstract

No history of photography or publication on the photography of the 1920s fails to mention the photo-book Die Welt ist schön. Regarded as a ‘manifesto of the revival of Realism,’¹ and hailed as the ‘bible’ of Neue Sachlichkeit photography,² ‘hardly any other book has influenced a generation of photographers to the same great extent and with such long-lasting effects as this volume‘.³ It was the book's tide in particular that was received like a catchword and influenced the reception of this photographic volume: ‘The tide became symbolic for an attitude of Neue Sachlichkeit to the world and the book was acknowledged as the ideal volume of Neue Sachlichkeit photography’.⁴ Hitherto in the history of the book's reception, this opinion has been restricted primarily to the reference to Walter Benjamin's well-known negative critique of 1931.⁵ Amongst the multitude of reviews of Die Welt ist schon, it is Benjamin's assessment which is most frequendy cited in the literature. That Benjamin was able to neglect explicidy mentioning Renger-Patzsch's name and to refer merely to the tide of the book can be interpreted as proof of the great fame of this photographic author. In fact, Die Welt ist schön had by this time been reviewed in nearly all leading cultural magazines and daily newspapers and evaluated as an exemplary volume of a modem, neusachliche photography. For critics such as Benjamin, however, the tide was synonymous with a new, sterile ‘l’art pour l'art' photography which manipulated reality and denied social contexts. But to confine negative criticism of Die Welt ist schön to the political left and its praise to a more conservative attitude is too simple a model as becomes apparent when all of the reviews are taken into consideration. Karl With's attempt to summarize the contradictions of this picture book may be cited here: ‘Ein seltsames Buch!} (A strange book!). Exciting in its busding abundance, as well as in its silence’.⁶     

Still Supplementation: Stan Douglas's Cuba Photographs

Focusing closely on the incorporation of photographs into Stan Douglas's media installations, this essay argues that the relationship between photography and film in his work is more complex than critics have acknowledged. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's concept of the ‘supplement’ as a necessary addition, both inside and outside specific forms, it contends that Douglas's use of photography is an integral part of his film works and installations and functions to foreground stillness as a theme. In doing so, the Cuba Photos undermine the seeming finality of still images and ironically reveal the end of faith in historical progress. While scholarship on circulation, following John Tagg's pioneering research, has emphasised Michel Foucault's concern with the historical construction of ideological meaning, the supplement in Douglas's work invites us to interrogate the very category of history by foregrounding the notion of re‐construction. Approaching the relationship between photography and film in terms of the supplement offers a provocative way of understanding the significance of photographic circulation.     

Camouflage and the Half-Hidden History of Max Dupain in War

Max Dupain is Australia's best-known modernist photographer. The least-known period of his working life is the Second World War, when he joined many other Australian artists and served as a camouflage officer for the Department of Home Security, attached to the Royal Australian Airforce. Dupain was trained in aerial photography. He camouflaged airbases in New South Wales and photographed camouflage experiments from the air. When the war moved into the SW Pacific region, Dupain was sent to Goodenough Island in Papua to work alongside Americans. This article addresses the emotional impact of the war on Dupain and contrasts the depersonalised, abstracted aesthetics of functional aerial camouflage photography with The New Guinea Series, a portfolio of documentary photographs of people and landscapes on the islands of New Guinea and Papua. Dupain's war service left him troubled and searching for greater truth through photography. I argue that The New Guinea Series, which was completed independently of Dupain's official employment as a camoufleur, communicates his sharpened awareness of the importance of embodiment as a moral approach to the world. I propose that the New Guinea Series acted as a humanist antidote to the dehumanisation that Dupain experienced through the abstractions of aerial photography.     

Ara Güler's Photography of ‘Old Istanbul’ and Cosmopolitan Nostalgia

Based on Ara Güler's photographs of Istanbul, this paper explores the relationship between nostalgia and photography in the city. Most of Güler's best known photographs were taken in the 1950s and 1960s while he was working as a photojournalist for the print press. The re-coding of a selection of his black and white images since the 1990s as art photography and in the pursuit of recalling ‘Old Istanbul’ as a cosmopolitan city presents a revealing case. Güler's recruitment as a photojournalist in the 1950s was a result of the expansion and modernisation of the city's print press, which itself was a response to dramatic transformations in the city, such as massive rural-to-urban migration and urban renewal and expansion. Güler's pictures from this era are typically of the urban poor and working classes. Focusing on two journalistic narratives co-produced by Güler – one in 1959 for the illustrated journal Hayat, and the other in 1969 for the daily Ak?am – this paper asks why and how only images from the latter circulate today. It argues that contemporary urban discourses influence how we interpret these old photographs now.     

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.     

‘Swiping … and Daguerreotyping’: Photographing Golf at St Andrews

Abstract

When photography was invented, St Andrews was already a very old town, littered with the remains of a glorious and turbulent his tory: notably the skeletons of a once magnificent cathedral and a large Augustinian priory and a ruined castle, horne of the former bishops and archbishops. Zealous reformers had helped reduce these great symbols of medieval Scotland's archiepiscopal see, which were now picturesque ruins, ideal for recording in the new medium of photography. However, St Andrews in the nineteenth century was more than just ‘that Reformation bombsite’.1 This rather apt phrase was used recently by Les Murray in his poem, St Andrews University AD 2000, one of ten poems specially commissioned to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Fergusson, poet, former St Andrews student and inspiration to Robert Burns. It had a small, sleepy university, with old college buildings nestling among the town's commercial and private properties. But also it had something else alive and stirring in the western end of the town — its famous 'Old' golf course. Around the time the first St Andrews photographs were being made, George Fullerton Carnegie penned the following lines in his Golfiana: Address to St Andrews:     

Early Photographs of Albania and Macedonia by Josef Székely

Abstract

Fifty photographs of Albania and Macedonia, taken in 1863 by Dr Josef Szekely, a 25-year-old chemist and photographer from Vienna, are important for their early date, their subject matter and their quality. They deserve attention also because of their novelty. Until now, these photographs have been unknown even to students of Albanian photography.¹ Székely's photographs include the first pictures ever taken in Albania and among the earliest known of Macedonia. Two 1864 photographs of the northern Albanian city of Shkodra have been called the first pictures taken in Albania,² but Székely took eight photographs there no later than September 1863, and by mid-October he had also photographed the Albanian towns of Prizren, Dibra and Ochrid. For historians of 144 ISSN 0308-7298 © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd. photography, as well as for historians of the Ottoman Balkans, Szekely's cityscapes, landscapes and portraits are a valuable and unknown resource.     

The Aesthetics of Politics in the Hungarian Photobook From Our Lives

Lajos Kassák is best known outside of Hungary for his commitment to international dialogue among the avant‐gardes of the late 1910s and early twenties, as exemplified by his periodical Today (Ma). Within Hungary, however, he is also recognized for his politically driven activities during the late twenties and early thirties, and specifically, for his role in organizing and promoting the leftist activities of the Work Circle (Munka Kör). The present essay challenges this traditional characterization of Kassák's career trajectory. A careful investigation of the paragon Work Circle project – the photobook From Our Lives (A Mi Életünkbo?l) – demonstrates that Kassák's sustained interest and commitment are neither to purely aesthetic nor to purely political goals, but rather, to the very notion of art's aesthetic potential for political impact. Once we recognize that From Our Lives is a pedagogic project, we can properly understand its impact on the Hungarian worker photography movement: it was essentially an instruction manual for artists on how to construct a socially conscious image. As such, it should be distinguished from other more political works which did indeed serve as showcases for exemplary worker photographs – and even from the explicitly political messages presented in the eponymous exhibitions with which the Work Circle photobook is often mistakenly conflated. The broader applicability and implications for this sort of pedagogic analysis of a work's form and function are discussed.     

Between the wars

Abstract

During the 1930s the Julien Levy Gallery was the liveliest photographic centre in New York City. It opened in 1931, and it was Levy's plan to show photographs along with paintings and drawings and other works of art. It was at his Madison Avenue gallery that New Yorkers first saw the photographs of Atget that Berenice Abbott acquired shortly after the photographer's death, together with Julien Levy, who advanced the purchase funds. It was also there that Walker Evans had his first one-man show, and where Henri Cartier-Bresson was introduced to the American public. Through his series of exhibitions the New York public came to know the work of the avant garde in photography. Indeed, without Julien's pioneering work, the exhibition which the present reviewer organized for The Museum of Modern Art in 1937 would have been the poorer. Julien Levy has never received the recognition he deserves. Now, upon the occasion of receiving the Julien Levy Collection, partly as a gift, partly on extended loan, the Art Institute of Chicago has remedied the situation by publishing this modest but well illustrated and meticulously documented catalogue. Produced by David Travis, the museum's Associate Curator of Photography, it is, without question, the most important scholarly publication on the history of art photography between World Wars I and II. Not only does the book recreate the excitement of the discovery by Julien and his friends that photography was indeed a part of 'modern art', but it contains a wealth of information. Moreover, of the 58 photographs that are reproduced, three-quarters have not been previously published. They were made by 32 photographers. It is well to name them, for 15 have been almost entirely forgotten today. They were: Berenice Abbott, Manuel Alvarez-Bravo, Eugene Atget, Use Bing, Brassai:, Anton Bruehl, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans, Walter Hege, Gertrude Kasebier, Andre Kertesz, Clarence John Laughlin, Alice Lex-Nerlinger, Eli Lotar, George platt Lynes, Lee Miller, Lucia Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Nadar, Oscar Nerlinger, Paul Outerbridge Jr, Roger Parry, Man Ray, Sherril V. Schell, Charles Sheeler, Emmanuel Sougez, Ralph Steiner, Paul Strand, Maurice Tabard, Umbo (Otto Umbehr), and Clarence H. White.     

Eduard Steichen and Maurice Maeterlinck

Abstract

Eduard Steichen (1879-1973) met the Belgian Symbolist writer Maurice Maeterlinck in 1901, when Steichen was in Europe. Steichen's goal there was to photograph painters and writers whom he personally admired,¹ including Maeterlinck whom Steichen photographed in 1901. Maeterlinck attended Steichen's first one-man exhibition at Maison des Artistes in 1902 and looked favourably on the young artist's work. Maeterlinck and Steichen discussed photography at the time. Steichen thought that Maeterlinck's comments were ‘more considered than any [he] had heard before’ and ‘wondered whether he would put down some of his thoughts’² to be included with reproductions of Steichen's photographs in Camera Work. Steichen felt emphatically that his best photographs should be reproduced with Maeterlinck's statement, and he told Alfred Stieglitz as much.³ The connection between Maeterlinck and Steichen has not gone unnoticed     

Pro Pelle Cutem: Photographing Furs for the Hudson’s Bay Company’s 250th Anniversary Celebrations in Canada

In 1920, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) celebrated its 250^th anniversary through national and international events, as well as honours and benefits for its employees. The year 1920 was an important moment for the HBC, as it underwent institutional change to support the expansion of its department store operations through public relations and advertising strategies. Central to these strategies was an emphasis on the HBC’s central role in Canadian nation formation, and in particular its fur trade history. This article discusses the use of photography in the HBC’s 250^th anniversary celebrations through an analysis of photographs of fur. I trace photographic representations of fur through three moments: in the process of extraction (as trapped animal or dead pelt); in the process of preparation (as Indigenous bush labour); and in the process of consumption (as fur goods in a department store window). While the fur trade was declining in significance at the time of the 250^th anniversary celebrations, its symbolic status was essential to the Company’s burgeoning retail operations. In this article, I argue that the photograph of fur replaced the fur pelt as the central trade item of the HBC, and, further, that photography fused together nationalist and capitalist expansion in Canada.     

The Reception and Sources of Berenice Abbott's Paris Portrait Style, 1925–1929

This study focuses on the photographs that first brought Berenice Abbott critical acclaim: her Paris portraits from the late 1920s. As a body of work, these images – along with what Abbott had to say about them and the critical attention they generated at the time – provide a rich resource for the study of three interconnected topics: the avant-garde critical climate of Europe in the late 1920s, the American expatriate experience in Paris during this same time and Abbott's nascent photographic values and aesthetic, which helped to inform not only her portraits but also her later, better-known photographs of New York City. The paper first defines the divergent critical responses to Abbott's portrait work in the late 1920s – focusing especially on the published criticism by Florent Fels and Pierre Mac Orlan that helped to secure Abbott's international reputation as a leading modern photographer. It then turns to Abbott's expatriate experience in order to examine the ideas and individuals that she identified as most important to her photographic practice. Specifically the paper explains Abbott's desire to create an alternative approach to photography from the one used by Man Ray, her awareness of the classical style associated with Pablo Picasso and her admiration for the aesthetic theories of Leo Stein.     

Between orientalist clichés and images of modernization

Abstract

In contemporary writing about nineteenth-century photography of the Middle East it has become almost a cliche to describe many of these images as ‘Orientalist’-that is, reflecting or propagating a system of representation that creates an essentialized difference between the ‘Orient’ and the ‘West’. Most of these scholars draw on Edward Said's influential book Orientalism, which traces how Europe manufactured an imaginary Orient through literary works and the social sciences.¹ For example, Nissan N. Perez writes in his book Focus East: Early Photography in the Near East (1839–1885) that ‘Literature, painting, and photography fit the real Orient into the imaginary or mental mold existing in the Westerner's mind .... These attitudes are mirrored in many of the photographs taken during this time [the nineteenth century] ... Either staged or carefully selected from a large array of possibilities, they became living visual documents to prove an imaginary reality’. ²     

Photography at the Threshold: Atget,Benjamin and Surrealism

This paper re-evaluates the association between Eugène Atget and Surrealism by means of a reading of several essays by Walter Benjamin written during the 1920s and 1930s. The well known but brief moment of surrealist reception of Atget was superseded when later and more influential writers viewed him instead as an important forerunner of documentary photography. To this end, surrealist meanings and values became occluded by various writers, while the poetic or ‘aesthetic’ features of the photographs were marginalised. I want to suggest that the oneiric qualities of Atget's work should not be ignored or opposed to documentary or materialist readings – rather, it is the peculiar suspension of documentary and aesthetic modes that characterises his work and locates it in a particular historical moment. In forging this argument I enlist Benjamin, who made Atget a key figure in his discussion of the surrealist aesthetic and for whom the political force of Surrealism lies in its simultaneous intensification and overcoming of conceptual, spatial and temporal boundaries. It is argued that Benjamin's surrealist reading of Atget illuminates the way in which Atget's photographs thematise the transformation of aesthetic and social space, destabilising the fixed categories of photographic realism and art.