Ermakov album

Abstract

When I first met Henry Ries in his home in Manhattan in the mid-1980s, I was struck by his generosity in telling me about his career. Born in 1917 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf in an assimilated Jewish family, Henry (born Heinz) Ries left for New York on 13 January 1938. Initially, he found employment in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he taught photography at the Jewish community centre and could use their laboratory for his own work. He tried to enlist in the United States Army in December 1941, but this was not possible, since he was an 'enemy alien' and a recent emigrant without American citizenship. In May 1943, he joined the Army Air Corps and received American citizenship. Initially posted to the Pacific theatre, making aerial photographs of China for the 20th Bomber Command, he subsequently transferred to the European theatre, arriving in London in late May 1945. Assigned to the ‘Office Director of Intelligence’, his first job was to evaluate Heinrich Himmler's ‘secret state library’ correspondence with the SS, Hitler, Goebbels, Goring, and others, which was later utilized in the Nuremberg Medical Trial. Three months later, Ries was transferred to Berlin.     

The Photography of Roman Freulich from Poland to Hollywood

Professional contributions and technical innovations of photographer Roman Freulich to the Hollywood film industry are contextualised regarding the heritage of his life experiences in Czenstochowa, Poland, New York and Los Angeles. The remarkable output of Freulich's independent work, consisting of film projects that ventured far beyond the relative professional shelter provided by his popular glamour shots, emerges in the present study. Freulich sought to give voice to the voiceless as evidenced in his self-produced film Broken Earth (1936) – the first film to feature a black actor in a starring role – as well as his collaborations with the actor Paul Robeson. Freulich's immigration to America and the loss of his family members who remained in Poland are two legacies that distinguished Freulich from his fellow cameramen. Freulich both achieved a fruitful Hollywood career as a photographer of contract players – aided by his early use of the 35 mm camera – and authored a narrative of Joseph Trumpeldor, founder of the Jewish Legion. A survivor of the Holocaust, Freulich did more than preserve these dual identities; his lasting achievement lies in the incorporation of a veteran's sensitivity toward war in cinematic works that expanded early principles of still and moving image photography. Perspective by Freulich's family members is presented in original form, illuminating chronological events in the life of a pioneering photographer, writer and soldier.     

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.     

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.     

Photography at the Institute of Design

Abstract

In 1937, László Moholy-Nagy planted the Bauhaus seed, a hybrid of art and mass production, in the soil of the American Midwest. The New Bauhaus in Chicago only survived a year, but its successor, first called the School of Design and then the Institute of Design (ID), would be an influential centre of photographic experimentation for the next thirty-five years. Taken by Design: Photographs from the Institute of Design, 1937–1971 traces the tumultuous history of the school's small but seminal photography programme, the work of its major instructors, and their combined influence on photography in the USA. The essays in this handsome catalogue tell the story of how the ID approach evolved, from Moholy's formalist view of photography as one of the design arts, into the arrival of the medium as an art form in its own right under Hany Callahan, Aaron Siskind and Arthur Siege!. Published to accompany David Travis and Elizabeth Siegel's exhibition of the same title for the Art Institute of Chicago, the book is the first comprehensive documentation of the vital contribution of the Institute of Design to the history of photography.     

An album of seascapes by Gustave Le Gray

Abstract

In 1856 Ernest Lacan, a journalist and early critic in the field of photography, advanced a prediction which only recently has been confirmed, that Gustave Le Gray (1820–c. 1882) ‘s'est fait un nom qui restera dans l'histoire des progrès de la photographie’¹. There is little doubt that in the 1850s Le Gray was considered at least the equal of contemporary luminaries such as Nadar, owing to the following activities and accolades: his highly advanced technical experiments, discoveries and improvements; his several treatises and short notes in journals which dealt with such; his extensive and consistent exhibition record which was accompanied by almost exclusively positive and enthusiastic reviews; persistent application of and investigation into nearly every photographic technique and iconographic theme popular at the time; his informal or professional training of photographers of note such as Henri Le Secq, Charles Nègre, Charles Marville, Maxime Du Camp, Roger Fenton, and Adrien Tournachon; and the ultimate approbation, the grant to him in c. 1858–1859 of the title ‘Photographe de S. M. L'Empereur’. Accordingly, one finds in the histories and photographic journals of his day repeated references to the exceptional quality of Le Gray's prints and the widespread influence of his writings and instruction. Nadar, in his Quand j'étais photographe of c. 1900, included extensive remarks relating to Le Gray's personal life and photographic career, but because of a span of 40 or more years between original events and recollections, Nadar's account of his subject's endeavours is at best superficial, and tends to emphasize anecdote as opposed to factual history. Short treatments dealing primarily with the technical aspects of Le Gray's photography do appear in most 20th-century surveys (Freund, Lécuyer, Gernsheim, Newhall, etc.), but neither these brief synopses nor Nadar's reminiscences constitute what may even faintly be construed as a serious attempt at a reconstruction of the photographer's career and accomplishments2 For essentially revisional biographical information concerning Le Gray, see the author's dissertation¹, especially pp. 1–20, 41–42, 52–53, and 63–47. . In recent years, however, photographic historians, art historians, and to some extent the general public, have witnessed a renaissance of interest in Le Gray's life and works, a revival which has led to more detailed and accurate textual inforinntion, and the attendant availability of a wider range of examples of his works and writings³. It therefore seems propitious to add to this rapidly expanding corpus of Le Gray studies an intensive discussion of what may well be the photographer's most distinguished technical and aesthetic achievement, the Vistas del Mar album of scascapes, here dated c. 1857–1859, now housed in the Art Institute of Chicago.     

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.     

Oliver Wendell Holmes as an amateur photographer

Abstract

On 6th July 1862, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a letter to Coleman Sellers, thanking him for some photographs received and excusing his own negligence in writing. His eldest son, missing in action in Richmond, commanded all his attention, but then Holmes added: ‘If it were not for this war, I should begin getting photographic apparatus tomorrow. If peace ever returns I feel sure I shall try my hand at the art and then I shall be only too happy to send you some of my handiwork in return for the many favors I have received from you’¹. The letter catches Holmes at an interesting point in his life. Always intrigued by photography and well known among his friends as a popularizer of it, he was finally thinking of turning theory into practice.     

Henri Cartier‐Bresson Reinterprets his Career

Between 1952 and 1974, Henri Cartier‐Bresson significantly revised his understanding of himself as a photojournalist. This article analyses that change through close readings of his book, The Decisive Moment (1952), an interview in Le Monde (1974), and other published statements and unpublished letters by Cartier‐Bresson. It draws on interviews and correspondence with his widow Martine Franck, with his friend and representative Helen Wright, and with associates at Magnum Photos. It argues that what appears from a superficial reading of the interview to be a rejection of photography and photojournalism was in fact Cartier‐Bresson's first public expression of a long‐simmering opposition to the consumer society – which he as an ecologist strongly opposed – and to fashion and advertising photography, which he believed promoted unnecessary consumption. It concludes that Cartier‐Bresson reinterpreted his past by seeing himself as a surrealist to the denial of having done photojournalism. The article is predicated on the belief that understanding the change in Cartier‐Bresson's own conception of his work is essential to a full understanding of it.     

British Nature Photographers in Wild Life

This article concerns the work of a group of British wildlife photographers just prior to World War I. A photographic exhibition in 1912 by members of the Zoological Photographic Club led to the publication of Wild Life: An Illustrated Monthly, edited by Douglas English. Wild Life was published between 1913 and 1918, and, especially in the pre‐war issues, it achieved an impressive standard of reproduction of natural history photography. Mammals and birds were pictured in their natural habitats; hitherto most wildlife pictures had been taken in Zoos, where the subjects were shown out of context. The editor of Wild Life believed that nature‐photographers should have an opportunity to mitigate or correct artistic defects in their negatives. I argue that it is a wildlife photograph's consideration of content and context that determines its artistic merit.     

War by Photography: Shooting Japanese in Australia’s Pacific War

Characterised by their determination to get close to the action, the Australian combat cameramen of the Second World War made a significant contribution to the evolution of the war photographer into the dynamic figure familiar today. This is especially true of their intimate documentation of the vicious encounter with the Japanese in New Guinea and other islands of the Southwest Pacific, which went beyond professional bravery. A large corps of official photographers shooting for both government and military agencies expressed the racial ideology of a war fought against an opponent who was increasingly loathed as the war progressed. Their pictures of Australian triumphs over the Japanese, including graphic and often deliberately demeaning pictures of dead and captured enemy, reflected the exigencies of wartime propaganda. But they also expanded on a frame of cultural reference derived from decades of anxiety about the threat of invasion by Japan, and reveal an abiding national view of the battlefield as the definitive arena for a contest of rival masculinities. Australia’s war in the Pacific has attracted increasing scholarly and popular attention in recent years. However, the enormous archive of official photographs has been largely ignored, except as a source of illustrative material. This article argues that the archive needs to be read as a collective text in its own right, for the significant insight it provides into Australian cultural as well as military and geopolitical insecurities.     

Lewis Carroll

Abstract

There tend to be two classes of polymaths: those whose breadth of talent and contribution is uniformly recognized and acclaimed; and those for whom one achievement or area of achievement is of such fame that it overshadows or occludes all other, less celebrated, efforts. If the former category includes such individuals as Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Jefferson, the latter certainly for tht' past century has encompassed the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known under his literaly pseudonym Lewis Carroll. Carroll scholarship to date has been predominantly driven by the popularity of his Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass and other children's texts, to the extent that his accomplishments in other fields have been viewed as minor sidelines. This is particularly true in the case of photography, a pastime that occupied as much, if not more, of Dodgson's efforts as literature, and that resulted in an extensive and remarkable oeuvre on par with the greatest practitioners of his time.     

From Studio to Street: The Urban Photography of Man Ray

Dada and Surrealist photographer Man Ray is rarely associated with street photography, a genre popular with artists and writers of the 1920s and 1930s. Yet his work demonstrates a closer connection to this area than has previously been acknowledged. From the early Dada constructions to the later photographic depictions of Paris and New York, the city played a crucial role in Man Ray's artistic output. This essay explores Man Ray's urban photography not as an uncharacteristic shift of concerns, as some critics have argued, but rather as an extension of the aesthetic approach taken in his more famous studio-based works. It explores the influence of Eugène Atget, whom Man Ray claimed to have ‘discovered’, and argues that the latter draws on the older photographer's compositional structures, pushing them into more abstract, formalist territory.     

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.     

Amateur Photography in the Nineteenth-Century Jewish Diaspora: The Colonial,National, and Transnational Aspects of a Montefiore Family Album

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Montefiores were an international Jewish family including prominent bankers, insurers, and merchants. Four brothers of the family were also leading members of the amateur photography movement in Britain, Belgium, France, and Australia. An album containing photography now in the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, but made by Eliezer Levi Montefiore in the Colony of Victoria, reveals aspects of his family’s identity. The album reflects their role in the British colonisation of Australia, as well as their interest in the development of Australian national identity. The enthusiasm for photography manifest in the album was shared by the brothers across national borders, and so also reflects their transnational, diasporic experience. Furthermore, the album represents aspects of the family’s class and gender identities, and functioned as a kind of visual primer for its recipient, Eliezer’s young daughter, Caroline.     

Leah King-Smith and the Nineteenth-century Archive

Abstract

In postmodern criticism the camera has often been seen as an apparatus of control, one of the surveillance mechanisms of the state, in the service of its institutions and immersed in its technologies of power. The metaphor of the camera as a weapon, as analysed by Susan Sontag in the early 1970s, describes an unbalanced and non-reciprocal relationship between photographer and subject.¹ One is the hunter, the other the prey; one is the agent, the other the victim. This theoretical paradigm was consolidated in the 1980s when structuralist critics started to analyse nineteenth-century photographic archives held in libraries, institutions and museums.² Much of this criticism followed the work of Michel Foucault who used Jeremy Bentham's model of the Panopticon to analyse the controlling mechanism of the gaze in modern institutions.³ I am aware that aligning Foucault with structuralism will appear problematic to some; however, the way in which some of his work has been adapted by postmodern critics of photography does underline the determinism of his theory. For a lucid analysis, see Joan Copjec, Read my Desire: Lacan against the Historicists, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1994, 1–10. For a different perspective, sympathetic to Foucault, see Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1997. Although Foucault's concept of power is productive and he admits to sites of resistance, he is pessimistic about the possibilities of such resistance.⁴ Discipline and Punish, upon which many theories of photographic surveillance are predicated, constructs disciplinary power as ‘the nonreversible subordination of one group of people by another’.⁵     

Horacio Coppola: Towards an Aesthetic Genealogy

Although a milestone in the history of Latin American photography, the work of Horacio Coppola is little known outside Argentina. His unorthodox angles and tilting frames, his attention to industrial and urban themes, and his experimentation with different lenses in the period between 1927 and 1931 were in absolute synchrony with the precepts of European New Vision and New Objectivity photography, and with American straight photography. That Coppola’s visual idiom was in tune with the latest photographic developments in interwar Europe is obvious. What remains unclear is how exactly he achieved that synchrony. Several scholars have wrestled with this question, which nevertheless remains elusive due to lack of evidence of direct contact with European photography prior to his studies at the Berlin Bauhaus in 1932 and his repeated attempts to downplay the influence contemporary photographers had on his work. The article provides a systematic study of Coppola’s aesthetic genealogy and his photographic borrowings through a critical examination of his early pictures and theoretical writings. It teases out possible direct and indirect channels of dialogue with the New Vision, New Objectivity, and straight photography in the second half of the 1920s, and probes the reasons behind Coppola’s reluctance to admit a connection with contemporary European photography in particular.     

The invention and reinvention of Martín Chambi

Abstract

Distanced by over fifty years, Latorre and Thornton offer opposing perceptions of Martin Chambi as an artist.3 This is an abbreviated version of chapter four from my doctoral dissertation, Rethinking Martín Chambi, completed in 1997 at the University of New Mexico. Roberto Latorre, writer for and editor of the intellectual journal Kosko, was an integral part of the cultural milieu of 1 920s Cusco, Peru, where Chambi lived and worked. His statement was part of a review of Chambi's exhibitions from around 1925. Gene Thornton, photography critic at the New York Times during the 1970s, judged Chambi from pictures exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1979. Both critics reflect the aesthetic sensibilities of their time and the context in which they were writing: what are we to make of such disparate interpretations of the same photographer, including the shift from Latorre's emphasis on Chambi's landscapes to Thornton's interest in his portraits? At issue is the difference between Chambi's sense of himself as an artist during his own life, and how that sense was reshaped when Chambi was rediscovered after his death in 1973.