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.     

Intelligence and Internationalism: The Cold War Career of Anton Bruun

The Danish marine biologist Anton Frederik Bruun (1901–1961) is chiefly remembered as an explorer of the deep‐sea fauna and a key figure in international scientific organizations during the 1950s. As the Cold War increasingly permeated the marine sciences and it became too expensive for small states to operate deep‐sea research vessels, he became an asset to the USA's oceanographic establishment as it sought to first assess Soviet strength (in terms of research, technology and logistical capacity) and then to build up American oceanography in response. Bruun's contacts with the USSR – including a visit in 1957 – strengthened his contacts to the American military as well as American oceanographers. His enthusiasm for raising interest in the marine sciences in developing countries could also be matched to American geopolitical goals. Bruun's participation in the Scripps Institution of Oceanography's Naga expedition to the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand captured the mutually beneficial nature of his American connections. Bruun was able to use the USA to reach distant oceans, while the USA in turn gained from Bruun's prestige as it forged connections with friendly states through science, an increasingly important arena for Cold War competition.     

The Ghost of Humanism: Rethinking the Subjective Turn in Postwar American Photography

This article examines the use of shadow, blur, graininess, and reflection in the work of the postwar photographers Robert Frank, William Klein, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard as a response to the rhetoric of Cold War containment. In contrast to the more comforting images in Edward Steichen’s popular exhibit The Family of Man, which sought to downplay Cold War anxieties, the photographs of Frank, Klein, and Meatyard challenged viewer expectation by presenting human figures in varying states of disintegration and disappearance. The term ‘subjective’ has long been used to describe a return to personal and private concerns during the postwar years, but discussion has focused mainly on the subjectivity of the artist rather than the viewer. By challenging the sanctity of the human figure, Frank, Klein, and Meatyard force viewers to confront such difficult images and, in the process, re-examine the fears and anxieties that lay dormant during the tense years of the early Cold War.     

Picturing Burma: Felice Beato's Photographs of Burma 1886–1905

This article examines the career of the photographer Felice Beato in Burma from 1886 to 1905. It examines, on one level, his photographic business in Burma through a consideration of his portfolio and his business practices. On a more important level, it examines Beato's representation of Burma through visual and contextual analysis of his photographs of the Burmese people. It discusses this topic in the context of Beato's entire photographic career, his non‐photographic preoccupations, and nineteenth‐century commercial photographic production and consumption, as well as considering ways in which his photographs were used in travel literature. The core argument of this study is that Beato's desire to cater to consumer demands was a key element in shaping his photographic production, both in terms of his imaging strategies and his business practices. His photographic representation of Burma was thus closely tied to the context of its production and consumption. Essentially, Beato's representation of Burma can be understood as a commodification of the Burmese experience for the consumer. This commodification entailed depicting Burma in picturesque conventions – as a series of familiar, pleasing, and ultimately saleable pictures.     

Medical Archives and Digital Culture

When BioShock was released in 2007, reviewers praised the moral complexities of the narrative and the game's dystopian vision of what Ayn Rand dubbed the “virtue of selfishness”. What critics overlooked was the extent to which the disturbingly realistic artwork and musical score relied on found images and sound, including a recording of distressed breathing from a physician's website, and digitised First World War medical photographs of soldiers with facial injuries. This article examines the implications of these acts of appropriation from a range of critical perspectives including Susan Sontag's commentary on the representation of suffering; recent literature on the ethics of computer games; and an online discussion forum in which players of BioShock discuss the moral “grey areas” of the game.     

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.     

Surreal Encounters: Science,Surrealism and the Re‐Circulation of a Crime‐Scene Photograph

This article examines the implications of the surrealist appropriation and re‐circulation of a crime‐scene photograph depicting the body of Mary Kelly, Jack the Ripper's final victim. The article traces the trajectory of the photograph, taken in 1888, as it shifts from its role as a visual police record in London, to evidence of sexual sadism in the developing field of criminology in France, before finally becoming an object in the text of a play, ‘Regards sur l'enfer anthropoclasique’, by surrealist Maurice Heine, and being published in 1936 along with that play in Minotaure, a luxury art review. As it is re‐framed in various contexts, however, the photograph retains some of its prior meaning. A key point in the argument is that this kind of appropriation reveals how photographic meaning is produced and anchored.     

Public/Private Tensions in the Photography of Sally Mann

This article examines the circulation of Sally Mann's pictures of her children, which were exhibited and published in 1992 under the title Immediate Family. Most of the Immediate Family photographs were made at the Manns' rustic summer house in a wild, isolated area, not far from their home in Lexington, Virginia. The children are often naked or nearly naked, and they are variously dirty, injured, confrontational and flirtatious. Strong and divergent responses to the Immediate Family photographs affirm art historian Anne Higonnet's conclusion that ‘No subject is as publicly dangerous now as the subject of the child's body’. This article expands on the spatial dimension to Higonnet's insight, and argues that the anxieties about Immediate Family stem from photography's refusal, or perhaps confusion about, the division between public and private. The circulation of the Immediate Family project suggests how notions of public and private are negotiated through photography.     

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.     

News and Notes

This article contextualises documentary photographs taken of working-class holidaymakers in Blackpool by Humphrey Spender in the late 1930s. Working for Tom Harrisson's northern branch of Mass Observation, Spender recorded how the residents of ‘Worktown’ (Bolton, Lancashire) spent the ‘fifty-second week’ or summer holiday period of each year. Harrisson recruited Spender for this task because his camera was an ideal apparatus for recording the most mundane details of average British lives. Yet these images (indeed, all the photographs taken by Spender for Mass Observation) were used only sparingly by the organisation at the time of their creation. This article examines reasons for this, suggesting that Harrisson's understanding of photographic realism in combination with his perception of national identity served to highlight photography's ability to undermine rather than affirm the goals of Mass Observation as Harrisson had conceived them.     

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.     

Through a Mediated Mirror: The Photographic Physiognomy of Dr Hugh Welch Diamond

This article explores the photographic physiognomy of Victorian asylum superintendent Hugh Welch Diamond. Through close readings of Diamond's photographs as well as commentary published by Diamond and Dr John Conolly, the author argues that Diamond expanded the meaning of the word physiognomy to include metonymic traits such as clothing and hairstyle. Diamond used physiognomy for both diagnostic and therapeutic purposes, and he staged his photographs to maximize their efficacy for both, creating a mediated mirror through which his patients viewed themselves. Through photographic physiognomy, Diamond tried to change the nature of asylum practice, using images of his patients to nurture them to health without physical restraints.     

Guillermo Kahlo and Casasola

Abstract

The photographers Guillermo Kahlo and Agustín Víctor Casasola recorded the cultural artefacts and political events that shaped Mexican culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. Their photographic collections exemplify the initial uses of photography as both cultural and historical documents. In the case of Kahlo, his 25 albums, entitled Photographic Inventory cif Spanish Colonial Church Architecture in Mexico (1910),¹ were among the commemorative projects the Porfirian government sponsored to record national sights and monuments representative of Mexican cultural history for the centenary celebration of Mexican Independence (1810). Kahlo's photographic inventory was a significant government commission that documented the colonial architecture still standing in Mexico. In turn, Casasola established in 1912 the first Agenda Mexicana de Información Fotográfica that collected and produced photographs documenting the events of the Revolution. He presented the results of his endeavour in the 15-volume work, Álbum Histórico Gráfico (1921).     

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.     

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.     

Charles Marville and the Landscapes of the Carrières d’Amérique

Charles Marville’s photographs of Paris preserve the look of streets slated for demolition under Georges-Eugène Haussmann. This article examines his photographs of the Carrières d’Amérique, or America Quarries – gypsum quarries in the outlying Parisian neighbourhood of Belleville. At a time when the rezoning of districts that were formerly extra muros was still controversial, Belleville was seen as a crime-ridden area. Marville’s photographs become documents that refute contemporary narratives of criminality. Borrowing Walter Benjamin’s view that the city ‘opens up’ to the flâneur ‘as a landscape’, the article analyses Marville’s landscapes of the Carrières d’Amérique as images that juxtapose the city, the work site, and the no-man’s land or terrains vagues at Paris’s outer limits.     

Ethno‐biology during the Cold War: Biocca's Expedition to Amazonia

This article focuses on the ethno‐biological expedition to the Amazon headed by Ettore Biocca between November 1962 and July 1963. Biocca, a parasitologist by training, assembled a multidisciplinary team to carry out an ethno‐biological study of Amazon natives. The expedition work covered the natives' customs, myths, chants, diseases and the hallucinogenic compounds and curare they used, and took into account plants and animals common to the Amazon environment. This article aims to contribute to the understanding of the 20th‐century Western approach to the Amazon people and its cultural importance. It sets out to show how Biocca's encyclopaedic work related to the centrality of Amazonia and its peoples in scientific and cultural debates on modernity and Western culture in the 1960s, and how it connects to Cold War anxieties about the disappearance of ‘uncorrupted’ peoples.     

Introduction: Perspectives on Cold War Science in Small European States

With this introduction we aim to illuminate Western Europe's place on the map of Cold War science and, specifically, to draw attention to the differences in and the diversity of Western European Cold War science in comparison to the United States. By discussing narratives of Cold War science in small states and asking how they fit into the European condition, we suggest that the fact of being a small state affects the conditions for and the scope of Cold War science. As a whole, this special issue also emphasizes the importance of the spatial dimension; that is, the significant dependence of Cold War science on geographical relations and geopolitical interests.     

Things of Darkness: Genetics,Melanins and the Regime of Salazar (1936–1952)

This article discusses the interaction between genetics and politics during the early phase of Salazar's regime. In particular it focuses on the work of the Portuguese biologist José A. Serra who investigated the genetics of hair pigmentation at the University of Coimbra. The first part of the article describes how Serra's research benefitted from the ideological and political context in Coimbra before and during WWII, and how his work on melanins was a clear response to a new project initiated at the German Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Anthropologie. The second part shows how his expertise in the inheritance and composition of hair colour was required by the regime in the post‐war period, when wool became a priority of the corporatist State. The ‘things of darkness’ are melanins, dark biological pigments responsible for pigmentation in mammalian tissues, used in this historical investigation to connect Serra's rather obscure field of research to the political context of his time.     

Arthur Conan Doyle and psychic photographs

Abstract

The issue of Punch for 12 May 1926 featured a cartoon which depicted an elderly and oversized Arthur Conan Doyle sitting on a stool (see figure 1). Clouds are gathered around his uplifted, preoccupied head. Holding a chain which shackles Doyle's legs is a miniature Sherlock Holmes, brooding and thoughtful. The cartoon's immediate context is satirical: Doyle's warm reception of the Cottingley Fairy photographs, then a matter of ongoing notoriety due to the publication of his The Coming of the Fairies in 1922, had prompted a degree of ridicule. In 1920 he had become involved in an investigation of what purported to be photographs of actual fairies taken by two teenage girls. The matter which commenced as an investigation had, by 1928, with the publication of the study's second edition, developed into a whole-hearted endorsement of the photographs. For Doyle and his colleague, the theosophist Edward Gardner, this event was the ultimate proof that fairies actually existed. Nor was the intervention Doyle's only encounter with paranormal photography. A committed spiritualist by the 1920s, Doyle had previously championed the cause of spirit photography, a process where supposed materializations of the dead appeared in photographs. For the spiritualists, this possibility was an important concept, as it endorsed their central tenet: that the living could communicate with the dead. Relatedly, Doyle's The Case for Spirit Photography (1923) defended William Hope, who had been accused of using fraudulent methods to attain his materializations.