Frances Benjamin Johnston 1864˜1952

Abstract

A short obituary in Time magazine, published in June 1952, marked the passing of one of America's foremost women photographers, whose death had occurred almost three months earlier, on 16th March 1952.     

Panoramic photographs as nineteenth century book illustrations

Abstract

The earliest panoramic photograph exposed on a single plate is attributed to Friedrich von Martens, a German, who resided in France in the 1840s. The 4.7 x 15 inch curved daguerreotype was produced in a camera equipped with a lens which pivoted over an angle of about 150°.¹ Some dealers in ‘philosophical instruments’ included in their offers of cameras, from the mid 1840s through the 1850s, ‘Traversing’ cameras.² These they described as providing panoramic views, about 3" x 10", on a curved plate. However, neither the original von Martens, nor any of the ‘Traversing’ cameras, are known to have survived.     

Alfred Stieglitz and New Yark Dada

Abstract

In February of 1921 the photographer and entrepreneur Alfred Stieglitz mounted the fIrst public exhibition of his work since the closing of his pioneering art gallery, ‘291’, nearly four years earlier.1 An exhibition of 146 of Stieglitz's photographs was held at the Anderson Galleries in New York during February of 1921. This show was instrumental in helping Stieglitz ultimately to reassert his prominence in the New York art world and re-establish his status as an important American artist. Curiously, however, the manner in which Stieglitz and his associates chose to promote the photographer was somewhat unusual. They repeatedly described the camera as an extension of Stieglitz's own body, and his photographs as an extension of his spirit. As a result, they claimed that Stieglitz had achieved a profound physical and spiritual union both with his machinery and with the subjects he photographed.     

The lantern slide and art history

Abstract

About 150 years ago, the first art history courses appeared in America and attracted the attention of inquisitive young students. It all began at Princeton in 1831-32, when the study of Roman antiquities was introduced and lectures on historical architecture were given. Soon such institutions as New York University, Yale, the University of Vermont, and the University of Michigan began giving courses; by the time of the Civil War six colleges had instituted such offerings with varying degrees of success.     

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).     

Gilbert Radoux: An early photographic publisher

Abstract

The printing industry has always been a leading-edge application of photography¹. It is no coincidence that the desire to improve on traditional graphic processes was the stimulus which fuelled the researches of both Niepce and Talbot. Since its invention, photography has been used as an information bearer in most domains of human activity. As Talbot recognized when he set up his Talbotype Printing Establishment in Russell Terrace, Reading, in late 1843 or early 1844, printing was a promising industrial sector for the exploitation of photography. He was also forced to realize, when he shut down the operation some three years later, that photographic publishing was perhaps an idea whose time had yet to come.² The necessary preconditions for ensuring commercial success - minimum viability in the form oflow unit costs, mass-produced prints of marketable quality and evidence of a real demand for the finished product - had still to be met.     

Nature's pencil,humour's pen

Abstract

Caricature and photography are commonly thought of as popular arts that have a topical character, and it can be argued that both provide us with the most immediate and lively impression of the greater part of the 19th century. It is, therefore, of more than passing interest that the invention and early development of photography should have coincided with the zenith of inventiveness and popularity of caricature. That this was not a coincidence but the natural result of the social and artistic situation in France during the period 1830 to 1860 is the thesis and scholarly basis of Rolf H. Krauss' attractive and informative book. This book confirms at a glance that the subject is a natural one, and that such an anthology of pictorial jibes at photographers and their profession is still a romp as well as a specialized study. The cartoons tell the story effectively in their own terms, and the author's captions and additional data given at the back of the book usually suffice to answer any questions the images may raise.     

Nicholas Henneman

Abstract

In 1992, Allen Ellenzweig published a pioneering work on the male nude as it was presented in photography, a study tracing the historical development of the masculine body in pictures from the daguerreotype to the present.¹ Ellenzweig's book accomplished more than a mere survey of homoerotic images. Quite the opposite, it challenged art historians to embark on the search for ‘an iconography of the homoerotic’ and to identify, if it existed, an art historical tradition within which gay modes of representation could be situated. It is the pursuit of a tradition of gay signs which motivates this brief examination of Robert Mapplethorpe's stilllifes.     

David A. Sinclair's Pilgrimage

Abstract

The secretary of the Young Men's Christian Association has spent the last few days in bidding farewell and receiving the best wishes of his friends, as he prepared to leave them in search of his health. The large number of friends gathered about him last Sunday showed the hold he has upon the people of this city.     

Bulgaria

Abstract

In a brief span of only 135 years, photography has been turned from a purely technical invention into a symbol of our time, and this itself constitutes one of the most remarkable phenomena of modern civilization. The illustration has become the full-fledged partner of literature, and photography a basic means of acquiring and recording knowledge. Photography has become a tool of science, and a means of the aesthetic exploration of reality. It spread rapidly all over the world; but its appearance in Bulgaria was greatly delayed because the Bulgarian people were still under Ottoman domination and some 39 years since its invention had passed before liberation finally came.     

The painterly photograph

Abstract

The preface of this book relates that 100 years ago the price of an ounce of silver was 51d. By the turn of the century it had dropped to 24d, but after the First World War, it shot up to almost 9Od. The depression of the 1930s brought the price down to a crisis 12d, but during the Second World War and thereafter, it climbed to approach £T. hese were the ups and downs in the price of silver, and all very relevant to the ups and downs of the firm which became Ilford Limited.     

Arresting Nudes in Second Empire Paris

This paper concerns two collections of photographs made in Paris during the 1850s and 1860s. The first archive was assembled by the Paris police in the course of enforcing laws against the production and distribution of obscénités. These photographs were pasted into an official arrest register and served as legal evidence. The second collection, a set of stereographs made by Auguste Belloc for clandestine commercial distribution, was seized in a police raid but never inserted into the register. The author analyzes the evolving style of the photographs in these collections, correlating the changes with patterns of prosecution documented in public records. The study reveals the intricate relationship between photography and modern notions of gender, identity and the imaging of sex.     

Sidney Carter and Alfred Stieglitz: The Canadian Pictorialist Exhibition (1907)

Abstract

On a late autumn afternoon in 1907, to the sweet strains of orchestral music, 500 of Montreal's cultural elite turned out for the opening of Canada's first international exhibition of pictorial photographs, in the galleries of the Art Association of Montreal, the oldest and most prestigious art museum in the dominion.¹ Sidney Carter (figure 1), a young Photo-Secessionist zealously determined to advance ‘the cause’, had single-handedly solicited the support of the Art Association, gathered the prints, written the catalogue and hung the show.     

‘The art of correctly painting the expressive lines of the human face’: Duchenne de Boulogne's Photographs of Human Expression and the École des Beaux-Arts

Abstract

Admired in their day as living anatomy, the strange, powerful photographs of human expression produced by or under the direction of Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne (1806–75) functioned in two fields, medicine and fine art.¹ I would argue that these photographs' credibility in both fields derived from shared practices of ‘drawing from life’, practices laden with expectations of naturalism and legibility, as was photography in general at this time. While it was quite common during the nineteenth century that images made to serve the purposes of one of these fields were studied or circulated in the other, rarely were photographs given both scientific and artistic aims or, even less so, qualities, as Duchenne claimed for his work. Recent scholarship on Duchenne's work has tended to critique its perceived objectivity and scientific meaning by following Michel FoucauIt and unpacking the enlightened bourgeois modes of controlling, investing and understanding representations of the human body.² The exhibition catalogues published in 1999 by the Ecole nationale des beaux-arts and by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art discuss important aspects of the aesthetic context of Duchenne's photographs. However, neither one asked how and why his work was rejected by the French Academy of Fine Arts in 1863, only to become part of the fine art curriculum of the École des Beaux-Arts a decade later. To address those unstudied questions, I will examine relevant aspects of the photographs' creation, forms and functions, and their receptions by the scientific and art communities.     

Maoris in focus

Abstract

The virtually simultaneous announcement of the invention of photography in Paris and London in January 1839 marks the “official” birthday of the new technology. The reception given to this announcement in the course of that year, and the subsequent diffusion of knowledge and practice of the technology, show significant differences from country to country. These differences in impact and the rate of take-up may have depended on such factors as the country's proximity to the key events, its level of intellectual openness and general economic development, as well as the ex~stence of key individuals — businessmen and scientists — willing to experiment in the untried processes out of sheer curiosity or for personal gain.     

William Lake Price and James Mudd

Abstract

Photography, of course, appears everywhere but for all its successes it has been remarkably unable to shake the complacency of the disciplines; it has its uses and its places, but these seem just too setded and too well known. The photographer remains a junior partner in the practices of a society, high or low, cultural or otherwise. But if we travel back through time we will encounter a point when photography seemed anything but limited. If any spatial figure typifies English photographic debate in the 1860s it would be ‘boundless’. In the language of English photographic culture the idea that the potentials of the new medium were unlimited stretched from Lady Easdake to the juror's reports on the International Exhibitions. Out of this mass of commentary I intend to extract only two fairly ordinary pieces of writing: William Lake Price's A Manual of Photographic Manipulation published in 1868¹ and James Mudd's ‘A photographer's dream’, originally read at the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, and published in The Photographic News for May 1865.²     

Greenback Shutterbug

Abstract

Maud Sulter combines a number of art media in new ways. She was born in Glasgow in 1960 and has published two books of poetry. The first was titled As a Blackwoman (1985) and her second book, Zabat: Poetics of a Family Tree, came out in 1989. She's a visual artist who uses photography first and foremost, but she also draws and paints. She's currently Momart Artist-in-Residence at the Tate Gallery in Liverpool. Maud Suiter describes herself as a cultural activist, and she's concerned with some very large issues. Her exhibition, Zabat, means, variously, ‘a sacred dance’, ‘an occasion of power’ (as in Witches Sabbath), and ‘black women's rite of passage’. The exhibition re-presents the nine Muses–each is portrayed by a black woman with symbolic attributes such as a flute, flowers, a picture, and so on. The writer Alice Walker appears as the ‘Muse of Comedy’. Ysaye Maria Barnwell, of Sweet Honey in the Rock, is ‘Polyhymnia, the Muse of Sacred Song’.     

Photography and the choice of Canada's Capital

Abstract

By the 1850s Canadians had not yet selected a single, permanent seat of government for their provincial administration. Since 1843 the business of government had shifted between various cities and was shunted every five years between Toronto and Quebec City. The inefficiencies were apparent, but years of political acrimony, indecision and bitter debate failed to resolve the issue.¹ In March 1857 the matter was referred to imperial authorities in Britain. Queen Victoria was requested to select the location for the capital ofCanada.² Six cities — Quebec, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Kingston and Hamilton — were privileged to submit memorials to the British Colonial Office stating. their claims and the reasons in favour of their city.³     

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.