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 The well known but brief moment of surrealist reception of Atget was superseded when later and more influential writers viewed him instead as an important forerunner of documentary photography.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.     

数字电影大场景画面多层拍摄与合成

本文通过参与制作美国哥伦比亚娱乐公司的电影《天外紫罗兰》(ULTRAVIO-LET)并根据对其大场景画面合成镜头的实例分析,探讨了制作数字画面的关键技术和要求。参照好莱坞的制片经验,提出了制作数字电影要转变拍摄理念,要加强前期的设计、策划工作等建议。     

Imagining the Image: Photography,psychoanalysis and the affects of latency

This essay brings together the figure of the photographer with that of the psychoanalyst by tracing their work with and through latency. Both photographer and psychoanalyst expose something latent in their work: the photographer through dealing with images that are yet to be revealed; the analyst through dealing with signs that are yet to be brought into a relief of signification. Appearing in either field, the latent finds its conceptual bearings in different contexts and by different means. This essay contends that latency forms a transdisciplinary modality, running across fields that stage its effects in dissimilar ways. By stepping outside the need to establish something analogous in latency's operation across the fields of photography and psychoanalysis, we discover what is proper to photography: the play of certainty and doubt around the production of images.     

Vibrant Photography: Photographs,actants and political ecology

Jane Bennett’s thesis in Vibrant Matter argues that we need to find ways to acknowledge and engage with the agency of all factors that create ecologies and environments, including non-human actants. This essay argues that Richard Misrach and Kate Orff’s project Petrochemical America signals some important strategies that are useful for developing visual political ecologies and understanding non-human actants, including the non-living. Although some of the images are typical scenes of environmental devastation, human and social links are made to foster the understanding that we are looking at an image of ecology rather than nature ravaged. In addition to the titles of images, captions and overall contextualization of the project, Kate Orff’s team SCAPE produce a series of diagrams called Throughlines that situate the subject of petrochemical creation and its impact in the Mississippi River corridor. The cumulative impact of Misrach’s photographic approach, combined with the effective and systematic linking of his images to other forms of relevant information by Kate Orff, produces an understanding of environment as not only inextricably linked to human activity and habitation, but which also contains differing agencies constituting a broader ecology.     

乐凯胶片集团公司第二胶片厂走向世界的发展历程

不久以前,国家主席胡锦涛视察了乐凯胶片集团第二胶片厂,充分赞扬了该厂遵循科学的发展观,通过长期努力,克服种种困难,使企业发展成为我国最大的印刷用感光材料开发和生产基地,产品成为国际先进、国内领先的产品,他还勉励全厂职工继续努力,把产品推入国际市场,使其成为国际上知名的品牌产品。本文对该厂的发展历程作一个全面的介绍。     

The Floating Face: Garbo,Photography and Death Masks

A number of writers have noted the influence of Ernst Benkard’s 1927 book of death masks, Das Ewige Antlitz, on Modernist artists and writers of the inter-war period. This article links it specifically to the emergence in the late 1920s of a very particular way of photographing people, termed here “the floating face”, which is epitomised in publicity portraits of Greta Garbo. It is suggested that this photographic convention is linked to changing attitudes associated with war, to the techniques of cinema, and to surrealism, but also to the influence of Benkard’s book. The resemblance between the death mask image and movie star portrait is significant for an understanding of the origins and affective impact of a certain photographic style. This essay also suggests that the death mask as a figure in film and photography theory emerges out of this particular style of photography, and this specific social and cultural context, but then becomes applied to “the photograph” in general. It is argued that the idea of photographs as like death masks is overdetermined by the social and cultural context of 1920s Europe.     

Perovskite LEDs: World Record of External Quantum Efficiency That ApproachThose of the Best-performing Organic LEDs

正Light-emitting diodes (LEDs),which convert electricity to light,are widely used in modern society,for example,in lighting,flatpanel displays,medical devices and many other situations. Generally,the efficiency of LEDs is limited by nonradiative recombination (whereby charge carriers recombine without releasing photons) and light trapping~([1]). In planar LEDs,such as organic LEDs,around 70%to 80%of the light generated from the emitters is trapped in the device~([2]),leaving considerable opportunity     

Herschel,Talbot and Photography: Spring 1831 and Spring 1839

Abstract

The rich, productive, and enthusiastic interaction between Henry Talbot and John Herschel is a fascinating microcosm of early photographic research. An isolated experiment, shared by them in 1831, is a typical example of the tantalizing near-misses that pervade the chronicles of the pre-history of photography. Their correspondence in early 1839, before Herschel saw Daguerre's then superior productions, is a window for us today to learn from the initial thoughts of the excited pioneers. We face contemporary reports of discovery and hope, unedited and unrefined by the influence of time and later events.     

William Morris,Photography, and Frederick H. Evans

Abstract

In 1896, the year of Morris's death, Frederick H. Evans took several pictures of Kelmscott Manor (figure 1). Some months earlier, following Morris's advice, Evans photographed a thirteenth-century barn nearby (figure 2). These pictures eventually illustrated two articles, the first a posthumous tribute to Morris in an Arts and Crafts magazine, the other by Evans in a photography periodical.¹ Together they are the most artistic photographs connected to Morris, depicting buildings and spaces he loved. Although photography is not one of the many endeavours usually associated with him, it was nevertheless an important part of Morris's creative universe.