Metropolitan Surveillance and Rural Opacity: Secret Photography in Nineteenth‐Century Ireland

This essay considers the significance of the Foucaultian notion of surveillance in accounts of the history of photography, raising the question whether Ireland's colonial placement during the nineteenth century led to a different history of the medium. The study focuses on Irish Special Branch's adoption of secret photography during the latter part of the nineteenth century in order to determine why this type of photography was considered useful. It also pays attention to the types of photographs collected by the Branch. The writer situates Special Branch's adoption of secret photography within a visual economy in Ireland where an alternative type of imagery (commercially produced eviction photographs) was employed to construct a different register for what constituted legitimacy and lawlessness. In addition, emphasis is placed on the role of photography in Ireland within a larger discursive framework of colonial policy making. Visibility is crucial to the Foucaultian model, and the failure to embed such signs in both the photographs produced and collected by Special Branch indicates that it was possible to produce lacunae in the power/knowledge paradigm. The writer concludes that the history of the deployment of secret photography in Ireland reveals how it failed to produce the required visual signs needed to win consent for control.     

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.     

Photography in 1848: Five Case Studies from Central Europe

This article examines the role of photography in the Year of Revolution and the place this topic holds in historiography. Unlike many historical disciplines which perceive 1848 as a turning point in the nineteenth century, the history of photography gives the impression that photographic production was not really affected by the upheavals which otherwise had a great impact on the whole of continental Europe. Collections and archives, however, contain large amounts of visual and written material that indicate the very opposite – that the involvement of photography in the events of 1848 was not rare. Using five examples from Central Europe, three portraits and two cityscapes, this article provides an insight into the cultural and historical backgrounds of photographic production in that year. The article demonstrates the ways in which photographs were involved in the social, political, and cultural events of the time, and how they helped shape ideas about them.     

Performing Aboriginality: Desiring Pre-contact Aboriginality in Victoria, 1886–1901

This paper re-investigates notions of performed Aboriginality in relation to photographs made at Lake Tyers Mission Station, Victoria, Australia, and argues that Nicholas Caire's photographs reveal complex Aboriginal subjectivities. The photographs, made originally in 1886 and distributed to tourists, were later reproduced and circulated in book format in 1897. The first presentation of the photographs, whilst focusing on historical Aboriginality, contains traces of cross-cultural hybridity. However, the later presentation of the work reinforces historical and traditional material culture over cross-cultural dialogue. This paper argues that the desire to find historical notions of Aboriginality on mission stations in Victoria was not just due to the establishment of hierarchical racial theories in the latter part of the nineteenth century (generating the idea that Aborigines could not change and adapt to notions of ‘civilisation’) and doubts about the success of mission stations, but also because there was an interest in Aborigines who had experienced little assimilation from more remote parts of the continent of Australia. This curiosity in pre-contact Aboriginality fuelled tourism in Victoria to accessible mission stations such as Lake Tyers.     

Helen F. Stuart and Hannah Frances Green: The Original Spirit Photographer

Spirit photographs are joint portraits that visually unite the bereaved and the deceased without use of a corpse. Arising from the same ideas that founded Spiritualism in the nineteenth century, these enchanted mementos are said to have been discovered by William H. Mumler in 1861, in Boston, Massachusetts. Spirit photographers typically worked with mediums who enabled the appearance of magical ‘extras’ of the deceased, and as the majority of mediums were women, their contributions to this development within personal mourning rituals have been limited almost exclusively to this activity. Fuelled by the acknowledged proximity of two women to the invention, Helen F. Stuart and Hannah Frances Green, this article challenges Mumler’s widely accepted status as the originator of spirit photography. Although Stuart was the owner of the studios where Mumler stumbled upon his invention and Green was a secretary and medium in the same studios, scholars have tended to refuse these women larger roles. This article establishes the viability of a new narrative, presenting the strong likelihood that these women were in fact one and the same person and proposing that this woman be recognised as a pioneer of spirit photography.     

Displaced ‘Origins’: William Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature

This essay analyses William Henry Fox Talbot's book of photographs The Pencil of Nature (1844–1846), in which he discusses the role of the photograph as a document. By emphasizing the historical specificity of the book, this essay argues that it presents an undecided and reserved view with regard to the future of the photograph. The Pencil of Nature is neither embedded in the discourse of the mechanical and mass‐produced copy, nor is it embedded in the idea of the ‘authentic’ copy or index, as has been suggested in recent theories of photography. Instead, it reflects a specific form of Romantic historicism which emerged in the early nineteenth century as part of a shift in the organization of knowledge. Talbot's statements on the evidentiary status of the photograph are thus related to literary genres of writing, and, in particular, to Thomas Babington Macaulay's work, to the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, and to Talbot's own philological and classical studies. In this context, the intelligibility of documents is a function of time, yet time is simultaneously a source of constant change and the intellectual ‘horizon’ within which things acquire their meaning. This, the writer contends, forms the discursive framework within which Talbot's views on the document are formed: on the one hand, the desire for ‘truth’, on the other hand, the recognition that time dismantles any claim for the universality of knowledge.     

The Japanese Photographers of Broome: Photography and Cross-Cultural Encounter

The remote West Australian town of Broome has a unique photography heritage that sheds new light on the complexities of photography and intercultural relations. During the early twentieth century thriving Japanese communities were established in this region around the lucrative pearling industry. These Japanese communities also helped to develop a fascinating photography culture in Broome. Photography was not simply a business opportunity for the Japanese or a means of documenting people and events; it was a medium through which hierarchised social relations were produced, redefined, and challenged. This article examines photographs by these Japanese residents as an important site of cross-cultural communication and interpretation. These photographs of Anglo-Australian, Japanese, and Aboriginal residents of Broome enrich the study of cross-cultural photographic encounters, and emphasise the dynamic and dispersed qualities of Australian photographic practice and history. Here national histories of photography are usefully conceptualised as the products of imbricated social, economic, and cultural relations that operate across regional, national, and international realms.     

Retracing the image: The emergence of photography in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This is a difficult conference to review. It is particularly difficult as your reviewer comes from the margins of the discipline of his tory of photography; but then, all reviews are from a single, personal viewpoint (as are most photographs) and may not necessarily reflect an audience consensus. So, I shall begin by saying that this was not what I had expected. Had I been a mainstream art historian, still flushed with youthful enthusiasm, I might have loved it; but age, experience and a profound uneasiness about my own lack of wisdom left me with the distinct impression of the curate's egg. This conference was ‘good in parts’.     

‘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:     

‘A Pointer for Beauty’: Photography,Ekphrasis, and the Aesthetics of Attention in Johannes Jaeger’s 1866 Photobook

This essay inquires into attention and detail as aesthetic categories in the nineteenth-century reception of photography in Scandinavia. It circles around what is generally considered to be Sweden’s first book with original photographs, Johannes Jaeger’s Molin’s Fountain in Photographs, with text (1866), read through two articles on the aesthetic potential of the photographic medium written by two contemporary Scandinavian art critics. In seven albumen print photographs, the book documents a fountain sculpture by Swedish sculptor Johan Peter Molin, exhibited at the first Scandinavian Art and Industrial Exhibition in 1866. However, the book also includes poetry; each photograph is juxtaposed with a poetic stanza that describes the part of the sculpture that the photograph reproduces. This paper studies the close relation between image and text in Jaeger’s volume. It argues that a contemporary view of the photographic image, also articulated by the Scandinavian art critics, can be discerned from the layout of the book – namely, that photography produces images too distractive and oversaturated with insignificant details to be aesthetically valuable. The visual and verbal framework for the photographs, then, arguably aims to overcompensate the distractive qualities of the image, by regulating the reader/viewer’s attention towards the sculpture and its significant details. In this ambition, Jaeger’s photobook anticipates a future aesthetic appreciation of the photograph in its own right.     

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.     

Modernist Photography and Women’s Social Networks: The Case of Olive Cotton and Margaret Michaelis

This article’s title refers to the larger project of illuminating the social networks informing Australian artistic communities from the late colonial period to the middle of the twentieth century. Focusing primarily on developments in photography, the article itself asks what were the links between creative practices and the social relationships that characterised the modernist period in particular? It attempts to answer this question by examining the relationship between two retrospectively celebrated women photographers working in the war years in Australia – Olive Cotton and Margaret Michaelis. For a fair portion of their lives Cotton and Michaelis lived in the same city, worked contemporaneously in the relatively small field of studio photography, and shared similar artistic and commercial ambitions, yet they had virtually no professional or personal contact with each other. There is some evidence to suggest that social networks played a role in training early Australian women photographers, particularly those working in the professional studio system between the 1890s and the 1920s. Social networks would take on an explicitly political role in the consciousness-raising feminist context of women’s photography in Australia from the 1970s to the 1990s. Given that Cotton and Michaelis were professional photographers during the interval between these periods, one is bound to ask whether their lack of contact had a personal basis or there was a wider more socially determined reason. In other words, was there something about the social conditions effecting Australia’s artistic associations at this time that explains the lack of artistic connections between women, and if so was this lack the same across all the arts or particularly pronounced in photography?     

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.     

Measuring the Heavens: Charles S. Peirce and Astronomical Photography

Taking its point of departure from the current digitisation of the Harvard Astronomical Plate Collection, this article follows the plates back to the time when the status of photography as a research tool for astronomers was still to be established. It focuses on Charles S. Peirce, who, while employed by the US Coast Survey, made astronomical observations and contributed to the deliberation over visual and photographic methods. Particular attention is paid to Peirce’s involvement in early explorations of photography’s potential as a measurement tool. The guiding assumption is that approaching photography as a tool, rather than as a sign or representation, offers new inroads into the old problem of photography’s revealing powers and its capacity to serve as a means of discovery in science. Drawing on Peirce’s scientific practice as an alternative resource for theory construction, this article contributes to the ongoing efforts to conceptualise the productive or generative dimension of photographic methods. It concludes by pointing to the diagrammatic notion of evidence developed late in Peirce’s philosophical career, proposing that photography be reconceived as a diagrammatic tool.     

‘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.     

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.     

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.     

‘The Diversity of Expression and the Wondrous Power of the Art of Photography’ in the Albums of Richard Cockle Lucas

From 1859 to 1878 the British sculptor Richard Cockle Lucas assembled at least sixteen albums containing photographs of himself in numerous guises, ranging from Shakespearean roles to embodiments of specific emotions. Lucas utilised the practice of dressing up in front of the camera in conjunction with the album format as an ongoing means of experimenting with photography’s capacity to convey human expression, and as an extension of his concerns as a sculptor. Lucas’s albums, which also include photographs of his work in sculpture, represent the first sustained pursuit of photographic self-depiction in such a wide range of roles. Read in conjunction with Lucas’s own writings on expression in photography and sculpture, the albums reveal how Lucas viewed photographic self-portraiture as a form of ‘living sculpture’ to be enacted before the camera.     

Taki Kōji,Provoke, and the Structuralist Turn in Japanese Image Theory, 1967–70

This article explores the intellectual underpinnings of the late-1960s Japanese photography collective Provoke. It argues that Provoke was more radical and theoretically inflected than is conventionally understood, its project being the forging of a ‘scientific’ photography capable of unveiling the ‘untruth’ of established relations of power and knowledge production in Japan. I present Provoke’s central figure to be Taki Kōji, who in 1967–68 published a series of articles that introduced structuralism into Japanese image discourse and established the basis for Provoke’s theoretically informed practice, or praxis. The article outlines how, in response to a variety of influences (Roland Barthes, Matsumoto Toshio, and Kevin Lynch, among others, but apparently not Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser), Taki formulated the notion of a unified and self-regulating ideological ‘environment’ (kankyō) that is made manifest in a variety of seemingly neutral and benign cultural forms. Additionally, he theorised a semiotically transgressive photographic image, derived from Barthes’s early studies of photography, which he believed could escape language and code – and thereby the ideological superstructure. I conclude by showing that Taki’s emancipatory project, while singular in relation to contemporaneous Marxist oppositional endeavours in Europe, was ultimately self-defeating: the efforts of Provoke’s photographers to strip their images of readable codes by deliberately ‘mishandling’ their cameras only worked to create new ones, and the shakiness and blurriness of the resulting photographs became a mere style.