Recent Publications

This article examines the absence of atrocity in the photographic series The Course of History by the Belgian-born, New York-based photographer Bart Michiels (1964–). It shows, in beautiful, large-format prints, seemingly innocent landscapes and confined views of nature. Only when viewers read the titles of the photographs do they become aware of the violent history of the sites. These turn out to be the fields of fierce European battles such as Verdun, Waterloo and Stalingrad. The present article reviews recent trends towards using place as a motif in contemporary art photography and focuses on the ‘empty’ landscape as a pictorial strategy that opens up a narrative space, one that needs to be completed by the viewer. The absence evoked by the image is treated as antithetical to the conventional ethos of photography, which canonically stands as the evidence of an occurrence.     

Migrant Mothers: Richard Harrington’s Indigenous ‘Madonnas’

Canadian photographer Richard Harrington has been recognised since the 1950s for his photographs of the Arctic, and specifically for portraits of the Padleimiut taken at a hunting camp in 1950 during a winter of acute shortages. Three were selected for Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man (1955). Of that group, two focused on motherhood through depictions of childbirth and maternal love; the latter is sometimes referred to as ‘Canada’s Madonna and Child’, making a timeless secular icon from the representation of a crisis. Harrington was a documentary photographer who made his living as a freelance photojournalist specialising in human interest stories and travel features for magazines and newspapers. On assignment in British Columbia for the Hudson’s Bay Company magazine The Beaver, he photographed a First Nations mother and child, an image entitled ‘Madonna of the Peace’. This photograph later graced the cover of a Roman Catholic missionary magazine, Pôle et Tropiques. This article draws parallels between Harrington’s photographs of Indigenous mothers and children and Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, using Harrington’s diaries and community-based research to reconstruct the lives of his subjects, and considering the sacrifice of knowledge to iconicity.     

Lorene Squire’s Psychical Landscapes of Colonial/Modern Gender in the Canadian North

From 1937 to 1939, Lorene Squire was commissioned by The Beaver (the company magazine of the Hudson’s Bay Company) and Canadian Airways to produce photographs of the Canadian North suitable for their publications, focused on her specialisation in wildfowl photography, as well as landscapes, planes, and people. This article focuses on her 1938 commissions, and in particular two photographs of Indigenous women and two self-portraits. When these photographs are considered alongside photographs of white settler women, her correspondence, and her book Wildfowling With A Camera (1938), I argue that they offer insights into gender as a colonial concept (what María Lugones calls the ‘colonial/modern gender system’). I contend that the setting of the ‘North’ as a psychical landscape makes Squire’s contestations possible. Squire’s photographs resist common ways of depicting white and Indigenous women in the 1930s, but they do so in a way that is paradoxical and leaves intact the colonial/modern gender system. In addition to providing biographical information about Squire, this article contributes to theoretical and historical scholarship on the meaning of photographs of Indigenous people in Canada for projects of nation-building and northern economic development, as well as on how the North functions as a reference point for Canadian identity.     

On a bessel function integral

We consider the integral where, K, k andb are all positive real numbers. We reduce this integral to a linear combination of two integrals. The first of these is an exponential integral, which can be expressed as a difference of two Shkarofsky functions, or can easily be evaluated numerically. The second is the original integral, but withk andK both replaced by kK. We express this as a MeijerG function, and then reduce it to the sum of an associated Bessel function and a modified Bessel function.Previously at the Maple Symbolic Computation Group, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L-3G1     

Polaroid,Aperture and Ansel Adams: Rethinking the Industry-Aesthetics Divide

This article takes the history of Polaroid photography as an opportunity to question a presupposition that underpins much thinking on photography: the split between industrial (i.e. useful) applications of photography and its fine art (i.e. aesthetic) manifestations. Critics as ideologically opposed as Peter Bunnell and Abigail Solomon-Godeau steadfastly maintain the existence of this separation of utility and aesthetics in photography, even if they take contrasting views on its meaning and desirability. However, Polaroid, at one time the second largest company in the photo industry, not only enjoyed close relations with those key representatives of fine art photography, Ansel Adams and the magazine Aperture, but it also intermittently asserted the ‘essentially aesthetic’ nature of its commercial and industrial activities in its own internal publications. The divide between industry and aesthetics is untenable, then, but this does not mean that the two poles were reconciled at Polaroid. While Aperture may have underplayed its commercial connections and Polaroid may have retrospectively exaggerated its own contributions to the development of fine art photography, most interesting are the contradictions and tensions that arise when the industrial and the aesthetic come together. The present article draws on original research undertaken at the Polaroid Corporation archives held at the Baker Library, Harvard, as well as with the Ansel Adams correspondence with Polaroid, held at the Polaroid Collections in Concord, Massachusetts.     

Pro Pelle Cutem: Photographing Furs for the Hudson’s Bay Company’s 250th Anniversary Celebrations in Canada

In 1920, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) celebrated its 250^th anniversary through national and international events, as well as honours and benefits for its employees. The year 1920 was an important moment for the HBC, as it underwent institutional change to support the expansion of its department store operations through public relations and advertising strategies. Central to these strategies was an emphasis on the HBC’s central role in Canadian nation formation, and in particular its fur trade history. This article discusses the use of photography in the HBC’s 250^th anniversary celebrations through an analysis of photographs of fur. I trace photographic representations of fur through three moments: in the process of extraction (as trapped animal or dead pelt); in the process of preparation (as Indigenous bush labour); and in the process of consumption (as fur goods in a department store window). While the fur trade was declining in significance at the time of the 250^th anniversary celebrations, its symbolic status was essential to the Company’s burgeoning retail operations. In this article, I argue that the photograph of fur replaced the fur pelt as the central trade item of the HBC, and, further, that photography fused together nationalist and capitalist expansion in Canada.     

The business of being an editor: Norman Lockyer,Macmillan and Company,and the editorship of Nature, 1869–1919

Broadly speaking, Victorian scientific periodicals fell into one of two categories: specialist periodicals aimed at publishing original research for an audience of scientific researchers, or popularizing periodicals meant to share news about science with a broader readership. When astronomer Norman Lockyer founded Nature in 1869, he envisioned his new weekly as a member of the latter group. That vision resulted partly from his own wish to raise science's profile in Great Britain and partly from the interests of his publisher Macmillan and Company, which bankrolled Nature with its eye on eventual profit. This paper shows that the pressure for Nature to be a financial success shaped Lockyer's approach to editing and thus shaped Nature's content, leading the magazine to occupy an unusual space in the landscape of Victorian science publishing and placing unique burdens on its editor. Nature quickly moved away from Lockyer's initial vision of a popularizing magazine and became known as a periodical by and for researchers. The magazine's popularity among scientific researchers set it apart from its closest inspiration, the commercial weekly Chemical News. But in contrast to contemporary editors at learned society journals, such as George Gabriel Stokes at the Philosophical Transactions, Lockyer did not linger over the scientific details of Nature's papers. Instead, articles for Nature were usually either accepted or rejected immediately, with little editorial involvement shaping their scientific content. The difference between editing Nature and editing other research periodicals is clearly visible in the selection of Richard Gregory as Lockyer's successor in 1919. Most research periodicals selected eminent men of science as their editors-in-chief. Gregory, a science writer and long-time subeditor at Nature, did not lend scientific prestige to the masthead, but was eminently qualified to maintain Nature's distinctive content and its profitability for Macmillan and Company.     

Alfonso: Spain's premier photojournalist

Abstract

The founder of the Alfonso dynasty, Alfonso Sánchez García, was born in Ciudad Real in 1881, the son of an unsuccessful theatre and opera impresario.¹ After a brief experimentation with sculpture and drawing, he was admitted as an apprentice to the successful Madrid photographer, Amador. He was an eager assistant, determined to learn his craft thoroughly. Soon he became an accomplished maker of ambulancias, photographs of important social gatherings, political dinners, and meetings of learned societies taken on location rather than in the photographer's gallery. By now a skilled studio photographer with considerable on-location experience, he left Amador to work in the studio of Manuel Company, at the time (1897) the most important in Madrid, where he soon became the primer operador de galería (chief studio photographer) and received the highest salary. By this time, he was alternating studio work with an increasing journalistic/press involvement. In 1904, still in his early twenties and now the father of ‘Alfonsito’ (Alfonso Sánchez Portela), Alfonso left Company to join the staff of El Gráfico. It was during El Gráfico's brief existence that the photo credit, FOTO ALFONSO, was born. When the paper suspended publication a short time later, he was offered a position with El Heraldo de Madrid, Madrid's leading evening newspaper.     

Joseph A. Maybin and Two Steamboat Wrecks

Abstract

Just after 10 a.m. on Monday 17th August 1885, as the steamboat S. M. Felton left its dock in Philadelphia headed for Wilmington, Delaware, an explosion ripped through its forward deck structure. Miraculously, no one was killed, although several people were injured. The ship returned to the dock and, after the passengers were disembarked, was towed to the Pusey & Jones Company in Wilmington for repairs. The ship's captain and others were convinced that the explosion had not been an accident, and that for some unknown reason a ‘veritable infernal device’ had been ‘smuggled’ on board and set to go off to make it look as if the boiler had exploded. No theory was advanced as to who would have done such a thing, although it was pointed out that the Felton was the archrival of the ship Brandywine. Since the two ships frequently left Philadelphia at the same time, races between them were common¹. Another good cause for speculation was the report in the Wilmington Every Evening less than two weeks before the explosion that the Felton charged a fare ‘so low that it is intended to drive all other boats from the river’². In the long run nothing came of these suspicions, and no one was ever convicted in the case, despite the work of a Captain Linden of the Pinkerton Detective Agency.     

Moving Localities and Creative Circulation: Travels as Knowledge Production in 18th‐Century Europe

In recent historiography of science, circulation has been widely used to weave global narratives about the history of science. These have tended to focus on flows of people, objects and practices rather than investigating the spread of universal patterns of knowledge. The approach has also, to a great extent, concentrated on colonial contexts and treated ‘European science’ as a more or less homogeneous knowledge realm. Furthermore, these studies of circulation have usually been tied to a contextualist view of knowledge formation in which locality is taken as a set of specificities linked with particular locations. In this article we redirect the focus of the discussion on circulation to Europe, and reference spaces that are often absent from other scholarly accounts. We will ground our discussion on a comparative study of three travelling actors from the European periphery through whom we will introduce the notion of ‘moving locality’ in order to depict circulation as a knowledge production process per se.     

High Formalism: The aerial view and the colour field

Laura Kurgan’s Monochrome Landscapes (2004), first exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, consists of four oblong Cibachrome prints derived from digital files sourced from the commercial Ikonos and QuickBird satellites. The prints are ostensibly flat, depthless fields of white, green, blue, and yellow, yet the captions provided explain that the sites represented are related to contested military, industrial, and cartographic practices. In Kurgan’s account of Monochrome Landscapes she explains that it is in dialogue with another work from the Whitney by abstract artist Ellsworth Kelly. This article pursues the relationship between formalist abstraction and satellite imaging in order to demonstrate how formalist strategies aimed at producing an immediate retinal response are bound up with contemporary uses of digital information and the truth claims such information can be made to substantiate.     

An assessment of the kernel‐distance‐based multivariate control chart through an industrial application

Traditional multivariate quality control charts assume that quality characteristics follow a multivariate normal distribution. However, in many industrial applications the process distribution is not known, implying the need to construct a flexible control chart appropriate for real applications. A promising approach is to use support vector machines in statistical process control. This paper focuses on the application of the ‘kernel‐distance‐based multivariate control chart’, also known as the ‘k‐chart’, to a real industrial process, and its assessment by comparing it to Hotelling's T² control chart, based on the number of out‐of‐control observations and on the Average Run Length. The industrial application showed that the k‐chart is sensitive to small shifts in mean vector and outperforms the T² control chart in terms of Average Run Length. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Comparing Two Process Capability Indices under Balanced One‐Way Random Effect Model

Process capability indices such as C_p, C_pk, C_pmk and C_pm are widely used in manufacturing industries to provide a quantitative measurement of the performance of the products. In this article, we derived generalized confidence intervals for the difference between process capability indices for two processes under one‐way random effect model. Our study provides coverage probability close to the nominal value in almost all cases as shown via simulation. An example from industrial contexts is given to illustrate the results. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Seeing Photographically: Reading Rejlander’s “Apology”

The subject of this essay is a little known text by the photographer Oscar G. Rejlander (1813–1875) titled “An Apology for Art-Photography” published in 1863. The article argues that the “Apology” renders visible a mode of seeing that Celia Lury terms “seeing photographically.” “Seeing photographically” is the means or medium through which Rejlander came to see and fashion his self as a photographer. A reading of Freud’s “R is my Uncle” dream from The Interpretation of Dreams provides an analogical and analytical lever with which to open and expand Lury’s insight into the optics of seeing photographically. The article concludes with a reading of Rejlander’s Two Ways of Life of 1856. It argues that this photograph can be read as what I call, following W.J.T. Mitchell, a metaphotograph of the nineteenth-century photographer imaged as a divided figure emerging against the culturally contested backdrop of early photography.     

The Photomontage Activity of Postmodernism

For decades now, Douglas Crimp’s landmark 1980 essay ‘The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism’ has shaped our understanding of modernism’s aftermath, at least as it unfolded in North America and Western Europe. Less remembered, however, is the degree to which the procedures of disjunction, copying, appropriation, and outright theft that he highlighted were epitomised not just by contemporary photography, but by photomontage in particular. This article recovers the debates that led critics such as Crimp, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Christopher Phillips, Benjamin Buchloh and others to turn to photomontage as one of their principal objects of concern in what became known as the postmodern critique of photography. Why was montage tasked to perform this critical function, particularly by people around the journal October who had not otherwise devoted the balance of their writing to photography’s history? The article suggests that these men and women, along with the contemporary artists they foregrounded, manifested what Mary Anne Doane has called a ‘desire for signification’, a reaction in the late 1970s against the mute theatricality of minimalist and conceptual art. Photomontage reintroduced representation to contemporary art and to the canon of art history. But unlike the reemerging illusionism in painting that also manifested this desire, montage guarded against an uncomplicated realism by highlighting and critiquing operations of representation in a manner that painting no longer could.     

Ceramic-based chemical sensors, probes and field-tests in automobile engines

The monitoring and control of combustion-related emissions is a top priority in many industries. The major methods used to detect combustion gases fall short of practical applications for in-situ measurements in industrial environments involving high temperature and chemical contaminants. The real challenge is not only to develop highly sensitive and selective sensors, but to maintain long-term stability in such aggressive environments. This article presents an overview of a multidisciplinary research effort in ceramic-based chemical sensors, highlighting opportunities as well as challenges. The group of sensors (CO, NO _x , O₂, and CO₂) selected for this article can, in general, be used to determine the state of combustion in a wide variety of applications. Fabrication of sensor probes and their field-test results in automobile engines are also presented.     

Development of joint maintenance and production strategies in a subcontracting environment

This article, inspired by an industrial problem, develops efficient maintenance and just-in-time production policies in a subcontracting environment according to two orientations. The first invokes subcontracting with the objective of satisfying a constant customer demand knowing that our production system, composed of a machine M ₁, cannot satisfy the totality of demand. Subcontracting is represented by a machine M ₂ which has a constant failure rate, while three maintenance policies for M ₁ are tested and evaluated. The second orientation takes the perspective of our production system as a supplier which is obliged to allocate part of its production capacity to subcontracting so as to satisfy a constant demand. We consider a production system made up of two machines, both of which produce a single type of product, are subject to breakdowns and can carry out subcontracting tasks. The objective of this part of the article is to prove the efficiency of the so-called integrated maintenance policy, which combines production and maintenance decisions in a subcontracting environment.     

Interference Figures of Biaxial Crystal Plates (Optic Axes Figures)

Abstract

The intensity distribution in the interference field produced by a plane parallel biaxial crystal plate between crossed polarizers and transmitted by convergent light (optic axes figures) is presented as an explicit formula. This has been achieved by a suitable procedure of approximation which consists of treating the crystal as an isotropic medium and using Fresnel's formulae for the transmitted wave amplitudes at both surfaces. The anisotropy of the crystal is taken into account only in the determination of the orthogonal vibration directions and of the refractive indices pertaining to the two waves originating from the double refraction at the first surface of the crystal. The interference figures calculated by this method are in close agreement with the exact results from Rath and Pohl.     

Sequencing approaches for multiple-aisle automated storage and retrieval systems

Automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS) are used in high velocity distribution centres to provide accurate and fast order processing. While almost every industrial system is comprised of many aisles, most of the academic research on the operational aspects of AS/RS is devoted to single-aisle systems, probably due to the broadly accepted hypothesis proposing that an m aisles system can be modelled as m 1-aisle independent systems. In this article, we present two multi-aisles sequencing approaches and evaluate their performance when all the aisles are managed independently first, and then in a global manner. Computational experiments conducted on a multi-aisle AS/RS simulation model clearly demonstrate that a multi-aisle system cannot be accurately represented by multiple single-aisle systems. The numerical results demonstrate that, when dealing with random storage, globally sequencing multi-aisle AS/RS leads to makespan reductions ranging from 14 to 29% for 2- and 3-aisle systems, respectively.