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.     

Wanted: The Outlaw in American Visual Culture; Capturing the Criminal Image: From Mug Shot to Surveillance Society; Pictures from a Drawer: Prison and the Art of Portraiture

Several amateur photographers lived and worked in the Coal Branch, a series of mining communities in the eastern foothills of the Canadian Rocky Mountains in Alberta. These communities were transient and very isolated from the rest of the province. Among the photographers working there were Allan Godby and Charles Lee, whose photographs are housed at the Provincial Archives of Alberta. The photographs of Godby and Lee present a unique record of life in the Coal Branch and provide particular insight into the social structures of that community as well as offering a mediated visual document of imposed settlement in pristine wilderness.     

Practices of Photography: Circulation and Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean

Recent theoretical work on the Mediterranean has emphasised the sea as an agent of ‘connectivity’ over a highly fragmented space, bringing peoples, goods, languages, and ideas into contact. Early photography in the Mediterranean manifests this connectivity and mixedness across the whole field of its practice: among photographers, sitters, printers, dealers, consumers, patrons, and even the photographs themselves. Focusing on the eastern Mediterranean, this article treats early photography in its ‘Mediterranean’ context: located within a space of multiple languages, ethnicities, and religions, of personal and commercial networks between cities and across borders, and of spatial and social circulation and exchange. Such an approach complicates the two prevailing scholarly narratives of Mediterranean photography: one based on place, nationality, or ethnicity; the other on Orientalism. Seen in this light, the early history of photography in the Mediterranean may have implications for understanding the ways in which modernisation took hold and operated in the region.     

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.     

Groet uit Java: Picture Postcards and the Transnational Making of the Colony around 1900

This article explores the transnational visual language of picture postcards and the international business networks responsible for producing and disseminating the image of Dutch colonialism around 1900. Following a microhistorical approach, I consider the multilayered representation and transnational production of one particular postcard sent from colonial Indonesia to the Netherlands in 1900. The postcard established, visualised, and catalysed colonialism through its use of a European visual language. Colonialist meaning was attached to the image in Germany and was reinforced through the process of the postcard’s delivery from colony to metropolis. This article moves beyond a nation-based framework and instead analyses the meanings of colonial imagery in transnational contexts.