Henri Cartier‐Bresson Reinterprets his Career

Between 1952 and 1974, Henri Cartier‐Bresson significantly revised his understanding of himself as a photojournalist. This article analyses that change through close readings of his book, The Decisive Moment (1952), an interview in Le Monde (1974), and other published statements and unpublished letters by Cartier‐Bresson. It draws on interviews and correspondence with his widow Martine Franck, with his friend and representative Helen Wright, and with associates at Magnum Photos. It argues that what appears from a superficial reading of the interview to be a rejection of photography and photojournalism was in fact Cartier‐Bresson's first public expression of a long‐simmering opposition to the consumer society – which he as an ecologist strongly opposed – and to fashion and advertising photography, which he believed promoted unnecessary consumption. It concludes that Cartier‐Bresson reinterpreted his past by seeing himself as a surrealist to the denial of having done photojournalism. The article is predicated on the belief that understanding the change in Cartier‐Bresson's own conception of his work is essential to a full understanding of it.     

‘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.     

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.     

Photography at the Institute of Design

Abstract

In 1937, László Moholy-Nagy planted the Bauhaus seed, a hybrid of art and mass production, in the soil of the American Midwest. The New Bauhaus in Chicago only survived a year, but its successor, first called the School of Design and then the Institute of Design (ID), would be an influential centre of photographic experimentation for the next thirty-five years. Taken by Design: Photographs from the Institute of Design, 1937–1971 traces the tumultuous history of the school's small but seminal photography programme, the work of its major instructors, and their combined influence on photography in the USA. The essays in this handsome catalogue tell the story of how the ID approach evolved, from Moholy's formalist view of photography as one of the design arts, into the arrival of the medium as an art form in its own right under Hany Callahan, Aaron Siskind and Arthur Siege!. Published to accompany David Travis and Elizabeth Siegel's exhibition of the same title for the Art Institute of Chicago, the book is the first comprehensive documentation of the vital contribution of the Institute of Design to the history of photography.     

Kurt Tucholsky,John Heartfield and Deutschland,Deutschland über Alles

This essay analyses Kurt Tucholsky and John Heartfield's 1929 Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles. In this ‘picture‐book’ right‐wing nationalism, the military, the democratic system, and capitalism were trenchantly criticized. This essay argues, however, that Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles is as much about the role of photography in society as it is about Weimar's political situation. The late 1920s are generally seen as a period of medium optimism in which the new photography was in the forefront. Yet a close analysis of the use of photography in Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles nuances the so‐called optimism of Weimar visual culture and its sudden disruption by the advent of fascism in the 1930s. While from the early 1910s onwards, Tucholsky had promoted the polemical power of photography, his position shifted by the end of the 1920s. An ambivalence marked Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles: on the one hand the photographic medium was used as a critical tool; on the other, the book reflects an underlying critique of and frustration with photojournalism and its association with urban modernity.     

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.     

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.     

US Photography in the Philippines Before 1898: The Menage Expedition of 1890–1893

Between 1890 and 1893, two young Americans, Frank Swift Bourns and Dean Conant Worcester, travelled through the central and southern Philippines on a zoological expedition. In addition to collecting animal specimens, the two men took more than one hundred and fifty photographs. These photographs have not been given much attention by historians but they are an important set of images that help expand the understanding of photography in the Philippines in the late Spanish colonial era. This article discusses the circumstances surrounding the making of these images and provides a framework for interpreting their significance by applying the concept of the ‘photographic obsessions’ of Western explorers as defined and described by Willem van Schendel and his colleagues in the book The Chittagong Hill Tracts: Living in a Borderland.     

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.     

Henry van der Weyde (1839–1924)

Abstract

My great-great-grandfather Henry van der Weyde (figure 1) was a fascinating individual with a variety of talents. He was an artist, society photographer and inventor. He can be regarded as one of the fathers of electric-light photography because, in 1877, he was the first person to use a dynamo to produce electric-arc light to illuminate his studio. This was a revolution in the evolution of photography. He also invented and developed photographic techniques in lenses, lighting, printing and vignetting. He filed 81 patent applications, which were not all in the field of photography.     

Thomas Glaister and early Australian photography

Abstract

In common with research into the early photographic history of most colonial societies, attempts to learn more about the photographers who worked in nineteenth-century Australia can be an exasperating exercise. Many of these early practitioners arrived in Australia as immigrants from Europe or America, often intent on concealing their origins, or, more optimistically, simply wanting to establish a new life in a new country without the encumbrances of their own pasts. Despite the technical skill and the cumbersome equipment required to produce early photographic images, many new arrivals in the colony took up photography principally as a means of making money, either as itinerant country photographers (Jack Cato called Australian photography in the 1840s a ‘vagrant process’¹) or, later in the cities, through studio portraiture and views of colonial streets and buildings. Aesthetic considerations were often secondary to the desire for a ‘good likeness’ produced in the shortest amount of time.     

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’.     

Book reviews

Abstract

When news of the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi circulated through New Delhi on 30 January 1948, Margaret Bourke-White, one of Life magazine's premier photographers, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, then a comparatively unknown French photojournalist, raced to Birla House, where the event occurred. Both understood the journalistic imperative of photographing Gandhi's body. Because of their different philosophical and technical approaches to photography, they responded to the challenge in different ways and produced very different results. This study compares their ideas, approaches, and results. It also offers a case study of one of Cartier-Bresson' s most important news reportages.¹     

Peter Henry Emerson

Abstract

In his recent study, Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary sees the writings on perception by the German physician, physiologist, and mathematician, Hermann von Helmholtz, as part of an epistemic shift, the emergence of what Crary terms a ‘modernizing vision’.¹ His study proposes that ‘during the first few decades of the nineteenth century a new kind of observer took shape in Europe radically different from the type of observer dominant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’.² Helmholtz's thcory of perception contributes to this emergence of a ‘new observer’, a theory in which sight is no longer severed from the body. Helmholtz's account of a corporealizcd encounter with the phenomenal world marks a shift from the notion of a static monocular eye organizing our sensory experience and constitutes the notation of an autonomous vision, of an optical experience that was produced by and within the subject. Light, for example, is shown to be produced not from without but in darkness, the mere effect of the stimulation of nerve ends by electrical impulses.³ Such a theory highlighted not only the significance of the body in perception but an interrelationship between the senses. The sense of sight could be triggered by physical contact; a blow to the eye created light, made one see ‘stars’.     

Sadakichi artmann,essayist and critic

Abstract

During the last two years of his life, Ralph Eugene Meatyard assembled a series of photographs into a book titled The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater. The album's main subject is his wife Madelyn Meat yard who wore one mask for the title role of Lucybelle Crater, and appeared in sixtyfour photographs accompanied in each by a different person wearing one other mask. Madelyn Meat yard's mask, an opaque representation of a grotesque hag, is described as resembling ‘Mammy Yokum from Outer Space’.¹ The other mask is transformed by its wearer, for it is a translucent representation of an androgynous older person. Only two images are titled, and the real names of the masked people are revealed in a listing at the end of the book.     

Croatia

Abstract

When we speak about early photography in Yugoslavia, we must bear in mind the geographical and political situation of the country at the time when photography appeared. In the 19th century, Croatia, today one of the six Yugoslav federal republics, was a part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. So was Slovenia and, in the latter part of the century, Bosnia and Hercegovina, while Serbia and Montenegro had emerged from the disintegration of the Ottoman empire as small independent states. In this survey we shall consider the beginnings of photography in Croatia, not just because that aspect has been studied the most, but because Croatia's special position within the boundaries of Austria-Hungary led to a correspondingly rapid development of photography in this area, as compared with other Slav lands in the south.     

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.     

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     

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.