An album of seascapes by Gustave Le Gray

Abstract

In 1856 Ernest Lacan, a journalist and early critic in the field of photography, advanced a prediction which only recently has been confirmed, that Gustave Le Gray (1820–c. 1882) ‘s'est fait un nom qui restera dans l'histoire des progrès de la photographie’¹. There is little doubt that in the 1850s Le Gray was considered at least the equal of contemporary luminaries such as Nadar, owing to the following activities and accolades: his highly advanced technical experiments, discoveries and improvements; his several treatises and short notes in journals which dealt with such; his extensive and consistent exhibition record which was accompanied by almost exclusively positive and enthusiastic reviews; persistent application of and investigation into nearly every photographic technique and iconographic theme popular at the time; his informal or professional training of photographers of note such as Henri Le Secq, Charles Nègre, Charles Marville, Maxime Du Camp, Roger Fenton, and Adrien Tournachon; and the ultimate approbation, the grant to him in c. 1858–1859 of the title ‘Photographe de S. M. L'Empereur’. Accordingly, one finds in the histories and photographic journals of his day repeated references to the exceptional quality of Le Gray's prints and the widespread influence of his writings and instruction. Nadar, in his Quand j'étais photographe of c. 1900, included extensive remarks relating to Le Gray's personal life and photographic career, but because of a span of 40 or more years between original events and recollections, Nadar's account of his subject's endeavours is at best superficial, and tends to emphasize anecdote as opposed to factual history. Short treatments dealing primarily with the technical aspects of Le Gray's photography do appear in most 20th-century surveys (Freund, Lécuyer, Gernsheim, Newhall, etc.), but neither these brief synopses nor Nadar's reminiscences constitute what may even faintly be construed as a serious attempt at a reconstruction of the photographer's career and accomplishments2 For essentially revisional biographical information concerning Le Gray, see the author's dissertation¹, especially pp. 1–20, 41–42, 52–53, and 63–47. . In recent years, however, photographic historians, art historians, and to some extent the general public, have witnessed a renaissance of interest in Le Gray's life and works, a revival which has led to more detailed and accurate textual inforinntion, and the attendant availability of a wider range of examples of his works and writings³. It therefore seems propitious to add to this rapidly expanding corpus of Le Gray studies an intensive discussion of what may well be the photographer's most distinguished technical and aesthetic achievement, the Vistas del Mar album of scascapes, here dated c. 1857–1859, now housed in the Art Institute of Chicago.     

‘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.     

The Making of a Hunter: Moriyama Daidō 1966–1972

The images from Moriyama's earliest photobooks – Nihon gekijō shashinchō (Nippon Theatre), Shashin yo sayōnara (Farewell Photography), and Kariudo (A Hunter) – are among his most highly respected works, yet comparably little is known about the processes and contexts of their production. This essay examines the photographer's early collaborative projects with the writer and dramatist Terayama Shūji, as well as such important magazine serial projects as ‘Akushidento (Accident)’ and ‘Nanika eno tabi (Searching Journeys)’, with a view to better understanding his formative years. The analysis draws heavily from the notes that Moriyama often wrote to accompany his photo-stories and argues that his most important thematic terrain is the often unsettling tension between two modalities of the photograph: on the one hand as ‘cold’, ‘authentic’ documentary record, and on the other as emotionally affecting simulation of meaningful contact with the external world.     

Lewis Carroll's Barker and his daughter May and the legend of Aristotle and Phyllis

Abstract

When Lewis Carroll died, a young woman who had been one of his ‘child-friends’ explained that, like the mirror-letters he sometimes wrote, ‘he was a man whom one had to read backwards’, a man that had to be looked at ‘As Through a Looking Glass’.¹ Certainly Carroll was a man that few understood. The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson seemed to be a walking contradiction. The stiff, rectitudinous mathematician and logician, who gave ‘dull-as-ditchwater’ lectures at Christ Church, Oxford,² was in sharp contrast to the man who delighted in the whimsical and paradoxical — author of Alice in Wonderland, inventor of word games, and writer of satirical pamphlets. He was also, in the words of the great photographer Brassaï, ‘the most remarkable photographer of children in the nineteenth century’.³ These photographs, most often images of Carroll's young female friends, are indeed remarkable. Yet they are also decidedly complex and paradoxical, producing in the modem viewer a high degree of psychological discord. On the one hand they are charming, personal portraits of children; on the other, they evoke something mature, sensual and alarmingly intimate.     

Alfred Stieglitz and New Yark Dada

Abstract

In February of 1921 the photographer and entrepreneur Alfred Stieglitz mounted the fIrst public exhibition of his work since the closing of his pioneering art gallery, ‘291’, nearly four years earlier.1 An exhibition of 146 of Stieglitz's photographs was held at the Anderson Galleries in New York during February of 1921. This show was instrumental in helping Stieglitz ultimately to reassert his prominence in the New York art world and re-establish his status as an important American artist. Curiously, however, the manner in which Stieglitz and his associates chose to promote the photographer was somewhat unusual. They repeatedly described the camera as an extension of Stieglitz's own body, and his photographs as an extension of his spirit. As a result, they claimed that Stieglitz had achieved a profound physical and spiritual union both with his machinery and with the subjects he photographed.     

For Explication: Poling the Marsh Hay

Abstract

For over a century the development and employment of photomechanical processes have significandy contributed to the advancement of the graphic arts. Evidence of this requires one to look no further than today's average newspaper, illustrated as it is with a seemingly coundess number of photomechanically produced halftone images. Traditionally, credit for the invention of the halftone printing process has been assigned to a number of individuals, including Stephen Horgan, Frederick E. Ives, George Meisenbach, the Jaffe brothers and Max Levy. However, such credit fails to recognize the achievement of two Canadians, William Augustus Leggo and George Edward Desbarats, who in 1869 commercially published the world's first letterpress halftone reproduction of a photograph. In addition to their pioneering efforts in halftone reproduction, during the 1860s and 1870s, Leggo and Desbarats were responsible for other important advances involving the application of photography to early photomechanical printing processes.     

David A. Sinclair's Pilgrimage

Abstract

The secretary of the Young Men's Christian Association has spent the last few days in bidding farewell and receiving the best wishes of his friends, as he prepared to leave them in search of his health. The large number of friends gathered about him last Sunday showed the hold he has upon the people of this city.     

The success of Samuel Bourne in India

Abstract

In their 1955 edition of The History of Photography Helmut and Alison Gernsheim noted that the work of Samuel Bourne has ‘undeservedly fallen into oblivion’. They recognized the outstanding quality of the photographs produced on Bourne's excursions in India during the 1860s, including three arduous treks into the western Himalayas. By drawing on the young Englishman's own engaging accounts of his exploits in the mountains — a series of articles published in The British Journal of Photography — the Gernsheims were able to provide ‘an impression of a truly unique achievement’.¹ This initial effort to rescue Bourne from the limbo of forgotten landscapists was continued some twenty years later when his expeditionary work was featured in Ann Turner's BBC television series, ‘Pioneers of Photography’, which was brought out in book form by Aaron Scharf in 1976.² Other serious examinations of Bourne's photographs soon followed, the most significant of these being Arthur Ollman's brief but excellent monograph published in conjunction with an exhibition sponsored by the Friends of Photography in California.³ While the collective writings on Bourne thus ensured his entry into the mainstream of photo-history and provided the groundwork for future studies, numerous questions still remained unanswered regarding Bourne's entry into the photographic trade in India, his professional success, and the impact of his work on his contemporaries. Moreover, previous discussions of the artist's pictorial accomplishments have been limited to selected works with little or no investigation of the possible meanings attached to variations of formats and subtly interrelated series of images, including their cultural and social significance.⁴     

Guillermo Kahlo and Casasola

Abstract

The photographers Guillermo Kahlo and Agustín Víctor Casasola recorded the cultural artefacts and political events that shaped Mexican culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. Their photographic collections exemplify the initial uses of photography as both cultural and historical documents. In the case of Kahlo, his 25 albums, entitled Photographic Inventory cif Spanish Colonial Church Architecture in Mexico (1910),¹ were among the commemorative projects the Porfirian government sponsored to record national sights and monuments representative of Mexican cultural history for the centenary celebration of Mexican Independence (1810). Kahlo's photographic inventory was a significant government commission that documented the colonial architecture still standing in Mexico. In turn, Casasola established in 1912 the first Agenda Mexicana de Información Fotográfica that collected and produced photographs documenting the events of the Revolution. He presented the results of his endeavour in the 15-volume work, Álbum Histórico Gráfico (1921).     

The Album of Camille Silvy

Abstract

Camille Silvy (1834-1910), an elusive figure in the history of photography, was very successful in the brief 11 years that he produced photographs. He has been primarily known for his beautifully toned cartes-de-visite, in addition to larger images, most prominently River Scene, France. Recently, much attention has been given to this Silvy masterpiece, which has been the subject of a book and an exhibition.¹ The book, intensively researched by Mark Haworth-Booth, sheds considerable light on Silvy's life and career. One of the items that Haworth-Booth uncovered was an album or scrapbook that belonged to Silvy and now belongs to Silvy's descendants in Paris. This album served as a scrapbook or memory book and provides clues and insights into Silvy's life. It reflects his inspirations and early training, his interests, his professional accomplishments, events in his life, and his lifelong interest in documentation.     

F. Holland day

Abstract

Research Into F. Holland Day's æuvre has begun to provide a framework for interpreting the content found in his photographs, and the host of literary, artistic, and spiritual sources that often seem to have informed has aesthetic decision making. For while Day's work is here considered in the context of photographic history, he is no less part of the intricate network of writers, poets, artists, and socialites whose often controversial expression comprise the fin de siècle that ruptured Brahmin society in Boston. Incited by Estelle Jussim's resistance to discussing either homosexuahty or the homoerotic content manifest in Day's Images of the male nude (figure 1; see also figure 14, Curtis, ‘F. Holland Day: The Poetry of Photography’, in this issue.), scholars have been vigorously asserting the centrality of these issues as a means for understanding Day's life and career.¹ While it is evident that many of his photographs of the male nude possess a casual relationship to the profusion of gay male erotica circulating in both England and the United States, the issues that may explicate the sexual ambiguities of male-male relationships during this period are far more complex than what has emerged 10 the literature on Day.² It can be said, moreover, that the male nude photographs by Day have received disporportionate attention from scholars, and thus have suppressed discussions about the diversity of his repertoire, and the important role that other images play in the photographer's æuvre.     

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.     

Greenback Shutterbug

Abstract

Maud Sulter combines a number of art media in new ways. She was born in Glasgow in 1960 and has published two books of poetry. The first was titled As a Blackwoman (1985) and her second book, Zabat: Poetics of a Family Tree, came out in 1989. She's a visual artist who uses photography first and foremost, but she also draws and paints. She's currently Momart Artist-in-Residence at the Tate Gallery in Liverpool. Maud Suiter describes herself as a cultural activist, and she's concerned with some very large issues. Her exhibition, Zabat, means, variously, ‘a sacred dance’, ‘an occasion of power’ (as in Witches Sabbath), and ‘black women's rite of passage’. The exhibition re-presents the nine Muses–each is portrayed by a black woman with symbolic attributes such as a flute, flowers, a picture, and so on. The writer Alice Walker appears as the ‘Muse of Comedy’. Ysaye Maria Barnwell, of Sweet Honey in the Rock, is ‘Polyhymnia, the Muse of Sacred Song’.     

Thomas Annan and the scottish landscape

Abstract

Thomas Annan (1830–87) was a successful Scottish photographer who produced work in all the main subject categories associated with commercial practice in the midnineteenth century, including portraiture, landscape, urban and industrial documentation and reproductions of works of art. While it is true that the versatility and range of his achievement have not gone unacknowledged, his reputation today undoubtedly rests on one particular body of work— his survey of Glasgow's High Street slums, first published in 1871 as Photographs of the Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow.¹ Stark, shocking, and yet strangely hypnotic, the images in this book are among the earliest as well as the most powerful of their kind ever made. They are also sufficiently ambiguous in their status as ‘representations’ to have provided a fruitful target for critical analysis among cultural historians anxious to demonstrate the deeply problematic nature of the nineteenth-century documentary project as a whole.² Old Streets and Closes is in every way an outstanding work. It speaks eloquently of a now vanished past, while confronting us with the inherently paradoxical nature of photography's contribution to historical discourse.     

Leah King-Smith and the Nineteenth-century Archive

Abstract

In postmodern criticism the camera has often been seen as an apparatus of control, one of the surveillance mechanisms of the state, in the service of its institutions and immersed in its technologies of power. The metaphor of the camera as a weapon, as analysed by Susan Sontag in the early 1970s, describes an unbalanced and non-reciprocal relationship between photographer and subject.¹ One is the hunter, the other the prey; one is the agent, the other the victim. This theoretical paradigm was consolidated in the 1980s when structuralist critics started to analyse nineteenth-century photographic archives held in libraries, institutions and museums.² Much of this criticism followed the work of Michel Foucault who used Jeremy Bentham's model of the Panopticon to analyse the controlling mechanism of the gaze in modern institutions.³ I am aware that aligning Foucault with structuralism will appear problematic to some; however, the way in which some of his work has been adapted by postmodern critics of photography does underline the determinism of his theory. For a lucid analysis, see Joan Copjec, Read my Desire: Lacan against the Historicists, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1994, 1–10. For a different perspective, sympathetic to Foucault, see Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1997. Although Foucault's concept of power is productive and he admits to sites of resistance, he is pessimistic about the possibilities of such resistance.⁴ Discipline and Punish, upon which many theories of photographic surveillance are predicated, constructs disciplinary power as ‘the nonreversible subordination of one group of people by another’.⁵     

The delicious Harlequin

Abstract

The prim little girl in the century-old cabinet photograph ¹ Connie Giickrist. Original in the Pennsylvania State University Libraries. Purchased from D'Offay Couper Galleries, London, in 1971 is wearing her very best dress, and the bow fitted around her waist must have made it difficult to maintain a balance in a high wind. But she most certainly could have coped with the problem because rope-skipping was her particular talent, and she practised it as ‘the skipping girl’ on the stage of the Adelphi Theatre². Good looks and a few lengths of hemp made 11-year-old Constance MacDonald Gilchrist a London celebrity, and a personage who needed no introduction as late as 1898. She fascinated painters. Whistler was captivated enough to make two studies of her, retaining one of them, Harmony in Yellow and Gold: The Gold Girl, Connie Gilchrist, until his death³. (It is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.) Lewis Carroll svho, strangely enough, shared Whistler's interest in the theatre, also had a more than casual interest in little girls, and a near-professional interest in photographing them. That this great man has been occasionally criticized for this penchant seems hardly fair, but his diaries often betray a man caught in the grip of two passions—for children, and for photography. The passages on Connie Gilchrist are as good as any for illustration.     

Ara Güler's Photography of ‘Old Istanbul’ and Cosmopolitan Nostalgia

Based on Ara Güler's photographs of Istanbul, this paper explores the relationship between nostalgia and photography in the city. Most of Güler's best known photographs were taken in the 1950s and 1960s while he was working as a photojournalist for the print press. The re-coding of a selection of his black and white images since the 1990s as art photography and in the pursuit of recalling ‘Old Istanbul’ as a cosmopolitan city presents a revealing case. Güler's recruitment as a photojournalist in the 1950s was a result of the expansion and modernisation of the city's print press, which itself was a response to dramatic transformations in the city, such as massive rural-to-urban migration and urban renewal and expansion. Güler's pictures from this era are typically of the urban poor and working classes. Focusing on two journalistic narratives co-produced by Güler – one in 1959 for the illustrated journal Hayat, and the other in 1969 for the daily Ak?am – this paper asks why and how only images from the latter circulate today. It argues that contemporary urban discourses influence how we interpret these old photographs now.     

‘Princess’ Alice

Abstract

Burr Mcintosh had an enviable job as a photographer; at the turn of the century, he was called the ‘special photographer … to [a popular] Theodore Roosevelt’¹. With such credentials, Mcintosh accompanied William Howard Taft's Republican peace entourage to the Philippines and to China in 1905, bathing in the knowledge that his calling and appointment were secure. He was obviously smitten by ‘the Princess’, Alice Roosevelt, Teddy's headstrong daughter, and took every opportunity to photograph her with the other politicos on the junket. Alice mentions these events m her autobiography, Crowded Hours     

The Aesthetics of Politics in the Hungarian Photobook From Our Lives

Lajos Kassák is best known outside of Hungary for his commitment to international dialogue among the avant‐gardes of the late 1910s and early twenties, as exemplified by his periodical Today (Ma). Within Hungary, however, he is also recognized for his politically driven activities during the late twenties and early thirties, and specifically, for his role in organizing and promoting the leftist activities of the Work Circle (Munka Kör). The present essay challenges this traditional characterization of Kassák's career trajectory. A careful investigation of the paragon Work Circle project – the photobook From Our Lives (A Mi Életünkbo?l) – demonstrates that Kassák's sustained interest and commitment are neither to purely aesthetic nor to purely political goals, but rather, to the very notion of art's aesthetic potential for political impact. Once we recognize that From Our Lives is a pedagogic project, we can properly understand its impact on the Hungarian worker photography movement: it was essentially an instruction manual for artists on how to construct a socially conscious image. As such, it should be distinguished from other more political works which did indeed serve as showcases for exemplary worker photographs – and even from the explicitly political messages presented in the eponymous exhibitions with which the Work Circle photobook is often mistakenly conflated. The broader applicability and implications for this sort of pedagogic analysis of a work's form and function are discussed.     

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