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     

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.     

‘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 art of the autochrome

Abstract

The work of Esther Parada resonates with the Chicago tradition of experimental photography but with a decisively activist fervour born of the 1960s. Her themes impinge on the neglected confluence of public and private domains, the stories of lives omitted from official record, and the frank negotiation of personal accountability in response to political dissembling and disingenuousness. Though Chicago itself continues to be thoroughly inscribed in her life and her work, reflected in projects that tell of the crucial importance of black Americans, women, and urban landscaping in the history of the city, her perspectives are truly global in scope - as wide ranging as Nicaragua, England, and India. As an educator in photography at the School of Art and Design of the University of Illinois, Chicago, she deserves special consideration as having exemplified the visionary practice and critical teaching of the medium established in 1937 by László Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus. Indeed, she did graduate studies at the Institute of Design, where she came in contact with such innovative artists as Aaron Siskind, Arthur Siegel, and Joseph Jachna.¹ Parada, however, has broken new ground as one of the fJISt photographers to make the jump from the analogue or film-based photograph to the digital image, which she has deployed as part of an extended interventionist strategy of collage in order to pose alternative views to the limited narratives of privileged political and social institutions.     

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.     

Notes on early photography in Albania

Abstract

The manner in which the photographic invention interacted with various societies and national temperaments is undoubtedly one of the most interesting aspects of this field. Very little has been published about the arrival and development of photography in Albania. This article is based in part on conversations with the Albanian photographers Gegë Marubi, Piro Milkani and others, in the autumn of 1980¹.     

Early Serbian photography

Abstract

At the onset of the industrial revolution, at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, while all civilized nations of the world were building up their tcchnological resources, Serbia was making its first attempts to free itself from Turkish occupation. When photography was announced in 1839, Serbia was a small country, still partly governed by Turkey. A newly formed class of city dwellers tried eagerly to make up, at an accelerated pace, for all that it had missed in culture and civilization while dominated by the Turks. In their efforts they were aided by numerous émigré Serbs from Vojvodina¹ who were invited and offered positions in government by Duke Milo: ObrenoviC (1780–1860). Many foreign craftsmen, skilled in newly developed techniques, arrived from Western Europe in search of higher earnings, and likewise participated in this cultural awakening.     

Bonfils & Son,Egypt, Greece and the Levant; 1867–1894

Abstract

Félix Bonfils was born in Saint Hippolyte du Fort, France, on 6th March 1831. Little is known of his early life. Family sources indicate he began his professional career by operating his own printing press¹. On becoming interested in photography, he produced photographs using the heliogravure process invented by Niépce. In due course, he adopted the collodion wet-plate process, with all its well-known complications and encumbrances. For the landscape photographer lie was to become, the task of moving his equipment from place to place must have been formidable, especially in countries where roads and transport were meagre.     

Elizabeth Alice Austen: An American “original”

Abstract

At the founding of the Society for Photographic Education in 1962, a speaker remarked on the scarcity of books on photography. He noted that while secondary and minor figures in painting, sculpture and the graphic arts were subjects of art historical publications, even the major figures in photography were then barely known. His plea was both prophetic and ironic, for although a flood of books on photography and photographers has issued forth in the twenty-five years since that occasion, there are still no major works on a number of significant photographers. However, despite the fact that many of these publications have been hastily researched and poorly produced, in sum they have expanded our knowledge of photography in several directions: as biographical sources, as aesthetic expression and as social interpretation.     

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.     

The naming of photography

Abstract

Photography now seems so natural a word for the process to which it refers that we tend to forget that the naming of this process was a matter of intense debate during the years leading up to 1839. Indeed photography's pioneers showed almost as much interest in the medium's nomenclature as in its invention, and almost all of them proposed one or more possible names. Given the importance attached to language at the time, it is reasonable to assume that the choice of name for their inventions was in each case indicative of their general thinking about photography and its character. In many cases the word actually came before the invention, or at least before the invention was fully operational. The choice of name therefore reflected not so much what photography was as what photography might be. It was a one-word summation of the idea of photography, and of the desires and aspirations that induced each of its various inventors to undertake their experiments. A history of photography's naming represents a useful insight into these desires, useful because it gives us one more glimpse into the manner of the medium's conception and early development.     

Bulgaria

Abstract

In a brief span of only 135 years, photography has been turned from a purely technical invention into a symbol of our time, and this itself constitutes one of the most remarkable phenomena of modern civilization. The illustration has become the full-fledged partner of literature, and photography a basic means of acquiring and recording knowledge. Photography has become a tool of science, and a means of the aesthetic exploration of reality. It spread rapidly all over the world; but its appearance in Bulgaria was greatly delayed because the Bulgarian people were still under Ottoman domination and some 39 years since its invention had passed before liberation finally came.     

Gilbert Radoux: An early photographic publisher

Abstract

The printing industry has always been a leading-edge application of photography¹. It is no coincidence that the desire to improve on traditional graphic processes was the stimulus which fuelled the researches of both Niepce and Talbot. Since its invention, photography has been used as an information bearer in most domains of human activity. As Talbot recognized when he set up his Talbotype Printing Establishment in Russell Terrace, Reading, in late 1843 or early 1844, printing was a promising industrial sector for the exploitation of photography. He was also forced to realize, when he shut down the operation some three years later, that photographic publishing was perhaps an idea whose time had yet to come.² The necessary preconditions for ensuring commercial success - minimum viability in the form oflow unit costs, mass-produced prints of marketable quality and evidence of a real demand for the finished product - had still to be met.     

Maoris in focus

Abstract

The virtually simultaneous announcement of the invention of photography in Paris and London in January 1839 marks the “official” birthday of the new technology. The reception given to this announcement in the course of that year, and the subsequent diffusion of knowledge and practice of the technology, show significant differences from country to country. These differences in impact and the rate of take-up may have depended on such factors as the country's proximity to the key events, its level of intellectual openness and general economic development, as well as the ex~stence of key individuals — businessmen and scientists — willing to experiment in the untried processes out of sheer curiosity or for personal gain.     

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     

Oliver Wendell Holmes as an amateur photographer

Abstract

On 6th July 1862, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a letter to Coleman Sellers, thanking him for some photographs received and excusing his own negligence in writing. His eldest son, missing in action in Richmond, commanded all his attention, but then Holmes added: ‘If it were not for this war, I should begin getting photographic apparatus tomorrow. If peace ever returns I feel sure I shall try my hand at the art and then I shall be only too happy to send you some of my handiwork in return for the many favors I have received from you’¹. The letter catches Holmes at an interesting point in his life. Always intrigued by photography and well known among his friends as a popularizer of it, he was finally thinking of turning theory into practice.     

View of the West

Abstract

Perhaps meaning in Cuban photography has been tied to context more than is the case in other cultures. An island crossroads, Cuba was among the first Latin American nations to receive the foreign harbingers of this invention in 1840, and early daguerreotypes - as well as pictorialist portraits made by other techniques - were produced for those who could afford them. It could be argued that Cuban photography only really begins to deal with that country's reality during the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1895-98.² There, images of emaciated Cuban civilians, starved and mistreated in the Spanish concentration camps, both marked the beginnings of ‘critical realism’ and signalled the complexities that would surround photography in this culture. To Cubans, these photographs were a stimulus in struggling against the atrocities of colonial rule; to the US government, they offered simply one more excuse to invade the island and replace the Spanish flag with the Stars and Stripes.     

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.