F. Holland Day's ‘Nubians’

Abstract

In the October 1897 issue of his newly-founded journal, Camera Notes, Alfred Stieglitz began to publish a remarkable series of ‘Nubian’ portraits. They were by F. Holland Day, the Boston photographer whose innovative and dramatic images of young women had already established his reputation internationally. Greatly admired by Stieglitz, Day's ‘Nubian’ series was afforded the most painstaking attention, and reproduced in the expensive process of photogravure.     

F. Holland Day and ‘the Beautiful Boy’: The Story of Thomas Langryl Harris and Day's Nude Study

F. Holland Day has long been recognised as a pioneer American pictorial photographer and uncompromising advocate for photography as a fine art. His work, particularly his depictions of the male nude and the crucifixion of Christ (for which he was his own model), was somewhat controversial in his lifetime and remains influential. His advocacy culminated in the mounting of the all-important New School of American Photography exhibition in London and Paris more than a century ago. Thomas Langryl Harris, on the other hand, was primarily a painter of miniature portraits and had a questionable reputation. He led a short, tragic life and today is totally unknown in the art world. This article explores the relationship between F. Holland Day and Thomas Langryl Harris, the creation of a nude study of the young man by Day and its subsequent erroneous identification as a ‘study for the crucifixion’.     

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.     

Arthur Conan Doyle and psychic photographs

Abstract

The issue of Punch for 12 May 1926 featured a cartoon which depicted an elderly and oversized Arthur Conan Doyle sitting on a stool (see figure 1). Clouds are gathered around his uplifted, preoccupied head. Holding a chain which shackles Doyle's legs is a miniature Sherlock Holmes, brooding and thoughtful. The cartoon's immediate context is satirical: Doyle's warm reception of the Cottingley Fairy photographs, then a matter of ongoing notoriety due to the publication of his The Coming of the Fairies in 1922, had prompted a degree of ridicule. In 1920 he had become involved in an investigation of what purported to be photographs of actual fairies taken by two teenage girls. The matter which commenced as an investigation had, by 1928, with the publication of the study's second edition, developed into a whole-hearted endorsement of the photographs. For Doyle and his colleague, the theosophist Edward Gardner, this event was the ultimate proof that fairies actually existed. Nor was the intervention Doyle's only encounter with paranormal photography. A committed spiritualist by the 1920s, Doyle had previously championed the cause of spirit photography, a process where supposed materializations of the dead appeared in photographs. For the spiritualists, this possibility was an important concept, as it endorsed their central tenet: that the living could communicate with the dead. Relatedly, Doyle's The Case for Spirit Photography (1923) defended William Hope, who had been accused of using fraudulent methods to attain his materializations.     

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     

Between orientalist clichés and images of modernization

Abstract

In contemporary writing about nineteenth-century photography of the Middle East it has become almost a cliche to describe many of these images as ‘Orientalist’-that is, reflecting or propagating a system of representation that creates an essentialized difference between the ‘Orient’ and the ‘West’. Most of these scholars draw on Edward Said's influential book Orientalism, which traces how Europe manufactured an imaginary Orient through literary works and the social sciences.¹ For example, Nissan N. Perez writes in his book Focus East: Early Photography in the Near East (1839–1885) that ‘Literature, painting, and photography fit the real Orient into the imaginary or mental mold existing in the Westerner's mind .... These attitudes are mirrored in many of the photographs taken during this time [the nineteenth century] ... Either staged or carefully selected from a large array of possibilities, they became living visual documents to prove an imaginary reality’. ²     

Erotic Photography

Abstract

In his exhibition catalogue The Body Exposed: 150 Years of the Nude in Photography (Zurich 1995), Michael Kohler expresses the hope that ‘nobody will shy away from taking a closer look at nude photography, its aesthetics, its history and its ideology under the illusion that there is nothing left to discover; for it's exactly the opposite’. In fact, true academic attention toward the nude photograph has been surprisingly limited, the genre leaving behind instead a trail of pseudo-academic coffee-table books and prodigious, but unanalysed, collections. This is perhaps the reason that Michelle Olley's book is at once so heartening and so disappointing. Venus presents an anthology of erotic, and predominantly nude, photography of women spanning approximately the last 40 years. Unfortunately, where such a collection could be a prime opportunity to finally provide a cogent and analytical narrative of the genre's recent history, Olley instead offers a sparse text that uses the photographs merely as evidence of the modern world's sexual liberation. She asserts that ‘Our attitudes toward sex and sexuality, women and the depiction of erotic subjects has shifted, so that society no longer hides the nude away from us as something forbidden and too shocking even for adults’. Her argument is supported by a cursory history of the female nude in painting and photography and by references to ‘restrictive’ Victorian morality. This single-mindedness glosses over the diversity of issues posed by the photographs in the collection — issues such as identity, isolation and interaction, confinement and freedom, universality and incident.     

Arnold Rönnebeck and Alfred Stieglitz: Remembering the hill

Abstract

Arnold R.onnebeck visited Stieglitz and O'Keeffe for a week at Lake George in October 1924. While there, he took a series of snapshots which record Stieglitz taking photographs of O'Keeffe, images which are unique since no other photographs document Stieglitz actually in the process of expanding what is arguably the most famous portrait of the twentieth century, an ongoing work of thematic and temporal depth. Other photographs in which Stieglitz is shown holding a camera (figure 1), perhaps even pausing in his work, appear self-consciously posed, and with the artist separated from his subjects. Rönnebeck's pictures are remarkable for the vivid image they convey of an artist thoroughly absorbed in his work.     

Atomic Afterimages

This article examines the recirculation of Robert Del Tredici's photographs of the Cold War nuclear weapons complex. Originally published in his groundbreaking book, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb (1987), a number of Del Tredici's photographs have been republished in a series of post‐Cold War US Department of Energy reports. The article examines the post‐Cold War circulation of Del Tredici's images in these official government reports and analyzes shifts in their meaning across different historical periods. Ultimately, this paper raises questions about the critical stance of Del Tredici's photographs as they are republished in government reports and examines ways in which the meaning of his photographs responds to both Cold War and post‐Cold War contexts.     

Eduard Steichen and Maurice Maeterlinck

Abstract

Eduard Steichen (1879-1973) met the Belgian Symbolist writer Maurice Maeterlinck in 1901, when Steichen was in Europe. Steichen's goal there was to photograph painters and writers whom he personally admired,¹ including Maeterlinck whom Steichen photographed in 1901. Maeterlinck attended Steichen's first one-man exhibition at Maison des Artistes in 1902 and looked favourably on the young artist's work. Maeterlinck and Steichen discussed photography at the time. Steichen thought that Maeterlinck's comments were ‘more considered than any [he] had heard before’ and ‘wondered whether he would put down some of his thoughts’² to be included with reproductions of Steichen's photographs in Camera Work. Steichen felt emphatically that his best photographs should be reproduced with Maeterlinck's statement, and he told Alfred Stieglitz as much.³ The connection between Maeterlinck and Steichen has not gone unnoticed     

A scene in a library

Abstract

This essay concerns one photograph: the eighth plate in The Pencil of Nature, called A Scene in a Library, which originally appeared in the second installment of Talbot's inaugural book on photography (figure 1). I have already written extensively about A Scene in a Library — and given its title to a book on illustrated books.¹ But it is a photograph that, together with the text that accompanies it, has never ceased to intrigue me. I continue to wonder what Talbot's intentions were when he chose this photograph for his book. Why did he choose it over similar photographs that he had made and could possibly just as well have used? Why did he title it the way he did — A Scene in a Library — when we know that it was not actually taken in his library? Why and when did it occur to him to write the piece of text that accompanies the plate — which speaks of experimentation with the invisible end of the light spectrum? And what did he have in mind when he put the plate, the caption and the accompanying text together? For A Scene in a Library is remarkable — and exceptional — for the unaccountable way in which it puts text together with image. Almost all the other plates have text that bears on them fairly straightforwardly, either explaining how and where they were made or indicating possible uses for the photograph in question. Not so A Scene in a Library, which functions, rather, as a kind of clef de roman, and which has, as I hope to show, an emblematic status in The Pencil of Nature precisely because it is an exception.     

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.     

Walker Evans' American Photographs

Abstract

It is an article of faith among photographers and scholars that Walker Evans' American Photographs is a sequence of pictures rather than a simple collection or anthology; that is to say that the photographs should be looked at in the order in which they are given. Indeed the book is often spoken of as innovative and influential in precisely that respect (among others). Some years ago I set out to learn more about the origin of Evans' sequence in the context of a broader investigation of American Photographs.¹ That study (which remained unpublished) has now been superseded in many ways by Alan Trachtenberg's insightful discussion in the book Reading American Photographs, which appeared in 1989.² Nevertheless some of my original material remains useful and I offer it here largely intact, with only a small number of revisions and additions.     

Weegee's Jewishness

A New York photojournalist who specialised in scenes of crime and disaster, Weegee also made photographs reflecting his Jewish heritage, among them being pictures focusing upon assimilation, social justice and anti-Semitism. By discussing a number of such photographs, many of them published in Weegee's first books, Naked City (1945) and Weegee's People (1946), this article describes how the photographer's religiocultural inheritance influenced his imagery. At the same time, the article provides a model for future analyses of how Jewish descent affected the work of other influential Jewish-American photographers.     

Book reviews

Abstract

A joint exhibition of Ansel Adams's Museum Set portfolio of seventy-five images plus one hundred photographs selected from his centennial project for the University of California, Fiat Lux, was due to open at the University of California, Irvine, on 8 January 1991. The installation of The Museum Set photographs was near completion when museum scientist and installation designer, Phyllis Lutjeans, noticed that Sequoia Gigantea Roots, Yosemite National Park, California, c.1950 (figures 1 and 2), plate number 55 in the exhibition catalogue,¹ was reversed, from the image hanging on the wall before her. Ms Lutjeans had been using the catalogue as a guide to affix labels for the exhibition.     

Alfred Stieglitz

Abstract

Several recent projects devoted to Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) reveal current trends in scholarship regarding this key figure in twentiethcentury cultural history. Two new publications focus primarily upon the myriad significant contributions he made to the ali and culture of the United States. For the historian of photography, these works offer useful insights conceming the intellectual and altistic climate that informed Stieglitz, md which can be productively applied to discussions of his photographic oeuvre. Venturing off the printed page, a documentary film revisits the Stieglitz biography and lauds his photography as one of the major artistic achievements of the twentieth century. Those looking for a comprehensive assessment of Alfred Stieglitz's endeavours as a photographer, however, will have to wait a little longer. The National Gallery of Art in Washington intends to publish a major catalogue, Stieglitz, in 2002, in conjunction with an exhibition featuring a selection of Stieglitz's photographs drawn from their collection. I await this publication with great anticipation. Meanwhile, the National Gallery has developed an innovative website that previews their undertaking.     

Robert McNeill and black government photographers

Abstract

American photo-historians and other scholars of culture have long assumed that the only major black photographer working in the civilian sector of the Federal Government during the Depression and Second World War era was Gordon Parks. The assumption is understandable, in light of Parks's obvious photographic creativity, his talent for selfpromotion in recent decades, and a common scholarly tendency to consider Office of War Information (OWI) photographic production solely in terms of the particular unit rooted in the Farm Security Administration (FSA) project that launched Parks's documentary career. Relevant, too, is the current desire of photo-historical revisionists to focus on the limiting impact of FSA photographic director Roy Stryker — the pernicious white male bureaucrat, according to recent renderings — whose initial reluctance to bring on Parks is well known. ¹ However much the ‘lone black’ assumption may suit scholars' needs, or Gordon Parks's needs, it is quite erroneous.     

Matisse's Odalisques and the Photographic Académie

Henri Matisse's experiments during the first decade of the twentieth century with colour and form have often been the focus of critical analysis of his work, while the radical changes in his figurative style have received less attention. These changes owe much to Matisse's engagement with visual discourse he encountered in the pages of Mes modèles, L'Étude académique, and L'Humanité feminine, illustrated journals the artist consulted as source material for a number of his paintings and sculptures. The impact of these journals, which specialized in photographic académies went beyond the borrowing of a few poses. Instead, Matisse's conceptualization of the female nude as an erotic spectacle and his use of the arabesque as a signifier of feminine voluptée were in large part shaped by the illustrations and editorials he observed in these journals. Matisse's use of the photographic académie offers a valuable case‐study in the eroticization of the aesthetic style in the art of one of the most influential artists of the early twentieth‐century.     

Female Spectatorship and the Masquerade: Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills

Since the late 1970s Cindy Sherman has been one of the most prominent artists in the USA. She is a cult figure because of her chameleon-like masquerade in a female imagery reminiscent of American and European cinema and western art. Her dramatic metamorphosis began with Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980), in which she acted out a variety of female roles from Hollywood and European movies. In the early 1980s she gradually transformed her image into horrific monsters and decaying matter. In the late 1980s Sherman assumed different male and female personas based on old master paintings. Since then, the subject matter of her pictures has increasingly been taken up by hybrid dolls with surreal or grotesque connotations. This paper attempts to venture back into the terrain of Untitled Film Stills that inaugurated Sherman's artistic career. This series of photographs has become one of the most prominent landmarks of feminist/postmodern art. I will propose a new interpretation against the grain of the established feminist readings of these photographs.     

William Morris,Photography, and Frederick H. Evans

Abstract

In 1896, the year of Morris's death, Frederick H. Evans took several pictures of Kelmscott Manor (figure 1). Some months earlier, following Morris's advice, Evans photographed a thirteenth-century barn nearby (figure 2). These pictures eventually illustrated two articles, the first a posthumous tribute to Morris in an Arts and Crafts magazine, the other by Evans in a photography periodical.¹ Together they are the most artistic photographs connected to Morris, depicting buildings and spaces he loved. Although photography is not one of the many endeavours usually associated with him, it was nevertheless an important part of Morris's creative universe.