Books Received and Noted

Abstract

In August 1920 Lu Marten published a two-part essay entided ‘History, satire, Dada and more’ in Die Rote Fahne, the newspaper of the German Communist Party (KPD).¹ Written as a response to Gertrud Alexander's review of the First International Dada Trade Fair, which had appeared the previous month and characterized the exhibition as a manifestation of ‘bourgeois decadence’,² Märten's essay articulated a more complex understanding of Dada's significance by locating it within satire's historical development. Märten described how the bourgeoisie's replacement of the epic and fable with new literary genres had stripped satire of its popular character. Confined to the treatment of narrow, individual issues in the bourgeois humour magazine, satire had degenerated into a telling of jokes; and any illusions that humour magazines such as Simplicissimus provided social criticism had been dispelled by their performance during the recent war and revolution which had revealed their true class interest. The proletariat was increasingly in the grip of the bourgeois press, because capitalism's control of the publishing industry deprived the proletariat of the technological means necessary for modem satire. This circumstance, Marten argued, was the field in which Dada operated as the negative side of proletarian satire. Its important discovery was that art was no longer necessary for satire since capitalism's material body was satire itself Materials published by the bourgeois press could be arranged for satirical effect and ‘the simple reproduction, the photograph also replaces art here’.³ This destructive impulse was one side of a dialectic that Marten viewed as offering hope for proletarian satire's new beginning.     

The Reception of Albert Renger-Patzsch's Die Welt ist schön

Abstract

No history of photography or publication on the photography of the 1920s fails to mention the photo-book Die Welt ist schön. Regarded as a ‘manifesto of the revival of Realism,’¹ and hailed as the ‘bible’ of Neue Sachlichkeit photography,² ‘hardly any other book has influenced a generation of photographers to the same great extent and with such long-lasting effects as this volume‘.³ It was the book's tide in particular that was received like a catchword and influenced the reception of this photographic volume: ‘The tide became symbolic for an attitude of Neue Sachlichkeit to the world and the book was acknowledged as the ideal volume of Neue Sachlichkeit photography’.⁴ Hitherto in the history of the book's reception, this opinion has been restricted primarily to the reference to Walter Benjamin's well-known negative critique of 1931.⁵ Amongst the multitude of reviews of Die Welt ist schon, it is Benjamin's assessment which is most frequendy cited in the literature. That Benjamin was able to neglect explicidy mentioning Renger-Patzsch's name and to refer merely to the tide of the book can be interpreted as proof of the great fame of this photographic author. In fact, Die Welt ist schön had by this time been reviewed in nearly all leading cultural magazines and daily newspapers and evaluated as an exemplary volume of a modem, neusachliche photography. For critics such as Benjamin, however, the tide was synonymous with a new, sterile ‘l’art pour l'art' photography which manipulated reality and denied social contexts. But to confine negative criticism of Die Welt ist schön to the political left and its praise to a more conservative attitude is too simple a model as becomes apparent when all of the reviews are taken into consideration. Karl With's attempt to summarize the contradictions of this picture book may be cited here: ‘Ein seltsames Buch!} (A strange book!). Exciting in its busding abundance, as well as in its silence’.⁶     

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     

Daniel Manders Beere

Abstract

Through History of Photography, photoarchivists at the National Photography Collection of the Public Archives of Canada have learned that one of Canada's photographic pioneers was among New Zealand's early photographers of note. An article by William Main entitled, ‘Photographic Reportage of the New Zealand Wars’¹, and subsequent correspondence from John Sullivan², have shed welcome light on the origins and later life of Daniel Manders Beere.     

John Bishop Hall

Abstract

Excitement, elation, and scepticism travelled throughout the photographic industry when first reports of a new colour and stereoscopic relief process were published on 1 August 1856.¹ The process was patented by John Bishop Hall in New York, on 27 May 1856 and 20 January 1857. Hall's location at 585 Broadway, New York City was known as the ‘Temple of Art’, occupied by the well known photographer Charles Deforest Fredricks. The photographic journals conceived the name hallotype, a derivative of the ambrotype process on glass. The ambrotype was patented July 1854 by James Ambrose Cutting. Legal action relating to Cutting's several patents on the ambrotype began in the early 1860s. In 1868, Cutting's ambrotype patent extension was denied by the patent office. Jerimiah Gurney, a leading photographer at 349 Broadway, New York City, co-signed Hall's patent. On 13 November 1853 Gurney was awarded first prize in a photographic contest sponsored by Edward Anthony. He was awarded a silver pitcher for his tinted whole plate daguerreotype of a mother and her child. Several medals were awarded to Gurney in 1857, at the annual exhibition of the American Institute.² Gurney objected to the ambrotype process, claiming that it was not permanent. He preferred the hallotype claiming that it could be ‘colored by transparent painting put on from behind; — and the ambrotype is taken on one piece of glass and covered by another, the atmosphere being excluded by a balsamic cement, which secure the faces to each other’.³ A business venture employing the name Hall & Gurney was established at 349 Broadway, known as the ‘Palace of Art’, to exploit the hallotype process.⁴     

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     

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.     

Painter and photographer; Brisbane in the 18805 and 18905

Abstract

In August of 1889 the popular local magazine The Boomerang published an article entitled ‘Photography as an Art’, which took the form of an extended advertisement for the recently moved establishment of Thomas Mathewson, one of Brisbane's well-patronized photographic studios ¹ Mathewson began as a professional photographer in 1864, travelling widely throughout Queensland and setting up studios in Gympie and Maryborough. In July of 1876 he opened the studio of Mathewson and Co. in Queen Street, Brisbane. The studio was well established by the mid 1880s and continued in operation until the 1920s. . In the article the writer compares Mathewson's studio with an artistically appointed ‘salon’: ‘This is a palace of photography indeed, with its glittering entrance gallery lined with golden show frames and its luxurious waiting-room that is like the salon of a patron of the fine arts’ ² The Boomerang (24th August 1889). (Figure 1).     

‘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     

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.     

Duchenne de Boulogne

Abstract

In this 1986 article ‘The Body and the Archive’, Alan Sekula argues that the Essays on Physiognomy of Johann Casper Lavater, which were published in the 1770s, helped to establish a belief that was augmented and elaborated during the nineteenth century through the use of photography.¹ To give an example, Francis Galton based much of his photographic work on the premise that the surface of the body could provide an observer with clues about the inner character of an individual, a virtually timeless supposition that Lavater had revived and systematized. Of course, nineteenth-century physiognomic studies aimed to corroborate a wide range of assumptions about the social and biological status of the individual, which may be seen as responses to the socioeconomic needs of the time — Galton's eugenic theories are generally cast against the background of growing, impoverished urban populations in the second half of the century.² Nevertheless, Lavater's original delineation of the subject of physiognomy may provide us with a valuable starting point for the study of nineteenth-century work in that area, and this holds true when we come to examine the work of Duchenne of Boulogne, whose Le Mçcanisme de la Physionomie Humaine was published in Paris in 1862.     

An Art of Getting Lost: Mapping Patrick Clancy's Photoscroll 365/360

This article analyses Patrick Clancy's photoscroll 365/360 (1985) as an important postmodern image/text investigation into the problematic of the moving still that plays between photography and film and challenges the medium specificity of the Modernist paradigm. 365/360 consists of a number of interweaving and open-ended micro-narratives conveyed (and interrupted) through six rows of images, two registers of text, and the spaces opened up between them. The micro-narratives principally involve the dispersed journeys of artists Arthur Cravan, Mina Loy, and Marcel Duchamp during the First World War. These are oblique avant-garde narratives that revolve around questions of travel (what produces images in motion) and that engage ‘the art of getting lost’, reflecting back on the viewer's own precarious situation at the borders of (non)sense and (dis)orientation when viewing/experiencing this complex work. The article maps the key figures of the winged hermetic, cataloguer of (photographic) grain, and nomadic browser embedded in 365/360.     

Strand's world

Abstract

Paul Strand's photographs are always a pleasure to look at, just as Calvin Tompkins' writing is always a pleasure to read. Aperture, the sine qua non of American photographic book publishing, has recently brought out yet another volume of Strand's photographs, this time pairing them with a critical essay by Calvin Tompkins and adding what is perhaps the most interesting element of all, a section entitled, ‘excerpts from correspondence, interviews and other documents’. The book is a stunning contribution to photographic literature. The pictures themselves are beautifully and faithfully reproduced. Tompkins' interpretive historical essay, altered very little from its first appearance in The New Yorker (16th September 1974), is graceful and informative. The book is executed with the high degree of taste associated with Aperture, thoroughly befitting the intelligence of Strand's photographs. By publishing more pages on Strand than on any other photographer, Aperture had made its own contribution to the Strand legend. This includes the recent, charming article by Catherine Duncan (‘The Garden: Vines and Leaves’, in Aperture, No. 78) and, of course, the monumental two-volume catalogue (also issued in a single volume version) which served as an accompaniment to the Strand retrospective exhibition organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1971.     

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     

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’.     

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.     

Francis Frith and Negretti & Zambra

Abstract

When Francis Frith's eagerly awaited¹ stereographic series Egypt and Nubia was published in late 1857, the 100 albumen views caused a popular sensation². W. C. Darrah has recently described them as ‘probably the most lavishly praised and famous series in the history of stereography–³.     

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     

Forum Romanum/Campo Vaccino

Abstract

In a famous passage in his Memoirs, Edward Gibbon describes his first experience of the Roman Forum, in the autumn of 1764: ‘After a sleepless night I trod with a lofty step the ruins of the Forum; each memorable spot where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke, or Caesar fell was at once present to my eye; and several days of intoxication were lost or enjoyed before I could descend to a cool and minute investigation’.¹ Shordy thereafter, while musing over the ruins, Gibbon decided to undertake the project that was to become his life's work, the monumental Decline and Fall if the Roman Empire, which he completed in 1788. Almost exacdy a century after Gibbon's revelatory stay in Rome, the American writer William Dean Howells paid his first visit to the Forum, in 1866. He was appalled by the conditions he found: ‘In hollows below the level of the dirty cowfield, wandered over by evil-eyed buffaloes, and obscenely defiled by wild beasts of men, there stood here an arch, there a pillar, yonder a cluster of columns crowned by a bit of frieze’.²