Max Penson in Uzbekistan

Photography reached the Ottoman Empire soon after its invention, at about the time that painting began to be practised there as part of a broader project of assimilating aspects of European culture. This was in marked contrast to the situation in Europe, where photography had to contend with visual traditions from which it adopted pictorial conventions and subject matter. Instead of supplanting existing traditions of realistic visual representation, photography in the Ottoman Empire served as a discrete source of inspiration. This paper examines how this inversion of European experience within the Ottoman Empire provides an alternative to dominant narratives of photographic history. If one of the salient characteristics of modernist movements in Western art is their ability to break with tradition, then the adoption of Western practices of representation by artists within the Ottoman Empire may be viewed as a radical modernist success.     

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.     

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 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.