Photography in 1848: Five Case Studies from Central Europe

This article examines the role of photography in the Year of Revolution and the place this topic holds in historiography. Unlike many historical disciplines which perceive 1848 as a turning point in the nineteenth century, the history of photography gives the impression that photographic production was not really affected by the upheavals which otherwise had a great impact on the whole of continental Europe. Collections and archives, however, contain large amounts of visual and written material that indicate the very opposite – that the involvement of photography in the events of 1848 was not rare. Using five examples from Central Europe, three portraits and two cityscapes, this article provides an insight into the cultural and historical backgrounds of photographic production in that year. The article demonstrates the ways in which photographs were involved in the social, political, and cultural events of the time, and how they helped shape ideas about them.     

Photography and Communication Media in the Nineteenth Century

The increasing interest in media history within the academic world has not yet resulted in an intensive examination of the relationship between photography and communications media. This article seeks to begin to address this lacuna by examining photography's insertion into the so-called revolution of communication in middle-nineteenth-century America. The first section of the present study links photography to the introduction of telegraphy, the development of the railway and the expansion of the postal system. The second section examines aspects of the reception of photography in nineteenth-century America and argues this is related to improvements in communication and transportation technologies. The conclusion calls for a broader consideration of the links between the history of photography and the history of media.     

From Carnival to Satire: Photomontage as a Commentary on Photography

This article discusses two eras of manipulated photography –that of trick photography before 1914 and that of photomontage of the 1930s. The former had a carnivalesque character, while the latter highlighted political satire. Although profusely discussed in its days, trick photography was largely anonymous. By contrast, the 1930s brought about distinct personalities such as John Heartfield or the Soviet cartoonist Boris Klinch as well as prominent theorists, including Karel Teige or Günther Anders. Despite formal differences the article argues for a continuity of approaches: both periods represent steps that question photography as a medium that claims stable signification.     

The Japanese Photographers of Broome: Photography and Cross-Cultural Encounter

The remote West Australian town of Broome has a unique photography heritage that sheds new light on the complexities of photography and intercultural relations. During the early twentieth century thriving Japanese communities were established in this region around the lucrative pearling industry. These Japanese communities also helped to develop a fascinating photography culture in Broome. Photography was not simply a business opportunity for the Japanese or a means of documenting people and events; it was a medium through which hierarchised social relations were produced, redefined, and challenged. This article examines photographs by these Japanese residents as an important site of cross-cultural communication and interpretation. These photographs of Anglo-Australian, Japanese, and Aboriginal residents of Broome enrich the study of cross-cultural photographic encounters, and emphasise the dynamic and dispersed qualities of Australian photographic practice and history. Here national histories of photography are usefully conceptualised as the products of imbricated social, economic, and cultural relations that operate across regional, national, and international realms.     

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.     

‘Mechanism’ Made Visible: Process and Perception in Henry Peach Robinson’s Composite Photographs

This article analyses Henry Peach Robinson’s method of making composite photographs in the context of widespread belief that the photographer’s ‘mechanism’ was perceptible in the appearance of his prints. By examining Robinson’s preparatory and darkroom procedures, as well as the photographer’s extensive writing about his photographic practice, I suggest that composite photographs invited viewers to pay attention to process, and to take it into account in their evaluation of an image. This attitude challenged key tenets of academic art theory – the paradigm for nascent concepts of art in photography – by refusing to subordinate manual labour to that of the mind. While many nineteenth-century critics rejected Robinson’s approach, the debates engendered by composite techniques reveal a persistent fascination with making that advanced photographic practice as a marker of artistic value.     

Modernist Photography and Women’s Social Networks: The Case of Olive Cotton and Margaret Michaelis

This article’s title refers to the larger project of illuminating the social networks informing Australian artistic communities from the late colonial period to the middle of the twentieth century. Focusing primarily on developments in photography, the article itself asks what were the links between creative practices and the social relationships that characterised the modernist period in particular? It attempts to answer this question by examining the relationship between two retrospectively celebrated women photographers working in the war years in Australia – Olive Cotton and Margaret Michaelis. For a fair portion of their lives Cotton and Michaelis lived in the same city, worked contemporaneously in the relatively small field of studio photography, and shared similar artistic and commercial ambitions, yet they had virtually no professional or personal contact with each other. There is some evidence to suggest that social networks played a role in training early Australian women photographers, particularly those working in the professional studio system between the 1890s and the 1920s. Social networks would take on an explicitly political role in the consciousness-raising feminist context of women’s photography in Australia from the 1970s to the 1990s. Given that Cotton and Michaelis were professional photographers during the interval between these periods, one is bound to ask whether their lack of contact had a personal basis or there was a wider more socially determined reason. In other words, was there something about the social conditions effecting Australia’s artistic associations at this time that explains the lack of artistic connections between women, and if so was this lack the same across all the arts or particularly pronounced in photography?     

Repopulating the Street: Contemporary Photography and Urban Experience

Over the past thirty years, the city as represented by art photography has been shown as progressively empty and alienating. While the emptiness of nineteenth-century streets was due to the limitations of photographic technology, it was actively pursued as a formal device by the New Topographics photographers. Recent art photography shows an even more pronounced trend towards showing the city as vacant. This contrasts starkly with the densely populated, bustling, urban environments typical of twentieth-century street photography. This essay argues that images of an empty contemporary city can be understood as a symptom of disciplinary relations internal to photography as an art form, and as a consequence of art photography's distancing of itself from vernacular representations of the city when the distinction between art photography and vernacular photography is at risk of collapsing. Empty urban images tell us about modes of experience in the contemporary city and about photography itself. This essay uses the trope of the banal as a way of locating the ‘extreme form of the everyday’ that typifies the contemporary photographic discourse of the street. Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Melanie Manchot both address the everyday street as an acute site for understanding the negotiation of public space and contemporary experiences of the city. Both refer to yet go beyond the dichotomy of the city as empty or full and reveal a different set of relations to the street through photography.     

The Reception and Sources of Berenice Abbott's Paris Portrait Style, 1925–1929

This study focuses on the photographs that first brought Berenice Abbott critical acclaim: her Paris portraits from the late 1920s. As a body of work, these images – along with what Abbott had to say about them and the critical attention they generated at the time – provide a rich resource for the study of three interconnected topics: the avant-garde critical climate of Europe in the late 1920s, the American expatriate experience in Paris during this same time and Abbott's nascent photographic values and aesthetic, which helped to inform not only her portraits but also her later, better-known photographs of New York City. The paper first defines the divergent critical responses to Abbott's portrait work in the late 1920s – focusing especially on the published criticism by Florent Fels and Pierre Mac Orlan that helped to secure Abbott's international reputation as a leading modern photographer. It then turns to Abbott's expatriate experience in order to examine the ideas and individuals that she identified as most important to her photographic practice. Specifically the paper explains Abbott's desire to create an alternative approach to photography from the one used by Man Ray, her awareness of the classical style associated with Pablo Picasso and her admiration for the aesthetic theories of Leo Stein.     

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.     

Measuring the Heavens: Charles S. Peirce and Astronomical Photography

Taking its point of departure from the current digitisation of the Harvard Astronomical Plate Collection, this article follows the plates back to the time when the status of photography as a research tool for astronomers was still to be established. It focuses on Charles S. Peirce, who, while employed by the US Coast Survey, made astronomical observations and contributed to the deliberation over visual and photographic methods. Particular attention is paid to Peirce’s involvement in early explorations of photography’s potential as a measurement tool. The guiding assumption is that approaching photography as a tool, rather than as a sign or representation, offers new inroads into the old problem of photography’s revealing powers and its capacity to serve as a means of discovery in science. Drawing on Peirce’s scientific practice as an alternative resource for theory construction, this article contributes to the ongoing efforts to conceptualise the productive or generative dimension of photographic methods. It concludes by pointing to the diagrammatic notion of evidence developed late in Peirce’s philosophical career, proposing that photography be reconceived as a diagrammatic tool.     

The Photography of Roman Freulich from Poland to Hollywood

Professional contributions and technical innovations of photographer Roman Freulich to the Hollywood film industry are contextualised regarding the heritage of his life experiences in Czenstochowa, Poland, New York and Los Angeles. The remarkable output of Freulich's independent work, consisting of film projects that ventured far beyond the relative professional shelter provided by his popular glamour shots, emerges in the present study. Freulich sought to give voice to the voiceless as evidenced in his self-produced film Broken Earth (1936) – the first film to feature a black actor in a starring role – as well as his collaborations with the actor Paul Robeson. Freulich's immigration to America and the loss of his family members who remained in Poland are two legacies that distinguished Freulich from his fellow cameramen. Freulich both achieved a fruitful Hollywood career as a photographer of contract players – aided by his early use of the 35 mm camera – and authored a narrative of Joseph Trumpeldor, founder of the Jewish Legion. A survivor of the Holocaust, Freulich did more than preserve these dual identities; his lasting achievement lies in the incorporation of a veteran's sensitivity toward war in cinematic works that expanded early principles of still and moving image photography. Perspective by Freulich's family members is presented in original form, illuminating chronological events in the life of a pioneering photographer, writer and soldier.     

A Life in Peking: The Peabody Albums

The author examines two photograph albums found in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, Massachusetts). The albums contain 125 albumen prints depicting people and places associated with Peking (Beijing), China in the late-nineteenth century. Through a close analysis of the individual images, in the context of a detailed understanding of the historical period, the author is able to attribute the topographic views of Peking to Dr John Dudgeon (a missionary doctor from Scotland) and the ownership of the albums to Hugh Fraser (a diplomat in the British Legation).     

Michael Fried's Modernist Theory of Photography

This essay critically analyses Michael Fried's book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. It examines the relevance of Fried's categories of absorption and theatricality to contemporary photography and his assumption that photography is an inherently modernist art. In his book Fried explains the shift to large-scale colour photographs in the 1980s as signalling a return to problems of beholding, which dominated painting since the 1750s and 1760s. In contrast, this essay argues that this shift reveals the importance of the legacy of conceptualism and minimalism to recent photography and, in particular, the role of the conceptual ‘document’ within contemporary artistic practices.     

The Cut and the Continuum: Sophie Ristelhueber’s Anatomical Atlas

From her early photographs of the ruinous aftermath of the Lebanon War in Beirut (1982) to her more recent images of bomb craters in Eleven Blowups (2006), the French artist Sophie Ristelhueber has been intent to maintain, in her own metaphor, ‘the analytical distance of an anatomy lesson’. Exhibiting the evidence of warfare but withholding their explanation, Ristelhueber’s provocative gesture of making art of war, removing human conflicts from their political contexts to render them as still-lifes, ready-mades, earthworks, or surrealist poems, is patently anti-journalistic. In keeping with the artist’s surgical analogy, this article explores Ristelhueber’s aesthetic mode of address as one that shares its fundamental operation with that of photography – namely, to make a cut. Retracing the morphology of recurring imprints and injuries that appear across the terrestrial and corporeal expanses traversed in her work, the article considers the ways in which these cuts pertain to the transformative power of violence and images alike.     

Photography at the Threshold: Atget,Benjamin and Surrealism

This paper re-evaluates the association between Eugène Atget and Surrealism by means of a reading of several essays by Walter Benjamin written during the 1920s and 1930s. The well known but brief moment of surrealist reception of Atget was superseded when later and more influential writers viewed him instead as an important forerunner of documentary photography. To this end, surrealist meanings and values became occluded by various writers, while the poetic or ‘aesthetic’ features of the photographs were marginalised. I want to suggest that the oneiric qualities of Atget's work should not be ignored or opposed to documentary or materialist readings – rather, it is the peculiar suspension of documentary and aesthetic modes that characterises his work and locates it in a particular historical moment. In forging this argument I enlist Benjamin, who made Atget a key figure in his discussion of the surrealist aesthetic and for whom the political force of Surrealism lies in its simultaneous intensification and overcoming of conceptual, spatial and temporal boundaries. It is argued that Benjamin's surrealist reading of Atget illuminates the way in which Atget's photographs thematise the transformation of aesthetic and social space, destabilising the fixed categories of photographic realism and art.     

Taki Kōji,Provoke, and the Structuralist Turn in Japanese Image Theory, 1967–70

This article explores the intellectual underpinnings of the late-1960s Japanese photography collective Provoke. It argues that Provoke was more radical and theoretically inflected than is conventionally understood, its project being the forging of a ‘scientific’ photography capable of unveiling the ‘untruth’ of established relations of power and knowledge production in Japan. I present Provoke’s central figure to be Taki Kōji, who in 1967–68 published a series of articles that introduced structuralism into Japanese image discourse and established the basis for Provoke’s theoretically informed practice, or praxis. The article outlines how, in response to a variety of influences (Roland Barthes, Matsumoto Toshio, and Kevin Lynch, among others, but apparently not Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser), Taki formulated the notion of a unified and self-regulating ideological ‘environment’ (kankyō) that is made manifest in a variety of seemingly neutral and benign cultural forms. Additionally, he theorised a semiotically transgressive photographic image, derived from Barthes’s early studies of photography, which he believed could escape language and code – and thereby the ideological superstructure. I conclude by showing that Taki’s emancipatory project, while singular in relation to contemporaneous Marxist oppositional endeavours in Europe, was ultimately self-defeating: the efforts of Provoke’s photographers to strip their images of readable codes by deliberately ‘mishandling’ their cameras only worked to create new ones, and the shakiness and blurriness of the resulting photographs became a mere style.     

Henri Cartier‐Bresson Reinterprets his Career

Between 1952 and 1974, Henri Cartier‐Bresson significantly revised his understanding of himself as a photojournalist. This article analyses that change through close readings of his book, The Decisive Moment (1952), an interview in Le Monde (1974), and other published statements and unpublished letters by Cartier‐Bresson. It draws on interviews and correspondence with his widow Martine Franck, with his friend and representative Helen Wright, and with associates at Magnum Photos. It argues that what appears from a superficial reading of the interview to be a rejection of photography and photojournalism was in fact Cartier‐Bresson's first public expression of a long‐simmering opposition to the consumer society – which he as an ecologist strongly opposed – and to fashion and advertising photography, which he believed promoted unnecessary consumption. It concludes that Cartier‐Bresson reinterpreted his past by seeing himself as a surrealist to the denial of having done photojournalism. The article is predicated on the belief that understanding the change in Cartier‐Bresson's own conception of his work is essential to a full understanding of it.     

George Shiras and the Circulation of Wildlife Photography

This article examines the circulation of George Shiras 3rd's Midnight Series of deer photographs. The photographs were taken in 1896 as part of Shiras's experiments with night‐time flash photography and were part of the North American practice of camera hunting. The article traces the photograph's circulation from their display at the 1900 Paris Exposition through their publication in National Geographic Magazine. It argues that the meaning of the images shifted as the moved through these different contexts, ultimately helping to frame the genre of wildlife photography.     

On Diane Arbus: Establishing a Revisionist Framework of Analysis

The recent publication of a large selection of Diane Arbus's private papers, contact sheets and prints presents an opportunity to re-examine existing interpretations of her photography. More than merely overcoming the Sontag-based critical tradition of evaluating Arbus on moral and psychological terms, this article is concerned with widening the scope of inquiry. Areas explored include Arbus's conceptual approach to the magazine photo-essay, her ongoing failure after 1961 to publish her essays as she had conceived them, her formal and technical experimentation in pursuit of originality and snapshot-like authenticity, and the connections between her pursuit of ‘insideness’ and the New Journalism movement of the 1960s.