PHOTOGRAPHY,RACE AND INVISIBILITY

Although colonial troops formed the majority of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Army, the photographs of the liberation of Paris in 1944 feature mostly white-looking soldiers. This was no coincidence: France’s allies insisted that Paris should be liberated by white troops only. The absence of blackness is particularly significant because the liberation has been an iconic object of national collective memory since 1945. So far, the response to this erasure has consisted in unearthing alternative images demonstrating the contribution of black soldiers. Despite its obvious rhetorical value, this approach leaves intact the alignment between photographic indexicality and race that permitted the exclusion of blackness in the first place. This article, by contrast, builds on recent reflections concerning photography and the ethics of spectatorship to question the forms of invisibility that are produced not just by leaving things out of the frame, but by race itself. Through the formal and aesthetic constructs that sustain the visuality of race, the article explores the symbolic work performed by both blackness and whiteness. Ultimately, it proposes a form of criticism that is both interpretative and performative, revealing not only the role of photographic representations in naturalizing race, but also the way race shapes photographic representations.     

From Science to Fashion: Photography and the Production of a Surrogate Colony in Weimar Germany

This article examines German colonial cultures in the post-World War I period following Germany’s loss of a colonial empire. Photography had long been embedded in both the practical and ideological production of empire, but after 1918 took on an especially significant role in constructing a ‘surrogate colony’ that kept the colonial idea alive in the absence of direct colonial rule. The dynamics of this surrogate colony are especially evident in the publications of the organised colonial movement. Drawing on these publications, I argue that the colonial movement produced a surrogate colony that was as much about the management of gendered and racialised German populations as it was about propagandising for a return to colonial rule. Photography played a key role in bringing together two areas that underlay this gendered and racialised dynamic: science and commercial culture. I thus begin by tracing the way in which photographic scientific cultures, in particular in the fields of medicine, anthropology, and racial science, shaped the contours of the surrogate colony. These scientific cultures emerged in an unstable relationship with mass commercial photographic cultures, with the article then turning to an exploration of ‘colonial fashion photography’. The foregrounding of clothing and bodies in this photography highlights the complex relationship between scientific and commercial photography, which is shown to be deeply implicated in the production of racialised and gendered forms of embodiment.     

Shooting Blind

Abstract

These two works, both of which deal with photography by visually impaired artists, explore relationships between sight and meaning, light and darkness, truth and trust, seeing and being seen, and, beneath all these, the relationship — in terms of photography — between the sighted and the blind. These issues lie at the heart of photography itself, and in some ways the emphasis on blindness only makes them that much clearer and more fundamental. There is also a definitional strangeness in the idea of photography by the visually impaired that in and of itself makes the works attractive and intellectually engaging. The idea of seeing into a sightless world, or into sightless interpretations of the visual, excites the mind and begins to open doors to understanding.Abstract     

Metropolitan Surveillance and Rural Opacity: Secret Photography in Nineteenth‐Century Ireland

This essay considers the significance of the Foucaultian notion of surveillance in accounts of the history of photography, raising the question whether Ireland's colonial placement during the nineteenth century led to a different history of the medium. The study focuses on Irish Special Branch's adoption of secret photography during the latter part of the nineteenth century in order to determine why this type of photography was considered useful. It also pays attention to the types of photographs collected by the Branch. The writer situates Special Branch's adoption of secret photography within a visual economy in Ireland where an alternative type of imagery (commercially produced eviction photographs) was employed to construct a different register for what constituted legitimacy and lawlessness. In addition, emphasis is placed on the role of photography in Ireland within a larger discursive framework of colonial policy making. Visibility is crucial to the Foucaultian model, and the failure to embed such signs in both the photographs produced and collected by Special Branch indicates that it was possible to produce lacunae in the power/knowledge paradigm. The writer concludes that the history of the deployment of secret photography in Ireland reveals how it failed to produce the required visual signs needed to win consent for control.     

Purifying Bodies,Translating Race: The Lantern Slides of Sir Everard im Thurn

In 1893 the colonial administrator and anthropologist, Everard Ferdinand im Thurn, gave an illustrated lecture, entitled Anthropological Uses of the Camera, in which he used more than thirty lantern slides. Im Thurn argued that, in addition to photographing the measured physical body, ‘primitive folk’ as ‘living beings’ in their ‘natural conditions’ could also be captured on film for the advancement of anthropological science. Although this lecture has been seen as representing a humanistic turn in anthropological photography, little attention has been given to the ways in which lantern slide technology participated in and facilitated this shift. The present paper demonstrates that im Thurn used the lantern slide to re‐assert and re‐define the scope of anthropological inquiry, altering the connections between morality and race and culture and nature. Lantern slides not only permitted heightened public visibility of particular selections of the body but also normalized classifications of race, nature, and culture. By situating lantern slides as photographic translations that travel through various spaces, we can begin to understand how the lantern slide was enlisted by im Thurn to uphold anthropology as a science, to alter what constituted a proper anthropological subject for the photograph, and ultimately to legitimize himself as a scholar.     

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.     

MINIATURE LANDSCAPES

This visual essay examines Sharqi, a collection of 27 polaroid photographs that are the result of Nicos Philippou’s decade-long photographic and theoretical investigation of Cypriot topography. The essay explores the ways in which Sharqi challenges existing photographic representations of Cyprus, produced mainly in the early-to-mid twentieth century by photographers, by travellers and by the state itself, while raising relevant questions about how: (a) Cypriot landscape photography often carries a romanticized and orientalizing gaze that attests as much to the island’s specific colonial past as to photography’s ties to imperialism, and (b) photography has often become a vehicle for perpetuating a Greek-Cypriot nationalism on the island. Finally, the essay addresses the documentary, autobiographical and self-referential nature of polaroid photography by discussing specific photographs from the Sharqi series. This article also looks at Sharqi in relation to relevant historic examples from the work of Ed Ruscha and Walker Evans.     

Manuel González Salazar,the Peruvian Atget

The Lima-born photographer Manuel González Salazar documented the colonial architectural heritage of his native city, as well as other major Peruvian cities such as Cusco, Arequipa, Ayacucho, Cajamarca and Trujillo. Just as Eugène Atget had documented the old Paris that he saw gradually disappearing, González Salazar chose to photograph the architectural and artistic heritage of the colonial era, which dominated the urban environment of the Peru of his day, but which was threatened by modernisation and social change. Like Atget in the French context, González Salazar is an anomaly in the history of Peruvian twentieth-century photography, which is best known on the international stage for indigenismo and the depiction of pre-Hispanic customs. The rediscovery of González Salazar’s work invites scholars to pay greater attention to the cultural heritage of the colonial era, as well as to the archives that documented it in all its splendour.     

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.     

浅谈人像摄影中的眼神光运用

在人像摄影中,眼睛的表现是刻画人物内心世界的关键,而处理好眼神光则是这关键之关键。本文通过对眼神的位置与情绪的关系、眼神光的表现方法和注意事项等方面进行分析,旨在提高人像摄影的创作水平。     

三基色荧光灯在刑事摄影中的应用

三基色荧光灯具有显色性好、光效高、稳定性高、寿命长、耗电省、安全性好等优点，可发展成为刑事摄影的主要光源。本文分析了三基色荧光灯的特性和目前刑事摄影光源存在的缺陷，论述了使用三基色荧光灯作为刑事摄影照明光源的优点及展望。     

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?     

Nineteenth-century Photography in Greece: Select Bibliography

In the mid-nineteenth century, technicians at the Austrian Royal and Imperial Court Printing Office devised the first method for mechanically reproducing nature prints: that is, prints from intaglio plates made from the impression of botanical specimens. Despite the complexity and apparent limitations of the process, Alois Auer, director of the printing office, claimed that the new process was more important than photography. This surprising claim forms the basis of the following investigation into mid-nineteenth-century photography, nature printing and the world of print-media. The race to devise a mechanical process for reproducing images led to a variety of ingenious inventions before the half-tone process fully solved the problem of rendering photographs in printers' ink near the end of the century. Only in the context of other nineteenth-century processes to reproduce images do we begin to discern the common properties of photography and nature printing.     

Lorene Squire’s Psychical Landscapes of Colonial/Modern Gender in the Canadian North

From 1937 to 1939, Lorene Squire was commissioned by The Beaver (the company magazine of the Hudson’s Bay Company) and Canadian Airways to produce photographs of the Canadian North suitable for their publications, focused on her specialisation in wildfowl photography, as well as landscapes, planes, and people. This article focuses on her 1938 commissions, and in particular two photographs of Indigenous women and two self-portraits. When these photographs are considered alongside photographs of white settler women, her correspondence, and her book Wildfowling With A Camera (1938), I argue that they offer insights into gender as a colonial concept (what María Lugones calls the ‘colonial/modern gender system’). I contend that the setting of the ‘North’ as a psychical landscape makes Squire’s contestations possible. Squire’s photographs resist common ways of depicting white and Indigenous women in the 1930s, but they do so in a way that is paradoxical and leaves intact the colonial/modern gender system. In addition to providing biographical information about Squire, this article contributes to theoretical and historical scholarship on the meaning of photographs of Indigenous people in Canada for projects of nation-building and northern economic development, as well as on how the North functions as a reference point for Canadian identity.     

浅谈偏振光照相在现代刑事技术中的应用

偏振光照相技术在现代刑事科学技术领域运用广泛,发挥着重要的作用。本文阐述了偏振光照相的原理、操作的一般方法以及在指纹等痕迹物证检验、法医检验、微量物证检验中的应用。     

影室灯在刑事摄影中的应用

本文介绍人像摄影常用的影室灯，作为面光源，应用于刑事摄影中的痕迹拍摄。在一些痕迹的拍摄中取得良好效果。     

数码红外线彩色图像的合成与分析应用

红外线彩色照相有普通彩色照相和黑白红外线照相所不具备的优异性，但是也存在一些无法克服的缺点。为此，根据红外线彩色照相的感光原理和色彩再现过程，利用计算机技术和Photoshop 7．0图像处理软件，对数码照相机拍摄的数码彩色图像和红外线图像进行合并，生成新的数码红外线彩色合成图像，并通过试验阐述操作步骤和方法。最后，对合成图像的色彩再现结果进行分析，说明合成图像与红外线彩色照相的色彩效果是相同的，同时，指出在文件检验中的应用。     

A mass spectrometry and electron paramagnetic resonance study of photochemical and thermal aging of triterpenoid varnishes

Photochemical and thermal aging of triterpenoid dammar and mastic resins used as varnishes on paintings were studied using graphite-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry. This extends an earlier study on similar materials (Zumbühl et al., Anal. Chem. 1998, 70, 707-715) that focused on photoaging. Progressive aging results in development of groups of signals spaced by 14 and 16 Da, indicating incorporation of oxygen as well as simultaneous loss of hydrogen. Oligomers up to tetramers are formed, while cleavage reactions lead to increased signal intensities in the mass ranges between the oligomers and below the monomers. No major differences were found between the mass spectra of samples aged in light or darkness, except that deterioration was faster in light. Electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy revealed similar and significant amounts of radicals in films of dammar stored either in light or in darkness. It is concluded that oxidative radical reactions also take place in darkness and that differences in light and dark aging pathways are minor, although rates may differ. These findings lead to a unified explanation for yellowing of natural resin varnishes, one of the major degenerative changes in the appearance of paintings. It is also shown that the commercially available, nominally fresh resins are already in an advanced stage of oxidation and degradation. Energy-rich substances are formed upon irradiation with sunlight and are believed to restart the autoxidative chain reactions, regardless of storage conditions. As a result, varnishes are oxidized quite quickly (months) even when kept in darkness.     

全息照相及常用的全息记录材料

本文简要概述了全息照相的概念、白光显示全息图及其应用状况。全息照相是一种新型的照相技术,与普通照相相比较具有三维立体性、重复记录性、可分割性等优点。本文还介绍了用于全息照相的记录材料,主要有三种:卤化银全息干版、DCG干版和高分子感光材料。     

LATENT IMAGES ON THE CAMERA’S WALL: Forensic aesthetics as photography

This paper examines the “algorithmic turn” in light of the “forensic turn” and seeks to consider the relevance of Forensic Architecture’s work for the theory of photography. First, I will analyze the role of photography as testimony in light of the concept of “forensic aesthetics,” and argue that with it, the role of photography as evidence is less related to its visible dimensions and more to its being a material trace—an invisible latent image that needs to be developed and animated. Second, I will diagnose the implication of the concept of “forensic aesthetics” in one of the agency’s first research projects: an investigation of US drone warfare in Pakistan from 2011 and argue that the concern that arose with the emergence of digital photography from a “post-photographic” era—in which the effect of digital technologies was perceived as the virtualization of the world—takes a material twist with forensic aesthetics. It is precisely the digitization of photography that enables it to maintain its indexical power, even at the cost of losing its limits as a medium.