Robert Louis Stevenson and the Portrait Photographers

This article is prompted by the remarkable characteristic of nineteenth-century Scotland that circumstances congregate to give an unprecedentedly generous or democratic view of life. Four forms of communication – the statistical accounts, which were followed by the British census records, the boom in publishing, especially in newspapers and journals, and inexpensive communication promoted by the penny post, even the information in street directories and advertisements – all combine with the exploitation of photography to give us insights, which can be disconcertingly specific, acting as occasional spotlights on the landscape. This article is prompted by one particular letter from Robert Louis Stevenson, written when he was a young man, and is followed through two lines of connected thought: the practice of studio photography in Scotland and Stevenson's continuing interest in the photographic portrait.     

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.     

Science on the edge of empire: E. A. Forsten (1811–1843) and the Natural History Committee (1820–1850) in the Netherlands Indies

Between 1820 and 1850, the Dutch government sent several scientists to the Netherlands Indies as part of the Natuurkundige Commissie (Natural History Committee). One of these was naturalist Eltio Alegondus Forsten (1811–1843), who was sent on a collecting mission to Celebes (Sulawesi). This paper explores the ways in which Forsten was in a relationship of mutual interdependence with four spheres of influence, two in the Netherlands (those of the Dutch government and the natural history museum in Leiden) and two in the Dutch East Indies (those of the governor-general and the local population of Forsten's collecting grounds). These four entities served as focal points for Forsten's practice, and tried to use his mission for their own purposes. At the same time, Forsten negotiated their demands deftly and turned them to his own advantage in order to serve his own future career. Throughout, I draw parallels with the experiences of various other members of the Natural History Committee. I ultimately propose that this case study of Forsten provides a glimpse of a possible pattern for the relationship between government-sponsored science and empire in the Dutch East Indies in the first half of the 19th century.     

David A. Sinclair's Pilgrimage

Abstract

The secretary of the Young Men's Christian Association has spent the last few days in bidding farewell and receiving the best wishes of his friends, as he prepared to leave them in search of his health. The large number of friends gathered about him last Sunday showed the hold he has upon the people of this city.     

The Jersey Years; Photographer in the Circle of Victor Hugo

Abstract

An interesting and little-discussed body of photographic work is connected with the circle of Victor Hugo during the years of his exile on the island of Jersey in the English Channel, from 1852 to 1855. These works are now dispersed; a n~umber of them are in Paris, in the Museé de la Maison de Victor Hugo and in the Bibliothèque Nationale, another survives in the archivcs of the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; and various other examples exist in private collections. The Jersey photographs are the result of a joint effort by Charles Hugo, the poet's son, and his friend, Auguste Vacquerie.     

Photography and the Elphinstone Institution of Bombay

Abstract

Ralizing the potentials of photography, the Court of Directors of the East India company recommended to the Government of Bombay as early as 1845 ‘the encouragement of the study of this useful art of photography in any of the seientific or educational institutions under the control or inf1uence of your government’. They also offered to furnish students with the requisite apparatus, if they found it necessary to procure them from England¹. The proposal was repeated in their dispatch dated 29th December 1854, when they again expressed their desire to establish training in photography. Thereupon, W. Hart, Secretary to the Government of Bombay, requested the Board of Education of Bombay Presidency to submit a scheme for carrying out this project². Mr Stowell, Secretary to the Board of Education, called for the opinions of the Principal of the Elphinstone Institution, and of its Professor of Chemistry³. A small but interesting episode of early photography in India had its beginning in this way.     

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.     

Lost Somewhere in the Mountains: Wilhelm Angerer and Austrian Heimat Photography

This article examines the Austrian Homeland or Heimat movement through an investigation of Wilhelm Angerer's 1942 book of poems and photographs, A Song Sweeps Down from the Mountains (Ein Lied rauscht von den Bergen). The multifaceted, widespread regionalist or homeland movement infiltrated all areas of visual culture, from tourist postcards and popular films to high‐quality picture books and exhibition prints. In considering the book by Angerer, this article highlights an intersection of modernity with tradition, defined in terms of a popular visual culture that formed a distinct and complex concept of the Austrian Heimat.     

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.     

Graciela Iturbide’s Cholos/as Series: Images of Cross-Border Identities

This article looks at Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide’s Cholos/as series taken on both sides of the border: in Los Angeles in 1986 and in Tijuana in 1989. The cholos/as, or gang members, have a complex relationship to Mexico; this response grows in part from the constructed nature of the border in general – a symbolic and relatively recent division between nations that does not represent lived reality or divisions between identities and cultures. As an outsider, Iturbide inserts visual cues throughout the series that tie the cholos/as’ lifestyle to its Mexican roots and historical legacies, thus recuperating the mexicanidad, or Mexican identity, that exists in the borderlands. The narrative thrust of this series is strong, foregrounding female agency and matrilineal family structures over traditional, heteropatriarchal conceptions of family; complex negotiations of personal identity; and generally emphasising the social ties of border communities and subcultural groups through a distinct aesthetic style that intervenes in traditional photographic genres like studio portraiture. Iturbide’s images form an origin story for the topicality of the US–Mexico border at the present moment and demonstrate that the issues of the border have been a critical point of inquiry for artists since the 1980s.     

The Sign of Stieglitz,the Art of Evans

This essay examines how Walker Evans evolved his documentary style in response to what he saw as Alfred Stieglitz's overbearing aestheticism. It begins with their first meeting and Evans's ‘rejection’ of this father‐figure, a rejection which became generalised in the history of photography on the grounds of a dichotomy between photographic art and social documentary. Evans came to represent this latter tendency despite his own wishes. With the help of friends like Lincoln Kirstein and Bernice Abbott, Evans claimed a different artistic genealogy, via the Civil War work of Mathew Brady and his teams and Eugène Atget, neither of whom were working in the same vein of documentary as Evans might have imagined. He attempted to remain the independent artist, all the while taking advantage of his various photographic employments and the directions in which they pushed him. In the end, history made him famous and influential as the champion of social documentary, a genre which coincided neatly with his own desire for a ‘lyric documentary’ for only a few years. In his desire to be an artist free from a social agenda, in his resistance to branding, he is a maverick bohemian much closer to Stieglitz than has been supposed, and he seemed to recognise the fact in his last comments on his predecessor.     

The art of the autochrome

Abstract

The work of Esther Parada resonates with the Chicago tradition of experimental photography but with a decisively activist fervour born of the 1960s. Her themes impinge on the neglected confluence of public and private domains, the stories of lives omitted from official record, and the frank negotiation of personal accountability in response to political dissembling and disingenuousness. Though Chicago itself continues to be thoroughly inscribed in her life and her work, reflected in projects that tell of the crucial importance of black Americans, women, and urban landscaping in the history of the city, her perspectives are truly global in scope - as wide ranging as Nicaragua, England, and India. As an educator in photography at the School of Art and Design of the University of Illinois, Chicago, she deserves special consideration as having exemplified the visionary practice and critical teaching of the medium established in 1937 by László Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus. Indeed, she did graduate studies at the Institute of Design, where she came in contact with such innovative artists as Aaron Siskind, Arthur Siegel, and Joseph Jachna.¹ Parada, however, has broken new ground as one of the fJISt photographers to make the jump from the analogue or film-based photograph to the digital image, which she has deployed as part of an extended interventionist strategy of collage in order to pose alternative views to the limited narratives of privileged political and social institutions.     

The Ghost of Humanism: Rethinking the Subjective Turn in Postwar American Photography

This article examines the use of shadow, blur, graininess, and reflection in the work of the postwar photographers Robert Frank, William Klein, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard as a response to the rhetoric of Cold War containment. In contrast to the more comforting images in Edward Steichen’s popular exhibit The Family of Man, which sought to downplay Cold War anxieties, the photographs of Frank, Klein, and Meatyard challenged viewer expectation by presenting human figures in varying states of disintegration and disappearance. The term ‘subjective’ has long been used to describe a return to personal and private concerns during the postwar years, but discussion has focused mainly on the subjectivity of the artist rather than the viewer. By challenging the sanctity of the human figure, Frank, Klein, and Meatyard force viewers to confront such difficult images and, in the process, re-examine the fears and anxieties that lay dormant during the tense years of the early Cold War.     

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.     

Retracing the image: The emergence of photography in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This is a difficult conference to review. It is particularly difficult as your reviewer comes from the margins of the discipline of his tory of photography; but then, all reviews are from a single, personal viewpoint (as are most photographs) and may not necessarily reflect an audience consensus. So, I shall begin by saying that this was not what I had expected. Had I been a mainstream art historian, still flushed with youthful enthusiasm, I might have loved it; but age, experience and a profound uneasiness about my own lack of wisdom left me with the distinct impression of the curate's egg. This conference was ‘good in parts’.     

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.     

天然纤维缓冲材料的开发应用

通过介绍国外天然纤维缓冲材料的纤维处理、缓冲材料的制造工艺及性能分析,阐述该材料在包装工业,汽车及家具行业、建筑行业和矿山工业等方面的应用,说明国内开发应用天然纤维缓冲材料的现状及今后设想。     

数字散斑相关方法在木材科学中的应用及展望

随着现代光电子和计算机技术的发展以及数字图像处理理论的深入，数字散斑相关方法（DSCM）迅速成为实验力学领域一种重要的测试方法。文章介绍了DSCM的基本原理，并对其在木材科学领域的应用进行了综述，包括在木材常规力学测试和木材断裂、微观力学以及复合材料力学测试等方面的应用及一些新的成果。最后根据木材材料的特点, 对DSCM在木材科学上的进一步应用提出了几点建议。     

The Public Image(s) of Science and Technology in the Greek Daily Press, 1908-1910

Abstract.   This paper discusses the results of our analysis of over 2,500 articles related to science and technology found in the daily newspapers Embros and Skrip , between 1908 and 1910. In view of the importance of this historical period for Greece, we examine the public images(s) of science and technology and interpret the multifaceted discourse used by journalists when accounting for science and technology in their articles. From the wide range of articles studied, we have discerned four broad themes: the introduction and cultural appropriation of new technologies in Greek cities, the concern with public hygiene and general health issues, attempts to control Nature, and lastly the presentation of the scientific and technological advances taking place abroad. Our empirical study has shown that (1) all scientific and technical fields were covered in both newspapers, (2) science and technology were not only addressed in special columns dealing with science popularization, but permeated the entire newspaper, (3) the term 'science', with all its derivatives, was used for science proper, but also in expressions employed in order to write about the advanced technology of the period, (4) the concept of science was associated with the notion of modernity and that of progress.