The Family of Man as American foreign policy

Situated within an engaging personal account of a career in photojournalism, Morris contributes a thoughtful analysis of The Family of Man, its origins, message and impact. Born in 1916, John G. Morris was an eye-witness to key political events informing the philosophy behind the exhibition. As Picture Editor for the London Bureau of LIFE magazine during World War II, and later, as executive editor of Magnum Photos, he worked closely with the premiere photojournalists of the period, many of whom contributed work to the exhibition. ‘People Are People the World Over’, Morris's innovative series of photo essays for Ladies' Home Journal, influenced Edward Steichen and, ultimately, the shape of The Family of Man. Morris provides a unique perspective on the historical and political context of the exhibition.     

Ansel Adams and Fiat Lux

Abstract

In 1963, Clark Kerr, then President of the University of California, approached Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall to participate in the centennial celebrations (in 1968) of the founding of the University. Adams's photographic work on the nme campuses in the years following resulted in the production of six thousand negatives, from which six hundred and five were produced as fine prints (placed in the University Archives at the Bancroft Library at Berkeley) and many others reproduced in the book, Fiat Lux (1968), with text by Nancy Newhall. In 1990, an exhibition consisting of one hundred of those photographs (to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the University of California at Irvine) toured the campuses of the University between January 1991 and May 1992, accompanied by the exhibition catalogue, Ansel Adams: Fiat Lux.     

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.     

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.     

Talbot's Epigraph in The Pencil of Nature

This study elucidates the Virgilian epigraph on the title page of the first fascicle of The Pencil of Nature, first by situating it in the context of Henry Fox Talbot's education and, secondly, by placing it in the larger setting of classical culture in Georgian and Victorian England. The article concludes that the epigraph Talbot selected for The Pencil of Nature was embedded in the classical consciousness of his public school and university educated contemporaries, while also recalling venerable chapters in the British literary heritage.     

How Stieglitz came to photograph cityscapes

Abstract

Beginning in 1927, at the age of 63, Alfred Stieglitz began photographing the views of Manhattan outside the windows at the Intimate Gallery, his third-floor exhibition space on East 59th Street, and at the thirtieth-floor apartment at the Shelton Hotel, at 49th Street and Lexington Avenue, where he lived with Georgia O'Keeffe. In concerted bursts over the next four years, and then intermittently until ill-health forced the end of his picture-making in 1937, Stieglitz produced about 90 cityscapes, most of them depicting the changing views from .the Shelton and from his seventeenthfloor gallery An American Place, at 53rd Street and Madison Avenue, where he moved operations just after the stockmarket crash of 1929.1 The key set of Stieglitz's photographs in the National Gallery, Washington, DC, deposited there by Georgia O'Keeffe in 1949, includes 80 New York cityscapes from 1927 and after. The collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art has, among its late cityscapes, a handful that are not present in Washington, being variants in either negative, cropping, or photographic paper. These have been donated in stages over the years by Dorothy Norman. Further examples of variations from the images in Washington are unknown at present. These hard-edged yet lush gelatine silver prints vividly document a building boom of the late 1920s and early Depression years which transformed the refined, residential ‘uptown’ that Stieglitz had known all his life into a skyscraper-ridden ‘midtown’, a centre for office rentals, luxury apartment hotels and the fme art trade (figure 1).     

British Nature Photographers in Wild Life

This article concerns the work of a group of British wildlife photographers just prior to World War I. A photographic exhibition in 1912 by members of the Zoological Photographic Club led to the publication of Wild Life: An Illustrated Monthly, edited by Douglas English. Wild Life was published between 1913 and 1918, and, especially in the pre‐war issues, it achieved an impressive standard of reproduction of natural history photography. Mammals and birds were pictured in their natural habitats; hitherto most wildlife pictures had been taken in Zoos, where the subjects were shown out of context. The editor of Wild Life believed that nature‐photographers should have an opportunity to mitigate or correct artistic defects in their negatives. I argue that it is a wildlife photograph's consideration of content and context that determines its artistic merit.     

The later years of James Robertson

Abstract

In ‘A Chronology of James Robertson’,¹ the authors refer to my generous sharing of Beato material. I fear I was unintentionally ungenerous in not referring them to Appendix 5 of Japanese-British Exchanges in Art: 1850s–1930s, published privately by John Clark in London in 1989, a publication that might not seem obvious in reference to a Scotsman working in Constantinople. John Clark is now at the department of Art History, Australian National University, Canberra but at the time of publication was lecturing at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His publication Japanese-British Exchanges included in its 323 pages a chronology of Charles Wirgman, the Special Artist of the Illustrated London News resident in Japan and highly influential on Japanese art.     

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.     

Cut and Paste

Published posthumously, this article begins with a discussion of the historiography – and a related exhibition history – of the terms collage, photo-collage, and photomontage; and of the criteria that have been used to distinguish them as techniques, as visual idioms, and for their political implications and resonances as images of fine or applied art. The article then moves on to the work of two living artists who have been cutting and pasting photographs for more than forty years, Martha Rosler and John Stezaker, and the ambiguities of their being described as collagists, monteurs, or photomonteurs. In rethinking these categories, Evans argues for an expansive history of photomontage and collage that has continuing resonance today.     

Reflection: Nat Finkelstein,Warhol Filming Duchamp (1966)

In this paper the author considers a 1966 photograph by Nat Finkelstein. Andy Warhol is seen filming Marcel Duchamp at an exhibition opening in New York City. Using this image as a starting point, the author reflects upon the nature of personal associations between artists and the tradition of the avant-garde in the history of art.     

La Andalucía Médica; The First Journal of Medical Photography in Spain

Abstract

The publication of a journal of medical photography implies recognition of photography's role in medicine. This is certainly exemplified by the Revue Médico-Photographique des Hôpitaux de Paris and the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. The first of these, founded in 1869 in Paris by Dr. de Montméja, is the earliest medical photographic journal known. The second was founded in 1875 by Drs. Bourneville and Regnard. The birth of both journals was possible only because adequate photographic service facilities in hospitals had already come into being. Thus, the Revue Médico-Photographique des Hôpitaux de Paris appeared in the same year in which Drs. Hardy and Montméja began such a service at the Hospital ‘Saint Louis’ of Paris. Similarly, the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière appeared two years after similar facilities had been created at the Hospital de la Salpêtrière.     

Sidney Carter and Alfred Stieglitz: The Canadian Pictorialist Exhibition (1907)

Abstract

On a late autumn afternoon in 1907, to the sweet strains of orchestral music, 500 of Montreal's cultural elite turned out for the opening of Canada's first international exhibition of pictorial photographs, in the galleries of the Art Association of Montreal, the oldest and most prestigious art museum in the dominion.¹ Sidney Carter (figure 1), a young Photo-Secessionist zealously determined to advance ‘the cause’, had single-handedly solicited the support of the Art Association, gathered the prints, written the catalogue and hung the show.     

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.     

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.     

Displaced ‘Origins’: William Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature

This essay analyses William Henry Fox Talbot's book of photographs The Pencil of Nature (1844–1846), in which he discusses the role of the photograph as a document. By emphasizing the historical specificity of the book, this essay argues that it presents an undecided and reserved view with regard to the future of the photograph. The Pencil of Nature is neither embedded in the discourse of the mechanical and mass‐produced copy, nor is it embedded in the idea of the ‘authentic’ copy or index, as has been suggested in recent theories of photography. Instead, it reflects a specific form of Romantic historicism which emerged in the early nineteenth century as part of a shift in the organization of knowledge. Talbot's statements on the evidentiary status of the photograph are thus related to literary genres of writing, and, in particular, to Thomas Babington Macaulay's work, to the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, and to Talbot's own philological and classical studies. In this context, the intelligibility of documents is a function of time, yet time is simultaneously a source of constant change and the intellectual ‘horizon’ within which things acquire their meaning. This, the writer contends, forms the discursive framework within which Talbot's views on the document are formed: on the one hand, the desire for ‘truth’, on the other hand, the recognition that time dismantles any claim for the universality of knowledge.     

The Decisive Network: Producing Henri Cartier-Bresson at Mid-Century

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photobook The Decisive Moment (1952) popularised the notion that the best photographs are made by the patient and gifted photographer who captures a fleeting moment with just one click of the shutter, creating an image with internal geometry and balance. The book solidified Cartier-Bresson’s reputation as an artist working with a camera and it encouraged scholars, curators, and hobbyists to understand photography as the product of trained individual vision and talent. Yet the book’s emphasis on personal vision also deflected attention away from the collective efforts and infrastructure necessary to promote Cartier-Bresson’s practice as art. By shifting our attention to the decisive network of magazine editors, book publishers, printers, and curators who helped Cartier-Bresson onto a highly orchestrated road to fame at mid-century, this article considers the ways in which collective work is central to the material and social history of photography, and how these realities challenge the decisive moment’s paradigm of individual and inspired creation.     

US Photography in the Philippines Before 1898: The Menage Expedition of 1890–1893

Between 1890 and 1893, two young Americans, Frank Swift Bourns and Dean Conant Worcester, travelled through the central and southern Philippines on a zoological expedition. In addition to collecting animal specimens, the two men took more than one hundred and fifty photographs. These photographs have not been given much attention by historians but they are an important set of images that help expand the understanding of photography in the Philippines in the late Spanish colonial era. This article discusses the circumstances surrounding the making of these images and provides a framework for interpreting their significance by applying the concept of the ‘photographic obsessions’ of Western explorers as defined and described by Willem van Schendel and his colleagues in the book The Chittagong Hill Tracts: Living in a Borderland.     

The Ties that Bind Hans Bellmer's Tenir au Frais to Heinrich Von Kleist

This article examines Hans Bellmer's photographic collage of 1958 Tenir au frais (Keep Cool), a work produced as part of his exploration of the theme of the female body bound with string. The paper argues that an interpretation of this image in the context of French Surrealism must take into account the fact that it appeared on the cover of le surréalisme, même, a journal that was filled with praise for the German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist. Tenir au frais has been interpreted variously, but little attention has been paid to its material context as the cover of the Surrealist journal. The Surrealists were political and cultural radicals, and their aim was a profound transformation of the world, a world that had generated atrocities beyond imagination in two World Wars. Shock was an important element in the work of the Surrealists, who often used images of sexual violence to challenge the status quo. The roots of this preoccupation lay in the writings of the literary heroes of the movement. This article argues that material context is crucial when considering possible meanings and that the image is tied to the Surrealist preoccupation with the German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist. Kleist's Penthesilea was particularly cherished by the group. They were interested in his portrayal of sexual frenzy, in how love and violence are fused in the play and in the psychological realism and tension in this ecstatic work. Bellmer's photographic collage provides an allusive illustration to the text on Kleist and connects with his drama on a number of levels, for it conveys extraordinary emotional distress but also the physical turmoil of the play in which the theme of binding is evident throughout.     

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.