Books Received and Noted

Abstract

In August 1920 Lu Marten published a two-part essay entided ‘History, satire, Dada and more’ in Die Rote Fahne, the newspaper of the German Communist Party (KPD).¹ Written as a response to Gertrud Alexander's review of the First International Dada Trade Fair, which had appeared the previous month and characterized the exhibition as a manifestation of ‘bourgeois decadence’,² Märten's essay articulated a more complex understanding of Dada's significance by locating it within satire's historical development. Märten described how the bourgeoisie's replacement of the epic and fable with new literary genres had stripped satire of its popular character. Confined to the treatment of narrow, individual issues in the bourgeois humour magazine, satire had degenerated into a telling of jokes; and any illusions that humour magazines such as Simplicissimus provided social criticism had been dispelled by their performance during the recent war and revolution which had revealed their true class interest. The proletariat was increasingly in the grip of the bourgeois press, because capitalism's control of the publishing industry deprived the proletariat of the technological means necessary for modem satire. This circumstance, Marten argued, was the field in which Dada operated as the negative side of proletarian satire. Its important discovery was that art was no longer necessary for satire since capitalism's material body was satire itself Materials published by the bourgeois press could be arranged for satirical effect and ‘the simple reproduction, the photograph also replaces art here’.³ This destructive impulse was one side of a dialectic that Marten viewed as offering hope for proletarian satire's new beginning.     

Lewis Hine

Abstract

‘I'm afraid, Mr Hine, that you haven't the broad sociological background required,’ said a distinguished adviser when Lewis W. Hine announced his decision to give up teaching at the Ethical Culture School and set up as a ‘social’ photographer. ‘Nonsense,’ retorted Arthur Kellogg, ‘it's wonderful to find a photographer who has any sociological background’.     

Edward Steichen

Abstract

‘The camera’, Steichen wrote in 1947, ‘serves as an instrument for waging war and as an historian in recording the war’.¹ He spoke from experience. By this time, as a veteran of both world wars, he was reflecting upon a long life devoted to photography as art, as an advertising medium, as social commentary, and as war documentation. Although Steichen often used his camera as a very effective propaganda device in wartime, his hatred of war motivated him to use the same instrument to persuade people that war would never provide a lasting solution to human problems.²     

Bogawantalawa,the final resting place of Julia Margaret Cameron

Abstract

The tombstones of Julia Margaret Cameron and her husband in the picturesque graveyard of St. Mary's Church at Bogawantalawa¹ near Glencairn in Sri Lanka are reminders of the love the Camerons had for that country, ever since Mr C. H. Cameron toured the island in his capacity as Reforms Commissioner, during his service in India. After their later years in England (1846–1875), the Camerons decided ‘to spend the last years of their lives in Ceylon and even brought their coffins with them’². They did so in 1875, and bought a large acreage of land upcountry, which is even today known as ‘Cameronwatte’³. Mrs Cameron died on 26th January 1879⁴. She was born in India on 11th June 1815⁵, the third daughter of James Pattie of the Bengal Civil Service. Mr Charles Hay Cameron was a Member of the Law Commission in India in 1838, and this is how they came to meet.     

The painterí lens

Abstract

The importance of the artist Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) as a forerunner of international tachism painting of ‘Art informal’ has long been recognized. It is surprising, therefore, that Laszlo Glozer's new study, Wols Photograph, is the first monograph devoted to the artist. Even more surprising, perhaps, is the author's concentration on Wols' activity as a a role usually not identified with his high art-historical position. Actually, Glozer is at pains to characterize the artist as a tragic, creative unity; we realize as we read the admirable text that the author might have taken any aspect of Wols' production as his point of departure and ended essentially with the same picture of the artist. ‘Wols’ art is autobiographical', Glozer writes. ‘Behind the transformations of the expressive forms, it remains self-expression to the end. This unconditional situation is constant.’ Wois himself is responsible for the remark, ‘il faut savoir que tout rime’, and Glozer discovers the truth of the dictum, not only for the totality of Wols' art but for his life as well.     

Cuthbert Bede and O.J. Rejlander

Abstract

Photographic Pleasures, published in February 1855, was the first collection of humorous essays about the new art to appear in England. Its author, the Reverend Edward Bradley, writing under the pen name of Cuthbert Bede, was a young man of twenty-eight who already had one national best-seller to his credit. This was Mr Verdant Green, a novel about undergraduate life at Oxford, which came out at the end of 1853, with an engraved portrait of the author as its frontispiece (Figure 1).     

Mario Cresci's

Abstract

‘Any claim to systematic knowledge appears as a flight of foolish fancy. To acknowledge this is not to abandon the idea of totality .... Reality is opaque; but there are certain points — clues, symptoms — which allow us to decipher it’.¹ Searching for an epistemological model, or paradigm in the social sciences, the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg wrote these words in an essay published in 1979 under the title ‘Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes’. Ginzburg was able to weave into his essay many threads in an interdisciplinary discussion on the research method used, towards the end of the nineteenth century, by an Italian art connoisseur (Giovanni Morelli), a physician in Vienna (Sigmund Freud), and a British writer of detective stories (Arthur Conan Doyle). What unified their method was the attention paid to ‘marginal and irrelevant details as revealing clues’,² for the attribution of a painting, the analysis of a symptom, and the discovery of a criminal. In his own work, Ginzburg considered this paradigm as an effective research method for the study of obscure fields of human culture, such as witchcraft and popular beliefs.³     

Thomas Annan and the scottish landscape

Abstract

Thomas Annan (1830–87) was a successful Scottish photographer who produced work in all the main subject categories associated with commercial practice in the midnineteenth century, including portraiture, landscape, urban and industrial documentation and reproductions of works of art. While it is true that the versatility and range of his achievement have not gone unacknowledged, his reputation today undoubtedly rests on one particular body of work— his survey of Glasgow's High Street slums, first published in 1871 as Photographs of the Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow.¹ Stark, shocking, and yet strangely hypnotic, the images in this book are among the earliest as well as the most powerful of their kind ever made. They are also sufficiently ambiguous in their status as ‘representations’ to have provided a fruitful target for critical analysis among cultural historians anxious to demonstrate the deeply problematic nature of the nineteenth-century documentary project as a whole.² Old Streets and Closes is in every way an outstanding work. It speaks eloquently of a now vanished past, while confronting us with the inherently paradoxical nature of photography's contribution to historical discourse.     

Photohistorica gottingensis. Part Two: Daguerreotypy in Göttingen — Philipp Petri (1800–1887)

Abstract

After over 140 years it is difficult to form a complete picture of the early years of photography in Gi:ittingen. Around 1840 there existed neither a regularly appearing daily newspaper in this small university town, nor city directories which might have served as sources of information today. The first printed announcement about Göttingen photographers is found in a guide-book of 1854, which mentions ‘daguerreotypes furnished by the painters Petri and Spangenberg’¹. Spangenberg, self-appointed ‘Artist and Photographer’, offered ‘porcelain pictures, as well as the manufacture of photographs at the least expensive prices to all visitors’. Likewise, the lithographic establishment of Hermann Stromfeldt offered ‘Portraits’ and ‘Daguerreotypes’ at reasonable prices, and ‘Gerhard Steuber, Art Supplies and Stationery’, offered ‘Copper Engravings and Lithography’ as well as the ‘Production of Silhouettes of Every Sort’. To all appearances, the artist Spangenberg and the lithographer Stromfeldt dedicated themselves to this new business of photography, so ripe for exploitation, a full decade after Petri, and then worked much more intensely with the newly developed, and more popular, negativepositive process².     

F. Holland Day's ‘Nubians’

Abstract

In the October 1897 issue of his newly-founded journal, Camera Notes, Alfred Stieglitz began to publish a remarkable series of ‘Nubian’ portraits. They were by F. Holland Day, the Boston photographer whose innovative and dramatic images of young women had already established his reputation internationally. Greatly admired by Stieglitz, Day's ‘Nubian’ series was afforded the most painstaking attention, and reproduced in the expensive process of photogravure.     

Alfonso: Spain's premier photojournalist

Abstract

The founder of the Alfonso dynasty, Alfonso Sánchez García, was born in Ciudad Real in 1881, the son of an unsuccessful theatre and opera impresario.¹ After a brief experimentation with sculpture and drawing, he was admitted as an apprentice to the successful Madrid photographer, Amador. He was an eager assistant, determined to learn his craft thoroughly. Soon he became an accomplished maker of ambulancias, photographs of important social gatherings, political dinners, and meetings of learned societies taken on location rather than in the photographer's gallery. By now a skilled studio photographer with considerable on-location experience, he left Amador to work in the studio of Manuel Company, at the time (1897) the most important in Madrid, where he soon became the primer operador de galería (chief studio photographer) and received the highest salary. By this time, he was alternating studio work with an increasing journalistic/press involvement. In 1904, still in his early twenties and now the father of ‘Alfonsito’ (Alfonso Sánchez Portela), Alfonso left Company to join the staff of El Gráfico. It was during El Gráfico's brief existence that the photo credit, FOTO ALFONSO, was born. When the paper suspended publication a short time later, he was offered a position with El Heraldo de Madrid, Madrid's leading evening newspaper.     

Malraux's photography

Abstract

The extraordinary life of Andre Malraux (1901–76), novelist, soldier, statesman, and art essayist, continues to inspire critical re-evaluations and new biographies from scholars in various disciplines.¹ What arouses all this attention is perhaps Malraux's seemingly contradictory nature, a nature that spilled over into his novels and art books, not to mention into his status as a charismatic politician and committed intellectual.² Malraux as contradiction seems to be the point of one review of several biographies: ‘In the end [Malraux was], as someone once said of the Mexican general Santa Anna, “faithless to men, women, and causes”’.³ Indeed, even the most cursory reading of some of the highlights of Malraux's life makes it difficult to believe that this is the story of just one person.⁴     

Bernard Shaw, ‘Unmechanical’ Photography and unconventional science

Abstract

It certainly is true that George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright and essayist, was fond of provocation and paradox. Yet, as our epigraph suggests, his writings always build on a core of truth. For Shaw, truth was defined by his socialism as well as by relations among art, science, and religion. These ideas merge in his provocative essay of 1902, ‘The Unmechanicalness ofPhotography’,² written when the focus of his photographic criticism was shifting from primarily political! economic concerns to a synthesis of social, aesthetic, metaphysical, and scientific ideas. Although his essay has been reprinted since 1902,³ the broader context that lends meaning to Shaw's otherwise peculiar remarks about painting and photography has not been explored sufficiently; that is our goal here.     

The success of Samuel Bourne in India

Abstract

In their 1955 edition of The History of Photography Helmut and Alison Gernsheim noted that the work of Samuel Bourne has ‘undeservedly fallen into oblivion’. They recognized the outstanding quality of the photographs produced on Bourne's excursions in India during the 1860s, including three arduous treks into the western Himalayas. By drawing on the young Englishman's own engaging accounts of his exploits in the mountains — a series of articles published in The British Journal of Photography — the Gernsheims were able to provide ‘an impression of a truly unique achievement’.¹ This initial effort to rescue Bourne from the limbo of forgotten landscapists was continued some twenty years later when his expeditionary work was featured in Ann Turner's BBC television series, ‘Pioneers of Photography’, which was brought out in book form by Aaron Scharf in 1976.² Other serious examinations of Bourne's photographs soon followed, the most significant of these being Arthur Ollman's brief but excellent monograph published in conjunction with an exhibition sponsored by the Friends of Photography in California.³ While the collective writings on Bourne thus ensured his entry into the mainstream of photo-history and provided the groundwork for future studies, numerous questions still remained unanswered regarding Bourne's entry into the photographic trade in India, his professional success, and the impact of his work on his contemporaries. Moreover, previous discussions of the artist's pictorial accomplishments have been limited to selected works with little or no investigation of the possible meanings attached to variations of formats and subtly interrelated series of images, including their cultural and social significance.⁴     

Between orientalist clichés and images of modernization

Abstract

In contemporary writing about nineteenth-century photography of the Middle East it has become almost a cliche to describe many of these images as ‘Orientalist’-that is, reflecting or propagating a system of representation that creates an essentialized difference between the ‘Orient’ and the ‘West’. Most of these scholars draw on Edward Said's influential book Orientalism, which traces how Europe manufactured an imaginary Orient through literary works and the social sciences.¹ For example, Nissan N. Perez writes in his book Focus East: Early Photography in the Near East (1839–1885) that ‘Literature, painting, and photography fit the real Orient into the imaginary or mental mold existing in the Westerner's mind .... These attitudes are mirrored in many of the photographs taken during this time [the nineteenth century] ... Either staged or carefully selected from a large array of possibilities, they became living visual documents to prove an imaginary reality’. ²     

Daguerreotype Portraiture

Abstract

Facing the Light is a major national exhibition of 110 daguerreotype portraits gathered from 35 sources. In his introduction to this catalogue for the exhibition, Pfister outlines his criteria for selection in the National Portrait Gallery's show. For consideration, the works had to be ‘unmistakably identified portraits of nationally prominent individuals … [whose] inclusion was first determined by the existence of a striking example of the daguerrean [sic] art’. This respect for the medium, as well as for the likenesses represented, makes the book a happy blend that should appeal to a broad audience. It is fitting that a national exhibition sponsored in part by the government and in part by the public-minded Polaroid Corporation should have set itself this task.     

Oliver Wendell Holmes as an amateur photographer

Abstract

On 6th July 1862, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a letter to Coleman Sellers, thanking him for some photographs received and excusing his own negligence in writing. His eldest son, missing in action in Richmond, commanded all his attention, but then Holmes added: ‘If it were not for this war, I should begin getting photographic apparatus tomorrow. If peace ever returns I feel sure I shall try my hand at the art and then I shall be only too happy to send you some of my handiwork in return for the many favors I have received from you’¹. The letter catches Holmes at an interesting point in his life. Always intrigued by photography and well known among his friends as a popularizer of it, he was finally thinking of turning theory into practice.