The highest form of art

Abstract

If anyone still believes that Alfred Stieglitz's vaunted Photo-Secession sprang up, full-grown, like Pallas Athena from the forehead of Zeus, armed and ready to do battle for the recognition of photography as a fine art, much recent scholarship considerably revises that flattering view. The predecessors of the American Photo-Secession were strongly developed European societies and movements, among them the earnestly aesthetic Linked Ring Brotherhood, founded in May 1892 by a talented group of English pictorialists which included A. Horsky Hinton, George Davison, H. H. H. Cameron, and—rather unexpectedly—the manipulator of tableaux, Henry Peach Robinson.     

‘The art of correctly painting the expressive lines of the human face’: Duchenne de Boulogne's Photographs of Human Expression and the École des Beaux-Arts

Abstract

Admired in their day as living anatomy, the strange, powerful photographs of human expression produced by or under the direction of Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne (1806–75) functioned in two fields, medicine and fine art.¹ I would argue that these photographs' credibility in both fields derived from shared practices of ‘drawing from life’, practices laden with expectations of naturalism and legibility, as was photography in general at this time. While it was quite common during the nineteenth century that images made to serve the purposes of one of these fields were studied or circulated in the other, rarely were photographs given both scientific and artistic aims or, even less so, qualities, as Duchenne claimed for his work. Recent scholarship on Duchenne's work has tended to critique its perceived objectivity and scientific meaning by following Michel FoucauIt and unpacking the enlightened bourgeois modes of controlling, investing and understanding representations of the human body.² The exhibition catalogues published in 1999 by the Ecole nationale des beaux-arts and by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art discuss important aspects of the aesthetic context of Duchenne's photographs. However, neither one asked how and why his work was rejected by the French Academy of Fine Arts in 1863, only to become part of the fine art curriculum of the École des Beaux-Arts a decade later. To address those unstudied questions, I will examine relevant aspects of the photographs' creation, forms and functions, and their receptions by the scientific and art communities.     

Alfred Stieglitz and New Yark Dada

Abstract

In February of 1921 the photographer and entrepreneur Alfred Stieglitz mounted the fIrst public exhibition of his work since the closing of his pioneering art gallery, ‘291’, nearly four years earlier.1 An exhibition of 146 of Stieglitz's photographs was held at the Anderson Galleries in New York during February of 1921. This show was instrumental in helping Stieglitz ultimately to reassert his prominence in the New York art world and re-establish his status as an important American artist. Curiously, however, the manner in which Stieglitz and his associates chose to promote the photographer was somewhat unusual. They repeatedly described the camera as an extension of Stieglitz's own body, and his photographs as an extension of his spirit. As a result, they claimed that Stieglitz had achieved a profound physical and spiritual union both with his machinery and with the subjects he photographed.     

Photography in Australia: A select bibliography

Abstract

Olana, the extraordinary private home of American painter Frederic Church, perches high above the Hudson River, with commanding views of the Catskill Mountains and the verdant countryside, approximately 120 miles north of New York City (figure 1). Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), the internationally recognized painter of exotic locales and the North American landscape, lived much of his adult life at Olana, and it was here he retreated when arthritis curtailed his passion for world travel. Designed by architect Calvert Vaux in a Persian style, but in large measure created by Church, the house is architecturally eclectic, an exuberant physical manifestation of the artist's interests, beliefS and travels. Olana is also home to Church's personal collections offine art, books and photographs. Church assembled at Olana an art collection of fifty pieces (including old master paintings, art by his friends and contemporaries, as well as work of his own), a library of 1900 volumes (mainly travel, geography, science and religion), and a collection of approximately 5700 photographs. Although not a photographer himself, Church was an active collector of photographs throughout his life. This photograph collection, wellpreserved but only recently catalogued, and exhibited for the first time at the Dahesh Museum of Art, New York, is of compelling interest to historians of art and photography alike.     

The Parole of the Primitives

Abstract

Understanding very old photographs, as we know, poses a particular problem of interpretation, which is all the more difficult when we go back to the origins of photography to a time when the first ‘photographists’ still had a very innocent attitude towards the medium and used it with an almost naive confidence. We do not usually reflect on this difficulty of reading photographs, yet we do concede that the internal logic and necessity of many images of the years 1840–60 escape us; and more often than not we draw a modest veil over the poverty of our modern knowledge of such hazy notions as ‘creation’, ‘art’, and ‘personal expression’, notions that merely return the discussion to concepts with no currency in present day criticism.     

Eudora Welty,photographer

Abstract

That Eudora Welty¹ in addition to her great gifts as a short-story writer should also have been a gifted photographer may come as something of a surprise. One thinks immediately of Wright Morris², another original writer and photographer, whose interest in the art has continued to this day, whereas photographic activity was only a passing phase for Welty. For a time Eudora Welty thought of becoming a professional photographer, but her early portfolios did not sell, while her short stories did. In 1944 Vogue magazine published three of her pictures with an accompanying text, entitled ‘Literature and the lens’, the first of three statements that she has made on the nature of the photograph and of the moment it preserves³. Her photographs are indeed of One Time, One Place, Mississippi in the Depression; A Snapshot Album to quote the title of a collection of her photographs published with a preface in 1971⁴. A new and sumptuous portfolio of 20 well-printed photographs has since appeared⁵.     

Two Stieglitz Autochromes: Katherina and Käti Raab

Abstract

In the course of preparatory research for the exhibition ‘Frank Eugene — The Dream of Beauty’, several boxes of autochromes privately owned by a Munich industrialist came to light. These autochromes were taken by the American art photographers Frank Eugene and Alfred Stieglitz, probably between 1907 and 1909 in Tutzing. In the meantime, the colour photographs taken by Eugene have been reproduced in the catalogue of the above-mentioned exhibition (Ulrich Pohlmann, ed., Frank Eugene — The Dream of Beauty, Munich: Nazraeli 1995, 176-79).     

M. O. Hammond of Toronto

Abstract

‘Mr Hammond, you have a good way of sensing public taste’,¹ remarked an official of the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) in 1926, during a discussion with members of the Toronto Camera Club (TCC) about the annual International Salon of Photography. ‘Mr Hammond’ was the journalist and amateur photographer M. O. Hammond (1876-1934),² a fixture in the Toronto culture scene since 1906 when he had become literary editor and a reviewer of art exhibitions for the newspaper The Globe. He was well known for his efforts to encourage and publish Canadian writers and artists. His three books³ and numerous newspaper and magazine articles popularized Canadian history, art, and literature, and were frequently illustrated by his own photographs.     

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’.     

Photography at the Amon Carter Museum

Abstract

This slender but handsome volume samples a tantalizing forty-eight of the 200 000 photographs in the Amon Carter Museum's holdings of American photography. Devoted to American art, the museum collects photography in three major areas, all represented here: fine art photography, historical photography and artist collections. In Singular Moments one finds great names like Ansel Adams, iconic images like Barbara Morgan's Martha Graham — Letter to the World (Swirl), documentary work by less famous practitioners such as Carl Mydans and Laura Gilpin, and fascinating glimpses into the nineteenth centmy through the lenses of unknown early photographers, especially those of the American West. The book ably reproduces a great variety of techniques, from daguerreotypes, chloride prints and photogravures to more recent processes such as dye destruction prints as well as gelatine silver prints. A bibliography gives the novice reader an excellent starting place for further reading and hints at the vast scholarship that the entire collection represents. Singular Moments invites all those interested in photography to watch this museum for future exhibitions from its enormous and evidently beautiful collection.     

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.     

Alvin Langdon Coburn

Abstract

One of the most intriguing aspects of Alvin Langdon Coburn's life began when he stopped making photographs. At thirty-six years of age, Coburn had a well established photographic career. He had photographed some of the most important people of his day and was admired and befriended by many of them. A member of the Photo-Secession and the Linked Ring, Coburn was involved in the promotion of photography as an art form. He made Vortographs in 1917 and therefore he is also credited by many as the first purely abstract photographer. Yet, in 1918, Coburn stopped photographing professionally. In his autobiography he said:     

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.     

African Photography

Abstract

In recent years there has been increasing interest, both in the art world and in anthropology, in the photographic practices of Africa, building, especially, on French work on francophone Africa. This volume, which is linked to an exhibition of the same name at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, explores the studio portraits of Seydou Kelta and Malick Sidibé from Bamako in Mali. Their work is by now well known in photographic circles and amongst those interested in African visual practices. Both photographers, especially Keïta, have been widely exhibited in Europe and America and subject to extensive critical writing. The photographs themselves date from the 1950s to the 1970s. This period saw independence in Mali not only in colonial terms, but also in new freedoms and new influences, which transformed the way people saw themselves, changes which are reflected in the photographs.     

The Auer and Herzog collections: Two encyclopaedic projects in Switzerland

Abstract

‘Made in Switzerland. The Photography Collections of the Swiss Confederation’ was an exhibition organized by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture and hosted by the Musee de l'Elysee in Lausanne in 1997. The exhibition officially confIrmed that the Swiss are at last beginning to recognize the value of their national photographic heritage. Official efforts concerning the conservation of photographs have until recently consisted of the preservation of architectural documents by the Federal Archive for the Protection of Monuments in Bern and of the rather limited activities of the Swiss Foundation of Photography, located in Zurich since 1971, which has primarily focused on professional reportage. Two private collectors, however, have been discreetly active for over three decades amassing thousands of photographs, albums, cameras, and books on photography, thus safeguarding material that might have been lost or destroyed due to the general lack of interest shown by public institutions. Michele and Michel Auer, two photography encyclopaedists living in Hermance on Lake Geneva, and Ruth and Peter Herzog in Basle have assembled the two largest private photography collections in Switzerland. But whereas collecting is an extension of the professional work of the Auers, Ruth Herzog-Wyss, a book dealer, and Peter Herzog, a lawyer and art expert, are amateur collectors.     

Spatial resolution implications of digitizing aerial photography for environmental applications

Abstract

Accuracy, flexibility and cost effectiveness are advantages of using digitized aerial photographs as a data source for remote sensing studies of the environment, such as forests. However, the relationship between the resolution of digital images and the aerial photographs from which they were derived must be addressed to ensure valid application using the environmental data. This communication considers issues that affect the information content of environmental data through the spatial resolution of photographs and digitized images, and suggests how users can optimize the spatial resolution of the latter by selecting an appropriate scanning aperture. An optimal scanning aperture can be chosen by considering the combination of the resolving power of the camera system, the scale of the original photograph and the desired pixel size of the digital image. Optimizing spatial resolution while scanning will maximize the spatial information obtained from the original photographs without generating unnecessarily large file sizes. The authors make several recommendations for the digitization of aerial photographs for environmental applications, such as analyses of forests.     

‘A Pointer for Beauty’: Photography,Ekphrasis, and the Aesthetics of Attention in Johannes Jaeger’s 1866 Photobook

This essay inquires into attention and detail as aesthetic categories in the nineteenth-century reception of photography in Scandinavia. It circles around what is generally considered to be Sweden’s first book with original photographs, Johannes Jaeger’s Molin’s Fountain in Photographs, with text (1866), read through two articles on the aesthetic potential of the photographic medium written by two contemporary Scandinavian art critics. In seven albumen print photographs, the book documents a fountain sculpture by Swedish sculptor Johan Peter Molin, exhibited at the first Scandinavian Art and Industrial Exhibition in 1866. However, the book also includes poetry; each photograph is juxtaposed with a poetic stanza that describes the part of the sculpture that the photograph reproduces. This paper studies the close relation between image and text in Jaeger’s volume. It argues that a contemporary view of the photographic image, also articulated by the Scandinavian art critics, can be discerned from the layout of the book – namely, that photography produces images too distractive and oversaturated with insignificant details to be aesthetically valuable. The visual and verbal framework for the photographs, then, arguably aims to overcompensate the distractive qualities of the image, by regulating the reader/viewer’s attention towards the sculpture and its significant details. In this ambition, Jaeger’s photobook anticipates a future aesthetic appreciation of the photograph in its own right.     

A Book of the Jubilee Year

Abstract

The hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the official practice of photography has brought us to the point where any individual attempting to stand and account for the subject will immediately be shouted down by expert voices from all corners. A publication of this importance has wisely divided the subject into manageable chunks dealt with by Joel Snyder, Sara Greenough, David Travis and Colin Westerbeck. It should be said at the outset that this is a magnificent and exemplary publication - well-written, the photographs well-chosen to give an excellent balance of the astonishing but familiar and the unknown and equally startling, well-edited and well-printed so that every verbal and visual nuance is properly presented. The National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Art Institute of Chicago have come down with great seriousness in favour of the art of photography and must be congratulated whole-heartedly on the-success of the venture. They are assured of the in-depth jealousy of at least one European curator.