Guillermo Kahlo and Casasola

Abstract

The photographers Guillermo Kahlo and Agustín Víctor Casasola recorded the cultural artefacts and political events that shaped Mexican culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. Their photographic collections exemplify the initial uses of photography as both cultural and historical documents. In the case of Kahlo, his 25 albums, entitled Photographic Inventory cif Spanish Colonial Church Architecture in Mexico (1910),¹ were among the commemorative projects the Porfirian government sponsored to record national sights and monuments representative of Mexican cultural history for the centenary celebration of Mexican Independence (1810). Kahlo's photographic inventory was a significant government commission that documented the colonial architecture still standing in Mexico. In turn, Casasola established in 1912 the first Agenda Mexicana de Información Fotográfica that collected and produced photographs documenting the events of the Revolution. He presented the results of his endeavour in the 15-volume work, Álbum Histórico Gráfico (1921).     

A response to Roger Taylor

Abstract

Roger Taylor, in his response to my paper, may unwittingly have provided us with the answer to why Antoine Claudet distanced himself so firmly from the drawn out machinations and negotiations that led in January 1853 to the formation of what is now the Royal Photographic Society. It was snobbery. Taylor highlights the social chasm that existed between those in trade and those in polite society in the middle of the nineteenth century. ‘It is difficult to appreciate’, he reminds us, ‘just how conspicuously separate the two photographic communities (daguerreotype and calotype) were in the 1850s’.     

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.     

Daniel Manders Beere

Abstract

Through History of Photography, photoarchivists at the National Photography Collection of the Public Archives of Canada have learned that one of Canada's photographic pioneers was among New Zealand's early photographers of note. An article by William Main entitled, ‘Photographic Reportage of the New Zealand Wars’¹, and subsequent correspondence from John Sullivan², have shed welcome light on the origins and later life of Daniel Manders Beere.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

The Reception of Albert Renger-Patzsch's Die Welt ist schön

Abstract

No history of photography or publication on the photography of the 1920s fails to mention the photo-book Die Welt ist schön. Regarded as a ‘manifesto of the revival of Realism,’¹ and hailed as the ‘bible’ of Neue Sachlichkeit photography,² ‘hardly any other book has influenced a generation of photographers to the same great extent and with such long-lasting effects as this volume‘.³ It was the book's tide in particular that was received like a catchword and influenced the reception of this photographic volume: ‘The tide became symbolic for an attitude of Neue Sachlichkeit to the world and the book was acknowledged as the ideal volume of Neue Sachlichkeit photography’.⁴ Hitherto in the history of the book's reception, this opinion has been restricted primarily to the reference to Walter Benjamin's well-known negative critique of 1931.⁵ Amongst the multitude of reviews of Die Welt ist schon, it is Benjamin's assessment which is most frequendy cited in the literature. That Benjamin was able to neglect explicidy mentioning Renger-Patzsch's name and to refer merely to the tide of the book can be interpreted as proof of the great fame of this photographic author. In fact, Die Welt ist schön had by this time been reviewed in nearly all leading cultural magazines and daily newspapers and evaluated as an exemplary volume of a modem, neusachliche photography. For critics such as Benjamin, however, the tide was synonymous with a new, sterile ‘l’art pour l'art' photography which manipulated reality and denied social contexts. But to confine negative criticism of Die Welt ist schön to the political left and its praise to a more conservative attitude is too simple a model as becomes apparent when all of the reviews are taken into consideration. Karl With's attempt to summarize the contradictions of this picture book may be cited here: ‘Ein seltsames Buch!} (A strange book!). Exciting in its busding abundance, as well as in its silence’.⁶     

Sadakichi artmann,essayist and critic

Abstract

During the last two years of his life, Ralph Eugene Meatyard assembled a series of photographs into a book titled The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater. The album's main subject is his wife Madelyn Meat yard who wore one mask for the title role of Lucybelle Crater, and appeared in sixtyfour photographs accompanied in each by a different person wearing one other mask. Madelyn Meat yard's mask, an opaque representation of a grotesque hag, is described as resembling ‘Mammy Yokum from Outer Space’.¹ The other mask is transformed by its wearer, for it is a translucent representation of an androgynous older person. Only two images are titled, and the real names of the masked people are revealed in a listing at the end of the book.     

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.     

Leah King-Smith and the Nineteenth-century Archive

Abstract

In postmodern criticism the camera has often been seen as an apparatus of control, one of the surveillance mechanisms of the state, in the service of its institutions and immersed in its technologies of power. The metaphor of the camera as a weapon, as analysed by Susan Sontag in the early 1970s, describes an unbalanced and non-reciprocal relationship between photographer and subject.¹ One is the hunter, the other the prey; one is the agent, the other the victim. This theoretical paradigm was consolidated in the 1980s when structuralist critics started to analyse nineteenth-century photographic archives held in libraries, institutions and museums.² Much of this criticism followed the work of Michel Foucault who used Jeremy Bentham's model of the Panopticon to analyse the controlling mechanism of the gaze in modern institutions.³ I am aware that aligning Foucault with structuralism will appear problematic to some; however, the way in which some of his work has been adapted by postmodern critics of photography does underline the determinism of his theory. For a lucid analysis, see Joan Copjec, Read my Desire: Lacan against the Historicists, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1994, 1–10. For a different perspective, sympathetic to Foucault, see Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1997. Although Foucault's concept of power is productive and he admits to sites of resistance, he is pessimistic about the possibilities of such resistance.⁴ Discipline and Punish, upon which many theories of photographic surveillance are predicated, constructs disciplinary power as ‘the nonreversible subordination of one group of people by another’.⁵     

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.     

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.     

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.     

The darkroom abolish

Abstract

‘You press tlie button and we do the rest' had been Kodak's proud slogan slnce 1888, but as the success of popular pliotography grew, the wisdom of allowing hundreds of thousands of amateurs to do ‘the rest’ themselves became very clear. By 1902, the annuals sales of photographic paper alone had reached three million dollars¹, and Kodak's famous propaganda slogan was tacltly disowned with the publication of The Darkroom Abolished. In eloquent terms, and supported by the highest photographic authorities in the land, the notion came to be propagated that ‘You’ should not only press the button, but also ‘do tlie rest’ yourself. If ‘The Kodak Girl’ could do it, fragile and delicate woman that she was, anyone could. No mention here of the fact that at least 18 women were formal members of the Photo-secession in that year, or that two had been among the founders. The early years of this century were not, of course, attuned to these sensibilities; indeed, plctures of pretty girls selling enticing products like potassium ferrous oxalate to an eager publoc will be with us for a while yet. In the testimonials for the new products, Eickemeyer ranks discreetly above (or at any rate ‘before’) Stieglitz, and through the four quotations are almost on a par, one may guess that the layout of the brochure was more popular in some quarters than in others. And Edward W. Newcoinb, while equally positive, was evidently confused about the limits of human skill. Frederick Remington's endorsement must have been valued more for the sake of the artist's name than for its own persuasive qualities. His cautious tone notwithstanding, it is known that his own practice as an illustrator was shaped, at least in part, by the public's insistence on the kind of pictorial authenticity that only a pliotograph could sulpply².     

‘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.     

The London Diorama

Abstract

A Month in London, or Some of its Modern Wonder described¹ is as evocative a title for a book as one could wish for, and when I saw it was dated 1832, it was irresistible. It turned out to be a piece of thinly disguised fiction, so beloved in that age which felt that serious instruction, particularly for the young, must be sugar coated. An American tourist treats two young English relatives to a month's sightseeing in London. A chance acquaintance, named Mr Finsbury (and, most appropriately, living there), appears before the end of the Introduction, and volunteers to take them on the rounds. One particular adventure starts with a ride on George Shillibeer's three-horse Omnibus.     

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.