The Album of Camille Silvy

Abstract

Camille Silvy (1834-1910), an elusive figure in the history of photography, was very successful in the brief 11 years that he produced photographs. He has been primarily known for his beautifully toned cartes-de-visite, in addition to larger images, most prominently River Scene, France. Recently, much attention has been given to this Silvy masterpiece, which has been the subject of a book and an exhibition.¹ The book, intensively researched by Mark Haworth-Booth, sheds considerable light on Silvy's life and career. One of the items that Haworth-Booth uncovered was an album or scrapbook that belonged to Silvy and now belongs to Silvy's descendants in Paris. This album served as a scrapbook or memory book and provides clues and insights into Silvy's life. It reflects his inspirations and early training, his interests, his professional accomplishments, events in his life, and his lifelong interest in documentation.     

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.     

James Van Der Zee's Harlem book of the dead

Abstract

‘Night Funeral in Harlem’ by Langston Hughes, which was first published in 1951, exemplifies the importance of funerals to African-Americans throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Like James Van Der Zee's Harlem Book of the Dead, the poem is about the crossroads of life and death. Like the Haitian Voudoun God Ghede, whose capacity for living is legendary but whose symbol is the cross on the tomb, the Hughes poem and the Van Der Zee book show how the bodies of the dead affect the souls of the living. Van Der Zee's book is about judgement: about how the living and the dead view each other at their final encounter. This dialogue also describes Ghede who is lord of the interaction between the living and the dead and who is ‘the final judge of a man's life and the worth of his soul in death’.¹ Through its poems and pictures the book depicts people at a cosmic threshold, and like Ghede, who is guardian of the history and heritage of the race, the Harlem Book of the Dead is intimately connected to the culture from which it springs.²     

The invention and reinvention of Martín Chambi

Abstract

Distanced by over fifty years, Latorre and Thornton offer opposing perceptions of Martin Chambi as an artist.3 This is an abbreviated version of chapter four from my doctoral dissertation, Rethinking Martín Chambi, completed in 1997 at the University of New Mexico. Roberto Latorre, writer for and editor of the intellectual journal Kosko, was an integral part of the cultural milieu of 1 920s Cusco, Peru, where Chambi lived and worked. His statement was part of a review of Chambi's exhibitions from around 1925. Gene Thornton, photography critic at the New York Times during the 1970s, judged Chambi from pictures exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1979. Both critics reflect the aesthetic sensibilities of their time and the context in which they were writing: what are we to make of such disparate interpretations of the same photographer, including the shift from Latorre's emphasis on Chambi's landscapes to Thornton's interest in his portraits? At issue is the difference between Chambi's sense of himself as an artist during his own life, and how that sense was reshaped when Chambi was rediscovered after his death in 1973.     

Photographic Eye as Poetic I: Maiakovskii's and Rodchenko's Pro eto project (1923)

Abstract

Early in Dostoevskii's The Idiot, the hero is transfixed by a photoportrait of Nastasia Filippovna, whose face is to haunt him thereafter: ‘On the portrait a woman of truly unusual beauty was represented. She was photographed in a black silk dress … her eyes were dark and deepset, her brow pensive’.¹ The face, as we later learn, bears the imprint of a knowledge too terrible to contemplate, knowledge of the tragic end to Nastasia's own life; and, in the context of the novel's eschatological thematics, of the end of time itself Fifty years later, on 5 June 1923, Maiakovskii published in book form the first edition of a poem Pro eto (About That), illustrated with photomontages produced by his agitprop collaborator, the constructivist artist, Aleksandr Rodchenko.2 The book was published by the state publishing house, Gosizdat. It was reprinted in facsimile form by Ardis in 1973. Swedish publishers Bokomotiv issued the work in 1980, along with two extra photomontages not included in the original published edition. In 1994, the German specialist publishers Ars Nicolai published the most comprehensive version of the project. The Ars Nicolai edition includes a facsimile of the original Gosizdat book, Russian, German and Englishlanguage versions of Maiakovskii's poem, a very helpful commentary on the project by Aleksandr Lavrent'ev (again in English, German and Russian), and glossy copies of all the photomontages. See Vladimir Maiakovskii, Pro eto, with an Introduction by Alehandr Lavrent'ev, Berlin: Ars Nicolai 1994. It is from this edition that subsequent page references to Maiakovskii's poem are taken. The last of Rodchenko's photomontages (see figure 9) is juxtaposed with verses in which the poet imagines that in some future Utopia he has been resurrected from the dead to serve as keeper at a zoo — a favourite haunt of Lily Brik, the love of his life. The montage is dominated by a large photo of Lily who, likewise, looks back from the end at a captivated viewer in the ‘real’ time of the era in which the image was produced. It also contains an instantly recognizable photograph of the poet, looking in at a caged polar bear and up at the superimposed image of Lily. 3 Maiakovskii knew that his persona was a function of his being in the public eye, and of the unbreakable association between the camera image and its own reproducibility. By portraying Maiakovskii looking at Lily Brik, who looks into the camera (and out at us), Rodchenko achieves an identification of Maiakovskii the unique self, with us, the anonymous viewers of Maiakovskii the public persona.     

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.     

The German image

Abstract

This important book is not a technical history, nor is it ‘sociological’ in any scientific sense; its main thrust is rather in the realm of ‘the history of ideas’ and ‘the history of taste’, and it is thus intimately concerned with human values and attitudes. In this way, and because human nature transceinds national boundaries with conspicuous ease, Fritz Kempe's work is not ‘merely’ about Germany, but about photography and people in general. Without constraining system and without claims to exhaustive coverage, the book manages to get at the spirit and core of relationships by discussing 24 topics, which range from local history (‘Bremen, Wannover, Kassel’) to episodic accounts (‘On the secret magic of the hruman image’). That is its special charm, and also its lasting testament, because photography is really too complex a field to permit a stereotype presentation, if the finer nuances of the human response are to be given their due. If anything is lacking—but it would be chnrlisll to expect a single volume to cover every base—it is a more extensive discussion of the daguerreotype's influence on German painters.     

A scene in a library

Abstract

This essay concerns one photograph: the eighth plate in The Pencil of Nature, called A Scene in a Library, which originally appeared in the second installment of Talbot's inaugural book on photography (figure 1). I have already written extensively about A Scene in a Library — and given its title to a book on illustrated books.¹ But it is a photograph that, together with the text that accompanies it, has never ceased to intrigue me. I continue to wonder what Talbot's intentions were when he chose this photograph for his book. Why did he choose it over similar photographs that he had made and could possibly just as well have used? Why did he title it the way he did — A Scene in a Library — when we know that it was not actually taken in his library? Why and when did it occur to him to write the piece of text that accompanies the plate — which speaks of experimentation with the invisible end of the light spectrum? And what did he have in mind when he put the plate, the caption and the accompanying text together? For A Scene in a Library is remarkable — and exceptional — for the unaccountable way in which it puts text together with image. Almost all the other plates have text that bears on them fairly straightforwardly, either explaining how and where they were made or indicating possible uses for the photograph in question. Not so A Scene in a Library, which functions, rather, as a kind of clef de roman, and which has, as I hope to show, an emblematic status in The Pencil of Nature precisely because it is an exception.     

Early scottish photographic exhibitions

Abstract

There is that nerve-shredding time after the finalization of a text before, and immediately after, publication, when the author wonders what new photographs, correspondence, or other invaluable materials will rise up from unknown sources to mock his or her temporary certainties. So far, no one has yet come forward with another print of Camille Silvy's River Scene, France, or La Vallée de l'Huisne, from 1858 to disturb the (admittedly open) conclusions of my book on the photograph.¹ There is, however, new material to add. Pointed in the right direction by Sara Stevenson of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, I recently read some fascinating documents in the Scottish Record Office. Deposited on indefinite loan there by the Edinburgh Photo graphic Society in 1979 are the papers of the Photographic Society of Scotland (founded 1856, dissolved 1873). Bundies of hundreds of letters, invoices, and other papers document some of the early Edinburgh exhibitions more amply and significantly than any other photographic exhibitions of the time, so far as I am aware.² I concentrate here on the exhibition held in the Winter of 1858/59, at which Silvy's River Scene, France (1858) was first shown.     

Mexican Photography: A Bibliography

Abstract

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) is one of the great classics of modem Italian literature. First published in 1958, a year after the author's death, the novel is set in Sicily and covers a period of almost three decades, from 1860 to 1888. The overarching theme of the book is the dissolution of the Sicily of the Bourbons and its reinvention as part of the unified Kingdom of Italy. Lampedusa, himself a Sicilian aristocrat, follows this cultural and political transformation through the eyes of the Leopard, Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, head of one of the most ancient and prominent noble families of Palermo. Indeed, it is understood that Lampedusa drew on his own paternal great-grandfather as a model for Don Fabrizio. Lampedusa's historical novel was translated into English in 1960, and in 1963 it reached a still wider audience as a result of Luchino Visconti's film, in which Burt Lancaster starred as Don Fabrizio, Alain Delon took the role of Tancredi Falconeri, and Claudia Cardinale played Angelica Sedara.     

Magnum photos

Abstract

For over fifty years, since Magnum's birth in 1947, the history of this remarkable photographic cooperative has been awash in myth and legend. The gifted, colourful, principled, and often disorderly members of the agency created some of the twentieth century's most memorable still images. These photographs, appearing on the pages of magazines like LIFE, Picture Post and the Ladies' Home Journal, pricked and provoked the consciences of millions worldwide. In the process, Magnum photographers bridged that illdefined, vexatious gap between photojournalism and art. Readers interested in learning more about this phenomenon now have two new choices. One is to reach for a copy of Russell Miller's Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History. This unauthorized biography, by an outsider, examines the operation ‘of a large, unruly and highly talented family which, by some miracle has stayed together for 50 years ... (with an) aim simply to tell a cracking good story as impartially and truthfully and entertainingly as was within my capabilities, and to disregard the notoriously fragile sensibilities of the participants’. The book fulfils the criteria. Illustrated by lively quotes, twenty-six photos, and numerous anecdotes from members such as Ernst Haas, Robert Capa and Eve Arnold, the book conveys a sense of energy and excitement. The volume concludes with a look towards the future of the agency and the crucial structural importance of maintaining hannony in the union of its practitioners. Russell Miller is perceptive and his treatment of the subject comprehensive.     

Strand's world

Abstract

Paul Strand's photographs are always a pleasure to look at, just as Calvin Tompkins' writing is always a pleasure to read. Aperture, the sine qua non of American photographic book publishing, has recently brought out yet another volume of Strand's photographs, this time pairing them with a critical essay by Calvin Tompkins and adding what is perhaps the most interesting element of all, a section entitled, ‘excerpts from correspondence, interviews and other documents’. The book is a stunning contribution to photographic literature. The pictures themselves are beautifully and faithfully reproduced. Tompkins' interpretive historical essay, altered very little from its first appearance in The New Yorker (16th September 1974), is graceful and informative. The book is executed with the high degree of taste associated with Aperture, thoroughly befitting the intelligence of Strand's photographs. By publishing more pages on Strand than on any other photographer, Aperture had made its own contribution to the Strand legend. This includes the recent, charming article by Catherine Duncan (‘The Garden: Vines and Leaves’, in Aperture, No. 78) and, of course, the monumental two-volume catalogue (also issued in a single volume version) which served as an accompaniment to the Strand retrospective exhibition organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1971.     

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.     

Doris Ulmann and Marion Post Wolcott

Abstract

The mountaineer's life is hard but self-contained, and the sense of independence is his most prized trait. His psychology is still that of the frontier; he is suspicious of outsiders, takes strong measures against real or fancied wrongs, yet withal is extremely sociable.¹     

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     

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     

New York and Photography

Abstract

This exhibition catalogue about the New York School of photography, begun long before 11 September 2001, fortuitously lifts up the city as both image and source of visual ideas. Comforting in this accidental homage, the book also offers significant essays that explore the reasons for the flourishing of photography in twentiethcentury New York. New York: Capital of Photography offers some especially thought provoking explanations. Max Kozloff, art historian, critic and photographer, traces the development of a particular way of seeing that evolved from the early years of the century in the Reform Movement through the ‘made-to-order Surrealism’ of New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Five of his six essays approach a textbook treatment of this art form in this period and place. The sixth, ‘Jewish Sensibility and the Photography of New York’, poses the intriguing thesis that the aesthetic of New York photography as a whole is a Jewish one. This idea may not be accepted as fact in actual photography history texts until another hundred years have passed, but is worthy and fascinating, in Kozloffs telling, of consideration.     

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.     

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