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’.     

The Photography of Roman Freulich from Poland to Hollywood

Professional contributions and technical innovations of photographer Roman Freulich to the Hollywood film industry are contextualised regarding the heritage of his life experiences in Czenstochowa, Poland, New York and Los Angeles. The remarkable output of Freulich's independent work, consisting of film projects that ventured far beyond the relative professional shelter provided by his popular glamour shots, emerges in the present study. Freulich sought to give voice to the voiceless as evidenced in his self-produced film Broken Earth (1936) – the first film to feature a black actor in a starring role – as well as his collaborations with the actor Paul Robeson. Freulich's immigration to America and the loss of his family members who remained in Poland are two legacies that distinguished Freulich from his fellow cameramen. Freulich both achieved a fruitful Hollywood career as a photographer of contract players – aided by his early use of the 35 mm camera – and authored a narrative of Joseph Trumpeldor, founder of the Jewish Legion. A survivor of the Holocaust, Freulich did more than preserve these dual identities; his lasting achievement lies in the incorporation of a veteran's sensitivity toward war in cinematic works that expanded early principles of still and moving image photography. Perspective by Freulich's family members is presented in original form, illuminating chronological events in the life of a pioneering photographer, writer and soldier.     

George Dobson Valentine in New Zealand

Abstract

George Dobson Valentine (1852–1890) was a Scottish photographer of great talent, whose departure for New Zealand for health reasons in the mid 1880s must have left his family's firm bereft of one of their best cameramen. Indeed, it may have threatened its position as one of the world's leading manufacturers of scenic views; however, the family concern did in fact continue successfully well into the 20th century. This article is concerned with Valentine's work in New Zealand, and with his contributions to New Zealand's cultural history.     

De Lancey W. Gill: Photographer for the Bureau of American Ethnology

Abstract

Between the 1850s and 1930s, Washington, D.C., was a centre for the photography of the American Indian. As many tribal leaders came to the capital to treat with government officials concerning their people's affairs, they sat for some of the city's leading photographers. Those who frequently worked behind the camera included Julian Vannerson, Alexander Gardner, A. Zeno Shindler, Charles M. Bell, andjohn K. Hillers¹. Although the work was first undertaken by a private photographer, it came to involve many individuals and government agencies and, in time, developed into a systematic effort to photograph as many of the Indian visitors as possible. The last of the photographers to work with the Indians in this way was De Lancey W. Gill. He made more portraits than all his predecessors combined, although he did not begin as a photographer until he was nearly 40 and well established in a government career.     

‘Princess’ Alice

Abstract

Burr Mcintosh had an enviable job as a photographer; at the turn of the century, he was called the ‘special photographer … to [a popular] Theodore Roosevelt’¹. With such credentials, Mcintosh accompanied William Howard Taft's Republican peace entourage to the Philippines and to China in 1905, bathing in the knowledge that his calling and appointment were secure. He was obviously smitten by ‘the Princess’, Alice Roosevelt, Teddy's headstrong daughter, and took every opportunity to photograph her with the other politicos on the junket. Alice mentions these events m her autobiography, Crowded Hours     

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.     

Seeing Photographically: Reading Rejlander’s “Apology”

The subject of this essay is a little known text by the photographer Oscar G. Rejlander (1813–1875) titled “An Apology for Art-Photography” published in 1863. The article argues that the “Apology” renders visible a mode of seeing that Celia Lury terms “seeing photographically.” “Seeing photographically” is the means or medium through which Rejlander came to see and fashion his self as a photographer. A reading of Freud’s “R is my Uncle” dream from The Interpretation of Dreams provides an analogical and analytical lever with which to open and expand Lury’s insight into the optics of seeing photographically. The article concludes with a reading of Rejlander’s Two Ways of Life of 1856. It argues that this photograph can be read as what I call, following W.J.T. Mitchell, a metaphotograph of the nineteenth-century photographer imaged as a divided figure emerging against the culturally contested backdrop of early photography.     

Migrant Mothers: Richard Harrington’s Indigenous ‘Madonnas’

Canadian photographer Richard Harrington has been recognised since the 1950s for his photographs of the Arctic, and specifically for portraits of the Padleimiut taken at a hunting camp in 1950 during a winter of acute shortages. Three were selected for Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man (1955). Of that group, two focused on motherhood through depictions of childbirth and maternal love; the latter is sometimes referred to as ‘Canada’s Madonna and Child’, making a timeless secular icon from the representation of a crisis. Harrington was a documentary photographer who made his living as a freelance photojournalist specialising in human interest stories and travel features for magazines and newspapers. On assignment in British Columbia for the Hudson’s Bay Company magazine The Beaver, he photographed a First Nations mother and child, an image entitled ‘Madonna of the Peace’. This photograph later graced the cover of a Roman Catholic missionary magazine, Pôle et Tropiques. This article draws parallels between Harrington’s photographs of Indigenous mothers and children and Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, using Harrington’s diaries and community-based research to reconstruct the lives of his subjects, and considering the sacrifice of knowledge to iconicity.     

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.     

Edward Linley Sambourne (1844–1910)

Abstract

Edward Linley Sam bourne worked as a Punch cartoonist from 1867 until his death in 1910.¹ Beginning his 43-year association with the magazine as a freelance contributor he then joined the permanent staff in 1871 as Cartoon Junior (to Tenniel who was Cartoonist-in-Chief). His rise through the Punch ranks meant a commensurate increase in his workload and, because of this, he took up photography in the early 1880s to assist his productivity and to satisfy his demand for accuracy. Sometimes Sam bourne copied the entire photograph, occasionally he even traced it; or else he used elements of a photograph or several photographs to construct the picture for the final drawing. Gradually, Sam bourne the Cartoonist became Sambourne the Photographer as his interest in drawing was supplanted by a fascination with photography; he developed an enthusiasm for the medium in an amateur way, joining the Camera Club in April 1893 and slowly amassing an enormous archive comprising some 30,000 images. To follow Sambourne's development as a photographer involves looking at how and why he used photography, and what his private as well as his public attitude was towards the medium.     

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.     

Roberto Donetta (1865–1935): A photographer in the Ticino

Abstract

The history of the Canton of Ticino, the Italian-speaking Swiss territory to the south of the Alps, was until recently profoundly marked by emigration. In fact, only after the Second World War did the Canton experience the economic development which has detennined its present-day identity. The period in which Roberto Donetta was active as a photographer in the Valle di Blenio was one characterized by extremely hard living conditions, due to a difficult terrain where arable land was limited. The contribution of emigrants to the economy of the valley consequently proved to be of vital importance (especially those who worked in France and Great Britain). The Roberto Donetta Archives contain more than five thousand plates and about five hundred prints. The Commune of Corzoneso became the owner of the material on the death of the photographer, thus preventing its dispersal. For more than thirty years the plates had been forgotten in a bam, which contributed, possibly, towards their ultimate preservation. The Archives are housed in the Casa Comunale of Corzoneso, which is responsible for the supervision and conservation of a considerable quantity of archive material of major interest for research in both the photographic and historical fields. Donetta's life was marked by severe economic problems which lead him to depend on public (communal) assistance. On his death the Commune of Corzoneso auctioned off the few belongings previously owned by the photographer in order, in part, to retrieve the money spent for his maintenance. Whereas his household goods did find buyers his photographic plates, on the other hand, were of interest to no one and, in consequence, remained the property of the Commune.     

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.     

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.     

Ann Cooke

Abstract

The visual-verbal world of discursive topography will see few readings as valuable as that of the photographer Brassal developing his image of the past century's foremost autobiographer. That Proust and photography are inextricably bound rings tme to any careful reader of In Search if Lost Time. Brassal has placed a quote in the opening epigraph that captures, in a few words, the essential relationship between writing, reading, seeing, and personal interaction. Proust and photography together show how other people and their images, developed in the mind's eye, contribute autobiographically to a more extensive and composite notion of the subject as it seeks to re-create itself through barriers of time and space. As the author/ photographer of The Secret Paris if the 1930s (Gallimard 1976), Brassaï is well acquainted with the ins and outs of society, its margins and centre, the necessity and means of penetrating into personal portraits and sacred spaces where what is seen is rarely told. His vision of Proust as read in this book is replete with insight, both technical and psychological, as the photographer guides the reader through the universe of the ocular writer, opening doors, windows, and fields of vision that permit recorded views and stolen glimpses.     

Homme phototypique

Abstract

If Paris is to be considered the heart and brain of 19th-century France, then its pulse was surely Nadar's atelier on the Boulevard des Capucines. No single individual of that special milieu of mid-century Romantics and bohemians was better suited in temperament and artistic spirit to preside here than the many-sided, multi-talented, legendary character Nadar himself. He was renowned not only as the photographer par excellence who first elevated the camera over the Parisian rooftops with a balloon, and lowered it to capture images of the city's catacombs, but also as a writer, cartoonist, inventor, entrepreneur, political activist and professional eccentric. He revelled in all these roles, and his biography reads as though it were the creation of Balzac or Murger. In Nadar we have the prototypical, photo typical 19th-century image of the homme artistique, in the Balzacian sense of the phrase, a recorder who is also a creator, a soul on fire who amalgamates the best qualities of adolescence and genius.     

John Collier,Jr

Abstract

After sending off a portfolio of his pictures to the headquarters of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in Washington, DC, John Collier, Jr, became so preoccupied with just trying to survive in photography that he forgot about his submission. As weeks turned into months, he bounced from one photography job to another. Collier felt that he had hit rock bottom in 1941 working as a printer for Gabriel Milan's, ‘a very cut-throat photography company in San Francisco’. Then one day his labour in the laboratory was interrupted by a telephone call from Washington. ‘I was called out of my little dungeon where I was tinting goldtoned baby portraits and picked up the phone and couldn't hear what the man said, having a life-long hearing difficulty’. Collier handed the receiver over to the nearest person, who happened to be his boss, to relay the message. ‘There's a crazy guy in Washington, DC, who wants to pay you $2,300 a year. You'd better take it because I'm going to fire you’. A shocked and elated Collier took the receiver, and confirmed his acceptance with a simple ‘Yes’. Although Collier did not hear anything that Roy Stryker, Head of the Historic Section, said in reply, he immediately prepared to leave for the nation's capital, and became what turned out to be the last photographer hired for the greatest documentary project the world has ever known. ‘This was the climax of the concern that I had to do something about direct analysis and observation, about what was going on around me at the time of the Great Depression’. ¹     

Lewis Carroll's Barker and his daughter May and the legend of Aristotle and Phyllis

Abstract

When Lewis Carroll died, a young woman who had been one of his ‘child-friends’ explained that, like the mirror-letters he sometimes wrote, ‘he was a man whom one had to read backwards’, a man that had to be looked at ‘As Through a Looking Glass’.¹ Certainly Carroll was a man that few understood. The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson seemed to be a walking contradiction. The stiff, rectitudinous mathematician and logician, who gave ‘dull-as-ditchwater’ lectures at Christ Church, Oxford,² was in sharp contrast to the man who delighted in the whimsical and paradoxical — author of Alice in Wonderland, inventor of word games, and writer of satirical pamphlets. He was also, in the words of the great photographer Brassaï, ‘the most remarkable photographer of children in the nineteenth century’.³ These photographs, most often images of Carroll's young female friends, are indeed remarkable. Yet they are also decidedly complex and paradoxical, producing in the modem viewer a high degree of psychological discord. On the one hand they are charming, personal portraits of children; on the other, they evoke something mature, sensual and alarmingly intimate.     

The late work of Charles Marville

Abstract

Compared with other photographers of his generation, the career of Charles Marville was remarkably long. His first calotypes date from no later than 1851, and some may have been produced earlier than that. Although biographical details about his life are sketchy at best, it is likely that Marvillc continued to work in the medium of wet-plate collodion almost until his death, which is believed to have occurred in 1879.1 The year of Marvillc's death has never been determined precisely. It generally has been assumed that the sale of his studio and equipment, which took place in 1879, followed shortly after his demise. Henri Lc Sccq, who was two years younger than Marvillc, produced no new work after the mid-1850s. Gustave Lc Gray, Charles Ncgre and Edouard Baldus, all of whom were four years his junior, ceased active photography in the 1860s. Of the first generation of French photographers working in the calotype or daguerreotype processes, only Hippolyte Bayard, who was 14 years older than Marville, had a longer active career. Marville produced a large body of calotypes, many of which were published by Blanquart-Evrard, that first revealed what became a lifelong passion for architectural photography.² However, it was only after Marville took up the wet plate in the 1850s that he settled into a full-time career as an architectural photographer.