Mary A. Bartlett: Illustrator of Children's Books

Mary A. Bartlett was an early woman photographer, active in Chicago camera clubs, and interested in the medium's creative use. This article outlines her life and examines the three children's books she photographically illustrated in the 1890s. More elaborate than most similar publications of the time, Bartlett's books featured sensitive images of children, accompanied by fanciful verse, printed in high‐quality photogravure. They are outstanding examples of the genre.     

Surreal Encounters: Science,Surrealism and the Re‐Circulation of a Crime‐Scene Photograph

This article examines the implications of the surrealist appropriation and re‐circulation of a crime‐scene photograph depicting the body of Mary Kelly, Jack the Ripper's final victim. The article traces the trajectory of the photograph, taken in 1888, as it shifts from its role as a visual police record in London, to evidence of sexual sadism in the developing field of criminology in France, before finally becoming an object in the text of a play, ‘Regards sur l'enfer anthropoclasique’, by surrealist Maurice Heine, and being published in 1936 along with that play in Minotaure, a luxury art review. As it is re‐framed in various contexts, however, the photograph retains some of its prior meaning. A key point in the argument is that this kind of appropriation reveals how photographic meaning is produced and anchored.     

Matisse's Odalisques and the Photographic Académie

Henri Matisse's experiments during the first decade of the twentieth century with colour and form have often been the focus of critical analysis of his work, while the radical changes in his figurative style have received less attention. These changes owe much to Matisse's engagement with visual discourse he encountered in the pages of Mes modèles, L'Étude académique, and L'Humanité feminine, illustrated journals the artist consulted as source material for a number of his paintings and sculptures. The impact of these journals, which specialized in photographic académies went beyond the borrowing of a few poses. Instead, Matisse's conceptualization of the female nude as an erotic spectacle and his use of the arabesque as a signifier of feminine voluptée were in large part shaped by the illustrations and editorials he observed in these journals. Matisse's use of the photographic académie offers a valuable case‐study in the eroticization of the aesthetic style in the art of one of the most influential artists of the early twentieth‐century.