The secret eye

Abstract

The authors of this lavishly illustrated book have brought imppeccable credentials to their task, and have created a scholarly and entertaining work on what must surely be one of the most fascinating subjects in thc history of photography. The book is concerned with cameras either very small, so that they could be hidden during picture taking, or else disguised in various ways, pretending to be other objects of use, sometimes taking photographs in directions other than those in which the photographer himself appeared to face. The notion of the unobserved observer thus began very early in photography's history, and remains popular to this day.     

Lorene Squire’s Psychical Landscapes of Colonial/Modern Gender in the Canadian North

From 1937 to 1939, Lorene Squire was commissioned by The Beaver (the company magazine of the Hudson’s Bay Company) and Canadian Airways to produce photographs of the Canadian North suitable for their publications, focused on her specialisation in wildfowl photography, as well as landscapes, planes, and people. This article focuses on her 1938 commissions, and in particular two photographs of Indigenous women and two self-portraits. When these photographs are considered alongside photographs of white settler women, her correspondence, and her book Wildfowling With A Camera (1938), I argue that they offer insights into gender as a colonial concept (what María Lugones calls the ‘colonial/modern gender system’). I contend that the setting of the ‘North’ as a psychical landscape makes Squire’s contestations possible. Squire’s photographs resist common ways of depicting white and Indigenous women in the 1930s, but they do so in a way that is paradoxical and leaves intact the colonial/modern gender system. In addition to providing biographical information about Squire, this article contributes to theoretical and historical scholarship on the meaning of photographs of Indigenous people in Canada for projects of nation-building and northern economic development, as well as on how the North functions as a reference point for Canadian identity.     

Photographic fundraising: Civil war philanthropy

Abstract

With the development of the carte de visite in the 1850s, an inexpensive, reproducible, and highly portable image could be used for propaganda campaigns aimed at the heart and purse strings of a susceptible public. One measure of the popularity and versatility of the carte de visite may be found in its use as a vehicle for fund-raising during and after the American Civil War. Wounded soldiers, orphaned children, widows, and needy victims had their causes promoted by means of these small (2 1/2 × 4 1/4 in.) card-mounted, albumen photographs. The card mount provided space for a verbal appeal, to increase the impact of tlie photograph itself.     

From the studio to the snapshot: An immigrant photographer of the 1920s

Abstract

In his justly famous work, Looking at Photographs, John Szarkowski remarked¹ that ‘Photography has learned about its nature not only from the great masters, but also from the simple and radical works of photographers of modest aspiration and small renown ….’. It is thanks to critics like Szarkowski that we are encouraged to view photographs on their own terms, instead of always having to compare them to the rigid aesthetic hierarchies of Hochkunst.     

Der fotograf der goldenen zwanziger Jahre

Abstract

Fragmentation involves anteriority, decay, and loss in relation to some superseded whole. As excerpts from a world that was, photographs are understandable as fragments, which means that they carry with them an invitation to reflect on and even to reconstruct former environments and totalities. The history of photography is a history of responses to that invitation, most of which are studiedly hesitant and doubtful of an outcome. One reason for this hesitation is that photographs seem to exist in a perpetual present, which means that photography inevitably has reservations about the past as past. If its personnel still exist, and if its events are still in progress, photographic representations would be better termed presentations. They belong, even if seemingly so, to an everyday in process, where everything is still to be resolved.¹     

Frances Benjamin Johnston: The Huntington Library portrait collection

Abtracts

My aim … is, and has been to make photographs best serve their purpose of illustration by giving them, wherever possible, an artistic quality and by care in detail, a study of arrangement and lighting, to make not only photographs but pictures … Frances B. Johnston.¹     

Editorial

Abstract

In the history of photography the earliest years are represented by a comparatively small number of people, remembered not only for their excellence, but often because their work features with some regularity in international salerooms. It is therefore gratifying to be able to introduce a new name onto the scene who was highly regarded by his contemporaries, and was at the same time related, by marriage, to William Henry Fox Talbot, the centenary of whose death we are remembering this year. That John Dillwyn Llewelyn should not be widely known today, is perhaps not surprising. Apart from a few photographs that were included in such publications as The Sunbeam, the majority of his existing images have remained in the family.That John Dillwyn Llewelyn should not be widely known today, is perhaps not surprising. Apart from a few photographs that were included in such publications as The Sunbeam, the majority of his existing images have remained in the family.     

Portraits portrayed

Abstract

The coffee-table is where Faces looks as if it belongs. A weighty package of 540 expensively produced pages, with 380 duo-tone reproductions, the book exudes a familiar slickness. But, as often with photographs themselves, the surface impression misleads. Ben Maddow's text is no mere accompaniment to the pictures. Winding among the landmarks of photographic history, the text vies in interest with the images; the text too is an artful performance. This alone gives this otherwise overproduced book high marks. Intelligent and interesting (let alone artful) writing about photographs, especially in the presence of images powerful enough to threaten speech with the charge of impertinence, is rare indeed. Novelist, poet, film maker, Maddow here undertakes ‘a narrative history’ of faces in photography, and while the history itself holds no surprises, the sheer facility and alertness of the writing keeps the text always slightly ahead of the pictures The writing dominates the book, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, and that is a welcome change in photography publications.     

Cuthbert Bede and O.J. Rejlander

Abstract

Photographic Pleasures, published in February 1855, was the first collection of humorous essays about the new art to appear in England. Its author, the Reverend Edward Bradley, writing under the pen name of Cuthbert Bede, was a young man of twenty-eight who already had one national best-seller to his credit. This was Mr Verdant Green, a novel about undergraduate life at Oxford, which came out at the end of 1853, with an engraved portrait of the author as its frontispiece (Figure 1).     

Arthur Conan Doyle and psychic photographs

Abstract

The issue of Punch for 12 May 1926 featured a cartoon which depicted an elderly and oversized Arthur Conan Doyle sitting on a stool (see figure 1). Clouds are gathered around his uplifted, preoccupied head. Holding a chain which shackles Doyle's legs is a miniature Sherlock Holmes, brooding and thoughtful. The cartoon's immediate context is satirical: Doyle's warm reception of the Cottingley Fairy photographs, then a matter of ongoing notoriety due to the publication of his The Coming of the Fairies in 1922, had prompted a degree of ridicule. In 1920 he had become involved in an investigation of what purported to be photographs of actual fairies taken by two teenage girls. The matter which commenced as an investigation had, by 1928, with the publication of the study's second edition, developed into a whole-hearted endorsement of the photographs. For Doyle and his colleague, the theosophist Edward Gardner, this event was the ultimate proof that fairies actually existed. Nor was the intervention Doyle's only encounter with paranormal photography. A committed spiritualist by the 1920s, Doyle had previously championed the cause of spirit photography, a process where supposed materializations of the dead appeared in photographs. For the spiritualists, this possibility was an important concept, as it endorsed their central tenet: that the living could communicate with the dead. Relatedly, Doyle's The Case for Spirit Photography (1923) defended William Hope, who had been accused of using fraudulent methods to attain his materializations.     

In vitro–in vivo correlations: general concepts,methodologies and regulatory applications

Abstract

The major objective of in vitro–in vivo correlations is to be able to use in vitro data to predict in vivo performance serving as a surrogate for an in vivo bioavailability test and to support biowaivers. Therefore, the aims of this review are: (i) to clarify the factors involved during bio-predictive dissolution method development; and (ii) the elements that may affect the mathematical analysis in order to exploit all information available. This article covers the basic aspects of dissolution media and apparatus used in the development of in vivo predictive dissolution methods, including the latest proposals in this field as well as the summary of the mathematical methods for establishing the in vitro–in vivo relationship and their scope and limitations. The incorporation of physiological relevant factors in the in vitro dissolution method is essential to get accurate in vivo predictions. Standard quality control dissolution methods do not necessarily reflect the in vivo behavior, so they rarely are useful for predicting in vivo performance. The combination of physiological based dissolution methods with physiological-based pharmacokinetics models incorporating gastrointestinal variables will lead to robust tools for drug and formulation development, nevertheless their regulatory use for biowaiver application still require harmonization of the mathematical methods proposed and more detailed recommendations about the procedures for setting up dissolution specifications.     

The Dysfunctional Leica

Abstract

Winding up the estate of somebody is a sad task, only sustained by the hope of unexpected finds or definitive proof of one's preconceived opinions. There is no difference in this between one's own grandmother and a contemporary like Lucia Moholy. While executing this task I naturally came across various documents that shifted my vague assumptions about this versatile woman in different directions. I saw photographs from her private life that enlightened me about her social relations but, in the end, I was disappointed at not havlng been able to get closer to a person I thought I knew quite well, even if from a certain distance.¹     

Civil war stamp duty; Photography as a revenue source

Abstract

For a two-year period, between 1st August 1864 and 1st August 1866, American photographers were required to affix adhesive revenue stamps to their ‘sun pictures’. This stamp is discussed briefly in the standard books on the history of photography, for example by Taft¹ and Gernsheim² and, most recently, that by William Welling³. With the very sketchy information at their disposal, collectors and historians have used the presence of such tax stamps to aid them in dating old photographs. If a tax stamp appears on the back of a carte-de-visite, one can say with certainty that it was sold between 1st August 1864 and 1st August 1866, and this is about as far as the familiar sources go.     

Public/Private Tensions in the Photography of Sally Mann

This article examines the circulation of Sally Mann's pictures of her children, which were exhibited and published in 1992 under the title Immediate Family. Most of the Immediate Family photographs were made at the Manns' rustic summer house in a wild, isolated area, not far from their home in Lexington, Virginia. The children are often naked or nearly naked, and they are variously dirty, injured, confrontational and flirtatious. Strong and divergent responses to the Immediate Family photographs affirm art historian Anne Higonnet's conclusion that ‘No subject is as publicly dangerous now as the subject of the child's body’. This article expands on the spatial dimension to Higonnet's insight, and argues that the anxieties about Immediate Family stem from photography's refusal, or perhaps confusion about, the division between public and private. The circulation of the Immediate Family project suggests how notions of public and private are negotiated through photography.     

Diane Arbus and Erving Goffman

Abstract

It has become something of a cliche to say that Diane Arbus distinctive talent lay in her use of the full-frontal pose involving an unexpected self-revelation on the part of the subject. The critic Hilton Kramer wrote: The subjects face the camera with interest and patience. They are fully aware of the picture-making process. They collaborate. It is this element of participation, this suggestion of a dialogue between the subject and the photographer, that gives these pictures their great dignity. And it is their dignity that is, I think, the source of their power.¹ and Susan Sontag in On Photography writes: What makes Arbus' use of the frontal pose so arresting is that her subjects are often people one would not expect to surrender themselves so amiably to the camera.²     

F. Holland day

Abstract

Research Into F. Holland Day's æuvre has begun to provide a framework for interpreting the content found in his photographs, and the host of literary, artistic, and spiritual sources that often seem to have informed has aesthetic decision making. For while Day's work is here considered in the context of photographic history, he is no less part of the intricate network of writers, poets, artists, and socialites whose often controversial expression comprise the fin de siècle that ruptured Brahmin society in Boston. Incited by Estelle Jussim's resistance to discussing either homosexuahty or the homoerotic content manifest in Day's Images of the male nude (figure 1; see also figure 14, Curtis, ‘F. Holland Day: The Poetry of Photography’, in this issue.), scholars have been vigorously asserting the centrality of these issues as a means for understanding Day's life and career.¹ While it is evident that many of his photographs of the male nude possess a casual relationship to the profusion of gay male erotica circulating in both England and the United States, the issues that may explicate the sexual ambiguities of male-male relationships during this period are far more complex than what has emerged 10 the literature on Day.² It can be said, moreover, that the male nude photographs by Day have received disporportionate attention from scholars, and thus have suppressed discussions about the diversity of his repertoire, and the important role that other images play in the photographer's æuvre.     

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.     

Erotic Photography

Abstract

In his exhibition catalogue The Body Exposed: 150 Years of the Nude in Photography (Zurich 1995), Michael Kohler expresses the hope that ‘nobody will shy away from taking a closer look at nude photography, its aesthetics, its history and its ideology under the illusion that there is nothing left to discover; for it's exactly the opposite’. In fact, true academic attention toward the nude photograph has been surprisingly limited, the genre leaving behind instead a trail of pseudo-academic coffee-table books and prodigious, but unanalysed, collections. This is perhaps the reason that Michelle Olley's book is at once so heartening and so disappointing. Venus presents an anthology of erotic, and predominantly nude, photography of women spanning approximately the last 40 years. Unfortunately, where such a collection could be a prime opportunity to finally provide a cogent and analytical narrative of the genre's recent history, Olley instead offers a sparse text that uses the photographs merely as evidence of the modern world's sexual liberation. She asserts that ‘Our attitudes toward sex and sexuality, women and the depiction of erotic subjects has shifted, so that society no longer hides the nude away from us as something forbidden and too shocking even for adults’. Her argument is supported by a cursory history of the female nude in painting and photography and by references to ‘restrictive’ Victorian morality. This single-mindedness glosses over the diversity of issues posed by the photographs in the collection — issues such as identity, isolation and interaction, confinement and freedom, universality and incident.     

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.