Elizabeth Buehrmann: American pictorialist

Abstract

It has been estimated that by 1900 more than 3500 American women worked as professional photographers,¹ and by ‘1911 there were 1600 American women managing their own portrait studios’.² One early twentieth-century photographer who deserves greater recognition is Elizabeth (‘Bessie’) Buehrmann (c. 1886-c. 1963).³ Although she stated that she came from the South,⁴ the exact date and place of her birth is unknown. Chicago, however, is the city where she spent her teens, and it was there that she developed and studied. When she was just a girl of 20, numerous articles marvelling at her talent and youth, and illustrated with her photographs, appeared in Chicago newspapers.⁵ She had already established, by that tender age, a reputation as a gifted artistic or pictorialist photographer who specialized in portraiture.⁶     

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.     

‘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     

Addenda to Henry Collen and the treaty of nanking

Abstract

In 1922, the combined work of journalist Victoria Hayward and photographer Edith S. Watson was collected in a publication entitled Romantic Canada. Introduced by Edward J. O'Brien and published in Toronto, it is 254 pages in length and generously illustrated with 77 halftone reproductions.¹ The book takes the reader from the eastern to the western shores of Canada, following rural pathways through isolated settlements and historic villages, and stopping along the way to study the particularities of place and custom. What is extraordinary about this book is the way in which the photographs and text complement each other in creating a pictorial and literary celebration of traditional country life. For the photographic historian, the work offers insights into the discursive relationship between photographic aesthetics and the cultural role of woman journalists in post-First World War Canada.     

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.     

View from the Top: Wilhelm von Herford on the great pyramid, 1856

Abstract

The two photographs shown¹ are perhaps the first ever taken from the top of the Great (or Cheops) Pyramid. They can be dated to 1856 when the German amateur photographer Wilhelm von Herford (1814–1866) became a Prussian consular officer in Cairo.¹     

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     

Recognition of photographic processes

Abstract

Although Diane Arbus was not an overtly political photographer, her concern with human appearances as defmed by sex, age, and social roles deserves re-examination for it focuses on the visual identity of women in our society. The monograph Diane Arbus, the only extant major book on her noncommercial work, is a fair if numerically limited assessment of her scope, and in the main, accurately reflects the visual world she recorded in her contact sheets.¹ This world is not an even-handed one, for it is disproportionately and stereotypically female through its depiction of women, transvestites, vulnerable men and a generally private leisure society where subjects display a frontal and emotional gaze and identify themselves through clothing and gesture.     

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.     

Clarence Comyn Taylor (1830–79)

Abstract

The recent acquisition for the India Office collections of an album of early photographs of Nepal with captions signed simply C.C.T. led to research that has opened up a whole new area of photographic activity in Nepal and the Rajasthan area of India in 1862–64, and made possible the identification of the work of a fine photographer hitherto known only by name. Much, however, still remains to be done to expand on the preliminary survey of the work of Clarence Comyn Taylor presented here.¹     

Book reviews

Abstract

A joint exhibition of Ansel Adams's Museum Set portfolio of seventy-five images plus one hundred photographs selected from his centennial project for the University of California, Fiat Lux, was due to open at the University of California, Irvine, on 8 January 1991. The installation of The Museum Set photographs was near completion when museum scientist and installation designer, Phyllis Lutjeans, noticed that Sequoia Gigantea Roots, Yosemite National Park, California, c.1950 (figures 1 and 2), plate number 55 in the exhibition catalogue,¹ was reversed, from the image hanging on the wall before her. Ms Lutjeans had been using the catalogue as a guide to affix labels for the exhibition.     

Early Photographs of Albania and Macedonia by Josef Székely

Abstract

Fifty photographs of Albania and Macedonia, taken in 1863 by Dr Josef Szekely, a 25-year-old chemist and photographer from Vienna, are important for their early date, their subject matter and their quality. They deserve attention also because of their novelty. Until now, these photographs have been unknown even to students of Albanian photography.¹ Székely's photographs include the first pictures ever taken in Albania and among the earliest known of Macedonia. Two 1864 photographs of the northern Albanian city of Shkodra have been called the first pictures taken in Albania,² but Székely took eight photographs there no later than September 1863, and by mid-October he had also photographed the Albanian towns of Prizren, Dibra and Ochrid. For historians of 144 ISSN 0308-7298 © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd. photography, as well as for historians of the Ottoman Balkans, Szekely's cityscapes, landscapes and portraits are a valuable and unknown resource.     

Lloyd Mifflin of the Susquehanna

Abstract

Lloyd Mifflin (1846–1921), known as the ‘Painter and Poet of the Susquehanna’¹, was also a photographer. After his death, the paintings, drawings, etchings, and writings of his estate were placed in the collections of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and the William Penn Memorial Museum. To the high school in his hometown of Columbia, Pennsylvania, he gave part of his library, copies of his published books, and a bronze self-portrait. Altogether, 200 sets of his writings were bequeathed to as many American universities and colleges². His private papers are in the library of Franklin and Marshall College, and two diaries are preserved in the holdings of the Lancaster Historical Society. In contrast, his glass negatives were discarded. One may assume that Mifflin himself had valued them no more highly than did his executors, for the glass plates were found in a junkyard about eight years ago, packed without envelopes or protective paper, in flimsy hosiery boxes.     

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.     

Alvin Langdon Coburn

Abstract

One of the most intriguing aspects of Alvin Langdon Coburn's life began when he stopped making photographs. At thirty-six years of age, Coburn had a well established photographic career. He had photographed some of the most important people of his day and was admired and befriended by many of them. A member of the Photo-Secession and the Linked Ring, Coburn was involved in the promotion of photography as an art form. He made Vortographs in 1917 and therefore he is also credited by many as the first purely abstract photographer. Yet, in 1918, Coburn stopped photographing professionally. In his autobiography he said:     

William Lake Price and James Mudd

Abstract

Photography, of course, appears everywhere but for all its successes it has been remarkably unable to shake the complacency of the disciplines; it has its uses and its places, but these seem just too setded and too well known. The photographer remains a junior partner in the practices of a society, high or low, cultural or otherwise. But if we travel back through time we will encounter a point when photography seemed anything but limited. If any spatial figure typifies English photographic debate in the 1860s it would be ‘boundless’. In the language of English photographic culture the idea that the potentials of the new medium were unlimited stretched from Lady Easdake to the juror's reports on the International Exhibitions. Out of this mass of commentary I intend to extract only two fairly ordinary pieces of writing: William Lake Price's A Manual of Photographic Manipulation published in 1868¹ and James Mudd's ‘A photographer's dream’, originally read at the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, and published in The Photographic News for May 1865.²     

Contemporary fiction and the history of photography

Abstract

Until recently, there has been a notable absence in fiction of photographers and photohistory.¹ So frequently do they appear now, however, that they comprise an intriguing sub-genre in contemporary writing. In the hands of talented writers, the character of the photographer has proved to be an interesting protagonist. Darkroom techniques are accurately recounted and even invested with a sense of romance. The nature of the medium itself, authors have found, suggests complex plots and startling revelations. The ‘vague pastness’ Susan Sontag observed in old photographs is being revisited and vivified with flights of intense imagination. More than a trendy direction in recent fiction, this new writing enhances our understanding and appreciation of the history of photography itself     

Reflections on a theme

Abstract

This book can and perhaps should be seen as a kind of portable exhibition with a wall label by Hilton Kramer. As an exhibition it should be reviewed in a fashion somewhat different from a book, with a much greater proportion of text. For many years Kertész's ‘distortions’ have been considered among the most successful surreal photographs ever made. Few people were aware that this series was as extensive as it turned out to be because many of the images had not been published or exhibited. Now that everything Kertész has done is being given the ‘master’ treatment, we are permitted to see what the photographer in earlier times would perhaps have left unseen.     

Cundall's and Howlett's Crimean Heroes

Abstract

In keeping with her deep regard for the brave men who served in the Crimean campaign, Queen Victoria, in 1856, commissioned Joseph Cundall and Robert Howlett to produce a series of portraits of the worthy veterans, strapping soldiers, and wounded victims alike. Though some of these images were on view in the Photographic Society's fourth major exhibition during the winter of 1857, and presumably available to the purchasing public, surprisingly few prints seem to have been produced by the commercially minded publisher/photographer, Cundall. The Queen, having ordered the work, retained the negatives and when Cundall needed them to make further prints, he had to apply to Dr Ernest Becker, photographer in residence to the royal household. Becker replied in a letter from Osborne House dated 20 August 1856 that ‘her majesty will let you have the negatives for a short time … the other ones are at Windsor. Would you want them too?’¹