Roland G. Rood

Abstract

Roland G. Rood (1863–1927) is an enigmatic, yet fascinating, figure in the history of American art criticism. Very little about his education and career is known. His published writings as well as unpublished drafts for essays on aesthetics, however, provide a comprehensive framework for his ideas. Dating or referring to the period 1904–1907, this body of work indexes a significant direction of change in the relationship of art to science. Featured in Alfred Stieglitz's avant-garde journal Camera Work, Rood's criticism also illuminates the probing, psychological, and intertextural nature of Stieglitz's modernism.     

Henry Peach Robinson and Victorian theory

Abstract

Any history that treats 19th-century photography mentions the work of H. P. Robinson (1830–1901). He is acknowledged to be a foremost practitioner of picture making by rule and combination. His Fading Away (1858) in which a young girl is seen on her deathbed, is as well known as Reijlander's Two Ways of Life (1857) and, at the time, excited much controversy for its ‘morbid sentiment’.     

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     

Von Stuck and photography

Abstract

Just as this Stieglitz issue was going to the printer the above catalogue arrived from Munich. Imagine our surprise to discover four photographic studies for Franz von Stuck's Wounded Amazon (pp. 25, 64), taken by von Stuck in collaboration with his wife Mary around 1904 (see previous item, ‘Alfred Stieglitz's Apples’). It is possible that Stieglitz saw these photographic studies as well as the painting and drawing: after all, he was in Munich in 1904 when they were being made. Perhaps he discussed photography with the von Stucks. There were clear connections between members of the Photo-Secession and the Munich painters. Steichen photographed von Stuck in 1901, Frank Eugene made a portrait around 1907, and Coburn another in 1908 (see pp. 48-51).     

Photography at the Amon Carter Museum

Abstract

This slender but handsome volume samples a tantalizing forty-eight of the 200 000 photographs in the Amon Carter Museum's holdings of American photography. Devoted to American art, the museum collects photography in three major areas, all represented here: fine art photography, historical photography and artist collections. In Singular Moments one finds great names like Ansel Adams, iconic images like Barbara Morgan's Martha Graham — Letter to the World (Swirl), documentary work by less famous practitioners such as Carl Mydans and Laura Gilpin, and fascinating glimpses into the nineteenth centmy through the lenses of unknown early photographers, especially those of the American West. The book ably reproduces a great variety of techniques, from daguerreotypes, chloride prints and photogravures to more recent processes such as dye destruction prints as well as gelatine silver prints. A bibliography gives the novice reader an excellent starting place for further reading and hints at the vast scholarship that the entire collection represents. Singular Moments invites all those interested in photography to watch this museum for future exhibitions from its enormous and evidently beautiful collection.     

The representation of Arabs and Jews on postcards in Israel

Abstract

A popular large Israeli postcard features a picture of a serving of falafel in half a pita, into which an Israeli flag has been stuck. The postcard, produced by a Jewish publishing house, bears the caption: ‘Falafel—Israel's national snack’ (figure 1). This apparently innocuous postcard is in fact a most telling metonymy of the political as well as symbolic domination of Jews over Arabs in contemporary Israel: falafel, little balls of ground chick-peas fried in oil, is an Arab dish which was appropriated by Israeli Jewish culinary culture and made into an Israeli dish; it becomes an expression of political domination by means of the Israeli flag stuck into the food.     

Some Comments on Designs for Cox's Mixture Polynomial

Designs are suggested for estimating the restricted parameters in Cox's mixture polynomial. The variances of the restricted estimates of the parameters are minimum when using the simplex-lattice designs suggested by Scheffé The precision of the estimates, in terms of their variances, as affected by the location of the design points as well as the location of the standard mixture s is also discussed. It is shown for the vertex design centered at s that if s is positioned on the axis of an individual component, the closer s lies to the vertex of the simplex representing the individual component, the more precise will be the parameter estimates associated with the individual component relative to the other components. A numerical example is presented to illustrate the difference in the interpretations given to the parameter estimates associated with the Cox polynomial and the Scheffé polynomial.     

The painterí lens

Abstract

The importance of the artist Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) as a forerunner of international tachism painting of ‘Art informal’ has long been recognized. It is surprising, therefore, that Laszlo Glozer's new study, Wols Photograph, is the first monograph devoted to the artist. Even more surprising, perhaps, is the author's concentration on Wols' activity as a a role usually not identified with his high art-historical position. Actually, Glozer is at pains to characterize the artist as a tragic, creative unity; we realize as we read the admirable text that the author might have taken any aspect of Wols' production as his point of departure and ended essentially with the same picture of the artist. ‘Wols’ art is autobiographical', Glozer writes. ‘Behind the transformations of the expressive forms, it remains self-expression to the end. This unconditional situation is constant.’ Wois himself is responsible for the remark, ‘il faut savoir que tout rime’, and Glozer discovers the truth of the dictum, not only for the totality of Wols' art but for his life as well.     

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.     

Calotype portraits of Elizabeth Rigby by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson

Abstract

Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake, is described in the Dictionary of National Biography as a ‘typical English “grande dame”, serene and easy in manner, intellectual and courageous, impervious to bores, highly esteemed, and looked up to in the best society in London’¹. Wife of Sir Charles Eastlake, artist, connoisseur, and Director of the National Gallery in London, she is remembered by posterity primarily as her husband's companion and confidante. Elizabeth's own accomplishments were considerable, however, and she had established a reputation as a formidable blue-stocking before she married Eastlake at the age of 39.     

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     

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.     

Kinetic Properties of Orientational Phase Transition in Polymerized States of Fullerites C60

Abstract

In the present work, we have shown that at early stages of dimerization, which occur during synthesis of C₆₀ fullerite T _syn = 10–40°C and P _syn = 1.5–8 GPa, kinetics of the sc→fcc phase transition, may be well described by Avrami law with Avrami's exponent n _Avr = 3 (i.e., in this case we are dealing with martensite‐like transformation). Fullerite's samples produced at higher temperatures (40°C < T _syn < 120°C) exhibit different kinetics with lower Avrami‐exponent. This behavior we attribute to the transformation switching to diffusion‐controlled kinetics.     

Alfred Stieglitz's apples

Abstract

I have long been astonished by the silliness of Stieglitz's photographs of women with apples, despite the desperate attempts to suggest that somehow they prove him as American as apple pie. Coming across Erika and Fritz Kempe's Die Kunst der Camera im Jugendstil (Frankfurt: Umschau 1986), an excellent piece of pictorialist sourcehunting, I suddenly realized from Theodor and Oskar Hofmeister's ‘Apfelemte’ (1897) that Stieglitz was drawing upon a stock subject from German genre painting (see pl. 129). The inanities of O'Keeffe with a basket of apples next to her head and Engelhard awkwardly clutching apples to her body are just two attempts by Stieglitz to submit the two Georgias to generic fantasy.     

Books Received and Noted

Abstract

In August 1920 Lu Marten published a two-part essay entided ‘History, satire, Dada and more’ in Die Rote Fahne, the newspaper of the German Communist Party (KPD).¹ Written as a response to Gertrud Alexander's review of the First International Dada Trade Fair, which had appeared the previous month and characterized the exhibition as a manifestation of ‘bourgeois decadence’,² Märten's essay articulated a more complex understanding of Dada's significance by locating it within satire's historical development. Märten described how the bourgeoisie's replacement of the epic and fable with new literary genres had stripped satire of its popular character. Confined to the treatment of narrow, individual issues in the bourgeois humour magazine, satire had degenerated into a telling of jokes; and any illusions that humour magazines such as Simplicissimus provided social criticism had been dispelled by their performance during the recent war and revolution which had revealed their true class interest. The proletariat was increasingly in the grip of the bourgeois press, because capitalism's control of the publishing industry deprived the proletariat of the technological means necessary for modem satire. This circumstance, Marten argued, was the field in which Dada operated as the negative side of proletarian satire. Its important discovery was that art was no longer necessary for satire since capitalism's material body was satire itself Materials published by the bourgeois press could be arranged for satirical effect and ‘the simple reproduction, the photograph also replaces art here’.³ This destructive impulse was one side of a dialectic that Marten viewed as offering hope for proletarian satire's new beginning.     

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’.     

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.     

Greenback Shutterbug

Abstract

Maud Sulter combines a number of art media in new ways. She was born in Glasgow in 1960 and has published two books of poetry. The first was titled As a Blackwoman (1985) and her second book, Zabat: Poetics of a Family Tree, came out in 1989. She's a visual artist who uses photography first and foremost, but she also draws and paints. She's currently Momart Artist-in-Residence at the Tate Gallery in Liverpool. Maud Suiter describes herself as a cultural activist, and she's concerned with some very large issues. Her exhibition, Zabat, means, variously, ‘a sacred dance’, ‘an occasion of power’ (as in Witches Sabbath), and ‘black women's rite of passage’. The exhibition re-presents the nine Muses–each is portrayed by a black woman with symbolic attributes such as a flute, flowers, a picture, and so on. The writer Alice Walker appears as the ‘Muse of Comedy’. Ysaye Maria Barnwell, of Sweet Honey in the Rock, is ‘Polyhymnia, the Muse of Sacred Song’.     

The second art

Abstract

The figure of the accomplished artist in one medium who develops an expertise in another always attracts interest, whether in a sense of amazement over so much energy, or in a sense of relief that even a virtuoso can be an amateur. One thinks ofEinstein and his violin, Gottfried Keller and his painting, William Thackeray and his caricatures, and many others. Emile Zola, Photograph presents us with a handsomely produced addition to this list, but the main role of this book is, of course, to fill another niche in the Zola shrine. Relatively little technical information is giveu, and one suspects that the primary audience was intended to be Zola admirers, lay as well as professional. Although there are several biographical sketches, the reader not familiar with Zola's life will not be able to appreciate the book fully, particularly since Zola's passion for photography developed only near the end of his life.     

Some 19th Century Photographers in Syria,Palestine and Egypt

Abstract

By the middle of the 19th century, tourist travel in the Eastern Mediterranean had become quite common. Thus, in April 1835, The Missionary Herald reports: 'The Delaware line-of-battle ship and the schooner Shark, the former being the flag of commodore Patterson, arrived at Beyroot on the 29th of August. The commodore's lady and three daughters were with him. 'The ships had previously anchored at Joppa, while all the officers but one, and the commodore's family, in two successive companies, went up to Jerusalem. A number of the sailors, also, took that opportunity to visit the Holy City, the zeal of some leading them to travel the whole distance on foot. Such a number of Franks had rarely arrived there in company since the time of the crusades. In the commodore's party, seventy-three Americans entered the gates of Jerusalem together’¹. This may well be one of the earliest accounts of a group tour to the Middle East.