Photographic Eye as Poetic I: Maiakovskii's and Rodchenko's Pro eto project (1923)

Abstract

Early in Dostoevskii's The Idiot, the hero is transfixed by a photoportrait of Nastasia Filippovna, whose face is to haunt him thereafter: ‘On the portrait a woman of truly unusual beauty was represented. She was photographed in a black silk dress … her eyes were dark and deepset, her brow pensive’.¹ The face, as we later learn, bears the imprint of a knowledge too terrible to contemplate, knowledge of the tragic end to Nastasia's own life; and, in the context of the novel's eschatological thematics, of the end of time itself Fifty years later, on 5 June 1923, Maiakovskii published in book form the first edition of a poem Pro eto (About That), illustrated with photomontages produced by his agitprop collaborator, the constructivist artist, Aleksandr Rodchenko.2 The book was published by the state publishing house, Gosizdat. It was reprinted in facsimile form by Ardis in 1973. Swedish publishers Bokomotiv issued the work in 1980, along with two extra photomontages not included in the original published edition. In 1994, the German specialist publishers Ars Nicolai published the most comprehensive version of the project. The Ars Nicolai edition includes a facsimile of the original Gosizdat book, Russian, German and Englishlanguage versions of Maiakovskii's poem, a very helpful commentary on the project by Aleksandr Lavrent'ev (again in English, German and Russian), and glossy copies of all the photomontages. See Vladimir Maiakovskii, Pro eto, with an Introduction by Alehandr Lavrent'ev, Berlin: Ars Nicolai 1994. It is from this edition that subsequent page references to Maiakovskii's poem are taken. The last of Rodchenko's photomontages (see figure 9) is juxtaposed with verses in which the poet imagines that in some future Utopia he has been resurrected from the dead to serve as keeper at a zoo — a favourite haunt of Lily Brik, the love of his life. The montage is dominated by a large photo of Lily who, likewise, looks back from the end at a captivated viewer in the ‘real’ time of the era in which the image was produced. It also contains an instantly recognizable photograph of the poet, looking in at a caged polar bear and up at the superimposed image of Lily. 3 Maiakovskii knew that his persona was a function of his being in the public eye, and of the unbreakable association between the camera image and its own reproducibility. By portraying Maiakovskii looking at Lily Brik, who looks into the camera (and out at us), Rodchenko achieves an identification of Maiakovskii the unique self, with us, the anonymous viewers of Maiakovskii the public persona.     

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.     

Original Talbot photographs in Estonia

Abstract

On the 25th September 1934, the Estonian newspaper Postimees published an interesting article concerning one of the founders of photography, W. H. F. Talbot.¹ Talbot's granddaughter, Miss Matilda Talbot, visited Estonia from the 17th September until the 1st October of that year, and the article was about her visit as well as her grandfather. She was the guest of Mrs Hünerson, Chief Commissioner of the Estonian Girl Guides, who had been in England that summer to attend a Girl Guide conference, and had been introduced to Miss Talbot at Lacock Abbey by a mutual acquaintance. Miss Talbot spent her time mainly at Tartu, but she also visited Petseri and Voru, small towns in southern Estonia, about 60 – 80 kilometres from that city. She was later to include a delightful account of her impressions of this Estonian holiday in one chapter of her memoirs.²     

‘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     

Eudora Welty,photographer

Abstract

That Eudora Welty¹ in addition to her great gifts as a short-story writer should also have been a gifted photographer may come as something of a surprise. One thinks immediately of Wright Morris², another original writer and photographer, whose interest in the art has continued to this day, whereas photographic activity was only a passing phase for Welty. For a time Eudora Welty thought of becoming a professional photographer, but her early portfolios did not sell, while her short stories did. In 1944 Vogue magazine published three of her pictures with an accompanying text, entitled ‘Literature and the lens’, the first of three statements that she has made on the nature of the photograph and of the moment it preserves³. Her photographs are indeed of One Time, One Place, Mississippi in the Depression; A Snapshot Album to quote the title of a collection of her photographs published with a preface in 1971⁴. A new and sumptuous portfolio of 20 well-printed photographs has since appeared⁵.     

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.     

Self Diffusion in Solid 4He and 3He-4He Mixtures Near the bcc-hcp Phase Transition

We report experiments on the plastic flow of solid ⁴ He and ³ He- ⁴ He mixtures of 1.4% and 2.8% near the bcc-hcp transition. Plastic flow was generated by moving a wire through a macroscopic single crystal. We found that the plastic flow rate both in pure ⁴ He and in mixture helium crystals is enhanced in vicinity of the bcc-hcp phase transition. The results are interpreted in terms of self diffusion in the solid. Values of the self diffusion coefficient D_s at the respective transition temperatures of pure ⁴ He and of the mixtures are very close, and reach that found in normal liquids. The activation energy for self diffusion in the mixtures is lower by up to 3 K than in pure ⁴ He. We suggest that similar to what is observed in bcc metals, self-diffusion in solid He takes place through phonon assisted atom-vacancy exchange. The enhancement of the diffusion near the bcc-hcp transition is a result of the softening of a short wavelength transverse phonon. The temperature dependence of the energy of the phonon calculated using our data is in accord with the Landau theory of a phase transition driven by a soft mode. Work hardening was observed in mixture crystals, but not in pure ⁴ He. This implies that ³ He impurities pin dislocation lines.     

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     

Expansion of Liquid 4He Through the Lambda Transition

Zurek suggestedNature 317 , 505; 1985) that the Kibble mechanism, through which topological defects such as cosmic strings are believed to have been created in the early Universe, can also result in the formation of topological defects in liquid ⁴ He, i.e. quantised vortices, during rapid quenches through the superfluid transition. Preliminary experiments (Hendry et al., Nature 368 , 315; 1994) seemed to support this idea in that the quenches produced the predicted high vortex-densities. The present paper describes a new experiment incorporating a redesigned expansion cell that minimises vortex creation arising from conventional hydrodynamic flow. The post-quench line-densities of vorticity produced by the new cell are no more than 10 ¹⁰ m ^–2 , a value that is at least two orders of magnitude less than the theoretical prediction. We conclude that most of the vortices detected in the original experiment must have been created through conventional flow processes.     

The London Diorama

Abstract

A Month in London, or Some of its Modern Wonder described¹ is as evocative a title for a book as one could wish for, and when I saw it was dated 1832, it was irresistible. It turned out to be a piece of thinly disguised fiction, so beloved in that age which felt that serious instruction, particularly for the young, must be sugar coated. An American tourist treats two young English relatives to a month's sightseeing in London. A chance acquaintance, named Mr Finsbury (and, most appropriately, living there), appears before the end of the Introduction, and volunteers to take them on the rounds. One particular adventure starts with a ride on George Shillibeer's three-horse Omnibus.     

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’.     

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     

John Bishop Hall

Abstract

Excitement, elation, and scepticism travelled throughout the photographic industry when first reports of a new colour and stereoscopic relief process were published on 1 August 1856.¹ The process was patented by John Bishop Hall in New York, on 27 May 1856 and 20 January 1857. Hall's location at 585 Broadway, New York City was known as the ‘Temple of Art’, occupied by the well known photographer Charles Deforest Fredricks. The photographic journals conceived the name hallotype, a derivative of the ambrotype process on glass. The ambrotype was patented July 1854 by James Ambrose Cutting. Legal action relating to Cutting's several patents on the ambrotype began in the early 1860s. In 1868, Cutting's ambrotype patent extension was denied by the patent office. Jerimiah Gurney, a leading photographer at 349 Broadway, New York City, co-signed Hall's patent. On 13 November 1853 Gurney was awarded first prize in a photographic contest sponsored by Edward Anthony. He was awarded a silver pitcher for his tinted whole plate daguerreotype of a mother and her child. Several medals were awarded to Gurney in 1857, at the annual exhibition of the American Institute.² Gurney objected to the ambrotype process, claiming that it was not permanent. He preferred the hallotype claiming that it could be ‘colored by transparent painting put on from behind; — and the ambrotype is taken on one piece of glass and covered by another, the atmosphere being excluded by a balsamic cement, which secure the faces to each other’.³ A business venture employing the name Hall & Gurney was established at 349 Broadway, known as the ‘Palace of Art’, to exploit the hallotype process.⁴     

The Catalogue of the Sale of Camille Silvy's Studio,London 1869

Abstract

During the mid-19th century, the name Lola Montez was a household word in a surprisingly wide range of circles. A London sculptor went so far as to display, in private, her bust side-by-side with that of Queen Victoria¹, and while Her Majesty's response to this gesture remained unrecorded, Lola could have drawn comfort from the fact that she herself was enjoyed and admired by large numbers of people in less exalted positions. Her status derived in the first place from her beauty, in the second place from her notoriety, the latter being by far the most potent and enduring stimulus. Photographers flocked to take her picture, not only in Europe but also in America (Figure 1), and popular journals everywhere published her likeness, either in the form of engravings or else as photographs, when that became possible. Lola thus shared with Jenny Lind the distinction of being one of the first to be made into a ‘celebrity’ directly or indirectly through the action of the camera. Lola became the inspiration for plays, novels, music and even a film².     

The delicious Harlequin

Abstract

The prim little girl in the century-old cabinet photograph ¹ Connie Giickrist. Original in the Pennsylvania State University Libraries. Purchased from D'Offay Couper Galleries, London, in 1971 is wearing her very best dress, and the bow fitted around her waist must have made it difficult to maintain a balance in a high wind. But she most certainly could have coped with the problem because rope-skipping was her particular talent, and she practised it as ‘the skipping girl’ on the stage of the Adelphi Theatre². Good looks and a few lengths of hemp made 11-year-old Constance MacDonald Gilchrist a London celebrity, and a personage who needed no introduction as late as 1898. She fascinated painters. Whistler was captivated enough to make two studies of her, retaining one of them, Harmony in Yellow and Gold: The Gold Girl, Connie Gilchrist, until his death³. (It is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.) Lewis Carroll svho, strangely enough, shared Whistler's interest in the theatre, also had a more than casual interest in little girls, and a near-professional interest in photographing them. That this great man has been occasionally criticized for this penchant seems hardly fair, but his diaries often betray a man caught in the grip of two passions—for children, and for photography. The passages on Connie Gilchrist are as good as any for illustration.     

Talbot's broom and Swift's broomstick

Abstract

In 1986 I made an attempt to interpret Talbot's famous picture, The Open Door (1844) as emblematic of Reason (the bridle of the passions), Truth (the lantern of illumination), and Spirit (the broom that sweeps the threshold clean).¹ More recently, I was stimulated by Larry Schaafs account of the variants of the image to think a little further on the subject.² The earlier version of 1841, which is without bridle or lantern and with a more worn-looking broomstick than the one in The Open Door, was given the title of The Soliloquy of the Broom by Talbot's mother, Lady Elisabeth. Following her suggestion, The Open Door might be retitled ‘The Colloquy of the Broom with the Bridle and the Lantern’. To do this would leave the picture where it probably most properly belongs — in the emblematic tradition.     

Trend & taste

Abstract

Autumn 1977 saw the appearance of the first comprehensive book in German on the history of photography in this century. The work is divided into three sections of which the first, on ‘The Forerunners of Modern Photography’, deals with the technical and intellectual foundations of the field, as they were at the beginning of the century. At about that time photography was able to break away from pamtmg, and although it was still strongly influenced by Impressionism it succeeded in establishing itself as a medium in its own right, through the avant-garde trends in fine art. The principal subjects remained allegories, meaningless portraits and genre pictures, but this soon changed before, and especially after, the First World War when photography was subjected to new forces, which led to the development of modern styles.     

Relation between work of adhesion and work of fracture for simple interfaces

A study was conducted of the relation between work of adhesion and work of fracture for adhesive-substrate systems exhibiting fracture at the interface. Materials and test conditions were selected to eliminate contributions from irreversible, energy-consuming processes in the bulk of the adhesive or substrate. Values for W _a were determined from contact angle measurements made at room temperature with the adhesive in the liquid state; values for F were determined from inverted blister tests conducted at temperatures low enough for the adhesive to be in the solid state. The independent variable, W _a, ranged from about 40 mJ/m² to 144 mJ/m². The dependent variable, F, was found to range from 0.12 J/m² to 20 J/m², with most under 5 J/m². The excess of F over W _a was found to increase exponentially with W _a, and was proof of the occurrence of irreversible processes in specimens as they were loaded and fractured. The exponential behavior of (F – W _a) with W _a suggested that the irreversible process was orientation hardening. The absence of detectable permanent deformation of any kind in the bulk substrates or at the fracture surfaces, plus the incapability of the adhesives to sustain significant irreversible processes, led to the conclusion that the orientation hardening must have taken place in the substrate, within a thin layer (and small volume) adjacent to the interfacial plane.     

Stress-driven diffusion in a deforming and evolving elastic circular tube of single component solid with vacancies

The title problem is considered for an elastic circular tube of inner radius A and outer radius B. The tube is made of a single component solid with vacancies as its second component. The mole fraction of the massive species is denoted by x ¹, while that of the vacancies by x ⁰ = 1 – x ¹. The tube is completely surrounded by vacuum, serving as a reservoir of vacancies. One of the standard elasticity boundary conditions is applied at time t = 0, when the composition is uniform. The ensuing coupled deformation and diffusion leads to the evolving of A(t), B(t) and x ¹(R, t) as functions of time. Since the single component solid is not in contact with its vapor or liquid, the diffusion boundary condition is always tied to the elasticity problem through a surface condition that involves the normal configurational traction. Our chemical potential has an energy density term that serves as a source in the interior and the boundary conditions for the diffusion problem are such that the time rates of boundary accretion Ȧ(t) and Ḃ(t) must simultaneously satisfy two dissipative inequalities, one governed by the gradient of the internal chemical potential and the other by the normal configurational traction.