The World of Michael Fried's Antiquity

Antiquity occupies a surprisingly central role in Michael Fried's account of contemporary art photography. More specifically, on Fried's account, photographs of antiquity by Thomas Struth and Patrick Faigenbaum stand at the vanguard of contemporary photographic practice. This essay examines the place of these photographs in Fried's work. The essay suggests that close attention to them can illuminate not only unclear turns in Fried's otherwise stunning argument, but also our understanding of the phenomenology of ‘beholding’ in antiquity, a problem that recent work in ancient aesthetics has made considerably more philosophically fraught.     

Repopulating the Street: Contemporary Photography and Urban Experience

Over the past thirty years, the city as represented by art photography has been shown as progressively empty and alienating. While the emptiness of nineteenth-century streets was due to the limitations of photographic technology, it was actively pursued as a formal device by the New Topographics photographers. Recent art photography shows an even more pronounced trend towards showing the city as vacant. This contrasts starkly with the densely populated, bustling, urban environments typical of twentieth-century street photography. This essay argues that images of an empty contemporary city can be understood as a symptom of disciplinary relations internal to photography as an art form, and as a consequence of art photography's distancing of itself from vernacular representations of the city when the distinction between art photography and vernacular photography is at risk of collapsing. Empty urban images tell us about modes of experience in the contemporary city and about photography itself. This essay uses the trope of the banal as a way of locating the ‘extreme form of the everyday’ that typifies the contemporary photographic discourse of the street. Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Melanie Manchot both address the everyday street as an acute site for understanding the negotiation of public space and contemporary experiences of the city. Both refer to yet go beyond the dichotomy of the city as empty or full and reveal a different set of relations to the street through photography.     

The naming of photography

Abstract

Photography now seems so natural a word for the process to which it refers that we tend to forget that the naming of this process was a matter of intense debate during the years leading up to 1839. Indeed photography's pioneers showed almost as much interest in the medium's nomenclature as in its invention, and almost all of them proposed one or more possible names. Given the importance attached to language at the time, it is reasonable to assume that the choice of name for their inventions was in each case indicative of their general thinking about photography and its character. In many cases the word actually came before the invention, or at least before the invention was fully operational. The choice of name therefore reflected not so much what photography was as what photography might be. It was a one-word summation of the idea of photography, and of the desires and aspirations that induced each of its various inventors to undertake their experiments. A history of photography's naming represents a useful insight into these desires, useful because it gives us one more glimpse into the manner of the medium's conception and early development.     

Photo Noise

Like past avant-garde movements, glitch and noise in the twenty-first century are used to reveal the materiality of the medium. But instead of providing insight or clarity into the politics or social conditions of a technology, they demarcate broader conditions of opacity and blockage, contributing to what Jodi Dean has called ‘communicative capitalism’. The work of German photographer Thomas Ruff alongside the Düsseldorf School, New Photography and JPEG technology are used in this article to illustrate this tendency as a move away from meaning and toward visual noise and communicative breakdown. I use three core analytic registers: the deliberate failure to adhere to visual norms, communicative failure and machine failure and breakdown. Ruff’s work uses visual noise as art to at once reaffirm pervasive conditions of breakdown, failure and decline in high-tech global capitalism, while simultaneously providing a temporary reprieve from these conditions through an emergent form of visual beauty.     

Photography at the Institute of Design

Abstract

In 1937, László Moholy-Nagy planted the Bauhaus seed, a hybrid of art and mass production, in the soil of the American Midwest. The New Bauhaus in Chicago only survived a year, but its successor, first called the School of Design and then the Institute of Design (ID), would be an influential centre of photographic experimentation for the next thirty-five years. Taken by Design: Photographs from the Institute of Design, 1937–1971 traces the tumultuous history of the school's small but seminal photography programme, the work of its major instructors, and their combined influence on photography in the USA. The essays in this handsome catalogue tell the story of how the ID approach evolved, from Moholy's formalist view of photography as one of the design arts, into the arrival of the medium as an art form in its own right under Hany Callahan, Aaron Siskind and Arthur Siege!. Published to accompany David Travis and Elizabeth Siegel's exhibition of the same title for the Art Institute of Chicago, the book is the first comprehensive documentation of the vital contribution of the Institute of Design to the history of photography.     

Taki Kōji,Provoke, and the Structuralist Turn in Japanese Image Theory, 1967–70

This article explores the intellectual underpinnings of the late-1960s Japanese photography collective Provoke. It argues that Provoke was more radical and theoretically inflected than is conventionally understood, its project being the forging of a ‘scientific’ photography capable of unveiling the ‘untruth’ of established relations of power and knowledge production in Japan. I present Provoke’s central figure to be Taki Kōji, who in 1967–68 published a series of articles that introduced structuralism into Japanese image discourse and established the basis for Provoke’s theoretically informed practice, or praxis. The article outlines how, in response to a variety of influences (Roland Barthes, Matsumoto Toshio, and Kevin Lynch, among others, but apparently not Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser), Taki formulated the notion of a unified and self-regulating ideological ‘environment’ (kankyō) that is made manifest in a variety of seemingly neutral and benign cultural forms. Additionally, he theorised a semiotically transgressive photographic image, derived from Barthes’s early studies of photography, which he believed could escape language and code – and thereby the ideological superstructure. I conclude by showing that Taki’s emancipatory project, while singular in relation to contemporaneous Marxist oppositional endeavours in Europe, was ultimately self-defeating: the efforts of Provoke’s photographers to strip their images of readable codes by deliberately ‘mishandling’ their cameras only worked to create new ones, and the shakiness and blurriness of the resulting photographs became a mere style.     

The Photography of Roman Freulich from Poland to Hollywood

Professional contributions and technical innovations of photographer Roman Freulich to the Hollywood film industry are contextualised regarding the heritage of his life experiences in Czenstochowa, Poland, New York and Los Angeles. The remarkable output of Freulich's independent work, consisting of film projects that ventured far beyond the relative professional shelter provided by his popular glamour shots, emerges in the present study. Freulich sought to give voice to the voiceless as evidenced in his self-produced film Broken Earth (1936) – the first film to feature a black actor in a starring role – as well as his collaborations with the actor Paul Robeson. Freulich's immigration to America and the loss of his family members who remained in Poland are two legacies that distinguished Freulich from his fellow cameramen. Freulich both achieved a fruitful Hollywood career as a photographer of contract players – aided by his early use of the 35 mm camera – and authored a narrative of Joseph Trumpeldor, founder of the Jewish Legion. A survivor of the Holocaust, Freulich did more than preserve these dual identities; his lasting achievement lies in the incorporation of a veteran's sensitivity toward war in cinematic works that expanded early principles of still and moving image photography. Perspective by Freulich's family members is presented in original form, illuminating chronological events in the life of a pioneering photographer, writer and soldier.     

The international reception of The Family of Man

This paper examines the role of The Family of Man in American cultural diplomacy. The exhibition was circulated around the world by the United States Information Agency (USIA), a government unit charged with distributing information about the culture and civic institutions of the US. The reception of the exhibition by the international viewing public is discussed. The discussion is informed, in part, by photographs documenting visitors to the exhibition.     

The Jersey Years; Photographer in the Circle of Victor Hugo

Abstract

An interesting and little-discussed body of photographic work is connected with the circle of Victor Hugo during the years of his exile on the island of Jersey in the English Channel, from 1852 to 1855. These works are now dispersed; a n~umber of them are in Paris, in the Museé de la Maison de Victor Hugo and in the Bibliothèque Nationale, another survives in the archivcs of the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; and various other examples exist in private collections. The Jersey photographs are the result of a joint effort by Charles Hugo, the poet's son, and his friend, Auguste Vacquerie.