Robert Gill and his Circle of Friends in India

The author examines a series of photographic albums in different collections: The ‘Biden Albums’ numbered 1 to 7, and the Gill/Johnston album, all of which are in the Alkazi Collection, New Delhi, as well as the British Library's Allardyce Album. The albums contain photographs of and by Robert Gill, James Johnston, Horatio Biden and others, taken in Western India during the 1860s. Through a close analysis of the images, the author reveals Robert Gill's professional and social connections, and presents a more comprehensive account of his work and life than has hitherto been given.     

‘The Diversity of Expression and the Wondrous Power of the Art of Photography’ in the Albums of Richard Cockle Lucas

From 1859 to 1878 the British sculptor Richard Cockle Lucas assembled at least sixteen albums containing photographs of himself in numerous guises, ranging from Shakespearean roles to embodiments of specific emotions. Lucas utilised the practice of dressing up in front of the camera in conjunction with the album format as an ongoing means of experimenting with photography’s capacity to convey human expression, and as an extension of his concerns as a sculptor. Lucas’s albums, which also include photographs of his work in sculpture, represent the first sustained pursuit of photographic self-depiction in such a wide range of roles. Read in conjunction with Lucas’s own writings on expression in photography and sculpture, the albums reveal how Lucas viewed photographic self-portraiture as a form of ‘living sculpture’ to be enacted before the camera.     

Links between Painting and Photography in Nineteenth-Century Turkey

It is well known that engravings were used by artists as models for their paintings. Another visual source employed by painters was the photograph. This occurred in Turkey after photography was introduced into Ottoman territories as a result of visits made by Europeans to the Ottoman states. In addition, courses on photography were added to the curricula of the schools. Although photography was initially received negatively by the public, the positive attitude of the Ottoman Sultans determined the popularity and acceptance of this branch of art. The introduction of photography and its adoption by the Istanbul public occurred first during the reign of Sultan Abdülmecid (1839–1861). Sultans Abdülaziz (1861–1876) and Abdulhamid II (1876–1909) played significant roles in the development of Ottoman photography. In addition, Abdulhamid II appointed photographers to document the events, institutions and structures in the empire and had around 800 photograph albums prepared. In these albums important settlements, structures and gardens of the period are documented. In wall paintings and in paintings on canvas, photographs were notably used as sources.     

An Unidentified Photographer: Face to Face with History

Confronted with a recently discovered and previously unknown calotype, this author embarks upon a careful investigation into the making and meaning of the photograph. The process of the investigation, including an analysis of the internal evidence, physical properties and cultural context of the image, is recorded in this essay. The conclusion draws upon this matrix of data and illustrates the complexity of ‘reading’ photographs.     

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     

Guillermo Kahlo and Casasola

Abstract

The photographers Guillermo Kahlo and Agustín Víctor Casasola recorded the cultural artefacts and political events that shaped Mexican culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. Their photographic collections exemplify the initial uses of photography as both cultural and historical documents. In the case of Kahlo, his 25 albums, entitled Photographic Inventory cif Spanish Colonial Church Architecture in Mexico (1910),¹ were among the commemorative projects the Porfirian government sponsored to record national sights and monuments representative of Mexican cultural history for the centenary celebration of Mexican Independence (1810). Kahlo's photographic inventory was a significant government commission that documented the colonial architecture still standing in Mexico. In turn, Casasola established in 1912 the first Agenda Mexicana de Información Fotográfica that collected and produced photographs documenting the events of the Revolution. He presented the results of his endeavour in the 15-volume work, Álbum Histórico Gráfico (1921).     

The art of the autochrome

Abstract

The work of Esther Parada resonates with the Chicago tradition of experimental photography but with a decisively activist fervour born of the 1960s. Her themes impinge on the neglected confluence of public and private domains, the stories of lives omitted from official record, and the frank negotiation of personal accountability in response to political dissembling and disingenuousness. Though Chicago itself continues to be thoroughly inscribed in her life and her work, reflected in projects that tell of the crucial importance of black Americans, women, and urban landscaping in the history of the city, her perspectives are truly global in scope - as wide ranging as Nicaragua, England, and India. As an educator in photography at the School of Art and Design of the University of Illinois, Chicago, she deserves special consideration as having exemplified the visionary practice and critical teaching of the medium established in 1937 by László Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus. Indeed, she did graduate studies at the Institute of Design, where she came in contact with such innovative artists as Aaron Siskind, Arthur Siegel, and Joseph Jachna.¹ Parada, however, has broken new ground as one of the fJISt photographers to make the jump from the analogue or film-based photograph to the digital image, which she has deployed as part of an extended interventionist strategy of collage in order to pose alternative views to the limited narratives of privileged political and social institutions.     

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).     

Through a Mediated Mirror: The Photographic Physiognomy of Dr Hugh Welch Diamond

This article explores the photographic physiognomy of Victorian asylum superintendent Hugh Welch Diamond. Through close readings of Diamond's photographs as well as commentary published by Diamond and Dr John Conolly, the author argues that Diamond expanded the meaning of the word physiognomy to include metonymic traits such as clothing and hairstyle. Diamond used physiognomy for both diagnostic and therapeutic purposes, and he staged his photographs to maximize their efficacy for both, creating a mediated mirror through which his patients viewed themselves. Through photographic physiognomy, Diamond tried to change the nature of asylum practice, using images of his patients to nurture them to health without physical restraints.     

Raja Deen Dayal and Sons: Photographing Hyderabad’s Famine Relief Efforts

This paper studies a collection of photographs that document a famine relief effort organized by the sixth Nizam of Hyderabad (India). Made by the firm of Raja Deen Dayal and Sons and assembled in an album now preserved in the Andhra Pradesh State Archives, the photographs reveal much about the relationship between photography, modernity and statecraft in late nineteenth-century princely India.     

Gilles Caron and the May 1968 Rebellion in Paris

This article analyzes the coverage of the May 1968 rebellion in Paris by photojournalist Gilles Caron. Caron photographed the events with thoroughness, recording the student militants and the forces of order during their nightly skirmishes. He documented numerous demonstrations, rallies, political meetings and other major events and portrayed the major student leaders and politicians. Caron produced several images that went beyond daily news photographs to become lasting symbols of the rebellion.     

Robert Louis Stevenson and the Portrait Photographers

This article is prompted by the remarkable characteristic of nineteenth-century Scotland that circumstances congregate to give an unprecedentedly generous or democratic view of life. Four forms of communication – the statistical accounts, which were followed by the British census records, the boom in publishing, especially in newspapers and journals, and inexpensive communication promoted by the penny post, even the information in street directories and advertisements – all combine with the exploitation of photography to give us insights, which can be disconcertingly specific, acting as occasional spotlights on the landscape. This article is prompted by one particular letter from Robert Louis Stevenson, written when he was a young man, and is followed through two lines of connected thought: the practice of studio photography in Scotland and Stevenson's continuing interest in the photographic portrait.     

Pilgrims on Paper: The Calotype Journey of Leavitt Hunt and Nathan Flint Baker

In 1851, two young Americans, Leavitt Hunt and Nathan Flint Baker, extended their Grand Tour to include Egypt, the Holy Land and Greece. In the course of this trip the men successfully produced over sixty calotype records of their journey. In introducing this long‐forgotten work, the author explores the visual approach of the artists and the potential commercial reception of calotype images in the United States.     

Bulgaria

Abstract

In a brief span of only 135 years, photography has been turned from a purely technical invention into a symbol of our time, and this itself constitutes one of the most remarkable phenomena of modern civilization. The illustration has become the full-fledged partner of literature, and photography a basic means of acquiring and recording knowledge. Photography has become a tool of science, and a means of the aesthetic exploration of reality. It spread rapidly all over the world; but its appearance in Bulgaria was greatly delayed because the Bulgarian people were still under Ottoman domination and some 39 years since its invention had passed before liberation finally came.     

Reflection: Nat Finkelstein,Warhol Filming Duchamp (1966)

In this paper the author considers a 1966 photograph by Nat Finkelstein. Andy Warhol is seen filming Marcel Duchamp at an exhibition opening in New York City. Using this image as a starting point, the author reflects upon the nature of personal associations between artists and the tradition of the avant-garde in the history of art.     

Arresting Nudes in Second Empire Paris

This paper concerns two collections of photographs made in Paris during the 1850s and 1860s. The first archive was assembled by the Paris police in the course of enforcing laws against the production and distribution of obscénités. These photographs were pasted into an official arrest register and served as legal evidence. The second collection, a set of stereographs made by Auguste Belloc for clandestine commercial distribution, was seized in a police raid but never inserted into the register. The author analyzes the evolving style of the photographs in these collections, correlating the changes with patterns of prosecution documented in public records. The study reveals the intricate relationship between photography and modern notions of gender, identity and the imaging of sex.     

The Ghost of Humanism: Rethinking the Subjective Turn in Postwar American Photography

This article examines the use of shadow, blur, graininess, and reflection in the work of the postwar photographers Robert Frank, William Klein, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard as a response to the rhetoric of Cold War containment. In contrast to the more comforting images in Edward Steichen’s popular exhibit The Family of Man, which sought to downplay Cold War anxieties, the photographs of Frank, Klein, and Meatyard challenged viewer expectation by presenting human figures in varying states of disintegration and disappearance. The term ‘subjective’ has long been used to describe a return to personal and private concerns during the postwar years, but discussion has focused mainly on the subjectivity of the artist rather than the viewer. By challenging the sanctity of the human figure, Frank, Klein, and Meatyard force viewers to confront such difficult images and, in the process, re-examine the fears and anxieties that lay dormant during the tense years of the early Cold War.     

Notes on early photography in Albania

Abstract

The manner in which the photographic invention interacted with various societies and national temperaments is undoubtedly one of the most interesting aspects of this field. Very little has been published about the arrival and development of photography in Albania. This article is based in part on conversations with the Albanian photographers Gegë Marubi, Piro Milkani and others, in the autumn of 1980¹.     

The City Vanishes: Urban Landscape in Staged Chinese Photography

Recent practice of staged photography in China renders views of urban landscapes as active elements in performative actions directed for the camera. These cityscapes, featured in photographs produced by artists such as Li Wei, Cao Fei, Chi Peng and Xing Danwen, not only reflect the country's rapid urbanisation but also ongoing processes of globalisation. The same processes reconfigure time–space relations around the globe and offer an opportunity to ‘decentre’ the world, but they equally escape capture and document in real time. Fictional photographic elaborations of their accompanying elements, such as the technologisation of culture and the inability to fix a stable image of the future, provide a point of departure to explore photography's role in response to the challenges posed by global urban living. This issue also creates a space for rethinking the critical potential of the medium.     

‘Swiping … and Daguerreotyping’: Photographing Golf at St Andrews

Abstract

When photography was invented, St Andrews was already a very old town, littered with the remains of a glorious and turbulent his tory: notably the skeletons of a once magnificent cathedral and a large Augustinian priory and a ruined castle, horne of the former bishops and archbishops. Zealous reformers had helped reduce these great symbols of medieval Scotland's archiepiscopal see, which were now picturesque ruins, ideal for recording in the new medium of photography. However, St Andrews in the nineteenth century was more than just ‘that Reformation bombsite’.1 This rather apt phrase was used recently by Les Murray in his poem, St Andrews University AD 2000, one of ten poems specially commissioned to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Fergusson, poet, former St Andrews student and inspiration to Robert Burns. It had a small, sleepy university, with old college buildings nestling among the town's commercial and private properties. But also it had something else alive and stirring in the western end of the town — its famous 'Old' golf course. Around the time the first St Andrews photographs were being made, George Fullerton Carnegie penned the following lines in his Golfiana: Address to St Andrews: