Daniel Manders Beere

Abstract

Through History of Photography, photoarchivists at the National Photography Collection of the Public Archives of Canada have learned that one of Canada's photographic pioneers was among New Zealand's early photographers of note. An article by William Main entitled, ‘Photographic Reportage of the New Zealand Wars’¹, and subsequent correspondence from John Sullivan², have shed welcome light on the origins and later life of Daniel Manders Beere.     

Between orientalist clichés and images of modernization

Abstract

In contemporary writing about nineteenth-century photography of the Middle East it has become almost a cliche to describe many of these images as ‘Orientalist’-that is, reflecting or propagating a system of representation that creates an essentialized difference between the ‘Orient’ and the ‘West’. Most of these scholars draw on Edward Said's influential book Orientalism, which traces how Europe manufactured an imaginary Orient through literary works and the social sciences.¹ For example, Nissan N. Perez writes in his book Focus East: Early Photography in the Near East (1839–1885) that ‘Literature, painting, and photography fit the real Orient into the imaginary or mental mold existing in the Westerner's mind .... These attitudes are mirrored in many of the photographs taken during this time [the nineteenth century] ... Either staged or carefully selected from a large array of possibilities, they became living visual documents to prove an imaginary reality’. ²     

Obituary

Abstract

This handsome book is a superb introduction to the history of photography in Japan as well as a catalogue of The History of Japanese Photography exhibition held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Cleveland Museum of Art (2003). The over-sized (12 x 10 inches) volume contains 207 beautifully reproduced photographic plates, seven chapters discussing the history of photography in Japan from 1848 until 2000, and a helpful series of appendices. The latter includes the ‘Exhibition Checklist’, a ‘Chronology’, ‘Artist Profiles’, listings of ‘Major Photography Clubs and Associations’ and ‘Major Photography Magazines’, a ‘Selected Bibliography’ and an ‘Index’. For those interested in a well written, informative and visually stimulating introduction to the subject, this is the book to consult.     

F. Holland day

Abstract

Research Into F. Holland Day's æuvre has begun to provide a framework for interpreting the content found in his photographs, and the host of literary, artistic, and spiritual sources that often seem to have informed has aesthetic decision making. For while Day's work is here considered in the context of photographic history, he is no less part of the intricate network of writers, poets, artists, and socialites whose often controversial expression comprise the fin de siècle that ruptured Brahmin society in Boston. Incited by Estelle Jussim's resistance to discussing either homosexuahty or the homoerotic content manifest in Day's Images of the male nude (figure 1; see also figure 14, Curtis, ‘F. Holland Day: The Poetry of Photography’, in this issue.), scholars have been vigorously asserting the centrality of these issues as a means for understanding Day's life and career.¹ While it is evident that many of his photographs of the male nude possess a casual relationship to the profusion of gay male erotica circulating in both England and the United States, the issues that may explicate the sexual ambiguities of male-male relationships during this period are far more complex than what has emerged 10 the literature on Day.² It can be said, moreover, that the male nude photographs by Day have received disporportionate attention from scholars, and thus have suppressed discussions about the diversity of his repertoire, and the important role that other images play in the photographer's æuvre.     

From the studio to the snapshot: An immigrant photographer of the 1920s

Abstract

In his justly famous work, Looking at Photographs, John Szarkowski remarked¹ that ‘Photography has learned about its nature not only from the great masters, but also from the simple and radical works of photographers of modest aspiration and small renown ….’. It is thanks to critics like Szarkowski that we are encouraged to view photographs on their own terms, instead of always having to compare them to the rigid aesthetic hierarchies of Hochkunst.     

Erotic Photography

Abstract

In his exhibition catalogue The Body Exposed: 150 Years of the Nude in Photography (Zurich 1995), Michael Kohler expresses the hope that ‘nobody will shy away from taking a closer look at nude photography, its aesthetics, its history and its ideology under the illusion that there is nothing left to discover; for it's exactly the opposite’. In fact, true academic attention toward the nude photograph has been surprisingly limited, the genre leaving behind instead a trail of pseudo-academic coffee-table books and prodigious, but unanalysed, collections. This is perhaps the reason that Michelle Olley's book is at once so heartening and so disappointing. Venus presents an anthology of erotic, and predominantly nude, photography of women spanning approximately the last 40 years. Unfortunately, where such a collection could be a prime opportunity to finally provide a cogent and analytical narrative of the genre's recent history, Olley instead offers a sparse text that uses the photographs merely as evidence of the modern world's sexual liberation. She asserts that ‘Our attitudes toward sex and sexuality, women and the depiction of erotic subjects has shifted, so that society no longer hides the nude away from us as something forbidden and too shocking even for adults’. Her argument is supported by a cursory history of the female nude in painting and photography and by references to ‘restrictive’ Victorian morality. This single-mindedness glosses over the diversity of issues posed by the photographs in the collection — issues such as identity, isolation and interaction, confinement and freedom, universality and incident.     

Dickens and ‘photography’ in ‘household words’

Abstract

The January 1981 issue of History of Photography (Vol. 5, No. 1 , p. 51), Lindsay Lambert writes: ‘The following article [‘Photography, 1853’] appeared in Household Words (19th March 1853). The journal was edited by Charles Dickens, and since the article carries no other by-line, it may well have been written by the editor himself’.     

Correspondence: Images of native Americans II

Abstract

The Navajo people of the American Southwest have been abundantly photographed since the beginnings of photography's extension into Western America — indeed, from almost since the beginnings of photography itself. Navajoland ‘offered’ dramatic landscapes and ‘The People’¹ have served as exemplar for an assorted series of Western projects, changes in Western projects, and objects of Western desire. The photographs of Native Americans by Edward S. Curtis, though largely ignored during his lifetime, emerged shortly after his death in 1952 to become popular icons, which were so dramatic a phenomenon from the 1960s that today they are something of a cliché. ‘Original’ prints currently sell for thousands of dollars.² This resurrection is also characteristic among specialists on Native Americans. Indeed, after having been neglected and abused by anthropology for many years for his elaborate staging, soft focus, excessive pastoral romanticism and nostalgia, Curtis has more recently become fashionable again and now enjoys something of an anthropological embrace.³     

Michael Fried's Modernist Theory of Photography

This essay critically analyses Michael Fried's book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. It examines the relevance of Fried's categories of absorption and theatricality to contemporary photography and his assumption that photography is an inherently modernist art. In his book Fried explains the shift to large-scale colour photographs in the 1980s as signalling a return to problems of beholding, which dominated painting since the 1750s and 1760s. In contrast, this essay argues that this shift reveals the importance of the legacy of conceptualism and minimalism to recent photography and, in particular, the role of the conceptual ‘document’ within contemporary artistic practices.     

Sadakichi artmann,essayist and critic

Abstract

During the last two years of his life, Ralph Eugene Meatyard assembled a series of photographs into a book titled The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater. The album's main subject is his wife Madelyn Meat yard who wore one mask for the title role of Lucybelle Crater, and appeared in sixtyfour photographs accompanied in each by a different person wearing one other mask. Madelyn Meat yard's mask, an opaque representation of a grotesque hag, is described as resembling ‘Mammy Yokum from Outer Space’.¹ The other mask is transformed by its wearer, for it is a translucent representation of an androgynous older person. Only two images are titled, and the real names of the masked people are revealed in a listing at the end of the book.     

Eduard Steichen and Maurice Maeterlinck

Abstract

Eduard Steichen (1879-1973) met the Belgian Symbolist writer Maurice Maeterlinck in 1901, when Steichen was in Europe. Steichen's goal there was to photograph painters and writers whom he personally admired,¹ including Maeterlinck whom Steichen photographed in 1901. Maeterlinck attended Steichen's first one-man exhibition at Maison des Artistes in 1902 and looked favourably on the young artist's work. Maeterlinck and Steichen discussed photography at the time. Steichen thought that Maeterlinck's comments were ‘more considered than any [he] had heard before’ and ‘wondered whether he would put down some of his thoughts’² to be included with reproductions of Steichen's photographs in Camera Work. Steichen felt emphatically that his best photographs should be reproduced with Maeterlinck's statement, and he told Alfred Stieglitz as much.³ The connection between Maeterlinck and Steichen has not gone unnoticed     

The Making of a Hunter: Moriyama Daidō 1966–1972

The images from Moriyama's earliest photobooks – Nihon gekijō shashinchō (Nippon Theatre), Shashin yo sayōnara (Farewell Photography), and Kariudo (A Hunter) – are among his most highly respected works, yet comparably little is known about the processes and contexts of their production. This essay examines the photographer's early collaborative projects with the writer and dramatist Terayama Shūji, as well as such important magazine serial projects as ‘Akushidento (Accident)’ and ‘Nanika eno tabi (Searching Journeys)’, with a view to better understanding his formative years. The analysis draws heavily from the notes that Moriyama often wrote to accompany his photo-stories and argues that his most important thematic terrain is the often unsettling tension between two modalities of the photograph: on the one hand as ‘cold’, ‘authentic’ documentary record, and on the other as emotionally affecting simulation of meaningful contact with the external world.     

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.     

Arthur Conan Doyle and psychic photographs

Abstract

The issue of Punch for 12 May 1926 featured a cartoon which depicted an elderly and oversized Arthur Conan Doyle sitting on a stool (see figure 1). Clouds are gathered around his uplifted, preoccupied head. Holding a chain which shackles Doyle's legs is a miniature Sherlock Holmes, brooding and thoughtful. The cartoon's immediate context is satirical: Doyle's warm reception of the Cottingley Fairy photographs, then a matter of ongoing notoriety due to the publication of his The Coming of the Fairies in 1922, had prompted a degree of ridicule. In 1920 he had become involved in an investigation of what purported to be photographs of actual fairies taken by two teenage girls. The matter which commenced as an investigation had, by 1928, with the publication of the study's second edition, developed into a whole-hearted endorsement of the photographs. For Doyle and his colleague, the theosophist Edward Gardner, this event was the ultimate proof that fairies actually existed. Nor was the intervention Doyle's only encounter with paranormal photography. A committed spiritualist by the 1920s, Doyle had previously championed the cause of spirit photography, a process where supposed materializations of the dead appeared in photographs. For the spiritualists, this possibility was an important concept, as it endorsed their central tenet: that the living could communicate with the dead. Relatedly, Doyle's The Case for Spirit Photography (1923) defended William Hope, who had been accused of using fraudulent methods to attain his materializations.     

Samuel Bourne of Nottingham

Abstract

Samuel Bourne was one of the great pioneers of travel photography, and the photographs which he took in India during the 1860s have become familiar to a wide audience through their inclusion in exhibitions, their use as book illustrations and also through television coverage. Although acknowledging the merit of that aspect of his work, this paper discusses the hitherto comparatively little-known role which he played in the arena of photography during the period immediately before he went to India, and also his activities in the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries.     

New York and Photography

Abstract

This exhibition catalogue about the New York School of photography, begun long before 11 September 2001, fortuitously lifts up the city as both image and source of visual ideas. Comforting in this accidental homage, the book also offers significant essays that explore the reasons for the flourishing of photography in twentiethcentury New York. New York: Capital of Photography offers some especially thought provoking explanations. Max Kozloff, art historian, critic and photographer, traces the development of a particular way of seeing that evolved from the early years of the century in the Reform Movement through the ‘made-to-order Surrealism’ of New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Five of his six essays approach a textbook treatment of this art form in this period and place. The sixth, ‘Jewish Sensibility and the Photography of New York’, poses the intriguing thesis that the aesthetic of New York photography as a whole is a Jewish one. This idea may not be accepted as fact in actual photography history texts until another hundred years have passed, but is worthy and fascinating, in Kozloffs telling, of consideration.     

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.     

19th century indian photographers in India

Abstract

It may never be possible to discover who was the first person to use a camera in India. Dr A. Toussaint considers it likely that the Frenchman, Jules Léger, may have taken photographs during his visit to India before establishing a photographic studio in Mauritius in February 1845¹. Josiah Rowe, a Calcutta surveyor, was hailed as ‘the father of photography in India’ by Dr F. J. Mouat, the first president of the Bengal Photographic Society, but as yet no photographs have been found that can be attributed to him. The earliest known photographs were taken by John McCosh, a surgeon in the Bengal establishment of the East India Company's army, during the second Sikh War in 1848-49. He had no doubts about the pleasures of photography:

I would strongly recommend every assistant-surgeon to make himself master of photography in all its branches, on paper, on plate glass, and on metallic plate. I have practised it for many years, and know of no extra-professional pursuit that will repay him for all the expense and trouble (and both are very considerable) than this fascinating study².     

Criminal Lines,Indian Colours,and the Creation of a Black Legend: The Photographs of ‘Los Bandidos de la Halancha’, Bolivia

The author’s discovery of a set of inscribed photographs of the ‘Bandits of La Jalancha’, made in La Paz, Bolivia in 1871 and now in the collections of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, has made possible the identification of the photographed gang’s leader ‘Salvador Chico’ with the Afro-Aymara anti-hero known in contemporary folklore as El Zambo Salvito. On their photographic journeys out of Bolivia, Salvador and his men were transformed into anonymous ‘Indian bandits’ and became generic illustrations of ethnic Aymara types in the service of racialised evolutionary science. Back in La Paz, however, the photographs were forgotten but the legend of the infamous son of an African slave from Chicaloma, a coca-producing hacienda in the region of Yungas, grew in the public imagination. Whereas nineteenth-century racial discourse only recognised his indigeneity, twentieth- and twenty-first-century folklore and illustrations have instead emphasised his blackness. In tracing the split legacies of Salvador of Chicaloma, through exported photographs and the formation of local legends, this work reveals how identity was constructed, evacuated, and made anew. This fluidity of representation was made possible, in part, by the relative archival invisibility of afrodescendientes in Andean South America, whose lives and histories remain largely uninscribed.