Oliver Wendell Holmes as an amateur photographer

Abstract

On 6th July 1862, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a letter to Coleman Sellers, thanking him for some photographs received and excusing his own negligence in writing. His eldest son, missing in action in Richmond, commanded all his attention, but then Holmes added: ‘If it were not for this war, I should begin getting photographic apparatus tomorrow. If peace ever returns I feel sure I shall try my hand at the art and then I shall be only too happy to send you some of my handiwork in return for the many favors I have received from you’¹. The letter catches Holmes at an interesting point in his life. Always intrigued by photography and well known among his friends as a popularizer of it, he was finally thinking of turning theory into practice.     

A talk with Paul Starnd; France,Summer 1974

Abstract

Ideas often come from unexpected directions. While I was talking to Paul Strand, I noted him watching his wife Hazel arrange a bouquet of flowers in their home near Orgeval outside Paris. He said to me in mid conversation that he had just arrived at a solution to a problem he had been thinking about for the past few years. He went on to say that beginning over 10 years ago he had made a series of informal portraits of men and women important in French cultural life. How to use these photographs in a meaningful way was a problem, for already there were available a number of picture books of famous personages. Publishers had told him that they felt new photographs of the cultural tlite of France would duplicate much that had already been done. He had also found that publishers who were interested in his pictures wanted to have a say in the selection of people to be included in a book of this kind. Strand indicated he did not want to relinquish control to this degree. The rcsult was that the portraits had been put away for future consideration.     

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.     

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.     

Cut and Paste

Published posthumously, this article begins with a discussion of the historiography – and a related exhibition history – of the terms collage, photo-collage, and photomontage; and of the criteria that have been used to distinguish them as techniques, as visual idioms, and for their political implications and resonances as images of fine or applied art. The article then moves on to the work of two living artists who have been cutting and pasting photographs for more than forty years, Martha Rosler and John Stezaker, and the ambiguities of their being described as collagists, monteurs, or photomonteurs. In rethinking these categories, Evans argues for an expansive history of photomontage and collage that has continuing resonance today.     

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.     

Charles Piazzi Smyth's 1865 Conquest of the Great Pyramid

Abstract

Most photo-historical accounts of the development of miniature cameras and artificial lighting cite Charles Piaim Smyth's pioneering photographic work at the Great Pyramid in 1865. This artlcle, based on the recent rediscovery of an album of his photographs and subsequent new information on his estate, is a more detailed examination of that work than has previously been possible.     

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.     

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.     

Ermakov album

Abstract

When I first met Henry Ries in his home in Manhattan in the mid-1980s, I was struck by his generosity in telling me about his career. Born in 1917 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf in an assimilated Jewish family, Henry (born Heinz) Ries left for New York on 13 January 1938. Initially, he found employment in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he taught photography at the Jewish community centre and could use their laboratory for his own work. He tried to enlist in the United States Army in December 1941, but this was not possible, since he was an 'enemy alien' and a recent emigrant without American citizenship. In May 1943, he joined the Army Air Corps and received American citizenship. Initially posted to the Pacific theatre, making aerial photographs of China for the 20th Bomber Command, he subsequently transferred to the European theatre, arriving in London in late May 1945. Assigned to the ‘Office Director of Intelligence’, his first job was to evaluate Heinrich Himmler's ‘secret state library’ correspondence with the SS, Hitler, Goebbels, Goring, and others, which was later utilized in the Nuremberg Medical Trial. Three months later, Ries was transferred to Berlin.     

‘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:     

US Photography in the Philippines Before 1898: The Menage Expedition of 1890–1893

Between 1890 and 1893, two young Americans, Frank Swift Bourns and Dean Conant Worcester, travelled through the central and southern Philippines on a zoological expedition. In addition to collecting animal specimens, the two men took more than one hundred and fifty photographs. These photographs have not been given much attention by historians but they are an important set of images that help expand the understanding of photography in the Philippines in the late Spanish colonial era. This article discusses the circumstances surrounding the making of these images and provides a framework for interpreting their significance by applying the concept of the ‘photographic obsessions’ of Western explorers as defined and described by Willem van Schendel and his colleagues in the book The Chittagong Hill Tracts: Living in a Borderland.     

Burton Brothers of New Zealand

Abstract

The New Zealand firm of Burton Brothers was engaged in a wide spectrum of enterprise, icluding portrait, topographic and commercial photography. It came into being withing 20 years of the founding of the Otago Settlement. The firm soon became widely known for its ethnoghraphic photographs of the South Pacific, and later for its output of photographic postcards under the name of Muir & Moodie. Thomas M. B. Muir, who joined the firm early on, was related both to James Weaver Allen, a noteworthy pioneer photographer in the colony, and to Fred Muir who carried his camera to the unexplored interior of the South Island of New Zealand and brougllt back views of the hitherto unknown lakes, waterfalls and natural wonders to fascinated townspeople. Not surprisuingly, therefore, Burton Brothers and Muir & Moodie are household names in New Zealand, and are also well known to librarians and ethnographers throughout the world.     

Travel Reports and Photography in Early Photographically Illustrated Books

Abstract

Abstract A previous article¹ dealt with some of the first books illustrated by tipped-in photographs, or else by early photomechanical procedures, with subject matter drawn from the fields of microscopy, medicine and astronomy. The present essay is concerned with technically similar publications, on topics of a more social nature.     

How Stieglitz came to photograph cityscapes

Abstract

Beginning in 1927, at the age of 63, Alfred Stieglitz began photographing the views of Manhattan outside the windows at the Intimate Gallery, his third-floor exhibition space on East 59th Street, and at the thirtieth-floor apartment at the Shelton Hotel, at 49th Street and Lexington Avenue, where he lived with Georgia O'Keeffe. In concerted bursts over the next four years, and then intermittently until ill-health forced the end of his picture-making in 1937, Stieglitz produced about 90 cityscapes, most of them depicting the changing views from .the Shelton and from his seventeenthfloor gallery An American Place, at 53rd Street and Madison Avenue, where he moved operations just after the stockmarket crash of 1929.1 The key set of Stieglitz's photographs in the National Gallery, Washington, DC, deposited there by Georgia O'Keeffe in 1949, includes 80 New York cityscapes from 1927 and after. The collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art has, among its late cityscapes, a handful that are not present in Washington, being variants in either negative, cropping, or photographic paper. These have been donated in stages over the years by Dorothy Norman. Further examples of variations from the images in Washington are unknown at present. These hard-edged yet lush gelatine silver prints vividly document a building boom of the late 1920s and early Depression years which transformed the refined, residential ‘uptown’ that Stieglitz had known all his life into a skyscraper-ridden ‘midtown’, a centre for office rentals, luxury apartment hotels and the fme art trade (figure 1).     

Retracing the image: The emergence of photography in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This is a difficult conference to review. It is particularly difficult as your reviewer comes from the margins of the discipline of his tory of photography; but then, all reviews are from a single, personal viewpoint (as are most photographs) and may not necessarily reflect an audience consensus. So, I shall begin by saying that this was not what I had expected. Had I been a mainstream art historian, still flushed with youthful enthusiasm, I might have loved it; but age, experience and a profound uneasiness about my own lack of wisdom left me with the distinct impression of the curate's egg. This conference was ‘good in parts’.     

Arnold Rönnebeck and Alfred Stieglitz: Remembering the hill

Abstract

Arnold R.onnebeck visited Stieglitz and O'Keeffe for a week at Lake George in October 1924. While there, he took a series of snapshots which record Stieglitz taking photographs of O'Keeffe, images which are unique since no other photographs document Stieglitz actually in the process of expanding what is arguably the most famous portrait of the twentieth century, an ongoing work of thematic and temporal depth. Other photographs in which Stieglitz is shown holding a camera (figure 1), perhaps even pausing in his work, appear self-consciously posed, and with the artist separated from his subjects. Rönnebeck's pictures are remarkable for the vivid image they convey of an artist thoroughly absorbed in his work.     

Alfred Swaine Taylor (1801–80)

Abstract

After a period in decline the Portobello Road market in London has enjoyed a revival in the past two or three years. There are at least three dealers in historic photographs within fifty yards of an East Anglian couple who regularly bring good quality decorative antiques and other curios to sell on Saturday mornings. I stopped at their showcase, looked in, walked on, and then returned to take a second look at a scrapbook, so often a source of good printed ephemera. It was open at a page showing a comic drawing of a wagon done up as an itinerant photographer's studio. I was told how much the scrapbook was and spent the next ten minutes looking through it. I decided on balance that I could ‘just about see the price in it’ ignoring the four photographs, which I believed must be of little or no value. On reaching my car I had another look through the album. A negative image of a leaf (figure 1) looked interesting, for a few months earlier I had been to Lacock and now remembered Talbot's photogenic drawings. Examination of the engravings and lithographs showed that they started in the 1820s and ended in 1853. This was undoubtedly a girl's scrapbook begun when she was quite small and probably continued until her early teens when the enthusiasm for pasting was bound to wane. I settled on a probable year of birth of 1840 for the girl but most careful combing discovered no name or initials in the book. There were, however, some postcards celebrating a pageant in 1907 at Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, and one had been posted to a Mrs F. Methold at an address in Bury, but how she was connected with the book remained to be disovered. I looked once more through the printed ephemera and spotted that two cards with heavily embossed borders had small hand-coloured lithographs pasted on to them. My suspicion that these were early Victorian invitations proved to be correct. Removing the little pictures revealed that they were invitations from the Pharmaceutical Society to Alfred S. Taylor, FRS, to attend two dinners dated May 1848 and July 1849. I did not think that it was straining common sense to conclude that father had given his daughter these old invitations for her scrapbook.     

Sage of Lacock

Abstract

‘The good is oft interred with their bones.’ Much of what has been written of William Henry Fox Talbot has done him meagre justice: criticism for patenting his inventions, accusations that he patented the ideas of others, denigration of the importance of his discoveries. Though acknowledged as a scientist, his place as an artistic worker in the medium he invented has not been appreciated.