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.     

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.     

An Art of Getting Lost: Mapping Patrick Clancy's Photoscroll 365/360

This article analyses Patrick Clancy's photoscroll 365/360 (1985) as an important postmodern image/text investigation into the problematic of the moving still that plays between photography and film and challenges the medium specificity of the Modernist paradigm. 365/360 consists of a number of interweaving and open-ended micro-narratives conveyed (and interrupted) through six rows of images, two registers of text, and the spaces opened up between them. The micro-narratives principally involve the dispersed journeys of artists Arthur Cravan, Mina Loy, and Marcel Duchamp during the First World War. These are oblique avant-garde narratives that revolve around questions of travel (what produces images in motion) and that engage ‘the art of getting lost’, reflecting back on the viewer's own precarious situation at the borders of (non)sense and (dis)orientation when viewing/experiencing this complex work. The article maps the key figures of the winged hermetic, cataloguer of (photographic) grain, and nomadic browser embedded in 365/360.     

The Family of Man as American foreign policy

Situated within an engaging personal account of a career in photojournalism, Morris contributes a thoughtful analysis of The Family of Man, its origins, message and impact. Born in 1916, John G. Morris was an eye-witness to key political events informing the philosophy behind the exhibition. As Picture Editor for the London Bureau of LIFE magazine during World War II, and later, as executive editor of Magnum Photos, he worked closely with the premiere photojournalists of the period, many of whom contributed work to the exhibition. ‘People Are People the World Over’, Morris's innovative series of photo essays for Ladies' Home Journal, influenced Edward Steichen and, ultimately, the shape of The Family of Man. Morris provides a unique perspective on the historical and political context of the exhibition.     

Finland

Abstract

The 19th century was for Finland an eventful and complicated period of adjustment to the Russian Empire. As a consequence of the war of 1808-09 the country had been separated from Sweden and joined to Russia but, thanks to the benevolence of Czar Alexander I and to skilful diplomacy, the Grand Duchy of Finland achieved a considerable degree of autonomy. A legislature, a national army and a monetary unit of its own implied distance from the Russian administration, but though this favourable situation depended entirely on the emperor's goodwill, the privileges of Finland were not seriously infringed until the end of the century. On the whole, the 19th century was a time of peaceful recovery, economic development and the beginning of industrialization. The population grew from a little less than one million to about 2·7 million in 1900. In primary education remarkable progress was made. The importance of towns increased and Helsinki (Helsingfors), the capital, acquired the characteristics of a new metropolis.     

Female Spectatorship and the Masquerade: Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills

Since the late 1970s Cindy Sherman has been one of the most prominent artists in the USA. She is a cult figure because of her chameleon-like masquerade in a female imagery reminiscent of American and European cinema and western art. Her dramatic metamorphosis began with Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980), in which she acted out a variety of female roles from Hollywood and European movies. In the early 1980s she gradually transformed her image into horrific monsters and decaying matter. In the late 1980s Sherman assumed different male and female personas based on old master paintings. Since then, the subject matter of her pictures has increasingly been taken up by hybrid dolls with surreal or grotesque connotations. This paper attempts to venture back into the terrain of Untitled Film Stills that inaugurated Sherman's artistic career. This series of photographs has become one of the most prominent landmarks of feminist/postmodern art. I will propose a new interpretation against the grain of the established feminist readings of these photographs.     

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).     

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.     

Displaced ‘Origins’: William Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature

This essay analyses William Henry Fox Talbot's book of photographs The Pencil of Nature (1844–1846), in which he discusses the role of the photograph as a document. By emphasizing the historical specificity of the book, this essay argues that it presents an undecided and reserved view with regard to the future of the photograph. The Pencil of Nature is neither embedded in the discourse of the mechanical and mass‐produced copy, nor is it embedded in the idea of the ‘authentic’ copy or index, as has been suggested in recent theories of photography. Instead, it reflects a specific form of Romantic historicism which emerged in the early nineteenth century as part of a shift in the organization of knowledge. Talbot's statements on the evidentiary status of the photograph are thus related to literary genres of writing, and, in particular, to Thomas Babington Macaulay's work, to the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, and to Talbot's own philological and classical studies. In this context, the intelligibility of documents is a function of time, yet time is simultaneously a source of constant change and the intellectual ‘horizon’ within which things acquire their meaning. This, the writer contends, forms the discursive framework within which Talbot's views on the document are formed: on the one hand, the desire for ‘truth’, on the other hand, the recognition that time dismantles any claim for the universality of knowledge.     

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.     

David A. Sinclair's Pilgrimage

Abstract

The secretary of the Young Men's Christian Association has spent the last few days in bidding farewell and receiving the best wishes of his friends, as he prepared to leave them in search of his health. The large number of friends gathered about him last Sunday showed the hold he has upon the people of this city.     

F. Holland Day and ‘the Beautiful Boy’: The Story of Thomas Langryl Harris and Day's Nude Study

F. Holland Day has long been recognised as a pioneer American pictorial photographer and uncompromising advocate for photography as a fine art. His work, particularly his depictions of the male nude and the crucifixion of Christ (for which he was his own model), was somewhat controversial in his lifetime and remains influential. His advocacy culminated in the mounting of the all-important New School of American Photography exhibition in London and Paris more than a century ago. Thomas Langryl Harris, on the other hand, was primarily a painter of miniature portraits and had a questionable reputation. He led a short, tragic life and today is totally unknown in the art world. This article explores the relationship between F. Holland Day and Thomas Langryl Harris, the creation of a nude study of the young man by Day and its subsequent erroneous identification as a ‘study for the crucifixion’.     

Photography in the Szondi Test: ‘The Analysis of Fate’

Léopold Szondi invented a projective test using photographs of people with mental pathologies to determine the unconscious, ancestral illnesses (or aptitudes) of his subjects. Szondi’s images were garnered from psychiatric textbooks published around 1900. Such photographs presumably revealed unconscious thoughts, desires, and destinies in the course of a test session. If a patient responded positively to a photo-portrait of a diagnosed ‘hysteric’, for instance, this indicated that the subject herself had unconscious, inherited hysterical traits. Szondi’s reasoning was predicated upon two commonly held fallacies: first that an individual’s physical appearance is the external marker of mental life, and second that photography is a transparent means of revealing true facts. In spite of (or maybe even because of) such problematic assumptions, Szondi’s use of photographs can be located historically in a tradition of reading human character from portraiture. The test was widespread, and was even administered to Adolf Eichmann at the time of his trial in Jerusalem – an ironic cultural development as Szondi himself would have been among the thousands of Jews deported from Hungary directly to Auschwitz by Eichmann had the Szondi family not been rescued by the Kastner train of 1944.     

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.