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.     

Explication a montage by Dora Maar

Contemporary photographers Rineke Dijkstra and Nan Goldin each seek intimacy through portrait making. Perhaps not surprisingly, their work is most frequently framed in terms of either empathy or voyeurism. Considering selections from Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and Dijkstra’s New Mothers photographs, this essay argues that instead of approaching the text critically through the lens of ‘voyeurism’, this work is best explored by focusing on the question of ‘intimacy’. This essay situates the notion of intimacy both theoretically and historically, considering the workings of intimacy and its relationship to the persistence of inside/outside binaries (most frequently applied in discussion of the dynamics of the photographer/subject relationship). Looking at the way intimacy is represented through the surfaces of skin and the pregnant or maternal body, this essay speaks to questions of intention and critical reception and considers the ways in which photographers, subjects, and audiences engage with photographs as material objects.     

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.     

The Reception and Sources of Berenice Abbott's Paris Portrait Style, 1925–1929

This study focuses on the photographs that first brought Berenice Abbott critical acclaim: her Paris portraits from the late 1920s. As a body of work, these images – along with what Abbott had to say about them and the critical attention they generated at the time – provide a rich resource for the study of three interconnected topics: the avant-garde critical climate of Europe in the late 1920s, the American expatriate experience in Paris during this same time and Abbott's nascent photographic values and aesthetic, which helped to inform not only her portraits but also her later, better-known photographs of New York City. The paper first defines the divergent critical responses to Abbott's portrait work in the late 1920s – focusing especially on the published criticism by Florent Fels and Pierre Mac Orlan that helped to secure Abbott's international reputation as a leading modern photographer. It then turns to Abbott's expatriate experience in order to examine the ideas and individuals that she identified as most important to her photographic practice. Specifically the paper explains Abbott's desire to create an alternative approach to photography from the one used by Man Ray, her awareness of the classical style associated with Pablo Picasso and her admiration for the aesthetic theories of Leo Stein.     

‘A Pointer for Beauty’: Photography,Ekphrasis, and the Aesthetics of Attention in Johannes Jaeger’s 1866 Photobook

This essay inquires into attention and detail as aesthetic categories in the nineteenth-century reception of photography in Scandinavia. It circles around what is generally considered to be Sweden’s first book with original photographs, Johannes Jaeger’s Molin’s Fountain in Photographs, with text (1866), read through two articles on the aesthetic potential of the photographic medium written by two contemporary Scandinavian art critics. In seven albumen print photographs, the book documents a fountain sculpture by Swedish sculptor Johan Peter Molin, exhibited at the first Scandinavian Art and Industrial Exhibition in 1866. However, the book also includes poetry; each photograph is juxtaposed with a poetic stanza that describes the part of the sculpture that the photograph reproduces. This paper studies the close relation between image and text in Jaeger’s volume. It argues that a contemporary view of the photographic image, also articulated by the Scandinavian art critics, can be discerned from the layout of the book – namely, that photography produces images too distractive and oversaturated with insignificant details to be aesthetically valuable. The visual and verbal framework for the photographs, then, arguably aims to overcompensate the distractive qualities of the image, by regulating the reader/viewer’s attention towards the sculpture and its significant details. In this ambition, Jaeger’s photobook anticipates a future aesthetic appreciation of the photograph in its own right.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Photography at the Threshold: Atget,Benjamin and Surrealism

This paper re-evaluates the association between Eugène Atget and Surrealism by means of a reading of several essays by Walter Benjamin written during the 1920s and 1930s. The well known but brief moment of surrealist reception of Atget was superseded when later and more influential writers viewed him instead as an important forerunner of documentary photography. To this end, surrealist meanings and values became occluded by various writers, while the poetic or ‘aesthetic’ features of the photographs were marginalised. I want to suggest that the oneiric qualities of Atget's work should not be ignored or opposed to documentary or materialist readings – rather, it is the peculiar suspension of documentary and aesthetic modes that characterises his work and locates it in a particular historical moment. In forging this argument I enlist Benjamin, who made Atget a key figure in his discussion of the surrealist aesthetic and for whom the political force of Surrealism lies in its simultaneous intensification and overcoming of conceptual, spatial and temporal boundaries. It is argued that Benjamin's surrealist reading of Atget illuminates the way in which Atget's photographs thematise the transformation of aesthetic and social space, destabilising the fixed categories of photographic realism and art.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Charles Marville and the Landscapes of the Carrières d’Amérique

Charles Marville’s photographs of Paris preserve the look of streets slated for demolition under Georges-Eugène Haussmann. This article examines his photographs of the Carrières d’Amérique, or America Quarries – gypsum quarries in the outlying Parisian neighbourhood of Belleville. At a time when the rezoning of districts that were formerly extra muros was still controversial, Belleville was seen as a crime-ridden area. Marville’s photographs become documents that refute contemporary narratives of criminality. Borrowing Walter Benjamin’s view that the city ‘opens up’ to the flâneur ‘as a landscape’, the article analyses Marville’s landscapes of the Carrières d’Amérique as images that juxtapose the city, the work site, and the no-man’s land or terrains vagues at Paris’s outer limits.     

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.     

Platinum Print (Photo-Graphic Art) 1913–17

In the 1920s art museums in the United States began to collect and display photographs by Alfred Stieglitz and other leading photographers as works of art. Previous scholars have acknowledged this movement's significance in Stieglitz's struggle for the institutional recognition of photography. They have, however, scarcely queried the conditions under which this movement began. This article scrutinises the circumstances under which the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, accepted prints from Stieglitz and other practitioners of the medium. It posits that the Boston Museum's decision to accept these prints was motivated by its protean curator Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy's interest in pictorialist and photo-secessionist photography's creative and political possibilities as well as in Stieglitz's life and work. Stieglitz's pictures appealed to Coomaraswamy because he recognised in them ways in which the American photographer was referencing strands of classical South Asian aesthetics to develop more inclusive and more symbolic works of American art. One of these filaments was Stieglitz's absorption of a codified language of hand gestures assumed by dancers and deities that Coomaraswamy was concurrently documenting and interpreting in his writings, photographs and films to elevate maligned traditions of South Asian sculpture and performance as Art. In recovering this narrative of Coomraswamy and Stieglitz's overlapping lives and works, this article begins to disentangle histories of collecting, of modernist photography and of the crystallisation of South Asian art history as a scholarly discipline.     

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.     

Still Supplementation: Stan Douglas's Cuba Photographs

Focusing closely on the incorporation of photographs into Stan Douglas's media installations, this essay argues that the relationship between photography and film in his work is more complex than critics have acknowledged. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's concept of the ‘supplement’ as a necessary addition, both inside and outside specific forms, it contends that Douglas's use of photography is an integral part of his film works and installations and functions to foreground stillness as a theme. In doing so, the Cuba Photos undermine the seeming finality of still images and ironically reveal the end of faith in historical progress. While scholarship on circulation, following John Tagg's pioneering research, has emphasised Michel Foucault's concern with the historical construction of ideological meaning, the supplement in Douglas's work invites us to interrogate the very category of history by foregrounding the notion of re‐construction. Approaching the relationship between photography and film in terms of the supplement offers a provocative way of understanding the significance of photographic circulation.     

Metropolitan Surveillance and Rural Opacity: Secret Photography in Nineteenth‐Century Ireland

This essay considers the significance of the Foucaultian notion of surveillance in accounts of the history of photography, raising the question whether Ireland's colonial placement during the nineteenth century led to a different history of the medium. The study focuses on Irish Special Branch's adoption of secret photography during the latter part of the nineteenth century in order to determine why this type of photography was considered useful. It also pays attention to the types of photographs collected by the Branch. The writer situates Special Branch's adoption of secret photography within a visual economy in Ireland where an alternative type of imagery (commercially produced eviction photographs) was employed to construct a different register for what constituted legitimacy and lawlessness. In addition, emphasis is placed on the role of photography in Ireland within a larger discursive framework of colonial policy making. Visibility is crucial to the Foucaultian model, and the failure to embed such signs in both the photographs produced and collected by Special Branch indicates that it was possible to produce lacunae in the power/knowledge paradigm. The writer concludes that the history of the deployment of secret photography in Ireland reveals how it failed to produce the required visual signs needed to win consent for control.     

The Aesthetics of Politics in the Hungarian Photobook From Our Lives

Lajos Kassák is best known outside of Hungary for his commitment to international dialogue among the avant‐gardes of the late 1910s and early twenties, as exemplified by his periodical Today (Ma). Within Hungary, however, he is also recognized for his politically driven activities during the late twenties and early thirties, and specifically, for his role in organizing and promoting the leftist activities of the Work Circle (Munka Kör). The present essay challenges this traditional characterization of Kassák's career trajectory. A careful investigation of the paragon Work Circle project – the photobook From Our Lives (A Mi Életünkbo?l) – demonstrates that Kassák's sustained interest and commitment are neither to purely aesthetic nor to purely political goals, but rather, to the very notion of art's aesthetic potential for political impact. Once we recognize that From Our Lives is a pedagogic project, we can properly understand its impact on the Hungarian worker photography movement: it was essentially an instruction manual for artists on how to construct a socially conscious image. As such, it should be distinguished from other more political works which did indeed serve as showcases for exemplary worker photographs – and even from the explicitly political messages presented in the eponymous exhibitions with which the Work Circle photobook is often mistakenly conflated. The broader applicability and implications for this sort of pedagogic analysis of a work's form and function are discussed.