Indian Courtesans in Cartes - de - Visite

Abstract

Cartes-de-visite of the nineteenth century covered a wide spectrum of subjects, and were indeed ‘an interface between photography and the social scene’¹. People wanted to have their photographs taken ‘to share among friends and to express, social standing’²; the likenesses were ‘inexpensive, easy to look at and easy to care for’³, and much cheaper than a painter's miniature, providing a commercial application of photography in sales of the object depicted. Indeed, Oliver Wendell Holmes called them ‘the greenbacks of civilisation’⁴.     

The Reception of Albert Renger-Patzsch's Die Welt ist schön

Abstract

No history of photography or publication on the photography of the 1920s fails to mention the photo-book Die Welt ist schön. Regarded as a ‘manifesto of the revival of Realism,’¹ and hailed as the ‘bible’ of Neue Sachlichkeit photography,² ‘hardly any other book has influenced a generation of photographers to the same great extent and with such long-lasting effects as this volume‘.³ It was the book's tide in particular that was received like a catchword and influenced the reception of this photographic volume: ‘The tide became symbolic for an attitude of Neue Sachlichkeit to the world and the book was acknowledged as the ideal volume of Neue Sachlichkeit photography’.⁴ Hitherto in the history of the book's reception, this opinion has been restricted primarily to the reference to Walter Benjamin's well-known negative critique of 1931.⁵ Amongst the multitude of reviews of Die Welt ist schon, it is Benjamin's assessment which is most frequendy cited in the literature. That Benjamin was able to neglect explicidy mentioning Renger-Patzsch's name and to refer merely to the tide of the book can be interpreted as proof of the great fame of this photographic author. In fact, Die Welt ist schön had by this time been reviewed in nearly all leading cultural magazines and daily newspapers and evaluated as an exemplary volume of a modem, neusachliche photography. For critics such as Benjamin, however, the tide was synonymous with a new, sterile ‘l’art pour l'art' photography which manipulated reality and denied social contexts. But to confine negative criticism of Die Welt ist schön to the political left and its praise to a more conservative attitude is too simple a model as becomes apparent when all of the reviews are taken into consideration. Karl With's attempt to summarize the contradictions of this picture book may be cited here: ‘Ein seltsames Buch!} (A strange book!). Exciting in its busding abundance, as well as in its silence’.⁶     

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     

The darkroom abolish

Abstract

‘You press tlie button and we do the rest' had been Kodak's proud slogan slnce 1888, but as the success of popular pliotography grew, the wisdom of allowing hundreds of thousands of amateurs to do ‘the rest’ themselves became very clear. By 1902, the annuals sales of photographic paper alone had reached three million dollars¹, and Kodak's famous propaganda slogan was tacltly disowned with the publication of The Darkroom Abolished. In eloquent terms, and supported by the highest photographic authorities in the land, the notion came to be propagated that ‘You’ should not only press the button, but also ‘do tlie rest’ yourself. If ‘The Kodak Girl’ could do it, fragile and delicate woman that she was, anyone could. No mention here of the fact that at least 18 women were formal members of the Photo-secession in that year, or that two had been among the founders. The early years of this century were not, of course, attuned to these sensibilities; indeed, plctures of pretty girls selling enticing products like potassium ferrous oxalate to an eager publoc will be with us for a while yet. In the testimonials for the new products, Eickemeyer ranks discreetly above (or at any rate ‘before’) Stieglitz, and through the four quotations are almost on a par, one may guess that the layout of the brochure was more popular in some quarters than in others. And Edward W. Newcoinb, while equally positive, was evidently confused about the limits of human skill. Frederick Remington's endorsement must have been valued more for the sake of the artist's name than for its own persuasive qualities. His cautious tone notwithstanding, it is known that his own practice as an illustrator was shaped, at least in part, by the public's insistence on the kind of pictorial authenticity that only a pliotograph could sulpply².     

John Bishop Hall

Abstract

Excitement, elation, and scepticism travelled throughout the photographic industry when first reports of a new colour and stereoscopic relief process were published on 1 August 1856.¹ The process was patented by John Bishop Hall in New York, on 27 May 1856 and 20 January 1857. Hall's location at 585 Broadway, New York City was known as the ‘Temple of Art’, occupied by the well known photographer Charles Deforest Fredricks. The photographic journals conceived the name hallotype, a derivative of the ambrotype process on glass. The ambrotype was patented July 1854 by James Ambrose Cutting. Legal action relating to Cutting's several patents on the ambrotype began in the early 1860s. In 1868, Cutting's ambrotype patent extension was denied by the patent office. Jerimiah Gurney, a leading photographer at 349 Broadway, New York City, co-signed Hall's patent. On 13 November 1853 Gurney was awarded first prize in a photographic contest sponsored by Edward Anthony. He was awarded a silver pitcher for his tinted whole plate daguerreotype of a mother and her child. Several medals were awarded to Gurney in 1857, at the annual exhibition of the American Institute.² Gurney objected to the ambrotype process, claiming that it was not permanent. He preferred the hallotype claiming that it could be ‘colored by transparent painting put on from behind; — and the ambrotype is taken on one piece of glass and covered by another, the atmosphere being excluded by a balsamic cement, which secure the faces to each other’.³ A business venture employing the name Hall & Gurney was established at 349 Broadway, known as the ‘Palace of Art’, to exploit the hallotype process.⁴     

The Photo Archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Abstract

The primary function of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is educational. Its secondary role, no less important, is to preserve and record the history of the Holocaust for future generations. In this regard, the collection and preservation of photographs, textual records and artefacts that enable us to study this tragic period are of paramount importance. ‘After Daguerre, every man's family acquired a visual past: a tangible link with the history of the species’, wrote John Szarkowski in Looking at Photographs.¹ Now, after many years of dogged collecting, the ‘family’ of Holocaust survivors has a heavily documented visual past lodged at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Established in 1989, the photo archive of the Museum now counts 60 000 photographs in its roster. The photographs document Jewish life throughout the world before the Second World War, as well as the history of the persecution and extermination of Europe's Jews as well as non-Jewish victims. It is one of the largest such repositories in the world and one which historians, journalists and researchers ask to use every day.     

Lewis Hine

Abstract

‘I'm afraid, Mr Hine, that you haven't the broad sociological background required,’ said a distinguished adviser when Lewis W. Hine announced his decision to give up teaching at the Ethical Culture School and set up as a ‘social’ photographer. ‘Nonsense,’ retorted Arthur Kellogg, ‘it's wonderful to find a photographer who has any sociological background’.     

The success of Samuel Bourne in India

Abstract

In their 1955 edition of The History of Photography Helmut and Alison Gernsheim noted that the work of Samuel Bourne has ‘undeservedly fallen into oblivion’. They recognized the outstanding quality of the photographs produced on Bourne's excursions in India during the 1860s, including three arduous treks into the western Himalayas. By drawing on the young Englishman's own engaging accounts of his exploits in the mountains — a series of articles published in The British Journal of Photography — the Gernsheims were able to provide ‘an impression of a truly unique achievement’.¹ This initial effort to rescue Bourne from the limbo of forgotten landscapists was continued some twenty years later when his expeditionary work was featured in Ann Turner's BBC television series, ‘Pioneers of Photography’, which was brought out in book form by Aaron Scharf in 1976.² Other serious examinations of Bourne's photographs soon followed, the most significant of these being Arthur Ollman's brief but excellent monograph published in conjunction with an exhibition sponsored by the Friends of Photography in California.³ While the collective writings on Bourne thus ensured his entry into the mainstream of photo-history and provided the groundwork for future studies, numerous questions still remained unanswered regarding Bourne's entry into the photographic trade in India, his professional success, and the impact of his work on his contemporaries. Moreover, previous discussions of the artist's pictorial accomplishments have been limited to selected works with little or no investigation of the possible meanings attached to variations of formats and subtly interrelated series of images, including their cultural and social significance.⁴     

Books Received and Noted

Abstract

In August 1920 Lu Marten published a two-part essay entided ‘History, satire, Dada and more’ in Die Rote Fahne, the newspaper of the German Communist Party (KPD).¹ Written as a response to Gertrud Alexander's review of the First International Dada Trade Fair, which had appeared the previous month and characterized the exhibition as a manifestation of ‘bourgeois decadence’,² Märten's essay articulated a more complex understanding of Dada's significance by locating it within satire's historical development. Märten described how the bourgeoisie's replacement of the epic and fable with new literary genres had stripped satire of its popular character. Confined to the treatment of narrow, individual issues in the bourgeois humour magazine, satire had degenerated into a telling of jokes; and any illusions that humour magazines such as Simplicissimus provided social criticism had been dispelled by their performance during the recent war and revolution which had revealed their true class interest. The proletariat was increasingly in the grip of the bourgeois press, because capitalism's control of the publishing industry deprived the proletariat of the technological means necessary for modem satire. This circumstance, Marten argued, was the field in which Dada operated as the negative side of proletarian satire. Its important discovery was that art was no longer necessary for satire since capitalism's material body was satire itself Materials published by the bourgeois press could be arranged for satirical effect and ‘the simple reproduction, the photograph also replaces art here’.³ This destructive impulse was one side of a dialectic that Marten viewed as offering hope for proletarian satire's new beginning.     

Surreal Encounters: Science,Surrealism and the Re‐Circulation of a Crime‐Scene Photograph

This article examines the implications of the surrealist appropriation and re‐circulation of a crime‐scene photograph depicting the body of Mary Kelly, Jack the Ripper's final victim. The article traces the trajectory of the photograph, taken in 1888, as it shifts from its role as a visual police record in London, to evidence of sexual sadism in the developing field of criminology in France, before finally becoming an object in the text of a play, ‘Regards sur l'enfer anthropoclasique’, by surrealist Maurice Heine, and being published in 1936 along with that play in Minotaure, a luxury art review. As it is re‐framed in various contexts, however, the photograph retains some of its prior meaning. A key point in the argument is that this kind of appropriation reveals how photographic meaning is produced and anchored.     

Edward Steichen

Abstract

‘The camera’, Steichen wrote in 1947, ‘serves as an instrument for waging war and as an historian in recording the war’.¹ He spoke from experience. By this time, as a veteran of both world wars, he was reflecting upon a long life devoted to photography as art, as an advertising medium, as social commentary, and as war documentation. Although Steichen often used his camera as a very effective propaganda device in wartime, his hatred of war motivated him to use the same instrument to persuade people that war would never provide a lasting solution to human problems.²     

Union Cases Based on Designs by Bertel Thorvaldsen

Abstract

The recent article¹ on the use of Thorvaldsen's medallion designs by Peck for the decoration of two of the Peck and Hdvorsen cases made no reference to its use by other manufacturers. We have a case (see illustration), not recorded by Rinhart², nominally of quarter plate size, of fine quality and bearing the moulded legend contained within an oval ‘SMITH'S PATENT. 1860’. (Indicated ‘A’ on illustration.) It bears the title ‘Morning’ and there appears to be no indication of the engraver of the die. The paper label contained within is merely printed     

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 painterí lens

Abstract

The importance of the artist Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) as a forerunner of international tachism painting of ‘Art informal’ has long been recognized. It is surprising, therefore, that Laszlo Glozer's new study, Wols Photograph, is the first monograph devoted to the artist. Even more surprising, perhaps, is the author's concentration on Wols' activity as a a role usually not identified with his high art-historical position. Actually, Glozer is at pains to characterize the artist as a tragic, creative unity; we realize as we read the admirable text that the author might have taken any aspect of Wols' production as his point of departure and ended essentially with the same picture of the artist. ‘Wols’ art is autobiographical', Glozer writes. ‘Behind the transformations of the expressive forms, it remains self-expression to the end. This unconditional situation is constant.’ Wois himself is responsible for the remark, ‘il faut savoir que tout rime’, and Glozer discovers the truth of the dictum, not only for the totality of Wols' art but for his life as well.     

James Van Der Zee's Harlem book of the dead

Abstract

‘Night Funeral in Harlem’ by Langston Hughes, which was first published in 1951, exemplifies the importance of funerals to African-Americans throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Like James Van Der Zee's Harlem Book of the Dead, the poem is about the crossroads of life and death. Like the Haitian Voudoun God Ghede, whose capacity for living is legendary but whose symbol is the cross on the tomb, the Hughes poem and the Van Der Zee book show how the bodies of the dead affect the souls of the living. Van Der Zee's book is about judgement: about how the living and the dead view each other at their final encounter. This dialogue also describes Ghede who is lord of the interaction between the living and the dead and who is ‘the final judge of a man's life and the worth of his soul in death’.¹ Through its poems and pictures the book depicts people at a cosmic threshold, and like Ghede, who is guardian of the history and heritage of the race, the Harlem Book of the Dead is intimately connected to the culture from which it springs.²     

‘Princess’ Alice

Abstract

Burr Mcintosh had an enviable job as a photographer; at the turn of the century, he was called the ‘special photographer … to [a popular] Theodore Roosevelt’¹. With such credentials, Mcintosh accompanied William Howard Taft's Republican peace entourage to the Philippines and to China in 1905, bathing in the knowledge that his calling and appointment were secure. He was obviously smitten by ‘the Princess’, Alice Roosevelt, Teddy's headstrong daughter, and took every opportunity to photograph her with the other politicos on the junket. Alice mentions these events m her autobiography, Crowded Hours     

Life painting and light painting: Photography and the early Russian avant-garde

Abstract

‘At worst a colour photograph, at best a graveyard on the edge of town’.1 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Posledniaia glava ncokonchennoi avtobiografii’, in Vasilii Rakitin and Andrei Sarab'anov, eds., N. I. Khardzhiev. Stat'i ob avangarde, Moscow: RA 1997, vol. I, 130. Malevich may well have made this remark after looking through the journal Solntse Rossii (Petrograd), No. 293 (September 1915), which ran an obituary and extensive photographic tribute to Konstantin Makovskii. That is how Kazimir Malevich once described nineteenth-century Realism and the stylization of the fin de siecte that had preceded his establishment of Suprematism in 1915. He emphasized further that for him there was no cardinal difference between ‘naturalism’ (his generic denotation of all pre-Suprematist painting) and ‘photography’. Yet only a decade later Aleksandr Rodchenko was exhorting the new society to dismiss painting and to ‘photograph and be photographed’,² replacing his paintbrush with a handcamera — and zhivopis' with svetopis'— to produce some of the most remarkable photographs of the twentieth century.3 ‘hivopis’ (‘life painting’), while an early, indigenous word for ‘photography’ was ‘svetopis’ (‘light painting’); soon, however, replaced by fotografia.      

Peter Henry Emerson

Abstract

In his recent study, Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary sees the writings on perception by the German physician, physiologist, and mathematician, Hermann von Helmholtz, as part of an epistemic shift, the emergence of what Crary terms a ‘modernizing vision’.¹ His study proposes that ‘during the first few decades of the nineteenth century a new kind of observer took shape in Europe radically different from the type of observer dominant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’.² Helmholtz's thcory of perception contributes to this emergence of a ‘new observer’, a theory in which sight is no longer severed from the body. Helmholtz's account of a corporealizcd encounter with the phenomenal world marks a shift from the notion of a static monocular eye organizing our sensory experience and constitutes the notation of an autonomous vision, of an optical experience that was produced by and within the subject. Light, for example, is shown to be produced not from without but in darkness, the mere effect of the stimulation of nerve ends by electrical impulses.³ Such a theory highlighted not only the significance of the body in perception but an interrelationship between the senses. The sense of sight could be triggered by physical contact; a blow to the eye created light, made one see ‘stars’.     

William Eggleston

Abstract

The significance of photography in both the opening and the shaping of the Western frontier has been more extensively analysed than its role in Florida has been.¹ It appears, however, that photography has been an equally important factor in the shaping of ideas of this state and its people. Florida's economic boom was at its most intense in the 1920s, so that its ‘discovery’ by the industrialized North-eastern USA occurred in a world where photography, its inexpensive and ubiquitous reproduction, and the corollary modern arts of advertizing and political manipulation, were fully refined and internalized by popular culture.