Book reviews

Abstract

A joint exhibition of Ansel Adams's Museum Set portfolio of seventy-five images plus one hundred photographs selected from his centennial project for the University of California, Fiat Lux, was due to open at the University of California, Irvine, on 8 January 1991. The installation of The Museum Set photographs was near completion when museum scientist and installation designer, Phyllis Lutjeans, noticed that Sequoia Gigantea Roots, Yosemite National Park, California, c.1950 (figures 1 and 2), plate number 55 in the exhibition catalogue,¹ was reversed, from the image hanging on the wall before her. Ms Lutjeans had been using the catalogue as a guide to affix labels for the exhibition.     

PHOTOGRAPHIC EXCEPTIONALISM

Asserting that photographic education is an understudied area of photographic historiography, this article makes a case study of the entry of creative photography into US higher education in the post-Second World War period as a means to extend Stephen Bann’s notion of “photographic exceptionalism” beyond the historiography of nineteenth-century visual culture. Charting the trajectories in post-war America of two creative photographic pedagogies, the integrated model identified with Moholy-Nagy and the medium-specific one identified with the proponents of what is here called “Aspen modernism” (Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Ansel Adams and Minor White), it is argued that there is an Other to mid-twentieth-century photographic exceptionalism that signals its vulnerability. According to Bann, photographic exceptionalism still substantially informs thinking and writing on photography: so how did it survive postmodernism? The final section of the article looks at the legacies of the separatist model for what is now called “art photography” in relation to the institutional landscape of the art world. It is argued that the Photo Boom of the 1970s set in motion a new, institutional medium-specificity for photography and that this too has its vulnerabilities.     

Polaroid,Aperture and Ansel Adams: Rethinking the Industry-Aesthetics Divide

This article takes the history of Polaroid photography as an opportunity to question a presupposition that underpins much thinking on photography: the split between industrial (i.e. useful) applications of photography and its fine art (i.e. aesthetic) manifestations. Critics as ideologically opposed as Peter Bunnell and Abigail Solomon-Godeau steadfastly maintain the existence of this separation of utility and aesthetics in photography, even if they take contrasting views on its meaning and desirability. However, Polaroid, at one time the second largest company in the photo industry, not only enjoyed close relations with those key representatives of fine art photography, Ansel Adams and the magazine Aperture, but it also intermittently asserted the ‘essentially aesthetic’ nature of its commercial and industrial activities in its own internal publications. The divide between industry and aesthetics is untenable, then, but this does not mean that the two poles were reconciled at Polaroid. While Aperture may have underplayed its commercial connections and Polaroid may have retrospectively exaggerated its own contributions to the development of fine art photography, most interesting are the contradictions and tensions that arise when the industrial and the aesthetic come together. The present article draws on original research undertaken at the Polaroid Corporation archives held at the Baker Library, Harvard, as well as with the Ansel Adams correspondence with Polaroid, held at the Polaroid Collections in Concord, Massachusetts.     

Photography at the Amon Carter Museum

Abstract

This slender but handsome volume samples a tantalizing forty-eight of the 200 000 photographs in the Amon Carter Museum's holdings of American photography. Devoted to American art, the museum collects photography in three major areas, all represented here: fine art photography, historical photography and artist collections. In Singular Moments one finds great names like Ansel Adams, iconic images like Barbara Morgan's Martha Graham — Letter to the World (Swirl), documentary work by less famous practitioners such as Carl Mydans and Laura Gilpin, and fascinating glimpses into the nineteenth centmy through the lenses of unknown early photographers, especially those of the American West. The book ably reproduces a great variety of techniques, from daguerreotypes, chloride prints and photogravures to more recent processes such as dye destruction prints as well as gelatine silver prints. A bibliography gives the novice reader an excellent starting place for further reading and hints at the vast scholarship that the entire collection represents. Singular Moments invites all those interested in photography to watch this museum for future exhibitions from its enormous and evidently beautiful collection.     

Ansel Adams and Georgia O'Keeffe: On the Intangible in Art and Nature

Ansel Adams and Georgia O'Keeffe, although committed realist artists using straightforward photographic technique and an objective style of painting, transfigured the natural scene artistically to express profoundly metaphysical responses to nature. Both Adams and O'Keeffe were aware of manifold currents of mystical thought in the 1930s through personal contact with the theosophical teachers A. R. Orage and Jean Toomer. Treating landscape features as psychological and spiritual phenomena, they shared a lifelong quest for creative development and self‐discovery through the forms of nature.     

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.     

Daguerreotype Portraiture

Abstract

Facing the Light is a major national exhibition of 110 daguerreotype portraits gathered from 35 sources. In his introduction to this catalogue for the exhibition, Pfister outlines his criteria for selection in the National Portrait Gallery's show. For consideration, the works had to be ‘unmistakably identified portraits of nationally prominent individuals … [whose] inclusion was first determined by the existence of a striking example of the daguerrean [sic] art’. This respect for the medium, as well as for the likenesses represented, makes the book a happy blend that should appeal to a broad audience. It is fitting that a national exhibition sponsored in part by the government and in part by the public-minded Polaroid Corporation should have set itself this task.     

Two Stieglitz Autochromes: Katherina and Käti Raab

Abstract

In the course of preparatory research for the exhibition ‘Frank Eugene — The Dream of Beauty’, several boxes of autochromes privately owned by a Munich industrialist came to light. These autochromes were taken by the American art photographers Frank Eugene and Alfred Stieglitz, probably between 1907 and 1909 in Tutzing. In the meantime, the colour photographs taken by Eugene have been reproduced in the catalogue of the above-mentioned exhibition (Ulrich Pohlmann, ed., Frank Eugene — The Dream of Beauty, Munich: Nazraeli 1995, 176-79).     

The international reception of The Family of Man

This paper examines the role of The Family of Man in American cultural diplomacy. The exhibition was circulated around the world by the United States Information Agency (USIA), a government unit charged with distributing information about the culture and civic institutions of the US. The reception of the exhibition by the international viewing public is discussed. The discussion is informed, in part, by photographs documenting visitors to the exhibition.     

Ansel Adams and George Waters: Photographer and Printer

Ansel Adams's photographic career was paralleled by his desire to achieve the finest quality of photomechanical reproduction of his images for his many fine printed books. For thirty years, he relied upon letterpress halftone to recreate the aesthetic effect of his ‘f/64’ style. In the 1960s, as letterpress for photographic reproduction was phased out by most commercial printers, George Waters introduced Adams to the new technology of offset lithography. Together, they formed a highly successful collaboration as artist and master printer from 1969 to 1979.     

Greenback Shutterbug

Abstract

Maud Sulter combines a number of art media in new ways. She was born in Glasgow in 1960 and has published two books of poetry. The first was titled As a Blackwoman (1985) and her second book, Zabat: Poetics of a Family Tree, came out in 1989. She's a visual artist who uses photography first and foremost, but she also draws and paints. She's currently Momart Artist-in-Residence at the Tate Gallery in Liverpool. Maud Suiter describes herself as a cultural activist, and she's concerned with some very large issues. Her exhibition, Zabat, means, variously, ‘a sacred dance’, ‘an occasion of power’ (as in Witches Sabbath), and ‘black women's rite of passage’. The exhibition re-presents the nine Muses–each is portrayed by a black woman with symbolic attributes such as a flute, flowers, a picture, and so on. The writer Alice Walker appears as the ‘Muse of Comedy’. Ysaye Maria Barnwell, of Sweet Honey in the Rock, is ‘Polyhymnia, the Muse of Sacred Song’.     

A new subliminal channel based on fiat‐Shamir's signature scheme

Abstract

This paper constructs a subliminal channel in a RSA‐like variant of the Fiat‐Shamir signature scheme to transfer any secret information. The proposed subliminal channel, unlike that in El‐Gamal signature scheme, can avoid the serious shortcoming that a subliminal receiver can undetectably forge a signer's signature. In addition, our channel also overcomes almost all shortcomings from which the subliminal channel in El‐Gamal signature scheme suffer.     

Helen Levitt's Cropping

Abstract

Helen Levitt was born in 1913. After her initial success in 1943 with a one-person exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (and the articles that came out on that occasion) she was held in high esteem, and continued to be exhibited at the Modern but was not known nationally except to a community mainly of photographers and friends. The publication of A Way of Seeing in 1965 was followed by a second edition in 1981 and a third edition in 1989,¹ in the course of which her work was gradually to become better known through the general growth of photographic interest, and through her consequent inclusion in gallery exhibitions and publications.²     

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.     

Julia Margaret Cameron

Abstract

Two new publications examine and celebrate the contribution of Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) to the history of photography. The books were published in conjunction with a travelling exhibition of Cameron photographs circulating to the National Portrait Gallery (London), the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (Bradford) and the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles). Julian Cox, Assistant Curator of Photographs at the Getty Museum, and Colin Ford, founding head of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (Bradford), compiled the catalogue raisonne and edited the accompanying essays appearing in Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs. Colin Ford is sole author of Julia Margaret Cameron: A Critical Biography. These splendid publications significantly expand our understanding of Cameron and her photography.     

Ella Fuller of Ypsilanti; a woman photographer in Michigan

Abstract

The photographic work of Ella Fuller was unknown until 1970, when more than 225 anonymous glass negatives came to the University of Michigan as the gift of H. Mark Hildebrandt, who bought them at an auction in rural Michigan in 1968. The plates turned out to be the work of Ella Grace Frisbee Fuller, a woman of Quaker origin. Born in 1872 in Belleville, near Detroit, she took up photography soon after her marriage in 1894 to Ira Fuller, a farmer from Ypsilanti Township. At about the same time she was reporting the events of her small community to a local newspaper. The plates span a period from around 1900 to just before the First World War. From later years only run-of-the-mill snapshots survive. Fuller took much interest in the temperance movement and at the age of 86 made her first air trip to attend an international Women's Christian Temperance Union conference in Mexico City in 1959. She died in 1968 at the age of 94.     

Development of a FTA versus Parts Count Method Model: Comparative FTA

This study adopts a special Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) method called Comparative FTA to compare the reliability of an electronic braking system with its mechanical counterpart. To this end two Top Events, ‘Ineffective parking braking’ and ‘Wheels jamming during emergency braking’, were analysed. One of the limitations of classic FTA is that the setting up of the tree diagram requires the long‐term involvement—one to two months according to Fiat Auto—of specialists of the system being studied. For this reason, therefore, when dealing with relatively complex systems, classic FTA is only used when safety is involved. This paper introduces a simplified FTA model based on the same principle as the Parts Count Method, which limits its attention to the new branches, thereby avoiding the study of all the branches of the tree, in order to make FTA management easier and to encourage its use. The probability that a Top Event takes place is therefore evaluated by studying the different causes which diversify the solutions considered. This approach is a lean practice to minimize the resources and the time of the analysis. It has guaranteed very satisfactory results and, therefore, Fiat Auto has introduced the practice in their Corporate Instructions. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Illustrating the ‘Reports by the Juries’ of the great exhibition of 1851; Talbot,Henneman, and their failed commission

Abstract

A major publishing event in the history of photography has gone largely unnoticed in the scholarship of the field. This was the appearance, in 1852, of the Reports by the Juries of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Published in four volumes, the Reports were illustrated with 155 photographs. 140 presentation sets of this work were ordered by the Royal Commissioners of the Exhibition to be g1ven to notables of countries participating in the exhibition as a record of the great event.¹     

Concept and convention

Abstract

There are, of course, many books on the history of photography, among them fundamental and profound works like those of Beaumont Newhall, Helmut Gernsheim, and Otto Stelzer. However, since 1931, when Walter Benjamin's Kleine Geschichte der Photographie was published, only a few books on the aesthetics of the photographic medium have appeared in print. Here is one of those, and one that provokes analysis and contradiction.     

Notes & Reviews

Abstract

Published in asssocaition with an exhibition organized by the Dallas Musem of Art, Thomas Struth, this volume presents a comprehensive survey of the photographer's labours of the last twenty-five years. The lavishly reproduced images catalogue Struth's major bodies of work. These include his well known photographs of museum visitors and the human-altered landscape, as well as the less frequently discussed series of portraits and pictures of nature.