MINIATURE LANDSCAPES

This visual essay examines Sharqi, a collection of 27 polaroid photographs that are the result of Nicos Philippou’s decade-long photographic and theoretical investigation of Cypriot topography. The essay explores the ways in which Sharqi challenges existing photographic representations of Cyprus, produced mainly in the early-to-mid twentieth century by photographers, by travellers and by the state itself, while raising relevant questions about how: (a) Cypriot landscape photography often carries a romanticized and orientalizing gaze that attests as much to the island’s specific colonial past as to photography’s ties to imperialism, and (b) photography has often become a vehicle for perpetuating a Greek-Cypriot nationalism on the island. Finally, the essay addresses the documentary, autobiographical and self-referential nature of polaroid photography by discussing specific photographs from the Sharqi series. This article also looks at Sharqi in relation to relevant historic examples from the work of Ed Ruscha and Walker Evans.     

ALAIR GOMES IN THE UNITED STATES

This article is mainly focused on the photographic work of Alair Gomes during the 1970s and 1980s in the United States. The analyses include photo essays published in the Performance,The Advocate and Advocate MEN magazines, as well as in Gay Sunshine journal and the Artists Almanac. The five photo essays feature a series of visual elements which characterize the work of Alair Gomes, most notably the sequential and multiple photographic images and print media as space of artistic production. This multiplicity of elements broadens the relationship established by his historiography between photography and homoeroticism. The proposition was to offer a new reading of Alair Gomes’ work, highlighting new aspects along the artistic path of his photographic work.     

The Gernsheim Collection

This article focuses on the photographs of public sculptures used on belle époque picture postcards of Brussels. The subject is approached from two perspectives. Firstly, we analyse the conventions of in situ photography of public sculpture in light of the genre’s reliance on painterly and photographic traditions, as well as its adoption of visual strategies derived from amateur and snapshot photography. Secondly, we explore the role of the photographic mise-en-scène of picture postcards in constructing an ideological as well as visual perspective on public monuments and the cityscape. The in situ photography of urban statues for picture postcards can be regarded as a photographic genre at the intersection of documentary art reproduction practices and amateur photography of the city. Moreover, the picture postcards discussed in this essay confirm and propagate dominant discourses on the monument and the cityscape, even if at the same time such visions were challenged. In the case of Brussels, the postcards demonstrate a preference for a monumental, impressive cityscape, worthy of representing the Belgian nation and capable of legitimising it through views of sculpture as a grand art, serving the worship of grands hommes.     

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.     

Recent Publications

This article examines the absence of atrocity in the photographic series The Course of History by the Belgian-born, New York-based photographer Bart Michiels (1964–). It shows, in beautiful, large-format prints, seemingly innocent landscapes and confined views of nature. Only when viewers read the titles of the photographs do they become aware of the violent history of the sites. These turn out to be the fields of fierce European battles such as Verdun, Waterloo and Stalingrad. The present article reviews recent trends towards using place as a motif in contemporary art photography and focuses on the ‘empty’ landscape as a pictorial strategy that opens up a narrative space, one that needs to be completed by the viewer. The absence evoked by the image is treated as antithetical to the conventional ethos of photography, which canonically stands as the evidence of an occurrence.     

‘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.     

Photo-Graphy, “The Shadow In The Cave,” Its Pain And Love: The ethics of photography

This paper maps out photography’s newer ethics by examining Boris Mikhailov’s Case History that often stirs controversy over its bold depiction of human misery. The paper criticizes the idea that photographers should not represent “the other’s pain”: an idea that has sabotaged the medium’s inherent visual desire in order to prioritize its moral responsibility. In that idea is found a resilient Platonic antagonism against image, a logo-centric prejudice that marks a biased demarcation between art and politics in photography theory. The paper challenges this photographic Platonism through recent arguments that illuminate the medium’s inter-regimic, dialectical, redemptive roles (Jacques Rancière, Walter Benjamin, Ariella Azoulay, et al.). With this theoretical challenge, the paper aims to outline a new ethics of photography for an era in which the image’s “pandemic” growth is resetting the mode of human communication and the role of photography.     

Kurt Tucholsky,John Heartfield and Deutschland,Deutschland über Alles

This essay analyses Kurt Tucholsky and John Heartfield's 1929 Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles. In this ‘picture‐book’ right‐wing nationalism, the military, the democratic system, and capitalism were trenchantly criticized. This essay argues, however, that Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles is as much about the role of photography in society as it is about Weimar's political situation. The late 1920s are generally seen as a period of medium optimism in which the new photography was in the forefront. Yet a close analysis of the use of photography in Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles nuances the so‐called optimism of Weimar visual culture and its sudden disruption by the advent of fascism in the 1930s. While from the early 1910s onwards, Tucholsky had promoted the polemical power of photography, his position shifted by the end of the 1920s. An ambivalence marked Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles: on the one hand the photographic medium was used as a critical tool; on the other, the book reflects an underlying critique of and frustration with photojournalism and its association with urban modernity.     

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.     

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     

NEW MIXTURES

Some have talked about a crisis in documentary photography since its inter- and post-war heydays. But more recently a new kind of art-documentary has developed with a self-reflexive approach towards the limits and the possibilities of photography. The spectrum between documentary and art provides photography with a specific opportunity to address difficult subject matter between the personal and the political. Leaving the discussion of “the politics of representation” — so dominant in the 1980s — aside and instead departing from a handful of newer theoretical framings which try to formulate an ethically responsive, activist and transitive form of photographic agency (such as Roberts, Thrift, Butler and Azoulay), this article identifies and discusses a current in contemporary photography of new conceptual strategies of socially and politically engaged documentary. This strategy is called “new mixtures” because it mixes hitherto separated photographic forms such as family and cell phone photos, reportage and conceptual and archival forms. It is identified as a global tendency, but more closely exemplified by the work of Scandinavian photographers Kent Klich and Tina Enghoff. As such the article identifies what is called both a “social” as well as a more “positive” take on both theory and photography, which has taken place in the decade that photographies has existed.     

Envisioning Modernity,Practising Desire: Baby and Family Photographic Portraiture in Korea

Portraiture is one of the most common practices of photography around the world. Different cultures have developed distinctive types of portraits, from the post-mortem photographs of the Victorian era to the funerary portraiture of East Asia. Korea's unique set of photographic portrait types revolves around the stages of life: a portrait on the hundredth day after birth and the first birthday; family portraits on the sixtieth, seventieth and eightieth birthdays; and a portrait for use at the subject's funeral. These constitute photographs as rites of passage, commemorating the importance of certain stages in life, and such commemorative portraiture has come to comprise an integral part of modern traditions in Korea. The development of photographic portraiture as a modern ritual is closely related to intellectual movements led by Korean elites under colonial rule (1910–45); it was nevertheless under the military regime (1961–92) that family and baby photographic portraiture in South Korea truly began to reflect familial desires entangled with those of the state. During the country's ‘compressed modernisation’, a term used to describe the rapid, lopsided industrialisation characterising the military regime, the public began to appreciate specialised photographic practices that highlighted ‘modern’ family structure and values. This article argues that family and baby studio portraits, as ‘rite of passage’ practices, not only reflect the changing demographics of the population – the shift from extended families in rural areas to nuclear families in urban centres – but also promote a family model suited to the modernisation scheme of the military government.     

Motherhood Reimag(in)ed: A study of domestic photography in the digital age

This essay presents a reflective and critical investigation into the relationship between photographs of children and maternal experience. It employs Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida as a model for the project’s structure, style, and methodology; accordingly, images represent sites of inquiry and discovery within the text. In 20 sections, images, reflections, theories, and anecdotes are pieced together to perform an analysis of domestic photography in an attempt to access the essence of motherhood and understand what that essence demands of and means for mothers. The critical apparatus consists of scholarship related to vernacular photography, family photography, feminist motherhood, and critical theory. The essay argues that photography in the digital age ultimately dissolves distinctions between mother and child, image and identity, and reproduction and representation. At the same time, it considers the inventive potential of photographs and photographic practices to reclaim and validate personal understandings of motherhood.     

Von Stuck and photography

Abstract

Just as this Stieglitz issue was going to the printer the above catalogue arrived from Munich. Imagine our surprise to discover four photographic studies for Franz von Stuck's Wounded Amazon (pp. 25, 64), taken by von Stuck in collaboration with his wife Mary around 1904 (see previous item, ‘Alfred Stieglitz's Apples’). It is possible that Stieglitz saw these photographic studies as well as the painting and drawing: after all, he was in Munich in 1904 when they were being made. Perhaps he discussed photography with the von Stucks. There were clear connections between members of the Photo-Secession and the Munich painters. Steichen photographed von Stuck in 1901, Frank Eugene made a portrait around 1907, and Coburn another in 1908 (see pp. 48-51).     

Five Cent Fantasies: Photographic Experimentation in Illustrated Song Slides

This article examines the production and consumption of illustrated song lantern slides. Motivated by the commercial success of Tin Pan Alley songs, slide companies began illustrating songs with live action photography in the early years of the twentieth century. Shown between reels of film, the slides were an attraction themselves and an integral part of the filmgoers’ experience. The photographic experimentation in these slides, especially that of the firm Scott and Van Altena, is surprisingly novel. They frequently use multiple photograph negatives to exaggerate spatial and scale differences or frame narrative scenes. The author concludes that the layering and scale differences frequently seen in these slides allowed the company to expedite manufacture by recycling photographic images and also appealed to a popular taste for visual tricks in modern American visual culture. Although the imagery was nostalgic and conventional, the compositions challenged the viewer to see in a new, fragmented way. The often surreal effects show that the line between avant-garde experimental photography and commercial photography was not so clearly drawn.     

Postwar Australian landscape photography Olive Cotton and Max Dupain

Abstract

It is now widely accepted that Australian Pictorialist photography had two main phases, clearly delineated by Gael Newton in her pioneering catalogue Australian Pictorial Photography.¹ The first, beginning around the tum of the century, was distinguished by the predominance of a lowtone, atmospheric style. The Adelaide-born photographer John Kauffmann was one of the movement's leading exponents, promoting a soft-focus impressionist imagery.² Pictorialist images from this period bore a close relationship to their British and European counterparts; they were generally not recognizable as Australian in either subject-matter or style. The second phase, evident by 1917, was initiated by members of the Sydney Camera Circle; their aim was, Jack Cato later wrote, to ‘interpret something of the bright light and spaciousness of Australia’.³ The followers, aptly named the Sunshine School, owed much to traditions in Australian landscape painting. Sue Smith has noted that Australian Pictorialists, ‘presented familiar themes — the bush landscape — the gum tree, the selector's hut — in the guise of landscape painting as it had been practised by artists from [Tom] Roberts, and [Arthur] Streeton in the 1890s to [Hans] Heysen, [Elioth] Gruner and [J. J.] Hilder in the twentieth century’.⁴     

Thomas Glaister and early Australian photography

Abstract

In common with research into the early photographic history of most colonial societies, attempts to learn more about the photographers who worked in nineteenth-century Australia can be an exasperating exercise. Many of these early practitioners arrived in Australia as immigrants from Europe or America, often intent on concealing their origins, or, more optimistically, simply wanting to establish a new life in a new country without the encumbrances of their own pasts. Despite the technical skill and the cumbersome equipment required to produce early photographic images, many new arrivals in the colony took up photography principally as a means of making money, either as itinerant country photographers (Jack Cato called Australian photography in the 1840s a ‘vagrant process’¹) or, later in the cities, through studio portraiture and views of colonial streets and buildings. Aesthetic considerations were often secondary to the desire for a ‘good likeness’ produced in the shortest amount of time.     

Taki Kōji,Provoke, and the Structuralist Turn in Japanese Image Theory, 1967–70

This article explores the intellectual underpinnings of the late-1960s Japanese photography collective Provoke. It argues that Provoke was more radical and theoretically inflected than is conventionally understood, its project being the forging of a ‘scientific’ photography capable of unveiling the ‘untruth’ of established relations of power and knowledge production in Japan. I present Provoke’s central figure to be Taki Kōji, who in 1967–68 published a series of articles that introduced structuralism into Japanese image discourse and established the basis for Provoke’s theoretically informed practice, or praxis. The article outlines how, in response to a variety of influences (Roland Barthes, Matsumoto Toshio, and Kevin Lynch, among others, but apparently not Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser), Taki formulated the notion of a unified and self-regulating ideological ‘environment’ (kankyō) that is made manifest in a variety of seemingly neutral and benign cultural forms. Additionally, he theorised a semiotically transgressive photographic image, derived from Barthes’s early studies of photography, which he believed could escape language and code – and thereby the ideological superstructure. I conclude by showing that Taki’s emancipatory project, while singular in relation to contemporaneous Marxist oppositional endeavours in Europe, was ultimately self-defeating: the efforts of Provoke’s photographers to strip their images of readable codes by deliberately ‘mishandling’ their cameras only worked to create new ones, and the shakiness and blurriness of the resulting photographs became a mere style.     

Measuring the Heavens: Charles S. Peirce and Astronomical Photography

Taking its point of departure from the current digitisation of the Harvard Astronomical Plate Collection, this article follows the plates back to the time when the status of photography as a research tool for astronomers was still to be established. It focuses on Charles S. Peirce, who, while employed by the US Coast Survey, made astronomical observations and contributed to the deliberation over visual and photographic methods. Particular attention is paid to Peirce’s involvement in early explorations of photography’s potential as a measurement tool. The guiding assumption is that approaching photography as a tool, rather than as a sign or representation, offers new inroads into the old problem of photography’s revealing powers and its capacity to serve as a means of discovery in science. Drawing on Peirce’s scientific practice as an alternative resource for theory construction, this article contributes to the ongoing efforts to conceptualise the productive or generative dimension of photographic methods. It concludes by pointing to the diagrammatic notion of evidence developed late in Peirce’s philosophical career, proposing that photography be reconceived as a diagrammatic tool.     

British Nature Photographers in Wild Life

This article concerns the work of a group of British wildlife photographers just prior to World War I. A photographic exhibition in 1912 by members of the Zoological Photographic Club led to the publication of Wild Life: An Illustrated Monthly, edited by Douglas English. Wild Life was published between 1913 and 1918, and, especially in the pre‐war issues, it achieved an impressive standard of reproduction of natural history photography. Mammals and birds were pictured in their natural habitats; hitherto most wildlife pictures had been taken in Zoos, where the subjects were shown out of context. The editor of Wild Life believed that nature‐photographers should have an opportunity to mitigate or correct artistic defects in their negatives. I argue that it is a wildlife photograph's consideration of content and context that determines its artistic merit.