The Cut and the Continuum: Sophie Ristelhueber’s Anatomical Atlas

From her early photographs of the ruinous aftermath of the Lebanon War in Beirut (1982) to her more recent images of bomb craters in Eleven Blowups (2006), the French artist Sophie Ristelhueber has been intent to maintain, in her own metaphor, ‘the analytical distance of an anatomy lesson’. Exhibiting the evidence of warfare but withholding their explanation, Ristelhueber’s provocative gesture of making art of war, removing human conflicts from their political contexts to render them as still-lifes, ready-mades, earthworks, or surrealist poems, is patently anti-journalistic. In keeping with the artist’s surgical analogy, this article explores Ristelhueber’s aesthetic mode of address as one that shares its fundamental operation with that of photography – namely, to make a cut. Retracing the morphology of recurring imprints and injuries that appear across the terrestrial and corporeal expanses traversed in her work, the article considers the ways in which these cuts pertain to the transformative power of violence and images alike.     

Notes & Queries

In the summer of 1966, the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama installed Narcissus Garden in the main grounds of the 33rd Venice Biennale. Fifteen hundred mirrored plastic balls formed the core of a dynamic, complex work, which also included human agents, environmentally determined, ephemeral elements, and photographic images. The common thread, however, was the presence of the artist herself, captured for posterity in nearly every existing photograph of Narcissus Garden. Taken collectively, these images of Kusama and her work create a complicated amalgam of self-publicity and effacement, presenting a complex fusion of artist, image, and object. Photographs do not supplement the sculpture, Narcissus Garden, but function as an integral component of the work, acting as the connective tissue amongst its multiple parts.     

Maoris in focus

Abstract

The virtually simultaneous announcement of the invention of photography in Paris and London in January 1839 marks the “official” birthday of the new technology. The reception given to this announcement in the course of that year, and the subsequent diffusion of knowledge and practice of the technology, show significant differences from country to country. These differences in impact and the rate of take-up may have depended on such factors as the country's proximity to the key events, its level of intellectual openness and general economic development, as well as the ex~stence of key individuals — businessmen and scientists — willing to experiment in the untried processes out of sheer curiosity or for personal gain.     

My photographic career in Shanghai

Abstract

For more than ten years there has been an ever increasing demand for photos that I took showing scenes of Jewish refugees during their years of exile in Shanghai (figure 1). But it had never been my intention, or within my resources, to create a photographic record of the Jewish refugee community which had lived in Shanghai during the Second World War. All this came about rather incidentally. Like most young children, I was fascinated by photography, but the purchase of what I would call a ‘real’ camera was always beyond my financial resources. When I arrived in Shanghai in 1938 I did not even own a camera, but my brother had an Agfa box camera. Such a camera had a fixed-focus lens, and only a single shutter speed, but in good light, on any sunny day, it produced perfectly acceptable pictures. This most basic camera became available to me because my brother had different interests.     

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.     

View of the West

Abstract

Perhaps meaning in Cuban photography has been tied to context more than is the case in other cultures. An island crossroads, Cuba was among the first Latin American nations to receive the foreign harbingers of this invention in 1840, and early daguerreotypes - as well as pictorialist portraits made by other techniques - were produced for those who could afford them. It could be argued that Cuban photography only really begins to deal with that country's reality during the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1895-98.² There, images of emaciated Cuban civilians, starved and mistreated in the Spanish concentration camps, both marked the beginnings of ‘critical realism’ and signalled the complexities that would surround photography in this culture. To Cubans, these photographs were a stimulus in struggling against the atrocities of colonial rule; to the US government, they offered simply one more excuse to invade the island and replace the Spanish flag with the Stars and Stripes.