From the studio to the snapshot: An immigrant photographer of the 1920s

Abstract

In his justly famous work, Looking at Photographs, John Szarkowski remarked¹ that ‘Photography has learned about its nature not only from the great masters, but also from the simple and radical works of photographers of modest aspiration and small renown ….’. It is thanks to critics like Szarkowski that we are encouraged to view photographs on their own terms, instead of always having to compare them to the rigid aesthetic hierarchies of Hochkunst.     

Eudora Welty,photographer

Abstract

That Eudora Welty¹ in addition to her great gifts as a short-story writer should also have been a gifted photographer may come as something of a surprise. One thinks immediately of Wright Morris², another original writer and photographer, whose interest in the art has continued to this day, whereas photographic activity was only a passing phase for Welty. For a time Eudora Welty thought of becoming a professional photographer, but her early portfolios did not sell, while her short stories did. In 1944 Vogue magazine published three of her pictures with an accompanying text, entitled ‘Literature and the lens’, the first of three statements that she has made on the nature of the photograph and of the moment it preserves³. Her photographs are indeed of One Time, One Place, Mississippi in the Depression; A Snapshot Album to quote the title of a collection of her photographs published with a preface in 1971⁴. A new and sumptuous portfolio of 20 well-printed photographs has since appeared⁵.     

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.     

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     

Against the Photograph as Memento Mori

Abstract

The photographic image imposes the idea of the past upon us, and its subject says that it is no more. We feel vaguely conscious that what we see is no longer being done, but was over and done with before appearing here. This is a déjà vécu, an already lived that wants to live again. The voices themselves rise from the grave … (Paul Valéry)¹     

The ‘Peccavi’ Photographs

Abstract

Among the holdings of the Asiatic Library of Bombay, there is a major album entitled Sind Photographs, which has become known to the initiated under the title ‘Peccavi Photographs’, in memory of a delicious political pun¹. All the photographs are portraits, with captions neatly inscribed. None is signed, but one bears the imprint ‘Photo by Capt. Houghton’, which was sufficient to provide researchers with an important clue as to their origin.     

Early magnesium light portraits

Abstract

The suggestion of using flash as a means of giving light rather than to arrest movement was first made by William Crookes, then editor of Photographic News, in October 1859.¹ In a reply to a correspondent, ‘V. C.’, he commented: ‘A still more brilliant light but a terribly expensive one, can be obtained by burning the new metal, magnesium,² in oxygen. A piece of magnesium wire held by one end in the hand, may be lighted at the other extremity by holding it to a candle … It then burns away of its own accord evolving a light insupportably brilliant to the unprotected eye and possessing powerful actinic properties.’     

19th century indian photographers in India

Abstract

It may never be possible to discover who was the first person to use a camera in India. Dr A. Toussaint considers it likely that the Frenchman, Jules Léger, may have taken photographs during his visit to India before establishing a photographic studio in Mauritius in February 1845¹. Josiah Rowe, a Calcutta surveyor, was hailed as ‘the father of photography in India’ by Dr F. J. Mouat, the first president of the Bengal Photographic Society, but as yet no photographs have been found that can be attributed to him. The earliest known photographs were taken by John McCosh, a surgeon in the Bengal establishment of the East India Company's army, during the second Sikh War in 1848-49. He had no doubts about the pleasures of photography:

I would strongly recommend every assistant-surgeon to make himself master of photography in all its branches, on paper, on plate glass, and on metallic plate. I have practised it for many years, and know of no extra-professional pursuit that will repay him for all the expense and trouble (and both are very considerable) than this fascinating study².     

Sadakichi artmann,essayist and critic

Abstract

During the last two years of his life, Ralph Eugene Meatyard assembled a series of photographs into a book titled The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater. The album's main subject is his wife Madelyn Meat yard who wore one mask for the title role of Lucybelle Crater, and appeared in sixtyfour photographs accompanied in each by a different person wearing one other mask. Madelyn Meat yard's mask, an opaque representation of a grotesque hag, is described as resembling ‘Mammy Yokum from Outer Space’.¹ The other mask is transformed by its wearer, for it is a translucent representation of an androgynous older person. Only two images are titled, and the real names of the masked people are revealed in a listing at the end of the book.     

F. Holland day

Abstract

Research Into F. Holland Day's æuvre has begun to provide a framework for interpreting the content found in his photographs, and the host of literary, artistic, and spiritual sources that often seem to have informed has aesthetic decision making. For while Day's work is here considered in the context of photographic history, he is no less part of the intricate network of writers, poets, artists, and socialites whose often controversial expression comprise the fin de siècle that ruptured Brahmin society in Boston. Incited by Estelle Jussim's resistance to discussing either homosexuahty or the homoerotic content manifest in Day's Images of the male nude (figure 1; see also figure 14, Curtis, ‘F. Holland Day: The Poetry of Photography’, in this issue.), scholars have been vigorously asserting the centrality of these issues as a means for understanding Day's life and career.¹ While it is evident that many of his photographs of the male nude possess a casual relationship to the profusion of gay male erotica circulating in both England and the United States, the issues that may explicate the sexual ambiguities of male-male relationships during this period are far more complex than what has emerged 10 the literature on Day.² It can be said, moreover, that the male nude photographs by Day have received disporportionate attention from scholars, and thus have suppressed discussions about the diversity of his repertoire, and the important role that other images play in the photographer's æuvre.     

Crystal growth and structure of L-methionine L-methioninium hydrogen maleate—a new NLO material

Abstract

A new organic nonlinear optical (NLO) crystal from the amino acid family, viz., L-methionine L-methioninium hydrogen maleate (LMMM), has been grown by slow evaporation method from aqueous solution. Bulk crystals were grown using submerged seed solution method. The structure was elucidated using the single crystal x-ray diffraction data. The compound crystallized in the space group P2₁ and the unit cell contains a protonated L-methioninium cation and a zwitterionic methionine residue plus a maleate anion. The backbone conformation angles Ψ¹ and Ψ² are in cis and trans configurations for both the methionine and methioninium residues, respectively. Amino and carboxyl groups of the methioninium and methionine residues are connected through N–H…O hydrogen bonds leading to a ring R₂²(10) motif.     

Book Received and Noted

Abstract

THE DAGUERREOTYPE. — The first experiments made in this country with the instrument and process of M. Daguerre were exhibited yersterday [sic] by M. St. Croix, who has just arrived from Paris, in the presence of a select number of scientific men and artists … The place of exhibition was No.7, Piccadilly, nearly opposite the southern crescent of Regent-street, and the picture produced was a beautiful miniature representation of the houses, pathway, sky, &;c, resembling a beautiful mezzo tint. The experiments were perfectly satisfactory.¹     

‘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     

Walker Evans' American Photographs

Abstract

It is an article of faith among photographers and scholars that Walker Evans' American Photographs is a sequence of pictures rather than a simple collection or anthology; that is to say that the photographs should be looked at in the order in which they are given. Indeed the book is often spoken of as innovative and influential in precisely that respect (among others). Some years ago I set out to learn more about the origin of Evans' sequence in the context of a broader investigation of American Photographs.¹ That study (which remained unpublished) has now been superseded in many ways by Alan Trachtenberg's insightful discussion in the book Reading American Photographs, which appeared in 1989.² Nevertheless some of my original material remains useful and I offer it here largely intact, with only a small number of revisions and additions.     

Crystal and Molecular Structure of a New Complex of [60]Fullerene, 2(C60)·2(TMTSF)·(C6H6)

Abstract

A new molecular complex of [60]fullerene with composition 2(C₆₀)·2(TMTSF)·(C₆H₆) was synthesized. The structure and composition of the complex were found by an x-ray study. Crystal data: 2(C₆₀)2(C₁₀H₁₂Se₄)(C₆H₆), M = 2415.4, monoclinic, a = 19.388(4), b = 13.410(2), c = 32.467(6) A, β = 92.71(2)°, V = 8432(3) [Adot]³, space group P2₁/n, Z = 4, d_calc = 1.903 g/cm³, R = 0.0606. The crystal structure was shown to be layered with the alternating layers of three types. Two of them have the same composition (C₆₀, TMTSF) but different interorientation of molecules in a layer and different number of shortened contacts C…C and C…Se. The third layer consists of benzene molecules. The energy of intermolecular interactions C₆₀…. TMTSF was estimated by ab initio calculations. The TMTSF molecule has a “boat” conformation.     

Early Photographs of Albania and Macedonia by Josef Székely

Abstract

Fifty photographs of Albania and Macedonia, taken in 1863 by Dr Josef Szekely, a 25-year-old chemist and photographer from Vienna, are important for their early date, their subject matter and their quality. They deserve attention also because of their novelty. Until now, these photographs have been unknown even to students of Albanian photography.¹ Székely's photographs include the first pictures ever taken in Albania and among the earliest known of Macedonia. Two 1864 photographs of the northern Albanian city of Shkodra have been called the first pictures taken in Albania,² but Székely took eight photographs there no later than September 1863, and by mid-October he had also photographed the Albanian towns of Prizren, Dibra and Ochrid. For historians of 144 ISSN 0308-7298 © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd. photography, as well as for historians of the Ottoman Balkans, Szekely's cityscapes, landscapes and portraits are a valuable and unknown resource.     

M. O. Hammond of Toronto

Abstract

‘Mr Hammond, you have a good way of sensing public taste’,¹ remarked an official of the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) in 1926, during a discussion with members of the Toronto Camera Club (TCC) about the annual International Salon of Photography. ‘Mr Hammond’ was the journalist and amateur photographer M. O. Hammond (1876-1934),² a fixture in the Toronto culture scene since 1906 when he had become literary editor and a reviewer of art exhibitions for the newspaper The Globe. He was well known for his efforts to encourage and publish Canadian writers and artists. His three books³ and numerous newspaper and magazine articles popularized Canadian history, art, and literature, and were frequently illustrated by his own photographs.     

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     

Addenda to Henry Collen and the treaty of nanking

Abstract

In 1922, the combined work of journalist Victoria Hayward and photographer Edith S. Watson was collected in a publication entitled Romantic Canada. Introduced by Edward J. O'Brien and published in Toronto, it is 254 pages in length and generously illustrated with 77 halftone reproductions.¹ The book takes the reader from the eastern to the western shores of Canada, following rural pathways through isolated settlements and historic villages, and stopping along the way to study the particularities of place and custom. What is extraordinary about this book is the way in which the photographs and text complement each other in creating a pictorial and literary celebration of traditional country life. For the photographic historian, the work offers insights into the discursive relationship between photographic aesthetics and the cultural role of woman journalists in post-First World War Canada.     

Travel Reports and Photography in Early Photographically Illustrated Books

Abstract

Abstract A previous article¹ dealt with some of the first books illustrated by tipped-in photographs, or else by early photomechanical procedures, with subject matter drawn from the fields of microscopy, medicine and astronomy. The present essay is concerned with technically similar publications, on topics of a more social nature.