Ideation and Photography: A critique of François Laruelle’s concept of abstraction

In Concept of Non-Photography (2011) and Photo-Fiction (2012), François Laruelle, outlines a theory of photographic abstraction that breaks completely with the debate on realism in photographic theory. Refusing to see photographic representation as involving any concession to resemblance (photographs have more in common with other photographs than with the objects they depict, he declares), he inflates the notion of the photograph as a symbolic entity into a transcendental theoretical domain. This is the result of his radical (non-philosophical) separation of appearances from truth (nothing stands ‘behind’ photographs he asserts). If this inflates photographs-as-abstractions as a form of rich ‘unlimited theoretical’ production, it also deflates them as social discursive entities, that ‘give and ask for reasons’. The result is a post-dialectical flattening of photographic appearances, in which images run in one-dimensional ‘parallel’ with the world. Laruelle’s attempt to release photography from mere appearances, produces a socially deracinated account of abstraction.     

Photography in the Szondi Test: ‘The Analysis of Fate’

Léopold Szondi invented a projective test using photographs of people with mental pathologies to determine the unconscious, ancestral illnesses (or aptitudes) of his subjects. Szondi’s images were garnered from psychiatric textbooks published around 1900. Such photographs presumably revealed unconscious thoughts, desires, and destinies in the course of a test session. If a patient responded positively to a photo-portrait of a diagnosed ‘hysteric’, for instance, this indicated that the subject herself had unconscious, inherited hysterical traits. Szondi’s reasoning was predicated upon two commonly held fallacies: first that an individual’s physical appearance is the external marker of mental life, and second that photography is a transparent means of revealing true facts. In spite of (or maybe even because of) such problematic assumptions, Szondi’s use of photographs can be located historically in a tradition of reading human character from portraiture. The test was widespread, and was even administered to Adolf Eichmann at the time of his trial in Jerusalem – an ironic cultural development as Szondi himself would have been among the thousands of Jews deported from Hungary directly to Auschwitz by Eichmann had the Szondi family not been rescued by the Kastner train of 1944.     

The World’s Most Amazing 100% Awesome Photography Theory

A recent British trend has been the growth in HE photography courses with a concurrent emphasis on industry skills and commercial career outcomes. And, although pedagogic approaches to practical material have adapted, the theoretical material can be seen to be woefully lacking. Calls for a re-examination have indeed been made, but little has been offered that is not simply a rearticulation of the already dominant theoretical models. Rather than relying on the well-trodden models that promote photographer as visionary or emphasise meaning generation, it is proposed that photography theory should look to the breadth of approaches found in film studies, particularly in relation to commercial production. The two areas for development particularly advocated here are genre studies and industry analysis in terms of production and distribution. Since most commercially bound photographers work within industrial structures and constraints, both of these approaches would facilitate an understanding of creativity and innovation in this context. This would open up areas of photographic study that have thus far been largely ignored by academics and, further, would facilitate a closer relationship and dialogue between theory and practice in the educational context.     

Photography and Writing,or the Intimacy of the Image: A Dialogic Encounter between Barthes’s Camera Lucida and Blanchot’s Philosophy of Otherness

This article was prompted by James Elkins’s argument — developed in his book, What Photography Is, from 2011 — that there is no actual relationship between Roland Barthes’s theory of photography and Maurice Blanchot’s philosophy. Drawing on considerations of an historical, philosophical, and literary nature, the article argues for the importance of a dialogic encounter between Barthes and Blanchot, demonstrating that the interconnection between the concepts of intimacy, image, and writing, appears as a crucial aspect in the theory of both authors. At the same time, by contesting Elkins’s wider criticism of Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1982), the article aims to develop better-informed theoretical understandings of Barthes’s thoughts on photography. The final section of the article attempts to map promising points of connection between Barthes, Blanchot, and Proust, in order to reassess the notion of punctum in its broader relation with the concepts of time and death.     

Photography and the Right to Life: Activestills’ and Anne Paq’s "Obliterated Families" Project

The essay focuses on the repurposing of family photography in the project “Obliterated Families” by Activestills collective photographer Anne Paq. In this project, Paq rephotographed photographs of family members who were killed in Israel’s air strikes in Gaza in 2014 at the actual bombed sites. The essay analyzes “Obliterated Families” as a project of visual activism and traces its different modes of dissemination and circulation as part of an effort to solicit a “public” for it. The mobilization of familial imagery is meant to disturb the circulation of affective responses in the Israeli public sphere by politically “presencing” those “whose lives are not regarded as lives worth saving and defending,” as Judith Butler argues. Through this project, the essay reconsiders the relations between photographic practices and the concept of universality as it pertains to a politics of human rights in light of the privatization of citizenship under neoliberal rationality.     

War by Photography: Shooting Japanese in Australia’s Pacific War

Characterised by their determination to get close to the action, the Australian combat cameramen of the Second World War made a significant contribution to the evolution of the war photographer into the dynamic figure familiar today. This is especially true of their intimate documentation of the vicious encounter with the Japanese in New Guinea and other islands of the Southwest Pacific, which went beyond professional bravery. A large corps of official photographers shooting for both government and military agencies expressed the racial ideology of a war fought against an opponent who was increasingly loathed as the war progressed. Their pictures of Australian triumphs over the Japanese, including graphic and often deliberately demeaning pictures of dead and captured enemy, reflected the exigencies of wartime propaganda. But they also expanded on a frame of cultural reference derived from decades of anxiety about the threat of invasion by Japan, and reveal an abiding national view of the battlefield as the definitive arena for a contest of rival masculinities. Australia’s war in the Pacific has attracted increasing scholarly and popular attention in recent years. However, the enormous archive of official photographs has been largely ignored, except as a source of illustrative material. This article argues that the archive needs to be read as a collective text in its own right, for the significant insight it provides into Australian cultural as well as military and geopolitical insecurities.     

‘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.     

‘The Diversity of Expression and the Wondrous Power of the Art of Photography’ in the Albums of Richard Cockle Lucas

From 1859 to 1878 the British sculptor Richard Cockle Lucas assembled at least sixteen albums containing photographs of himself in numerous guises, ranging from Shakespearean roles to embodiments of specific emotions. Lucas utilised the practice of dressing up in front of the camera in conjunction with the album format as an ongoing means of experimenting with photography’s capacity to convey human expression, and as an extension of his concerns as a sculptor. Lucas’s albums, which also include photographs of his work in sculpture, represent the first sustained pursuit of photographic self-depiction in such a wide range of roles. Read in conjunction with Lucas’s own writings on expression in photography and sculpture, the albums reveal how Lucas viewed photographic self-portraiture as a form of ‘living sculpture’ to be enacted before the camera.     

The Determinants of Digital Payment Systems’ Acceptance under Cultural Orientation Differences: The Case of Uncertainty Avoidance

The digital payment method has become a pervasive payment phenomenon in the world, as in the case of Jordan Mobile Payment (JoMoPay) system which can be used to save time, effort, and cost. Consequently, the evaluation of digital payment systems is vital to ensure successful implementation and positive influences on users. The current paper expands the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2) to the study of JoMoPay system in the Jordanian context. The research's proposed model incorporates four new external constructs into UTAUT2 model, namely; awareness, security, privacy and culture. In addition, the relationships between social influence and behavioural intention to use JoMoPay system is moderated by culture. The data were collected by conducting a field survey questionnaire on 270 respondents of Jordanian public sector employees and were analyzed using Partial Least Squares (PLS) Version 3.2.3. The results mainly show that intention to use JoMoPay system is significantly and positively influenced by performance expectancy, social influence, price value, security and privacy, which together explain 0.612 of the variance of behavioural intention. Next, contrary to what is expected, culture does not moderate the relationship between social influence and intention to use JoMoPay system; and hence the related hypothesis was not supported. Lastly, more discussion regarding the theoretical and managerial contributions as well as limitations and future research are presented at the end of this paper, which completes the whole paper.     

Con Colbert’s Portrait: The Lives of a Photograph

The history of photography has generally been conceived of in terms of technical advances, aesthetics, genre or oeuvre. This article proposes that other histories become apparent when materiality is foregrounded. To support this proposition the study focuses primarily on one portrait photograph and its embedded history, which is evident in its shifts in material form. The photograph under consideration is of Cornelius, more familiarly known as Con Colbert, a minor figure in the Irish Rising of 1916. His memory came to exceed the life of a man, and to understand why this was the case it is necessary to focus on the mediated presence of his portrait image in a culture of remembrance. What Colbert’s portrait makes evident is that a photograph is a material object which carries a history in its transferences, display formats and layered meanings. Photographs do things, they have agency, are affective and, in turn, are effected by cultural needs and interpretation. In other words, it is proposed that a history of the photograph is embedded in the exchanges and uses to which it is put which cannot be separated out from choices of material form.     

The Hydra battle and Cichon’s principle

In rewriting the Hydra battle refers to a term rewrite system proposed by Dershowitz and Jouannaud. To date, withstands any attempt to prove its termination automatically. This motivates our interest in term rewrite systems encoding the Hydra battle, as a careful study of such systems may prove useful in the design of automatic termination tools. Moreover it has been an open problem, whether any termination order compatible with has to have the Howard–Bachmann ordinal as its order type, i.e., the proof theoretic ordinal of the theory of one inductive definition. We answer this question in the negative, by providing a reduction order compatible with , whose order type is at most , the proof theoretic ordinal of Peano arithmetic.     

The Experience of Elsewhere: Photography in the Travelogues of Pierre Trémaux

Between 1852 and 1868, the architect and amateur naturalist Pierre Trémaux (1818–1895) produced three groups of plates and accompanying texts on the geography, architecture, and people of African and Anatolian regions. These luxe publications, produced with the support of the French government, exploit an array of graphic techniques; they combine salted paper prints, engravings, tinted and colour lithographs, photolithographs, and texts in ways never previously attempted. Their examination provides insights into the ways these media interacted, and how comfortably photography in fact sat amongst its predecessors within the long-established context of the travel narrative. This paper will probe the implications of photography for Trémaux’s project through an investigation of his first book, Voyages au Soudan oriental et dans l’Afrique septentrionale. To what extent did the new, mechanical medium clarify or confound his effort to “explain” parts of Africa still hardly known to Europeans? What does this reveal about the role of photographic authenticity in familiarizing imperial audiences with distant places, during a transitional moment in visual culture?     

Analysis of fracture and cracks of oldham’s couplings used in anchor hoisting. Case study

The usual failure of an anchor hoisting assembly was investigated. The anchor ensures stability in cases of ship mooring in a harbor, anchorage or bay and provides adequate safety combined with convenient and easy handling. For the anchor hoisting a hydraulic motor is used consisting of a main two-speed crankshaft, the oldham’s coupling and a valve spool. The oldham’s coupling of a specific oil-tanker frequently fails during the anchor descent and blocks the whole hoisting system. Three pieces used to the same anchor were examined. Two of them exhibited total fracture while the third one had been plastically deformed. The study involved chemical analysis, hardness measurements and in-depth examination of microstructures and fracture morphologies of specimens derived from the failed parts. The paper presents conclusions related to the fracture mechanism and the type of fractures respectively. It was found that poor design and wrong material selection were the main causes of failure.