Helen F. Stuart and Hannah Frances Green: The Original Spirit Photographer

Spirit photographs are joint portraits that visually unite the bereaved and the deceased without use of a corpse. Arising from the same ideas that founded Spiritualism in the nineteenth century, these enchanted mementos are said to have been discovered by William H. Mumler in 1861, in Boston, Massachusetts. Spirit photographers typically worked with mediums who enabled the appearance of magical ‘extras’ of the deceased, and as the majority of mediums were women, their contributions to this development within personal mourning rituals have been limited almost exclusively to this activity. Fuelled by the acknowledged proximity of two women to the invention, Helen F. Stuart and Hannah Frances Green, this article challenges Mumler’s widely accepted status as the originator of spirit photography. Although Stuart was the owner of the studios where Mumler stumbled upon his invention and Green was a secretary and medium in the same studios, scholars have tended to refuse these women larger roles. This article establishes the viability of a new narrative, presenting the strong likelihood that these women were in fact one and the same person and proposing that this woman be recognised as a pioneer of spirit photography.     

一百三十年前的恳请

以莫里斯1877年撰写的英国《古建保护协会宣言》作为精读对象,尝试展开当时英国社会关于古建修复问题的各种立场;并在对莫里斯的理解中,探照当下中国古建保护的可能出路。     

2010 award winners: Distinguished professional contributions.

The American Psychological Association 2010 Awards for Distinguished Professional Contributions are given to psychologists whose research has led to important discoveries or developments in the field of psychology. The winner for 2010 are Catherine E. Lord, Lisa Robbin Grossman, Kathleen M. McNamara, and William Q. Hua. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

One hundred years of inorganic crystal chemistry – a personal view

It was suspected by Leucippus (fifth century BCE) that atoms had to be ordered, but no relationship between atomic order and crystals has been handed down to us from antiquity. In modern times, beginning with Kepler, 1611, crystals were thought to be composed of ordered small particles, but not necessarily atoms. This changed with Dalton, ca. 1800. Barlow made in 1883 a successful prediction of alkali halide structures, while Alfred Werner understood in 1893 already coordination compounds and coordination numbers. By the time of the experiments of the Braggs, 1913, atomism was mostly accepted. The first important crystal chemistry paper was published in 1920 by W. Lawrence Bragg, the son: he found that interatomic distances in crystals obeyed an additivity rule. In 1926, Goldschmidt had amassed a large amount of crystal structure data and deduced from that what he called the laws of crystal chemistry, thus he became the founder of crystal chemistry. On the basis of W. L. Bragg's crystal structure determinations and of Goldschmidt's laws Machatschki unravelled in 1927, the principles of the constitution of the silicates, a problem that had vexed mineralogists and inorganic chemists during the nineteenth century. In 1928/1929, Pauling published his famous rules concerning the principles determining the structures of complex ionic crystals. His second rule, the electrostatic valence principle, which essentially says that the charges of the ions in a crystal structure are balanced locally, was particularly useful. The first book on crystal chemistry was published by Hassel in 1934. Wells showed beginning in 1954 in a series of papers and books that one could systematize crystal structures on the basis of three-dimensional periodic nets of bonds. After the 1950s, the increasing accuracy of crystal structure determinations made it possible to look for interpretations of bond length variations and distortions of coordination polyhedra. Bärnighausen constructed family trees of the group-subgroup relationships of topologically related crystal structures. A general method for predicting crystal structures of inorganic compounds from a knowledge of the chemical composition alone is not yet available. Empirical crystal chemistry remains a valuable tool for searching for methods of representing and classifying structures.     

Awards for Distinguished Scientific Contributions.

The Awards for Distinguished Scientific Contributions are presented by the American Psychological Association at the annual convention. The awardees for this year (1995) are Rochel Gelman, William A. Mason, and Michael L. Rutter. The awardees' citations, biographies, and selected bibliographies are presented here. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

论威廉·莫里斯

本文针对现代设计的先驱莫里斯的思想进行研究,分析了他的思想根源与其意义。既肯定了其积极的启示作用,又批评了他的历史复古主义思想。然而,当这对矛盾集中地在一个人身上体现时,就具有了一种深远的启示意义。     

William Ulrich Snyder (1915-2001).

Memorializes William U. Snyder. His contributions to psychotherapy are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Elizabeth Alice Austen: An American “original”

Abstract

At the founding of the Society for Photographic Education in 1962, a speaker remarked on the scarcity of books on photography. He noted that while secondary and minor figures in painting, sculpture and the graphic arts were subjects of art historical publications, even the major figures in photography were then barely known. His plea was both prophetic and ironic, for although a flood of books on photography and photographers has issued forth in the twenty-five years since that occasion, there are still no major works on a number of significant photographers. However, despite the fact that many of these publications have been hastily researched and poorly produced, in sum they have expanded our knowledge of photography in several directions: as biographical sources, as aesthetic expression and as social interpretation.     

Generative Design Methods and the Exploration of Worlds of Formal Possibility

Five decades after Ivan Sutherland first launched ‘SketchPad’, computer-aided design has entered the engineering mainstream. That strand in architectural computing which pursues the potential of generative design systems has, however, followed an entirely different course. Here Philip Steadman , Emeritus Professor of Urban and Built Form Studies at the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, University College London (UCL), criticises such approaches, and instead argues for a ‘design science’ that lays out worlds of possible plans and forms from which designers can choose.     

The Golden Age: Between Wilderness and Utopia

Artist Dominic Shepherd pursues the imaginative and a sense of mystery in his work; his 2012 one-man show at Charlie Smith London was entitled ‘Jerusalem’. Here he reflects on the Golden Age as depicted in Cranach's masterpiece of that name, and ruminates on the cyclical nature of the pastoral, a landscape that is tended and nurtured by generations of hands.