Bulgaria

Abstract

In a brief span of only 135 years, photography has been turned from a purely technical invention into a symbol of our time, and this itself constitutes one of the most remarkable phenomena of modern civilization. The illustration has become the full-fledged partner of literature, and photography a basic means of acquiring and recording knowledge. Photography has become a tool of science, and a means of the aesthetic exploration of reality. It spread rapidly all over the world; but its appearance in Bulgaria was greatly delayed because the Bulgarian people were still under Ottoman domination and some 39 years since its invention had passed before liberation finally came.     

Francis Frith and Negretti & Zambra

Abstract

When Francis Frith's eagerly awaited¹ stereographic series Egypt and Nubia was published in late 1857, the 100 albumen views caused a popular sensation². W. C. Darrah has recently described them as ‘probably the most lavishly praised and famous series in the history of stereography–³.     

Questions of Taste

Charles Holland of FAT picks up the Post-Modern baton from Venturi Scott Brown and Charles Jencks and raises the neglected topic of taste. Though the way architecture is experienced by people is bound up with taste, it remains an area of discomfort for architects – tied up with awkward discussions of privilege and class. Holland shows how in FAT's Islington Square housing project the DIY taste of the residents was not only embraced, but fully accommodated. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Un détail de ce qui change: Function of a Function

Why should computation be leading to a bifurcation in architectural detailing, resulting in a simultaneous, and opposing, tendency towards either greater precision in fabrication or increasing plasticity? Architectural designer and theorist Peter Macapia asks what is driving these propensities in computation, and what in turn historically might be the relation between the detail and force. What comes into play now, though, when architectural style is no longer identified by a taxonomy of parts, or a vocabulary of orders, but rather by a network of forces and functions correlating actions? How might economic and political power be interacting with force, the diagram and function in contemporary design?     

Leah King-Smith and the Nineteenth-century Archive

Abstract

In postmodern criticism the camera has often been seen as an apparatus of control, one of the surveillance mechanisms of the state, in the service of its institutions and immersed in its technologies of power. The metaphor of the camera as a weapon, as analysed by Susan Sontag in the early 1970s, describes an unbalanced and non-reciprocal relationship between photographer and subject.¹ One is the hunter, the other the prey; one is the agent, the other the victim. This theoretical paradigm was consolidated in the 1980s when structuralist critics started to analyse nineteenth-century photographic archives held in libraries, institutions and museums.² Much of this criticism followed the work of Michel Foucault who used Jeremy Bentham's model of the Panopticon to analyse the controlling mechanism of the gaze in modern institutions.³ I am aware that aligning Foucault with structuralism will appear problematic to some; however, the way in which some of his work has been adapted by postmodern critics of photography does underline the determinism of his theory. For a lucid analysis, see Joan Copjec, Read my Desire: Lacan against the Historicists, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1994, 1–10. For a different perspective, sympathetic to Foucault, see Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1997. Although Foucault's concept of power is productive and he admits to sites of resistance, he is pessimistic about the possibilities of such resistance.⁴ Discipline and Punish, upon which many theories of photographic surveillance are predicated, constructs disciplinary power as ‘the nonreversible subordination of one group of people by another’.⁵     

Lighting the Cavern: ‘Alvar Aalto: Through the Eyes of Shigeru Ban’

Michael Spens has an intimate working knowledge of the buildings of Alvar Aalto having supported a restoration programme for Aalto's Viipuri Library in Russia between 1993 and 1997, which involved professionals from Russia and Finland. Here he offers his thoughts on the recent Aalto exhibition at the Barbican. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

That Old Thing Called Flexibility: An Interview with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown hold an unrivalled position within architecture. Now written several decades ago, their classic books Learning from Las Vegas and Complexity and Contradiction remain unsurpassed for their ability to shock and overturn current architectural thought. Francesco Proto talks to Venturi and Scott Brown on their present thinking about iconography, transparency, spectacularisation, architectural pornography and the contemporary architectural avant-garde. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reflection: Nat Finkelstein,Warhol Filming Duchamp (1966)

In this paper the author considers a 1966 photograph by Nat Finkelstein. Andy Warhol is seen filming Marcel Duchamp at an exhibition opening in New York City. Using this image as a starting point, the author reflects upon the nature of personal associations between artists and the tradition of the avant-garde in the history of art.     

An Art of Getting Lost: Mapping Patrick Clancy's Photoscroll 365/360

This article analyses Patrick Clancy's photoscroll 365/360 (1985) as an important postmodern image/text investigation into the problematic of the moving still that plays between photography and film and challenges the medium specificity of the Modernist paradigm. 365/360 consists of a number of interweaving and open-ended micro-narratives conveyed (and interrupted) through six rows of images, two registers of text, and the spaces opened up between them. The micro-narratives principally involve the dispersed journeys of artists Arthur Cravan, Mina Loy, and Marcel Duchamp during the First World War. These are oblique avant-garde narratives that revolve around questions of travel (what produces images in motion) and that engage ‘the art of getting lost’, reflecting back on the viewer's own precarious situation at the borders of (non)sense and (dis)orientation when viewing/experiencing this complex work. The article maps the key figures of the winged hermetic, cataloguer of (photographic) grain, and nomadic browser embedded in 365/360.     

Daguerreotypes in the National Archives of Canada

Abstract

The announcement of the daguerreotype process to the French scientific community in August 1839 spread through the Western world like a shockwave. The British North American colonies comprising Canada East and Canada West (now Quebec and Ontario) and the Maritime provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island were no exceptions. Rumours of the discovery had been published in Canadian newspapers as early as 3 May 1839.¹ As early as 1840 we find advertisements in Canadian newspapers offering daguerreotype portraits by itinerant photographers who first made known and popularized the process. There are no extant examples of these first Canadian attempts.²