The Global Architectural Influences on London

London today has become ‘a laboratory and testing ground’ for neoliberal capitalism, attracting investment from the Middle East, Russia, India, the Far East and Australasia as well as the US. Murray Fraser describes the urban impact of economic globalisation in the capital, while exploring ways that it might potentially be countered. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

以小城镇建设为基点促进新农村建设发展——以武汉市汉南区新农村建设规划为例

作为我国行政体系中最基本的社会单位,村庄大多不是孤立存在的,它们都是存在于小城镇这个社会、经济、文化、生态空间范围内。农业是弱势产业,农村是弱势地区,农民是弱势群体。农业问题不能局限在农业内部解决,农村问题不能局限在农村内部解决,农民问题不能局限在农民内部解决。要解决农业问题,需要大力发展非农产业;要解决农村问题,需要充分促进小城镇建设发展,并且充分发挥小城镇这个重要基点的辐射带动作用,促进新农村建设事业的全面发展。     

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.     

Situating Hannah Maynard: A Comparison with Hannah Höch

Hannah Maynard's experimental works continue to defy classification, for critics have tended to explain them as either the product of an eccentric personality or as a surrealist aberration. This article gives particular attention to the latter claim, exploring Maynard's relationship to the modernist movement more generally through comparison with Hannah Höch, who is known as a practitioner of Dadaist photomontage. While the contents of their oeuvres place Maynard and Höch within their respective historical milieus, the two artists passed through similar developments and demonstrated uncanny parallels in their technique and approach to artistic production. Maynard and Höch flaunted social convention in their lives and work, using modernist tools to critique norms of domesticity and to explore notions of self. With one foot in a Victorian world of spirit, memorialization, and interior imagery and the other applying increasing levels of structure, juxtaposition, perspective and irony to problems of individual identity, Maynard is best viewed as an intermediary between nineteenth-century sensibilities and a more modern world view.     

51% Studios

Howard Watson profiles a London-based studio whose practice results from the interplay of a wide range of influences spanning contemporary culture, history, nature, landscape and the ephemeral. Working at a variety of scales from the domestic to the urban, partners Peter Thomas and Catherine du Toit demonstrate a natural bent for the arts-related in undertaking collaborations with artists and exhibition installations. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Montage and Multiples in Hannah Maynard’s Self-Portraits

Hannah Maynard was a prolific photographic portraitist who opened her first commercial studio in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1862. While she maintained a conventional commercial practice, her creative photographic work began to assimilate and respond to significant societal shifts in unconventional ways. In the 1880s Maynard started to experiment with a variety of ‘avant-garde’ techniques including photo collage, photo montage, photo sculpture, and multiple and composite images. In her late series of multiple exposure self-portraits, the integrity of the self and of the image, an imperative of conventional photographic portraiture, comes into question. Through a metaphorical relationship with spirit photography, these self-reflexive images toy with the distance between realism and surrealism, between coherent self and spectral other, and between the living and the dead.     

Cut and Paste

Published posthumously, this article begins with a discussion of the historiography – and a related exhibition history – of the terms collage, photo-collage, and photomontage; and of the criteria that have been used to distinguish them as techniques, as visual idioms, and for their political implications and resonances as images of fine or applied art. The article then moves on to the work of two living artists who have been cutting and pasting photographs for more than forty years, Martha Rosler and John Stezaker, and the ambiguities of their being described as collagists, monteurs, or photomonteurs. In rethinking these categories, Evans argues for an expansive history of photomontage and collage that has continuing resonance today.     

Looking Beyond Informality

It is all too easy to be optimistic about the economic and social future of Latin America. Daniela Fabricius , the author of 100% Favela: The Informal Geographies of Rio de Janeiro (forthcoming), calls into question architects working within the realpolitik of a globalised, post-nationalist world. Could an all too ready acceptance of existing conditions and the adoption of informality leave inhabitants short-changed? For to live informally is also to live precariously - no substitute for secure and prosperous living.