Showing papers in "History of Photography in 2010"

Photography and National Memory: Senegal about 1960

Abstract: This essay explores key historical and theoretical concerns in the photographic history of Senegal. Drawing on interviews carried out during visits to Saint-Louis and Dakar (in 2007-2008), it documents the polyvalent practices of photographers working in Senegal in the mid-20th century, with a focus on the career and collections of El Hadj Adama Sylla, a photographer active in Saint-Louis from the 1950s and the former curator of the photographic collections of the Centre de Recherches et de Documentation du Senegal (CRDS). Sylla was also a formidable private collector, and, in the first part of the essay, I examine the complex relationships between these official and personal collections, and I explore the broader consequences of polyvalent practice for the constitution of collections, definition of genres, and for our broader understanding of the role played by photography in the development of the political imagination of the postcolonial state. In the second part of the essay, I examine the extension of photography, in the period immediately following independence, into new domains of political imagination, and its role in the production of both 'official' and unofficial or non-state investments in the political iconography of the postcolonial state.

The Topography of the Early History of African Photography

Abstract: African historians' interest in photographic sources is still rather recent and can be traced back to the mid-1980s. Today, after more than twenty years of research, we know the general outlines of the history of African photography, but have yet to move beyond the larger picture. In having a close look at some centres of the early history of West and Central African photography such as Sierra Leone, Fernando Po and Gabon, as well as at the professional careers of African photographers such as Francis W. Joaque, this paper will contribute to a better and deeper understanding of the early history of West African and Central African photography. Research using and comparing photographs and textual sources from the archive of the Atlantic Visualscape displays a world and a time between 1850 and 1900 when African photographers moved beyond cultural, political and linguistic boundaries to explore potentials in an increasingly competitive market.

‘Behold the Tears’: Photography as Colonial Witness

Abstract: Photographs were a powerful means of communicating ideas about Indigenous peoples, despite their sometimes diffuse and ambivalent meanings. Only recently, however, has visual evidence begun to play a part in Australian debates about colonial violence and oppression. During the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century, which in Britain marked a transition from an evangelical tradition of anti-slavery to a new discourse about human rights, campaigns against the ‘new slaveries’ of European imperialism in Africa, and especially the Congo reform movement, made highly effective use of photographs of colonial atrocities. Yet the campaign against the ill-treatment of Aboriginal people of Western Australia, waged at precisely this time, was limited in its capacity to arouse popular interest either domestically or in Britain. This paper explores the complex process of seeing and overlooking, remembering and forgetting, that characterised views of the northern frontier, through an investigation of photograp...

The history and aesthetics of the classical film still

Abstract: Dealing with the film still of classical Hollywood films, this article traces the historical development of this photographic genre through an investigation of statements made by ‘stillmen’ in trade journals such as International Photographer throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In addition, the article discusses the aesthetics of the film still, which implies a specific kind of dealing with light, focus, narrative, time, temporality and the instantaneous. Finally, it investigates how these elements were taken up by some prominent contemporary art photographers and video artists.

Film, Charcoal, Time: Contemporaneities in Gold Coast Photographs

Abstract: As photography was taken up in the entrepots of nineteenth-century west Africa, among them Cape Coast and Accra, it became a primary mode of portraiture. When considered alongside colonial-era holdings in European and US archives, historical photograph collections in families in Ghana suggest that photography's emergence cannot be separated from a range of other emerging and far-reaching creative modernisms. These portraits entail aspects of ceremonial debut spectacles, political ascendancy rites, and the visuality of decorum in larger public performances. From the medium's inception, photographs have been held and kept as enduring objects; at the same time, they are the layered products of multiple formal, aesthetic, temporal and conceptual interventions in a range of media, only some of which are the work of a camera.

Studio Photo Jacques: A Professional Legacy in Western Cameroon

Abstract: Through an exploration of the history and legacy of the first photography studio in Mbouda, Western Cameroon, this paper focuses on links between professionalism in the local photography trade and the importance of the studio establishment. Despite increasing access to cheap cameras and colour processing, the photography studio remains an aspiration for local photographers, evidencing contradictions in the economic drivers maintaining the operation of photographic studios. The paper explores notions of recognition and remembrance inherently linked to photography practices for photographers and their subjects. It also looks at how a professional career can be validated through the visible presence of the photographic studio, constructions of local memory and the alteration of images for new audiences in the international art market and scholarly archive.

Ara Güler's Photography of ‘Old Istanbul’ and Cosmopolitan Nostalgia

Abstract: Based on Ara Guler's photographs of Istanbul, this paper explores the relationship between nostalgia and photography in the city. Most of Guler's best known photographs were taken in the 1950s and 1960s while he was working as a photojournalist for the print press. The re-coding of a selection of his black and white images since the 1990s as art photography and in the pursuit of recalling ‘Old Istanbul’ as a cosmopolitan city presents a revealing case. Guler's recruitment as a photojournalist in the 1950s was a result of the expansion and modernisation of the city's print press, which itself was a response to dramatic transformations in the city, such as massive rural-to-urban migration and urban renewal and expansion. Guler's pictures from this era are typically of the urban poor and working classes. Focusing on two journalistic narratives co-produced by Guler – one in 1959 for the illustrated journal Hayat, and the other in 1969 for the daily Aksam – this paper asks why and how only images from the latt...

Picturing Rooms: Interior Photography 1870–1900

Abstract: This study examines the meanings of late-nineteenth-century interior photography, a widespread but critically ignored practice. Drawing on collections in the USA, it considers three types of domestic interior photographs: house books or bound series of photographs taken by professional photographers to document the homes of middle- or upper-class families; photographs taken by the inhabitants of homes to document their own interiors; and photographs of college dormitory rooms. Consideration of the role narrative, aesthetics and biography play in the creation and preservation of interior photographs complicates the presumption that interior photography may offer a transparent view of the private spaces of nineteenth-century Americans. Rather, in the context of nineteenth-century cultures that appreciated both the analytical and metonymic values of photographs, views of interiors may be understood as specific kinds of visual rhetoric employed to make sense of domestic spaces over time.

Cine-film, Film-strips and the Devolution of Colonial Photography in The Gambia

Abstract: In the 1940s colonial administrators in the Gambia Colony hired local photographers to provide a vernacular window into colonial policies, procedures and successes. The political and aesthetic implications of their still photography were structured by forays into forms of visual expression that customarily lay beyond the bounds of the portrait studio – especially cine-film and film-strips. This photography inaugurated a political consciousness of colonial devolution within the administrative hierarchy. Even though Public Relations Office photography was clearly based within the bounds of government in the Gambia, it was a heterogeneous practice. Far from being a teleological tool of the state, colonial administrative photography in the Gambia was actually less stable, more innovative and significantly possessed of political and aesthetic power as to lead to its own demise.

Impreciseness in Julia Margaret Cameron's Portrait Photographs

Abstract: Julia Margaret Cameron developed her approach to focus in her portraits of the 1860s, when photographic rules and terminology had just begun to be established. Cameron's notion of focus has been discussed largely from the perspective of whether her photographic style was deliberate. This article approaches her work by denying this dichotomy. It argues that Cameron's treatment of focus implies a critique of the photographic image, for it undermines one of the major photographic goals at this time: the rendering of a precise, sharp, accurate record. The truth of Cameron's images lies not in their precision but in the allusion they make to the sitters' characters by blurring their physical form. Impreciseness – the quality of being inexact, ambiguous, nebulous, even out-of-focus – encourages viewers to interact with the images while also revealing the photographic process.

Photography at the Threshold: Atget, Benjamin and Surrealism

Abstract: This paper re-evaluates the association between Eugene Atget and Surrealism by means of a reading of several essays by Walter Benjamin written during the 1920s and 1930s. The well known but brief moment of surrealist reception of Atget was superseded when later and more influential writers viewed him instead as an important forerunner of documentary photography. To this end, surrealist meanings and values became occluded by various writers, while the poetic or ‘aesthetic’ features of the photographs were marginalised. I want to suggest that the oneiric qualities of Atget's work should not be ignored or opposed to documentary or materialist readings – rather, it is the peculiar suspension of documentary and aesthetic modes that characterises his work and locates it in a particular historical moment. In forging this argument I enlist Benjamin, who made Atget a key figure in his discussion of the surrealist aesthetic and for whom the political force of Surrealism lies in its simultaneous intensification and ...

Performing Aboriginality: Desiring Pre-contact Aboriginality in Victoria, 1886–1901

Abstract: This paper re-investigates notions of performed Aboriginality in relation to photographs made at Lake Tyers Mission Station, Victoria, Australia, and argues that Nicholas Caire's photographs reveal complex Aboriginal subjectivities. The photographs, made originally in 1886 and distributed to tourists, were later reproduced and circulated in book format in 1897. The first presentation of the photographs, whilst focusing on historical Aboriginality, contains traces of cross-cultural hybridity. However, the later presentation of the work reinforces historical and traditional material culture over cross-cultural dialogue. This paper argues that the desire to find historical notions of Aboriginality on mission stations in Victoria was not just due to the establishment of hierarchical racial theories in the latter part of the nineteenth century (generating the idea that Aborigines could not change and adapt to notions of ‘civilisation’) and doubts about the success of mission stations, but also because there wa...

Michael Fried's Modernist Theory of Photography

Abstract: This essay critically analyses Michael Fried's book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. It examines the relevance of Fried's categories of absorption and theatricality to contemporary photography and his assumption that photography is an inherently modernist art. In his book Fried explains the shift to large-scale colour photographs in the 1980s as signalling a return to problems of beholding, which dominated painting since the 1750s and 1760s. In contrast, this essay argues that this shift reveals the importance of the legacy of conceptualism and minimalism to recent photography and, in particular, the role of the conceptual ‘document’ within contemporary artistic practices.

Alexander Gardner in Review

Abstract: There are many misconceptions concerning the life and photographs of Alexander Gardner. It has been stated repeatedly that Gardner left Mathew Brady's studio because he was slighted by not receiving credit for photographs he made. It has come to light that not only was that not the reason for the split but that Gardner himself sometimes did not give credit to photographers working for him, especially when images were reproduced as woodcuts in such publications as Harper's Weekly. Furthermore, there has been little acknowledgement of Gardner's 1867 Western series and portfolio, the earliest comprehensive survey of the western landscape that remains today, or of his notable and substantial documentation of North American Indians. Other than his seminal work Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War, Gardner's photographically illustrated books have also been overlooked by scholars. In addition, the publication date of Gardner's Sketch Book has often been given erroneously as 1865. Documents establish th...

Reviews Publications Received

Abstract: Richard Benson. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2008. 338 pages, with 316 colour and black & white illustrations. Hardcover £30.00/$60.00, ISBN 978-0-870-70721-6. Bertrand Lavedrine. Getty Conserva...

Weegee's Jewishness

Abstract: A New York photojournalist who specialised in scenes of crime and disaster, Weegee also made photographs reflecting his Jewish heritage, among them being pictures focusing upon assimilation, social justice and anti-Semitism. By discussing a number of such photographs, many of them published in Weegee's first books, Naked City (1945) and Weegee's People (1946), this article describes how the photographer's religiocultural inheritance influenced his imagery. At the same time, the article provides a model for future analyses of how Jewish descent affected the work of other influential Jewish-American photographers.

Links between Painting and Photography in Nineteenth-Century Turkey

Abstract: It is well known that engravings were used by artists as models for their paintings. Another visual source employed by painters was the photograph. This occurred in Turkey after photography was introduced into Ottoman territories as a result of visits made by Europeans to the Ottoman states. In addition, courses on photography were added to the curricula of the schools. Although photography was initially received negatively by the public, the positive attitude of the Ottoman Sultans determined the popularity and acceptance of this branch of art. The introduction of photography and its adoption by the Istanbul public occurred first during the reign of Sultan Abdulmecid (1839–1861). Sultans Abdulaziz (1861–1876) and Abdulhamid II (1876–1909) played significant roles in the development of Ottoman photography. In addition, Abdulhamid II appointed photographers to document the events, institutions and structures in the empire and had around 800 photograph albums prepared. In these albums important settlements,...

The Little Magazine of the Photo-Secession

Abstract: Between 1902 and 1909 Alfred Stieglitz published a little-known newsletter for his famous group of pictorialists, the Photo-Secession. In it he covered the group's finances, social events and, most importantly, its exhibitions. The Photo-Secession is both an attractive example of Arts-and-Crafts design and printing and an important supplemental source of information on the group.

Promo-femme: Promoting Women Photographers in Bamako, Mali

Abstract: This article discusses the conditions and circumstances related to the professional emergence of women photographers in Bamako, the capital of Mali. The founding of the school Promo-femme: Center of Audiovisual Education for Young Women by Aminata Dembele Bagayoko has had an influential effect on the field's gender demographic, enabling women to not only engage in, but become successful at, this formerly all-male profession. I analyse the production of three women working in 2006 in different photographic genres: Penda Diakite, a studio portraitist; Alimata dite Diop Traore, a photo-journalist; and Fatoumata Diabate, an artist. The professional lives and works of these three women comprise an arena of active contestation over female identity in Mali.

Exposing the Zenana: Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II's Photographs of Women in Purdah

Abstract: This paper explores a group of photographic portraits taken by the Jaipur maharaja Ram Singh II of female inhabitants of his zenana. These largely unexplored portraits of upper-class Rajput women who lived in purdah inhabit a peculiar intermediate zone between orientalist ‘harem’ photography and Victorian studio portraiture, upsetting our expectations of both. In order to elucidate the unique character of these portraits, this paper sets them within the context of colonial and Rajput ideas about female roles in domestic space and norms of female representation. It argues that the portraits present the zenana as a sanitized and modernized domestic space and thereby defend this long-standing domestic institution from the critiques of late nineteenth-century social reform movements. Ultimately, Ram Singh's portraits of women in purdah are found to represent a staging of modernity in the service of tradition.

Female Spectatorship and the Masquerade: Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills

Abstract: Since the late 1970s Cindy Sherman has been one of the most prominent artists in the USA. She is a cult figure because of her chameleon-like masquerade in a female imagery reminiscent of American and European cinema and western art. Her dramatic metamorphosis began with Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980), in which she acted out a variety of female roles from Hollywood and European movies. In the early 1980s she gradually transformed her image into horrific monsters and decaying matter. In the late 1980s Sherman assumed different male and female personas based on old master paintings. Since then, the subject matter of her pictures has increasingly been taken up by hybrid dolls with surreal or grotesque connotations. This paper attempts to venture back into the terrain of Untitled Film Stills that inaugurated Sherman's artistic career. This series of photographs has become one of the most prominent landmarks of feminist/postmodern art. I will propose a new interpretation against the grain of the established f...

The Reception and Sources of Berenice Abbott's Paris Portrait Style, 1925–1929

Abstract: This study focuses on the photographs that first brought Berenice Abbott critical acclaim: her Paris portraits from the late 1920s. As a body of work, these images – along with what Abbott had to say about them and the critical attention they generated at the time – provide a rich resource for the study of three interconnected topics: the avant-garde critical climate of Europe in the late 1920s, the American expatriate experience in Paris during this same time and Abbott's nascent photographic values and aesthetic, which helped to inform not only her portraits but also her later, better-known photographs of New York City. The paper first defines the divergent critical responses to Abbott's portrait work in the late 1920s – focusing especially on the published criticism by Florent Fels and Pierre Mac Orlan that helped to secure Abbott's international reputation as a leading modern photographer. It then turns to Abbott's expatriate experience in order to examine the ideas and individuals that she identified...