Photograph Albums Research Articles

Adam and Katarzyna Potocki’s Photograph Album of the Near East

This article examines a photograph album compiled by the Polish aristocrats Adam and Katarzyna Potocki of their journey to Egypt, the Holy Land and Istanbul in 1852 and 1853. The album, which is now in the National Library of Poland, consists of thirty-three calotype prints by three different photographers. The author discusses the album and its depiction of the Middle East in the first period of photography in the region. The article describes the processes by which the photographs were made, pointing out differences in the photographers’ methods and the consequences of these differences for the aesthetic values of the photographs. It describes the working processes of each photographer and demonstrates three different methods of photographing the Middle East in the mid-nineteenth century.

Reading Irish Women's Lives in Photograph Albums

ABSTRACTThis article aims to provide a new approach to photography in Ireland by shifting focus from ‘art’ photography to the processes and practices of snapshot photography. In employing a new methodological approach to photography, it also provides a new way to examine women's history, exploring photography as part of the tactics women used in order to resist or assimilate state- and Church-led discourses of womanhood, which have often been characterized as both oppressive and hegemonic. In order to explore these themes in detail, this article examines the photography collection of Dorothy Stokes, the largest twentieth century amateur collection held by the National Library of Ireland. I situate Stokes's photographs between two traditions – ethnographic photographs of Ireland and ‘snapshot’ images of holidays and family. Stokes self-consciously made use of these two genres, but also disrupted them. Taking photographs and the making of photograph albums became ways for her to comment on Irish society and her place in the nation and to represent and constitute an oppositional private life.

Exploring subject positions and multiple temporalities through an Iranian migrant mother's family photograph albums

In this article, I draw on a research study of one Iranian migrant mother's generation of selves through her material configuration of her personal photograph albums and through our verbal reading of her photographs. The research engages in a visual-material feminist ethnographic approach, and is informed by the work of Gillian Rose and the understanding that family photographs are a means by which women negotiate subject positions. In this article, I discuss an unexpected finding of my research, the significance of multiple temporalities in a migrant mother's production of selves. The photo album practices of the participant mother of this study, ‘Parvin’, depart from the common social convention of mothers arranging their photograph albums to chart family growth following the model of milestones occurring over linear developmental time. Parvin does not limit herself to linear developmental time, but rather she mixes up photographs in her post-migration family albums to generate multiple temporalities woven together by an enveloping ‘mixed’ time. Drawing on both Julia Kristeva and Homi Bhaba's theories of temporality and the subject, I suggest that Parvin produces subject positions for self and family through a continual interweaving of a multitude of pasts into the present and through a subsuming of milestones within cyclical family time. Further, I suggest that through her generation of multiple temporalities, Parvin produces the subject position of ‘accommodating mother’. Finally, I highlight the potential afforded by considering the temporal and the spatial together in studies of migrant identity.

Picturing Qājār Persia: A Gift to Major-General Henry Creswicke Rawlinson

AbstractThe focus of this essay is a photograph album that Colonel Luigi Pesce created and gave, in 1860, to the British consul in Tehran, Major‐General Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson. The album's 42 photographs represent some of the first‐ever taken of Nasir al‐Din Shah's court; the city gates, mosques, and vicinity of Tehran; and the ruins and reliefs of Persepolis, Naqsh‐e Rostam, and Taq‐e Bastan. Sent to Persia to secure a British presence as part of the Great Game, Rawlinson played a key role in the strategic rivalry between the British and Russian Empires, which were vying for supremacy in central Asia. Rawlinson was not only an accomplished military officer and diplomat, he was also an exceptional linguist who has been described as the father of Assyriology because his translations of the Behistun inscription enabled a collective scholarly deciphering of cuneiform. As a visual artifact with a historically precise provenance and a known maker and recipient, the Rawlinson album helps to frame th...

Erasable Photograph Tagging: A Mobile Application Framework Employing Owner's Voice

SUMMARY This letter proposes a mobile application frameworknamed erasable photograph tagging (EPT) for photograph annotation andfast retrieval. The smartphone owner’s voice is employed as tags and hid-den in the host photograph without an extra feature database aided for re-trieval. These digitized tags can be erased anytime with no distortion re-maining in the recovered photograph. key words: smartphone application, speech processing, reversible datahiding, robust hashing, image retrieval 1. Introduction In recent years, the widely use of smartphones and the rapiddevelopmentofmobileapplications(appsforshort)marketsmutually accelerate each other. These apps refer to the soft-ware applications including games, banking services, order-tracking, ticket purchases, and so on. Nowadays, a varietyofmobileappscanbedownloadedfromaspecifiedplatformand installed to a target device. Its popularity and usageis still becoming increasingly prevalent across smartphoneusers.This letter proposes a novel mobile app frameworknamed erasable photograph tagging (EPT). It is developedfor photograph annotation and retrieval based on smart-phone owner’s voice. In particular, the owner’s voice is ac-cepted via the recorder first, then digitized into a bit-streamtag, and finally imperceptibly hidden in the current capturedphotograph. The novelty lies in that the speech informationusedasinvisibletagscanbeeasilyerased,andtherecoveredphotograph is still exactly the same as its original version.Only the smartphone’s camera, recorder and photograph al-bum are required to realize the EPT framework. From an-other point of view, this work can be regarded as a kind ofcross-media analysis which is a new emerging research areain current multimedia research.

Chaotic Image Encryption with Random Shuffling of Data

Security of valuable multimedia contents such as images in personal photograph albums, electronic publishing, frames of multicast video conference can be achieved by image encryption. Secure transmission of these contents is required to be rapid, efficient and practical. Hence, image encryption process must be chosen not only to satisfy the security goals but also to fulfill these requirements. Due to the inadequacy and inefficiency of conventional text based information encryption methods, researchers have proposed several encryption schemes. Many of them are based on chaotic algorithms. Recently, the studies are concentrated on some weaknesses of chaotic algorithms and most of the presented solutions came up with complex structured chaotic maps. In this paper, we present a self-diagonal shuffler mechanism embedded to one dimensional chaotic encryption system to overcome its leak points while keeping simplicity and efficiency properties.

Tracking the Use of Climbing Plants in the Urban Landscape through the Photoarchives of Two Oxford Colleges, 1861–1964

This paper explores the historical appearance and use of climbing plants (ivy and creeper) at Trinity and Pembroke Colleges, University of Oxford, UK. Archival materials are used to present the evidence and establish an historical record of landscape change in the use of ivy and creeper in the built environment. The record from the Trinity College archive captures ivy or creeper between 1861 and 1964. Temporal trends convey increasing growth on some buildings, such as the Chapel. Four photographic albums were identified at Pembroke College that contain photographs dating between 1889 and 1964. Whereas climbing plants appear in photographs from the nineteenth century, around 1953 they were cleared from walls that served as backdrops for group photographs. There is, however, some indication that ivy- or creeper-clad building backdrops were favoured, perhaps suggesting a continued social preference for this visual aesthetic.

The photograph album of Albert Henry Scott, the photographer son of George Gilbert Scott

This paper describes the contents of an album of photographs taken in 1861–2 by the seventeen-year-old third son of the renowned architect George Gilbert Scott. The album is evidence of the growing popularity of photography as a hobby for amateurs in the 1850s and 1860s as a result of technical developments that made the equipment easier to transport and use in the field. Analysis of the subjects in the album reveals a pioneering interest in vernacular architecture; the album also contains rare and early photographs of railway subjects and the only known portrait of George Gilbert Scott's wife, Caroline Oldrid.

Ronald Ogier Ward, urologist, hero & first president of BAUS

Ronald Ogier Ward, urologist, hero &amp; first president of <scp>BAUS</scp>

Behavior guidance techniques in Pediatric Dentistry: attitudes of parents of children with disabilities and without disabilities

This study compared the parental acceptance of pediatric behavior guidance techniques (BGT). Forty parents of children without disabilities (Group A) and another 40 parents of children with disabilities (Group B) were selected. Each BGT was explained by a single examiner and it was presented together with a photograph album. After that parents evaluated the acceptance in: totally unacceptable, somewhat acceptable, acceptable, and totally acceptable. Results indicated that in Group A, the BGT based on communicative guidance was accepted by most participants. In Group B, just one mother considered totally unacceptable the voice control method and other two, tell-show-do. For both groups, the general anesthesia was the less accepted BGT. There was statistically significant difference in acceptance for protective stabilization with a restrictive device in Group B. Children's parents with and without disabilities accepted behavioral guidance techniques, but basic techniques showed higher rates of acceptance than advanced techniques.

Deutsche Heimat in Afrika: Colonial Revisionism and the Construction of Germanness through Photography

In 1939, photographer Ilse Steinhoff published a photograph album of her 1937 trip to the former German colonies of Southwest and East Africa. Through a close study of this photograph album, this article elucidates larger themes in the visual culture of post-colonial and National Socialist Germany. The photographs in Deutsche Heimat in Afrika visualize the colonialist imaginary—peaceful but separate racial relations; the German qualities imposed by the settlers on the landscape and in the cities; an expansion of German women’s roles that still maintained the traditional realm of family and culture; and the fertility of the African landscape and the next generation of colonial Germans. Steinhoff showed metropolitan Germans the importance of the colonial space through a visual aesthetic that resonated with that of Nazi Germany, thereby combining the fantasy of the past with the ideals of the present to further colonial revisionism in the Third Reich.

“You Feel So Out of Place”: Germantown's J. Gordon Baugh and the 1913 Commemoration of the Emancipation Proclamation

A fragile album of photographs made in 1913 by an African American resident of the Germantown section of Philadelphia may seem an unlikely addition to a collection of essays on the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet, J. Gordon Baugh Jr.’s A Souvenir of Germantown Issued during the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation at Philadelphia, PA, September 1913 not only offers an illuminating glimpse of African American life in the half century after the Civil War—it explores the memories of emancipation. In ways both commemorative and journalistic, the 1913 souvenir album gives valuable insight into a sector of Germantown’s community frequently left out of its well-documented historical memory—and, one might fairly extrapolate, an indication of blacks’ thinking about the meaning of emancipation in the early twentieth century.

Álbumes de tarjetas de visita en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX en México como documento para la Historia Social

Los álbumes fotográficos de tarjetas de visita formaron parte de la vida cotidiana de la burguesía mexicana desde 1860 hasta que finaliza el siglo XIX. La trascendencia que los fotógrafos tuvieron en esta época en México ha sido estudiada en relación a su desempeño artístico; las conclusiones que se han obtenido de estos estudios se han realizado desde el enfoque de la historia del arte. Sin embargo, no se ha investigado la función social que los álbumes cumplían en este ámbito; este proyecto tiene como objetivo analizar la información que éstos proporcionan para la comprensión del contexto social mexicano de la burguesía en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX.El análisis propuesto en este trabajo se efectuó desde la perspectiva metodológica de la historia social a través de la comparación de cinco álbumes de tarjetas de visita procedentes de la Fototeca Nacional del INAH; examinando las fotografías y los álbumes como documento visual dentro del contexto histórico que los originó. Se concluye que la conformación de este tipo de álbumes muestra la estructura y el significado de las relaciones sociales y familiares de este sector; en ellos se expresa la forma de ver el mundo de este grupo a través de las ideas positivistas de la época.

Fitting between Present and Past: Memory and Social Interaction in Cape Breton Gaelic Singing

In ‘The Anthropology of Performance’, Victor Turner wrote that performative meaning is constructed though ‘negotiating about “fit” between present and past’. This article considers the dynamic role of memory and social interaction in the transmission and performance of Gaelic song in Cape Breton, through which a relationship between past and present is cultivated. Gaelic singers value accurate transmission of text and melody but, as my research demonstrates, they have a flexible relationship with their oral and written sources, and in some cases subvert their authority by turning instead to first-hand experience. While songs are learned through observation and repetition, just as important is the web of associations they communicate along the way. Singers and community members use an array of objects—photograph albums, clippings and recordings—to evoke a sense of previous singers, renditions and contexts. This simultaneous presence of past and present has significant implications for what it means to ‘know’ a song, and it comes to be understood as a composite of multiple memories, performances and meanings.

Fighting for Fame: The ‘Heroines of Pervyse’ and the Disputed Construction of a Public Image

: This investigative analysis bases itself on an array of documentary material from the archives of the Imperial War Museum in its effort to recover the intricate story behind the two British volunteer nurses who made their name during the First World War with the first-aid station they set up in Pervyse, a mere stone's throw away from the Belgian firing line. The essay juxtaposes a variety of documentary sources—the unpublished diaries of the two women, Geraldine Mitton's reconstruction of the story out of the nurses' journals and letters in The Cellar-House of Pervyse (1916), and two photograph albums, ‘The Women of Pervyse’, bequeathed to the Imperial War Museum—in a quest to understand how the two nurses came to acquire their status of national heroines. Sifting through the source material, this investigation reveals the numerous inconsistencies and gaps that exist between the published and the unpublished accounts of the dressing station, whose true genesis is obscured by several competing narratives. A close reading of Mitton's account and the photographic portraitures discloses that neither of these documents ought to be taken at their face value. They need to be understood as valuable tools in the nurses' own battle for authority, public recognition and their opportunity to feature as genuine protagonists in the arena of war.

Transparency, Spectatorship, Accountability: Indigenous Families in Settler-State “Postdemocracies”

Transparency, Spectatorship, Accountability: Indigenous Families in Settler-State “Postdemocracies” Jennifer Henderson (bio) Transparency “Take the picture! Take the picture if vanishing is so beautiful!” These words are spoken by a Métis journalist toward the end of Marie Clements’s new play, The Edward Curtis Project. She is looking up from her prone position at a distressed Edward S. Curtis, the nineteenth-century photographer of North American Indigenous peoples who saw himself as a documentarian capturing images of waning peoples for posterity. His appearance in Angeline’s present-day world is in the form of a living trace. He is the ghostly originator of a vein of representations that exerts power through its claims to transparency and that continues to do its work in Angeline’s twenty-first-century world where the effects of her intimate experience of the ongoing production of spectacles of Indigenous waning is diagnosed as clinical depression.1 Clements’s play stages a complex unraveling of that ahistorical diagnosis through encounters with Curtis in which Angeline and other Indigenous characters speak back to the photographer and speak out from his fatalistic frames, which are themselves reframed by projections [End Page 299] from the contemporary Indigenous characters’ family photograph albums, asserting another conception of the beautiful. The event that is the ostensible catalyst for Angeline’s descent into depression is the freezing death of three Indigenous children, which she has dutifully reported in her job as an Aboriginal affairs reporter, providing the facts that—she realizes too late—do not so much speak for themselves as trigger a set of narrative codes and discursive positions. These produce a socially distanciated but empathetic spectatorship of Indigenous tragedy read as pathology: an alcoholic father has neglected his children. Never mind the father’s having to struggle to raise children under conditions rendered unviable. Angeline knows these preconditions for tragedy, but up to this point she has not really noticed that her métier does not render them speakable. Nor has she noticed in herself the accumulated somatic strain of continually being a spectator to such freeze-frames of tragedy or the violence that their conception of a beautiful “vanishing” does to her. These journalistic freeze-frames, like Curtis’s photographs, never imagine the Indigenous witness who, living on, may struggle to identify somehow, across the objectification, a subject position beyond the representation’s ordering of “the perceptible” (Rancière 55). In Clements’s play, this strain accumulates and settles in as a feeling of being cold and tired, a feeling that links Angeline metonymically to the frozen children. Clements’s play draws a parallel between the violence of decontextualized fact in journalistic coverage and the “notion of indexicality” from which Curtis’s nineteenth-century photographs derived their power: as Wanda Nanibush has put it, this indexical code seems to assert that “because the camera was really there recording ‘reality,’ its products point to reality” (np). When the twenty-first-century Angeline challenges Curtis to capture her own suffering for the sake of its beauty—“Take the picture if vanishing is so beautiful!”—the audience of Clements’s play is invited to consider what it means to be moved by a genre that requires some actual person’s suffering. If Curtis’s photographs, as Nanibush argues, offer a kind of aesthetically orchestrated affective relief through their transformation of settler-colonial guilt into nostalgia, what kind of affect, and what kind of spectator, is involved in the contemporary circulation of spectacles of broken Indigenous families? The play’s densely textured reflection on modes of making Indigenous lives visible condenses the issues that concern me in this article: interrelated technologies of transparency, renderings of spectacle and spectatorship around Indigenous families, “moral-affective publicness” (Berlant, “Epistemology” 49) and its place in contexts of impoverished [End Page 300] political engagement. In Canada in 2013, a play about the history and politics of claiming to represent Indigenous lives transparently resonates with a peculiar charge, especially (but certainly not exclusively) in the wake of media coverage of the 2011 crisis in living conditions in the northern Ontario community of Attawapiskat. That coverage included the attempt by national newspaper columnist, Jeffrey Simpson, to dismiss the “rhetoric surrounding...

Validation of a Mexican food photograph album as a tool to visually estimate food amounts in adolescents

The aim of the present study was to validate a food photograph album (FPA) as a tool to visually estimate food amounts, and to compare this estimation with that attained through the use of measuring cups (MC) and food models (FM). We tested 163 foods over fifteen sessions (thirty subjects/session; 10-12 foods presented in two portion sizes, 20-24 plates/session). In each session, subjects estimated food amounts with the assistance of FPA, MC and FM. We compared (by portion and method) the mean estimated weight and the mean real weight. We also compared the percentage error estimation for each portion, and the mean food percentage error estimation between methods. In addition, we determined the percentage error estimation of each method. We included 463 adolescents from three public high schools (mean age 17·1 (sd 1·2) years, 61·8 % females). All foods were assessed using FPA, 53·4 % of foods were assessed using MC, and FM was used for 18·4 % of foods. The mean estimated weight with all methods was statistically different compared with the mean real weight for almost all foods. However, a lower percentage error estimation was observed using FPA (2·3 v. 56·9 % for MC and 325 % for FM, P< 0·001). Also, when analysing error rate ranges between methods, there were more observations (P< 0·001) with estimation errors higher than 40 % with the MC (56·1 %), than with the FPA (27·5 %) and FM (44·9 %). In conclusion, although differences between estimated and real weight were statistically significant for almost all foods, comparisons between methods showed FPA to be the most accurate tool for estimating food amounts.

Two New Hebrides Mission Photograph Albums

This paper focuses on two photograph albums held at the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand archives in Dunedin, New Zealand, that relate to the Church's New Hebrides (Vanuatu) mission field. While it is acknowledged that photographs are valuable sources for the historian, photograph albums have not received the same level of critical attention. Taking the lead from the material turn in anthropology, this paper presents the object-story of the two New Hebrides albums, which means the albums themselves are placed under closer historical scrutiny within the context of both the Presbyterian mission in the New Hebrides and its imaging and propagation on New Zealand's shores. By approaching these albums as both collections of images and objects that traversed different social and physical spaces, their importance as part of the material and visual culture of the mission becomes clear.

"Metaphors for Life Itself": Historical Photograph Albums, Archives, and the Shape of Experience and Memory

"Metaphors for Life Itself": Historical Photograph Albums, Archives, and the Shape of Experience and Memory

Twenty Years After the Death of the Book: Literature, the Humanities, and the Knowledge Economy

Twenty Years After the Death of the Book:Literature, the Humanities, and the Knowledge Economy Allison Muri (bio) The Death of the Book Twenty years ago, the book was figuratively laid to rest by artist Dennis Ashbaugh, author William Gibson, and publisher Kevin Begos, Jr. An art book wrapped in a shroud of cheesecloth and placed in a clam-shelled slate-grey case, deliberately distressed, seemingly time-scarred and battered, Agrippa (a book of the dead) (1992) evokes a disinterred coffin. Those who encounter the physical object must exhume the book's corpse to read it. Inside the book are traces of texts and images, illegible and faded inscriptions, and, embedded in a niche in the middle, a 3.5-inch floppy disk containing a self-encrypting poem by Gibson about his father, who died when the author was six. The book and the poem examine the inscription of lived sensory experience, books and bodies, memory and technology, loss and decay, the tenuous provisionality of knowledge and understanding. "Agrippa" refers at once to the name of a particular photograph album sold by Kodak in the 1920s (Agrippa Files, item #d26) and to the second-century Greek philosopher who formulated the Five Modes of skepticism. Gibson could not have known that Kodak would declare bankruptcy in 2012, but already in 1986 the company had been criticized for its complacency while "silver halide photography, the technology that Kodak invented 105 years ago, is slowly being eclipsed by electronic images" (Taylor and Caminiti). [End Page 115] The modes of Agrippa are known today only because they were recorded by Sextus Empiricus, whose Outlines of Pyrrhonism and Against the Mathematicians are the only existing detailed accounts of Greek skepticism. He did not name Agrippa, but Diogenes Laertius ascribed the Five Modes to him in Lives of the Philosophers. At once, then, the title Agrippa indicates the technological obsolescence of various mechanisms humans have used to inscribe and retrieve memory and history, the fragility of those records and the uncertainty of what they tell, and a philosophical skepticism about evidence that questions the possibility of any justified theory of knowledge. The commentary by Gibson, Ashbaugh, and Begos on the nature of books, digital media, and knowledge are well worth revisiting in this issue on the "Future of the Humanities," with the increasing prevalence of digital "books" (including documents, texts, games, social media, and so on) and digital scholarship. Agrippa (a book of the dead) was a reply to increasing speculations on the effects of the book's supposed demise upon the value of literature, the humanities, and knowledge itself with the arrival of networked communications, Bulletin Board Systems (BBSS), Usenet, the establishment of World Wide Web protocols, and graphical user interfaces.1 The "death" of the book coincided with the rise of the so-called knowledge society, and what Agrippa told us at that crucial moment just after the invention of the World Wide Web still speaks to the roles of books and digital works in the discipline of literature and in the humanities in general. The death of the book had been predicted long before Agrippa was published. As early as 1955 Lester Asheim had speculated on it in his introduction to a special issue of The Library Quarterly on "New Problems in Plotting the Future of the Book." Musing on the possibility that the library would not necessarily remain primarily a "book agency" (282), Asheim noted there is nothing eternal and God-given about the format and dimension of the book as we happen now to know it.... Some of the greatest items in our own cultural heritage, which we [End Page 116] now equate with the book, were not intended for book form and were committed to the page by other hands. (283-84) Marshall McLuhan echoed predictions of the book's decline in a 1960 interview by Alan Millar of the CBC: "Just as books and their private point of view are being replaced by the new media," he explained, "so the concepts which underlie our actions, our social life, are changing." Further, "Books are what gave the Renaissance its peculiar stamp. We had to see the world and each other...