Authentic Art Research Articles

The Effect of Vincent Van Gogh's Psychopathology on His Works

Vincent van Gogh, whose life was summed up in the phrase "Sorrow will last forever", opened the door to a new era and led his successors to question art in a process that evolved from the abstract to the concrete, from style to substance, from nationality to universality. The artist, who personally considered himself a failure, did not stop working, despite his increasing pathological disorders, and became a great beacon of hope for the painters who would be his successors. Many competing claims have been made about Vincent van Gogh's physical and mental health, but no consensus has yet been reached. After his death, in addition to the old diagnoses, discussions inspired by his writings and letters continued about depression, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, paranoid schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, sunstroke, self-harm, anxiety disorder, etc. Vincent van Gogh's rejection of Impressionist art, his refusal to submit to the artistic authority of the time, his disregard for academic rules and his declaration of his own manifesto on art in France, the cradle of art, are either an expression of the artist's spirit or a reflection of his pathological condition. In the context of many conflicting claims about Vincent van Gogh's physical and mental health, this study proposes an alternative interpretation of his work. It concludes that an interdisciplinary study of Vincent van Gogh's work is important for understanding him and making sense of his work.

Integrated Arts Education: Perspectives and Practices of Teacher-Educators and Student-Teachers

Integrated arts education (IAE) promotes authentic interdisciplinary connections, linking the arts with other subjects in meaningful ways. In this intrinsic case study, we explored perspectives of teacher-educators and non-arts student-teacher interns regarding the ways pre-service K-8 classroom teachers are prepared to incorporate IAE into their future instruction. We selected three higher education institutions requiring integrated-arts methods courses in the elementary education curriculum, then interviewed corresponding teacher-educators and surveyed student-teachers. We analyzed interview data inductively and deductively, while conducting cross-case analysis with focused coding. We found that teacher-educators' objectives and instructional activities aligned with their IAE perspectives, student-teachers indicated their intent to create and deliver IAE lessons, and participants highlighted strategies and barriers related to confidence and developing IAE pedagogy. We recommend practical, meaningful instruction that facilitates undergraduate students’ arts integration practices and ongoing professional development for in-service teachers in order to promote in-depth interdisciplinary education and highlight authentic arts integration.

Contemporary Art Authentication with Large-Scale Classification

Art authentication is the process of identifying the artist who created a piece of artwork and is manifested through events of provenance, such as art gallery exhibitions and financial transactions. Art authentication has visual influence via the uniqueness of the artist’s style in contrast to the style of another artist. The significance of this contrast is proportional to the number of artists involved and the degree of uniqueness of an artist’s collection. This visual uniqueness of style can be captured in a mathematical model produced by a machine learning (ML) algorithm on painting images. Art authentication is not always possible as provenance can be obscured or lost through anonymity, forgery, gifting, or theft of artwork. This paper presents an image-only art authentication attribute marker of contemporary art paintings for a very large number of artists. The experiments in this paper demonstrate that it is possible to use ML-generated models to authenticate contemporary art from 2368 to 100 artists with an accuracy of 48.97% to 91.23%, respectively. This is the largest effort for image-only art authentication to date, with respect to the number of artists involved and the accuracy of authentication.

Art authentication with vision transformers

In recent years, transformers, initially developed for language, have been successfully applied to visual tasks. Vision transformers have been shown to push the state of the art in a wide range of tasks, including image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. While ample research has shown promising results in art attribution and art authentication tasks using convolutional neural networks, this paper examines whether the superiority of vision transformers extends to art authentication, improving, thus, the reliability of computer-based authentication of artworks. Using a carefully compiled dataset of authentic paintings by Vincent van Gogh and two contrast datasets, we compare the art authentication performances of Swin transformers with those of EfficientNet. Using a standard contrast set containing imitations and proxies (works by painters with styles closely related to van Gogh), we find that EfficientNet achieves the best performance overall. With a contrast set that only consists of imitations, we find the Swin transformer to be superior to EfficientNet by achieving an authentication accuracy of over 85%. These results lead us to conclude that vision transformers represent a strong and promising contender in art authentication, particularly in enhancing the computer-based ability to detect artistic imitations.

Recurring patterns: An ethnographic study on the adoption of AI music tools by practitioners of electroacoustic, contemporary and popular musics

The intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and art has been a topic of great interest in recent times. Driven by greater visibility of accessible AI applications within mainstream media, artists have increased their uptake of such tools as means of exploring and expanding their creative expressions. With the music industry also displaying similar levels of curiosity for AI tools, practitioners and audiences voice diverging opinions on the topics of artistic authenticity, creative labour and the threats posed by thinking machines on the future of musicians’ careers. This article aims to explore these topics through an ethnographic study conducted through interviews with five composers active in the areas of electroacoustic music, contemporary composition and experimental electronic music. The discussions reveal some of the software and methodologies currently popular among composers, the challenges faced and avenues presented when adopting AI tools, as well as the attitudes and discourse that permeate the niche circles of AI-generated music. The findings point towards the swift uptake of new technologies by curious artists and the slow development of trust in AI applications by traditionalist makers and listeners, suggesting a continuation of the patterns of behaviour evident since the emergence of music technology.

Thinking with Heraldry on the Eve of the Reformation: A Drawing by Niklaus Manuel Deutsch

This essay addresses an understudied drawing of a fictional coat of arms by the Swiss artist Niklaus Manuel, called Deutsch, suggesting that it gently subverts heraldic conventions, reflecting contemporaneous concerns about the instability of earthly insignia. By evoking iconographies of Fortuna and the homo viator, the drawing challenges the security of armorial prestige. Manuel – like Albrecht Dürer and Martin Schongauer before him – used the heraldic framework to probe pictorial conventions and to signal their artistic authority as arbiters of ornamental meaning. Produced on the eve of the Reformation, the drawing prefigures the intensified scrutiny of earthly and spiritual sign systems that would occur just a few years later. Art historians have tended to dismiss heraldry as a distinctly medieval and utilitarian category of image, too rule‐governed to nourish the imaginations of Renaissance artists. However, Manuel's drawing unlocks a window onto a world in which the heraldic provided a common point of reference for thinking about signification and identity during a period of transformative cultural change.

VISUAL COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS AS THE INSTRUMENT OF THE URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSFORMATIONS (IVANO-FRANKIVSK CITY EXPERIENCE)

Increasing paces of life, intensification of city planning and urbanization processes generate new tasks for the visual communications systems, solutions to which are strategically important for the effective functioning of urban spaces. It’s hard to overestimate the effectiveness of the informational field as of a formative parameter of an urban environment. Due to incorrect integration, visual sources may have absolutely destructive impact on the architectural field, contradict artistic authenticity and compositional appeal of the environment. If executed correctly, on the other hand, can activate the area, make it more holistic and harmonious. Quality transformations of the informational space can facilitate the functioning of the individual as part of the urban organism, reinforce one’s effectiveness in environmental exploration, minimize negative optical stimuli and form a positive experience from the urban interactions. When abstracted from the communicative functions of visual informational sources, their spatial, formative, plot-forming properties (which are the main means of the urban environmental transformations) come to the forefront. Global transformations of urban environment take place as a result of qualitative changes in the following essential categories: visual activity; dynamism; structure; aesthetics. Visual activity is determined by the number of optical and content accents and the power of their stimuli in a specific area. The tools that proved to be the most effective in achieving informational object’s visual activity are color, scale, shape. Depending on the level of visual activity of the environment, the degree of individual’s cognitive environmental perception varies. Dynamism as a vector of urban transformations is achieved by organizing the visual communicational systems on a ground of basic compositional accuracy – by using rhythm, asymmetry, contrast, etc. Construction of informational object’s rhythmic rows both in open spaces and on the facades of buildings is one of the simplest and most effective ways of artistic and compositional environmental organization. The concept of “structure” in urban visual-communicative environment is revealed through the definition of informational objects’ constructive function, their ability to arrange, integrate, divide and zonate space. Person’s necessity for systematization, summarization of perceived information is the basic instinct in the environmental explorations. That is why the urban environment must obey the principles of functional zoning, clear allocation of spatial landmarks, creation of composite axes, etc. However, due to global urbanization and increased city planning development, these requirements are often ignored, the process of forming urban structures is spontaneous. Under such circumstances, the spatial plasticity of the visual informational objects plays a crucial role. The aesthetic principle accumulates all of the artistic and compositional methods of forming the urban communicative space, but differs in particular appeal to the emotional and psychological perception at the levels of the unconscious, sensual. While the basis for the informational environment’s aesthetic organization are objective spatial, compositional, coloristic, stylistic parameters, the decisive touches are the subjective categories of beauty, harmony, climate, comfort etc.

AUTHENTICITY AND THE POOR IMAGE IN THE AGE OF DEEP LEARNING

Deep learning techniques are increasingly used to automate categorization and identification tasks for large datasets of digital photographs. For rasterized images formats, such as JPEGs, GIFs, and PNGs, the analysis happens on the level of individual pixels. Given this, digital images used in deep learning applications are typically restricted to relatively low-resolution formats to conform to the standards of popular pre-trained neural networks. Using Hito Steyerl’s conception of the ‘poor image’ as a theoretical frame, this article investigates the use of these relatively low-resolution images in automated analysis, exploring the ways in which they may be deemed preferable to higher-resolution images for deep learning applications. The poor image is rich in value in this context, as it limits the undesirable ‘noise’ of too much detail. In considering the case of automated art authentication, this article argues that a notion of authenticity is beginning to emerge that raises questions around Walter Benjamin’s often-cited definition in relation to mass image culture. Copies or reproductions are now forming the basis for a new model of authenticity, which exists latently in the formal properties of a digital image.

Self-Betrayal or Self-Deception? The Case of Jackson Pollock

Clement Greenberg interpreted the rise of authentic modern art as a rejection of kitsch and “half-baked” religiosity and celebrated Jackson Pollock as representing what he called for. However, his presentation of Pollock as a leading modernist fails to do justice to his lifelong spiritual quest and to his desire to reach a broad public, which led him to open his art and person to the popular media of photography and film. Following Greenberg, Donald Kuspit would have us understand Pollock’s embrace of and by the public as a self-betrayal, transforming his great abstractions into decorative kitsch. Kuspit’s understanding of Pollock’s “true self”, however, cannot convince. His embrace of the public did lead Pollock to doubt his artistic enterprise: his dream of art as alchemy. But, the great abstractions testify to the power of that dream to create great art, challenging us to reconsider the relationship between authentic art and mass culture, of modernism, spirituality, and the public.

The globalization of local indexicalities through music: African‐American English and the blues

AbstractThis article reports on a sociolinguistic study into the prevalence of African‐American English (AAE) features in the lyrical language use of blues artists, relying on data from different social and national backgrounds and time periods. It adopts a variationist linguistic methodological approach to examine the prevalence of five AAE forms in live‐performed blues music: /aɪ/ monophthongization, post‐consonantal word‐final /t/ deletion, post‐consonantal word‐final /d/ deletion, alveolar nasal /n/ in < ing > ultimas, and post‐vocalic word‐final /r/ deletion. Mixed effects logistic regression analysis applied to a corpus of 80 performances finds no statistically significant association between national/ethnic background and variant use, and indicates that blues artists, from different eras and nationalities, are highly probable to realize the AAE variant of the analyzed variables, regardless of their sociocultural background. By building on early scholarly work on language and music, existing studies considering the use of AAE by non‐members of the African‐American community, and current theorizing on authenticity, style, and indexicality, this study hence provides tentative support for the existence of a standard blues singing style, which involves performers using AAE forms as a stylistic‐linguistic strategy to index artistic authenticity.

The Van Gogh Experience

This experimental writing both embodies and interrogates how creative work that is re-mixed and re-presented also creates multivalent “experiences.” A menagerie of quotations performs both a narrative-of-thinking and open-ended discursive potential. The work asks: Can this manuscript both analyze and perform a subversion, problematizing notions of authenticity, authorship, ownership, production, distribution, reception, and meaning? Can immersion in fragmented, derivative writing produce an affective experience in line with a contemporary post-pandemic and technologically- and social-media-immersive “structure of feeling”? The excerpts include discussions of Vincent Van Gogh’s work recently presented as popular “immersive experiences”; discourse on the commodification, reproduction, and authenticity of art; views on artistic presentation in a pandemic- and technology-infused era; and quotations concerning (and drawn from work in) deconstruction, authorship, and avant-garde fiction, further extending interpretative potential. Where does it start, where does it take you, and where do you feel it?

Impact of Lagos Photo in Mainstreaming Photography as Visual Art in Nigeria

More than ever before, the medium of Photography has gained wider acceptance in Nigeria as a mainstream art form in exhibitions and in art festivals. Previously regarded as mere result of a mechanical process, products of Photography are now viewed as part of a wider image-making culture in the visual arts of the 21st Century which the artist uses as a tool, like other art forms to frame statements on relevant issues. Using Lagos Photo, a platform established by a Nigerian artist and entrepreneur in 2010, this paper examines the trends and developments that led to the status of photography as contemporary art medium in Nigeria. In its 8th year, the festival has contributed immensely in constructing a new identity for Photography as an authentic art medium in Nigeria. This paper situates the achievements of Lagos Photo within the wider matrix of what Silva (2018) calls “other successful precedents and lineages” in the history of the development of photography in Nigeria. Keywords: Lagos Photo, African Identity, Photography, Festivals, Exhibitions, Workshops DOI: 10.7176/ADS/104-02 Publication date: March 31 st 2023

The [Dissipative] Joy of Accounting: Desiring, Imagining, and Talking about NFTs While the Planet Burns

Promoters of art-oriented non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and online NFT auction houses like Foundation, OpenSea, and SuperRare claim to be “revolutionizing” and “democratizing” the worlds of art and art collecting by deploying blockchain technology to track sales and purchases and thereby eliminating the threats of transactional opacity and fraud that have long plagued art markets. This article complicates such claims by arguing that with NFTs, the usual clamoring for authenticity in art becomes so abstract that only code remains, as the aesthetic object becomes effectively indistinct from the account of its provenance and transaction history. An NFT, like a financial derivative, has no necessary or representational relationship with any actual underlying object. The artwork associated with the token is, rather, prised apart from its existence as property and finds its use not in being seen or felt, but in the truth of its copyability. Looking beyond the NFTs themselves, this article interrogates the discourses promulgating this trend. Comment threads in Reddit and Discord groups, for example, do much to channel the libidinal energy elicited by an artwork, while the digital token itself generates an acquisitive enthusiasm wholly apart from the sensation of seeing or hearing the associated work. Despite fronting radical social change, NFTs ultimately reinforce traditional forms of property and ownership, exhibit reactionary aesthetic and cultural values, and anticipate increasingly authoritarian modes of social control. Taking a wider view, I consider ours an age of post-information, wherein, contrary to Bateson’s classic definition of information in terms of a doubled difference, we find data-based artifacts like NFTs (following cryptocurrency) to be increasingly productive of widespread social and political indifference, a perpetuation of sameness, and an augmentation of the narcissistic ego. In this case: data as the afterlife of art.

Paris in Korean Cinema: Fraudulence and the Female Form in Hong Sang-soo's Night and Day and Kim Ki-duk's Wild Animals

Abstract This article explores how and why fraudulence and deception get coded as feminine in Korean politics and popular culture. Focusing on the processes whereby deception gets conflated with the female body, it examines filmic articulations of physical and rhetorical attacks—ranging from subtle to overt—against works of art about the female body, in which aesthetic judgments take on a moral character. The article begins with a discussion of Kim Soyoung's new woman: her first song (2004), which locates the possibilities for subject formation that the figure of the new Korean woman exemplifies in deformations, ruptures and breakages. The article then turns to a pair of films, Hong Sang-soo's Night and Day (2007) and Kim Ki-duk's Wild Animals (1997), which explore the threat and possibilities that such a model of feminine subjectivity offers. The article then closes by way of reference to Jeon Soo-il's A Korean in Paris (2015), in which the possibility of formless subjectivity becomes disavowed within a paranoid vision of the new Korean woman as a fraud. In all of these films, the misogynist tendencies within contemporary Korean society are specifically displaced onto the distant location of Paris, which is not coincidentally regarded as the origin point of the new Korean woman. Generally, in Korean cinema, Paris has been featured both as a site of authenticity and formal experimentation in art and also as the scene of sexual awakening for women. The films discussed in this article foreground questions of aesthetic style around the figure of the female body, and in the process, the female subject's engagement to art becomes conflated with and assessed by questions of morality, becoming divorced from the more relevant aesthetic contexts.

Non-Invasive Study of Pigment Palette Used by Olga Boznańska Investigated with Analytical Imaging, XRF, and FTIR Spectroscopy

The scientific examination and comparative investigation of pigments are fundamental for further understanding and analysis of historic and artistic works, and particularly useful for conservators. In fine art authentication, investigations are strongly focused on the identification of the painting materials used by the author. This study is focused on the use of non-invasive analytical techniques to increase the knowledge of the painting technique of Olga Boznańska. The aim of this study was to assess the technology, painting technique, and materials used by Olga Boznańska. The pallets, tubes with the paints, and several oil paintings were studied. For each painting, a series of images were recorded using various ranges of electromagnetic radiation, including near-infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, and X-rays. In order to characterize the pigments present in the paint layer, measurements of the elemental composition by X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF) were carried out. The ground layers and paints were measured with infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). This allowed us to identify the artist’s painting technique and determine how she executed her painting, how she applied the paints, and what pigments she used.

Dean Martin: King of Cool“Sammy and Dino,” You Must Remember This

Dean Martin: King of Cool“Sammy and Dino,” <i>You Must Remember This</i>

A Cultural History of the 1984 Winter Olympics: The Making of Olympic Sarajevo by Zlatko Jovanovic (review)

Reviewed by: A Cultural History of the 1984 Winter Olympics: The Making of Olympic Sarajevo by Zlatko Jovanovic Bojan Aleksov Jovanovic, Zlatko. A Cultural History of the 1984 Winter Olympics: The Making of Olympic Sarajevo. Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. 2021. ix + 265 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliographies. Index. £79.99. Western media outrage over Qatar's hosting of the FIFA World Cup in 2022 rarely dwelled on the fact that the previous event was held in Putin's Russia, and others before that hosted by the Argentinian Junta (1978) and Mussolini (1934). The history of the Olympics has been even more controversial, however, from Hitler's infamous spectacle in Berlin 1936 to the Games being held to ransom throughout the Cold War. The Sarajevo Games remain the only Winter Olympics ever to have been held in the Balkans and the only Games organized by a Communist-run, non-aligned country. The event was exceptionally celebrated both in Sarajevo's host country, Yugoslavia, and hailed around the globe as a great sporting success devoid of controversies. Soviet and American athletes competed after a long series of boycotts. Probably the most iconic memory of the Games was Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean's 'Boléro', which was awarded nine perfect scores for artistic impression and won the Ice Dance Gold medal. Eight years on, Sarajevo's golden moment was overshadowed by war and the longest siege of a city since World War Two by forces supported by Milošević's Serbia. While the Games made all Sarajevans proud, its bloody aftermath loomed large over their legacy. Unsurprisingly, a great deal has been written about these events. In the monograph under review here, Zlatko Jovanovic confronts and criticizes much of this literature, looking at the political, economic, and especially 'cultural' aspects of the Games, surveying their media, print and audio-visual coverage, and also personal letters and popular culture sources, notably song [End Page 185] lyrics. Driven by the local political elite's desire to modernize and strengthen the city economically, the Games, according to Jovanovic, made Sarajevans more aware of their city's particularity, and helped to position them in the popular-cultural space, both in Yugoslavia and abroad. Jovanovic charts his agenda first by showing the continuity of Sarajevo's development in Socialist Yugoslavia, which was hastened by the bid, initiating urban transformation, modernization of its infrastructure and a campaign to reduce pollution. It also turned the city, which had no winter sport tradition despite being nestled in mountains, into a potential bidder for the Olympics. Yugoslavia's unique geopolitical position and prestige in the Cold War provided an antidote to Sarajevo's 1914 notoriety, framing it as a 'truly Yugoslav city'. No longer relying on its heroic acts in World War Two, which had been a key tool of legitimacy in Tito's Yugoslavia, by the 1980s Sarajevo was promoted as a modern alpine destination. Locals, for example, began playing ice hockey and only a few years later became one of the top clubs in the Yugoslav league. While Jovanovic elaborates on numerous economic, infrastructural and cultural benefits, one is still left to wonder whether Sarajevo did in fact become a global winter tourism centre, as had been envisaged, before it fell victim to nationalist exclusivism. On the other hand, Jovanovic shows how Sarajevo's newly propagated image exposed it during the protracted political crisis and re-emergence of nationalism as a 'leftover oasis' of Yugoslavia. The image promulgated of Sarajevo was that of a meeting place of the old and the new, 'a mosaic of the preserved traces of various cultures and epochs' (p. 59), where even the city's Oriental heritage was reevaluated through the idea of a historic harmonious coexistence, even though the political and cultural elites in Socialist Yugoslavia had previously emphasized the country's Mediterranean and Central European cultural and architectural heritage. The Games in Sarajevo also provided the setting for the emergence of an authentic art and music scene driven by its youth — its own version of the 1980s global New Wave, known as Nju primitivizam (New Primitivism) — which by the end of the decade became a...

Обучение профессионально ориентированному искусствоведческому дискурсу на занятиях по русскому языку как иностранном

At the current level of development of the methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language for special purposes, insufficient attention is paid to the professionally oriented teaching, which allows modeling imaginary professional situations of communication and forming the skills necessary for real professional communication. The problem is especially noticeable in teaching creative disciplines (including art criticism) where thematic discourse plays an important role. The paper describes an experiment of teaching art history discourse to Uzbek students in the Russian language classes. A model for studying art history discourse was experimentally introduced into practice of teaching Russian as a foreign language at the level of professional communication. The purpose of the study was to develop a technology for teaching art history discourse based on professionally oriented authentic texts in classes of Russian as a foreign language for future specialists in art. The experiment was described in detail with the allocation of experimental and control groups. The experimental group studied the language for professional purposes with the use of the teaching materials developed by the university professors. Most of the tasks of the training package are based on the information from the website of the Belgorod State Art Museum, which updates the educational material and implements the principle of professional orientation of education. The control group followed the traditional program of Russian as a foreign language for future artists. Upon completion of the experimental training, both groups had to do a creative task. Further assessment of the task demonstrated the effectiveness of the use of authentic art history texts and creative tasks in teaching the Russian language for professional purposes to Uzbek students. The study revealed that the students of the experimental group made greater progress compared to the control group in developing such a professional skill as “following art history strategies when creating a text”.

Poezija u doba digitalne (re)produkcije - digitalna aura u novomedijskoj poeziji

The paper "Poetry in the Age of Digital (Re)production: Digital Aura in New Media Poetry" explores the evolution of new media poetry from the 1990s to the present day, engaging with Walter Benjamin's concept of the aura of authentic art to analyze three forms of new media poetry and define the digital aura in this context. The following analysis is grounded in new media theories, particularly those of Lev Manovich and N. Katherine Hayles. The paper discusses how digital technologies have transformed the creation, distribution, and consumption of poetry and challenged notions of authenticity and originality. It emphasizes the interaction between poets and software, the blurring of boundaries between different forms of new media art, and the concept of materiality in the digital realm. The paper highlights the significance of the material aspects of digital art, drawing attention to the interplay between the physical and virtual dimensions and the sensory experiences they provide. The paper traces the development of new media poetry in different web eras - Web 1.0 helped launch e-poetry, Web 2.0 enabled poetry on social media platforms, and Web 3.0 engraved NFT poetry on blockchain technology. The analysis of three distinct forms of new media poetry - kinetic poetry, Instapoetry, and NFT poetry - demonstrates how each form engages with the digital aura and challenges traditional notions of authenticity and artistic presence. The paper concludes that the digital aura is not an inherent characteristic of artwork, but a continuous process realized through the interactions of artists and the audience with code, software, and interface.

The “Authentic Evocation” in Ethnographic Photography as Art: Taking Lau Pok Chi’s Art Practice as an Example

This article emphasizes the disciplinary problems of anthropology after the representation crisis, and the connected phenomenon of the intersection of the disciplines of art and anthropology, considering the art practice of the Chinese American photographer Lau Pok Chi, mainly his Cuban Chinese project, as an instance for showcasing the authenticity of photographic art as ethnographic practice and its value for the development of anthropology. After assessing the important motivation of the artist&amp;rsquo;s practice, which is rooted in his construction of self-identity, and the methods and principles of his &amp;ldquo;quasi-ethnographic&amp;rdquo; research, this paper recommends that the authenticity of such type of ethnographic photography also obtains from its exposure of reflexivity and the transcendence of the separation of &amp;ldquo;things&amp;rdquo; and &amp;ldquo;words&amp;rdquo;, which may further motivate the multiple explorations of the two-way intervention between these two disciplines.