Book Of Photographs Research Articles

Coleção Festejo Maior: possible links between design and visual anthropology in the production of photographic books

Coleção Festejo Maior: possible links between design and visual anthropology in the production of photographic books

Design of a Music Stage Documentation Photography Book Tani Maju Band

Malang City is one of the cities in Indonesia that has a rich and diverse music history. One of the famous music groups from Malang City is Tani Maju. Established since 1999, Tani Maju continues to enliven the music scene in Malang City until today. This research is a project by the author who has also been a documentation stage photographer for Tani Maju since 2009 until now. This research will result in a photography book documenting Tani Maju's music stage as the main medium. Music stage documentation photography is a branch of photography that focuses on documenting music performances. This photography book will contain photos of Tani Maju on stage, taken by the author from 2009 to mid-2019, and has undergone photography quality selection and editing processes by the author. The design method applied in this research is using a qualitative approach. The general aim of this design is to create a photography book that contains documentation of Tani Maju's music stage, and the benefits derived from this research and design are to add one form of visual artwork for the author and Tani Maju Band in the form of a music stage documentation book.

Dolors project: art-based polyethnography evoking contemporary rural mothering through photography, dance and chapbooks

This collaborative ethnography details the Dolors project, a transdisciplinary exploration that evokes rural mothering in Copons, Catalonia, through an immersive photographic process. The project culminated in an exhibition at an international festival, presenting a medley of family portraits, field notes, personal narratives and scenic elements. Central to the exhibition were eight chosen portraits of local mothers, paying tribute to Dolors Farrés, a revered ‘meta-mother’ figure in the community, whose wider social and metaphorical significance was progressively uncovered by the four co-authors. The exhibition's opening day featured an interpretive dance, transforming the photographic experience into a multimodal exploration. Post-exhibition, the visitor responses collected in chapbooks were transformed into a large-format photography book, and served as qualitative data for this study. Our creative, multi-voiced and evocative approach to ethnography seeks to shed light on a rich array of individual and collective perspectives around mothering within a rural setting.

Visages de la contemplation

Visages del la contemplation (1980) is the title of a photography book with images by Michele Pellegrino, a preface by Roger Etchegaray, Archbishop of Marseille at the time of publication, and Cardinal Presbyter of St. Leo I, former president of the Council of Conferences of Bishops of Europe and of the Episcopal Conference of France, with the full text and historical notes by Jean Pier Ravotti. The work, now quite rare and preserved in the Vatican Apostolic Library, unparalleled in its reflection, remains a powerful fresco of monasteries and contemplative life, the identities and differences of charisms, and the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience of the different orders and monasteries: the Benedictines, the Camaldolese, the Cistercians, the Canons Regular, the Trappists, the Carthusians, the Poor Clares, the Dominican and Carmelite nuns, the Passionists and the Little Sisters of Bethlehem, and the Little Brothers. A sister dimension to that of the cloistered emerges in the book, a dimension that could be considered the most neglected by historians, especially in the oblivion of sapiential traditions: cloistered monasteries as citadels of culture and art, custodians of priceless heritages, and at the same time extraordinary centres of production that admirably shape territories and landscapes. This world of partially lost sapiential traditions, of care, intelligence, love of nature, harmony, sustainability, invites us to think about the issue of sustainability in the mountains.

Crowding out the Algerian War in French Memorial Books

France's colonial history in Algeria has been the subject of “Memory Wars” since the end of the 1990s. Culminating in 2012 at the fiftieth anniversary of the Algerian War (1954–1962), these Memory Wars contributed to numerous publications about every aspect of Algeria. Large format coffee-table photographic books ( beaux livres), as well as paperbacks full of collected memories of the colonial years and the war, from both French and Algerians, flooded French bookshops. In this article, I engage with the concepts of competitive, hoarded, and multidirectional memory to demonstrate how French memorial books that are especially photo driven appear to place war on display, but, at the same time, bury difficult and traumatic memory. The research examines three French memorial books published between 2010 and 2012, leading up to the fiftieth anniversary of Algerian independence, and addresses how traumatic memories are recuperated and still hidden within texts that attempt to fill a memorial void. Despite book titles that claim to examine the memories of war, within the books, Algeria often remains a beautiful, peaceful, and nostalgic backdrop. War is not clearly depicted in the images but emerges in accompanying descriptive texts. In light of France's establishment of the Truth and Memory Commission on the Algerian War in 2022, I examine how diverse versions of the past come into dialogue with each other, while individual memorial books continue to crowd out unspeakable violence.

The Physiognomy of a Nation

Abstract This essay revisits American Photographs, one of the most important photographic books of the 1930s. Containing two portfolios by Walker Evans and an essay by Lincoln Kirstein, the 1938 publication presents readers with eighty-seven photographs printed one per double-page spread. While critical studies of the book have focused on the sequential ordering of the photographs, and on the book's filmic qualities, this essay considers the book's other organizing principle: physiognomy. More specifically, focusing on Evans's decision to include three photographs that he made in Cuba into the book's first part, it attends to the processes of racialization organizing the book and producing America in the 1930s. Challenging canonical accounts of American Photographs and Depression-era documentary more broadly, this essay argues for a history of documentary that does not dispense with its modernism. The argument is not that modernism is still with us but that we need its repetitions.

Acting out for the camera: performing Mizrahi masculinity and the politicisation of the Jerusalem neighbourhood, Katamon Tet

ABSTRACT Photographs taken in 1978 by photographer Yàakov Shofar portray teenage boys from Katamon Tet, an impoverished Mizrahi Jerusalem neighbourhood. The boys playfully perform for the camera. In one photo, a boy pretends to choke his friend, who uses his body and face to express pain comically. Photographs from this session appeared in Shofar’s photography books Finding a Way Out (1981) and Born in Israel (1984), addressed as a socially engaged practice, reflecting the time's developments in photography. This study aims to reveal the politicization of the photographed youth following social and political occurrences in Katamon Tet, which are unmentioned in the books, and to show that these were pivotal in shaping the images. Drawing on interviews and employing Tina Campt’s term, “The Black Gaze,” I suggest that the boys’ performance reacts to what Shofar represented – a socially privileged outsider. Basing my arguments on debates on photography and imagination, I underscore how the boys’ gestures confront the imagined gaze of the hegemony and reclaim mainstream stereotypes of Mizrahi masculinity. The theatricality of the boys’ performance is situated in relation to the Ohel Yosef community theatre in Katamon Tet, from which various forms of politicized Mizrahi protest emerged.

Photobooks and South Africa: Notes on Works by Peter Magubane and David Goldblatt

Photobooks are creative processes. Besides their historical contributions, they provide a platform for experimentation with photographs and other sign systems. South African photobooks are among the most prolific publications in Africa. They include a variety of works that range from colonial photographic books from the 1860s to recent and thought-provoking works such as those by Zanele Muholi, Sabelo Mlangeni, and Sophia Klaase. In the second half of the twentieth century, South African photobooks integrated a phenomenon in which photographic essays became to be used as a tool to document conflicts and denounce social problems. The article approaches this phase of South African photobooks by describing and analysing semiotic aspects of works by Peter Magubane and David Goldblatt. Their books indicate the existence of a variety of criteria - aesthetic, literary, political, and documentary - acting together to characterise the photobooks emerging around the 1960s in South Africa.

The Black Panthers of Israel and Ya’akov Shofar’s Musrara Photographs: Taming and Politicisation (1978–83)

In 1971, men from Musrara, an impoverished Jerusalem neighbourhood, formed the Black Panthers in protest against institutionalised discrimination against Jews from Muslim countries (Mizrahim). This article examines Born in Israel, a photography project by Ya’akov Shofar that appeared as a photography book in 1984 and as an exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 2017, to unpack the differences between these two instances. Shofar’s 1984 project portrayed young Mizrahi Musrara men while being interviewed by a Jerusalem municipality social worker. This collaboration had political potential but only fragments of these interviews are reproduced in the book. Although the men participated in the Black Panthers’ protests, the book underscores their ethnicity and avoids mentioning this movement. My study explores the visual and discursive elements that depoliticised the book due to the Black Panthers’ perceived threat to the hegemonic social order and in relation to local developments in photography as fine art. I show that, unlike the book, the 2017 Israel museum exhibition promotes Born in Israel’s relation to the Black Panthers, but also had limitations and contradictions. Finally, I argue that accounting for the unabridged interviews uncovers hegemonic Israel’s patronising attitude towards the marginalised photographed men, and compensates for lacunas in this project’s presentations.

Stillness and Movement: Photographic Essays and the Moving Images in Contemporary Digital Culture

In the age of digital re-materialization and the circulation of visual content, the discussion on the nature of the photographic image has its implications on the medium itself. In the context of new and interconnected media, it is somewhat relevant to reconsider the definitions of traditional visual forms. This article will examine the relations between photographic images in different media contexts. If it is considered that the photographic books and essays are the assemblages of still photographs structured in a particular order, the first question that arises is how to, in the first place, define the structural norms in the context of contemporary circulationism. Thematically and formally, the relations between photography and cinema, duration and time, movement and stillness have been questioned historically. In the contemporary context, we can find similar examples present in the form of cinema also as an expression in everyday communication on different platforms, which Lev Manovich describes as a specific language. This article will examine the nature of that language, the correlation between still and moving mediums of photography. Finally, the aim is to recontextualize the definition of cinematic photo-essay in its articulation in social media platforms, as the main generators in circulationsim of images in contemporary digital culture.
 
 Article received: April 6, 2022; Article accepted: June 21, 2022; Published online: September 15, 2022; Original scholarly paper

A Photo Book as a Box: On Mladen Teofilović’s work The Core

The history of the photo book is practically old as the history of photography. A photo book is more than just an object with leaves and pages, photographs, with or without text. Throughout The Core, the work of the young artist Mladen Teofilović, the text analyses the photography book as the relationships between text, images, and spectator. According to the artist's idea, the photo book looks like a metal box that imitates a hospital file. Conceiving the work in this way, the artist reveals and interprets the fragments from his life: his struggle with a severe migraine, his attempt to find a solution, to accept his condition and live with it. Teofilović directs his photo book to the spectator, inviting him to take a part in disassembly, analysis and reading where every picture, text or sentence does not have to but can take on a different meaning.
 
 Article received: April 12, 2022; Article accepted: June 21, 2022; Published online: September 15, 2022; Original scholarly paper

The Persistence of the Documentary Photobook in the Age of the Web

Several artists who take into consideration the existence of the Internet in their process of documenting the world remain faithful to the photography book. They find in the codex an experience that a screen remains incapable of providing. The adoption of the book by some documentarist artists engages appropriation practices from an ancient documentary project. War Primer 2 by Broomberg & Chanarin and Less Américains by Mishka Henner reproduce pre-existing books, respectively The ABC of War by Bertolt Brecht and The Americans by Robert Frank. The renewed interest of artists and photographers in books can be explained by a logic of comparison between the two media: the emergence of the web, with its formats and specificities, makes it possible to better appreciate, by analogy and distinction, what characterizes books and the web, and what makes their respective languages.
 However, rather than thinking of the modes of publication as alternatives, some of the artists merge their logic by resorting to online self-publishing platforms that allow the self-production and self-distribution of books. The artist Mishka Henner stands out in particular for his systematic production of books on self-publishing sites.
 
 Article received: March 31, 2022; Article accepted: June 21, 2022; Published online: September 15, 2022. Original scholarly paper

Alfred W. Bennett and the Photographic Gift Book

Alfred W. Bennett (1833-1902), better known to posterity as a botanist, was active as a publisher in London in the eighteen-sixties. Almost uniquely amongst his contemporaries, Bennett specialized in books illustrated with mounted photographic prints for the middle-class market. Every year, new ‘photographic gift books’ would be released to coincide with the Christmas season of giving. Subject matter was mainly topographical or literary. Text and images were associated creatively; design, typography and photographic printing were of the highest quality.
 While Bennett’s career in photographically illustrated books was brief, starting in 1861 and ending in 1868, he made a distinctive contribution to the creation and development of the genre in Britain. The article evaluates Bennett’s career and impact, covering the following topics: the Quaker context that influenced Bennett’s activity as a publisher and photograph dealer; Bennett’s invention of the photographic gift book as a genre; synergy with Lovell Reeve, another pioneering photographic book publisher; the crucial importance of literary tourism for Bennett’s output; assimilation of the concept of the Picturesque within photographic illustration; the extension of subject matter to Continental Europe; and the decline of the photographically illustrated book business in the hands of Bennett’s successor Abraham Provost.

Visual Literacy as a New Frontier of Digital Social Innovation

The research aims to analyze the characteristics of visual literacy as an incentive for digital social innovation in vocational education. Data analysis was performed using the Inquiry graphics (IG) framework to analyze visual (20 online photography book projects) communication messages and Qualitative Deductive Content analysis was used to analyze textual (interviews with 20 vocational students) messages. QSR NviVo 12 program was used for data processing. The research results reveal features of digital social innovations in students' projects and their significance in professional media education. The limitations of the research are that IG is merely a methodological and analytical tool and that applying semiotic approaches does not necessarily contribute to educational or vocational education theory or theoretical development but only to methods and teaching practice. The study results indicate the study's future directions regarding the binding of digital social innovation with global and research competence.

Photo-Textual Relationships in Early Photobook Making: [Re]tracing the Roots of Photobook Syntax

This paper proposes to analyse the first stages of the relationship between textual matter and photographic images in nineteenth-century photobook practice, investigating how these two elements interacted within several books created during that period of photobook history. The examination aims to demonstrate how those titles embody an unexpected duality in which text and photographic images can be divergent or harmonious, questioning established academic perceptions that defined photographs as exclusively secondary in relation to text or categorically central in the construction of photographic titles. In its second part, the paper examines how these different intersemiotic relationships did not immediately sustain the type of photo-textual narrative this article attributes to photobookworks, a type of photographic book defined by a complex suprasegmental, multi-layered and relational narrative predominantly based on a multimodal discourse that traverses the entirety of the book.

From Shulhoyf to Montparnasse: Cultural Collage in Moshé Vorobeichic's Photography Book The Ghetto Lane in Wilna (1931)

This article discusses the artistic genesis of the first avantgarde photography book in Lithuanian art history, The Ghetto Lane in Wilna (1931) by Moshé Vorobeichic-Moï Ver (Moshe Raviv, 1904–1995), and aims to conduct the first in-depth reconstruction of Vorobeichic’s early biographical and creative period in Vilnius in the 1920s in the local Jewish and multicultural milieu. The research is based on archival materials from Lithuanian state archives and the Raviv family archives in Israel. Vorobeichic, who was born in 1904 in Zaskavichy (currently in Belarus), made his artistic debut in Vilnius in 1923, and studied at the Faculty of Fine Art at Stephen Bathory University from 1923 to 1925. He continued his art studies at the Bauhaus school in Dessau (1927 to 1929) and, from 1929 in Paris at the École Technique de Photographie et de Cinématographie. From 1930 onwards, the photographer used the artistic pseudonym Moï Ver, under which his avant-garde photography book Paris, hailed as a masterpiece of the genre, was published by Editions Jeanne Walter in 1931. During the same period, Vorobeichic participated in Jewish cultural life in Vilnius, and was involved in the early stages of the formation of Yung Vilne, the acclaimed literary and artistic group of interwar Yiddish Modernism. The article aims to identify the cultural contexts in which Moï Ver’s artistic world-view and avant-garde style started to develop. The reconstruction of these contexts makes it possible to identify new semantic aspects in his avant-garde photography book The Ghetto Lane in Wilna, and to rethink its artistic concept. In this way, the cross-cultural semantics of Moï Ver’s photographic collages of Jewish Vilnius will emerge.

From the Editor

Welcome to the final edition of Afterimage for 2021 (Volume 48, no. 4).In this issue’s peer-reviewed section are examinations of two very different projects connected by their attention to space(s) and the position of the human body within it. First, Curt Lund looks at the work of twentieth-century photographer Alexey Brodovitch, who was best known for his decades-long tenure as art director of Harper’s Bazaar. Lund’s re-reading of Brodovitch’s 1945 photobook Ballet newly ties Brodovitch’s own artmaking to his “unorthodox” teaching philosophies and “groundbreaking” classroom practices. Through archival resources, the nature of Brodovitch’s experimental, even revolutionary teaching is brought to light. In our second article, Alena Kavka explores the displacement of Anthropocentrism in the unconventional architectural arrangements of Gregor Schneider’s Haus u r. Schneider’s ongoing domestic installation space in which he deconstructs and reconstructs the interiors of his family home in Germany, “defies easy categorization as an artwork.” Kavka argues that the project “offers an alternative to spatial anthropocentrism through the production of ‘antihuman’ rooms, which ultimately confer agency onto the space itself, forming a kind of body in which the viewer is made into the object of its senses” with Schneider moving “between these nodal sites as a kind of mediator.”In our reviews section we have a diverse selection of project, exhibition, and book coverage. To begin, Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann dig deep into the myriad layers of SwampScapes, a multi-platformed cocreation by Elizabeth Miller, Kim Grinfeder, and Juan Carlos Zaldivar. Covering a “mosaic of multiple issues, politics, and environments in South Florida,” SwampScapes, as Hudson and Zimmermann write, uses “technological interfaces to reconnect people to the swamp environment and to environmental epistemologies [as] an act of restoration, moving away from drainage and development into embodied and immersive engagements with natural environments that continue to exist in proximity to human-built environments.” Alisia Grace Chase explores the late Niki de Saint Phalle’s recent exhibition Structures for Life at MoMA PS1, finding the display confining for the size and scope of the works, noting that the artist’s “oeuvre is predicated on its scale and overall relation to site.” Regardless of some curatorial decisions, Chase concludes, “Saint Phalle’s life and this show prove…she was definitely capable of transforming it into art.”Alexander L. Fattal provides rich context for Verde, photojournalist Federico Rios Escobar’s book of photographs of the insurgents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In this collection, published by Raya Editorial, an independent publisher of artisanal photobooks based in Manizales, Colombia, Rios Escobar, Fattal writes, shows his “expert eye,” “evinces a strong social concern,” and “transmits a sociological sensibility.” In her review of the abundantly illustrated A Slow Burning Fire: The Rise of the New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, Jocelyn Jurich shares how author Marko Ilić reveals “the ways in which the New Art Practice emerged from and critically responded to the period when Yugoslavia became increasingly enmeshed in Western capitalism and how the economic inequalities among the republics…affected artists and artistic practices.”* * *Along with scholarly submissions intended for peer review, we welcome reports on events and happenings (taking place both in person and online); essays; photo essays; interviews with artists, curators, writers, and theorists; and exhibition, book, film, video, and project reviews. We also encourage proposals of dossiers and guest-edited issues.As we head into a second pandemic winter, we at Afterimage wish you and yours a safe and healthy season. We will see you again in 2022.

Review: Verde, by Federico Rios Escobar

Review: <i>Verde</i>, by Federico Rios Escobar

Intellectual montage in Journey into the Fantastic

This paper argues that Journey into the Fantastic, by Boris Kossoy, is an exemplary case of montage working as a creative process in photographic books. The work is an important contribution to the world of photobooks. Full of experimentation, it relates exercises of photographic expression to the exploration of conventional aspects of the support. By using Eisenstein's theory and typology, we describe how combinatorial patterns can be observed acting as meaning-making processes in this photographic book. We observe that juxtaposition types known as intellectual montage are the main processes regulating the relations established between its parts, scaffolding it as a whole.

Van-Leo

When the Art and Liberty group launched its activities in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the young Levon Boyadjian (later to become the famous Van-Leo) and his elder brother, Angelo, were jointly debuting their careers as photographers in Cairo. Van-Leo’s archive of photographic prints, negatives, and documents reveals much about the imaginative experimental channels he explored to crystallize his inner self. The artist’s self-portraiture—“auto-portraits,” as he called them—constituted the core of his surrealist production, and his photographic knowledge was enriched while he implemented these early self-portraits. Self-taught, he often returned to photography books, from which he learned techniques of double and triple exposure, juxtaposition, sandwiching, solarization, and cutouts and thus triggered his imagination and sense of exploration. This article traces the arc of Van-Leo’s early surrealist phase, which lasted about a decade that coincided with the beginning of his career in the 1940s. Other than the surrealist self-portraits, his photographic archive also contains a few hundred more works that are just as eccentric, although they rely more on disguise skills, shadows, and contrasts, or constitute false personifications of characters in society, rather than a surrealist approach. Although Van-Leo’s work was detached from what the Egyptian surrealist philosophies called for, he was, it seems, a surrealist by accident.