Historical Photographs Research Articles

The provenance and provenience of photographs: Reconnecting serial images in the Umzimkhulu district, South Africa, 1899–2023

ABSTRACT This article introduces the ideas of provenance and provenience as a methodological approach to the study of photography from and in colonial contexts. It argues that rendering visible in this way the complex microhistories and photographic occasions of colonization, is an essential precondition to considering what a decolonization of photography could actually look like. Retracing a photograph’s trajectory back in time as image, object, and practice at times not only allows it to be reconnected to the exact place and moment in which it has been produced, but also shows its entanglement with other objects and actors as a lived experience. While this approach has value for studying photography at large, it is developed here through a series of 17 photographs showing a so-called first-fruits ceremony (ingcubhe), all taken on the same photographic occasion in the South African Umzimkhulu district in March 1899. Only by matching historical and present photographic frames and framings are descendants of the photographed and other stakeholders able to engage collectively with the photographs and their histories. It follows that it is more appropriate to the medium’s nature to think through the process of returning such photographs to their place of origin, not as a visual repatriation, but first of all as a visual reconnection. Reconnecting historical photographs to the exact space and time of their production through the research method repeat photography eventually creates new photographic occasions, which in turn are able to socially reanimate old ones.

Roll of honour films: a reappraisal

ABSTRACT Roll of honour films, showing photographs of local men who were serving in the First World War, appeared in British cinemas from early 1915. Widely produced at the time, only 12 such films have survived, four of which are held at Imperial War Museums (IWM). This article concentrates on the roll of honour films held at IWM from cinemas in Yorkshire, Essex and Lancashire. Concurring with previous studies, this essay explains the roll of honour film as a development of existing cinema practises, the new genre functioning as a strategy of practical patriotism. However, making use of new sources, this article gives a fuller account of the genre’s origins and shows that it was more substantial and long-lasting than has been recognised. It also makes observations about the nature of the roll of honour films that places them in the context of military and photographic history. As well as producing a detailed visual analysis which reveals some illuminating patterns about the gene, contextual research shows that one of the IWM examples was produced long after it is believed that the genre had died out.

Study of Toned Photographs of the Late 19th and Early 20th Century Using Multispectral Imaging and SEM/EDS Analysis

Abstract Toned photographs became popular in the second half of the 19th and early 20th century, either as stand-alone photographic images or as part of representative cards such as cabinet cards or cartes de visite. Still, further research is desirable to deepen our understanding about materials and techniques that had been used to create toned photographs. This study focusses on toning processes and is based on the analysis of 16 historical photographs from that period. To understand the toning process, information was collected from historical literature, while multispectral techniques and SEM/EDS analysis were applied to the sixteen photographs. Multispectral techniques, both macroscopic and microscopic, provide valuable information on surface and texture, damage phenomena and the photograph’s stratigraphy. SEM/EDS analysis yields information on the elements found in the studied photographs and their stratigraphy. This combination of the evaluation of historical written sources and scientific analysis provided an insight into the materials and techniques used in the toning of photographs.

Thérèse Bonney, the Bonney Service and the Business of Syndicated Photography, 1922–45

Photography by Thérèse Bonney (1894–1978) has appeared in exhibitions on women’s roles within modernism and World War II, and research has been completed on aspects of her most famous publication: Europe’s Children (1943). Yet scholars have not grappled with the importance of her syndicated business, the Bonney Service, in the distribution of ideas around the globe, or how to reconcile her photographs of design with her later images of World War II. Her desire was to train the eye to feel the haptic qualities of her images and distinguish through careful looking her intertwining of materiality, identity and democratic values. She understood the need to share multiple images over a sustained time to convince people that her pictorial interpretation was accurate. As part of a larger book project rooted in a years-long investigation of Bonney’s archive, this article seeks to begin these complicated conversations about Bonney’s legacy in the USA and her artistic range, and to reinsert Bonney into the history of photography she helped canonise but in which she has since been minimised.

Small Architectural Forms in Tomsk Wooden Buildings in 19–20th Centuries

The paper considers small architectural forms in the wooden manor buildings of Tomsk late in the 19th and early 20th centuries and their impact on the historical image of the city. The paper also studies preservation of historical cities and loss of historical and architectural wooden heritage.Purpose: To identify the types of small architectural forms in the wooden houses of Tomsk and determine their role in the city image.Methodology: Historical photographs, drawings, and field survey of wooden buildings, archival documents and photographs by local historians P. N. Kokhanenko and R. Perushin, allowing to determine lost small architectural forms and systematize them.Research findings: Determination of small architectural forms in preserving individual history and culture of the historical city.Practical implications: The obtained results can be used to study wooden buildings of Siberian cities and develop projects for their reconstruction in Tomsk.

The Revolution Will (Not?) Be Colourised: Photographs from the Indonesian National Revolution (1945–49) on Social Media

This article critically reflects on the practice of colourisation in present-day recirculations of photographs originally made during the armed Indonesian struggle for independence from Dutch colonial rule (1945–49). The article focuses on digital colour manipulations of photographs disseminated on social media platforms to address ethical and methodological debates dividing academic and amateur historians on the modification of historic photographs. I compare the notable lack of controversy around colourised photographs that show the violence of the Indonesian National Revolution to the heated debates kindled by manipulated images of victims of the Holocaust and the Khmer Rouge regime. ‘Genocide’ arguably remains a special category for determining whether conflict photographs can be modified. I show how Indonesian colourisers fail to interrogate the propaganda origins of the Dutch-made photographs they circulate on social media. For Indonesian social media users, however, deep context and detailed metadata for such photographs are less relevant for generating meaning than debates about how such photographs connect to the unfinished projects of decolonisation in the Netherlands and Indonesia.

The first frame: A camera-less photographic encounter with the foetus

This article examines two first-hand encounters with the foetus to reflect on the familial, photographic and political dimensions of 3D and 4D foetal portraits. It examines the photographic status of foetal portraits as intimates of the family album while acknowledging their public meaning in reproductive politics. The article aims to situate 3D and 4D foetal portraits within photographic history, theory and practice by examining how these camera-less images align with photographic vision.

Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography by Siobhan Angus

Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography is a materials-driven investigation of photography in its many forms. Through each chapter, Siobhan Angus details the application and significance of various minerals that have been mined to make image production possible: bitumen, silver, platinum, iron, uranium, and rare earth elements. In this review, I discuss why Camera Geologica is a valuable introduction to the photographic medium and its close relationship with extractive practices.

Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography by Siobhan Angus (review)

Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography by Siobhan Angus (review)

DoeDat: Enhanced Roundtripping of Crowdsourced Specimen Annotations

The DoeDat platform was launched by Meise Botanic Garden in 2018 to capture label data from imaged herbarium specimens by inviting volunteer contributors (Groom et al. 2018). It has since facilitated data capture from specimens of other natural history collections (Helminger et al. 2020, Mitrache et al. 2023), as well as digitised content from various other disciplines, such as historical photographs, posters and postcards. Volunteers may simply transcribe handwritten and/or typed text, but often also interpret the sparse and scattered information on the image, including trying to georeference its original location. As of April 2024, almost 650.000 tasks have been completed, of which more than 470.000 were herbarium specimens from Meise. DoeDat supports domain standards, including Darwin Core, and follows most of the currently drafted MIDS (Minimum Information about a Digital Specimen) guidelines as to what data is captured for natural history specimens. However, images have to be pre-loaded into the server storage for each project and captured data gets exported as one or more CSV files per project. These data files then still need to be processed before they can be ingested into the local management system (Engledow et al. 2023). Often the data are also subjected to additional quality control before they get openly published. This can result in the pipeline from image to openly published annotations being quite time and labour-consuming. As the biodiversity infrastructure landscape moves more towards FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) open data, DoeDat will adapt accordingly. This includes digital objects that are easy to annotate. Furthermore, image servers following IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) greatly standardise the access and portability of media content, drastically changing the way images are being dealt with. We envision upgrading the DoeDat platform to load images and any required metadata as IIIF manifests, greatly streamlining the process of adding new content and tracking provenance. The transcriptions should be accessible for external systems, loading the updated image manifests and publishing them as annotations such as nanopublications.

Geolocation of Old Photographs and Rephotography in the Field: Contribution to a New Understanding of the al-ʿŪla Oasis in the Early 20th Century a.d.

ABSTRACT Historical photographs are commonly available in landscape archaeology; however, they are rarely used systematically for the maximum benefit in terms of spatial and temporal information. In the framework of the al-ʿŪla Cultural Oasis Project (funded and steered by the French Agency for AlUla Development on behalf of the Royal Commission for AlUla), photographs taken at ground level by the Dominican Fathers Antonin Jaussen and Raphaël Savignac in the early 20th century a.d. were geolocated by identifying mountain peaks in the background and comparing distance ratios (on the photos) with angle ratios (on GIS). These locations were then visited in the field to re-take the photographs. This work demonstrates the value of recontextualized ground-level photographs to improve our knowledge of archaeological landscapes when cross-referenced with data from a systematic archaeological survey. We also propose a reproducible methodology for geolocating historical photographs in similar or other contexts.

Implementasi Framework Laravel pada Aplikasi Pemesanan Jasa Photography menggunakan Metode Rapid Aplication Development

The advancement of technology in the field of photography has become an increasingly growing trend over time. In the context of Indonesia, the history of photography began in 1840, in line with the discovery of photography by Juriaan Munich, a Dutch media officer. Photography has been a part of people's lifestyle for centuries, ranging from the use of simple digital cameras to sophisticated devices that require specialized skills. Lensa Photography, as a photography studio in Bengkalis Regency, also faces challenges in the booking process. Manual processes through telephone or direct visits often result in scheduling errors. To address this issue, this study has successfully developed a website-based Lensa Photography booking system using the Laravel framework and the Rapid Application Development (RAD) development method. This booking system has successfully met its objectives by providing the following features, More efficient schedule management, Improved scheduling accuracy, Time and cost savings, Increased customer satisfaction, This booking system has been adopted by Lensa Photography and has provided significant benefits for the company, including, More organized and organized booking schedules, Reduced scheduling errors, More efficient booking time and costs, Increased customer satisfaction.

Hidden in plain sight: the covering of patients’ eyes and a microethics of medical photography

This article uses the author’s experience of researching historical photographs of facial injury and surgical reconstruction to think through the ethics of writing about and publishing images of patients anonymised...

Geoprocessing of archival aerial photos and their scientific applications: A review

Abstract Poland as well as other countries keep extensive collections of 20th and 21st-century aerial photos, which are underexploited compared to such other archival materials as satellite imagery. Meanwhile, they offer significant research potential in various areas, including urban development, land use changes, and long-term environmental monitoring. Archival photographs are detailed, often obtained every five to ten years, and feature high resolution, from 20 cm to 1 m. Their overlap can facilitate creating precise digital models that illustrate topography and land cover, which are essential variables in many scientific contexts. However, rapidly transforming these photographs into geographically accurate measurements of the Earth’s surface poses challenges. This article explores the obstacles in automating the processing of historical photographs and presents the main scientific research directions associated with these images. Recent advancements in enhancing work˚ows, including the development of modern digital photogrammetry tools, algorithms, and machine learning techniques are also discussed. These developments are crucial for unlocking the full potential of aerial photographs, making them easier accessible and valuable for a broader range of scientific fields. These underutilized photographs are increasingly recognized as vital in various research domains due to technological advancements. Integrating new methods with these historical images offers unprecedented opportunities for scientific discovery and historical understanding, bridging the past with the future through innovative research techniques.

‘Cameras and young people belong together’: Camera Comics (1944-46) as an imaginative, ideological and commercial space for addressing and depicting American child photographers

ABSTRACT In 1944, U. S. Camera Company, the force behind one of the largest circulation photography magazines, launched Camera Comics for children. At the heart of every ten-cent issue was Kid Click, a teenage “shutterbug” whose camera helped him overcome bullies at summer camp, to uncover Nazi spy rings, and to bring armed robbers to justice. The character provided a neat segue to the rotogravure illustrated and textual pages of Camera Comics that offered photographic guidance for children, including tips for building camera gadgets at home and winning school competitions. Photographs by “typical American boys” – real-life Kid Clicks – abutted camera advertisements aimed at the same. Camera Comics imagined and addressed US child photographers via a distinctive set of gendered and nationalistic narratives, offering an illuminating comic-themed case study in a much wider and longer story of how cultural expectations of cameras and children have been ideologically constructed to intersect. This article offers a close reading of the extant nine issues of the comic and a comparison with parallel issues of U. S. Camera magazine, along with other primary sources that aligned children with photography in the period. These are contextualised with secondary literature on comics, photographic history, and childhood studies. Ultimately, the article argues that Camera Comics offers a highly productive space for surveying cultural expectations made of children in mid-century USA, and especially the conflicting moral attributes applied to different media forms and tools directed at children as cultural consumers and producers.

Facial Recognition in Historical Photographs with Artificial Intelligence in Python

In this lesson, you’ll learn computer vision and machine learning principles for object recognition, and how to apply these principles using Python to recognize and classify smiling faces in historical photographs.

The Automation of Style

In histories of photography, the notion of ‘seeing photographically’ is associated with so-called ‘straight’ photographers such as Edward Weston. It means to train the human-camera eye – to ‘previsualise’ – by conforming to the conditions of what Vilém Flusser calls the “photographic program”. At the same time, seeing photographically is a constant dynamic between a protean technical practice and aesthetic conventions or styles. This paper revisits the notion of seeing photographically to contextualise how notions of photographic style operate in generative imaging practices and AI discourse. We argue that since not only photorealism but the look of photographs from any period or style can be generated with the right combination of prompts and parameters, it has become possible to ‘previsualise’ and ‘see photographically’ by treating the history of photography as a style market. The concept of ‘style’, outdated in art history, becomes newly important and photography becomes a memory to be evoked in ahistorical stylistic evocations.

The Unphotographable

In his famous discussion of the transparency of the photographic image, Walton (1984) claimed there are opaque photographs that fail to be transparent because of technological error, willful dishonesty, or author experimentation. Photographic history, philosophy, and epistemology have rarely interpreted such photos. The Fraenkel Gallery’s exhibition Unphotographable (2013) explored such failed, doubtful, and experimental photographs. This essay aims to further advance the concept of the unphotographable by interpreting this exhibition in relation to abstract images from the project Scotoma (2014–2018) by the Slovenian artist DK. Evoking Lacanian scotomization, DK’s project Scotoma points towards defining the unphotographable as a photographic black spot enforced by its technological, ideological, or operator-imposed conditions. Yet, since these shots are still photographs, the unphotographable is part of the photo-universe (Laruelle, 2011). Thus the unphotographable becomes a way of defining the photographable, revealing it as a dynamic field in which technology makes something that was previously unphotographable into part of the photographable.

Seeing Photographically

This Introduction to the ‘Seeing photographically’ special issue begins with four vignettes drawn from (nearly) two centuries of photographic history. These examples are leveraged to pose critical questions about photography’s transformation since the 19th century, and especially in the first decades of the 21st century, as trajectories associated with digitization, networked distribution, the widespread integration of cameras into mobile devices and the growing application of machine-learning to image-making have all taken hold. Photography has never been more widespread, but its boundaries and specificity seem to have become less and less certain. Beginning from the premise that ‘technological change’ is never simply technological, this issue challenged authors to respond to the theme of ‘seeing photographically’. Their responses clustered around a set of intersecting problematics: the impact of ‘generative AI’ on the photographic field; the way that photography has consistently challenged the (often unconscious) human-centrism of most accounts of perception and seeing; and the challenges associated with theorizing photography as media in the present.

Deterioration-associated microbiome of a modern photographic artwork: the case of Skull and Crossbones by Robert Mapplethorpe

The preservation of cultural heritage, including ancient photographic materials, is of paramount importance in the field of conservation science. In this context, the microbial diversity of ‘Skull and Crossbones’, a 1983 photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe printed on silver gelatine, was assessed. We employed both culture-dependent and culture-independent methods to characterize microbial communities inhabiting this artwork. Vibrational Raman micro spectroscopy and FT-IR spectroscopy were utilized to assess the chemical degradation condition and characterize the chemical components of the silver gelatin print. The combination of molecular sequencing methods (Sanger and HTS approach) and non-invasive vibrational spectroscopy yielded valuable insights into the microbial communities thriving on photographic material and the chemical degradation of the print. Isolated fungal strains were added to the Fungal Collection at the University of Naples Federico II, and their deteriorative potential was investigated by adding substrates, commonly used in canvas photographs to the culture media. These results establish a link between microbial communities colonizing ancient photographic materials, paper decomposition, and the enzymatic patterns of the retrieved microorganisms. This information is invaluable for understanding and addressing biodeterioration progression on valuable works of art, such as historical photographs, which remain understudied.