Historical Photographs Research Articles

Discovering a Project for the Development of Geotourism in Rural Areas: The Paleontological and Archaeological Interpretation Centre of Tamajón (CIPAT, Guadalajara, Spain)

The important paleontological and archaeological discoveries made in Tamajón in recent years have enriched the exceptional natural and cultural heritage of this town in the north of the Guadalajara province (central Spain). The extraordinary educational and outreach value of these findings led the PaleoIbérica Research Group to develop a project for the design and creation of the Paleontological and Archaeological Interpretation Centre of Tamajón (CIPAT, acronym in Spanish). In this new space, students and the general public have access to knowledge of the past of the region through three exhibition and didactic areas and the support of a rigorous and engaging infographic. The Paleontological Area allows visitors to explore, through fossils, replicas, models (real and virtual) and dioramas, the diversity of coastal and marine life that inhabited the region during the Late Cretaceous Age. Moreover, the area highlights crocodylomorphs, dinosaurs and fishes (identified through their fossilized tracks), and the remains of plants and invertebrates. The Archaeological Area shows the origin and uses of the building material known as Tamajón Stone by means of rough or carved samples, tools traditionally used in its extraction and carving, and historical photographs. Furthermore, in the Didactic Area, innovative specific educational activities are carried out, facilitating the knowledge and appreciation of the rich natural and cultural heritage of Tamajón. After its recent inauguration (August 2021), the CIPAT is a valuable tool to encourage the practice of positive attitudes toward geoconservation and to promote the sustainable and socioeconomic development of the region through geotourism.

Visual narratives of environmental change: collective memory and identity at New Zealand heritage sites

This article interrogates historical photographs exhibited at public heritage sites in Aotearoa New Zealand. The analysis reveals that – by portraying 19th-century environmental change as a ‘heroic’ narrative of ‘progress’ – the photographs construct New Zealand national identity in opposition to nature, rather than promote a sense of connectedness with the natural environment. The article thus makes three important contributions to the literature on the visualization of environmental and climate change. First, the empirical case study demonstrates that visual narratives shape our social identities in relation to nature. Second, the article adds a rare socio-semiotic analysis to the environmental communication literature, highlighting that photographs have to be examined through multimodal methods and in relation to wider discursive processes of meaning making. Third, by borrowing ideas from the literature on collective memory, the article shows that, even though they depict scenes that are set in the distant past, historical photographs can still influence environmental attitudes and behaviours in the present.

The Arapaho Way: Continuity and Change on the Wind River Reservation by Sara Wiles

Reviewed by: The Arapaho Way: Continuity and Change on the Wind River Reservation by Sara Wiles Angelica Lawson (bio) The Arapaho Way: Continuity and Change on the Wind River Reservation by Sara Wiles University of Oklahoma, 2019 SARA WILES'S PHOTO-ETHNOGRAPHIC BOOK The Arapaho Way: Continuity and Change on the Wind River Reservation highlights the lives and significant events surrounding twenty-two featured individuals, their extended families, and friends. Following a forward by Jordan Dresser (Arapaho) and a brief introduction, the book is divided into three sections, organized chronologically beginning in the early 1900s and concluding in 2017. After publishing Arapaho Journeys in 2011, Wiles sought to add more personal and historic depth to this second volume of Arapaho ethnography by including more family and historic photographs alongside her own and by placing biographical stories within larger historical contexts such as the boarding school era, the occupation of Alcatraz, and the early days of the American Indian Movement. The layering of family stories, as in the opening section "Connecting Families through Photographs and Oral Histories," adds depth to her photo-ethnography. "Discovering Matilda Spoonhunter" comprises the entire first section; this is an intriguing story accompanied by thirteen black-and-white photos. The narrative examines interactions between two families—Matilda's (Arapaho) and Minnie's (non-Arapaho) during a tenuous time, when homesteading was taking place near the newly created Arapaho reservation. Wiles does not problematize the negative impacts of homesteading in Arapaho territory; instead, she focuses on the friendship between Matilda and Minnie, who became fast friends after saving a child's life together. While the story lacks exegesis, it is lovely in how it highlights "the founding mother of two prominent Arapaho families," Matilda Spoonhunter, who until now had been hidden in the shadows of her more famous brother, Sherman Sage. Matilda's story shines among the photos of generations of her descendants and is one of many examples of fascinating women's stories in this collection. The many biographies of Arapaho women are especially compelling and cover a wide range of topics and time periods beginning with Matilda's story and ending with Nora Oldman's, who along with her husband William C'Hair, participated in the protests at Standing Rock. These stories are a positive [End Page 192] aspect of the collection and cover a wide range of topics. A favorite is Rubena Hernandez's story. With thirty years of flagging experience, Rubena began working on the Seventeen Mile Road project when she was seventy years old. Wiles contextualizes Rubena's biography by telling a story of personal significance to the Arapaho people of the Wind River Reservation—about a project that sought to improve the safety of an extremely dangerous road on the reservation. Wiles adds depth to her photo-ethnographic project by strategically pairing stories. Chapters pair themes of attending high school and college off the reservation, as well as themes of performance and rodeo. The most powerful pairing comes near the end of the collection with chapters about a recently committed hate crime and Arapaho tribal member Ron Howard's efforts to organize a peace march in the aftermath. The chapter explores racist attitudes toward Arapahos and hatred toward homeless Native Americans, in particular. It is followed by a chapter about one of the victims of the crime, James Goggles Jr., who was shot in the head by a non-Indian intent on murdering homeless Native Americans. Goggles was one of two men who were shot and the only survivor. Pairing—essentially layering these stories together—helps to humanize the stereotyped homeless Arapahos derogatorily referred to as "park rangers" (182). Although Wiles shines a light on the deeply entrenched racism surrounding Arapaho communities, she only slightly contextualizes that racism within the larger history of resource extraction, water wars, and other policies and practices that led to the disenfranchisement of Arapahos by neighboring towns. Readers looking for a highly academic or nuanced critique of settler colonialism's impact on this reservation community will not find it here; yet there is value in these very intimate and distinctly Arapaho stories and photos. Wiles states in the introduction that these are photos of friends and people...

Radical Welcome in the Archives: What Does It Really Mean to Say “You're Welcome Here”?

Radical Welcome in the Archives: What Does It Really Mean to Say “You're Welcome Here”?

Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography by Nicole Dawn Strathman

Reviewed by: Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography by Nicole Dawn Strathman Audrey Goodman (bio) Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography by Nicole Dawn Strathman University of Oklahoma Press, 2020 THROUGH A NATIVE LENS DEMONSTRATES the many ways that Native people in North America practiced photography, participated in image production and exchange, and integrated photographs into their communities. By design, it is not a comprehensive study. Instead, it offers a selective, well-paced overview of situations, practices, and interpretations of images made of Native subjects and/or by Native photographers between 1840 and 1940. It presents a clear critical framework or "rubric" for approaching both familiar and archival images, and the extensive illustrations in the book complicate and enrich existing published records and recent museum exhibitions. Rather than delve into the politics of repatriation, develop a sustained theoretical argument, or explore in detail the ongoing social lives of the images, the book realizes the value of the author's extensive archival research by concentrating on the conditions and contexts of image production. Strathman examines in detail how Indian subjects crafted their public personas and identities on many scales. With its wide range of visual materials, appealing design, high-quality reproductions, and clear structure, this informative and well-researched book is a pleasure to view and read. Strathman worked extensively in state, territorial, and tribal archives, including the Autry National Center's Braun Research Library, the National Anthropological Archives, the Oklahoma Historical Society, the American Heritage Center, the University of Wyoming, the Yukon Archives, and the Cherokee National Archives. The book shares her discoveries through narrative sketches of each photographer's experience. Divided into two parts, "Native Participants" and "Native Practitioners," the book distinguishes between the agency exercised by subjects and that exercised by creators. Within those parts, each chapter assembles topics, figures, and visual materials according to the degree of the subject's public notoriety or the photographer's professional expertise. It reports on the origin and status of each archival collection and invites readers to view, interpret, and delight in the array of photographs on display. The book contends that Native subjects and photographers "used photography to assert their right of self-representation," whether through small [End Page 154] gestures of resistance visible in the photographs themselves, negotiations for payment, or running a successful studio (179). Part I advances this claim through discussions of leaders such as Red Cloud (Oglala), the Hawaiian royal family, and Sarah Winnemucca (Paiute), each of whom used portrait photography to craft political strategies and public personas. Other examples reveal how Native people negotiated with non-Native photographers to control the production and circulation of images: at times they restricted the events that outsiders could photograph, or adapted rituals to make only secular elements visible, or chose whether to admit a photographer to witness and record family life. While many of the images reproduced in this section will be familiar to readers, they continue to command attention and have a cumulative power. The most original and rewarding chapters of the book are found in Part II, where Strathman explores a broad cross-section of practices by semi-professional and amateur Native photographers: visual ethnographers and collectors such as Louis Shotridge (Yeilgooxu); Bureau of Indian Affairs employee Richard Throssel (Crow/Scottish/adopted Cree); Benjamin Haldane (Tsimshian), owner of a photography studio in Metlakatla, Alaska; Jennie Ross Cobb (Cherokee), whose archive flaunts the confidence, independence, and personal style of young Cherokee women during the Progressive era; and George Hunt (Tlingit/British), whose snapshots convey the Tlingit community's pride in hunting and other rituals. For each, Strathman deftly assesses the archive, probes the limits of the historical record, teases out stylistic and rhetorical contrasts between the Native photographers and their mentors, and summarizes the political, commercial, and cultural pressures of each location and moment. Through a Native Lens is a fascinating and beautifully produced record of Native photography as a diverse enterprise. As Strathman writes in the conclusion, "There is no single Native American way of practicing photography but, instead, multiple photographies" (177). The study is a substantial contribution to recent and ongoing appraisals and revisions of Native photographic histories by a diverse group of...

Archive, Photography and the Language of Administration

Jane Birkin’s recently published Archive, Photography and the Language of Administration approaches one of the most critical topics in digital humanities: archives. Organized in a series of separate but connected essays, rather than formal chapters, it covers themes from the history of image archives to the social component of archives, cataloging and descriptions, technical data, performativity and finally opens up the theme of postdigital archives. Many types of archives are covered by this book, from methodical ones from natural sciences and controlling Secret Service archives to random digital snapshot archives. The book covers the history of photography and its memory, ranging in interest from glass plates and paper items to poor images such as thumbnails. It refers to original artworks and reproductions.The book’s specific focus is on the distinction but also the relationship between image and text, which Ronald Barthes introduced in his analysis of image theory, showing how text nails down the polyvalent meaning and ambiguity of the image by its precision. Moving between the formality of Foucault’s disciplinary discourse to the narrativity of Derrida, but also the rigid dualism of Barthes, Birkin sees more practical purpose in using text in both conceptual and descriptive writing, in a variety of forms, as label, tag, ekphrasis, iconographic reading, narrative, etc. Thus, the text has a triple function; it is used to “reveal, classify and to reproduce” (p. 42) the image as a document.Archive, Photography and the Language of Administration is a substantial read. Bringing up information, theories and references in significant density, it supplements and updates both previous knowledge on archives and its theories, hardly omitting any important detail in capturing the entire thematic landscape. As such, it would be a valuable source for archivists of all kinds, but furthermore it would be a great handbook for studies in the domain.

Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges

Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges

The Way She Looks: A History of Female Gazes in African Portraiture—Photographs from the Walther Collection

The Way She Looks: A History of Female Gazes in African Portraiture—Photographs from the Walther Collection

From Daguerreotype to Autochrome: An Incursion in European, Colonial and Romanian Pharmaceutical and Medical Photography

"Pharmacists have the ability to be chemists and that is the reason they possess the knowledge to make photographs. For that purpose, especially in the 19th century, some pharmacists were photographers, so the two professions are related to a certain extent. The daguerreotype was an invention that was brought to the attention of the public in the summer of 1839 in Paris by Louis Daguerre. Although it was a French invention, it enjoyed a huge success in the United States, and for that purpose the most numerous daguerreotypes derive from the American continent. Some daguerreotypes from the pharmaceutical and medical domain will be presented in this work: a picture of the pharmacist Martin (Gamas), of the physician Charles Abadie and of the physician Gustave Adolphe Raichon. The description of the daguerreotypes will include some other particular examples of empirical restoration from the collection of the author. Another type of photography, important for the history of photography, is the autochrome, one of the first colour photographic process available to the public. It was invented by the Lumière brothers. An example of medical photography from colonial France (Morocco), portraying a case of leprosy, will be presented as well. In the end, some examples from the European and Romanian photography will illustrate the role of the pharmacy and of the pharmacist in the 19th century-early 20th century, as a snapshot of the health professional of that period. In conclusion, the picture speaks for itself and somehow, it can be a vivid time machine for the reconstruction of the past, not only in the fields of pharmacy and medicine, but in any other field as well. Keywords: Daguerreotype, autochrome, pharmacy, medicine, old photography, photography collection. "

Experimental persistence of change: collages of the palimpsestic temporalities of Freixo's Thermoelectric Power Station (Campanhã, Porto)

This paper presents an artistic work developed as part of the curatorial research Persistent Materialities, that experimented with different modes of documentation and mediation of loss of the post-industrial ruins of Freixo’s Thermoelectric Power Station (Campanhã, Porto). Whereas this building becomes less legible as an official object of industrial heritage and yield into continuous ruination and post-human condition, the collaged photographs presented here constructs a narration and interpretation of a retrospective history. The visual representations usually surrounding the imaginary of this landscape highlight two fixed modes of its existence: historical photographs are instrumentalized in a conservative discourse of preservation while architectural collages and technical drawings project a possible future where the building is no more. Distancing from these visual representations that conceive the landscape apart from its contingent and material reality, the retrospective collages stage the complexity of layers that assemble and reassemble this palimpsestic landscape. The recollection of segments, traces and fragments of a dynamic and mutable history quest for the endurance of the transformed and transforming aspect of this heterotopic space rather than the landscape itself.

Models, Plans, Clusters & Pine Trees Vila Nova de Santo André 1971-2021


 
 
 As an odd case of urbanism Vila Nova de Santo André is the only city built from scratch in Portugal in the XX century, without any urban pre-existence. Conceived by political decision and framed by an ambitious industrial project, the Port of Sines, Vila Nova is located in an area of extensive pine forests, between Sines and Lagoa de St. André. Created in 1971 the Office of the Area of Sines (GAS) was the administrative body responsible for planning and implementing the different components of the project. Endowed with enormous expertise knowledge and economic resources, the enterprise suffered a significant setback with the 1973 international oil crisis and thereafter with the 25th April, 1974 Revolution. Political hesitations, setbacks and abandonment marked the entire Sines project until the GAS extinction in 1986.
 The main intention of this essay is to confront and reposition the negativeness of Santo André new town. Perceived as a failure and a lost opportunity, the lack of knowledge that supports this prejudice stems from the absence of a critical and reflective mass, whether in the form of academic research or artistic expression. The paper intends to confront and discuss archive historical photographs from different phases of construction of the city and its surrounding landscape, with recent photographs. This visual atlas, as an unfinished, inorganic and impure edifice, join and relates the photographs as fragments. It follows the line of reasoning of Walter Benjamin on the political potential of the outmoded as a subject matter.
 
 

Symbolism and National Identity in Carl Durheim’s Photographic Work

In this article I explore the work of Carl Durheim (1810-1890) as a production of highly symbolic imagery geared toward the visual creation of the Swiss national identity in the wake of the establishment of the Confederation in 1848. After providing some background about Durheim and the early history of photography in Switzerland I focus on Durheim’s pictures of the so-called Heimatlose (vagabonds), which were commissioned by the Police and Justice Department in Bern. I argue that these pictures cannot be interpreted merely as mug shots taken in order to reproduce the identity of the depicted subjects; rather, using the rhetorical force of photography, these images projected onto the Heimatlose the ideal of the new Swiss society, based on bourgeois values and clearly demarcated from everything foreign through an idealized operation of drawing geographical and social borders.

Reproductions, a Special Issue of History of Photography

Reproductions, a Special Issue of History of Photography

Conceptualizing ‘Science’ in the Photography Collections at the National Science and Media Museum

Focusing on the internationally significant photographic collections at the National Science and Media Museum (Bradford, UK), this article explores the central questions: What counts as ‘scientific’ in a museum dedicated to the history of photography (as well as film, television, and digital media)? And what is the place of photography in the history of science and technology? The article explores a set of photographic collections in the UK and Canada and offers a framework for thinking about the relationship between the histories of photography, histories of science and photography, and institutional collecting practices.

Paul Kretschmers Expedition 1901 nach Lesbos und das dortige Netzwerk der Lehrenden am Beispiel des Gymnasiallehrers Michail Κ. Stefanidis

The research of the expedition of Paul Kretschmer (1866–1956) to Lesbos in 1901 brought into focus the person of Michail K. Stefanidis (1868–1957), who was a scientist, professor at the University of Athens and an ordinary member of the Athens Academy. The most important person in the network of Kretschmer in Lesbos, Stefanidis supported the Viennese professor in collecting his linguistic material and evaluating the data. As a result of the expedition, Kretschmer published a monograph about the dialect of Lesbos in 1905. This study seeks to analyse Stefanidis' various activities during this expedition, when he was in the early stages of his career as a grammar school teacher in Mytilini. Previously unknown archive material, such as the travel diaries and historical photographs, were investigated to achieve the goal of the present paper. This valuable material can be found in Kretschmer's estate in the Austrian National Library and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Changes in plant communities and soil attributes in the "Cousteau's whale bone skeleton" tourist attraction area in Keller Peninsula after 48 years.

Ice-free areas of Antarctica represent an important study region that helps us understand how human activity affects plant communities and soil properties. The goal of this study was to determine the changes in plant composition and soil properties around a whale bone skeleton (WB) near Ferraz Station, King George Island, Antarctica from 1972 to 2020 (48 years). The WB was assembled in 1972 by Jacques-Yves Cousteau and his team. It is located in a large moss field and visited by many tourists. We studied the plant composition and development based on historical and recent photographs and phytosociological studies from 1986 to 2020. The soil was sampled in February 2009 to determine general properties. The results showed that human activity surrounding the WB directly affected the plant community composition and soil properties. The Syntrichia cushions were positively affected by the calcium deposits from bone dissolution. The principal component analysis revealed that mineralization of the bones increased soil nutrient assembly. A strong phosphatization process was observed in the WB area, similar to that in ornithogenic soils. The WB on the marine terrace enhanced soil fertility and changed the plant community.

“Souvenir. Dhar and Mandu”. A Princely Album as a Navigator Trough the History of Photography in (British) India

“Souvenir. Dhar and Mandu”. A Princely Album as a Navigator Trough the History of Photography in (British) India

Photography: Science, Technology, and Practice in Nineteenth-Century Canada

Drawing upon empirical research from a larger project on photography in nineteenth-century British North America, this essay proceeds from the conviction that photography—as science, as technology, as practice—warrants closer scrutiny for the ways in which it contributed to the creation and circulation of knowledge in mid-to-late nineteenth-century Canada. Based on surviving images as well as those known only from the written record, this foray into the entwined histories of photography, science, and technology, while far from comprehensive, is intended to open up new directions for further study by historians of science and technology.

Meaningful Places: Landscape Photographers in the Nineteenth-Century American West

The early history of photography in America coincided with the Euro-American settlement of the West. This thoughtful book argues that the rich history of western photography cannot be understood by focusing solely on the handful of well-known photographers whose work has come to define the era. Art historian Rachel Sailor points out that most photographers in the West were engaged in producing images for their local communities. These pictures didn't just entertain the settlers but gave them a way to understand their new home. Photographs could help the settlers adjust to their new circumstances by recording the development of a place--revealing domestication, alteration, and improvement. The book explores the cultural complexity of regional landscape photography, western places, and local sociopolitical concerns. Photographic imagery, like western paintings from the same era, enabled Euro-Americans to see the new landscape through their own cultural lenses, shaping the idea of the frontier for the people who lived there.

ЗАМОК ТІГІНА У ФОРТЕЦІ БЕНДЕРИ

The Bender fortress - the largest fortification in Moldova, consisting of a castle and a stone-earth fortress, was used by the 14th Army of the Russian Federation until 2008. Therefore for a long time, it was inaccessible for field studies, which soon revealed the contradiction between the accepted history and architecture. Two historical documents - the history of Sultan Suleiman about the construction of the fortress in 1538 and the memoirs of a traveler of the 17th century. Evlia Celebi determined the official record of the foundation of the stone fortress called Benders, closing the topic of the fortress's history before the Ottoman rejection, previously known in the sources as Tighina. A study of the castle's architecture and its comparison with graphic materials and historical photographs revealed that the current state had preserved enough details and traces of structures dating back to its construction before the use of artillery in defense. Among them: traces of the upper battle on the towers, adaptations for the mosque of the second tier of the entrance tower, the absence of walls facing the courtyard of the prismatic towers, a filled-in ditch near the walls of the castle - all these features indicate that, according to one of the most likely versions, the builders of the castle Tighina were Genoese. An analysis of graphic images and photographs of the castle, made before the architectural degradation of the structure, revealed the missing details that indicate features characteristic of the period before the probable construction of 1538. The castle's architecture was two centuries older than it is currently dated based on historical research, corresponding to a time before the use of firearms and artillery. This is evidenced by the loss of the first moat arranged near the walls of the castle, the wooden galleries on the top of the towers, from which the exit openings to the galleries and sockets from the consoles have been preserved, the missing walls of the prismatic towers facing the courtyard, similar to fortresses in northern Italy. The arrangement of the mosque in the second tier of the entrance tower was carried out later, for which it was necessary to dismantle the stone vault of the entrance passage, replacing it 2.0 m lower with a flat ceiling, and to arrange the entrance to the mosque several steps below the fighting passage, etc. Round artillery loopholes replaced vertical embrasures for bow and arrow defense. The Tighinsky castle was not made of wood and earth; a stone made by Turkish builders did not replace it - it is the same castle mentioned in 1408 as a guardhouse and customs house, and the details indicate a specific time and architectural and cultural region of influence. During the Turkish period, the Upper Fortress and a second moat were built at a distance from the castle, along the inner edge of which, on three sides, bastions for artillery, characteristic of the 16th century, were arranged, from which a tower with a drawbridge was preserved - it seems that this is all that was preserved from Mimar Sinan's contribution to the strengthening of the Bender Castle.