Intersection Of Photography Research Articles

Civil intent: Rethinking ‘the political’ in art and photography education

Recent scholarship bringing together photography, visual culture and political theory is unsettling established approaches to understanding photography beyond art-historical frameworks. This article examines the implications and potentials for education practices of this emerging new paradigm by exploring how the civil potential of photography and creative practice might be activated in learning environments. The article reflects on the collective learning arising from a series of educational experiments developed by the Doing Visual Politics network which have sought to connect cultures of socially motivated creative practice in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia; Kathmandu, Nepal and Dhaka, Bangladesh by interrogating and expanding disciplinary understandings at the intersection of photography, visual activism, social practice and public pedagogy. These learning spaces – where the expression of concern for shared world/s is prioritized – have provided useful insights into approaches capable of exceeding the limits of the conventional politics of representation.

The (un)promised land: queer identity and South Africa’s post-apartheid urban landscape

In this article, I explore the intersection of photography and contemporary urban topographies in the production of queer identity in post-apartheid South Africa. To do so I examine Thebeautifulonesarehere, a contemporary photo-collage portrait series by Kelebogile Ntladi, which attempts to queer representations of South African cityscapes to reveal the entrenched homophobia and the systematic rejection of queer subjects. Ntladi, inspired by their own experiences of counter-normativity and the omnipresent threat of violence they face as a result, took to the streets to walk through their home city of Johannesburg to photograph the urban and cultural landscape; these photographic prints were then used as the building blocks in the assembly and fabrication of imagined spaces in which they and their fellow queer citizens would be able to live without fear of violence, where they could move freely and without repercussion. Using the trope of the flâneur as a starting point, I draw on Walter Benjamin’s paradoxical experience of Paris: his writing of Paris as the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’ and ‘the promised land’ of the flâneur exists in stark juxtaposition with his own complex experience of anxiety, dislocation and impending doom while living in the city while in exile during World War II. Ntladi’s personal experience of post-1994 Johannesburg echoes the paradoxical experience.

The Language of Vision: Photography and Southern Literature in the 1930s and After by Joseph R. Millichap

Reviewed by: The Language of Vision: Photography and Southern Literature in the 1930s and After by Joseph R. Millichap Sarah Gleeson-White Joseph R. Millichap. The Language of Vision: Photography and Southern Literature in the 1930s and After. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2016. xv + 163 pp. In The Language of Vision, Joseph Millichap sets out "to analyze and interpret the complementary languages and visions of photography and literature in the South … from the 1930s forward" by "centering on a half dozen major writers and their finest texts through close readings both verbal and visual" (xiii). He provides a useful introductory survey of photographic tropes as these appear in the work of six canonical southern US writers: James Agee, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, and Natasha Trethewey. Chapter 1 provides historical context concerning the nexus of photography and literature in the South, with almost inevitable references along the way to Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida and Susan Sontag's On Photography. Of far greater use to Millichap, however, is Katherine Henninger's groundbreaking 2007 Ordering the Façade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women's Writing, in which she draws on Benedict Anderson's writings on nationhood to construct a specifically Southern intermedial culture. I was surprised that Millichap makes no mention in this first chapter (or in proceeding chapters) of the vast and fascinating scholarship concerning the intersection of photography and literature beyond Henninger's, most of which examines many of the same texts as his own study: Michael North's Camera Works (2005), Stuart Burrows's A Familiar Strangeness (2008), Jeff Allred's American Modernism and Depression Documentary (2005), and Joseph B. Entin's Sensational Modernism (2012), to name only a handful of book-length studies that focus on American literature. A second, equally striking absence from Millichap's study is that of any photographs themselves; this "strange" absence is explained, he writes, by the difficult, costly, and "time-consuming" activity of acquiring permissions and high-resolution images (xiv). [End Page 365] Chapter 2 foregrounds Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Because Millichap effectively dismisses recent scholarship on this canonical text as "tendentious and ultimately pointless" (138), it is difficult to gauge just where his reading might sit in relation to current debates about this text or the scholarship around intermediality. Nonetheless, this chapter usefully reminds us of the mechanics of Agee and Evans's production of this complex text—and, too, of the important issues and practices it raises: collaboration, ekphrasis, agency, and the relationship between modernism and realism. Millichap's chapter on Faulkner focuses on several lesser-studied works of the Faulkner canon, such as If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, Flags in the Dust, Pylon, and "The Leg." Perhaps most interesting is Millichap's unraveling of the differences between the two versions of Sanctuary, which comes down to, he argues, their deployment of photography: "several intriguing photographic tropes from the first version … were excised in the published novel" (50). This, Millichap argues, suggests "not just Faulkner's earlier connections with literary realism but his concern for social contexts that would reappear in his fiction as the Depression years unfolded." Like Faulkner, Warren (the subject of chapter 4) "never created a text illustrated by actual photographs" (67). Rather, "documentary visual art in the Depression era opened the emerging writer's imagination to the power of the real inherent in the photograph to revise subjective perceptions of personal, social, and cultural realities." In his survey of such an imagination at work across fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, Millichap begins to shift the framing of Warren's output from "the history and literature of the Civil War and Civil Rights eras" to "the interest in photography [he] shared with other Southern authors in the 1930s and 1940s[, which] may be attributed to the pervasive power of photography and film as graphic and popular art during these decades" (67–68). In his chapter on Welty, Millichap notes that there are "almost as many examples of photographs in her prose as of verbal texts in her pictures" (92), the implications of which seem to be that it is extremely difficult—and perhaps futile—to...

Mobile Photography and Open, Networked Learning

This paper explores the intersection of photography and education at a time when both are facing significant changes, partly as a result of the increasing use of digital, mobile devices. Mobile smart phones not only include increasingly good quality built-in cameras, they also enable the immediate editing and sharing of photos through social networks. This reduces the importance of the image as an artifact and increases the social aspect of photography. Similarly, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies in schools and universities provide opportunities to reconsider how and where learning happens. Mobile digital devices allow students to explore, create, communicate and collaborate with their peers in the classroom and with others beyond. Following a review of how networked smart phones are used for photography and in education, I report on two innovative photography courses that make effective use of mobile devices and social networks to empower students and enhance the learning experience. Phonar (photography and narrative) is a hybrid course that is offered to fee-paying place-based students at the University of Coventry and is also open for others to access for free. Phonar Nation is a free, non-credit course designed for teenagers and delivered through a mobile Web app with the help of community mentors. I discuss how their use of mobile media and social networks, together with collaboration and open strategies, serve as examples of how mobile devices can be effectively used to serve creative practice and extend learning.

Imaged Communities: Putting Canadian Photographic History in its Place

“Imaged Communities” imagines Canada as a network of photographic knowledge. Co-written by six members of Canadian Photography History/Histoire de la photographie canadienne (CPH/HPC), a research team based at Concordia University in Montreal, this essay examines the meeting places created by photographic technology. The mapping of these histories addresses the central questions about photographic history and mediated experience that have motivated this research—What did Canadians know about photography, and when did they know it?–and supplements it with a third—Where did these encounters take place? The introduction establishes the sites and parameters of the contribution. First, the research draws on the digital anthology of Canadian photographic literature that the authors are putting forward as a history of the medium in Canada—a community imaged at every stage of its mutation from colony to nation and thereby imagined, in Benedict Anderson’s well-known formulation (1991). This is a fragmentary photographic history, which accounts for the polyphonic nature of this text. Second, the authors write as art historians and photographic specialists, mindful of the various turns in the humanities and sciences that have engaged with, and sometimes emerged from, discoveries in photographic studies, the spatial turn most pertinent to this inquiry. The authors point out, however, that photographic practice has more than kept pace with theory. There is much to learn from artists’, documentarians’, snapshooters’, and compilers’ projects: their uses of photography as instruments of investigation; their photographic formulations of philosophical ideas and social conditions; the heuristic circle formed by the circulation of their work; and the penetration of that circle by neglected interests. For that reason, this group includes a creation-researcher, whose art historical practice is informed by the making of a photographic work. His armchair-tourist colleagues write at the intersection of photographic knowledge and photographic experience; the introduction seeks to elucidate the structure of that space. A third element of the introduction is an explanation of the lack of an authoritative history of Canadian photography, and how CPH/HPC and its network of individual and institutional collaborators are working within that gap to create new historiographical models. Five short studies follow, each using the intersection of photography and place as an organizing principle. In the frst, a brief survey of photographic literature on or about the Canadian West focusses on two bodies of work: a professional tourist’s travelogue of the West (and further West) as he constructed it in 1909 from his railcar, his hotel, and his campground; and a photographer/flmmaker’s lifelong investment in the representation of his diverse community, the North End of Winnipeg, Manitoba. The second study closes in on a single city—Toronto—as celebrated and chronicled in two nineteenth-century publications, and as revisited in a late twentieth-century exhibition and catalogue project based on the photographic collection of Library and Archives Canada. These curatorial perspectives on the city illuminate the social values of their day. In the third study, post-Centennial selection and uses of photographs from the Isaac Erb studio (c1870-1924) in Saint John, New Brunswick, are closely compared with the uses of those photographs at the time of their making and with a more complete version of the Erb oeuvre preserved in the provincial archives, revealing a photographic record of material culture that refects the port city’s emergence as a transnational, consumer economy. The fourth study moves to another Canadian port via the photographic holdings of the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, an ocean liner terminal and immigration shed-turned-museum. Through online display of its primarily digital collection, this doorway to Canada, selectively open between 1928 and 1971, is photographically preserved as a relational space, forever in between. Finally, a contemporary artist’s photographic study of photography and walking, conducted on boulevard Saint-Laurent in Montreal, creates a processual space of creation, bringing this essay full circle to the image and its imaginer. The conclusion underscores the dialogical structure of our relationships with photography, wherever we fnd it.

‘Sauvé du déluge des jours’ : Taxidermy, photography and literature in Adrien Goetz and Karen Knorr’s Le Soliloque de l’empailleur

This paper examines the intersection of photography and literature in Le Soliloque de l’empailleur, a short story by Adrien Goetz which reproduces 12 images from photographer Karen Knorr’s Fables. After discussing the profoundly intertextual nature of Knorr’s photos, which are inspired by Aesop, La Fontaine and Ovid, I undertake a close reading of Goetz’s story, examining the shared themes concerning the art of taxidermy and the disjunction between nature and culture present in both works. I also examine the ways in which the text evokes Knorr’s Fables, as the narrator sometimes describes a specific photo and at other times encourages the reader to imagine a photo that is not reproduced. The shared thematic content between Goetz’s story and Knorr’s photos, and the intermedial interaction between text and image allow the reader to concretise the fictional universe of the museum of taxidermied animals envisaged by both partners in this photo-literary collaboration.

Proving Preservation: Boston Subway Construction Photography, 1894–1897

While ostensibly depicting reality, documentary photography necessarily showcases a constructed version of it. In the nineteenth century, photographers and their sponsors already understood this quality and used photographs to convey prescribed truth. Official photographic documentation of the construction of America’s first subway, in Boston, Massachusetts, provides a case study of the uses of images as both an integral tool of the preservation movement and proof of successful preservation. Vociferous defenders of beloved local landmarks, including Boston Common, Boston Public Garden, and neighboring buildings, convinced lawmakers to undertake a massive and hotly contested engineering project. Even this supposed preservation plan required some disruption of the existing environs, and the Boston Transit Commission turned to photography to achieve two simultaneous goals. Some 200,000 photographs were created over the course of sixty-five years to record the construction of Boston’s transit system. While only a fraction of these survive today, principally at Historic New England, and most are unattributed to individual photographers, they allow the viewer to construct a cohesive narrative. The photographs do record construction, but more importantly they convey messages by the commission to convince detractors, prove preservation efforts, and demonstrate success. Viewed this way, the images of the commission represent the methodological intersection of photography and preservation when both were still in development.

Intersection of Photography and Architecture—Introduction

This special issue of Visual Resources presents a discussion on the intersection between architecture and photography, two closely interconnected disciplines whose interplay has evolved significantly over time. Since the invention of photography during the nineteenth century, the control over the visual representation of the built world has been contested between the architect and the photographer. The resulting relationship has moved from an initial reliance on photography in documenting buildings (and thus from its subordinate role to architecture) to a contemporary association in which architects depend on photographic images to convey a message or to legitimize their work. The essays included in this special issue offer a spectrum of different cases and modalities of interaction that cast light on a dynamic and often conflicted connection, proposing a reflection on the complexity and intricacy of the transcription of buildings onto photographic surfaces. Neither an indexical recording of the building nor an equivalent of architectural drawings, photographic representations of artifacts and built spaces reflect varying ideologies and politics, as well as evolving cultural and professional agendas.

The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture (review)

In the late nineteenth century, corporate managers began to rely on photography for everything from motion studies to employee selection to advertising. This practice gave rise to many features of modern industry familiar to us today: consulting, "scientific" approaches to business practice, illustrated advertising, and the use of applied psychology. In this imaginative study, Elspeth H. Brown examines the intersection of photography as a mass technology with corporate concerns about efficiency in the Progressive period. Discussing, among others, the work of Frederick W. Taylor, Eadweard Muybridge, Frank Gilbreth, and Lewis Hine, Brown explores this intersection through a variety of examples, including racial discrimination in hiring, the problem of photographic realism, and the gendered assumptions at work in the origins of modern marketing. She concludes that the goal uniting the various forms and applications of photographic production in that era was the increased rationalization of the modern economy through a set of interlocking managerial innovations, technologies that sought to redesign not only industrial production but the modern subject as well.