Photographic Eye Research Articles

Seen through the Camera Obscura: Life Photographs of the Korean War and Cold War Anxiety of the American Self

Abstract: The Korean War as seen and shown by Life 's photographic eye constitutes a contested geography in mapping the Cold War and locating America's place in it. Seen through the camera obscura of Life , Korea is conceived as a "terra incognita" of American imagination, and in turn, the magazine as the self-proclaimed national looking glass proves itself to be an interesting peep-box—a kaleidoscope of the American ways of "seeing" the war in Korea, the Cold War, and Americans themselves in the world. Specifically, the article situates Life 's correspondent David Douglas Duncan's photo-essays on the Korean War in the intersections of American and Korean cultural histories, examining them through the lens of Cold War liberalism, which she argues taps deeper into the American frontier myth.

Preliminary assessment of Onchocerca-induced visual impairment using clinical fundus camera in Gashaka local government area of Taraba state, north eastern Nigeria

IntroductionOnchocerciasis is the world's second leading cause of infectious blindness and remains a major problem in parts of Africa. In light of the efforts targeted towards improving ongoing elimination program, this study assessed onchocerca-induced visual impairments in Gashaka local government areas (LGA) in Taraba State, north-eastern Nigeria. MethodsIn 2019, we recruited 158 consenting visually impaired persons across three communities in Garbabi ward of Gashaka LGA. To avoid confusion with co-endemic trachoma, the integrity of the tarsal conjunctiva, eyelashes were assessed using direct light. The anterior segment of the eye was also examined using a torchlight with oblique illumination. However, the posterior segment of the eye was assessed using a fundus camera. Two photographic images for the left and right eye of each participant were captured using the clinical fundus camera. The photographic eye images that were too dark were discarded, and only clear images were analyzed by two ophthalmologists. An ocular manifestation report was recorded for each participant following consensus between the ophthalmologists. ResultsOf the 316 photographic eye images, almost half 146 (46.2%) from 73 participants were just too destroyed for light to penetrate and was not included in the analysis. Only 170 from 85 participants were clear and examinable. A total of 33 (39%) participants had chorioretinitis suggestive of onchocerciasis, including 22(25.9%) with chorio-retinal atrophy, 7(8.2%) and 4(4.7%) had chorioretinal atrophy in combination with early cataract and signs of trachoma respectively. In addition, 3(3.5%) of the participant had eye images which showed lens opacities, 1(1.2%) showed signs of keratoconus and 1(1.2%) showed a scared and pigmented cornea, possibly due to onchocerciasis. Furthermore, 28 (32.9%) had some ill-defined changes and 19 (22.4%) showed poorly defined chorio-retinal atrophy. ConclusionIn a bid to sustain MDA gains towards elimination of onchocerciasis, this work highlights the need for continuous assessment of onchocerciasis induced visual impairment, strengthening of ivermectin delivery and optimizing compliance and patient care among affected populations. These would require resource acquisition and local capacity building. Our preliminary findings call for further operational research on ocular morbidity as well as future stakeholders' consultations in this important and understudied area.

Visualizing Dunhuang: The Lo Archive Photographs of the Mogao and Yulin Caves

Visualizing Dunhuang: The Lo Archive Photographs of the Mogao and Yulin Caves

Fluid

Stories of expressions of trans, gender fluid, non-binary, Two Spirit, and other diverse gender identities circulate widely, adding to a complex and oft-times challenging web of shifting societal responses to gender. My photographic eye is guided by an aesthetic of simplicity, distillation & clarity. I want to apply this eye to make visible the many ways we read photographs and their subject matter (imagined and real) but particularly via a collaborative process as filtered through the voices of the people who posed for these photographs. Transgender identification, representation and image dissemination increasingly occupy the collective imagination and are reinforced by media headlines. Even as more and more trans, gender fluid, non-binary, and Two Spirit people are coming out in the public eye, the act of realizing/representing/revealing/ exposing/ exhibiting oneself through photography is a brave act, a form of defiance for a new wave of gender fluid pioneers reclaiming a broader live presence and virtual presence via social media. In the process, difference is being normalized.

Arranging bodies for photographs: Professional touch in the photography studio

This paper describes a particular form of professional touch, through which photographers taking photographs of their clients/models arrange their bodies and orchestrate their poses. Our analysis demonstrates that photographers adopt a professional touch-cum-vision, which combines professional vision and professional touch. The former is achieved by the photographers adopting a specific perspectival posture, allowing them to see the photographed persons from a distance, in a way that is analogous to the perspective of the photographic eye, that is, to the perspective of seeing through a camera. The latter involves a specific form and trajectory of arms and hands, accountably shaped in a way that enables a touch that is both precise, targeting specific details of the body, and delicate, orienting to the normativity of touching the other’s body. The clients/models can docilely align with the photographers’ touch but can also display more agency, initiating and preempting the arrangement of details of the pose, as well as some resistance, prompting the photographers to minimize their touching interventions and to ask for permission, apologize, and thank.
 Data are video recordings of photography sessions in professional studios, in which participants speak (Swiss) German and Turkish.

Stylized and photographic eye images do not increase charitable donations in a field experiment

The effects of watching eyes upon prosocial behavior have been explored in various contexts, for example, in relation to charitable donations, honor-system payments and littering. Whilst studies have explored the effects of both photographic and stylized eyes upon prosocial behavior, no study, to our knowledge, has compared stylized eyes to photographic eyes. Here we explored the effects of stylized and photographic eye images upon prosocial behavior assessed via charitable donations in a ‘free cakes’ field experiment. Charitable giving was assessed under six eye image conditions, three stylized eye images (evil eye, eye of Horus, all-seeing eye), one photographic eye image (human eye image) and two control images (geometric shape control and blank control). No difference in the amount of money donated was found between any of the eye image conditions. These results suggest that watching eyes, whether stylized or photographic, are not effective at eliciting prosocial behavior via charitable giving. However, further study contrasting single and paired eye imagery, and exploration of the effects of stylized eye imagery in deterring littering and crime, would be beneficial.

Scotland

I spent 14 days of intensive photographic research taking 10 000 photographs while travelling around the coast of Scotland. This includes the incredible architecture in ancient cities; amazing, magical landscapes of heather shrouded moorlands, expansive glens with grass covered hills and lowlands, and black and red mountains; and magnificent castles. Scotland is a part of my cultural heritage. This series of photographs is a merging of my artistic and academic skills as a visual arts researcher. It is similar to grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) used for my academic research wherein I let Scotland tell me what photographs needed to be taken and my photographic eye knew when to take the photograph from my years of experience as a photographer.
 Each of the photographs tells a visual story. As I continuously edited my photographs for months while making files in folders I asked myself: What was my experience of Scotland? How can I represent this experience so that it has the feeling of what each inspiring photograph had when I took the shot? It is a reliving and recreating of experience while working with specialty silver papers and creating triptychs, diptychs and other layouts to photographically tell the stories. These 19-limited edition colour archival quality giclée photographic prints are the result of my photographic Scotland experience. An exhibition is a publication and the exhibition of these photographs is supported by LURF.

Being Mexican : Identity, Location, and Rosa Nissán(IV)

“Hisho que te nazca – in search of desired identity” and “Sephardic narrative in Mexico : Impact, Reception, and Nissan’s photographic eye” A wider vision of education and employment After Oshinica and Lalo separate, the circumstances surrounding her attendance at the institute do change and she is now able to participate without domestic conflict. Her classmates also become a more active part of Oshinica’s life. They spend more time together and since there is no one to limit these friendshi...

John McGahern’s Photographic Eye

Cet article explore les parallèles qui existent dans l’imagination de John McGahern entre l’art du photographe et sa pratique en tant que romancier. Dans son introduction à une collection de photographies historiques, il écrit : « elles donnent à voir une société à un moment et dans un lieu donné, et toutes les images sont choisies avec soin. Le fait que [le photographe] ait choisi de se concentrer sur une pauvre chaumière, une femme pieds nus sur le seuil d’une porte, deux jeunes filles dans leurs plus beaux atours du dimanche, est significatif, mais ce qui est encore plus révélateur de son talent est l’angle de la maison, le balai à côté de la porte, la position de la cage et la roue ». Mon point de départ est la citation ci-dessus, qui évoque immanquablement des techniques et des préoccupations qui caractérisent son travail comme romancier. Je prends ici en considération ce qui est « significatif » dans les reconstitutions intimes (et quasiment « photographiques ») de la vie domestique des personnages que donne à lire McGahern et je fais valoir que ses gros plans de la vie quotidienne en particulier fonctionnent comme autant de synecdoques de circonstances historiques et de forces sociales et économiques plus larges. Comme les photographies que McGahern décrit, ses romans « donnent à voir une société à un moment et dans un lieu donné » grâce à leur attention aux détails de la vie quotidienne. Mon analyse m’amènera à insister sur la conscience sociale et historique qui transparaît en filigrane dans l’œuvre de McGahern.

A Period of Juvenile Prosperity by Mike Brodie (review)

Reviewed by: A Period of Juvenile Prosperity by Mike Brodie John Lennon A Period of Juvenile Prosperity. By Mike Brodie. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms. 2013. Mike Brodie, aka the Polaroid Kidd, loves trains. Hopping his first train in 2004 at age 18, Brodie has since traveled over 50,000 miles and 46 states. From the very beginning of his time on the road, with a friend’s Polaroid SX-70, he began snapping pictures of his fellow train-hoppers. When that film was discontinued, Brodie adapted, switching to an old 1980s 35mm camera, taking thousands of images, many of which he uploaded onto his own website. People quickly noticed, and by 2008, he had won the Baum Award for emerging artist. Within the next few years, his photos would be shown in galleries from the Yossi Milo in New York to M + BG in Los Angeles; he even has a photo hanging in the Louvre. As his notoriety emerged, he left the road—and photography—and received a degree from Nashville’s Auto Diesel College, hoping to one day work for the railroad. As he writes in his poetic, staccato two-page description of his life in the end of A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, his beautiful collection of 61 photos published by Twin Palms Publishers, “I don’t want to be famous, but I hope this book is remembered forever.” His photographs, though, are mostly of “forgotten” kids. Gutter punks drinking in abandoned buildings. Bandaged young women sleeping on cardboard near tracks. A tattooed man hanging from a speeding train, enthusiastically flipping off the camera. Brodie’s images speak of a loose collection of punks, hanging out and hanging onto society’s margins, glamorizing the road life even as the photos show us makeshift toilets and bloody underwear. In the images, allusions to Kerouac abound, and it’s no accident that in one photo, Thompson’s The Rum Diary (1998) is used as a makeshift pillow. There is plenty of romance mixed in with the dirt. As a photography book, it is beautiful. As a social document, much like its subject matter, the book drifts without leaving a mark. For example, in one image, a young African American male is being arrested; two images later, a young blond hair man is in the back of a police car. Is this book linking these two men together as social outcasts? Perhaps. The former, though, does not seem to be part of the train-hopping scene, looking dazed and resigned as he is handcuffed; the latter has the beginning of a smile while staring at the camera. The threads linking them are ideologically bare. Who, also, is the older bearded man sitting in his car and why is [End Page 183] he in this particular book of juvenile prosperity? The connections, if any, are hidden and a narrative refuses to form. This is certainly not a criticism of the book as much as a disappointment: Brodie’s photographic eye is sharp and his background makes him a perfect candidate to definitively document, without exploiting, his subjects. Instead, we have a handsome coffee table book. Certainly great, but it is my hope that more photographs, and a memoir, will follow. John Lennon University of South Florida Copyright © 2014 Mid-America American Studies Association

Psicologia e fotografia Comignoli sognanti e comignoli guerrieri

The article covers two aspects related to Psychology and Art. The first aspect concerns the similarities found between photography and various Schools of experimental psychology. For instance, the scientists of Psychology of ethological theory , and Non-verbal communication (NVC), observe with particular methodologies the non-verbal messages that animals and humans transmit to their peers through expressions, posture, gestures. The same is done by photographers (those who use the “camera” with a good knowledge of the medium and a “photographic eye”) when they look around, careful to catch an expression, any unusual attitude, or a gesture of friendship. Another School of psychology, the Gestalpsychologie ( Gestalt : form, figure, configuration), attributes a decisive value to the perception of space, the foreground and the background, the perspective and vanishing points, the contrast between black and white. All aspects that effectively interest psychologists just as much as photographers. Finally, the second aspect relates to the art of Antony Gaudi and makes some hypothesis about the personality and behavior of the great architect, with regard to the construction of two houses, Casa Batllo and Casa Mila: particularly because of the configuration or Gestalt of the chimneys that dominate the two buildings. In this study, cooperate each other psychological analysis and the art of photography. The last enables us to study also the details of the work of Gaudi, as can be seen in the pictures of this essay.

Creating Cellular Vision: Cell Phone Photography and the (Shifting) Photographic Eye"

This paper addresses the relatively new phenomenon of camera phone technology, focusing on the (re)construction of the shifting photographic vision, practice and gaze that this technology has created. I will examine the rearticulation of photography in terms of its temporality as the primary (photographic) concern by placing camera phones in parallel to their analog counterpoints. Finally, the paper considers how camera phone practices involve fervent social sharing and contemplates whether these images create a new form of memory.

Editorial: Introduction to Communities, Publics, and Communication

The editorial for the 2011 McMaster Journal of Communication issue on communities, publics and communication. The editorial presents the five articles contained in the issue ( “Redefining Gatekeeping Theory for a Digital Generation.” Lianne Chin-Fook and Heather Simmonds; “‘That Worries Me’: Affective and Rhetorical Framing in News Programming of The O’Reilly Factor”, Joey Brooke Jakob; “Public sphere, alternative media and social involvement in Belarus: The role of an individual in history”, Nataliya Lesnikova; “The Politics of Transparency”, Robyn Lew; “Creating Cellular Vision: Cell Phone Photography and the (Shifting) Photographic Eye”, Robert Vitulano) and acknowledges the help of the editorial committee members, Alyssa Lai and Christine Larabie; as well as that of faculty editor, Dr. Alex Sévigny.

The Photographic Eye and the Vision of Childhood in Lewis Carroll

The Photographic Eye and the Vision of Childhood in Lewis Carroll Rosella Mallardi Wait a moment. . . . I am going to interrogate myself.1 —Heraclitus Lewis Carroll’s fame is undoubtedly tied to the centrality of childhood in his works, both in relation to the content of his works and to the modalities of invention and writing: it is this latter aspect that my article intends to investigate. Most illuminating are the special occasions in which he cultivated his friendship with his young friends, and among these his photographic practice is particularly important. As a matter of fact, his “glass-house” becomes a sort of stage where the photographic sitting alternates with his narration of stories invented or reelaborated in that moment for and with his child friends/models.2 This analysis is meant to explore the ways in which the close occurrence between the proceedings of photographic author and portraiture—positive and negative—gave birth to forms of literary contamination by photography, forms really unprecedented and subversive, which contributed to significantly accelerating the renewal of current literary canons and to foreshadowing Modernism and the Avant-garde. In this perspective, Carroll’s letters and diaries offer precious testimony of his interest in photography and of the relation of the infant art not only with the other visual arts but also, and here more relevantly, [End Page 548] with the literary world. Since 1855, the year when he started his photographic practice, Carroll reproduced in poems and short stories the charming, mysterious atmosphere and typical proceedings of the new art. Some years later, his close relationship with his child friends/models on the occasion of more and more refined photographic sittings—“as an amateur-photographer whose special line is children”3—played a prominent role in the definition both of his childhood ideology and his new aesthetics. In the two decades (1860–80) that represented the golden period of photography, Carroll searched and created with children the space for a more concrete and direct interrelationship: the extended period of time needed by the new art process and its novel communicative capacity fueled, more than any other art did, his disposition to experiment with new forms of invention. In fact, it is in the glass-house that childhood inspires his most beautiful pictures and his most original writing. In the 1860s and ’70s Carroll captured the attention of the literary world with the extraordinary writing of the Alice books. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), among other conspicuously disruptive factors, the presence of the body itself and the peculiarly volatile apparitions of Wonderland creatures, as framed by an exclusively subjective vision, are particularly marked. These are factors that undoubtedly recall the photographic eye: in the new art, the sitter’s body, as shot by the eye/I of the artist, is the precondition for image reproduction. In the 1850s, daguerreotypes and photographs were still largely viewed as apparitions rather than as images, which, spectral as they might be, referred back to a body, absent but real and historically recorded.4 For this reason, the daguerreotype was called “the mirror with memory.”5 Also, early photographs, because of the apparatus limits and the long exposure time, uncovered the inner disposition of the sitter’s real body to metamorphosis, deconstruction, and deformity, a condition that highlighted the body’s immersion in time to such a degree that was unique [End Page 549] among previous art forms. In this context, Carroll’s relationship with his child friends/models, which for the first time was being cultivated in the gloomy and mysterious atmosphere of a photographic atelier, now acquired an unprecedented significance in that it nurtured a childhood vision that distanced itself from the idealized, metaphysical, ethical, and didactic approach of Romanticism and at the same time decidedly rejected the image of the “little adult” popularized by Victorian iconography. From the late 1850s to 1885, Carroll’s amateur photography got so refined as to gain him prestige and, more importantly for child portraiture, the complete trust of the children’s parents. In 1878, he claimed that child photography had been his greatest amusement for more than twenty years: “Photography from life—and especially photographing children—has...

A New Look at Robert J. Flaherty's Documentary Art

In his paper, "A New Look at Robert J. Flaherty's Documentary Art," Gerhard Lampe challenges the general view of documentary film director Robert J. Flaherty's work. In film studies, it is generally assumed that Flaherty ignored cinematographic developments and kept repeating himself by telling his stories of mythical battles of the individual against the powers of nature in always the same old-fashioned way. He is said to have improved his "photographic eye" with the help of improved lenses and more detailed shots; nevertheless, he did not show any interest in editing problems and sound recording. By comparing Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), Moana (1923-25), and Man of Aran (1934), Lampe shows that the continuity-editing-system and 180° system which emerged in Hollywood at the time of the transition from silent to sound production was also adopted by Flaherty in his films. Lampe argues that Flaherty in fact modernised his cinematographic style after shooting the semi-documentary "Paramount"-film Taboo (1929-30) with Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau.

Fotografía documental en los ambientes histórico-religiosos de la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos

La Fotografía documental se nutre de imágenes de vestigios culturales, artísticos y científicos de épocas pasadas y como una máquina registradora enfila su ojo fotográfico en dirección del mundo antiguo, grabando esos escasos remanentes para su preservación infinita y salvaguarda el patrimonio cultural, difundiendo valores a una sociedad civilizada. Este mundo de vestigios históricos, en una época actual, parece estar amenazada por el infortunio, por el saqueo y el hurto por bandas especializadas.

Photographic Eye as Poetic I: Maiakovskii's and Rodchenko's Pro eto project (1923)

Early in Dostoevskii's The Idiot, the hero is transfixed by a photoportrait of Nastasia Filippovna, whose face is to haunt him thereafter: ‘On the portrait a woman of truly unusual beauty was represented. She was photographed in a black silk dress … her eyes were dark and deepset, her brow pensive’.1 The face, as we later learn, bears the imprint of a knowledge too terrible to contemplate, knowledge of the tragic end to Nastasia's own life; and, in the context of the novel's eschatological thematics, of the end of time itself Fifty years later, on 5 June 1923, Maiakovskii published in book form the first edition of a poem Pro eto (About That), illustrated with photomontages produced by his agitprop collaborator, the constructivist artist, Aleksandr Rodchenko.2 The last of Rodchenko's photomontages (see figure 9) is juxtaposed with verses in which the poet imagines that in some future Utopia he has been resurrected from the dead to serve as keeper at a zoo — a favourite haunt of Lily Brik, the love of his life. The montage is dominated by a large photo of Lily who, likewise, looks back from the end at a captivated viewer in the ‘real’ time of the era in which the image was produced. It also contains an instantly recognizable photograph of the poet, looking in at a caged polar bear and up at the superimposed image of Lily. 3 Maiakovskii knew that his persona was a function of his being in the public eye, and of the unbreakable association between the camera image and its own reproducibility. By portraying Maiakovskii looking at Lily Brik, who looks into the camera (and out at us), Rodchenko achieves an identification of Maiakovskii the unique self, with us, the anonymous viewers of Maiakovskii the public persona.

Visions of Italy

In 1984, an exhibition and a book entitled Italian Journey signalled the beginning of the advenrure of contemporary Italian photography. Notwithstanding the title's echoes of Goethe, the images shown in the exhibition and collected in part in the book revealed the horizon of a landscape that undoubtedly no longer possessed the charm of a natural environment as uncontaminated as on the first day of creation, which had enchanted visitors on the Grand Tour. Instead, the journey of this photographic eye uncovered a landscape where the signs of narure and history coexisted with the great signs of urban artifice.

Using a Digital Camera to Teach Physically Challenged Students

Kim, a student who cannot lift a camera to see through viewfinder, learned basic photography by using a digital camera. She parked her batterypowered wheelchair in my office door, and asked if I would be willing to modify some assignments to enable her to take my Graphics of Journalism course. This course includes projects that require students to use computers, cameras and other graphic arts tools such as an X-acto knife, a proportion scale, and a linen tester. No problem, I told her. In past, I have modified or substituted assignments to accommodate students with special needs. Kim's physical challenges would not prevent her from a productive semester in my class. Kim enrolled in course following semester. This article describes one way to adapt new technology to classroom. Kim cannot use her hands or arms because she has no muscles that connect her joints. Kim has Arthrogryposis Multiplex Congenita (AMC), which is characterized by a non-hereditary hypomobility of multiple joints due to fibrous ankylosis. The disease affects Kim's fingers, hands, elbows, and shoulders. She relies on her dextrous feet to handle almost anything -- including a pen, keyboard, and computer mouse. In Kim's case, no computer assignments had to be modified. In fact, no assignments were changed. She turned in her designs as computer printouts instead of mounting them on conventional presentation boards. The basic photography project presented a challenge, however. Because Kim could not hold a camera to look through viewfinder and take pictures at same time, she expected a substitute assignment. Resisting this simple alternative, I struggled with what ifs? What if Kim has a photographic eye but never gets a chance to find out? What if she has an innate sense of photographic balance, composition and framing? What if she has ability to a decisive moment like CartierBresson? At first, I had no solution. How could I offer the photographic to this student? An idea came to me while watching a hockey game on television. I remembered that advertised a camcorder with an adjustable lens and a large preview screen, holding it at arm's length close to ice to his son on video. I considered using this video camera. Kim could shoot a full-motion video, review it, capture or grab individual frames, print them, and submit them as photographs. Technically, I had found a solution. But this would have offered Kim experience of a photo editor, not that of a photographer. We needed a still-frame camera with that Wayne Gretzky interface, but with a preview screen instead of a viewfinder. It could be mounted on her wheelchair so Kim could frame photo and click shutter with her toes. Fortunately, Casio had recently released such a camera. I arranged for Kim to use one. For first time in her life, Kim took a picture. With that one assignment, she discovered an interest and talent for photography. She proved to be a natural. Through my experience with Kim, I discovered that an innovative application of new technology in classroom not only accommodates physically challenged students but empowers them to fully participate in learning process. In turn, this experience allows them to discover and develop talents and skills that may lead to career opportunities never-before-imagined. Photographic study After lectures on photography, photo composition, digital imaging, and picture editing, students were instructed to complete a photographic line study. This is a basic photography assignment that requires students to shoot an aesthetically pleasing picture involving a dominant line. A study is a classic assignment in photography because occurrence of a is often considered one of most powerful design elements in photographic composition. …

A metáfora do olhar em Janela indiscreta, de Alfred Hitchcock

Watched from the viewpoint of what is being seen, Hitchcocks’s film “Rear Window” is a rich documentary about everyday life in modern world. It bears in it a combination of the elements of fragmentary living: uncertainty, fear, solitude within sociability, the dramatic and the tragic. The hegemony of the passive and photographic eye, not well fit to the dilemmas of loving, tell us that look mediated by the camera is a metaphor of seeing in everyday life and of living.