Historical Photographs Research Articles

Finding Photographic Recognition in the City: The Chicagoland-in-Pictures Amateur Historical Photography Project

Cet article étudie un vaste ensemble de photographies de Chicago produites par des amateurs dans les décennies d’après-guerre et destinées à la recherche et la publication sur la ville. Il examine la façon dont des photographes de classe moyenne ont collectivement défini une forme de documentation urbaine entre des normes hétérogènes venant de la pratique historique et de la culture des camera clubs. Il contribue à une histoire étendue de la photographie documentaire telle qu’elle a été définie et pratiquée par divers acteurs individuels et institutionnels.

Historic photos related to Cardiac Surgery in Bangladesh

Historic photos related to Cardiac Surgery in Bangladesh

In a Perfect World: Exploring the Desires and Realities for Digitized Historical Image Archives

ABSTRACTThe primary goal of this paper is to explore users' desires for digitized historical image collections, examining their desires based on different use purposes and information interaction activities. In addition, we investigate the image attributes that users wish to search from the collection. To accomplish this, we conducted 21 qualitative interviews with active users of a digitized historical photograph archive. Our findings suggest that users' desires relate to three contexts: tools, collection, and socio‐organizational issues. Moreover, our results indicate that users require support for various information interaction activities, not just searching. We found that users' desires vary based on their specific use purposes, and that users prioritize conceptual access points that can already mostly be generated through automated annotation methods. Ultimately, this study contributes to a better understanding of users' real‐life image needs and offers implications for improving access to digital image collections.

The happy man (The review of the book “The great librarian: Eduard Rubenovich Sukiasyan”)

The happy man (The review of the book “The great librarian: Eduard Rubenovich Sukiasyan”)

İstanbul’un Deniz Kıyısından Kaybolmak: Sarayburnu Tıbbiye-Yedekçiler Mescidi/Değirmen Ocağı Camii

Located on the outer part of the seawalls of the Topkapı Palace, the area around Sarayburnu was permanently changed with a new development plan implemented in Istanbul between 1956 and 1960. Urban practices in this period aimed to modernize urban space but resulted in a permanent transformation of the city’s shoreline. In order to ensure the continuity of cultural transmission, this research aims to remind historical places that disappeared as a result of the demolitions under the development plan and discusses the exploration of the buildings that disappeared from the shoreline of Sarayburnu by utilizing visual archive sources. This case study uses a selection of historical photographs as research material for areas outside seawalls that form the border between the Historic Peninsula and the sea. Document analysis of historical photographs revealed the photographs of the Sarayburnu Tıbbiye-Yedekciler Masjid/Degirmen Ocagi Mosque that does not exist today. Case study research, one of the qualitative research methods, was preferred to examine this building. The research findings provide information about history, location and construction of the building as well as its traces in the contemporary urban space. In the context of the relationship between architecture, city and history, one of the forgotten memory places that are important for cultural transmission has been explored.

Assessing the social values of historic shopping arcades: building biographies

Social value has a long academic tradition in the field of heritage studies, and while it has become part of heritage management, expert-driven intrinsic values still dominate the conservation policy and practice. This paper explores the use of building biographies as a way to assess, illustrate and record the social value of shopping arcades. A case study of the North Street Arcade in Belfast, Northern Ireland, is used to explore how building biographies can contribute bottom-up evidence to top-down value-based approaches of architectural conservation. The North Street Arcade is a listed shopping arcade that has been lying vacant and derelict for the last 30 years awaiting demolition and redevelopment. Archival documents, historic photographs, news reports and documentaries, interviews and anthropology were combined to compile the arcade’s biography. Allowing the combination of positivist and interpretive approaches, as well as merging community and expert voices, building biographies can produce localised and inclusive heritage narratives that accentuate the many dimensions of social value that different publics ascribe to built heritage. Policy relevance Although social value has become part of heritage management, expert-driven values still dominate the conservation policy and practice. The inclusion of social value in the statutory criteria for listing could afford heritage protection to places that are highly valued by local communities, thereby encompassing places that do not fulfil the architectural and historic criteria. This article explores the use of building biographies as a way to assess, illustrate and record the social value of shopping arcades. The building biography is an approach that combines qualitative methods deriving from anthropology and sociology with historical and architectural analysis, and can be used to highlight the link between people and places, as well as their ever-changing cultural context. This paper illustrates how building biographies can contribute bottom-up evidence to top-down value-based approaches of architectural conservation and highlight the social value of shopping arcades.

Migratory destinations and spatial structuring of humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) wintering off Nicaragua

Understanding the migratory patterns of large whales is of conservation importance, especially in identifying threats to specific populations. Migration ecology, including migratory destinations, movements and site fidelity for humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) remain poorly studied in parts of the range of the Central America population, considered endangered under the United States Endangered Species Act. This study aimed to investigate the migratory destinations of humpback whales sighted at two study sites in Nicaragua, which are part of the Central America population. A ten-year photographic database of humpback whales observed off Nicaragua was combined with citizen science contributions and sightings from dedicated research programs. The resulting image collection was compared with available historical photo identifications and databases using an automated image recognition algorithm. This approach yielded 36 years of photographic identification totaling 431 recaptures in Nicaragua (2006–2008 and 2016–2021) and 2539 recaptures (1986–2020) in both feeding and breeding grounds of 176 unique individuals sighted in Nicaragua. Our results showed that photo-identified whales were recaptured between October and April in breeding grounds and year-round in feeding grounds between British Columbia and California, with peak recaptures between June and October. Our study provided first-time evidence on fine-scale site affinity of individual humpback whales within Nicaraguan waters and to other breeding and feeding grounds.

The importance of a complementary approach when working with historical documents

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to show that the neo-documentary – or complimentary – approach in Library and Information Science by no means is conservative, but highly necessary also in today's digitized media landscape. An example from a digitized photo archive is chosen to demonstrate the importance of a complimentary analysis that considers both material aspects as well as social and mental ones.Design/methodology/approachBy taking Jenna Hartel's description of the neo-documentary turn as point of departure, the paper focuses on one case, the portrait of Johannes Abrahamsen Motka taken by Sophus Tromholt in 1883 and discusses different versions of the photograph from glass plate negatives to digitized versions in different contexts and media.FindingsMany of the same paratextual elements can be found in different versions, also the digitized ones, to help the viewer to establish a historical context, but the images exhibited today are nevertheless no longer the same ones taken by Tromholt at the end of the 19th century. Not only have the material properties changed, but also – and probably even more important in most cases – the social and mental aspects. More re-contextualization is needed for today's audiences to recognize and understand a historical photograph taken in a colonial context. Focusing on document's material elements is not novel within the LIS-field, but the so-called neo-documentary turn was also a reaction on political and technological developments during the 1980s and 1990s. The increased focus on understanding a document in a complimentary way has demonstrated its impact during the last decades and is, at the same time, still work in progress.Research limitations/implicationsAs a scholar in the humanities the author can only relate to and therefore analyze what the author can experience and observe on screen level.Originality/valueIn providing a case study, this article illustrates the necessity of employing a complimentary approach when analyzing documents. This also implicates the claim that the neo-documentary turn – or complimentary as it rather should be called – by no means is a conservative one, but a highly necessary one in today's digitized media landscape.

Ordinary Weimar: Global Press Photography, ‘Distant Seeing’ and the Normalcy of Crisis in the 1920s

Abstract Press photography was an important medium of public communication in Germany in the 1920s. Scholarship on the topic has had two distinct foci. First, research on the ‘golden age’ of visual news has mainly concentrated on the visual coverage and political implications of singular events or certain topics. Secondly, the history of photography tends to concentrate on the period’s most prominent photographers, highlighting exceptional and high-quality examples of the genre. This article argues for a change of perspective, emphasizing press photography as an industry that disseminated thousands of pictures to a wide public. Focusing on its production side and a form of ‘distant seeing’ gives a better understanding of the transnational iconography of the present as it was manufactured within this professional field. Examining portfolios distributed by important actors, such as Georg Pahl’s Berlin-based photo agency, helps chart the visual media landscape through which people became acquainted with local events and national and international politics. This iconography contributed to an image of ‘Weimar’ as a society which appeared much more ‘normal’ and more comparable to the developments in other countries than ex post interpretations of Weimar as a society in crisis suggest. Global press photography fostered homogenization of the ‘mattering maps’ of a transnational public. This concentration on the global embedding of press photography and its products balances interpretations which use photographic sources to stress either the glamorous or the dramatic aspects of life in the 1920s. The transnational collation of visual news created an image of Weimar as only one among several societies challenged by modern crisis.

The duration of To Be(Hold) in Revere: An Exhibition of Historical Photographs of People with Intellectual Disability

In this article, I discuss my curation of a photographic exhibition of people with intellectual disability (PWID) who were institutionalised at the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum, from 1890 to 1920. The exhibition titled, To Be(Hold) in Revere, aimed to display affirmative photographs and humanising stories of PWID obtained from the Asylum's casebooks. The Sites of Conscience movement influenced the exhibition's aim. The movement seeks to recover the agency and personhood of those who lived at a site of human suffering in order to establish a collective memory of their voices and experiences. This article details my curatorial approach; it provides a telling of the life stories of seven patients and outlines how I adopted the principles of the Sites of Conscience movement in facilitating exhibition walkabouts with the public. A key facet of the walkabouts was encouraging the public to witness the personhood of the Asylum's PWID, as well as to explore the current issues faced by today's PWID and advocate for their human rights.

Theatre heritage in pre-WWII Hong Kong: a postcolonial reading

ABSTRACT This paper aims to delineate the transformation of theatre design in Hong Kong, which was initially born out of Chinese settlements, through socio-cultural dimensions. It studies the factors that altered the design of theatre buildings from the early colonial years in the 1860s to around the second World War in the late 1930s. By adopting a postcolonial analytical framework as well as interpretive-historical and archival research methods to examine primary resources including government documents, historical photos and drawings, interviewing descendants of cinema operators and architects, as well as film archivists and architectural historians, this paper details how socio-cultural factors evolving building regulations and the local industry had impacted upon the transition of theatre architecture over half a century, witnessing indigenous efforts that resisted certain colonial narratives in the design process. The paper also scrutinises what potentials the architectures, demolished or still existing, can serve in the context of theatre heritage in postcolonial Hong Kong.

Historical Photographs of Kucha: Retracing Lost Caves and Related Thoughts

Historical photographs of Kucha, mostly those taken by the Turfan German Expedition (1902–1914), can be used to recover information concerning the caves lost over the last century and features that cannot be seen any longer. The analysis of photographic material can help to individuate patterns and trigger thoughts leading to a better understanding of the sites, appreciate lost features, reveal the likely location of caves presently covered by debris, understand how caves were restored in antiquity, and suggest better ways to preserve and use rock monastery sites. Though this article focuses on Kucha, the proposed method can be used at other archaeological sites.

The ‘Chok’ of Image ‘Constellations in Themselves’: Reframing Walter Benjamin’s ‘Little History of Photography’ (1931)

This article revisits some of the principal documents and guiding assumptions that have shaped the debate about the significance of Walter Benjamin’s landmark essay ‘Little History of Photography’ (1931) as well as Benjamin’s conception of photography and media discourse at large. Based on a handwritten draft fragment, translated for the first time into English, Benjamin’s earliest documented manuscript passages for ‘Little History of Photography’ are discussed here in detail to argue for an altered significance of the ‘directives’ inherent in ‘photography’s authenticity’. The article reconfigures the relevance of Benjamin’s ‘critically trained gaze’ and the illuminating ‘chok’ discovered by smaller and faster cameras in ‘postures, gestures, and gazes’. It takes a fresh look at Benjamin’s contested contributions to photography theory in his early ‘Little History of Photography’ and in his late 1940 theses ‘On the Concept of History’. The article re-examines the significance of the disruptive ‘static moment of events’ which, for Benjamin, captures revolutionary visual ’seeds of the new’. Reframing such seminal concepts as ‘chok’, ‘aura’ and ‘optical unconscious’, the article salvages critical impulses from Benjamin’s writings to address in productive fashion the multiple crises and challenges of visual culture in the twenty-first century.

Community-Based Photographic Archives and “Potential” Histories of the Cold War in Eastern Europe

The article proposes to look at the recently emerged online photographic archives in Eastern Europe as a form of digital commons. The bulk of the collected photographs in these archives are vernacular, family or amateur photographs, the sort which obstinately resists being included in the histories of photography. The online archives under scrutiny here, Fortepan in Hungary and Karta/CAS in Poland, disregard the established divisions between the photographic genres, allowing the reconfiguring of the hierarchies and values perpetuated by other archives and museum collections. Most significantly, by being accessible and relying on the contributions of its users, the online archives also forge a new public. The aim of this article is to investigate the affordances of these archives in constructing new photographic histories of the Cold War. Looking at selected photographs showing collective manifestations and street protests, the article will demonstrate the realignment of the private and the public in these archives.

Miroslav Zdovc: Contextualising the Archive

In this paper a case study of constructing a photographic archive in a museum context, and the ways of contextualising seemingly marginal and insignificant photographic material, is being showcased and analysed. The focal point of the paper is the personal photographic archive of Miroslav Zdovc (1929–2009), a prominent Slovenian professional photographer as well as an artist using photography who, however, did not receive a deserved place in local and regional history of photography and art. Therefore, his extensive body of work that has nearly disappeared from the public eye is now in the process of being reviewed and re-evaluated. His extensive archive consists of diverse materials: personal imagery, documentary photographs, documents of artworks, and (his own) photographic artworks. The paper thus presents the project in the making in which the curators of Božidar Jakac Gallery – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Kostanjevica na Krki have been conducting the process of cataloguing, evaluating and finally showcasing his immense body of work. It also brings forward the most significant elements of his artistic practice that spanned from the 1950s to the 1990s, and which was changing and developing in accordance with the concurrent tendencies in photography and art.

Sámi Literature in Norwegian Language Arts Textbooks

Sámi Literature in Norwegian Language Arts Textbooks

RESTORATION WORKFLOWS BY MEANS OF PHOTOGRAMMETRY: THE CASE STUDY OF PASHAS BRIDGE

Abstract. The restoration of cultural heritage sites is a complex and challenging process, particularly when the structure holds significant historical and cultural value. This paper refers to the first stages of the restoration study of Pashas Bridge, one of the largest stone bridges in Greece that was destroyed during World War II and further damaged by an earthquake in 1995. The project was assigned to multiple research groups from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh) for a period of 18 months by the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports. To restore the bridge effectively, it is essential to accurately record, document, and assess its current condition. Through the use of photogrammetry, which creates 3D models of objects or structures using images, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) which assisted in capturing multiple shots with various angles of the bridge, a detailed 3D model of the bridge’s current condition was generated. In addition to these technical approaches, historical research and documentation were utilized to understand the bridge's cultural heritage value. The process included an examination of historical photographs and records related to the bridge, with a constant effort to discover additional information about its history and importance. Ultimately, the restoration process of Pashas Bridge serves as a valuable case study for the effective restoration of cultural heritage sites. Through utilizing these resources, the team aims to restore the bridge to its former glory, preserving its cultural heritage value and ensuring its place as a valuable and integral part of the community for generations to come.

FAST OR EXTENSIVE? COMPARING WORKFLOWS FOR THE GEOMETRICAL ANALYSIS OF THE BUILT HERITAGE

Abstract. Three-dimensional digitization has been widely used for the documentation of built heritage. This paper presents two different approaches to the three-dimensional documentation of historic buildings using active 3D Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) devices and data integration from other heterogeneous sources. Both methods aim to produce accurate and complete 3D surveys by integrating data from other sources, such as historical photographs, conservation reports, and traditional drawings, to enable a geometric analysis of the buildings. The first approach aims for completeness and redundancy of geometric information. The second method focuses on rapidness and is suitable for situations where the building is not easily accessible. The two approaches are applied to the case studies of Diotti Palace in Milan and Uzbekistan Hotel in Tashkent, demonstrating the efficiency of the two different datasets for analyzing the built heritage. The paper compares these two approaches and highlights their advantages and drawbacks in terms of the reliability of the resulting data. The study shows how two different methodologies can be adopted in different scenarios to obtain a comprehensive database for reliable and in-depth analysis of historic buildings.

The 1965 Mahavel Landslide (Réunion Island, Indian Ocean): Morphology, Volumes, Flow Dynamics, and Causes of a Rock Avalanche in Tropical Setting

AbstractIn May 1965, a main landslide occurred in a deeply incised valley of Piton de la Fournaise volcano, in Réunion Island. This event occurred one day after heavy rainfalls and was consequently interpreted as a mud/debris flow. We take advantage of several sets of historical photographs to reappraise this event. They show that the collapse of a large part of the valley headwall produced a rock flow that dropped 1,740 m and traveled 5,050 m. The surface morphology suggests that the landslide produced a main flow that evolved in a secondary flow in the distal part. The main flow deposit is composed of a matrix‐rich fragmented facies and a jigsaw‐fracturated facies. The matrix presents a gravely‐to‐silty granulometry and fractal dimensions ranging between 2.472 and 2.865. Volumes of the collapsed material (59.7 ± 3.1 Mm3) and the deposit (46 ± 13 Mm3) were determined from a photogrammetric approach. We estimated velocities ranging between 86 and 44 m s−1 along the flow path. Our simulations with SHALTOP reveal that the landslide geometry and velocities are well reproduced with frictional Coulomb rheology. We thus interpret the 1965 Mahavel landslide as a main rock avalanche rather than a mud/debris flow. We propose that the trigger of the 1965 avalanche, and of the smaller events in 1995 and 2001, is the water infiltration related to the intense rainfalls, which systematically preceded by one day each collapse. Finally, the succession of dry and wet years before each collapse event could promote favorable conditions to failure.

Beyond geography: A study of smart culture and digital surrogates in Komagata Maru historical material

ABSTRACT Examined within the matrix of political and historical frames, and digitally interceded memories, the Komagata Maru is connected with the Canadian Immigration Act (1908). While appearing ‘fair to all migrants', the Canadian government was able to restrict the migration of Indians. Through an examination of digital surrogates of historical photographs and archival material, this article hinges on the extrapolations following data discovery and constructs comparative perspectives. The central premise addresses challenges of decontextualized interpretations and biases plaguing the study of ‘flotsam'. Key questions investigated are the restoration of historical material, cultural technologies, ‘smart culture’ and metadata.