Photographic Medium Research Articles

The stereoscope and the miniature

The world was drastically reduced in scale as it entered nineteenth- and early twentieth-century homes (1850–1920) through stereoscopes. The stereo image was always miniature. Its size was a topic of concern in the nineteenth century, yet the significance of scale to stereoscopy has not been substantially researched within the field of early popular visual culture. The miniature quality of the stereoscopic spectacle is approached in terms of contemporary and nineteenth-century perspectives. This exploration raises the issue of whether a connection can be drawn between dimension and standardization that was characteristic of stereography as the first photographic mass medium. This potential link between the miniature and the establishment of standards is traced through nineteenth-century stereographs of two cities, New York and Constantinople (Istanbul).

Imag(in)ing Abu Ghraib

... there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding--at a distance, through the medium of photography--other people's pain. Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen. --Susan Sontag (1) In the spring of 2004, several American news outlets published photographs taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, photographs showing Iraqi detainees subjected to horrific actions at the hands of their captors. For most viewers of the Abu Ghraib photographs, there was no doubt the actions depicted qualified as atrocities--well beyond the bounds of what might be considered acceptable conduct in time of However, the unsettling nature of the images stemmed not just from the barbaric practices depicted, but also from their very existence as images. In his 2010 memoir The Ticking is the Bomb, Nick Flynn recounts a conversation in which the horror of the photographs as photographs is revealed: On the day the photographs appear, a veteran of the Korean War is interviewed on the radio in a coffee shop in Tennessee. By now the photographs are in every newspaper in the world and it sounds as if he is thumbing through them as he speaks. You know, he begins slowly, searching for the words--stuff like this happens in every war. It's hard to tell if he's disgusted or merely baffled. He pauses, then his voice gets slightly more indignant--but don't take pictures. (2) The you referred to by the veteran is, of course, the soldier himself or herself--journalists might have license to photograph such atrocities as part of the historical record of war, but those committing the acts should not themselves record those actions. That the taboo role of soldier-photographer was assumed in Abu Ghraib is sometimes made apparent by what is revealed at the edges of the images. For example, the iconic photo of a hooded Iraqi prisoner standing on a box with wires attached to his arms includes at the right edge of the frame a soldier looking at the screen of his digital camera presumably doing what most of us do after taking a digital snapshot: checking to see whether it is a keeper or whether to trash it and reshoot. This mundane act reiterates the ultimate power of captor over captive: not only does the soldier have the right and power to force the physical torture of his subject, he also controls the visual rendering of the act, framing and fixing the moment according to his aesthetic pleasure. Tims, the Abu Ghraib photographs occupy a space at once related to and distanced from that held by photographs of horrors such as the Nazi concentration camps, napalmed Vietnamese children, and massacred Rwandan civilians. The last images rely for their effect on their privileged role as objectively capturing the truth of war through the eyes of a third party. The Abu Ghraib photos equally record the truth of wartime actions but do so through the view of those engaged in the acts themselves. Between 2005 and 2008, artist Daniel Heyman traveled with American lawyers to Jordan and Turkey to meet former detainees of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The attorneys were taking the detainees' depositions to be included in a series of civil cases filed in the United States on behalf of the Iraqi victims. As he listened to these men tell their stories, Heyman drew their portraits, combining text and image in media varying from drypoint to gouache. In many ways these portraits function as a counterpoint to the Abu Ghraib torture photographs. Unlike the photos, which foreground the degradation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners through shockingly graphic visual images, in Heyman's work the text is made to bear the burden of reproducing the horrific experiences of the detainees. …

Photography and the USA

From Ansel Adams to Carleton Watkins, Diane Arbus to Weegee, Richard Avedon to James VanDerZee, American photographers have recorded their vast, multicultural nation in images that, for more than a hundred years, have come to define the USA. In Photography and the USA, Mick Gidley explores not only the medium of photography and the efforts to capture key events and moments through photographs, but also the many ways in which the medium has played a formative role in American culture. Photography and the USA encompasses the major movements, figures and works that are crucial to understanding American photography, but also pays attention to more obscure aspects of photography's history. Focusing on works that reveal many different facets of America, its landscapes and its people, Gidley explores the ambiguities of American history and culture. We encounter images that range from an anti-lynching demo in 1934 to Dorothea Lange's poster All races serve the crops in California; an early photographic view of Niagara Falls against the painstaking detail of Edward Weston's Pepper, No. 30; a fireman's fight in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 to the Ground Zero images of 2001 by Joel Meyerowitz; an 1890s 'Wanted' image to Elliot Erwitt's shot of the Nixon-Kruschchev 'Kitchen Debate'. Organizing his narrative around the themes of history, technology, the document and the emblem, Mick Gidley not only presents a history of photography, but also reveals the complexities inherent in reading photographs themselves. A concise yet comprehensive overview of photography in the United States, this book is an excellent introduction to the subject for American Studies or visual arts students, or for anyone interested in US history or culture.

Comical Conflations: Racial Identity and the Science of Photography

Comical associations between the science of photography and ideas about race were common on both sides of the Atlantic in the decades after the medium's invention. Some humorists observed that no bourgeois sitter would welcome the sight of his “negative” or blackened self; others illustrated the cosmetic character of race by depicting the effects of photographic chemicals on human skin. This essay takes these racial jokes seriously by reading them as historically specific social commentary. Beginning with an analysis of the first book of photographic humor, Cuthbert Bede's Photographic Pleasures (1855), it shows how this genre both reinforced and challenged popular conceptions of whiteness, blackness, and the photographic medium.

The form of the norm: shades of gender in South African photography of the 1980s

This essay deals with questions of form and content in the medium of photography in South Africa in the 1980s. The avowed purpose of progressive photographers was a more complex portrayal of societ...

Summaries of Scholarly Symposia 1.2

Geoffrey Batchen Facing Asia: Histories and Legacies of Asian Studio Photography An International Conference. Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra August 21-22, 2010 A symposium held on Tuesday, February 8, 2011 Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick This afternoon symposium belongs to a series of public events organized by the Developing Room, a working group at the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis devoted to the study and practice of photography. The three speakers and two moderators will reflect on what it means to write national, regional, and global histories of photography. Why are such histories written? How do they challenge Western conceptions of the photographic medium and dominant narratives in the field of photography studies? What new challenges do geographically and culturally expansive histories create by bringing into dialogue photography and photographies, global and local, national and transnational, majorities and minorities, cultural identity and cultural difference? Panel Presentation at the College Art Association 99th Annual Conference Panel organizer: Ayelet Zohar, PhD, Lecturer, University of Haifa Hye-ri Oh, PhD Candidate, Binghamton University, State University of New York Namiko Kunimoto, PhD, Assistant Professor, American University, Washington DC Masako Toda, PhD Candidate, Tokyo University Yi Gu, PhD, Assistant Professor University of Toronto Jeehey Kim, PhD Candidate, The Graduate Center, City University of New York Mikiko Hirayama University of Cincinnati

P02-473 - A pilot program using media to combat trauma in adolescents

Empirical research and current statistics show that child sexual violence/abuse and its lasting effects, such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, are key issues in adolescent development and could be addressed in a novel fashion involving supervised peer-groups and the arts.We propose a pilot program that would span twenty-two weeks, with ideally a maximum of twenty (20) students from a large, metropolitan-area of United States. These high school aged adolescents will have experienced trauma through sexual violence/abuse and also will have experienced academic and behavioral decline within six months of the initial trauma. Students will explore, through the medium of photography, a weekly-assigned issue that relates to their daily life.After the twenty-two weeks have passed, we will continue to check in with the teens, parents, and teachers to see if any measured gains persist. My goal is to show that through the creative exploration of the self, coupled with the building a new social system, there will be an increase in academic performance, mental health, self-esteem, and behavior. As a pilot, I will be able to predict efficacy in advance of moving forward into a larger study.

Photographic Media for Pain Expression: Situated Learning with Graduate-Entry Masters Students to Develop Skills in Applying Theory-to-Practice

Entry-level healthcare practitioners must be able to engage in critical thinking, life long learning and be autonomous and accountable within the complex demands of healthcare in the 21st century. However, structuring learning opportunities to foster these skills within the pre-qualification curriculum can be challenging. To-date, little evidence exists in the literature to guide educators. This case report discusses how an elective module in the therapeutic use of digital photography for Master of Science in occupational therapy (MScOT) students was designed to enable students to develop an appreciation for, and ability in, scholarship and the application of theory-informed practice. The elective module is used as an example to illustrate the potential and relevance for Social Learning theory, Situated Learning theory and the concept of Most Knowledgeable Other (MKO) to guide capacity building in scholarship and theory-based practice. This collaboratively written student/faculty theoretical perspective, incorporating anecdotal evidence extracted from students’ learning assignments in the module, supports our conclusion that these types of learning modules may offer a useful vehicle in which situated learning can occur.

“Now smile”: Recent Developments in Jacques Derrida's Work on Photography

Jacques Derrida died more than five years ago now, but his work keeps on coming out and, in the case of his work on photography, keeps on developing. While three important works on photography were published in English during Derrida's lifetime (“The Deaths of Roland Barthes” [1981], Right of Inspection [1985], and a series of reflections on the photographs of Frédéric Brenner in Diaspora [2003]), the three works that are set to come out in English in 2010 are likely not just to supplement but to radically augment and transform our understanding of Derrida's reading of the photographic medium. In the forthcoming “Alētheia,” Copy, Archive, Signature, and perhaps most especially Athens, Still Remains, Derrida develops a powerful reading of the unique temporality of photography and its essential relationship to memory, ruin, and mourning. This essay argues that these recent works on photography illuminate in a most striking fashion some of Derrida's earliest reflections on time as deferral or delay; on survival as trace, testament, and archive; and on the now as always divided from itself and so always developing in several different, noncontemporaneous times—a veritable “now theory” that should resonate well with this special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly on theory now.

Witness to War: The Uses of Photography in the Illustrated Press, 1855-1904

An analysis of war images in the 19th—century press reveals a certain resistance to the new medium of photography. First, printing techniques did not allow for the direct use of the photograph itself in newspaper layouts: as the photographs were reproduced through the work of an engraver, what was there to distinguish them from traditional representations? Second, at the turn of the century, the halftone process replaced engraving and allowed for the printing of images that were more faithful in tonal subtleties to the original photographs. When special correspondents began supplying war photographs, how did illustrated newspapers organize the dissemination of this new kind of image? A consideration of the use of war photographs in the illustrated press informs us both of the choices made regarding the documentation of the war and the nature of the images that circulated in the public sphere, shaping the visual culture of the era.

Innovation and Tradition in the Reproduction of Spanish Art: Stirling, Utterson, and an Album in the British Museum

When William Stirling's book, the Annals of the Artists of Spain was published in 1848, its supplementary volume of Talbotype illustrations made it the first photographically illustrated art book, and heralded the use of the new medium of photography as the essential tool of the nascent discipline of art history. Only fifty copies of the Talbotypes volume were produced as presentation copies. Nevertheless, collectors with a special interest in the new process of reproduction occasionally succeeded in acquiring some of the individual unbound Talbotypes. Some of these rare and fragile images made their way into an album belonging to the bibliophile Edward Vernon Utterson, which is now in the British Museum. Like Stirling, Utterson produced a number of facsimiles of early printed books. Both men valued the quality and skills associated with the traditional arts of the book but at the same time, they were fascinated by new techniques of reproduction which they saw as a way of preserving and widening appreciation of the book arts. The Talbotypes, however, had many shortcomings as reproductions of Spanish art, and Utterson, an accomplished watercolourist, instead filled most of the rest of the album with his own copies after Spanish art. But though he reverted to an older method of reproduction, the astonishingly bold style he adopted anticipates aspects of the reworking of Spanish Golden-Age art by modern artists.

Afrikanische Silhouetten und Feldfotografie

This essay focuses on the interaction between the new reproduction media and corresponding reconfiguration of research fields in anthropology using the case of the “techniques of the body” – a concept developed by Marcel Mauss (1872–1950). For Mauss, the initiator of this discipline in France, body skills constituted the most important anthropological entity resulting from the confrontation of technical images and his interest in walking techniques. Three scenarios are especially significant for Mauss’s formulation of “body techniques” as a genuine concept: the front during the World War I, a New Yorker hospital in 1926, and an ethnographical field study conducted in Africa during the late 1920s. Both, the photographic media as well as the Abyssinian expedition of his student Marcel Griaule, whose research publication Mauss co-authored (Silhouettes et graffiti abyssins) in 1933, take centre stage here.

Mother's little nightmare: Photographic and monstrous genealogies in David Lynch's The Elephant Man

David Lynch's film The Elephant Man (1980) tells of the bourgeoisification and rehumanization of the physically deformed Englishman Joseph Merrick, who was put on display as the Elephant Man in European freak shows. The stages of this formative process are illustrated by the monster's progressive acquisition of the ability to engage in the normative use of photographic images. These events are framed by an allegory that constructs two material genealogies, Merrick's own and the genealogy of the filmic medium, and presents the origins of these genealogies, Merrick's mother and the medium of photography, as divided and derivative. At the same time, the interweaving of the two genealogies does not allow film to appear as photography's legitimate descendent, but rather its monstrous offspring. But The Elephant Man suggests that it is precisely this monstrosity that allows film in contrast to photography to represent the monster in a way that lends him a human countenance. This celebration of the filmic culminates in the final sequence, in which the transformation of the photographic medium into the filmic is surpassed by a general transformation from mediated to immediate, in which Lynch's film paradoxically allows its own medium to participate.

Call for Papers The Media of Photography

Call for Papers The Media of Photography

From <em>fotodinamismo</em> to <em>fotomontaggio</em>: The Legacy of Futurism's Photography

Author(s): Carey, Sarah | Abstract: This article examines the complicated and at times hostile relationship between Italian Futurism and the photographic medium with a particular focus on the movement's later uses of the iconic portrait and systems of montage.

Locating Family Portraits: Everyday Images from 1970s China

Family portraits from the 1960s and 1970s have been a source of inspiration for contemporary Chinese artists. In recent experimental works, many artists have used family portraits to reinvent the very ideas of the camera, the album, and the familial gaze as vehicles of longing, remembering, and contesting. This article pursues the prehistory of these images to critically address the recollection and reinvention of familial ties and bloodlines in contemporary Chinese art. The article studies a group of photographs taken during the second half of the Cultural Revolution, the early and mid-1970s, that define the “family portrait [quanjiafu]” as an important cultural genre, in dynamic contrast to photographic propaganda of the same period. Prior to the entrance of contemporary experimental artists, there was a subtle attempt to turn the photographic medium into narratives of personal histories, to locate and reinvent a “past” that was still very much the present. While recent studies of visual culture in postsocialist or post-Holocaust societies focus on “postmemory,” this article examines the mechanisms of materializing and restructuring personal memory that were in place before the Cultural Revolution had drawn to an end.

Call for Papers The Media of Photography

Call for Papers The Media of Photography

From Phenomena to Photographic Concepts. Pandora's Camera: The Photograph after the Photograph

Critical review of Pandora’s Camera: the after the photograph by Joan Fontcuberta, an academic book in which the artist-photographer’s vision is expressed as well as his theoretical arguments regarding the idea of the photographic medium as a truthful documentation or as a strategy to simulate reality, with particular emphasis on its use for digitally recording cultural heritage.

An intimate mode of looking: Francesca Woodman's photographs

This essay considers the intimacy between Francesca's Woodman's self representation and her exploration of the photographic medium. I argue that the small scale of Woodman's photographs, combined with their examination of the workings of photography via a picturing of the self, works to produce an intimate experience between viewer and photograph.

»Verklärte Nacht«: der Himmel, der Schatten und der Film

"The cinema is, as a photographic medium, an art form of light. But the mastery of lightning and the 'dark' side of his rhizomatic, interactive net have led very early to the configuration of shade and shadow and refer, ergo, to something which is perpetually related to all forms of figurative art. To film, 'night' means, however, something different, as it brings the configuration of the skies in a state of darkness with it. This is in disagreement with his usual depiction. It entails embarking on a singular figurative project, which approximates a contradiction in itself. This project demonstrates the autonomy of the configuration process precisely through this contradiction."