Photographic Medium Research Articles

The Rise of Digital Reproduction Against Mechanical Reproduction: “Techno-Nostalgia” in Photography

As a result of advancements in contemporary digital technology, the production tools utilized in art, alongside new instruments that facilitate daily life, are becoming increasingly diverse and sophisticated. The innovations offered by technology provide a wide range of creative opportunities, particularly for artists. However, since the 1990s, there has been a notable tendency towards a retrospective return and mimicry in both daily life and art. This research primarily focuses on the paradox of returning to the past, despite all technological developments and digitalization, as explored through the medium of photography. In this study, the reasons for looking back and mimicking the past in defiance of contemporary realities and technologies are analyzed within the framework of the concept of “tech-nostalgia.” Concrete examples of “tech-nostalgia” in the realm of photography, such as the Lomography movement and Polaroid productions, have been examined in detail. Despite the high-resolution image quality achieved through current technology and the conveniences of the image production process, the reasons for the observed increase in analog photography have been addressed. The investigation delves into how this increase is shaped within the nature of art and photographic aesthetics, and this trend is attempted to be elucidated through psychological and sociological perspectives with relevant examples.

The uncanniness of interactive photography: Exploring spatial perception in virtual tours and structure from motion

Photography has always been associated with the physical activity of the human body: capturing, editing and viewing photos are all activities that involve the user’s spatial interaction with the technology used. With conventional photography, one aspect of spatial relation with technology is the viewer’s ability to recognize the camera’s location in the photographic scene through visual indications, such as the relative location of objects in the frame to the camera’s point of view, combined with a basic familiarity with the functionality of conventional cameras, relating to the notions of ‘in-front’ and ‘behind’ the camera. Some instances of interactive photography, such as 360-degree imagery and three-dimensional photogrammetry, challenge the spatial connection between the photographer (represented by the camera location) and the viewer due to unique usability and innovative interactions, such as the viewer’s ability to ‘move’ freely in all directions of the three-dimensional, photographic space. The technological affordances of interactive photography create a distinct corporeal experience that challenges the traditional associations between the photographer, the viewer and the photographic imagery, evoking with the viewers the notion of technological uncanniness and, consequently, questioning some of the traditional preconceptions regarding the prime characteristics of the photographic medium.

Journalistic Images: Contemporary Challenges for Visual Research in Digital Journalism

This article aims to identify contemporary challenges in researching digital journalism images and propose potential outcomes for addressing these challenges. We argue that the analysis of contemporary journalistic photography requires a departure from traditional approaches used for analog images. Instead, it should be viewed within the ever-changing digital ecosystem in which digital journalism circulates and the new forms of creating, sharing, and visualizing its content that arise from platform context and mobile consumption. We have divided these challenges into two categories: the first relates to topics associated with the studied object, and the second pertains to the research process itself. On the one hand, changes in the nature of the photographic medium, its transmission and profusion potentials, shifts in journalistic workflow and labor relations, evolving professional multimedia needs, audience participation, and new forms of consumption are some of the aspects that need to be considered. On the other hand, we also must deal with the ephemeral quality of digital objects and recognize that researching digital objects is inherently intertwined with understanding the digital ecosystem in which these objects exist. Finally, we identify the digital methods-oriented approach as a potential path to addressing these challenges, mainly because of its characteristics of following and adapting to the medium’s logic

REAL ESTATE, PHOTOGRAPHY, AND CAPITALIST ABSTRACTION. ON EDGAR MARTINS’ THIS IS NOT A HOUSE, DANIEL SHEA’S 43-35 10TH STREET, AND LEWIS BUSH’S METROPOLE

The paper analyses three photographic bodies of work — Edgar Martins’ This Is Not a House, Daniel Shea’s 43-35 10th Street, and Lewis Bush’s Metropole — looking at various aspects of the real estate market: real estate collapse and the 2008 financial crisis in the USA, as well as real estate boom and gentrification in New York City and London. The case studies depict the real estate industry as an example of how invisible and abstract market processes shape visible and concrete domains of everyday life, such as, income inequalities, social relationships, or public space aesthetics. The artists in question use photography as a tool to deconstruct the abstractions of neoliberal capitalism through an attempt to visualise the invisible. By examining the three case studies in the light of economic theory on the real estate market, the paper defines links between neoliberal capitalism and the medium of photography using the idea of abstraction, and shows how photography is used to dissect the complexity of economic processes taking place within the realm of neoliberal capitalism.

Fashion and Politics, The Politics of Fashion: Józef Simmler’s Portrait of Emilia Włodkowska, Society Portrait and Haute Couture

The article proposes an analytical approach tuned to 19th-century society portraiture and tests it on Józef Simmler’s Portrait of Emilia Włodkowska (1865, National Museum in Warsaw). The pictured ball gown was likely by Worth and presented as being worn in Paris rather than in Warsaw to respect the politically-motivated Polish national mourning (1861–1866), culminating during the January Uprising (1863–1864) against Russian rule, that precluded organizing and attending balls at home. The portrait was an act of public performance—and indeed it was publicly exhibited at the artist’s posthumous exhibition in Warsaw in 1868. Its staging and costuming reflected the sitter’s particular agenda fine-tuned to multifarious current contexts: she promoted her Warsaw fashion house and herself as a respectable society lady and competent agent of French fashion in the period of political turmoil and resultant expectations concerning Polish women’s dress and conduct. The portrait showcases Simmler’s juste milieu approach and illustrates a very current shift in the fashionable female silhouette, advocated by Worth, while referencing the dress and artistic tradition of the 17th and 18th centuries and drawing inspiration from the new medium of photography.

Shifting perspectives: exploring the intersection of traditional and digital photography in contemporary artistic practices

The advent of digital photography has ushered in a dynamic era marked by evolving paradigms and practices in visual representation. This research delves into the profound interplay between traditional and digital photographic modalities, investigating their impact on contemporary art and society. Through an art-based research approach, this study examines an innovative artistic experiment conducted by Palestinian artist Ahmed Al-Saffarini. While Al-Saffarini's work serves as a starting point for philosophical reflection, it is the broader conceptual exploration of digital and traditional photography that forms the core of this research. By burying vintage photographic negatives underground for an extended period, Al-Saffarini sought to explore the transformative potential of integrating traditional and digital photography techniques. Drawing on a rich body of literature encompassing philosophical discourse, artistic practice, and technological advancements, this research elucidates key themes shaping the trajectory of photography in the digital age. Phenomenological perspectives illuminate the experiential dimensions of perception and consciousness inherent in the photographic medium, while scholarly debates on analogue versus digital photography underscore the epistemic complexities and artistic possibilities engendered by technological innovation. Furthermore, this study highlights photography's role as a conduit for memory, identity formation, and cultural expression in contemporary society. Through an analysis of Al-Saffarini's artistic experiment and its implications, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of photography's transformative potential and its evolving significance within the artistic landscape. Emphasising the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and creative experimentation, this study advocates for the integration of art-based research methodologies in scholarly inquiry, thereby enriching our comprehension of photography's multifaceted nature and its enduring relevance in the digital era.

Freddy Mamani’s Cholets for Export

The Bolivian Aymara architect Freddy Mamani has constructed more than sixty brightly colored cholets in El Alto, a migrant sister city to La Paz, Bolivia. These fantastical constructions are neither pure romantic manifestations of an Aymara cosmovision nor only superficial decorations that symbolize the Aymara Indigenous peoples’ entry into capitalism. Instead, they reflect the complexity and contradictions of dynamic urban Indigenous identity in a globalized world. The article is the first of its kind to consider cholets outside a Bolivian context. The article illustrates how cholets have been constructed out of imported products and, in turn, transformed into exportable objects for global consumption. Via analyzing a range of visual media—photography, documentary, and museum installations—I make the case that in the process of exportation, the cholets are converted into decorative objects that risk obfuscating the long class and racial struggles of the Aymara as they have resisted, and embraced, global capitalism’s imperatives.

On Social Media Photography

This article looks at the photography of Kris Graves and the circulation of the artist’s images on his social media accounts as a way of promoting social progress and racial justice, with a focus on his 2016 A Bleak Reality photoseries for Vanity Fair. The series consists of eight images that address the haunting specters of police brutality against eight African American male citizens who lost their lives at the hands of the state. Looking at Instagram, I posit a threefold claim about the social media photograph. First, I argue against the association of the social photo with the everyday. I examine a photoseries that initially participated in an economy of art but then migrated across a network of social relations in order to enhance its visibility—its dissemination ushering in the social life of the photograph that undergirds Black Lives Matter. Second, I suggest that the affective residues of Instagram’s content linger in an indexical trace that transcends the transplatform network’s digitally composited, modified, duplicated, and distributed images. This dual focus illuminates how social media function, on the one hand, as a technology of race while they allow Graves, on the other hand, to document instances of police brutality against African Americans. Third, in so doing, this article locates A Bleak Reality within a genealogy of civic media in order to explore how the co-optation of photography’s reproductive affordances by African American photographers, artists, scholars, intellectuals, and abolitionists has allowed them to construct a counter-archive of Black cultural production around historical movements for racial justice.

Narcissism on display? Effects of full-shot and medium-shot photographs posted on social media on tourists’ attraction visit interest

Through theory of narcissism and leisure constraint theory, this study considers how tourists’ vulnerable narcissism facets and lack of interest travel constraint at destination level affect their interest in attractions after viewing social media photographs of other visitors posed as full shot or medium shot (photograph types). Partial least-squares analysis on 614 survey returns (307 for full-shot and 307 for medium-shot photographs) revealed vulnerable narcissism’s impact on attraction visit interest is mostly evident in wenqing attractions. Lack of interest constraint lowers natural and monument attraction visit interest but not for wenqing attractions. Only entitlement rage facet positively influences lack of interest constraint.

PHOTOGRAPHY IN TOURISM

Basically, humans are social creatures that cannot be separated from the people around them. This affects a person's lifestyle, be it a lifestyle that is closely related to the development of society, which contains values such as social strata, imagery, and self-actualization which are all for the search for a new identity. Where in this case we know that in the world of tourism has developed rapidly in which there are several components related to the world of tourism, one of which is media photography that plays a role in the world of tourism which is used to capture moments in us doing tourist trips, which in this case aims as a promotional media because of the results of good pictures will make people interested in visiting tourist attractions especially Bali, where we all know that Bali is one of the destinations visited by many local and foreign tourists, now this is how important media photography is in the world of tourism.

Creating a Catalog of UMKM Setu Babakan Products for the Development of Betawi Culture to International Markets

Betawi culture is a culture that is passed down through generations in Betawi society and is mostly prevalent in the capital city of Jakarta. One of the cultural products that still exist today are produced by the local Small and Medium Enterprise (SME). These products can be promoted through the medium of photography. However, in fact, these local SME products do not have the proper documentation that represents the culture. This research aims to display local SME product in Setu Babakan Betawi village in a visually attractive and informative way. So that, more people will know about the existence of these local SME products in Betawi Cultural village. The catalog will be made not only as media documentation but also as a branding medium to promote in the commercial or industrial sector. The catalog will be in the form of that contains complete list of the products sold and offered and display photos showing the product details. The catalog will be either in the form of print or digital so it could be seen by domestic or foreign tourists. The method used in this study is descriptive qualitative analysis; data were gathered through observation as well as interview with the SME owner regarding the products sold by them.
 Keywords: Betawi Culture, SME, catalogs, product branding, tourists

Photo-able Urban Green-Blue Spaces

Urban green–blue spaces (UGBSs) are increasingly integrated into the urban fabric transformation, playing a pivotal role in shaping everyday interactions and experiences with nature in the Anthropocene era. Crowdsourcing, facilitated by digital technologies, has emerged as a novel methodological advance for accessing subjective place-based information, allowing the public to produce and share photographs at an unprecedented scale. As people can now readily capture and disseminate images on social media from virtually any location, these photographs contribute to the digital representation of places. Many studies have leveraged social media imagery to explore mental maps of cities, place perceptions, and ecosystem services. This raises fundamental questions: What are the UGBSs that promote photography across cities? What are the similarities and differences among cities’ photogenic UGBSs? And how do cities’ photogenic UGBSs relate to the happiness of their inhabitants? This study investigates these questions through an analysis of 203,020 photographs, taken from social media, of sites across 186 cities over a five-year period (2014 to 2018). Employing Google Cloud Vision and topic modelling with a state-of-the-art neural network model, photographs are clustered and used to identify cross-city features. The correlation between prevalence of photogenic UGBSs and levels of happiness is investigated using linear regression analysis. The results show that UGBSs eliciting photography practice are predominantly characterised by water-related subjects, confirming a widespread aesthetic appreciation for urban blue spaces. Perceptions of UGBSs exhibit significant variability among cities, offering a metric to assess environmental policy efficacy. Lastly, a positive association is found in high-income contexts between number of social media photographs of UGBSs and subjective well-being, while this correlation is not significant in middle- and low-income contexts. This sheds light on human–nature relationships by providing global evidence of how aesthetic appreciation of urban nature influences human well-being.

Analyse du processus créatif en photographie et son implication clinique en photo-thérapie

ContextThe author, a photographer and photo-therapist, tries to develop a new therapeutic approach based on the photographic act. AimsThis article aims to examine the psychic processes involved in the dynamics of taking photos and to explore what can be done with the photographic medium in clinical practice. MethodWe will listen to the photographic works of the famous Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto to see what they say about clinical work involving photo-therapy. ResultsDuring his artistic practice, Hiroshi Sugimoto summons up memory traces related to his own history and that of his ancestors and updates them in his photos. He experiences all kinds of bodily sensations and hallucinations. His photos are already within him in the form of inner visions, even before he has expressed them materially. The elaborative transposition of the inner image, which has become pre-conscious, takes place in a very specific material: his antique medium-format camera and his special lighting not only serve to create an atmosphere, but also to take him on a journey through the history of humanity and his own inner history. He comes to identify completely with his camera, which helps to plunge him into a state of fusion with the object being photographed. DiscussionDuring his creative process, the photographer goes through phases similar to those that the baby goes through during his development, in an attempt to achieve a (re)actualization of the self: alternating phases of integration and non-integration of the self with more or less chaotic regressive phenomena, a primary identification with a quasi-fusional state between the photographer and the camera and between the photographer and the photographed object, the mobilization of bodily sensations and a return to a state of fluidity in the gaze and gesture. ConclusionsIn photo-therapy, this re-actualization of the self is sought and the creative process in photography seems to contribute to this to a certain extent. The regressive states accompanied by bodily sensations, that is to say, this state of pathos that runs through the photographing patient, can, in the aftermath, restore movement in the psyche and bring back to life certain aspects that had not been (sufficiently) represented. The inner images of the psyche are expressed in the form of material external photos but this fixation allows the initial inner image to be reworked in a retroactive loop, and thus to reshape the psyche, through the body. The camera, which has the particularity of being both the tool and the surface of inscription, becomes part of the body of the photographer-patient. The transference is thus diffracted between the analyst and the photographic medium. From the subjectivity of the photographing subject and that of the photographed object, a third subjectivity is created, a kind of “analytic third:” the photo is charged with meaning that can be analyzed in therapy.

Framing Terrorism Survivors: Visual Representation of Boko Haram Survivors in International News Media

This study analyzed how African, American, and British online mainstream news sources visually represent Boko Haram survivors. A longitudinal study from 2014 to 2021 was conducted using purposive sampling to analyze news media photographs with captions (N = 187). Drawing from agenda-setting and cultural dimensions frameworks, the study identified major differences in survivors’ gender, emotional expressions, and personally identifiable information across all three online news platforms. Findings show that these media portrayals of terrorism survivors reflect the cultural norms of the society in which the predominant audience of these outlets resides.

Geodiversity photographed: An exploratory and iconographic study of geoheritage in protected areas

This paper is part of the scope of cultural geodiversity and mobilizes photography in order to understand the role it has played in the knowledge of geodiversity and in the recognition of geoheritage. To carry out this research, four books written and directed by specialists in the photographic medium were used. They allowed us to constitute a corpus of 88 photographs, 48 of which present a geodiversity now included within the limits of a protected area. They were taken between 1853 and 1999. These photographs were specifically analyzed according to three criteria: (1) the geological and geomorphological features that were the subjects of the images; (2) the location of the protected areas represented by these photographs; (3) the place and role of the photographs in the history of this medium (techniques and/or specialties). Three main results emerged from this exploratory study: The first concerned the nature of the elements photographed (typology of forms) and the “proto-geopatrimonialization” of this geodiversity (redundancy of photographs via the constitution of photographic series); the second specifically identified the links between protected areas and geodiversity via geological surveys, West Americans in particular, artistic views of abiotic nature and archaeological explorations; the third result showed the importance of geodiversity in the history of photography, and vice versa.

Tinkering with nature: craft, domesticity and female labour in F Percy Smith’s ‘Data’ notebooks (1925–1944)

This article examines two notebooks belonging to the scientific filmmaker F Percy Smith, labelled ‘Data A’ and ‘Data B’, which are held at the National Science and Media Museum (NSMM) in Bradford. These notebooks offer valuable insights into Smith’s working process in the last two decades of his life – between 1925 and 1945 – and they detail the wide array of materials, tools and equipment that he used to produce his films. The article suggests some of Smith’s uses for the notebooks, such as noting down locations for collecting specimens or describing how to construct tanks and troughs for filming individual organisms. Using a wide range of supplementary sources, including images, videos and an interactive map, I argue that Smith’s work amounted to a form of scientific ‘craft’, which blended across his experimentation with photographic media and scientific observation. Dismantling the long-held belief that F Percy Smith worked entirely alone, the article uses the notebooks as an opportunity to highlight for the first time the role that two women played in Smith’s studio-laboratory: his wife, Kate Smith, and his assistant, Phyllis Bolté. The notebooks are a key source for understanding the production of natural history films of the interwar period, including the popular Secrets of Nature (1922–1933) series. The article reflects on what media scholars can learn from taking a closer look at the materials and methods used for making films of this kind.

Visualizing Kingship in a Time of Change

Despite artistic engagement with photography in Iran almost immediately after the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, the field of Islamic art history has had difficulty accepting the modern period and the medium of photography as part of its discipline. Studies on painted Iranian portraiture have often stopped before the introduction of photography, and only in more recent years has photographic portraiture and its influence on painting been examined. Due to this nascent state of the field, large gaps exist even on more traditional topics, such as the question of royal portraiture. This article presents the first examination of photographic royal portraiture and the visualization of kingship during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911). This topic, in comparison with earlier Iranian painted royal portraiture, has received considerably less attention. Photographic portraiture, together with printed and painted examples, from the reigns of the Qajar rulers Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848-1896), Muzaffar al-Din Shah (r. 1896-1907), Muhammad ʿAli Shah (r. 1907-1909), and Ahmad Shah (r. 1909-1925), will be analysed in connection with social and political developments in order to better understand the development of royal image making during a time of political turmoil.

‘Una verità totale’: The Textual and Visual Encounter With the Other in Franco Fortini’s Asia Maggiore. Viaggio nella Cina

ABSTRACT The article explores the photo-textual form of Franco Fortini’s Asia Maggiore. Viaggio nella Cina, the travel account published in 1956 following the writer’s trip to socialist China in 1955. I will discuss the interaction between the photographs taken by the author during the journey and the text. The issue of the literary genre will also be examined, investigating the nature of the travel journal as a combination of both a descriptive account and an autobiographical diary. I will then discuss how this photo-textual blend functions both theoretically – by analysing the nature of the photographic medium in relation with the text – and practically – by providing examples of the ekphrastic interaction of the two media in Fortini’s icastic depiction of colours and crowds. The allegorical value of the account of socialist China is then brought into question, with particular focus on the use of comparison as an argumentative strategy.

In Loving Memories

Longing for cross-temporal, sustained connections, some bereaved will form relationships with photographic portraits of loved ones. These cherished photographs capture more than a fleeting moment – they have the ability to speak across time. Indeed, some become so enmeshed in the remembrance activity that their ability to participate is no longer dependent on the viewable object. Misplaced or (consciously/unconsciously) avoided, these mementoes can take on what I name a “hauntographic” presence – echoing the very phantoms they were meant to commemorate. This paper explores various forms of embellished photographic portraits that reintegrate the likeness of absent individuals into a common temporal frame with the bereaved. Introduced and developed within my research, hauntographs are skeuomorphs – retaining the now-superfluous attributes of objects that, for a time, hosted the now-disconnected remembrance activity. This paper follows the imagination’s role in remembrance as it moves through the photographic medium – through rephotography, spirit photographs, digitally manufactured composites, screenshots – towards an appreciation of photographs that need only be invoked.

“WORDS NOT SPENT TODAY BUY SMALLER IMAGES TOMORROW”: READING PHOTOGRAPHS AND THE EMERGENCE OF POSTWAR PHOTOGRAPHIC CRITICISM IN THE USA

This article examines the idea of ‘reading photographs’ as it circulated in postwar American criticism. It looks principally to the work of Henry Holmes Smith and Minor White and the way in which they deployed the idea, as well as the institutional framework of photographic journals in which their writing circulated. The essay examines the role that the concept played in helping establish photo-criticism as an established genre of writing, and explores particular emphases in that writing that proceeded from the claim audiences ‘read photographs’; of these emphases, the most important and germinative ones centered around photographic traditions and their capacity to establish the parameters of the photographic medium itself. From the vantage delineated above, the essay also situates photo-criticism in a larger universe of postwar concern, one that centered on the mutual convertibility of pictorial and linguistic forms: the development of ‘visual literacy’ discourse, protocols for training photographers as these emerged in the 1960s, and broader agendas in the postwar American university system, with all their interest in visual pedagogy.