Theory Of Photography Research Articles

Imag(in)ing Lagos globally

ABSTRACTThis article argues that Lagos, a megacity geographically located in southwestern Nigeria, also exists in other places and spaces. Such a global presence is not insignificant for the circumstances that enable it to transcend its physical locale to operate in the imagination. This article contends that particular artworks centred on the specific urban space – Lagos – but circulating internationally generate meaning between physical places creating a globally imagined Lagos. It does so highlighting work by three Lagosian artists with broad and varied international careers. It analyses Uche Okpa-Iroha’s photographic series Under Bridge Life (2009), Emeka Ogboh and Kristian Kowatsch’s soundwork Oshodi Stock Exchange (2014), and Abraham Oghobase’s photographic series Untitled (2012) for what they reveal about: the movement of people into and about Lagos, the instability that frames Lagosian daily life, the over-crowding of the city, cross-cultural interactions and the formation of networks. Drawing on phenomenological studies of place and Ariella Azoulay’s photographic theories of civil imagination, the essay demonstrates the ways that the pieces considered here offer marked political commentary on the conditions of life in the city itself, and situate Lagos in the larger world, establishing, reaffirming, and reshaping the networks in which we are all entwined.

“The problem of photography”: the spatiality of photographs in organizational ethnography

The use of photography in organization studies has increased rapidly in recent years. Yet, this increase in use has not been accompanied by a critical consideration of the ontological and epistemological implications of photographs as data. This article addresses this and theorizes the use of photography in organization studies. Recognizing recent attempts to prompt theoretically informed visual research (Bell & Davison, 2013; Meyer, Hollerer, Jancsary & Van Leeuwen, 2013; Ray & Smith, 2012; Shortt & Warren, 2017) we place photographic theory in the foreground by examining elements of Flusser’s (1983) philosophy of photography and its implications for organizational research. This centres on the dialectical relationship between text and image in all communicative action, particularly, on the production of space by organizing groups. We elaborate the key theoretical and methodological implications using existing field studies before moving on to consider the photographic aspects of one of the authors’ own ethnographic field research.

A SLIT THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY

Post-war experimental and conceptual photography in former Yugoslavia has only rarely been the subject of detailed study and interpretation. In considering this period, it is necessary to take into account several factors, including the absence of permanent exhibition spaces for photography, the lack of magazines in which photographic themes were presented and discussed, the impossibility of studying the field of photography and, finally, the inadequate knowledge and application of contemporary criticism and theories of photography. Nevertheless, from the mid-1950s onwards it is possible to note a variety of innovations in the field, in terms of both form and subject-matter. This article considers rare instances of institutional support for progressive photography-related events and unique, intellectual-poetic works. After the break-up of Yugoslavia, there is a dominant tendency to nationalize art created in the former state, thus ignoring the specific Yugoslav cultural field as well as the European context. Based on a methodology which surpasses the national (but still acknowledges it) and searches for meaning within the broader socio-political space to which art is referring, the research aims to change the paradigm of the peripheral position and general ignorance of the circumstances under which this innovative practice emerges.

IMAGE FLOW

This essay is about the phenomenon of mass, mobile photographic images in a digital, networked context. In response to recent writings that challenge the relevance of the close reading of singular images, it proposes rethinking the opposition between singular images and images en masse through philosophical ideas of multiplicity and, in particular, via the concept of image flow. It examines four connected contexts in which concepts of flow have been used: in discourses surrounding the internet and digital media, where it is used to naturalise these media; in psychology, where ideas of flow underpin descriptions of consciousness and human/animal perception; in robotics and artificial intelligence, where ideas of flow from psychology joined with a move away from dependence on representation to facilitate increasingly autonomous mobile machines; and finally in studies of television, where the on-tap transmission of images has been understood in terms of a flow that articulates or choreographs bodies and attention, connecting the rhythms and temporality of private and public space, cities and suburbs. This model of flow, in particular, allows for analysis that operates across different scales, and undoes oppositions of scale and surface/depth that pervade recent photography theory.

W poszukiwaniu „narodowości w fotografice”

In Search for the “National Features in Photography” Summary The main point of the paper is the interest of Polish photographers in nationalist ideas, which has long been one of the forgotten and overlooked episodes in the history of twentieth-century Polish photography. The issue appeared for the first time in 1931-1933, when Polish photographic magazines published a debate about revealing national traits in a photo. It was an aftermath of the idea of the national style in Polish art, promoted since the early 1920s in relation to the needs of the state that just became independent. The greatest authorities of the time took part in the debate, including Jan Bułhak, Józef Świtkowski, Jan Sunderland, and Antoni Wieczorek, who were the main theorists of the Polish photography in the early 20th century. Analyzing the problem, they reverted to various arguments, from purely formal ones, assuming a characteristic tendency of Polish artists to choose particular forms and types of composition (a view based on the theory of pictorialism), through thematic (referring to collective memory and the historical experience of Poles), sociological, and even legal (based on the ideas of Leon Petrażycki). The same arguments were often used later throughout the century. The paper presents the development and theoretical basis of the debate in the early 1930s, as well as later evolution of the concepts which, coined at that time, contributed to the theory of Polish photography in the 20th century.

The Half Moon Photography Workshop and Camerawork: Catalysts in the British Photographic Landscape (1972–1985)

The history of the radical photography collective Half Moon Photography Workshop has not so far been the subject of in-depth research in accounts of 1970s British photography. At a moment when photography was gradually gaining recognition as an art form, its radical voice and independent stance played a fundamental role in shaping the photographic landscape in Britain. Between 1972 and 1985, Half Moon Photography Workshop initiated pioneering debates on the politics of photographic representation and the reinvention of documentary practices and was instrumental in the emergence of photographic theory. Based on archival research and interviews conducted with some founding members, this detailed history examines the initial project, tensions, and evolution of the organization, which started as the Half Moon Gallery in 1972, became the Half Moon Photography Workshop in October 1975, and eventually Camerawork in 1981, taking the name of its successful photography magazine Camerawork published from 1976. As a gallery, a publishing project, and a resource center equipped with darkrooms open to all, the East End organization acted as a catalyst in the expanding British photographic landscape of the 1970s. The new political context of the 1980s and unresolved internal tensions caused its demise in 1985.

KONTEN FOTOGRAFI JURNALISTIK YANG MENJADI VIRAL DI INTERNET

With the presence of the Internet, journalistic photography can provide an opportunity to be more noticed by various societies. Social media and other online media accessed by billions of people each day therefore the spread of journalistic photography are wider. In this case the role of photojournalists becomes more crucial, Rothman (2012) explains that the beginning of motivational photojournalist plunge in the world of journalism due to the insistence in their hearts to announce something that is so important therefore they want to make a change. In this research will be discussed some journalistic photography that raised certain themes using content and structure of journalistic photography with significant results, then become viral on the internet. Some journalistic photography can be viral and some are not. The focus of this research is to find out the reasons and similarities in some journalistic photography that became viral on the Internet. This research uses qualitative content analysis method. Samples were selected based on the virality factor, 4 journalistic photography were taken from various sources and photographed by photographer with different background too. The first photo has been mentioned for 1,890,000 times; the second photo has been mentioned for 32,900,000 times; the third has been accessed for 22,600,000 times and the last has been accessed for 25,270,000,000 times. All four will be discussed based on the theory of journalistic photography, associated with the theory of virality.

Gerhard Roth’s Fotonotizen: The Early Years, 1972–1980

This essay, the first of two on the Fotonotizen of the Austrian writer, photographer, essayist, and political and cultural commentator Gerhard Roth, examines the utilization of photography in his aesthetic practice from 1972 to the late 1970s. To date, the scholarship on photography in Roth’s work remains fragmented, either embedded in studies of individual works or, where the topic is explicitly addressed, largely confined to an analysis of general stylistic tendencies or to a particular moment in his literary development, in particular, the production of his first, seven-volume narrative cycle Die Archive des Schweigens (1980–91). This essay locates Roth’s photographic activities within the context of photographic theory, Roth’s interest in the history of photography, and his reflections on the photographs he has produced and utilized in his writing.

Photo-Graphy, “The Shadow In The Cave,” Its Pain And Love: The ethics of photography

This paper maps out photography’s newer ethics by examining Boris Mikhailov’s Case History that often stirs controversy over its bold depiction of human misery. The paper criticizes the idea that photographers should not represent “the other’s pain”: an idea that has sabotaged the medium’s inherent visual desire in order to prioritize its moral responsibility. In that idea is found a resilient Platonic antagonism against image, a logo-centric prejudice that marks a biased demarcation between art and politics in photography theory. The paper challenges this photographic Platonism through recent arguments that illuminate the medium’s inter-regimic, dialectical, redemptive roles (Jacques Rancière, Walter Benjamin, Ariella Azoulay, et al.). With this theoretical challenge, the paper aims to outline a new ethics of photography for an era in which the image’s “pandemic” growth is resetting the mode of human communication and the role of photography.

The photographic portrait: a means to surveillance and subversion

ABSTRACTThe surveillance model, most notably expounded by John Tagg, has long held orthodoxy in photographic theory. In this reading, the lowering of the gaze of the camera, far from being inclusive, acts when a tool of state, to be a means for exclusion. In essence, what we recognise as the mugshot is a highly coded form of portraiture. I argue that a general knowingness about the conventions of photographic portraiture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries allowed the intended discursive power of a regime of visibility to be undermined, contested and destabilised through acts of dissembling, resistance and counter-strategies that drew on the conventions of honorific portraiture. To support this argument this article focuses on photographs of the Fenians (a secret, oath bearing separatist Irish nationalist organisation) who both were photographed as prisoners and commissioned portraits of themselves to further their radical cause.

Studio Portraiture as a Construct: Interview with Ana Peraica

Dr. Ana Peraica was born into a family of photographers. Her grandfather, as well as her father after him, run a family photo studio Atelier Perajica on the main square of Diocletian’s palace in Split, Croatia. The studio went into Ana’s hands, and she still works there herself today. Besides running the business, her main focus is photographic theory, more precise the field of contemporary arts, visual culture studies and media theory. It is very thought- provoking to see how her background and studio practice influenced her research and vice versa. In her writings she focuses on networked society, strategies of anonymity and pseudonymity, parallel hyper-narratives etc. She currently works on her new book Postdigital Arcadia in which she focuses on changes in the post digital photography (eg. aerial images and 360 images), and reflects upon the changes brought about by new visual language on our perception of reality. We spoke also about her last published book The Culture of the Selfie, an important survey on this particular contemporary phenomenon. Keywords: background, photographic backdrop, photography, selfie, studio photography

What’s in a Term: Can Feminism Look beyond the Global North/Global South Geopolitical Paradigm?

What’s in a Term: Can Feminism Look beyond the Global North/Global South Geopolitical Paradigm?

The Present Pasts: Image and Text in the Fiction of W.G. Sebald

In her Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag suggests that contemporary culture draws on photography to a historically unprecedented degree. This ubiquity of images, she claims, especially images of violence, imposes itself even on those who seek to express the specifc post-Holocaust nature of reality through textual medium. Her major example is the German writer, W.G. Sebald. In his novels, text is accompanied by images whose role, in Sontag’s reading, is reduced to that of an illustration. In my article, I suggest that the position of the photographic image in Sebald’s novels cannot be approached from the perspective proposed by Sontag. Rather, it invites reading in terms of the spectral presence of images whose intrusion into textual reality is as haunting as it is unavoidable. Referring to recent theories of photography, I discuss how in Sebald’s novels the relationship between text and image can be explained as that of parallel structures whose linearity is always already interrupted (haunted) by past events. I refer to recent theoretical perspectives on photography in order to account for the interactions between different media in Sebald’s works and for their visual/textual engagement with the interplay of temporalities that characterizes the working of memory.

Mediated Visions: Early Photography of the Middle East and Orientalist Network

This essay offers a network theory of early photography of the Middle East. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s elaboration of actor-network theory in Reassembling the Social (2005), it focuses on John Cramb’s 1860 photographs of Jerusalem, Maxime Du Camp’s 1849–50 photographs of Egypt, and Auguste Salzmann’s 1854 photographs of Jerusalem to critique art historical approaches that view these images solely in terms of their aesthetic values or documentary significance. What is slighted in such approaches, it argues, is the orientalist network that undergirds the works of these photographers. This essay discusses the overdetermined production of early photography of the Middle East to demonstrate that the large archive of early photographs of the region are inscribed within a complex web of actors, practices, institutions, as well as cultural, economic, and political relations between the West and the so-called ‘Orient’, a network that provided the logistical means and the conceptual paradigms for the production and consumption of these images.

What's So New about the “New” Theory of Photography?

This article considers the shift currently taking place in philosophical thinking about photography. What I call “new” theory departs from philosophical orthodoxy with respect to when a photograph comes into existence, a difference with far-reaching consequences. I trace this to Dawn Wilson (nee Phillips) on the “photographic event.” To assess the new theory's newness one needs a grip on the old. I divide this between “skeptical” and “nonskeptical” orthodoxy, where this turns on the theory's implications for photography's standing as art. New theory emerges as a response to skeptical orthodoxy (Roger Scruton) in particular. I divide new theory in turn between “restrictive” (Paloma Atencia-Linares) and “permissive” (Dominic McIver Lopes) responses to skeptical orthodoxy and raise challenges for both. The restrictive version arguably divides what does and does not count as strictly photographic in arbitrary ways; the permissive version rules in images that are not obviously photographs and faces two difficulties individuating photographs. I conclude by noting several questions that need to be addressed before new theory clearly has the upper hand over orthodoxy. These concern its ability to account for photography's epistemic capacities, the extent to which it constitutes an advance over “nonskeptical” orthodoxy (Kendall Walton), and whether new theorists have yet to be new enough when it comes to photographic agency.

High-resolution spectral video acquisition

Compared with conventional cameras, spectral imagers provide many more features in the spectral domain. They have been used in various fields such as material identification, remote sensing, precision agriculture, and surveillance. Traditional imaging spectrometers use generally scanning systems. They cannot meet the demands of dynamic scenarios. This limits the practical applications for spectral imaging. Recently, with the rapid development in computational photography theory and semiconductor techniques, spectral video acquisition has become feasible. This paper aims to offer a review of the state-of-the-art spectral imaging technologies, especially those capable of capturing spectral videos. Finally, we evaluate the performances of the existing spectral acquisition systems and discuss the trends for future work.

What Does the Baby Selfie Say? Seeing Ways of ‘Self-Seeing’ in Infant Digital Cultures

What Does the Baby Selfie Say? Seeing Ways of ‘Self-Seeing’ in Infant Digital Cultures

On Tangle Formations and Fluid Narratives: Scrapbooking and Photography in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Along the axes of the still-flourishing tendency in industrialized societies to render and mediate experience through image-making practices, and the attraction towards taking photographs of events permeating contemporary narrative, the present study intends to analyze the impact and role of intermedial practices between photographic and verbal language in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, with an specific emphasis on the protagonist’s scrapbook Stuff That Happened to Me. Given that Oskar Schell decides to perpetuate what occurs to him primarily through pictures, his diary challenges traditional ways of journaling and storytelling through scrapbooking strategies, thus disrupting the teleological reading of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, while becoming an intertextual resource, a narrative practice and a method of signification. In order to lay an analysis of the impact of “Stuff that Happened to Me” along the pages Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, selected case-studies are seen through the lens of Analog Fictions for the Digital Age by Julia Breitbach and Writing with Scissors by Ellen Gruber Harvey, joined to essentials of photographic theory. Ultimately, by posing questions such as: does Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close entail a radical provocation on the relationship between photography and literature, or is it a mere transposition of 18th century scrapbooking practices? Is this novel in its construction just a historical result of the long-known dialogue between word and image, or another symptom of the present information overload? Or is it, surprisingly, a consequence of its contextual circumstances – namely, an age of visual dominance? These inquiries will open the opportunity to briefly address ‘the visual turn’ in literature and the understanding (or the necessity to understand) new hybrid modes of reading and writing.

Al-Dilalah al-Siyaqiyyah Wa Suwar Tatbiquha Fi Tafsir al-Kasysyaf

The significance is a science that studies meaning or linguistics that deals with the theory of meaning. There are several theories related to the issue of meaning: indicative and photographic theory, behavioral theory, contextual theory, analytic theory, and semantic field theory. This research is based on contextual theory. The issue of meaning in the owners of this theory is to use the language, the study of the meanings of words in this theory requires an analysis of the contexts and attitudes that are contained in them even if they were non-language. In addition, the researcher determines in this research the linguistic context, not all of the research on the context. The objectives of this research are a statement of the contextual meanings and types of application in the interpretation of the first volume scout. This research is a kind of qualitative research and uses the researcher in this researcher descriptive approach, which is the data and description of the data in sentences or words. The researcher asks for these data from the sources related to the subject of this research such as the book of interpretation of the Scouts and the books of semantics and the book, which looked for the application of semantics. This research is also called research desk. The results of this research are that the meanings of contextual interpretation of the Scout Volume I of the twenty places of the verses. The meaning of the word sedition, the book, today, and the beating

ヴァルター・ベンヤミンの写真論 : 写真のアクチュアリティとは何か

ヴァルター・ベンヤミンの写真論 : 写真のアクチュアリティとは何か