Photographic Portraits Research Articles

Focal Length Affects Depicted Shape and Perception of Facial Images.

Static photographs are currently the most often employed stimuli in research on social perception. The method of photograph acquisition might affect the depicted subject’s facial appearance and thus also the impression of such stimuli. An important factor influencing the resulting photograph is focal length, as different focal lengths produce various levels of image distortion. Here we tested whether different focal lengths (50, 85, 105 mm) affect depicted shape and perception of female and male faces. We collected three portrait photographs of 45 (22 females, 23 males) participants under standardized conditions and camera setting varying only in the focal length. Subsequently, the three photographs from each individual were shown on screen in a randomized order using a 3-alternative forced-choice paradigm. The images were judged for attractiveness, dominance, and femininity/masculinity by 369 raters (193 females, 176 males). Facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) was measured from each photograph and overall facial shape was analysed employing geometric morphometric methods (GMM). Our results showed that photographs taken with 50 mm focal length were rated as significantly less feminine/masculine, attractive, and dominant compared to the images taken with longer focal lengths. Further, shorter focal lengths produced faces with smaller fWHR. Subsequent GMM revealed focal length significantly affected overall facial shape of the photographed subjects. Thus methodology of photograph acquisition, focal length in this case, can significantly affect results of studies using photographic stimuli perhaps due to different levels of perspective distortion that influence shapes and proportions of morphological traits.

Perfect Lighting for Facial Photography in Aesthetic Surgery: Ring Light.

Photography is indispensable for plastic surgery. On-camera flashes can result in bleached out detail and colour. This is why most of the plastic surgery clinics prefer studio lighting similar to professional photographers'. In this article, we want to share a simple alternative to studio lighting that does not need extra space: Ring light. We took five different photographs of the same person with five different camera and lighting settings: Smartphone and ring light; point and shoot camera and on-camera flash; point and shoot camera and studio lighting; digital single-lens reflex (DLSR) camera and studio lighting; DSLR and ring light. Then, those photographs were assessed objectively with an online survey of five questions answered by three distinct populations: plastic surgeons (n: 28), professional portrait photographers (n: 24) and patients (n: 22) who had facial aesthetic procedures. Compared to the on-camera flash, studio lighting better showed the wrinkles of the subject. The ring light facilitated the perception of the wrinkles by providing homogenous soft light in a circular shape rather than bursting flashes. The combination of a DSLR camera and ring light gave the oldest looking subject according to 64 % of responders. The DSLR camera and the studio lighting demonstrated the youngest looking subject according to 70 % of the responders. The majority of the responders (78 %) chose the combination of DSLR camera and ring light that exhibited the wrinkles the most. We suggest using a ring light to obtain well-lit photographs without loss of detail, with any type of cameras. However, smartphones must be avoided if standard pictures are desired. This journal requires that authors assign a level of evidence to each article. For a full description of these Evidence-Based Medicine ratings, please refer to the Table of Contents or the online Instructions to Authors www.springer.com/00266.

Lomba Merpati: Place-making and Communal Signalling within Javanese Pigeon Racing.

The project, Lomba Merpati, is a series of photographs and video works documenting pigeon racing in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Associated as a lower socio-economic class sport and tied up with expressions of Javanese masculinity, pigeon racing occupies a central position within much of the daily social activity of Javanese villages. The project explores the significance of pigeon training grounds as communal gathering points for young men in Yogyakarta. Comprising short video and photographic portraits, the series focuses on the performative gestures enacted by pigeon fanciers as they train their pigeons for short distance sprinting.

Does the Eyebrow Sag with Aging? An Anthopometric Study of 95 Caucasians from 20 to 79 Years of Age.

It is commonly assumed that a progressive sagging of the eyebrow occurs with the facial aging process. Only a few studies have analyzed this modification, and the findings are disparate and inconclusive. This study, based on reproducible and validated data, aimed to quantify the modifications of eyebrow position that may occur with aging. Also analyzed were the effects of these eyebrow position changes on the upper eyelid and on frontal muscle activity. The study included 95 Caucasian adults divided in three groups: 20 to 39, 40 to 59, and 60 to 79 years of age. Photographic portraits were made using a standardized photograph protocol. Eyebrow position was evaluated from the intercanthal line to four points along the upper margin of the eyebrow. The upper eyelid height, the lid sulcus height, and the upper iris coverage were measured. Severity of the forehead lines was analyzed using a validated scale. Reliability and validity of all measures were controlled beforehand. No significant differences were found when comparing eyebrow height above the medial canthus, the pupil, the lateral sclero-corneal limbus, and the lateral canthus between groups (p > 0.5). In addition, results suggested an increase of dermatochalasis when eyebrow height decreased. Also demonstrated was a significant increase of frontal muscle activity with aging. In contrast to conventional descriptions, this study demonstrated the stability of the eyebrow position with aging. This results from a physiological state of muscular compensation and may help explain the questionable results of eyebrow surgery.

Staging Japanese Femininity: Cross-cultural Dressing in Australian Photography

The popularity of Japanese inspired dress in portrait photographs of middle-class Australian women and girls during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offers new insight into cross-cultural dressing and its links to identity. Rather than simply mirroring Orientalist fantasies of the distant and exotic East, these photographs indicate how Anglo-Australian women’s material cultural practices spoke to their own experiences of modernity and their impressions of Japanese femininity. Through their production and consumption of Japanese inspired fashion, musical theatre, decorative arts and travel photographs, these women were encouraged to respond to their admiration of Japanese femininity with their own embodied performances for the camera. Photographs of Australian women and girls in kimonos also illuminate the complexity of Australia’s cultural engagement with Japan in the era of the racially exclusive “White Australia” policy and Japanese imperialist incursions in the Asia-Pacific region. In staging their perceptions of Japanese femininity at home and in the photographer’s studio, Australian women also reconciled a series of conflicting ideals associated with dress reform, women’s suffrage and the “new woman.”

Enhancing visual literacy through interpretation of photo-genres: toward a genre typology of journalistic photographs

ABSTRACTAlthough genre is one of the most extensively employed concepts in various disciplines, only a few attempts have been made to classify images in the press, providing either a palette of thematic categories similar to those of photography competitions or theory-based classifications, which often ignore certain types of photographs. In addition, no studies have suggested the genre typology as a tool for the interpretation of journalistic photographs. Based on a literature review and visual material analysis from the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, this study compiles a typology that sets out four photo-genres: news photography, reportage photography, portrait photography and illustrative photography, with related photo-types. The criteria used to distinguish certain photo-types are based on differences in the visual content of photographs, their context, layout of display, number of images, and their fulfillment of informative, expressive, impressive, esthetic, illustrative or marketing functions. As a result, the study describes each genre and type separately, illustrated by visual samples. The conclusion is that although genres have a tendency to merge and create hybrids, and thus, any attempt at classifying them leads to certain generalizations, the typology can be applied as a tool in visual literacy education to facilitate students’ interpretation of journalistic photographs.

The Animated Stereoscopic Portrait

This is a short report, first published in French in 1908, on Émile Reynaud’s ill-fated Stéréo-Cinéma, the last incarnation of his renowned Praxinoscope (first marketed in 1878). The Stéréo-Cinéma was intended to attract interest within the trend of animated portrait photography. This text contributes to our understanding of the limits of designating any clear-cut distinction between proto-cinematography and cinematography.

Photographic Portraiture in West Africa: Notes from “In and Out of the Studio”

Previous articleNext article No AccessPhotographic Portraiture in West Africa: Notes from “In and Out of the Studio”Giulia Paoletti and Yaëlle BiroGiulia PaolettiAndrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Curatorial Fellow, Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Search for more articles by this author and Yaëlle BiroAssociate Curator, Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Metropolitan Museum Journal Volume 512016 Sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/691114 Views: 190Total views on this site © 2016 by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Eudora Welty Biennial 2017

Eudora Welty Biennial 2017 David Kaplan, Curator The second Welty Biennial is in its planning stages. The 2017 theme will be “Parallel Mississippi: Parting the Curtain,” with a focus on the middle-class lives and elite society of African-Americans in the state of Mississippi and the unexpected ways Welty’s writing and life made connections and missed connecting with that world. The venues of the 2107 Biennial will be site specific, with an emphasis on portrait photography and oral history. Developing themes from 2015, the 2017 installations will feature quilts, graffiti, and live music. Specific dates for the late spring 2017 will be announced as soon as confirmed. Scholars interested in helping to develop exhibits and presentations should contact David Kaplan: curator@weltybiennial.org. [End Page 156] Click for larger view View full resolution Replicated columns of the Ruins of Windsor installed outside the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, for the first Welty Biennial, which was held from April 28–June 15, 2015, with the theme Classical Mississippi. [End Page 157] Copyright © 2016 Department of English, Georgia State University

Moths, Photographs, and Emigrants: The Capacity for Transmigration in the Work of W. G. Sebald

And since the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man is to tell him he is at the end of his nature, Browne scrutinizes that which has for any sign of the capacity for transmigration he has so often observed in caterpillars and moths. That purple piece of silĶ he refers to, then, in the um of Patroclus-what does it mean?-W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Satum (1995)Silk is a theme that weaves throughout W. G. Sebald's photograph-lined book The Rings of SaturnHowever the specificity of its ritual uses in funerary practice arises but twice in the phototextual narrative of a walking tour through the East Anglian countryside of England, at the conclusion of the first and last sections of the book. The purple funerary silk and black mourning ribbons described in these sections remain outstanding because they draw the reader's attention to how this inimitable material has been employed historically to facilitate the passage of human souls into the afterlife. For millennia, Sebald's narrator points out, humans have harvested raw silk from the cocoons spun by the Bombyx mori (silkworm) to undergo metamorphosis into a moth, effectively curtailing that very process of transformation. In this way, one species' transmigration is sacrificed to facilitate that of another. On the final pages of The Rings of Saturn, the author offers a photograph of the sericulture industry in early-twentieth-century India during British colonial rule. The faded black-and-white photograph shows three young men attending to countless cocoons attached to spiral-shaped wooden frames; the cocoons are silkworms that will soon be harvested for their silk (figure l).2The capacity for defined most simply as the ability to traverse boundaries both geopolitical as well as between life states, is treated at length in Sebald's third work of prose fiction and emerges as one of his exemplary methods for transmitting violent histories resistant to representation. In this essay, I argue that Sebald employs transmigration both thematically and methodologically to address the ethical challenges of representing catastrophe in a manner that preserves the reader's capacity for remembrance and reflection. Moths, photographs, and emigrants populate Sebald's works of historical fiction, appearing both textually within the narrative as well as in the form of photographic reproductions that interrupt the printed page. These three entities share the capacity for transmigration and become interchangeable with one another. For instance, an account of the metamorphosis of moths reads as a description of the photographic process, just as the recovery of an old photographic portrait becomes a metaphor for the return of a forgotten emigrant across time and space, and the harvesting of silkworm moths in a Nazi-era pedagogical film emerges as a thinly veiled allegory of the Holocaust.The topic of transmigration arises in the first of The Rings of Saturn's ten sections through the figure of the Norwich polymath Sir Thomas Browne. Trained as a physician and the son of a silk merchant, Browne's treatises cover a broad range of subjects: the geometrical patterns to be found in animate and inanimate nature, including the quincunx; the physiological mutations among living creatures; and the nature of time and human mortality, and in turn how cultural beliefs about the subject have played out in funerary practices. The topic of transmigration arises in the context of his study of the latter. Declaring that there is no antidote against the opium of time, Browne remains fascinated nonetheless by those rare examples of animate and inanimate matter that have escaped annihilation (R, 26). Indeed, the themes of mortality, obsolescence, and passage recur throughout Sebald's melancholic account of a pilgrimage through the Norfolk region of England.Among those entities exhibiting this mysterious capacity for transmigration, Browne identifies caterpillars and moths. …

Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–1915 by Owen Clayton

Reviewed by: Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–1915 by Owen Clayton Joanna Madloch Owen Clayton, Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–1915 New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2015, 233 pp. This book discusses a variety of interactions between photography and literature in the transitory period of the medium between 1850 and 1915. Building on terminology established by Daniel Novak and John Tagg, Owen Clayton chooses the term “photographies,” which stresses the fact that during the early days of the photographic medium, instead of one dominant process, there existed an array of coexisting techniques and photographic methods. As the author explains in his Introduction, the main goal of his work is to establish how various literary uses of photography reflect upon the heterogeneity of the medium itself and how they portray the changes that photography was undergoing. Chapter One further explores the notion of the term “photographies” and features [End Page 367] Clayton’s abbreviated history of the medium’s development, which includes notions of both its simultaneity and technological multiplicity. Chapter Two discusses Henry Mayhew’s work titled London Labour and the London Poor (1850–62), in which a popular English journalist portrays urban workers and underprivileged classes of his time. Clayton notices that while Mayhew’s work has already been well researched, the critiques never paid enough attention to the way it utilizes photographic images. According to Clayton, Mayhew’s choice of the daguerreotype-engraving mixed process over the more modern collodion technique is purposeful. The chapter presents how, by staging the images and then selectively engraving them, Mayhew achieves his goal to create an illusion of objectivity, while at the same time establishing his position of control and succeeding in generating specific emotions among his readers. In Chapter Three, Clayton presents how photography is employed in the creation of selfhoods in late nineteenth-century fiction. While discussing Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Clayton argues that Stevenson uses photography as a metaphor for the psychotic effect of modernity. The novel itself reflects the writer’s fascination with several photographic techniques, especially those that allow multiple images to be shown simultaneously (zoopraxiscope) and those that combine multiple exposures of the same image (composite photography). On the other hand, Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop (1888) introduces photography as a gender-model construction tool. According to Clayton, Levy uses photography to display how gender is constructed not through the portrayal of characters, but rather through their performance. This is illustrated by the novel, which presents the story of four sisters engaged in (an unusual for their time) pursuit of the photographic business, in the form of a gender performativity discourse in relation to photography. Chapter Four is dedicated to the analysis of William Dean Howells’s Suburban Sketches (1871). Clayton concentrates his attention on relationships between the notions of work, literature, and photography expressed in Howells’s work. For example, according to the author, Howells builds one of his reoccurring characters, Bartley Hubbard, as a polemic to Hawthorne’s Holgrave, and respective characters illustrate both authors’ notions of the nature of work. In addition, Clayton argues, in his novel titled A Modern Instance (1882), the motif of photographic portraiture is used as a representation of the self-destructive impulses of the protagonist. Chapter Five explores the interconnections between literary works by Jack London and both photography and early cinema. The analysis of London’s The People of the Abyss (1902), presents how London uses a variety of photographic techniques, including composite method, in order to create socially and politically meaningful images. As it is shown in the chapter, the image manipulation allows the writer to achieve the rhetorical effect, but consequently puts his work [End Page 368] under scrutiny for the lack of realism. Later in the chapter, Clayton presents the ways London’s photographs adopt numerous cinematic tropes, but also how the changing cinema reflects itself in his late fiction, including the Abysmal Brute (1911) and The Valley of the Moon (1913). In the Afterward the author talks about nostalgia for “photographies,” which at the end of the twentieth century takes a form of a revival of interest in old...

The relational image: Creating a psychoanalytic photographic portrait.

The relational image: Creating a psychoanalytic photographic portrait.

Normalising Deviance

Irish photographer Mark Curran presents his on-going project THE MARKET, which is an exploration of the predatory nature of the functioning and condition of global markets. Focusing on financial and commodity exchanges, Curran provides a multi-layered and multimodal investigation of market culture, primarily through interviews and photographic portraits of traders, financial analysts and bankers from Dublin, London, Frankfurt, Addis Ababa and Amsterdam. In the interview, Curran talks about the limitations of using photography to critically represent the intangible and immaterial aspects of the working of the market and its repetitive normalisation of deviance.

Artistic Tradition and Feminine Legacy in Elena Ferrante’s <em>L’amore molesto</em>

In this essay I examine Elena Ferrante’s L’amore molesto as a novel about artists, artist figures, and artistic legacies. Delia is a comic artist in Rome; her father is a Neapolitan painter of vulgar commercial canvases; and Amalia is an artist who works with fabric – as a seamstress, she invents and reinvents clothes, bodies, stories. Likewise, the text teems with artworks – the father’s lurid paintings of a semi-nude gypsy; a masterful canvas depicting two women and displayed in the window of a lingerie shop; and several photographic portraits of Amalia and Delia. Notably, all these images portray the woman’s body trapped within the frame of visual representation, within an artwork which is always the product of a male artist. By positing both Delia and her father as artists Ferrante invites scrutiny of their artworks and the social system that enables their production. In this essay I read the discourse constituted by the discrete artworks in the text to contend that the visual representation of women reflects the processes of objectification, fragmentation, and defacement associated with the male gaze and male artistic practice within a Western androcentric tradition. I illustrate these processes by analyzing the image of the female nude in L’amore molesto through the critical lenses of Western art history, visual theory, and feminist thought. I argue that Ferrante’s novel resists patrilineal artistic legacy by advocating a feminine genealogy that connects Delia and Amalia as artist figures and bonds them through the act of artistic creation. This reading offers a new approach to the novel and enriches our understanding of the text. It brings into focus Ferrante’s visual poetics and opens new lines of inquiry into her creative imagination.

Enduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby

Reviewed by: Enduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby Elizabeth Hutchinson Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby. Enduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015. 224pp. $45.00. For many scholars of nineteenth-century American history and visual culture, photographic portraits of leading black abolitionists are iconic and meaningful. Both Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth used the camera strategically and thoughtfully. Their images, like their published words, allowed for the sentiments presented in public speeches to reverberate beyond the bounds of the lecture hall, taking their place in the private spaces of potential allies and supporters. This is particularly true for cartes-de-visite (or CDVs), small photographs mounted on cards that were inexpensively printed and could be sent through the mail. After their [End Page 399] introduction in the United States in the late 1850s, CDVs of loved ones and public figures were so prevalent that Horace Greeley dubbed them “the greenbacks of civilization.” Enduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance, by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, a scholar of art history whose earlier works focus on painting and architecture in colonial Euro-American contexts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, offers an unprecedentedly comprehensive look at the photographs Truth had made, possibly as early as 1850, and nearly until her death in 1883. While driven by research and critical thought, the volume is directed toward a broad readership. Sizeable, well-illustrated, and written in accessible prose, it might sit on a modern coffee table much as the Victorian albums containing pictures of Truth might have resided in a middle-class parlor 150 years ago. And, like an album, the greatest pleasure offered by this volume lies in its presentation of so many portraits of its subject, many of which have not previously been published. Grigsby has taken care to not only locate photographs of Truth but also to accurately date them, allowing her to organize the book around clearly defined phases in Truth’s engagement with self-representation. She claims “Truth deployed photography to make arguments.” Grigsby argues that this body of work—comprising at least twenty-eight separate pictures made over the course of perhaps fourteen sessions with what seem to be six different photographers, and always undertaken with the goal of securing financial support—changes according to the times. Truth’s approach to portraiture is particularly important according to this author because Truth did not have access to the same range of means to assert her authority and build alliances as did the literate public figures of her time. Instead, she embraced an up-to-date technology whose inherent indexicality communicated a sense of her identity that might otherwise have been marked by a signature. As Grigsby shows, over time, Truth became increasingly comfortable and skilled at asserting a sense of self-possession through self-portraiture. The book is divided into three chronological sections, each of which is composed of several chapters. At the beginning of her relationship with photography, which coincided with the publication of The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a memoir recorded by abolitionist Olive Gilbert, Truth’s visible discomfort speaks to the reality that her public appearances at the time were frequently met with hostility, and that even allies such as Harriet Beecher Stowe employed pejorative stereotypes when discussing her. During the Civil War, several CDVs were made that linked the sitter with the Union cause through the use of props that created solidarity with viewers, including a portrait of a relative in uniform (her grandson, James Caldwell) and a piece of knitting (linked not only to contemporaneous notions of virtuous domesticity, but also to women’s contributions to the war effort). Another shift occurred in 1864, when the former slave began copyrighting photographs to claim ownership of her own image. During Truth’s later years, the photographs took on a new sense of dignity that ironically communicated a diminishing commitment to using photography as a “tool of war.” As Grigsby demonstrates, Truth collected few if any photographs herself, treasuring instead a collection of signatures and a scrapbook full of clippings; the fact that the photographs made at the end of her life are the most conventional reinforces the...

Honourable Healers: Pioneering Women Doctors, Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Constance Stone

134 BOOK REVIEWS lawful certain forms of exclusion from migration. Thus, for example, in 1882 the New Zealand Imbecile Passengers Act contained specific provisions for controlling the entry of any person ‘lunatic, idiotic, deaf, dumb, blind or infirm’ who might later depend on charitable or government public institutions (p. 166). Such individuals were not banned from New Zealand, but a bond was required if they were to gain entry. Later, in Australia, the Immigration (Restriction) Act of 1901, sought to restrict a range of ‘unwanted’ immigrants, including those with mental illnesses. Insanity, Identity and Empire draws on and extends Coleborne’s previously published works about institutional confinement. In future work she plans to assess whether the social distinctions inscribed in official asylum records affected patients’ treatment and discharge, analyses that will also reflect the mobility of medical knowledge about insanity. For those with an interest in the colonial management of mental illness this is something to anticipate. ANN WESTMORE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE Merrilyn Murnane. Honourable Healers: Pioneering Women Doctors, Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Constance Stone (North Melbourne, Victoria: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2015). ISBN 9781925333053 (HB). B&W and colour illustrations, B&W and colour portraits, facsimiles. xvi + 225pp. Retired Melbourne paediatrician Dr Merrilyn MurnaneAM, has in one inspiring narrative brought together the lives of nineteenth-century woman doctors Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Sophia Jex-Blake and Constance Stone. In story-like fashion, she demonstrates how each strove against strident opposition in different times and places to pioneer the right of women to gain medical qualifications and enter the medical profession. Relying mainly on secondary sources, Murnane has written a book of great accessibility. She begins with a chapter on the early history of women in medicine from ancient times to the nineteenth century, and then dedicates individual chapters to these four pioneer woman doctors, chronicling their lives from birth to death, and portraying their common struggles and diverse achievements in Great Britain, the United States, and Australia. They were women of action whose Health & History ● 18/2 ● 2016 135 effects on the medical profession, medical education, and womenonly outpatient and inpatient services were revolutionary. Murnane reveals the significant connections between the careers of these pioneers, and how their trailblazing work influenced the life paths of aspiring women doctors who followed. Particularly affecting is her assessment of the sometimes-overlooked contribution of Dr Sophia Jex-Blake, and her remarkable endurance in the face of decades of formidable opposition. Murnane’s chapter on Constance Stone has special resonance for Australian readers. Not only was Stone ‘The first Australian lady doctor’, but she instigated the establishment of Australia’s first professional association of medical women, the Victorian Medical Women’s Society. In 1896 she also helped found the Queen Victoria Hospital for Women (later the Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital), the first women’s hospital in Victoria operated for women by women. The author suitably devotes chapters six and seven to this Melbourne institution, which within fifty years had become the largest hospital run by women in the British Commonwealth. Murnane worked here first as a paediatric registrar then consultant , and claims its establishment was ‘the most important event in the history of medical women in Australia’ (p. 146). She writes with pride about this hospital’s development and survival over two world wars and beyond, emphasising its vital role as an employer of women medical graduates, able to entice almost every Melbourne woman doctor at some point in their professional life. Influenced by Blackwell, Garrett Anderson, and Stone, these women continued to endorse the very real need for women and children to be treated by female doctors, in dedicated women-only hospitals. Indeed, Murnane dedicates her book to one of this hospital’s former leading lights, the late neonatologist Dame Kate Campbell, whom she names as her ‘inspiration and mentor’. In Chapter Seven, distinguished black and white portrait photographs support brief biographical pieces about the hospital’s eleven founding woman doctors. These capture employment records unheard of now, exemplified by the unwavering dedication of the 52-year and 54-year service of Janet Lindsay Greig and Lilian Alexander respectively. Twenty-nine colour, sepia, and black and white plates adorn the pages following this chapter, and display...

Judging a Book by Its Cover: Beauty Effects in Chinese Communist Party’s Internal Labor Market

Using portrait photographs of 980 Chinese government officials from 1999 to 2013, we investigate the influence of these officials’ appearance on their career mobility. After controlling for persona...

Urban Figures, Common Ground: JR and the Cultural Practices of Perception

The most political decision you make is where you direct people’s eyes. In other words, what you show people, day in and day out, is political. Wim Wenders The stern gaze of monstrous eyes and the sudden provocative presence of grimacing faces have added a new and astonishing form of decor to the bleak and characterless walls of Downtown Los Angeles. In an uncompromising gesture, the gigantic photographic portraits which spread over entire walls of multiple stories buildings, garage doors, ro...

Portraits Against Amnesia: archival recuperation in the work of Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie

This article considers the work of contemporary photographer Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie (Taskigi/Diné). Part of the first generation of artists to popularize the field of contemporary Native American photography, her work engages with issues of identity construction, cultural memory, and representation in Indigenous communities. The article considers Tsinhnahjinnie's foundational concept of photographic sovereignty as explored through her interactions with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographic portraiture, both in her position as a viewer and as a cultural producer. Her reclamation of archival photographs in the photo-series Portraits Against Amnesia (2003); Double Vision (2010); and Damn! There Goes the Neighborhood (1998) facilitates an interpretive process that moves away from colonial narratives of representation. The article explores the ways in which the historical archive is paramount to these series, and functions as a catalyst for processes of recuperation and visual sovereignty.

Williams, Walker, and Shine: Blackbody Blackface, or the Importance of Being Surface

At the turn of the last century, Bert Williams and George Walker performed as a minstrel duo in which only Williams wore burnt cork. By mixing the surfaces of blacking and their own black skin, Williams and Walker offered an aesthetic critique of the subject/object status of the black body—animating the inanimate substance of burnt cork while objectifying animate black skin. Examples from portrait photography and the visual art of Whitfield Lovell and Kara Walker support arguments about the agency of surface.