Professional Photographers Research Articles

Routine Exposures: Reimaging the Visual Politics of Hazardous Sites

This paper aims to photographically reimagine the representation of hazardous sites. It examines disregarded worlds of mundane yet politically vital photography: procedural representations made and circulated in hazardous site interventions. Scholarship which examines the visualisations of hazardous sites remains largely concerned with professional photography and sublime aesthetic registers. This photo essay departs from this epistemological habit and examines the visualities and materialities of technical representations enacted in remediation and research processes. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research which follows the disposal of a chemical stockpile in Tanzania over three decades, the paper approaches photographs through the practices in which they are made and circulated. It occupies more-than-representational register that works to de-sensationalise hazardous site photography. These “routine exposures” unsettle naturalised ways of seeing contamination; they demonstrate how hazardous sites are made (in)visible and enable more situated understandings of the power of photography

Verbal-Semantic and Thesaurus Levels of the Russian and English Photographer’s Linguistic Personality

The paper presents the results of the complex analysis conducted to describe common and specific linguistic features at the verbal-semantic and thesaurus levels in the structure of the Russian and English photographer’s linguistic personality. The illustrative and practical parts of the study introduce the Russian-speaking and English-speaking discourse of photographers, based on texts posted on the websites of the Russian photo forums “KлубFoto” and “ПентаКлуб” from 2015 to 2018 and the American photo forums “PhotoNet” and “Digital Photography Forum with a smile” from 2015 to 2018 on the following topics: Weddings and Events, Beginner Questions, Medium Format, Large Format, Travel, Macro. In the present study, the typologization of the Russian-speaking and English-speaking professional language personality of a photographer is based on the identification of linguistic signs studied at the verbal-semantic and thesaurus levels of the structure of the linguistic personality. The article studies the volume of text messages is 540,889 word usages in the Russian language and 610,035 word usages in the English language. The research is based on 864 units of the Russian language and 820 units of the English language of photographers, used by people engaged in photo industry: professional photographers, assistants of photographers and amateur photographers.

The edge of computational photography

Smartphones and consumer cameras increasingly give professional photographers a run for their money.

Cover Art: A Sydney Phone Booth at Night 1997

Cover ArtA Sydney Phone Booth at Night 1997 Quentin Jones As noted in the essay by Demelza Hall in this issue, this newspaper photograph by Quentin Jones figures significantly in Alexis Wright's "After the Storm," where the character Gibbo, an Indigenous man from a remote community, carries a newspaper clipping of it "like a talisman." I have been working as a professional photographer for over twenty-five years, working for Fairfax Media for publications including the Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend Magazine, and the Sydney Magazine. I have had cucumber sandwiches with Queen Elizabeth II; I have a fossil site named after me at Riversleigh in Queensland (Quentin's Quarry); I have landed on the deck of the USS Independence aircraft carrier; and I have been under the Pacific Ocean in an Australian submarine. In the year 2000, I covered the Sydney Olympic Games, and in 2010, I covered the New Delhi Commonwealth Games. The photography of the telephone box was shot while I was covering a stakeout for the Sydney Morning Herald, in October 1997. I think I was bored and saw the phone boxes and thought it was a nice shot, one that could be used to illustrate a communications story one day. Of course, nowadays, there are very few phone boxes, as most people have mobile phones. I love photography so much that I shoot images every day, because every day, there is something new to cover, new people to meet, new experiences to behold. Life is rarely boring when your work is something that you love. —Quentin Jones [End Page 7] Quentin Jones Photographer Sydney, Australia Copyright © 2020 Wayne State University Press

Control over Contemporary Photography: A Tangle of Copyright, Right of Publicity, and the First Amendment

Professional photographers who make photographs of people negotiate a tense relationship between their own creative freedoms and the right of their subjects to control their images. This negotiation formally takes place over the terrain of copyright, right of publicity, and the First Amendment. Informally, photographers describe implied understandings and practice norms guiding their relationship with subjects, infrequently memorialized in short, boilerplate contractual releases. This short essay explores these formal and informal practices described by contemporary professional photographers. Although the evidence for this essay comes from professional photographic practice culled from interviews with contemporary photographers, the analysis of the evidence speaks to the more general challenge of balancing privacy and freedom of expression in the digital age. At the outset of this essay, I describe the scope of the empirical project and the process of collecting data. Then, in three parts, I describe how photographers simultaneously collaborate with and control the subjects of the photographs they make in order to assert themselves as civic storytellers with broad free speech rights in our digital age. I identify a conflict between photographers and their subjects, which serves to maximize the aesthetic freedom of photographers at the expense of their subjects. This conflict resolves in the photographers’ accounts through their caretaking role over their photographs on behalf of the subjects themselves. I conclude with a brief explanation of why it matters to better understand these professional photographic norms in our Internet age when free speech and privacy are increasingly in conflict.

PHOTOS OF L.N. TOLSTOY AS A SOURCE OF FORMATION OF CULTURAL MEMORY

The article is a study of the image of Leo Tolstoy, reflected in the photographic heritage of the great writer, represented by the photo funds of the State Museum of L.N. Tolstoy. Photos are considered in the context of heritage and historical memory. It shows the imprinting and deposition of the image of Tolstoy by a variety of people who create the context of historical memory. At the same time, special attention is paid to the photographic image of the writer created by his wife S.A. Tolstaya. It turns out that the image of the young Tolstoy appear at the same time with the advent of photography in Russia. It is established that in connection with the expansion of the social circle increases the number of photographers of Tolstoy, who want to capture a variety of moments of his life and creative experiences. In the 1900s, the number of photos associated with the arrival of guests and loved ones to Yasnaya Polyana, who created entire photo collections, which displayed a variety of topics, was expanding. This is the creative cuisine of Tolstoy, and images of him in full growth, and gatherings with friends, and the Caucasus. It is revealed that the photographic memory is heterogeneous: Tolstoy was shot by professional photographers, amateurs, reporters, and images of each group have their own characteristics, but they were all included in the cultural and anthropological aspect of life in Russia. Through the prism of meetings and spiritual quest shown a progressive significance of photography for the social life of Russia. The collections of the museum are analyzed as stages of forming of the visual image in the collective memory. Photos are studied in the context of the lifetime iconography of the great writer. Their positive aspect connected with visualization of everyday life in Russia is shown.

Corporate and Worker Photographs of the Offshore Oil Industry: The Case of the Ocean Ranger

Images of hydrocarbon extraction at sea remain strikingly circumscribed. The most extensively circulated are either the work of professional industrial photographers employed by oil companies to take carefully vetted promotional shots, or of news photographers commissioned to document catastrophes. Corporate-sponsored photography enforces the massive scale of offshore rigs, their technological sophistication, and apparent ability to withstand the vicissitudes of the ocean; it also tends to imply that companies adhere to strict safety regimens, and equal opportunity hiring practices. Photographs created by offshore oil workers are not widely circulated in the public domain. However, three collections of images recently donated to Newfoundland and Labrador’s provincial archives offer new viewpoints on the oil industry. Lance Butler, David Boutcher, and Lloyd Major were all employed on the Ocean Ranger platform, which capsized off the coast of Newfoundland in 1982 with the loss of 84 lives–including Boutcher’s. The men’s images resituate, expand upon, and on occasions challenge tropes that predominate in corporate photography; the striking arrangement of David Boutcher’s snapshots in album format by his mother is also salutary. This essay argues for the necessity of “onshoring” the offshore, and claims that workers’ photographs can potentially help us do so through a variety of means.

Professor David Lowenthal, 1923–2018

Professor David Lowenthal, 1923–2018

Patient Attitudes to Medical Photography: Study of a Spanish Population at the Pius Hospital de Valls in Tarragona, Spain

IntroductionMedical photography is a noninvasive technique used for diagnostic, monitoring, and educational purposes. It is important to understand the patient's attitude to all or part of their body being photographed. The objective of this study was to analyze the attitudes of patients towards medical photography at a district hospital in Tarragona, Spain. MethodologyThis exploratory study used a questionnaire to evaluate attitudes to medical photography among outpatients at Pius Hospital de Valls. The questionnaire explored the patients’ beliefs about the usefulness of medical photography, the circumstances in which they would agree to be photographed and by whom, as well as their prior experience of medical photography. They were also asked whether they would authorize the use of photography and, if not, to explain their motives. ResultsThe questionnaire was completed by 134 patients. The results showed that patients had a clearly positive attitude to being photographed for medical purposes (94.8%), treatment follow-up (88.1%), and consultation of their case with other physicians (86.6%). Acceptance was 88.8% if the lesion was malignant and 85.1% if it was extensive. For facial lesions, only 78.4% were willing to be photographed and in the case of genitals the percentage fell to 70.2%. Most patients (95.5%) would agree to being photographed by their doctor. The rate of acceptance was 66.4% in the case of a nurse, 64.9% for another doctor, and 21.6% for a professional photographer. ConclusionsOur study revealed that patients have a positive attitude to being photographed for medical purposes, particularly when they have a malignant lesion, when the photograph is taken by their specialist, and when they cannot be identified.

Virtual Portraitist

Smart photography carries the promise of quality improvement and functionality extension in making aesthetically appealing pictures. In this article, we focus on self-portrait photographs and introduce new methods that guide a user in how to best pose while taking a selfie. While most of the current solutions use a post processing procedure to beautify a picture, the developed tool enables a novel function of recommending a good look before the photo is captured. Given an input face image, the tool automatically estimates the pose-based aesthetic score, finds the most attractive angle of the face, and suggests how the pose should be adjusted. The recommendation results are determined adaptively to the appearance and initial pose of the input face. We apply a data mining approach to find distinctive, frequent itemsets and association rules from online profile pictures, upon which the aesthetic estimation and pose recommendation methods are developed. A simulated and a real image set are used for experimental evaluation. The results show the proposed aesthetic estimation method can effectively select user-favorable photos. Moreover, the recommendation performance for the vertical adjustment is moderately related to the degree of conformity among the professional photographers’ recommendations. This study echoes the trend of instant photo sharing, in which a user takes a picture and then immediately shares it on a social network without engaging in tedious editing.

Henry Snowden Ward (1865–1911) Biography with special reference to X-rays in 1896

Henry Snowden Ward was a professional photographer, Editor of The Photogram magazine, itinerant lecturer in England in 1896 on X-rays, and the author of the world’s first textbook on X-rays, Practical Radiography , which was first published in May 1896 and went into three editions with the later editions, 1898 and 1901, expanded and co­-authored with Adolph Isenthal (d~1910), a manufacturer in London of electrical apparatus and X-ray apparatus. Ward was a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and a founding member of the Rontgen Society. As with most early demonstrators of X-rays imaging, Snowden Ward left the field once qualified physicians, surgeons, physicists and engineers became more involved and took over as the prime leaders in X-ray diagnosis and therapy. Snowden Ward went on to publish and lecture on Charles Dickens, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and William Shakespeare. He died suddenly in December 1911 in New York whilst on a Dickens & Shakespeare lecture tour of the USA. Some of the illustrations from the three editions of Practical Radiography are included.

“Nobody understands what is beautiful and what is not”: Governing Soviet Amateur Photography, Photography Clubs and the Journal Sovetskoe Foto

In January 1957, the Soviet Ministry of Culture resumed publication of the premiere photography journal of the Soviet Union, Sovetskoe foto (The Soviet Photo) after a 16-year hiatus. At this time, the relative openness of the Cultural Thaw fostered a “climate of enthusiasm” among amateur photographers, who were eager to learn from the professional photographers and editors of Sovetskoe foto. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, amateur and professional photographers alike sought to establish particular aesthetic standards in photography in an attempt to receive State funding and better educational opportunities. The question of who should regulate and censor amateur activities and aesthetics, however, remained ambiguous.

At Home in the Victorian City? Revisiting Thomas Annan and the Social Contexts of Early Urban Photography

Photographs of mid-Victorian cities evoke an unsettling perspective of modernity by calling attention to the spasmodic process of societal and environmental change in this period. Focusing on four diverse commissions undertaken by the professional photographer Thomas Annan in Glasgow in the latter half of the nineteenth century, this article explores intriguing exchanges between photography and other media in an enlarging Victorian print market. This material suggests that we have yet to fully appreciate the ways in which photography participated in the often-fraught public debate on urban space and civic identity in localised environments. The article also explores how recent interventions in digital humanities, particularly in the field of mapping technologies, have opened up new possibilities of animating and reexamining the remote, conventional and impersonal viewpoints that characterise photographic representations of metropolitan areas in this period.

Professional Bereavement Photography in the Setting of Perinatal Loss: A Qualitative Analysis.

Perinatal loss, including fetal and infant death, is a devastating experience for parents, resulting in long-term adverse physical and psychosocial outcomes. However, little is known about what services might best support grieving parents. We aimed to understand the role of professional bereavement photography in assisting the grieving process of parents who have lost a fetus or infant, by examining the perspectives of bereaved parents, professional photographers, and health care professionals. Twenty semistructured interviews were conducted, and interview transcripts were analyzed using modified grounded theory. Twenty-three individuals participated, including 6 bereaved parents, 8 photographers, and 9 health care professionals. Analyses generated 5 major themes describing ways in which the photographs were valuable to parents: validation of the experience, permission to share, creation of a permanent and tangible legacy, creation of positive memories, and moving forward after the loss. Hospitals should consider incorporation of professional bereavement photography services into palliative care and bereavement programs.

A Woman’s Petrified Gaze at the Dead: Uncovering the Troubled Ethics Behind an Iconic Image of Bombing War Against Nazi Germany

A Woman’s Petrified Gaze at the Dead: Uncovering the Troubled Ethics Behind an Iconic Image of Bombing War Against Nazi Germany Christoph Weber (bio) In 2003, the German historian Jörg Friedrich published the picture book Brandstätten: Der Anblick des Bombenkriegs (Scenes of Fire: The View of the Bombing War), a visual counterpart to his bestselling 2002 monograph Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940–1945 (The Fire: Germany in the Bombing War 1940–1945). The gruesome photographs of charred and disfigured corpses in the chapter “Bergung” (rescue) sparked a controversy in Germany, as they had been presented without proper historical context. Reviewers jumped to the conclusion that Friedrich’s selection of shocking images constituted an attempt to balance “German crimes with German suffering,” thereby perpetuating “the myth of the Germans as Opfer.”1 For instance, Heinz-Peter Preußer argues that in Germany, “these photographs cannot be regarded without denoting the emblem of industrial mass killing, the destruction of European Jewry.”2 Viewed in isolation, without the critical reexamination of the historical circumstances that led to the destruction of Germany’s urban centers, the images of dead German civilians are vulnerable to misappropriation by revisionists and their accusatory claim that the Allies had perpetrated a “Bombing Holocaust.”3 This demonstrates the fundamentally problematic nature of showing violence in what John Berger calls “public photographs.”4 Because public photographs are “like images in the memory of a total stranger,” they “carry no certain meaning in themselves” and thus “lend themselves to any use.”5 With the easy access to and rapid proliferation of images on the internet, the question as to how photographed atrocities are being used in the service of an ideological standpoint becomes all the more pressing. David F. Crew concludes his analysis of online treatments of the bombing war in Germany since the 1990s with the remark that “numerous websites depend on inflammatory rhetoric, shock images, emotional appeals, and narrow perspectives to focus users’ attention exclusively on German suffering.”6 The “new emphasis on anger and outrage” informs the way these internet sites employ “[p]ictures of desolate ruins and gruesome [End Page 10] corpses” and ultimately “does not encourage viewers to think about the differences between the moral valence and the emotional impact of an image or series of images.”7 A possible strategy for blunting the emotional resentment and controversy that the photographs of the Allied bombardments are able to generate to the current day is to integrate them into what Berger has called the context of social and political experience: “The aim must be to construct a context for a photograph, to construct it with words, to construct it with other photographs, to construct it by its place in an ongoing text of photographs and images.”8 In fact, what has been barely explored in the debate about the ethical implications of publishing photographs of the German bombing dead is the context in which they were taken. Michael Kimmelman points out in his review of Brandstätten that “Mr. Friedrich is mysterious about their origin. They seem to have been amassed by the country’s efficient record keepers and collected in town archives.”9 Friedrich briefly mentions the involvement of unnamed professional photographers and officials with photo permits—fire officers, city architects, air raid wardens—in the documentation of the bombing war and who later in life donated their private photo collections to city archives.10 Yet it remains unclear what kind of socio-political forces pushed for the photographic documentation of the devastating air raids in the first place. Friedrich himself justifies the publication of atrocity images by stating that Joseph Goebbels “forbade these photos of our victims from the German papers” and “[i]n a way we’ve obeyed his orders until this day.”11 As the Allied bombings intensified, press directives issued by the Reich Ministry of Propaganda had indeed proscribed the newspaper publication of photographs of dead German civilians.12 However, the sheer volume of surviving images attests to a particular interest among Nazi officials in meticulously documenting the horrors unleashed by the so-called Anglo-American “terror attacks.” Contrary to Friedrich’s polemical claim, photographs...

Использование профессиональных фотографий для самопрезентации в социальных медиа как показатель личностного перфекционизма

The article presents the results of the study of personal characteristics of people who use professional photos for self-presentation in social media. Particular attention is paid to the study of the respondent’s inclination to perfectionism as a personal characteristic. Perfectionism is considered in the study as a trait that has destructive and adaptive forms, expressed in high personal standards, experiencing the disparity between the real and the ideal “I”, a high level of organization. The study involved 100 respondents, aged 22 to 39 years, using professional photographs for self-presentation in social media. The respondents were divided into two groups. The first group consisted of people who use exclusively professional photos for self-presentation in social media. The second group included people, in whose personal profiles professional images make up no more than 15% of the total. To study the personal characteristics of the respondents the perfectionist self-presentation scale (A. Zolotareva adaptation), the narcissistic personality traits questionnaire (O. Shamshikova, N. Klepikova adaptation), the interpersonal personality diagnosis test by T. Leary, the Big Five personality questionnaire by R. McCrae, P. Costa (A. Khromov adaptation), the Dark Triad short questionnaire were used (M. Egorova, M. Sitnikova, O. Parshikova adaptation). The study showed that people using professional photos for self-presentation in social media are characterized by an increased level of perfectionist self-presentation, authoritarianism, aggression, suspicion, subordination, extraversion, control, narcissism, machiavellianism, psychopathy. As a result of factor analysis, six personal factors of perfectionism were identified, which were named: “Lies for Admiration”, “Polarity in Interpersonal Interaction”, “Rigid Demonstration of Superiority”, “Need for Attention”, “Narcissism”, “Submission for Acceptance”. It is shown that the perfectionism of the respondents is associated only with those narcissistic characteristics that describe the inability to objectively perceive themselves and build constructive relationships with other people.

Cover Art

Cover ArtA Sydney Phone Booth at Night 1997 Quentin Jones As noted in the essay by Demelza Hall in this issue, this newspaper photograph by Quentin Jones figures significantly in Alexis Wright's "After the Storm," where the character Gibbo, an Indigenous man from a remote community, carries a newspaper clipping of it "like a talisman." I have been working as a professional photographer for over twenty-five years, working for Fairfax Media for publications including the Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend Magazine, and the Sydney Magazine. I have had cucumber sandwiches with Queen Elizabeth II; I have a fossil site named after me at Riversleigh in Queensland (Quentin's Quarry); I have landed on the deck of the USS Independence aircraft carrier; and I have been under the Pacific Ocean in an Australian submarine. In the year 2000, I covered the Sydney Olympic Games, and in 2010, I covered the New Delhi Commonwealth Games. The photography of the telephone box was shot while I was covering a stakeout for the Sydney Morning Herald, in October 1997. I think I was bored and saw the phone boxes and thought it was a nice shot, one that could be used to illustrate a communications story one day. Of course, nowadays, there are very few phone boxes, as most people have mobile phones. I love photography so much that I shoot images every day, because every day, there is something new to cover, new people to meet, new experiences to behold. Life is rarely boring when your work is something that you love. —Quentin Jones [End Page 7] Quentin Jones Photographer Sydney, Australia Copyright © 2020 Wayne State University Press

Photographic copyright and the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court in historical perspective

AbstractThis paper provides an in-depth case study of the enforcement of copyright in photographs by certain rights-owners today: freelance professional photographers who derive income from the exploitation of photographic copyright. Referring to the theoretical framework of Guido Calabresi and A Douglas Melamed, the paper reflects on the implications of the case study for the nature and function of copyright in a specific context today. Bringing the experience today into conversation with the enforcement of copyright by professional photographers in past times (the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries), the paper notes the influence of the bureaucratisation of copyright exploitation (ie exploitation through picture libraries) on legal decision making in a particular forum today: the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court Small Claims Track. The paper concludes with more general reflections on the case study's implications for the courts and copyright policy-makers today.

Actitudes de pacientes hacia la fotografía médica. Estudio en población española: Pius Hospital de Valls (Tarragona, España)

IntroductionMedical photography is a noninvasive technique used for diagnostic, monitoring, and educational purposes. It is important to understand the patient's attitude to all or part of their body being photographed. The objective of this study was to analyze the attitudes of patients towards medical photography at a district hospital in Tarragona, Spain. MethodologyThis exploratory study used a questionnaire to evaluate attitudes to medical photography among outpatients at Pius Hospital de Valls. The questionnaire explored the patients’ beliefs about the usefulness of medical photography, the circumstances in which they would agree to be photographed and by whom, as well as their prior experience of medical photography. They were also asked whether they would authorize the use of photography and, if not, to explain their motives. ResultsThe questionnaire was completed by 134 patients. The results showed that patients had a clearly positive attitude to being photographed for medical purposes (94.8%), treatment follow-up (88.1%), and consultation of their case with other physicians (86.6%). Acceptance was 88.8% if the lesion was malignant and 85.1% if it was extensive. For facial lesions, only 78.4% were willing to be photographed and in the case of genitals the percentage fell to 70.2%. Most patients (95.5%) would agree to being photographed by their doctor. The rate of acceptance was 66.4% in the case of a nurse, 64.9% for another doctor, and 21.6% for a professional photographer. ConclusionsOur study revealed that patients have a positive attitude to being photographed for medical purposes, particularly when they have a malignant lesion, when the photograph is taken by their specialist, and when they cannot be identified.

OBJECT DETECTION USING VIOLA-JONES ALGORITHM

In this paper it has been described and applied method for detecting face and face parts in images using the Viola-Jones algorithm. The work is based on Computer Vision Systems, artificial intelligence that deals with the recognition of two-dimensional or three-dimensional objects. When Cascade Object Detector script is trained, multimedia content is assigned for recognition. In this work the content will be in the form of an image, where the program will have the task of recognizing the objects in the images, separating the parts of the images in the head area, and on each discovered face, separately mark the area around the eyes, nose and mouth.Algorithm for detection and recognition is based on scanning and analyzing front part of human head. Common usage of face detection and recognition can be find in biometry, photography, on autofocus option which is implemented in professional photo cameras or on smiling detectors (Keller, 2007). Marketing is also popular field where face detection and recognition can be used. For example, web cameras that are implemented in TVs, can detect every face in near area. Calculating different type of algorithms and parameters, based on sex, age, ethnicity, system can play precisely segmented television commercials and campaigns. Example of that kind of systems is OptimEyes. (Strasburger, 2013)In other words, every algorithm that has as its main goal to detect and recognize face from image, should give as a feedback information, is there any face and if answer is positive, where is its location on image. In order to achieve acceptable performances, algorithm should minimize false recognitions. These are the cases when the algorithm ignores and does not recognize the real object from the image, and vice versa, when the wrong object is recognized as real. One of the algorithms that is frequently applied in this area of research is the Viola-Jones algorithm. This algorithm is functional in real time, meaning that besides detection, it is also possible to adjust the ability to monitor faces from video material.In this paper, the problem that will be analyzed is facial image detection. Man can do this task in a very simple way, but to do the same with a computer, it is necessary to have a range of precise and accurate information, formulas, methods and techniques. In order to maximize the precision of recognizing the face of the image using the Viola-Jones algorithm, it is desirable that the objects in the images are completely face-to-face with the image-taking device, which will be shown through experiments.