Studio Photographs Research Articles

The Work of Craft in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: The Lai Xá Photography Village in Vietnam

In Lai Xá Village, Vietnam, studio photography is the village handicraft. Counter to Walter Benjamin’s characterization of the click of a button, privileging eye over hand, but typical of many craft traditions, photographers there describe painstaking apprenticeships through which they learned to master the tools and materials of their craft. They learned to compensate for the shifting properties of light, climate, humidity, and irregular supplies of electricity, chemicals and printing paper, and adapted to changing regimes of technique and labor organization. As in many other craft traditions, apprentices often acquired their most valuable knowledge by stealth. We argue that studio photography belongs within contemporary discussions of craft as a handed, adaptive, engaged, small-scale social practice, and that craft awareness enables a richer ethnographic understanding of the work of studio photographers, both material and social.

Ira G. Owen: US Civil War Era Photographer of Newton, New Jersey

Like other studio photographers, Ira G. Owen, primarily active in Newton, New Jersey, in the 1860s, sought to profit from the strong demand for photographs so that he could have a comfortable middle-class life. Owen exemplifies the “you can make it if you try” kind of success story that came true for some able and motivated entrepreneurial Americans in a market economy in which small businesses could flourish under effective management. This article by Gary Saretzky traces the trajectory of Owen’s career, closely looking at his marketing and production methods, including posing styles employed to satisfy his many customers during the Civil War and postwar years in Newton, Hackettstown, and Scranton. For additional illustrations to this article, see the Ira G. Owen Digital Portfolio. A special addendum to this article, by Joseph G. Bilby, outlines the military career of one of Owen’s subjects, Nathaniel K. Bray.

Photo Cameroon: Studio Portraiture, 1970s-1990s

Photo Cameroon: Studio Portraiture, 1970s-1990s

Mimicking the Mode: The Fashionable Dress of Working-Class San Franciscans, 1880–95

In the late nineteenth century, the fashionable garments of women in the United States drew inspiration from the abundance of contemporary sources available to them, ranging from fashion plates in women’s periodicals to sewing patterns and ready-to-wear clothing. As Joan Severa details in her seminal book Dressed for the Photographer: Ordinary Americans and Fashion, 1840–1900 (1995), studio photographs from the time demonstrate precisely how high fashion was reinterpreted by working-class Americans in terms of materials, fit, and wear to suit their particular needs and lifestyles. One portrait album recently discovered at an estate sale illustrates Severa’s thesis, and this article offers a close examination of the album in tandem with contemporary fashion coverage in newspapers and elsewhere, social history, and demographics specific to working-class San Francisco. A focused regional case study, it offers insight into dress codes at a particular place and time that have to date been little studied by fashion scholars.

Still Photographs, Publicity, and the Making of Cecil B. DeMille's Ten Commandments (1956)

ABSTRACT: From 1954 to 1956, tens of thousands of still photographs were taken, reviewed, printed, and circulated to promote Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956). By tracing the conflicts that emerged over their management, this study centers the photographs and their distribution within an ecosystem of public relations, print media, and film production. While studio photographers produced the bulk of the photographs, their role was overshadowed by celebrity photographers, including Yousuf Karsh and Yul Brynner. Changes in the visual media landscape and Hollywood's photographic infrastructure threatened both the still photographers and the ability of studio publicists to shape the narrative.

Frank Mancao's “Pinoy Image”: Photography, Masculinity, and Respectability in Depression-Era California

Abstract This article examines the construction of respectability politics and ethnic identity in the visual archives of Frank Mancao, a Filipino labor contractor and photographer in California. By investigating Mancao's relationship with the male Filipino farmworkers he managed and photographed, it argues that ethnic photographers and migrant workers as photographic subjects turned to the camera as a means of constructing a respectability politics to refashion a denigrated masculine Filipino identity in the American West. It begins with an investigation of Mancao's photographic practice and moves into how his work as a studio photographer provided Filipino men—including Mancao himself—opportunities to represent themselves against the popular image of the Filipino vagrant and criminal. However, this study also suggests that the “Pinoy image” crafted around the camera was not a revolutionary one; instead, the photographs reified industriousness and participation in capitalist production as the merits of good citizenship.

Precious/Precarious Images: Cameroonian Studio Photography in the Digital Age

Based on ethnographic research in Cameroon, this article discusses recent developments in the field of African studio photography. It focuses first on how technical innovations have changed photographic practice and how this has affected studio photography in Cameroon. While new image-making professionals have emerged, most of the studios going back to the black-and-white era had closed down at the time of my research. Many of their photos were discarded or damaged. In the second part the article discusses how studio photography has been appropriated by the Western institutions of art and academia since the late 1980s, and how these ongoing activities contributed to the valorization and commodification of photographs outside their original contexts. As many photographs have either been destroyed, appropriated by the art market or have found their way into academic archives, I will conclude by arguing that these parallel developments have made the remaining studio photographs both precious and precarious.

Faux Nudes: Body Stockings and Photography at the fin de siècle

The visual culture of the female nude in Western art, after decades of attention, possesses a considerable genealogy of critical scholarship. The photographic imagery of women’s bodies occupies a significant place in this legacy, yet there are areas of inquiry that have to date remained little examined. In this article I consider a small and eccentric group of images, made by commercial photographers for popular consumption, posed by the American socialite Clara Ward around the turn of the twentieth century, as a case study of faux nudes – studio photographs in which models were encased in semitransparent body stockings, thus generalising, protecting and idealising the female body in its representation. If nudity is – ideally – an absolute state, it is nevertheless culturally complex in its various guises. The faux nudity constructed in these glamorous photographs was an invention of modern technology made possible by advances in commercial textile production as well as photography, as the stockinet body stocking provided a fiction of marmoreal whiteness further enhanced by being rendered in monochrome, and then widely distributed through cabinet prints and postcards. Around 1900 such artefacts further mystified the woman’s body in visual culture, producing a fantasy woman for modern times.

Sara Castrejón: fotografiar la revolución, representar a la mujer

En este artículo se presenta un análisis de la fotografía de Sara Castrejón durante la Revolución Mexicana y dentro del desarrollo de fotógrafas mexicanas. Se examina desde la fotohistoria, una vertiente de la metodología histórica en la cual las fotografías sirven de fuentes primarias. Así, el proceso es el de historia, descubrir los documentos y analizarlos desde la perspectiva de otras fuentes primarias; entre ellas, entrevistas y, además, se incorporan fuentes secundarias para contextualizar el estudio. Se pregunta cómo vivía Castrejón como fotógrafa de estudio en medio de una guerra civil y cuál era su posición política, comparada con otros fotógrafos de estudio. Además, se incorpora una perspectiva feminista al inquirir sobre cuáles eran las oportunidades para las mujeres de ganarse la vida en este periodo y cómo las decisiones de Castrejón diferían del patrón tradicional. Asimismo, se analizan particularidades de la fotografía de Castrejón que muestran cómo su género se expresó en su imaginario. Las imágenes de Castrejón se consideran un ejemplo de fotografía “vernácula”, la producida fuera de los cánones del arte (Batchen, 2000). En ese sentido, se podría considerar el estudio como inspirado por la teoría fotográfica posmoderna al desplazar la fotografía de arte de su dominio discursivo.

Silent Serial Sensations: The Wharton Brothers and the Magic of Early Cinema by Barbara Tepa Lupack

Reviewed by: Silent Serial Sensations: The Wharton Brothers and the Magic of Early Cinema by Barbara Tepa Lupack Richard D. Deverell (bio) Silent Serial Sensations: The Wharton Brothers and the Magic of Early Cinema By Barbara Tepa Lupack. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. 408 pages, 59 halftones, 1 map, 6" x 9". $22.95 paper, $10.99 ebook. In Silent Serial Sensations: The Wharton Brothers and the Magic of Early Cinema, literature and film scholar Barbara Tepa Lupack examines the lives and work of Leo and Ted Wharton, creators of an independent film production studio in Ithaca, New York, during the 1910s. Tracing the influence of the Whartons' work on the film industry during the silent era, Lupack argues that their serials, "which aroused the enthusiasm of audiences worldwide, played a vital role in the evolution of cinema as a mass medium and as a form of entertainment for people of all ages and backgrounds; and they became forerunners of today's ubiquitous crime and mystery procedurals and sensation-filled commercial blockbusters" (xi). Lupack's analysis proceeds chronologically, with each chapter largely focusing on the production of a specific film. She uses this to her advantage, so that the vignettes of production and filming mirror the themes the Whartons examined in their work. Lupack writes that, in their short films, "The Whartons spoke directly to the concerns [End Page 431] of their age and to the interests of their audiences" (13). These themes included the New Woman and feminism of the early twentieth century, particularly through shorts with women protagonists such as The Exploits of Elaine from1914 to 1915 (84). Works like The Mysteries of Myra (1916) blended sexuality with the occult while advancing special effects techniques, thereby entertaining their audiences while contributing to popular culture portrayals of the New Woman and the supernatural (132–33, 146–47). Lupack discusses how the Whartons used their films to address other contemporary social issues, including concerns about disreputable institutions, eugenics, and the eventual creation of the United Way, though their message came second to their professional standards of filmmaking and the need to turn a profit (192, 185–88, 219). With war on the horizon, the Wharton brothers similarly tapped into fears of foreign sabotage (165, 211, 219). Like many films from this period, a great deal of the Whartons' work was lost to time, so Lupack bases her close readings of the films on any extant clips, the archived scripts, and production photographs. In likening the Wharton brothers to other film histories, Lupack describes the complicated mechanism for film censorship, with state boards employing varying standards and even some municipalities denying content that the state itself approved. In addition to navigating these official censors, the Whartons worked with William Randolph Hearst, who was a hands-on producer and often dictated content or required reshoots to match his ideological vision (165, 175, 177, 202–03). Filming in New York, the Whartons made extensive use of the varied geography surrounding Ithaca and the Finger Lakes region (52, 54, 69). Upstate New York offered further benefits due to its proximity to New York City and New Jersey, then the headquarters of the American film industry (22–23). Unfortunately, following World War I, the film industry moved out west to Los Angeles (227). This, combined with the Whartons' own financial woes once they went fully independent and no longer relied on Hearst for funding and promotion, ended both their business and the film industry in Ithaca (237). Lupack draws extensively on the Wharton Collection in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University, the Wharton Collection at the History Center in Tompkins County, New York, and the Wharton Studio Photographs Collection at Ithaca College. She uncovers a great deal of the local involvement in and reaction to the Whartons' productions via newspapers such as the Ithaca Journal, the Cornell Daily Sun, and the Cornell Alumni News. These accounts help fill in some of the gaps in official studio production records as they feature more human interest stories that help bring the Whartons and their cadre of actors and studio hands to life. Finally, Lupack uses film trade publications including Moving Picture World...

Made Visible: Contemporary South African Fashion and Identity curated by Kathryn Gunsch

Made Visible: Contemporary South African Fashion and Identity curated by Kathryn Gunsch

<p><strong><em>Chascolytrum neobulbosum </em></strong><strong>(Poaceae: Pooideae), a new species from southern Brazil</strong></p>

During field works in Santa Catarina state, we found a new species of Chascolytrum that presents a bulb-like rhizome. This species is similar to Chascolytrum bulbosum, from Pampa biome, differing by glabrous leaf blades, inflorescences larger and laxer, longer spikelets and paleas glabrous between the keels. We additionally provide field and studio photographs and assess its conservation status according to IUCN criteria.

Anishnaabe Photographer Chief David B. Wawanosh: Treaties, Self-Determination, and Image-Making in Nineteenth-Century Aamjiwnaang / Le chef David B. Wawanosh, photographe anishinabé : traités, autodétermination et représentation visuelle chez la Première Nation Aamjiwnaang au 19e siècle

This paper introduces the life and work of mid-nineteenth-century Anishnaabe photographer Chief David B. Wawanosh from Aamjiwnaang First Nation. This article begins by tracing the history and advocacy work of Indigenous leaders before him, during the early peace and friendship negotiations of Covenant Chain diplomacy in the seventeenth century, into the nineteenth century, when oppressive Indian Department policy sought to dislocate the Anishnaabeg from their lands and deny their right to self-governance. It then aims to discern the links between a highly political, intergenerational history of Indigenous sovereignty and the early photographic-studio practice of artist David B. Wawanosh, who also served as Chief of what is now Aamjiwnaang First Nation in the mid-nineteenth century. Practising at a time in the 1850s when tropes of the “noble savage” and ideologies of Indigenous disappearance were at their height in the Western imaginary, the work of Wawanosh, who may be one of the earliest, if not the earliest, recorded Indigenous studio photographers in North America, is significant. A recent acquisition to the National Gallery of Canada’s collection – a sixth-plate daguerreotype and possible self-portrait – offers a potential starting point in the recovery of this important artist’s history and work. Although the self-portrait attribution remains uncertain, I propose the value of considering the daguerreotype in this light through the lens of “visual sovereignty”1 by tracing an intergenerational, political history of the Wawanosh family.

Retrospective and reinterpretation. Ethnographic photographs from the turn of the 19th and 20th century

The text deals with ethnographic photographs from Moravia and Slovakia, from 1880 andlater, and is based on the photographs´ collection of the Ethnographic Institute of MoravianMuseum, Brno (Czech Republic). This rich database contents visual documentation of manyaspects of material and spiritual folk life. Through icons of ethnographic photographs, thepaper tries: to unite at first sight fragmented effort of photographers, to find paths tosynthesis, and to show possibilities and potential of these images for present and futureethnologic studies. Key words: folk culture, photography, Moravia, Slovakia, document, art, studio photographs

Photo2clipart

We present a method to create vector cliparts from photographs. Our approach aims at reproducing two key properties of cliparts: they should be easily editable, and they should represent image content in a clean, simplified way. We observe that vector artists satisfy both of these properties by modeling cliparts with linear color gradients, which have a small number of parameters and approximate well smooth color variations. In addition, skilled artists produce intricate yet editable artworks by stacking multiple gradients using opaque and semi-transparent layers. Motivated by these observations, our goal is to decompose a bitmap photograph into a stack of layers, each layer containing a vector path filled with a linear color gradient. We cast this problem as an optimization that jointly assigns each pixel to one or more layer and finds the gradient parameters of each layer that best reproduce the input. Since a trivial solution would consist in assigning each pixel to a different, opaque layer, we complement our objective with a simplicity term that favors decompositions made of few, semi-transparent layers. However, this formulation results in a complex combinatorial problem combining discrete unknowns (the pixel assignments) and continuous unknowns (the layer parameters). We propose a Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm that efficiently explores this solution space by leveraging layering cues at image junctions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by reverse-engineering existing cliparts and by creating original cliparts from studio photographs.

“The Child of the World’s Old Age”: Australian Perceptions of Japan-as-Child

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the important symbolic role of photographs of children in the context of developing diplomatic and trade relationships between Australia and Japan between the 1880s and 1920s. A fascinating series of studio, commercial and tourist photographs are examined, including commemorative postcards marking the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and hand-coloured lantern slides produced commercially in Japan. Building on political and military studies of Australian–Japanese relations, it explores the ways that Australian–Japanese relationships were mediated and reproduced through photography practices operating across private and public domains. In these photographs, children feature simultaneously as the face of Japan and an interface for political and cultural interpretation. As photographs of children helped to reinforce conflicting conceptions of Japan as a children’s paradise, a budding military power and an industrial threat, they offer insight into Australian anxieties about what modernity meant for the two Asia-Pacific nations.

Portraits of the enemy: Visualizing the Taliban in a photography studio

This article examines studio photographs of Taliban fighters that deviate from popular media images which often confine them within the visual coordinates of terrorism, insurgency and violence. Gathered in a photographic book known simply as Taliban, these 49 photographs represent the militants in Afghanistan through a studio photography aesthetic, transplanting them from the battlefields of the global war on terror to intimate scenes of pretence and posing. Besides troubling the Taliban’s expected militant identity, these images invite an opaque and oppositional form of viewing and initiate enigmatic visual and imaginative encounters. This article argues that these alternative visualizations consist of a compassionate way of seeing informed by Judith Butler’s notions of precarity and grievability, as well as a viewing inspired by Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic dissensus that obfuscates legibility and disrupts meaning. Consequently, these photographs counter a delimited post-9/11 process of enemy identification and introduce forms of seeing that reflect terrorism’s complexity.

In-Between the Color Lines with a Spy Camera: The Appalachian Urban Folk Photography of Isaiah Rice

In-Between the Color Lines with a Spy CameraThe Appalachian Urban Folk Photography of Isaiah Rice Darin J. Waters (bio), Gene Hyde (bio), and Kenneth Betsalel (bio) "We don't know nothin' but what we see …" —Zora Neale Hurston1 Click for larger view View full resolution Pack Square. All images from the Isaiah Rice Photograph Collection, D.H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Asheville 28804. Images copyright Darin Waters. [End Page 92] After her mother Jeroline Rice passed in 2003, Marian Waters sorted through boxes of photographs that her father Isaiah Rice had taken over the course of his adult life. Rice, who died in 1980, had taken hundreds of photographs of family, friends, and strangers in his Asheville, North Carolina community. While Waters always knew her father loved photography and would go everywhere with his cameras, she laughed to remember how some people in the community joked that he was like a spy with that tiny camera he owned, even taking it to church on Sundays. He was a proud man who knew how to remain invisible when he needed to take a picture. Waters considered discarding the photos her father had taken of people she did not know, but she shared them first with her son, Darin Waters, a scholar of American and African American history, who immediately recognized the importance of the more than 1,000 vernacular photographs taken by his grandfather. He shared Rice's photographs with Gene Hyde and Ken Betsalel, colleagues at UNC Asheville, who agreed that Rice's photographs provided fresh insight into the unique cultural context of an urban African American community in southern Appalachia. Rice's photographs of Asheville draw some comparisons to other photographers who were working in the city at the same time. The largest and best known Asheville area photographic collection is the E. M. Ball Photographic Collection, which contains the work of professional photographers Ewart M. Ball Sr. and his son Ewart M. Ball Jr., as well as several photographers who worked for the Balls's studio. The Ball Collection, housed in Special Collections at UNC Asheville, contains over 11,000 photos and negatives and includes their work as both contract photojournalists for the local newspaper and as professional studio photographers. Although it documents Asheville over half a century, it contains only a handful of photographs of African Americans. What makes the Rice Collection uniquely valuable is that Isaiah Rice's photographs document a wide range of subjects, from his own Burton Street neighborhood, where he was known as "the picture man," to the wider Asheville communities through which he traveled.2 "there are few negroes"? Isaiah Rice (1917–1980) was born in Asheville, North Carolina, to Theodore and Alberta Rice. A loving family man of deep faith, conviction, and responsibility, he married Asheville native Jeroline Bradley Rice in 1942, and they had one daughter, Marian Waters. He was educated at Stephens-Lee High School and made the best of opportunities available to him, including working for the Works Progress Administration (wpa) during the Great Depression. Rice was drafted into the U.S. Army, and later worked as a beverage deliveryman for a local distributor until his [End Page 93] Click for larger view View full resolution death in 1980. He was well known in the African American community and faced the daily humiliations and limitations of racial prejudice and segregation by creating strong community bonds. Rice made his photographs during the post–World War II era of uneven national economic development, continued racial segregation, the ongoing fight for civil rights and racial equality, and the subsequent years of suburbanization and urban renewal in Asheville. When Rice was taking his photographs during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Asheville's African American community constituted a sizeable portion of the city's population. The 1950 Census reports that 12,723 "nonwhite" people lived in urban Asheville, which amounted to 21.8 percent of the city's population. By the 1960 census, the "nonwhite" population was 12,504, or 18.2 percent of the city's population, and by 1970, Asheville's "Negro or other races" population was 10,671, or 18.5 percent...

Dress Politics and Framing Self in Ghana: The Studio Photographs of Felicia Abban

Dress Politics and Framing Self in Ghana: The Studio Photographs of Felicia Abban

James Barnor: Ever Young, Never Sleep

Born in 1929 in Accra, then the Gold Coast colony, James Barnor began his career in photography typically, as an apprentice in a colonial portrait studio of a relative, his cousin J. P. Dodoo. But in a unique career spanning more than six decades, bridging continents and photographic genres, Barnor would migrate into creating a singular portfolio of street and studio portraiture depicting societies in transition: images of a burgeoning sub-Saharan African nation moving toward independence and a European capital city becoming a multicultural metropolis. In the process, Barnor would become, uniquely perhaps, the only African studio photographer to leave the continent before 1960 to study and practice in Europe. Whether in Ghana or England, Barnor documented cultures in transformation, new identities coming into being—the fragmented experience of modernity and diaspora; the shaping of cosmopolitan societies and selves; and the changing representation of blackness, desire, and beauty across time and space. His archive thus not only constitutes a rare document of the black experience in postwar Britain during the Swinging Sixties, but also provides an important frame of reference, overlapping and suturing questions of the postcolonial in relation to diasporic perspectives in twentieth-century photography. Barnor’s remarkable portraits represent significant moments in African diasporic subject formation and the cosmopolitan self-fashioning that emerged in tandem with transcultural journeys through modernity and postcolonial worlds.