Twentieth-century Photography Research Articles

Fetishizing the Foot: Mobility and Meaning in Indian Ocean Sandals

Fetishizing the Foot: Mobility and Meaning in Indian Ocean Sandals

Nowe widzenie – astrologiczny i astronomiczny wymiar wizji fotograficznej

The paper focuses on the New Vision – one of the most important developments in the history of the twentieth-century photography, whose ambition was to modernize human perception, hence also society. A project with such an objective, characteristic of the avant-garde, required not only the use of photography as a tool of “ocularcentrism,” to use a term coined by Martin Jay, but also some more solid epistemological and ontological foundation. The author analyzes the project of the New Vision, introducing two interpretive contexts, i.e. astrology and astronomy, which are understood as specific paradigms of cognition and knowledge. First, both concepts are located in a more general discourse of the philosophy of history (Nietzsche, Benjamin), and second, they are related to the practice and theory of the New Vision and the idea of developing a new vision of reality, shown at the famous “Film und Foto” exhibition (Stuttgart, 1929). The basis of the present interpretation is methodological reflection on the ideologization of photography in the so-called revisionist studies which favor the critique of the apparatus of power. Instead, the author proposes a concept of photographic vision connecting the picture and the spectator or, in other words, calling for taking into consideration the process of reception. This proposal, close to Hans Belting’s anthropology of the image, renounces the idea of the passive spectator, subject to the picture, in favor of the analysis of its perception. In the context of the New Vision, the picture-spectator relationship has been approached in terms of astrology and astronomy.

Photography from the Inside Out: Robert Frank's Memorial Images

Photography from the Inside Out:Robert Frank's Memorial Images Benjamin Pollak (bio) Everything he does is personal, and comes from the inside out. —Rudolph Wurlitzer1 In the early 1970s, just years after announcing that "photography was in [his] past," Robert Frank began to produce and exhibit still photographs again.2 Nothing in Frank's early career as a documentary photographer could have prepared viewers for the nakedly autobiographical, visually experimental images he began to make after his return to the medium. Confronted with the new turn in Frank's work, critics responded with perplexed silence or a dismissive shrug, even as they spoke of his early work in tones of increasing reverence. When Nicholas Dawidoff profiled Frank for the New York Times Magazine in July 2015, for instance, he devoted a scant 30 words of the approximately 8,300-word profile to Frank's photography after The Americans (1958)—an imbalance that is characteristic of both popular and scholarly assessments of Frank's work and legacy.3 With the exception of celebratory essays published in exhibition catalogs, the occasional blog post, and a few scattered essays in small journals, Frank's photography from the 1970s onward—what I will refer to here as his "later work"—continues to be treated as a minor footnote to the early images that earned him a reputation as "[o]ne of the most-cited figures in twentieth century photography" and "the most influential photographer alive."4 Frank's turn away from still photography directly followed the publication of The Americans, a book widely considered one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century photography.5 Published in France in 1958 and in the United States the following year, the volume of eighty-three grainy 35-mm prints shocked viewers with its unconventional, seemingly unstudied compositions and its critical depiction of a nation riven [End Page 27] by prejudice and inequality in the midst of material abundance.6 After an initially icy reception, The Americans achieved cult status in the 1960s, skyrocketing Frank to international fame and making him one of the towering figures in postwar photography, even as Frank himself embraced the relative obscurity of underground filmmaking. In 1959, he collaborated with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Alfred Leslie, and other friends to make the short film Pull My Daisy, which became a classic of the Beat movement. Frank would spend the next decade working as an independent filmmaker, his efforts after Pull My Daisy attracting little attention, even as the reputation of The Americans continued its vertiginous ascent. The story of The Americans' rise from obscurity to international fame, dramatized by news of Frank's sudden renunciation of photography, has contributed to what W. J. T. Mitchell has called the "mythical status" of both Frank and his most famous work. "If The Americans is the great tragic poem of American photography," Mitchell writes, "Frank seems to play the role of its tragic hero, a kind of Oedipus who 'had eyes' that saw something so terrible and shocking that he felt compelled to put them out, to put his camera in a closet."7 This narrative is so seductive—so surprising and seemingly perverse a story—that it has largely obscured Frank's subsequent return to the medium at the beginning of the 1970s, leading critics to overlook the affective power and formal innovation of the rich, if uneven, body of work he produced over the subsequent four and a half decades.8 In the pages that follow, I explore the startling direction Frank's work took after his return to photography, paying particular attention to his exploration of the relationship between photography and writing. More specifically, I focus on his attempts to use forms of visual sequence, collage, and abstraction to expand the representational capacities of photography by bringing it closer to the formal, expressive conditions of writing, which he saw as a more effective vehicle for self-reflection and subjective expression. After 1971, Frank began to develop a fragmentary, increasingly abstract collage aesthetic that was both more confessional and less mimetic than his more famous documentary photographs. As my reading of these images suggests, his early turn away from photography—as well as...

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.

What is twenty-first-century photography?

Abstract In the twentieth-century photography was the de-facto face of representation, as the visual arm of an industrial society that thought to reproduce the world as commodity for the consumption by individuals. However, in the twenty-first century this logic of mechanical reproduction is augmented by the (fuzzy) logic of algorithmic processing, which does not require individuals and commodities for its operation, but converts both to packets of data. The task of photography today is not to represent the world as an image, but to explore the conditions that make something like an ‘image’ possible.

New York City as Dwelling Place: Reinventing the American Dream in Steven Millhauser'sMartin Dressler, Joseph O'Neill'sNetherland, and Atticus Lish'sPreparation for the Next Life

York City has long been emblematic of American dream, celebrated in historical and fictional accounts, photography, and film. In his founding narrative on American dream in The Epic of America (1931), James Truslow Adams points to York City as center of American economic prosperity, but he claims that in quest for material well-being Americans have forgotten how to live (56-57, 186-87, 40406). More recently Michel de Certeau, observing York City from atop (original) World Trade Center, sees himself as a voyeur, not a walker, remote from practices of everyday life {Practice 92-93). Certeau argues that a city is not just a place, a location on a map, but a space in which people read and talk and walk and dwell- a dwelling place (94-97, 117-18). This tension between vast reaches of city with its seemingly endless opportunities and realities of everyday life is captured in vivid images from early twentieth-century photography and film (Lindner, After-Images; Lindner, New York Vertical) and is explored in contemporary fictional accounts that seek to reinvent American dream not as a quest for economic and social status but as a way of life-the originary dream of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness (Cullen 35-58). Steven Millhauser's Martin Dressier: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996) portrays a character who achieves, and tragically exceeds, his dream of rebuilding York City but cannot experience a meaningful personal relationship, even with his wife. Joseph O'Neill's Netherland (2009) rewrites this version of American dream in two interwoven stories: narrator's tale of a character who is destroyed by his dream of limitless and saga of his own attempts to rebuild his fragile relationship with his wife and son, played out in post-9/11 London and York. Atticus Lish's Preparation for Next Life (2014) rethinks and questions even dream of personal freedom and happiness for a man and woman at margins of York City's economic life, whose highly emotional and ultimately tragic love story is shattered by War in Iraq and trauma and neglect experienced by returning soldiers; by violence, drugs, and alcohol; and by restrictions on employment opportunities and threat of arrest, deportation, or imprisonment of illegal immigrants.Historically, American dream has been most closely associated with success as measured by economic and social status (Cullen 3-10, 59102, 133-57; Samuel 1-11, 111-16, 144-47). Contemporary fictional accounts suggest, however, that for many Americans and indeed for many others old dream of success has become a quest for something much simpler and more fundamental: a new dream of meaningful personal relationships and honest work as a means of achieving a measure of human dignity and economic or even physical survival. In cultural history, essence of American dream has long been the notion of upward mobility, idea that one can, through dedication and with a can-do spirit, climb ladder of success and reach a higher social and economic position (Samuel 7). Its most tangible instantiation is ownership of an individual family home: No American Dream has broader appeal, and no American Dream has been quite so widely realized (Cullen 136). The dream persists, Lawrence R. Samuel believes, despite changing economic and social trends, and is enriched and revitalized by continual flow of immigrants into United States, their enthusiasm and energy to achieve great things rubbing off on all of us (202). Jim Cullen maintains, moreover, that dream has evolved in part due to this flow of immigrants, as the trend... toward greater acceptance and opportunity has gradually expanded from men to women, from Irish and German to Arab and Mexican populations, and from Jews to Muslims (188).In fiction, classic portrait of American dream is F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), which captures this striving for economic and social status in narrator Nick Carraway's portrayal of nouveau riche Jay Gatsby and lavish home and extravagant parties that serve as emblems of his success. …

Manuel González Salazar, the Peruvian Atget

The Lima-born photographer Manuel González Salazar documented the colonial architectural heritage of his native city, as well as other major Peruvian cities such as Cusco, Arequipa, Ayacucho, Cajamarca and Trujillo. Just as Eugène Atget had documented the old Paris that he saw gradually disappearing, González Salazar chose to photograph the architectural and artistic heritage of the colonial era, which dominated the urban environment of the Peru of his day, but which was threatened by modernisation and social change. Like Atget in the French context, González Salazar is an anomaly in the history of Peruvian twentieth-century photography, which is best known on the international stage for indigenismo and the depiction of pre-Hispanic customs. The rediscovery of González Salazar’s work invites scholars to pay greater attention to the cultural heritage of the colonial era, as well as to the archives that documented it in all its splendour.

Making a Promised Land: Harlem in Twentieth-Century Photography and Film by Paula J. Massood (review)

Making a Promised Land: Harlem in Twentieth-Century Photography and Film by Paula J. Massood (review)

A Changing Scene

This paper examines the changing scene of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial photography in the Dutch East Indies (today Indonesia). The mid-nineteenth century collection of Woodbury & Page Photographers Java gives us insight into a mixing of vernacular and European architectural languages as experimented with in numerous buildings and colonial settlements throughout the archipelago. A prolific commercial studio, Woodbury & Page Photographers Java was established in Batavia in 1857 by two Englishmen, Walter Woodbury and James Page, following their brief and unsuccessful stay in Australia. Contrastingly, the early twentieth-century photography of the Dutch architect Pieter A. J. Moojen is dominated by the framing of a seemingly contained, pure and exotic indigenous architectural otherness constantly championed in lieu of the rapidly modernising and Europeanised urban settlements in other parts of the colony. The two generations of colonial photographers and the changing architectural scenes captured through their lenses represent a complex landscape of built forms, colonial society and colonial agency in the Indies. This change of scene also signals the rise of the dominant tradition of twentieth-century architectural historiography in the colony and, subsequently, Indonesia. This tradition is governed by a certain way of seeing, a selective visual framing of indigenous built forms as “traditional” and “authentic” other, an exotic antithesis of the modern colonial architectural movement, while marginalising the archipelago's shifting cosmopolitan architectural landscape.

Making a promised land: Harlem in twentieth-century photography and film

Making a Promised Land examines the interconnected histories of African American representation, urban life, and citizenship as documented in still and moving images of Harlem over the last century. Paula J. Massood analyzes how photography and film have been used over time to make African American culture visible to itself and to a wider audience and charts the ways in which the Mecca of the New Negro became a battleground in the struggle to define American politics, aesthetics, and citizenship. Visual media were first used as tools for uplift and education. With Harlem's downturn in fortunes through the 1930s, narratives of black urban criminality became common in sociological tracts, photojournalism, and film. These narratives were particularly embodied in the gangster film, which was adapted to include stories of achievement, economic success, and, later in the century, a nostalgic return to the past. Among the films discussed are Fights of Nations (1907), Dark Manhattan (1937), The Cool World (1963), Black Caesar (1974), Malcolm X (1992), and American Gangster (2007). Massood asserts that the history of photography and film in Harlem provides the keys to understanding the neighborhood's symbolic resonance in African American and American life, especially in light of recent urban redevelopment that has redefined many of its physical and demographic contours.

No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. By Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. xii, 419 pp. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-226-31606-2.)

Those who study twentieth century photography face overwhelming numbers of images. The National Archives holds eleven million. The Library of Congress has collected thirteen million more. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites's book No Caption Needed examines only nine. With all those millions of photographs waiting to be explored, one might wonder if studying a handful of very familiar shots is a promising project; but these two communication scholars have written a book that demonstrates a great deal can be learned by closely reading a few photographs we thought we knew. Hariman and Lucaites characterize iconic photography as “a public art form” that reflects and mediates tensions within American society (p. 6). The most comprehensive of these tensions is between “liberalism,” which they equate with personal liberty and autonomy, and “democracy,” which is their shorthand for representative government, equality before the law, and egalitarianism (pp. 14–16). Because iconic images such as “Migrant Mother,” “Accidental Napalm,” “Tiananmen Square,” and “The Times Square Kiss,” continue to be widely distributed and recognizable, and because they tap into such strong emotions and values, they are well positioned to highlight that tension. “Migrant Mother,” for example, not only captures the fear and poverty specific to the Great Depression, but remains “a complex representation” that still moves us to consider questions of class, gender, and individual and collective responsibility (p. 66). “Tiananmen Square” takes an event in Chinese history involving millions and translates it into a story of solitary courage—a story more in tune with liberal American values.

Inside the photograph: writings on twentieth-century photography

Inside the photograph: writings on twentieth-century photography

Encyclopedia of twentieth-century photography

Abbott, Berenice Abstraction Adams, Ansel Adams, Eddie Adams, Robert Advertising Photography Aerial Photography Afterimage Agitprop Alpert, Max An American Place (New York) Anthropological and Ethnographic Photography Aperture Appropriation Araki, Nobuyoshi Arbus, Diane Architectural Photography Archives Armstrong-Jones, Anthony (Lord Snowdon) Arnold, Eve Art Institute of Chicago Artists Books Astrophotography Atget, Eugene Auerbach, Ellen Australian Centre for Photography Avedon, Richard Ballen, Roger Baltz, Lewis Barr, Jr., Alfred H Barthes, Roland Bauhaus (German) Bayer, Herbert Beaton, Cecil Becher, Bernd and Hilla Bellmer, Hans Benjamin, Walter Berger, John

New light on the Cusco School

In the twenty years since I collaborated with Victor and Julia Chambi in re-evaluating, reprinting, and exhibiting the photographic work of their father, Martín Chambi, considerable attention has been focused both on his archive and on the work of other Andean photographers of the early twentieth century.1 Important contributions to these studies have been made in Cusco by the Fototeca Andina, at the Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos, San Bartolomé de las Casas, and by the independent research of Adelma Benavente under the aegis of her private collection known as Instituto Audio Visual Inka. For every researcher, however, the major stumbling block to creating a definitive chronology for photography in Cusco between 1900 and 1950 remains the scarcity of reliable records for biographies of photographers and accurate dates and attributions of photographs. In an effort to help define new references for early twentiethcentury photography in Cusco, my own research over the past decade has focused on selected private and public photographic collections, as well as on publications that appeared between 1910 and 1940 in which pictures by early Cusco photographers are reproduced. 2

Germaine Krull: photographer of modernity

Germaine Krull (1897-1985) led an extraordinary life that spanned nine decades and four continents. She witnessed many of the high points of modernism and recorded some of the major upheavals of the twentieth century. Her photographs include avant-garde montages, ironic studies of female nudes, press propaganda shots, as well as some of the most successful commercial and fashion images of her day. Her political commitments led her from communist allegiance to incarceration in Russia as a counterrevolutionary to support of the Free French cause against Hitler to a reclusive existence among Tibetan monks in India. Kim Sichel's study of this remarkable artist reveals a life of deep convictions, implausible transformations, complex emotional relationships, and inspired achievements. Krull refused to limit herself to one long-term relationship, one geographical region, or one set of religious and moral beliefs. Contemporary critics ranked her with Man Ray and Andre Kertesz. Younger photographers such as Berenice Abbott looked up to her. Yet until recently the absence of an archive has made a proper evaluation of Krull's contribution to photography and to modernism difficult if not impossible. In this book Sichel examines Krull's autobiographical texts and photographic oeuvre to present and unravel the rich mythology that Krull fabricated around her life and work. The chapters follow the geographical and chronological sequence of Krull's life, moving from Munich to Moscow to Berlin to Amsterdam to Paris to Brazil to Africa to Bangkok and other locations. This book, which accompanies the first major retrospective exhibition on Krull, should secure Krull's rightful place among the masters of twentieth-century photography. EXHIBITION SCHEDULE: Museum Folkwang Essen, Germany October 1999 - December 1999 Haus der KunstMunich, Germany December 1999 - February 2000 San Francisco Museum of Modern ArtSan Francisco, California March - June 2000 KunsthalRotterdam, the Netherlands August - September 2000 Centre PompidouParis, France November - December 2000

Light and Air The Photography of Bayard Wootten (review)

Light and Air The Photography of Bayard Wootten By Jerry w. Cotten University of North Carolina Press, 1998 253 pp. Cloth, $37.50 The North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina Library in Chapel Hill owns over 97,000 negatives of photographs taken by the Wootten-Moulton Studio, a New Bern-Chapel Hill photographic business in operation from 1906 until 1954. It also owns 260 original exhibition prints taken by Bayard Wootten (1875-1959). This is a treasure trove of material. Jerry W. Cotten's Light and Air examines the career of Bayard Wootten within the broader history of twentieth-century photography and reproduces a selection of 136 photographs, mostly from the 1930s. These are images of the South: landscapes, wooden cabins, a plantation house, but mostly black and white Americans in the lower reaches of society. Have we seen their faces before? Some were published as illustrations for books, notably Muriel Earley Sheppard's Cabins in the Laurel (1935), Charles Morrow Wilson's Backwoods America (1934), and Olive Tilford Dargan's From My Highest Hill: Carolina's Mountain Folks (1941). The photos collected by Cotten are both similar to and different from the better-known Depression-era photos: those, for example, of African Americans in Charleston and Appalachian mountaineers taken by Doris Ulmann, those of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans for the Farm Security Administration, or those of Margaret Bourke-White in Erskine Caldwell's You Have Seen Their Faces (1937). Each of these photographers is associated with the straight or realistic and documentary movement in photography. Wootten, a decade or two older, was a dedicated pictorialist, part of an earlier movement in which photographers aimed to create images that rivaled the form of painting, making use of mood, studied compositions (sometimes posed or contrived), a tendency to favor or sentimental subjects, and an emphasis on atmospheric effects (hence the Light and Air title). Cotten makes astute comparisons between the work of the and Wootten's slightly softer, gentler images. But the distinction between the two approaches is not always as sharp to the reader. The selection of subject matter is crucial, and the choices were often remarkably similar; those of the realists sometimes seemed to deliberately convey images of dire poverty. Born in New Bern, the daughter of a photographer (who died when she was five) and a mother with an artistic bent, Wootten became interested in photography around 1904. Driven by financial need, she set up her own business, a bold move for a woman of her generation. Her half-brother, George C. Moulton, soon joined her and handled much of the routine photography that kept them afloat financially. Early on, Wootten established a contact with the military at Fort Bragg, doing portraits and job work, and in 1928 she and Moulton moved to Chapel Hill to do similar work for the University of North Carolina. (Many of those 97,000 negatives at the North Carolina Collection represent the bread-and-butter business that sustained them.) As early as 1910 Wootten exhibited at a meeting of the Photographic Association of America. She remained a member of its Women's Federation and kept in touch with the Pictorial Photographers of America until that organization's demise around 1920. A few years later Wootten visited the Appalachian School (now Penland) in the mountains of western North Carolina, a school run by her cousin Lucy Morgan with the aim of reviving rural handicrafts as a basis for fireside industries. Wootten took pictures for the school's catalog and in turn grew to love the region and its people. Her first national recognition came in 1932 when she exhibited forty prints of landscapes and portraits at the Fine Arts Theatre in Boston. The Boston papers, as well as the Charlotte Observer, praised the natural and picturesque quality of her studies of mountain people. …

“Culture Morphology” and Cultural History in Berenice Abbott's Changing New York

Berenice abbott's photographs of New York City in the 1930s, made under the aegis of the Federal Arts Project of the WPA, have never enjoyed the acclaim that the work of photographers for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) received from the 1930s onward, despite the fact that her work is at least the equal of theirs in both aesthetic and documentary interest. Her photographs have not exactly been neglected — she is dutifully mentioned in most histories of twentieth-century photography — but neither have they been seen as at least equally central to our understanding of the culture of 1930s America as the work of Rothstein, Mydans, Lee, and even Lange and Evans. Changing New York (1939), a collection of nearly 100 of her photographs taken between 1935 and 1938, is a major document of the Depression, one that has heretofore been slighted in evaluations of the decade's achievements.