Visual Diary Research Articles

Preliminary remarks on George Seferis’ visual poetics

This article makes some preliminary remarks on Seferis’ photography, focusing mainly on its poetics as an act of seeing. The main intention is to highlight the direct relationship between Seferis’ visual sensibility and his poetry. The article primarily discusses some technical features of Seferis’ photography. It then examines his photography as a visual diary and draws attention to those cases where it is obvious that photographs hide behind specific poems. Finally, the article discusses the differences between photography and poetry regarding their relation to time. In this context, the poem ‘Με τον τρόπο του Γ.Σ.’, which makes explicit reference to photography, is examined.

David Hockney portraits

David Hockney is one of the most significant artists exploring and pushing the boundaries of figurative art today. He has been engaged with portraiture since his teenage years, when he painted Portrait of My Father (1955), and portraits of family, lovers, friends and well-known subjects represent an intimate visual diary of the artist's life.This authoritative new study examines Hockney's portraits in all media - painting, drawing, photocollage and prints - and is produced in close collaboration with the artist. Together, the authors reveal how Hockney's creative development and concerns about representation can be traced through his portrait work: from his iconic double portraits of the late 1960s and early 1970s to his cubist-influenced investigations of the 1980s and from his recent camera lucida drawings to his return to painting from life in oils. Featuring over 250 works from the past fifty years, David Hockney Portraits illustrates not only the range and innovation of his creative practice but also the circular nature of his subjects and artistic pre-occupations.David Hockney Portraits includes essays by Sarah Howgate, Contemporary Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, Barbara Stern Shapiro, Curator for Special Projects at the Museum of Fine Arts, Mark Glazebrook, Marco Livingstone and award-winning author Edmund White. The book will also include notes on sitters and an illustrated chronology.Published to accompany a major exhibition, David Hockney Portraits, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (26 February-14 May 2006), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (11 June-4 September 2006) and the National Portrait Gallery, London(12 October 2006-21 January 2007).

About the artist: Charlene sieg

The cover art for this issue is a photograph taken by Charlene Sieg, who was the managing editor of Psychological Perspectives for ten years. During that time, she was also the art director for the journal, as well as the public program coordinator for the Jung Institute of Los Angeles. Since then, Charlene has begun reclaiming her “artist-self,” and the images throughout this issue are photographs of the natural world … a visual diary of the ordinary, through her eyes.

An Interview With Jon Cattapan

An Interview With Jon Cattapan

Entering Germany, 1944-1949

This title presents Tony Vaccaro's images of Germany during World War II and its aftermath. Photographs and written text are combined in this visual diary of one man's experience of the war, including images such as the famous White death depicting a dead soldier nearly covered in snow.

An ordinary woman but a film-maker

Demain et encore demain/Tomorrow and Tomorrow—Diary 1995 (1997) is French director Dominique Cabrera's self-portrait. Taking as a starting point Cabrera's own description of herself as ‘an ordinary woman but a film-maker’, the purpose of this article is to show how Cabrera, by exposing herself on screen under her various identities (woman, daughter, sister, mother, lover, citizen and film-maker), brings about her own rebirth because she arrives at an understanding of what it means to be an artist. Her intimate visual diary becomes a means of accommodating herself to the world. This article also deals with the way Cabrera skilfully edited her film so that spectators are able to share what she herself was going through at the time of filming: a sense of loss leading to despair and finally, paradoxically, happiness. The article shows how her images of traces of bodies, fragments of conversations, half-gestures, and leftovers can give a sense of memory and times past, and embody love, anger and guilt. The article highlights the various references to cooking running through the film and concludes that for Cabrera the art of film-making is akin to the culinary art.