Years Of Photography Research Articles

Photography in Social Work and Social Change: Theory and Applications for Practice and Research, Matthias J. Naleppa, Kristina M. Hash and Anissa T. Rogers

This book poetically describes photography as ‘painting with light’ and makes a convincing case for the fit between photographic approaches and ‘the social work profession’s focus on the importance of place, the environment, and the needs and assets that they can encompass’ (p. 120). It consists of three parts: Photography in Social Work, which considers historical, practical, theoretical and research issues; Photographic Methods and Applications, which presents five specific methods; and Technical Aspects and Future Applications. The introductory chapter helpfully presents a brief history of photography before moving on to its use in social work. It provoked new thinking for me: for instance, what photographic evidence there is of the work of the Settlements in England in the early years of photography and whether there was any photographic accompaniment to influential documents like Charles Booth’s Poverty maps of London, which themselves rely on image, if not of a photographic type. I was attracted to the authors’ ideas about social work journalism in which different media combine to tell the stories of the people and communities in contact with social work.

Richard S. Buswell: Fifty Years of Photography by Richard S. Buswell

Reviewed by: Richard S. Buswell: Fifty Years of Photography by Richard S. Buswell Dana Fritz Richard S. Buswell: Fifty Years of Photography. By Richard S. Buswell. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020. 112 pp. Illustrations. $29.95 cloth. Richard S. Buswell: Fifty Years of Photography directs readers to look back at his oeuvre and at history. Throughout his Montana childhood and his career as a physician, Dr. Buswell cultivated a passion for photography at abandoned homesteads [End Page 360] and mining camps. The author’s preface includes accounts of these locations in vivid sensory detail. Seventy-two plates, printed in lush duotone, trace his black-and-white prints over five decades in chronological order, moving from more descriptive to more abstract. The earliest work, Railroad Trestle, 1976, depicts a crumbling roughhewn structure absent of rails which disappears into a forest. In Bedroom, 2002, the book’s cover image, an unglazed window framing tree branches is sandwiched between a peeling ceiling and a deep snowdrift. In some ways, this striking photograph is misleading as a cover because most of the plates in this book are from the past twenty years, when Buswell explored formal abstraction. While the author does not elaborate on the influence of Modernism, followers of photographic history will recognize in his work echoes of Group f/64, who formed in the early 1930s in San Francisco. They coalesced to evangelize about the ability of the large-format camera to convey a pure aesthetic that was free from the conventions of painting and narrative and was characterized by carefully composed abstract details of their subjects. These artists were criticized by some for turning their backs on social conditions of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl (the causes of many abandoned homesteads). The group dissolved quickly, but their legacy of formal abstraction and photographic technical precision endures. Most of the work in this book falls squarely into this camp, ironically eliminating the kinds of context and information Buswell details in his preface. While he is known as a Montana photographer and for photographing in homesteads and mining camps, most of these images appear “placeless” and the sometimes-unrecognizable subjects seem not specifically “Montanan.” Yet these details of plants, feathers, and bones are rigorously and elegantly composed as well as beautifully exposed. The work seems to hover in a timeless and formal past where the human and environmental injustices that propelled homesteading and mining in the West are peripheral to the pursuit of beauty in a decaying frontier. In many ways, the book ends where it started: with gelatin silver prints made in a darkroom, a photographic process and an approach that has become part of history over these five decades. Dana Fritz School of Art, Art History & Design University of Nebraska–Lincoln Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Evolving Knowledge

Interview with Inuk artist Barry Pottle from Nunatsiavut in Labrador (Rigolet). Photographs are selected from ten years of photography based on his experiences and observations as an urban Inuk. This conversation provides insight into Pottle’sphotographic practice, particularly the artist’s process of learning the art and technical processes of photography and why his photographs matter in the process of Canadians facing their complicities in Canada’s ongoing colonialism. Pottle’s practice produces unique knowledge about Inuit culture and history through his eyes as an urban Inuk photographer.

Researching early photography of the Pacific Islands: An overview

Historical research on the early years of photography in the Pacific Islands has revealed changes in the practice of photography, the development of Pacific imagery, tropes and stereotypes and changes in the ways images were distributed, archived and used in modern contexts. Research in the field was initially focused on photography’s indexical nature and the role of professional and amateur photographers, travellers, colonial officials and missionaries. The research highlighted here, only in the English language and excluding Aotearoa/New Zealand, reveals how later analyses have begun to grow more theoretical, in keeping with postcolonial approaches to reading cross-cultural representation, and how new directions in research point towards the nature of Indigenous engagement with early photography.

The Evolution of Salted Paper Printing During the 1850s: Published Recipes

ABSTRACT A close reading of sources in Britain, Europe, and the United States published during the early years of photography produces a timeline of developments in the processes used to make positive prints on paper. This serves to indicate the most prominent innovators in the early evolution of photographic printing and to mark the first appearance of significant modifications in the printing process, particularly the use of albumen.

Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art

Les relations entre peinture et photographie ont fait l’objet, recemment, de nombreuses publications, toutefois ces dernieres ont rarement (sinon jamais) focalise leur attention sur l’interet commun que des peintres et des photographes ont porte au vocabulaire formel abstrait. L’exposition organisee par la Tate Modern a Londres pendant l’ete et l’automne 2018 rappelle que des le developpement de la peinture abstraite au debut du XXe siecle, s’est developpee une pratique de la photographie se ...

The Body Which is Truly Ours. A Brief Three-Stage Approach to Mass Society Through Photography.

This article aims to analyse the role of women as the objects and subjects of desire in Western culture through self-portraits. To do so, we have selected three case studies which coincided with the development of mass society and the evolution of photography. A three-stage analysis of photographic images not only allows us to take a closer look at the selected artists’ work but also enables us to understand the current situation of women in the art system. We will initially approach the first years of photography through the Countess of Castiglione. Then, we will focus on the figure of Vivian Maier, whose work was only recently discovered. Thirdly, the work of Linder Sterling has been chosen as an example of British counterculture during the 1970s.

More Than “An Elegant Accomplishment”

Abstract This article explores the role of female photographers in the earliest years of photography in Pennsylvania focusing on the life and career of Sarah Garrett Hewes.

Radiocarbon Measurements on Early Photographs: Methods Development for Testing Waxed Paper Negatives

The earliest years of photography were full of experimentation and innovation; many photographers from this era carefully documented their experimental procedures. Consequently, it is possible to reproduce historically accurate photographs and negatives today. One of the oldest forms of photographic technology is the waxed paper negative, popular during the mid-19th century. It consists of a photosensitive sheet of writing paper coated with a layer of wax to render it transparent. Modern waxed paper negatives made using 19th century paper can potentially pass for historically significant 19th century negatives. This poses problems to museums and others interested in studying or collecting authentic 19th century photographic images. We have developed methods for separating the organic components of waxed paper negatives and measuring their radiocarbon content as a means of distinguishing between modern and historic waxed paper negatives. By detecting the presence or lack of bomb carbon in a given negative, this process can act as a tool for authentication. We have mainly focused on the extraction and 14C measurement of the wax component, reasoning that modern photographers might have easy access to 19th century paper, but would less likely use 19th century beeswax.

Photography and Japan

What defines Japanese photography? Is there a distinctive Japanese photographic aesthetic? In Photography and Japan, Karen M. Fraser argues that the diversity of styles, subjects and functions of Japanese photography precludes easy categorization along nationalized lines. Rather, the development of photography within Japan is best understood by examining its close relationship with the country's dramatic history. This book traces 150 years of photography, a period during which Japan has experienced some of the most significant events in modern history: a remarkable transformation from an isolated, feudal country into an industrialized, modern world power during the late nineteenth century, an equally striking rise and fall as an imperial power during the first half of the twentieth century, and a miraculous economic recovery in the decades following the utter devastation of World War Two. The history of photography has paralleled these events, becoming inextricably linked with notions of modernity and cultural change from the time it first arrived in the mid-nineteenth century. The author considers this intertwined history by tracing the intersection of photog raphy and social history, focusing on the role of the camera in documenting key cultural and political events and in exploring social responses to cultural change. Thematic chapters that focus on photography's role in negotiating cultural identity, war photog raphy and the documentation of urban life introduce many photographs that will be unfamiliar to Western viewers, and provide a broadened cultural context for more well-known images.

Photography and the USA by Mick Gidley (review)

Reviewed by: Photography and the USA by Mick Gidley Jennifer Steensma Hoag Photography and the USA. By Mick Gidley. London: Reaktion Books Ltd. 2011. Mick Gidley’s Photography and the USA is from the Exposures series, a set of books that looks at photography from various thematic perspectives. This title considers the photographic image from the perspective of American Studies and the result is an interesting, well-written book by an informed author. Gidley divides his investigation into thematic sections regarding technology, history, and social documentation. A fourth section looks at photographs as emblems of the USA and includes photographs made expressly for artistic purposes. [End Page 195] Gidley’s expertise in both photography and American Studies blend successfully in the first chapter, “Technologies.” Focusing on mechanization, Kodak, and photomechanical reproduction, Gidley identifies that while Americans were not the inventors of the medium, “much of the technological development of photography has taken place in the USA” (31). The USA used this new medium in every conceivable application while continuing to capitalize on technological developments to produce photo processes that were cheap, mass-producible, and functional. While Gidley’s coverage of technological developments ends in the 1960s, he concludes the chapter on a prescient note. Quoting Lucia Moholy’s 1939 text, A Hundred Years of Photography, and Don DeLillo’s 1984 book, White Noise, Gidley references the tremendous growth of photography, and our increased reliance on photographs. In the second chapter, “Histories,” Gidley emphasizes the American West as a dominant theme, basing a third of the chapter on the topic. Briefly touching on immigration, industrialization, regionalism, race, and racism, he also addresses complications of selecting examples from the vast amount of vernacular photographs generated. The following chapter, “Documents,” concerns social documentation and includes many expected references: Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Edward Curtis, and the Farm Security Administration, but also features the work of lesser known Frances B. Johnson. Gidley devotes a significant amount of time to the FSA and how it became an inspiration for other documentary projects concerning monuments, courthouses, and architecture. In this chapter Gidley also addresses the September 11 attacks. The final chapter of the text, “Emblems,” features work with symbolic reference to the USA and features practitioners with an aesthetic interest in photography. Gidley emphasizes the straight photography tradition, and, to a lesser extent, addresses manipulated modes of photographic expression. Each chapter moves roughly in chronological order, the strength of Gidley’s commentary being on early photography through modernism. He brings many themes from previous texts he has authored to bear here. Photography and the USA is heavily illustrated with 107 images for its 184 pages. The chosen illustrations emphasize a historical preference; thirty-three illustrations predate 1900, and thirty-eight represent the time period between 1900 to the end of World War II. A mere four images represent the last ten years, a time period that has certainly changed the USA and photography dramatically. Overall, Photography and the USA is a lucid and engaging consideration of photographic production and its symbiotic relationship with the USA. The book serves as an excellent introduction to the history of photography and the photograph’s role in American culture. Jennifer Steensma Hoag Calvin College Copyright © 2012 Mid-America American Studies Association

Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh

Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh

‘Splendid Calotypes’ and ‘Hideous Men’: Photography in the Diaries of Lady Pauline Trevelyan

The diaries of Lady Pauline Trevelyan (1816–1866) provide an unusual and insightful perspective on the first years of photography. Her wealthy and scientifically minded husband was a friend of William Henry Fox Talbot. Pauline herself was highly intelligent, highly independent, a close friend of Sir David Brewster and John Ruskin, and interested in many aspects of science and art. Her diaries record not only her own photographic experiences, both in taking and in collecting photographs, but also commenting on other photographers – some well known, some previously unheard of.

Everyone Had Cameras: Photography and Farmworkers in California, 1850-2000 (review)

Reviewed by: Everyone Had Cameras: Photography and Farmworkers in California, 1850-2000 Eric J. Sandeen Everyone Had Cameras: Photography and Farmworkers in California, 1850-2000. By Richard Steven Street. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2008. Everyone Had Cameras is a remarkable, timely book. Street brings together a startling array of photographs of California farm workers, establishing a continuity of image-making beginning in the earliest years of photography in the American West. From this tradition spring two iconic representations of farm laborers—the Dust Bowl-era Okie and the present-day, Hispanic migrant worker. Street performs important work by making the migrant worker visible, not only giving this large population a history but also tracing the engagement of these workers by photographers increasingly committed to this social justice cause. Street's depiction of pre-Dust Bowl agricultural work establishes themes that run throughout the volume. Through the fictionalized Ramona and the artistically embellished portrait of Lorraine Collett, the first Sun-Maid raisin girl, Street shows how the romantic figure of the field worker was constructed by the agricultural industry. Carlton Watkins is the first of many famous photographers to picture conditions in the fields. Watkins' perspective—a 15-foot platform elevating the frame to include human action in the foreground and agricultural context behind—is replicated by a more than a century of photographers who did not confront individual workers and their circumstances face-to-face. Beginning with Watkins' logistical challenge of a wagon full of equipment and chemicals, Street takes pains to show the craft of the photographer: the deployment of cameras, the preparation of film, the dynamics between aperture and exposure, and the setting up of the shot. He substantiates that the fields are fertile, multi-cultural ground from Watkins's photographs of Chinese workers to the present day: Chinese, Japanese, Native American, Filipino, and even Yemeni labors populate ground more commonly associated with generations of Hispanic farm workers. Above all, he begins the naming of those [End Page 284] who bear witness to the struggle for visibility in the fields, the amateur and transiently engaged professional photographers who risked their careers to document the struggle for visibility. There are wonderful details in this massive work. Street provides biographical information for dozens of photographers whose compelling work, in many cases, had lain in obscurity for decades. He does not hide his animus for photographers who simply will not engage the social ills that surround them—art photographers such as Edward Weston, who prefer to focus on shape, texture, or composition, instead of turning toward scenes of social inequity; professional photographers who parachute into a complex scene of labor unrest to capture salable shots and then depart. The challenge of Everyone Had Cameras is that at least three books that have been combined into one massive, compelling tome—hard to put down but almost equally hard to lift; teachable in the passion of its themes and vignettes and yet unusable for most classes because of the sheer weight of its argument. The first and most compelling book is a history of images of California farm workers which he begins generations before the appearance of the refugees fleeing the Dust Bowl of the Great Plains. Cesar Chavez, whose career dominates the last 100 pages of the text and concludes this history, is, in Street's portrayal, a complex, charismatic leader who always knew the value of a good photo opportunity. The second book presents the California career of Dorothea Lange. Several chapters detail Lange's troubled relationship with Roy Stryker and New Deal federal agencies. Street follows many of her shooting itineraries in meticulous detail, in some cases providing a great service to those interested in how Lange constructed her reading of the social disaster unfolding before her lens, and in other instances repeating well-known details of individual shots. Street's portrayal of Lange carries the reader through the 1930s and shows the cost of commitment to a social cause. This extended attention comes at considerable cost, attenuating portraits of equally committed but lesser known photographers like Hansel Mieth and Otto Hagel. The third book emerges on page 498 of Street's scholarly and engaging study. Here the author...

Glimpses of an Eclipsed Heritage: Photography of Afghanistan in the Collections of the Fine Arts Library at Harvard

The photographic collections of Harvard's Fine Arts Library have benefited from a recurring interest in augmenting its holdings of the art and architecture, and, latterly, the ethnography of Afghanistan. Approximately 9,000 images reflect nearly 90 years of photography and nearly 70 years of collecting. Starting with Benjamin Rowland and his expedition to Afghanistan in 1936, a series of Harvard scholars have contributed to these collections, directly or indirectly. While the earlier contributions primarily related to pre-Islamic art and architecture, the library began actively acquiring photographs and slides of Islamic architecture from Islamic art historians and professional photographers in the 1970s after the arrival of Oleg Grabar as Harvard's Professor of Islamic Art. These have been further augmented since the founding of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture in 1979 and its Documentation Center in the Library, especially by a variety of archival collections. Most notable among these is the very large gift of photography documenting art, architecture and ethnography created by Josephine Powell. These impressive collections have never been as important as now. The devastation to Afghanistan's cultures, art and architecture caused by Soviet invasion, a prolonged war of national liberation, the subsequent civil war that devastated Kabul, and the final assault on representational art by the Taliban iconoclasts have altered these images from useful to critical documents of a past that has largely passed from view.

Marc Riboud: 50 years of photography

Marc Riboud: 50 years of photography

Portrait of the Self

Portrait of the Self

Having Declared a Belief in God... (1995)

Having declared belief in and God's presence in current human affairs and (however obliquely) human consciousness, I think it is incumbent (in times like these, times of varying styles-of-doubt) to attempt to write what I personally mean by the word God.' I'm no theologian, obviously, nor even an acceptable cracker-barrel philosopher. I theorize-and almost entirely in the field of aesthetics. Primarily I write to exhaust language on given subject, to drive the mind beyond words, so that I can begin, and begin again and again where words-leave-off, veer their references into vision, each verbal connective synapse, to effect that my mind's eye have full sway so that I can commence my work: I am filmmaker. I have found, across years of photography and editing, that the verbal can open into the visual, like swing gate in the mind, or sprung door, revealing plethoras of inexplicable and often utterly unexpected visitations. It is my only excuse for titling my films-that words can announce Light's-life, as it were, and prompt chaotic display of illumination into Vision...and at the same time can tutor chaos into rhythmic mimic of cathectic thought. The twin aspects of seeing-(1) sheer reception of the entire fiery illumination of the world, its bounce-light, and (2) cathexis-of-such into visual thinking-can be guided (in imitation of language, perhaps) to co-exist at once and one, like the yes/no or then/now of unconscious process. It is as if that which sparks the meat-tongue and heaves the diaphragm into such shaping of air as we call speech can also cathect, haunt, invest light waves, sparkled optics, and the electricity of thought into memorable coherency without any loss of one's sense of chaos (i.e., chaos: a state of things in which chance is supreme, as Webster's has it). Oh God! Dear God, and the like, as pleas uttered in desperate nervous extremity, are the signifiers of illumination and envisionment at one, except inasmuch as the words stand shackled to wish. The aesthetic of such prayer might best be expressed Oh/God, OGod, so forth. How can God be defined in our language except as some ultimate compound Good. Perhaps it should be compacted to Gd;' that it be grunt of the flute-throat trapped in the mouth of the sayer rather than social expression... (for as saying, this word may be uttered easily immediately after, say, the act of slaying helpless creature to no purpose; but as term thrust to the arched roof of the mouth and curled upon the tongue, one would suppose it must adhere, in the mind, to benevolent kinship and Grace in the eventuality of thought). But as God can be experienced as ecstasis passionately, then one must factor all pain plentifully into any equation. The fevers of being Human, The Wrath of God as experience of life-on-Earth, invigorate any notion of deity with such trembling of the vocal cords and quake of mind as can be heard in barest whisper and felt as slightest thought. Yet this, too, must come to be known as goodness-even if against all body's sensibility of well-being. How to picture such?...except, say, classically, as stasis such as The Sphinx, or baroquely, as does Bach (with bass quaver at-one with theme engendering seemingly infinite variations) or romantically, as A solid moving through an inferno (as poet Michael McClure has it). None of these traditional formulas achieve moving at-oneness. None permit both visible-chaos and envisioned-meaning coexistence (though each, at best, can be sensed as attempts at such resolve). Fear, as an inward-looking condemnation of history's tradition-- ridden forms, aborts outlook, creates props (defence) such as, for prime example, matter. If the external be subject to one's self, and if self be, thus, possessed by oneself, then all explative becomes such muttering as an echo-chamber might be said to engender: the visual corollary to this word-trap would be mirror-reflecting-mirror's imagery to some supposed infinitesimal microcosm. …

Michael Pakenham Edgeworth (1812–81)

Occasional references have been made in connection with the earliest years of photography to the name of Michael Pakenham Edgeworth, emerging in the 1840s as a shadowy figure on the fringe of the pioneering activities of the remarkable circle of neophytes gathered around Sir David Brewster at the United Colleges of St Salvator and St Leonard in the city of St Andrews, Scotland.1 He was one of the first persons, if not the very first,2 to experiment extensively in Ireland with the positive-negative paper process which Henry Fox Talbot had patented in England in 1841, and he pursued the goal with enthusiasm and constancy which is demonstrated by his own lively accounts of his successes and his tailures. Further research reveals that he had been experimenting with the photogenic drawing as early as t 839 while still on active duty in India. Thus, he steps into the limelight as one of the very first photographers on that sub-continent.3

Review: Picturing the Century: One Hundred Years of Photography from the National Archives, by Bruce I. Bustard

Book Review| April 01 2000 Review: Picturing the Century: One Hundred Years of Photography from the National Archives, by Bruce I. Bustard Picturing the Century: One Hundred Years of Photography from the National ArchivesBruce I. Bustard Linda A. Ries Linda A. Ries Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2000) 22 (2): 99–100. https://doi.org/10.2307/3379617 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Linda A. Ries; Review: Picturing the Century: One Hundred Years of Photography from the National Archives, by Bruce I. Bustard. The Public Historian 1 April 2000; 22 (2): 99–100. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3379617 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 2000 Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.