Thomas Annan and the scottish landscape

Abstract

Thomas Annan (1830–87) was a successful Scottish photographer who produced work in all the main subject categories associated with commercial practice in the midnineteenth century, including portraiture, landscape, urban and industrial documentation and reproductions of works of art. While it is true that the versatility and range of his achievement have not gone unacknowledged, his reputation today undoubtedly rests on one particular body of work— his survey of Glasgow's High Street slums, first published in 1871 as Photographs of the Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow.¹ Stark, shocking, and yet strangely hypnotic, the images in this book are among the earliest as well as the most powerful of their kind ever made. They are also sufficiently ambiguous in their status as ‘representations’ to have provided a fruitful target for critical analysis among cultural historians anxious to demonstrate the deeply problematic nature of the nineteenth-century documentary project as a whole.² Old Streets and Closes is in every way an outstanding work. It speaks eloquently of a now vanished past, while confronting us with the inherently paradoxical nature of photography's contribution to historical discourse.     

Sadakichi artmann,essayist and critic

Abstract

During the last two years of his life, Ralph Eugene Meatyard assembled a series of photographs into a book titled The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater. The album's main subject is his wife Madelyn Meat yard who wore one mask for the title role of Lucybelle Crater, and appeared in sixtyfour photographs accompanied in each by a different person wearing one other mask. Madelyn Meat yard's mask, an opaque representation of a grotesque hag, is described as resembling ‘Mammy Yokum from Outer Space’.¹ The other mask is transformed by its wearer, for it is a translucent representation of an androgynous older person. Only two images are titled, and the real names of the masked people are revealed in a listing at the end of the book.     

An album of seascapes by Gustave Le Gray

Abstract

In 1856 Ernest Lacan, a journalist and early critic in the field of photography, advanced a prediction which only recently has been confirmed, that Gustave Le Gray (1820–c. 1882) ‘s'est fait un nom qui restera dans l'histoire des progrès de la photographie’¹. There is little doubt that in the 1850s Le Gray was considered at least the equal of contemporary luminaries such as Nadar, owing to the following activities and accolades: his highly advanced technical experiments, discoveries and improvements; his several treatises and short notes in journals which dealt with such; his extensive and consistent exhibition record which was accompanied by almost exclusively positive and enthusiastic reviews; persistent application of and investigation into nearly every photographic technique and iconographic theme popular at the time; his informal or professional training of photographers of note such as Henri Le Secq, Charles Nègre, Charles Marville, Maxime Du Camp, Roger Fenton, and Adrien Tournachon; and the ultimate approbation, the grant to him in c. 1858–1859 of the title ‘Photographe de S. M. L'Empereur’. Accordingly, one finds in the histories and photographic journals of his day repeated references to the exceptional quality of Le Gray's prints and the widespread influence of his writings and instruction. Nadar, in his Quand j'étais photographe of c. 1900, included extensive remarks relating to Le Gray's personal life and photographic career, but because of a span of 40 or more years between original events and recollections, Nadar's account of his subject's endeavours is at best superficial, and tends to emphasize anecdote as opposed to factual history. Short treatments dealing primarily with the technical aspects of Le Gray's photography do appear in most 20th-century surveys (Freund, Lécuyer, Gernsheim, Newhall, etc.), but neither these brief synopses nor Nadar's reminiscences constitute what may even faintly be construed as a serious attempt at a reconstruction of the photographer's career and accomplishments2 For essentially revisional biographical information concerning Le Gray, see the author's dissertation¹, especially pp. 1–20, 41–42, 52–53, and 63–47. . In recent years, however, photographic historians, art historians, and to some extent the general public, have witnessed a renaissance of interest in Le Gray's life and works, a revival which has led to more detailed and accurate textual inforinntion, and the attendant availability of a wider range of examples of his works and writings³. It therefore seems propitious to add to this rapidly expanding corpus of Le Gray studies an intensive discussion of what may well be the photographer's most distinguished technical and aesthetic achievement, the Vistas del Mar album of scascapes, here dated c. 1857–1859, now housed in the Art Institute of Chicago.     

Books Received and Noted

Abstract

In August 1920 Lu Marten published a two-part essay entided ‘History, satire, Dada and more’ in Die Rote Fahne, the newspaper of the German Communist Party (KPD).¹ Written as a response to Gertrud Alexander's review of the First International Dada Trade Fair, which had appeared the previous month and characterized the exhibition as a manifestation of ‘bourgeois decadence’,² Märten's essay articulated a more complex understanding of Dada's significance by locating it within satire's historical development. Märten described how the bourgeoisie's replacement of the epic and fable with new literary genres had stripped satire of its popular character. Confined to the treatment of narrow, individual issues in the bourgeois humour magazine, satire had degenerated into a telling of jokes; and any illusions that humour magazines such as Simplicissimus provided social criticism had been dispelled by their performance during the recent war and revolution which had revealed their true class interest. The proletariat was increasingly in the grip of the bourgeois press, because capitalism's control of the publishing industry deprived the proletariat of the technological means necessary for modem satire. This circumstance, Marten argued, was the field in which Dada operated as the negative side of proletarian satire. Its important discovery was that art was no longer necessary for satire since capitalism's material body was satire itself Materials published by the bourgeois press could be arranged for satirical effect and ‘the simple reproduction, the photograph also replaces art here’.³ This destructive impulse was one side of a dialectic that Marten viewed as offering hope for proletarian satire's new beginning.     

Leah King-Smith and the Nineteenth-century Archive

Abstract

In postmodern criticism the camera has often been seen as an apparatus of control, one of the surveillance mechanisms of the state, in the service of its institutions and immersed in its technologies of power. The metaphor of the camera as a weapon, as analysed by Susan Sontag in the early 1970s, describes an unbalanced and non-reciprocal relationship between photographer and subject.¹ One is the hunter, the other the prey; one is the agent, the other the victim. This theoretical paradigm was consolidated in the 1980s when structuralist critics started to analyse nineteenth-century photographic archives held in libraries, institutions and museums.² Much of this criticism followed the work of Michel Foucault who used Jeremy Bentham's model of the Panopticon to analyse the controlling mechanism of the gaze in modern institutions.³ I am aware that aligning Foucault with structuralism will appear problematic to some; however, the way in which some of his work has been adapted by postmodern critics of photography does underline the determinism of his theory. For a lucid analysis, see Joan Copjec, Read my Desire: Lacan against the Historicists, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1994, 1–10. For a different perspective, sympathetic to Foucault, see Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1997. Although Foucault's concept of power is productive and he admits to sites of resistance, he is pessimistic about the possibilities of such resistance.⁴ Discipline and Punish, upon which many theories of photographic surveillance are predicated, constructs disciplinary power as ‘the nonreversible subordination of one group of people by another’.⁵     

William Lake Price and James Mudd

Abstract

Photography, of course, appears everywhere but for all its successes it has been remarkably unable to shake the complacency of the disciplines; it has its uses and its places, but these seem just too setded and too well known. The photographer remains a junior partner in the practices of a society, high or low, cultural or otherwise. But if we travel back through time we will encounter a point when photography seemed anything but limited. If any spatial figure typifies English photographic debate in the 1860s it would be ‘boundless’. In the language of English photographic culture the idea that the potentials of the new medium were unlimited stretched from Lady Easdake to the juror's reports on the International Exhibitions. Out of this mass of commentary I intend to extract only two fairly ordinary pieces of writing: William Lake Price's A Manual of Photographic Manipulation published in 1868¹ and James Mudd's ‘A photographer's dream’, originally read at the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, and published in The Photographic News for May 1865.²     

Photography at the Institute of Design

Abstract

In 1937, László Moholy-Nagy planted the Bauhaus seed, a hybrid of art and mass production, in the soil of the American Midwest. The New Bauhaus in Chicago only survived a year, but its successor, first called the School of Design and then the Institute of Design (ID), would be an influential centre of photographic experimentation for the next thirty-five years. Taken by Design: Photographs from the Institute of Design, 1937–1971 traces the tumultuous history of the school's small but seminal photography programme, the work of its major instructors, and their combined influence on photography in the USA. The essays in this handsome catalogue tell the story of how the ID approach evolved, from Moholy's formalist view of photography as one of the design arts, into the arrival of the medium as an art form in its own right under Hany Callahan, Aaron Siskind and Arthur Siege!. Published to accompany David Travis and Elizabeth Siegel's exhibition of the same title for the Art Institute of Chicago, the book is the first comprehensive documentation of the vital contribution of the Institute of Design to the history of photography.     

The London Diorama

Abstract

A Month in London, or Some of its Modern Wonder described¹ is as evocative a title for a book as one could wish for, and when I saw it was dated 1832, it was irresistible. It turned out to be a piece of thinly disguised fiction, so beloved in that age which felt that serious instruction, particularly for the young, must be sugar coated. An American tourist treats two young English relatives to a month's sightseeing in London. A chance acquaintance, named Mr Finsbury (and, most appropriately, living there), appears before the end of the Introduction, and volunteers to take them on the rounds. One particular adventure starts with a ride on George Shillibeer's three-horse Omnibus.     

Francis Frith and Negretti & Zambra

Abstract

When Francis Frith's eagerly awaited¹ stereographic series Egypt and Nubia was published in late 1857, the 100 albumen views caused a popular sensation². W. C. Darrah has recently described them as ‘probably the most lavishly praised and famous series in the history of stereography–³.     

Peter Henry Emerson

Abstract

In his recent study, Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary sees the writings on perception by the German physician, physiologist, and mathematician, Hermann von Helmholtz, as part of an epistemic shift, the emergence of what Crary terms a ‘modernizing vision’.¹ His study proposes that ‘during the first few decades of the nineteenth century a new kind of observer took shape in Europe radically different from the type of observer dominant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’.² Helmholtz's thcory of perception contributes to this emergence of a ‘new observer’, a theory in which sight is no longer severed from the body. Helmholtz's account of a corporealizcd encounter with the phenomenal world marks a shift from the notion of a static monocular eye organizing our sensory experience and constitutes the notation of an autonomous vision, of an optical experience that was produced by and within the subject. Light, for example, is shown to be produced not from without but in darkness, the mere effect of the stimulation of nerve ends by electrical impulses.³ Such a theory highlighted not only the significance of the body in perception but an interrelationship between the senses. The sense of sight could be triggered by physical contact; a blow to the eye created light, made one see ‘stars’.     

Mexican Photography: A Bibliography

Abstract

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) is one of the great classics of modem Italian literature. First published in 1958, a year after the author's death, the novel is set in Sicily and covers a period of almost three decades, from 1860 to 1888. The overarching theme of the book is the dissolution of the Sicily of the Bourbons and its reinvention as part of the unified Kingdom of Italy. Lampedusa, himself a Sicilian aristocrat, follows this cultural and political transformation through the eyes of the Leopard, Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, head of one of the most ancient and prominent noble families of Palermo. Indeed, it is understood that Lampedusa drew on his own paternal great-grandfather as a model for Don Fabrizio. Lampedusa's historical novel was translated into English in 1960, and in 1963 it reached a still wider audience as a result of Luchino Visconti's film, in which Burt Lancaster starred as Don Fabrizio, Alain Delon took the role of Tancredi Falconeri, and Claudia Cardinale played Angelica Sedara.     

‘Swiping … and Daguerreotyping’: Photographing Golf at St Andrews

Abstract

When photography was invented, St Andrews was already a very old town, littered with the remains of a glorious and turbulent his tory: notably the skeletons of a once magnificent cathedral and a large Augustinian priory and a ruined castle, horne of the former bishops and archbishops. Zealous reformers had helped reduce these great symbols of medieval Scotland's archiepiscopal see, which were now picturesque ruins, ideal for recording in the new medium of photography. However, St Andrews in the nineteenth century was more than just ‘that Reformation bombsite’.1 This rather apt phrase was used recently by Les Murray in his poem, St Andrews University AD 2000, one of ten poems specially commissioned to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Fergusson, poet, former St Andrews student and inspiration to Robert Burns. It had a small, sleepy university, with old college buildings nestling among the town's commercial and private properties. But also it had something else alive and stirring in the western end of the town — its famous 'Old' golf course. Around the time the first St Andrews photographs were being made, George Fullerton Carnegie penned the following lines in his Golfiana: Address to St Andrews:     

Frances Benjamin Johnston 1864˜1952

Abstract

A short obituary in Time magazine, published in June 1952, marked the passing of one of America's foremost women photographers, whose death had occurred almost three months earlier, on 16th March 1952.     

The Catalogue of the Sale of Camille Silvy's Studio,London 1869

Abstract

During the mid-19th century, the name Lola Montez was a household word in a surprisingly wide range of circles. A London sculptor went so far as to display, in private, her bust side-by-side with that of Queen Victoria¹, and while Her Majesty's response to this gesture remained unrecorded, Lola could have drawn comfort from the fact that she herself was enjoyed and admired by large numbers of people in less exalted positions. Her status derived in the first place from her beauty, in the second place from her notoriety, the latter being by far the most potent and enduring stimulus. Photographers flocked to take her picture, not only in Europe but also in America (Figure 1), and popular journals everywhere published her likeness, either in the form of engravings or else as photographs, when that became possible. Lola thus shared with Jenny Lind the distinction of being one of the first to be made into a ‘celebrity’ directly or indirectly through the action of the camera. Lola became the inspiration for plays, novels, music and even a film².     

The later years of James Robertson

Abstract

In ‘A Chronology of James Robertson’,¹ the authors refer to my generous sharing of Beato material. I fear I was unintentionally ungenerous in not referring them to Appendix 5 of Japanese-British Exchanges in Art: 1850s–1930s, published privately by John Clark in London in 1989, a publication that might not seem obvious in reference to a Scotsman working in Constantinople. John Clark is now at the department of Art History, Australian National University, Canberra but at the time of publication was lecturing at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His publication Japanese-British Exchanges included in its 323 pages a chronology of Charles Wirgman, the Special Artist of the Illustrated London News resident in Japan and highly influential on Japanese art.     

The business of being an editor: Norman Lockyer,Macmillan and Company,and the editorship of Nature, 1869–1919

Broadly speaking, Victorian scientific periodicals fell into one of two categories: specialist periodicals aimed at publishing original research for an audience of scientific researchers, or popularizing periodicals meant to share news about science with a broader readership. When astronomer Norman Lockyer founded Nature in 1869, he envisioned his new weekly as a member of the latter group. That vision resulted partly from his own wish to raise science's profile in Great Britain and partly from the interests of his publisher Macmillan and Company, which bankrolled Nature with its eye on eventual profit. This paper shows that the pressure for Nature to be a financial success shaped Lockyer's approach to editing and thus shaped Nature's content, leading the magazine to occupy an unusual space in the landscape of Victorian science publishing and placing unique burdens on its editor. Nature quickly moved away from Lockyer's initial vision of a popularizing magazine and became known as a periodical by and for researchers. The magazine's popularity among scientific researchers set it apart from its closest inspiration, the commercial weekly Chemical News. But in contrast to contemporary editors at learned society journals, such as George Gabriel Stokes at the Philosophical Transactions, Lockyer did not linger over the scientific details of Nature's papers. Instead, articles for Nature were usually either accepted or rejected immediately, with little editorial involvement shaping their scientific content. The difference between editing Nature and editing other research periodicals is clearly visible in the selection of Richard Gregory as Lockyer's successor in 1919. Most research periodicals selected eminent men of science as their editors-in-chief. Gregory, a science writer and long-time subeditor at Nature, did not lend scientific prestige to the masthead, but was eminently qualified to maintain Nature's distinctive content and its profitability for Macmillan and Company.     

La Andalucía Médica; The First Journal of Medical Photography in Spain

Abstract

The publication of a journal of medical photography implies recognition of photography's role in medicine. This is certainly exemplified by the Revue Médico-Photographique des Hôpitaux de Paris and the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. The first of these, founded in 1869 in Paris by Dr. de Montméja, is the earliest medical photographic journal known. The second was founded in 1875 by Drs. Bourneville and Regnard. The birth of both journals was possible only because adequate photographic service facilities in hospitals had already come into being. Thus, the Revue Médico-Photographique des Hôpitaux de Paris appeared in the same year in which Drs. Hardy and Montméja began such a service at the Hospital ‘Saint Louis’ of Paris. Similarly, the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière appeared two years after similar facilities had been created at the Hospital de la Salpêtrière.     

The naming of photography

Abstract

Photography now seems so natural a word for the process to which it refers that we tend to forget that the naming of this process was a matter of intense debate during the years leading up to 1839. Indeed photography's pioneers showed almost as much interest in the medium's nomenclature as in its invention, and almost all of them proposed one or more possible names. Given the importance attached to language at the time, it is reasonable to assume that the choice of name for their inventions was in each case indicative of their general thinking about photography and its character. In many cases the word actually came before the invention, or at least before the invention was fully operational. The choice of name therefore reflected not so much what photography was as what photography might be. It was a one-word summation of the idea of photography, and of the desires and aspirations that induced each of its various inventors to undertake their experiments. A history of photography's naming represents a useful insight into these desires, useful because it gives us one more glimpse into the manner of the medium's conception and early development.     

Susan Lipper

Abstract

When William Norman opened his photographic studio in a tiny redbrick house on Bleury Street in Montreal in late 1856,1 Letter from Alice Notman, Montreal to her parents Mr and Mrs Thomas, Woodwork, England. 28 December 1856. the 30-year-old immigrant could not have dreamed that this small beginning would one day expand into a vast enterprise spanning four Canadian provinces and six states in the eastern USA.² Nor could he have known that the business would continue long after his death, and that the firm's production of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs would become the foundation of an archives of international repute and his pictures cherished by millions.     

The photographic experiments of Henry Brougham

Abstract

Of all the British claimants to the invention of photography, Henry Brougham is the one whose experiments have been given least attention in existing histories of photography. In his posthumously published three-volume autobiography of 1871, The Life and Times of Henry, Lord Brougham, written by himself, Brougham claimed to have engaged in some ‘experiments upon light and colours’ during the years 1794-–5 (when he was 16 years of age). He had, he tells us, included a discussion of his experiments in a paper offered to the Royal Society in 1795. Most of this paper, his first in the field of natural philosophy, was published in the Society's Philosophical Transactions (No. 86) of 1796 under the title ‘Experiments and observations on the inflection, reflection, and colours of light’. The paper, as published, was an attempt to discover analogous relationships between the bending of light within bodies (refraction or, using the 18th-century term, ‘refrangibility’) and the bending of light outside of bodies (reflection and diffraction or, in Brougham's terminology, flexion). As he wrote in the opening lines of his paper:

It has always appeared wonderful to me, since nature seems to delight in those close analogies which enable her to preserve simplicity and even uniformity in variety, that there should be no dispositions in the parts of light, with respect to inflection and reflection, analogous or similar to their different refrangibility. In order to ascertain the existence of such properties, I began a course of experiments and observations, a short account of which forms the substance of this paper.¹