Early landscapes by Gustave Le Gray

Abstract

Gustave Le Gray is most widely known for his collodion seascape views which were first exhibited in 1856 at the Photographic Society of London. These views, in their strict horizontal compositions and dramatic skies, anticipate the seascape paintings of Courbet¹, An equally strong parallel exists between Le Gray's landscape photographs and early paintings of the Impressionists. Le Gray's landscape views of the forest of Fontainebleau shown in the 1859 Photographic Salon were described by Burty, a French art critic: ‘he air plays through the leaves, and the sun streaks the dark grass like the hide of a panthe’ ² Ibid., p. 352. , The monumental trees, skies and rushing forests, halted by occasional lines of light, distinguish his landscape images ofthis period. He genuinely loved nature but never idealized it.     

How Stieglitz came to photograph cityscapes

Abstract

Beginning in 1927, at the age of 63, Alfred Stieglitz began photographing the views of Manhattan outside the windows at the Intimate Gallery, his third-floor exhibition space on East 59th Street, and at the thirtieth-floor apartment at the Shelton Hotel, at 49th Street and Lexington Avenue, where he lived with Georgia O'Keeffe. In concerted bursts over the next four years, and then intermittently until ill-health forced the end of his picture-making in 1937, Stieglitz produced about 90 cityscapes, most of them depicting the changing views from .the Shelton and from his seventeenthfloor gallery An American Place, at 53rd Street and Madison Avenue, where he moved operations just after the stockmarket crash of 1929.1 The key set of Stieglitz's photographs in the National Gallery, Washington, DC, deposited there by Georgia O'Keeffe in 1949, includes 80 New York cityscapes from 1927 and after. The collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art has, among its late cityscapes, a handful that are not present in Washington, being variants in either negative, cropping, or photographic paper. These have been donated in stages over the years by Dorothy Norman. Further examples of variations from the images in Washington are unknown at present. These hard-edged yet lush gelatine silver prints vividly document a building boom of the late 1920s and early Depression years which transformed the refined, residential ‘uptown’ that Stieglitz had known all his life into a skyscraper-ridden ‘midtown’, a centre for office rentals, luxury apartment hotels and the fme art trade (figure 1).     

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.     

‘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:     

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     

Nino Migliori

Abstract

When Nino Migliori (born in Bologna 1926, where he still lives and works) began his career in photography, ideas about visual art in Italy were divided into two main camps. From the end of the Second World War up to 1948, when Migliori's first photographs were produced, a bitter debate continued between those who championed the mirroring function of art and those who were more interested in the exploration of expression, which was made possible by the avant-garde movements. This ideological battle, which pitted groups of artists such as II Fronte Nuovo delle Arti against the II Milione group, the MAC group, and the Corrente group among others, ¹ Birolli, Cassinari, Guttuso and others, adhered to the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti (founded in 1946), whose aim was concerned an. The n Milione gallery (active in Milan since 1934), attracted artists such as Fontana, Licini, Reggiani, Veronesi; the Corrente artistic movement stenuned from the magazine of the same name (1938–40), which struggled against cultural autarchy of fascism. The MAC (Movimento Arte Concreta), funded in 1948 by Dorfles, Munari and Soldati, revived 1930s abstraction in Milan. was very complex, and involved themes ranging from ideological commitment to purely aesthetic questions. However, we can not reduce these arguments to the mere opposition between realism and abstraction, or between political commitment and fomulism. Nevertheless, the artists themselves were placed in these categories, and the divisions between them have characterized the evaluation of photographic, literary, and film production as well as painting since that time. Immediately after the war, photography in Italy was also burdened by a cultural environment that was deeply influenced by Benedetto Croce's idealism, which maintained that a sharp Jivisiun existed between ‘poetry’ and ‘non-poetry’. ² The scholastic reform in Italy in the 1930s carried out by G. Gentile was inspired by the philosophy ofBencdetto Croce. Various theoretical texts by groups of Italian photographers were directly inspired by his Breviario di Estetica(1912).      

Painter and photographer; Brisbane in the 18805 and 18905

Abstract

In August of 1889 the popular local magazine The Boomerang published an article entitled ‘Photography as an Art’, which took the form of an extended advertisement for the recently moved establishment of Thomas Mathewson, one of Brisbane's well-patronized photographic studios ¹ Mathewson began as a professional photographer in 1864, travelling widely throughout Queensland and setting up studios in Gympie and Maryborough. In July of 1876 he opened the studio of Mathewson and Co. in Queen Street, Brisbane. The studio was well established by the mid 1880s and continued in operation until the 1920s. . In the article the writer compares Mathewson's studio with an artistically appointed ‘salon’: ‘This is a palace of photography indeed, with its glittering entrance gallery lined with golden show frames and its luxurious waiting-room that is like the salon of a patron of the fine arts’ ² The Boomerang (24th August 1889). (Figure 1).     

Meletius Dutkiewicz (1836˜1897)

Abstract

Dutkiewicz, a fascinating and in some ways tragic character, has had no luck with biographers. Apart from one article in a photographic monthly ¹ Polish Biographical Dictionary, Cracow (1948), Vol. 6, pp. 15-16. This is in fact a résumé of an article by Aleksander Karoli, ‘In memoriam of Meletius Dutkiewicz’, published in a photographic monthly of Warsaw, Swiat?o (Light), No. 10 (1899), pp. 448-452. , and a brief entry in the Polish Biographical Dictionary, no published information concerning him has been traced. However, much that is of interest can be gleaned from surviving correspondence between the eminent Polish photographers Karol Beyer, Joseph Kordysz and Michal Greim ² Only a part of this correspondence was published by Juliusz Garztecki in his book on Michal Greim Mistrz zapominiany (Forgotten Master), Wydawnictwo Literackie, Cracow (1972). .     

Alfred Stieglitz and New Yark Dada

Abstract

In February of 1921 the photographer and entrepreneur Alfred Stieglitz mounted the fIrst public exhibition of his work since the closing of his pioneering art gallery, ‘291’, nearly four years earlier.1 An exhibition of 146 of Stieglitz's photographs was held at the Anderson Galleries in New York during February of 1921. This show was instrumental in helping Stieglitz ultimately to reassert his prominence in the New York art world and re-establish his status as an important American artist. Curiously, however, the manner in which Stieglitz and his associates chose to promote the photographer was somewhat unusual. They repeatedly described the camera as an extension of Stieglitz's own body, and his photographs as an extension of his spirit. As a result, they claimed that Stieglitz had achieved a profound physical and spiritual union both with his machinery and with the subjects he photographed.     

The late work of Charles Marville

Abstract

Compared with other photographers of his generation, the career of Charles Marville was remarkably long. His first calotypes date from no later than 1851, and some may have been produced earlier than that. Although biographical details about his life are sketchy at best, it is likely that Marvillc continued to work in the medium of wet-plate collodion almost until his death, which is believed to have occurred in 1879.1 The year of Marvillc's death has never been determined precisely. It generally has been assumed that the sale of his studio and equipment, which took place in 1879, followed shortly after his demise. Henri Lc Sccq, who was two years younger than Marvillc, produced no new work after the mid-1850s. Gustave Lc Gray, Charles Ncgre and Edouard Baldus, all of whom were four years his junior, ceased active photography in the 1860s. Of the first generation of French photographers working in the calotype or daguerreotype processes, only Hippolyte Bayard, who was 14 years older than Marville, had a longer active career. Marville produced a large body of calotypes, many of which were published by Blanquart-Evrard, that first revealed what became a lifelong passion for architectural photography.² However, it was only after Marville took up the wet plate in the 1850s that he settled into a full-time career as an architectural photographer.     

SURELY FADES AWAY

Photography has always had a precarious relation to cultural value: as Walter Benjamin put it, those who argued for photography as an art were bringing it to a tribunal it was in the process of overthrowing. This article examines the case of Polaroid, a company and technology that, after Kodak and prior to digital, contributed most to the mass‐amateurization of photography, and therefore, one might expect, to its cultural devaluation. It considers the specific properties of the technology, the often skeptical reception Polaroid cameras and film received from the professional photographic press, and Polaroid's own strategies of self‐presentation, and finds that in each case a contradictory picture emerges. Like fast food, the Polaroid image is defined by its speed of appearance – the proximity of its production and consumption – and is accordingly devalued; and yet at the same time it produces a single, unique print. The professional photographic press, self‐appointed arbiters of photographic value, were often rapturous about the technical breakthroughs achieved by Polaroid, but dismissive of the potential non‐amateur applications and anxious about the implications for the ‘expert’ photographer of a camera that replaced the expert's functions. For obvious marketing reasons, Polaroid itself was always keen to emphasize what the experts scorned in its products (simplicity of operation), and yet, equally, consistently positioned itself at the “luxury” end of the camera market and carried out an ambitious cultural program that emphasized the “aesthetic” potential of Polaroid photography. The article concludes that this highly ambivalent status of Polaroid technology in relation to cultural value means that it shares basic features with kitsch, a fact that has been exploited by, among others, William Wegman Wegman, William. 1982. Man's Best Friend, New York: Harry N. Abrams.  [Google Scholar], and has been amplified by the current decline and imminent disappearance of Polaroid photography.     

A note on ‘A bivariate optimal replacement policy for a repairable system’

An error appearing in equation (3) of Y.L. Zhang (J. Appl. Prob., 1994, 31, 1123–1127) has been pointed out by S.H. Sheu (Eur. J. Oper. Res., 1999, 112, 503–516) and the correct expressions (25)–(27) given accordingly on pp. 510–511. However, the derivation of the key expression (27), the long-run expected loss rate, was not presented. The purpose of this note is threefold. First, since a monotone process (e.g. an arithmetic, geometric, or arithmetic–geometric process) approach, as discussed by K.N.F. Leung (Eng. Optimiz., 2001, 33, 473–484), is considered to be relevant, realistic, and appropriate to the modelling of a deteriorating system maintenance problem, it is worth explicitly developing this expression, which is of benefit to the subsequent studies. Secondly, equation (3) in Zhang (1994) Zhang, Y. L. 1994. A bivariate optimal replacement policy for a repairable system. J. Appl. Prob., 31: 1123–1127. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] is shown to be fundamentally correct and so it can be viewed as an alternative method of formulating similar bivariate cases. Thirdly, although equations (4) and (5) in Zhang (1994) Zhang, Y. L. 1994. A bivariate optimal replacement policy for a repairable system. J. Appl. Prob., 31: 1123–1127. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] have been logically and correctly derived, both can be readily reduced to their simplest forms which are derived here.     

Criminal Lines,Indian Colours,and the Creation of a Black Legend: The Photographs of ‘Los Bandidos de la Halancha’, Bolivia

The author’s discovery of a set of inscribed photographs of the ‘Bandits of La Jalancha’, made in La Paz, Bolivia in 1871 and now in the collections of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, has made possible the identification of the photographed gang’s leader ‘Salvador Chico’ with the Afro-Aymara anti-hero known in contemporary folklore as El Zambo Salvito. On their photographic journeys out of Bolivia, Salvador and his men were transformed into anonymous ‘Indian bandits’ and became generic illustrations of ethnic Aymara types in the service of racialised evolutionary science. Back in La Paz, however, the photographs were forgotten but the legend of the infamous son of an African slave from Chicaloma, a coca-producing hacienda in the region of Yungas, grew in the public imagination. Whereas nineteenth-century racial discourse only recognised his indigeneity, twentieth- and twenty-first-century folklore and illustrations have instead emphasised his blackness. In tracing the split legacies of Salvador of Chicaloma, through exported photographs and the formation of local legends, this work reveals how identity was constructed, evacuated, and made anew. This fluidity of representation was made possible, in part, by the relative archival invisibility of afrodescendientes in Andean South America, whose lives and histories remain largely uninscribed.     

The delicious Harlequin

Abstract

The prim little girl in the century-old cabinet photograph ¹ Connie Giickrist. Original in the Pennsylvania State University Libraries. Purchased from D'Offay Couper Galleries, London, in 1971 is wearing her very best dress, and the bow fitted around her waist must have made it difficult to maintain a balance in a high wind. But she most certainly could have coped with the problem because rope-skipping was her particular talent, and she practised it as ‘the skipping girl’ on the stage of the Adelphi Theatre². Good looks and a few lengths of hemp made 11-year-old Constance MacDonald Gilchrist a London celebrity, and a personage who needed no introduction as late as 1898. She fascinated painters. Whistler was captivated enough to make two studies of her, retaining one of them, Harmony in Yellow and Gold: The Gold Girl, Connie Gilchrist, until his death³. (It is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.) Lewis Carroll svho, strangely enough, shared Whistler's interest in the theatre, also had a more than casual interest in little girls, and a near-professional interest in photographing them. That this great man has been occasionally criticized for this penchant seems hardly fair, but his diaries often betray a man caught in the grip of two passions—for children, and for photography. The passages on Connie Gilchrist are as good as any for illustration.     

Flowshop-scheduling problems with makespan criterion: a review

This paper is a complete survey of flowshop-scheduling problems and contributions from early works of Johnson of 1954 Johnson, SM. 1954. Optimal two- and three-stage production schedules with set-up times included. Naval Res. Logist. Quart., 1: 61–68.   to recent approaches of metaheuristics of 2004. It mainly considers a flowshop problem with a makespan criterion and it surveys some exact methods (for small size problems), constructive heuristics and developed improving metaheuristic and evolutionary approaches as well as some well-known properties and rules for this problem. Each part has a brief literature review of the contributions and a glimpse of that approach before discussing the implementation for a flowshop problem. Moreover, in the first section, a complete literature review of flowshop-related scheduling problems with different assumptions as well as contributions in solving these other aspects is considered. This paper can be seen as a reference to past contributions (particularly in n/m/p/c _max or equivalently F/prmu/c _max) for future research needs of improving and developing better approaches to flowshop-related scheduling problems.     

Life painting and light painting: Photography and the early Russian avant-garde

Abstract

‘At worst a colour photograph, at best a graveyard on the edge of town’.1 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Posledniaia glava ncokonchennoi avtobiografii’, in Vasilii Rakitin and Andrei Sarab'anov, eds., N. I. Khardzhiev. Stat'i ob avangarde, Moscow: RA 1997, vol. I, 130. Malevich may well have made this remark after looking through the journal Solntse Rossii (Petrograd), No. 293 (September 1915), which ran an obituary and extensive photographic tribute to Konstantin Makovskii. That is how Kazimir Malevich once described nineteenth-century Realism and the stylization of the fin de siecte that had preceded his establishment of Suprematism in 1915. He emphasized further that for him there was no cardinal difference between ‘naturalism’ (his generic denotation of all pre-Suprematist painting) and ‘photography’. Yet only a decade later Aleksandr Rodchenko was exhorting the new society to dismiss painting and to ‘photograph and be photographed’,² replacing his paintbrush with a handcamera — and zhivopis' with svetopis'— to produce some of the most remarkable photographs of the twentieth century.3 ‘hivopis’ (‘life painting’), while an early, indigenous word for ‘photography’ was ‘svetopis’ (‘light painting’); soon, however, replaced by fotografia.      

The Ties that Bind Hans Bellmer's Tenir au Frais to Heinrich Von Kleist

This article examines Hans Bellmer's photographic collage of 1958 Tenir au frais (Keep Cool), a work produced as part of his exploration of the theme of the female body bound with string. The paper argues that an interpretation of this image in the context of French Surrealism must take into account the fact that it appeared on the cover of le surréalisme, même, a journal that was filled with praise for the German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist. Tenir au frais has been interpreted variously, but little attention has been paid to its material context as the cover of the Surrealist journal. The Surrealists were political and cultural radicals, and their aim was a profound transformation of the world, a world that had generated atrocities beyond imagination in two World Wars. Shock was an important element in the work of the Surrealists, who often used images of sexual violence to challenge the status quo. The roots of this preoccupation lay in the writings of the literary heroes of the movement. This article argues that material context is crucial when considering possible meanings and that the image is tied to the Surrealist preoccupation with the German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist. Kleist's Penthesilea was particularly cherished by the group. They were interested in his portrayal of sexual frenzy, in how love and violence are fused in the play and in the psychological realism and tension in this ecstatic work. Bellmer's photographic collage provides an allusive illustration to the text on Kleist and connects with his drama on a number of levels, for it conveys extraordinary emotional distress but also the physical turmoil of the play in which the theme of binding is evident throughout.     

Kurt Tucholsky,John Heartfield and Deutschland,Deutschland über Alles

This essay analyses Kurt Tucholsky and John Heartfield's 1929 Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles. In this ‘picture‐book’ right‐wing nationalism, the military, the democratic system, and capitalism were trenchantly criticized. This essay argues, however, that Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles is as much about the role of photography in society as it is about Weimar's political situation. The late 1920s are generally seen as a period of medium optimism in which the new photography was in the forefront. Yet a close analysis of the use of photography in Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles nuances the so‐called optimism of Weimar visual culture and its sudden disruption by the advent of fascism in the 1930s. While from the early 1910s onwards, Tucholsky had promoted the polemical power of photography, his position shifted by the end of the 1920s. An ambivalence marked Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles: on the one hand the photographic medium was used as a critical tool; on the other, the book reflects an underlying critique of and frustration with photojournalism and its association with urban modernity.