Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England: Ladies, Mothers and Flirts
... Giorgio Vasari recomendaba coleccionar imágenes en un álbum, práctica que sería adoptada en gabinetes de curiosidades y bibliotecas (Ott et al., 2006). Estas formas de colección implicaban el tacto y la manipulación, cosa que cambiaría con el desarrollo e institucionalización del museo moderno (Di Bello, 2007 Publicado por Fisher, Son and Jackson en 1832. El volumen entero consta de páginas con textos, por lo regular poemas propios del romanticismo de la época, y páginas con los grabados correspondientes. ...
... Por esos años, se volvieron muy populares las "tarjetas de visita", un formato fotográfico económico de bolsillo. Si bien la estandarización del formato dio pie a la comercialización de álbumes fotográficos especializados, algunas mujeres empezaron a crear composiciones recortando figuras de las fotografías para pegarlas en escenarios pintados a mano, a menudo fantásticos o absurdos (Di Bello, 2007). Las imágenes no pueden pretender ser libres de fisuras: es evidente el contraste entre las figuras humanas fragmentadas, recortadas de las fotografías, con los fondos y demás elementos pintados a mano (ibid). ...
Poco se han explorado las afinidades formales y conceptuales entre formas populares de libros caseros como el scrapbook y el álbum, por un lado, y los libros-arte ubicados en los géneros autobiográficos, la estética del collage o el llamado giro de archivo, por el otro. El avance vertiginoso de las técnicas fotográficas y la creciente ola de impresos económicos de la revolución industrial propiciaron un gran desarrollo de libros visuales, amateur y profundamente personales a lo largo del siglo XIX. Quizá el temor a lo banal y lo artesanal impide reconocer la huella de estas manifestaciones, caseras y usualmente asociadas con las mujeres, en los libros-arte contemporáneos que los sucedieron. Estudiar más a fondo esas genealogías populares del libro ayudará a comprender ciertas cuestiones históricas, temáticas y de género en algunas de las maneras más frecuentes de abordar al libro-arte.
... For example, Elizabeth Siegel studied the social uses of portrait albums in the nineteenth-century USA; she wrote that "the album was seen to be filled as much by the desire to construct a family tree as by the urge to acquire portraits in great numbers" (Siegel 2010, p. 125). Patrizia di Bello examined gender issues in four albums created by British women (Di Bello 2007); Martha Langford (2008) focused on the albums' orality in her study of such books in the McCord Museum of Canadian History. Jill Haley's doctoral thesis surveyed evidence of colonialism in the albums of nineteenth-century immigrants to Otago, New Zealand (Haley 2017). ...
... Jewish men and women exchanged and collected portraits, which they displayed in albums. Several studies of non-Jewish albums (for example, Warner 1992, p. 30;Di Bello 2007;Siegel 2010, p. 140) have claimed that the collection and arrangement of portraits in an album was a predominantly female pastime. In the nineteenth century, Jewish men were more likely to maintain international contacts with family members for business and philanthropic purposes, whereas Jewish women more frequently took on the role of keeping up with their aging parents, married siblings, cousins, in-law relatives, and all aspects of family news, including the births of children, grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren. ...
This essay argues that the earliest genre of Jewish family photograph albums, the nineteenth-century portrait-card albums created by the bourgeoisie, may become a starting point for genealogical discoveries. Some display the visual genealogies of extended families, and many reveal the genealogical memories of family migration. The case studies presented here showcase the process through which an album became a starting point for the construction or expansion of a family’s genealogy. They draw on the radial sources commonly employed by family genealogists, including birth and burial records, censuses, and other archival materials. The discussion looks at the role of family albums in the passing down of family history to future generations.
... As Patrizia Di Bello notes, scrapbooking enabled women to 'give power to xiii their fantasies and validate their experiences, represented phenomenologicallyhow they felt, including to touch -rather than according to established modes of representation'. 19 Tactile, aesthetic and playful, scrapbooks expressed women's desires and documented their reading practices, highlighting the sort of material they found interesting, humorous, inspiring or ridiculous. ...
... Through these conjunctions the film mediates the traumatic experiences of Russian women under socialism, but also positions the filmmaker as a woman who takes care of this past as postmemory, through collecting and archiving not just images but also producing haptic postmemory objects, such as her film. This is the reversal of the mother-and-daughter roles that Patrizia de Bello (2007) described in her theoretical work on photo albums: in the era of analogue photographs usually mothers assumed the role of the family archivists who used the photobook as a site for family identity construction, but also designed it as a haptic object. ...
Found footage filmmaking, or “archiveology” (Russell, 2008), has become a contemporary mode of understanding the collective past. At the same time, in some recent European documentaries we have a more intimate, personal use of archival (and animated) images. They construct two-strand narrative structures showing both the trauma of losing a parent and the excavation of the unresolved traumas of those ailing and passing. In Us against Us ( Noi î mpotriva noastr ă , Andra Tarara, 2021) the director/daughter initiates a highly reflexive video dialogue with her schizophrenic father. Fragile Memory ( Крихка пам‘ять , Igor Ivanko, 2022) is a grandson’s story about a former cameraman affected by Alzheimer’s. Postmemory and post-generational trauma work is in the focus of Aliona van der Horst’s films like Love is Potatoes (2017), in which her own mother’s emigration story is recovered through intermediality, or Turn Your Body to the Sun (2021), in which the digitally manipulated archival footage accompanies a woman’s quest for her father’s repressed memories. These are all medially hybrid films, which rely on the affordances of intermediality, and which combine present day footage with images from personal or public archives. Archiveology becomes in these films an affective tool in caring for family, and a reflection on the precarity of life and memory in general.
... Patrizia Di Bello er en av dem som har påpekt at Barthes i dette verket, mer enn noe annet, var opptatt av de meningene som knytter seg opp mot optikk og kjemi -med andre ord det som skaper en direkte fysisk forbindelse mellom et fotografi og dets referent. 2 Slik hun ser det, fører dette uvilkårlig til at de sosiale og kulturelle konteksters potensielle betydning for fotografisk meningsdannelse blir undertematisert. Christine Hansens bidrag til dette saernummeret imøtekommer på et vis Di Bellos kritiske innspill. ...
... If we understand the studio to be a place in which little theatres of the 'self', as Edwards (2004) suggests, are performed, it is logical to analyse the studio photograph to see how to speak of cultural practices. There has been extensive analysis of early studio photography, for example by Di Bello (2007), Edwards (2006), Flint (2015) and Linkman (1993), who discuss studio photography as a framework that reflects the class and cultural aspirations of the sitters in the images. To ground this research, Bourdieu's (1984) concept of the 'habitus' can be applied. ...
How do cultural planners and policymakers work through the arts to create communities? What do artists need to build a sense of place in their community? To discuss these issues, Developing a Sense of Place brings together new models and case studies, each drawn from a specific geographical or socio-cultural context. Selected for their lasting effect in their local community, the case studies explore new models for opening up the relationship between the university and its regional partners, explicitly connecting creative, critical and theoretical approaches to civic development. The volume has three sections: Case Studies of Place-Making; Models and Methods for Developing Place-Making Through the Arts; and Multidisciplinary Approaches to Place and Contested Identities. The sections cover regions in the UK such as Bedford, East Anglia, Edinburgh, Manchester, London, Plymouth and Wakefield, and internationally in countries such as Brazil, Turkey and Zimbabwe. Developing a Sense of Place offers a range of viewpoints from, for example, the arts strategist, the academic, the practice-researcher and the artist. Through its innovative models, from performing arts to architectural design, the volume will serve the needs and interests of arts and cultural policy managers, master planners and arts workers, as well as students of Human Geography, Cultural Planning, Business and the Creative Industries, and Arts Administration, at undergraduate and postgraduate level.
... En estas obras, conservadas en los mayores museos de Francia, Inglaterra o Estados Unidos, los retratos fotográficos se fusionan con diseños de la más alta originalidad, siempre dentro de un marco visual afín a la sensibilidad burguesa. Numerosos investigadores, mediante nuevos estudios (Langford, 2001;Di Bello, 2007) o exposiciones (Siegel, 2009), plantean hipótesis teóricas y metodológicas para aprehender las diferentes capas semióticas de esta producción visual. ...
Resumen: Por extraño que pueda parecer, desgraciadamente, ser fotógrafa en el siglo XIX no implicaba necesariamente auto-definirse como tal. Mediante el análisis de las diversas manifestaciones de la relación entre mujer y fotografía, se trazará una primera cartografía de la influencia que tuvieron las mujeres fotógrafas españolas sobre el medio entre 1860 y 1880, tanto en el ámbito profesional como amateur. De este modo, se demostrará que, dentro de los usos expresivos de la fotografía, y mediante la construcción de un lenguaje doméstico, las fotógrafas españolas permitieron un desarrollo expresivo, simbólico y artístico del medio comparable con el de otros países industrializados.
Palabras Claves: Historia de la fotografía en España - Mujeres fotógrafas en el s.XIX español - Álbumes fotográficos - Fotografía Amateur - Fotografía doméstica. Women photographers in the nineteenth century Spanish: from the professional to the domestic.
Abstract: Unfortunately, it seems that being a women photographer in the 19th century did not necessarily imply a self-definition as such. Through the analysis of the various manifestations of the relationship between women and photography, a first map of the influence that Spanish women photographers had on the medium between 1860 and 1880, both in the professional and amateur field, will be drawn. In this way, it will be demonstrated that, within the growth of expressive uses of photography, and through the construction of a domestic language, Spanish photographers allowed an expressive, symbolic and artistic development of the medium, whose results are comparable with the production of other industrialized countries.
Key words: History of photography in Spain - Women photographers in the Spanish nineteenth century - Photographic albums - Amateur photography - Domestic photography.
... Las mujeres solían componer verdaderas obras de una gran imaginación, partiendo de los retratos. Estos álbumes han sido considerados como los primeros fotomontajes (Di Bello, 2007) y se han destacado en algunos estudios por su gran interés antropológico (Batchen, 2004). ...
Resumen : Mediante este artículo, se pretende dar una nueva visión de la relación entre mujer y fotografía en el siglo XIX, centrándose en particular en Madrid entre 1860 y 1880, mediante la Colección Castellano, conservada en la Biblioteca Nacional de España. Se ha querido resaltar el rol activo de las mujeres en el desarrollo del nuevo medio como agente de expresión y de comunicación social. Para ello, se estudió tanto a la “mujer modelo” —y el poder que ejerce sobre su propio cuerpo— como a la “mujer fotógrafa” y a las tensiones que existen entre ambas.
[en] From Model to Photographer. Women as Promoter of New Portrait’s Shapes in Madrid’s Photographic Studios (1860-1880) Abstract. Through this article, we intend to give a new vision of the relationship between women and photography in the nineteenth century, focusing on Madrid between 1860 and 1880, through the Colección Castellano, preserved in the Spanish National Library. We pretend to highlight the active role of women in the development of the new medium as an agent of expression and social communication. For this purpose, we will study both the “woman model” —and the power she exercises over her own body— as well as the “woman photographer” and the tension that exists between both of them.
Sumario. 1. Introducción y estado de la cuestión. 2. Fotografía y mujer: dos caras de la misma moneda. 3. Apuntes para una desmitificación de la figura del fotógrafo. 4. Hacia una nueva subjetividad. 5. Conclusiones. La fotografía como jaula dorada. 6. Bibliografía.
Cómo citar: Onfray, Stéphany. (2018). Ellas: de modelo a fotógrafa. La mujer como impulsora de nuevas formas retratísticas en los estudios fotográficos madrileños (1860-1880). Área Abierta. Revista de comunicación audiovisual y publicitaria, 18 (1), 13-38.
En este artículo proponemos incorporar el concepto “resistencias emocionales” al lenguaje historiográfico, no como meras expresiones afectivas de los grupos subalternos en el pasado, sino como saberes culturales con capital político para el presente, pues limitan el alcance normativo de los “regímenes emocionales” y producen innovaciones vitales que no son sólo un resultado reactivo frente al poder. Planteamos ampliar el significado del término resistencias para un desarrollo del campo de la historia de las emociones y utilizando como base la propuesta de Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick de desarrollar epistemologías reparativas, especialmente útiles para el feminismo.Desarrollar el estudio histórico de las resistencias emocionales requiere, para no seguir ancladas al estudio del poder, un replanteamiento del archivo en dos sentidos: “hacer hablar” al archivo hegemónico de otra manera al “desorientarlo” y generar “otros” archivos que permitan acercarnos al mundo de las emociones desde las experiencias de grupos subalternos. Desde este “otro” archivo, profundizamos en el análisis de los rastros y prácticas de la fotografía personal que tuvieron lugar sobre todo durante la dictadura franquista, como un ejemplo de práctica cultural que permite recuperar las resistencias emocionales, especialmente de las mujeres en quienes el régimen emocional del franquismo se cebó particularmente.
Nel contesto vittoriano di metà Ottocento, la possibilità di acquistare e collezionare piccoli ed economici ritratti fotografici diede vita alla moda di realizzare album di famiglia e scrapbook giustapponendo fotografie a disegni a scritture. Le donne aristocratiche che sperimentarono queste pratiche gli attribuirono la forza di uno strumento identitario e di gender politics in cui corpo, performatività e azione costituirono la possibilità di manipolare in modo trasgressivo le dimensioni dello spazio e del tempo. Il saggio approfondisce queste esperienze di tipo fotografico prendendo in esame due casi studio principali: l’album di Lady Charlotte Milles (1835-1927), e quello di Georgina Berkeley (1831-1919), per darne una lettura in cui la storia della fotografia e dell’arte contemporanea intrecciano i gender e i feminist studies. In quest’ottica, il recupero di attività marginali e amatoriali permette di valorizzare sperimentazioni extra-artistiche, quali furono gli scrapbook vittoriani, nel loro aurorale uso concettuale della fotografia. Pur trattandosi di un esercizio circoscritto storicamente e socialmente, gli album realizzati dalle donne vittoriane mostrarono la forza della fotografia nelle sue implicazioni autobiografiche, identitarie e dell’immaginario, con l’obiettivo di negoziare l’invisibilità a cui erano state destinate ma, al tempo stesso, dando vita ad azioni, esperienze e idee che solo l’arte contemporanea avrebbe reso praticabili.
This article examines the advent of photography in the Scottish university town of St Andrews in the context of local ties to the British Empire. It seeks to foreground the colonialist networks of some of the town’s principal families and argues that these investments ensured the avid reception and circulation of the calotype process and its products along well-established diasporic routes. In the latter section, David Brewster’s essays on photography will be assessed for their foundational statements on the camera’s potential imperialist applications. Brewster’s writings demonstrate the conceptual frameworks of empire that underpinned the adoption of photography in St Andrews. This article argues against the implicit associations that attend “provincial” photographic archives as circumscribed by local histories, geographies, and civic concerns. By doing so, it questions the politics of provincialising historiographies that disregard the extensive colonial networks of rural and small-town communities in the assessment of their photographic activities and vast archival legacies.
Following these early studies of vegetation in the late 1890s, in Britain a small group of botanists embarked on a concerted, strategic effort to promote further vegetation study, developing new methodological and theoretical principles for ecology. Chapter 3 deals with the social articulation of this new ecological knowledge, its disciplinary communities and institutions, and the importance of visual—especially photographic—mediation in disciplinary development and expansion. The social and institutional foundations of ecology and collective empiricism are explored, with a focus on the professional and amateur social networks in which ecologists were particularly active. The chapter places the growth of ecological work in the wider context of a generalised survey ethos, encompassing not only botanical science but also geology, anthropology, astronomy, meteorology, and other fields of study. In particular, the establishment and fate of photographic collections for botany and ecology are described and interrogated for their epistemological and disciplinary effects. Tracing these social articulations of ecological knowledge, the chapter highlights both indoor and outdoor social practices of ecology and makes a particular study of the International Phytogeographical Excursion (IPE) of 1911—a notably ambitious example of the sociable and photographic promotion of the ecological view of vegetation.
This thesis is concerned with the ways in which women are subject to and limited by gendered categorisations of photographic practice. The photography of Vivian Maier (1926-2009) will form a case study arguing that Maier’s photographic practice and posthumous recognition is representative of the marginalisation of women in photography, which has in turn led to an erasure of women photographers in photographic histories. The impetus for the construction of a reputation as a ‘street photographer’ for Maier is located in the economic imperatives governing the collectors and exhibitors of her work, whilst the necessary attributes of that reputation are determined by canonical values that eschew difference. The thesis will re-think the binaries of inside-outside and amateur-professional using Foteini Vlachou’s conceptualisation of centres and peripheries put forth in her article, Why Spatial? Time and the Periphery (2016) in order to show that the historiography of American photography is underpinned by sexual difference.
In the summer of 1938, four African American teachers from Cincinnati decided to tour Europe, on their own, by steamship and train. Back home in Avondale, Cincinnati, Althea Hurst created a scrapbook from the snapshot photographs she took, but also from the many postcards, tourist brochures, guidebooks, menus, transport timetables, maps, commercial and artistic illustrations she collected, all accompanied by itinerary and correspondence, precise legends, detailed captions and personal annotations. Some pages of the “Althea Hurst Scrapbook” were on display at the Public Library of Cincinnati in 2016, and the album, entirely digitalized, can be viewed online. This scrapbook is a typical example of a practice of collecting pictures linked to travel. It is at the same time exceptional because it was intended, from the beginning, not only to document a personal journey, but also to compare historical descriptions to actual places, and to encourage African American students to travel. The “Althea Hurst Scrapbook” will be put in relation to the broader practice of travel photo albums and described as a hybrid object combining images, written annotations, and other materials, thus merging personal photographic memories and educational documentation.
The portrait albums of nineteenth-century bourgeois Jews, which reified their social world, provided a space in which women exerted their agency and forged new identities, in national and cosmopolitan environments, beyond the family.
Objetivo:
El objetivo de este artículo es analizar los álbumes de amistad de tres mujeres del siglo XIX en Colombia: Agripina Samper, Lastenia Soffía y María Gregoria de Haro.
Metodología:
El análisis se realiza a partir de las fuentes primarias señaladas, los álbumes, con una perspectiva de género y un acercamiento desde la historia cultural y social y los estudios de cultura material y sociabilidad femeninas.
Originalidad:
El artículo constituye un aporte para el conocimiento histórico del siglo XIX colombiano. El análisis de los álbumes, que hasta el momento no han sido estudiados en profundidad, propone una nueva línea de estudio para entender las funciones que las mujeres desempeñaron en la vida social de la época.
Conclusiones:
Los álbumes funcionan como soporte de las redes sociales de las mujeres y abren el panorama crítico al estudio de una serie de conocimientos e información sobre la cultura e historia local y global acerca de la educación, la literatura, la historia y los roles de género. En los álbumes se pueden escuchar las voces silenciadas por el archivo histórico hegemónico de las tres mujeres que les dieron forma y contenido y se comprueba la solidez e importancia de los vínculos entre las mujeres y su labor en medio de la escena política y cultural de una época.
This dissertation asks two interrelated questions. First, how do visually iconic representations of Black-white families shift in relation to Black cultural politics and aesthetics throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Looking at widely circulating photographs and representations of iconic mixed-race families over the last century, I argue that these images have been shaped by a common set of visual themes and symbols that attempt to convey interracialism as perpetuating racial progress, integration, and social normativity. The continued use and evolution of these visual codes over time has coalesced into an iconography of interracial Black-white families, reproduced in American culture through the uplift of iconic mixed-race families in narratives of racial progress. Second, this dissertation asks what it would mean if Black women (their visions, their feelings, their memories, their presence) guided our understanding of the visual politics of racially mixed families in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? What images and stories of interracial kinship are centered when collected and curated through a Black feminist intellectual and historical lens? This study traces the shifting reception of Black and racially mixed women’s curatorial visions of interracial kinship over the past century, marking how Black women’s uses and narration of the public and private family archive situates interracial kinship within (rather than apart from) Black gender, sexual, and class politics and aesthetics. I argue that Black women have used private family archives throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to shape, reshape, and disrupt the visual icon of the mixed-race family over time, instead creating icons of Black racial affirmation for multiracial families. While sometimes operating in concert with the dominant, public visual iconography of mixed families, Black women’s curatorial approaches toward images of interracial kinship overwhelmingly reveal the emotional and psychological effects of these iconic representations on Black women, mothers, and racially mixed Black women and daughters. Using visual cultural analysis and archival research, each chapter offers a different take into how one or a number of iconic racially mixed families use images to negotiate notions of social and racial identity in public and in private, and how these negotiations impacted their politics in turn. Spanning from roughly 1918-2021, I situate these families within the very particular cultural, historical, and intellectual contexts in which they lived. Attending to Black women’s curatorial labor as it functions within domestic spaces and contexts, this study rethinks the political discourse regarding racial intimacy within interracial families in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In doing so, it reconstitutes this affective work back within histories of Black communal care, kinship, and survival rather than histories of uplift, progress, assimilation, and postracial futurities.
This article investigates the role of the darkroom in the experiences of British amateur photographers who, between the 1880s and 1900s, chose to process their negatives themselves while travelling. It focuses, in particular, on the reasons underpinning the development of a network of facilities for changing and developing plates available to tourists, and on how photographers’ engagement with this infrastructure expanded its function in ways that implicitly challenged dominant approaches to both photography and travel. It does so by examining the darkroom, first, as an alternative tourist bureau that put travelling photographers in contact with local knowledge, and second, as the site of a material culture that empowered photographers. These experiences demonstrate that close to the heart of these practitioners was not simply photographic mobility but, most importantly, photographic autonomy.
The craze for carte-de-visite portraits in the early 1860s established photography as an intensely social practice. As cartes were bought, gifted, traded, archived, and displayed, they captured and created social networks. This article asks what we can learn about the social language and networks of early photography by turning instead to amateur photography, specifically women’s amateur efforts. In 1863, a group of elegant women gathered in a makeshift photography studio at Pitfour, a huge country house outside Aberdeen. Using curios from the estate as props, they created playful staged photographs. Two of the most striking ones involve a huge fur blanket inventively deployed as a symbol of sensuality and power. In their collaborative creation and circulation in various albums made by the participants, the photographs offer an early example of women’s use of photography to create and archive a shared language and experience. However, the presence of this huge bear fur at a Scottish estate is a reminder that the images, the albums, and the women who created them must also be considered in the wider imperial context. This article maps the social production and circulation of the Pitfour photographs in order to consider the tension between progressive early uses of photography and the often-repressive contexts that shaped that work.
“Picture” stories, a whole genre of short fiction denoted by the central role of a picture, were common in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, from the 1840s to the 1860s. They featured in periodicals publishing fiction aimed towards middle- and lower-class readers, such as Ainsworth’s Magazine, Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal, Bentley’s Miscellany, and Sharpe’s London Magazine of Entertainment and Instruction for General Reading. Titles usually made the genre obvious: e.g. “The Story of a Picture” (1842), “The Fatal Picture” (Elder 1843), “The Adventures of a Picture” (Medwin 1843), “The Unfinished Picture: A Reverie” (Kenney 1845), “The Lost Picture” (1853), “The Unowned Picture” (1856), and “Memoirs of an Old Picture” (1859). Many of the “pictures” in these stories of the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s are paintings, but not all. Picture stories about photographs often worked in radically different ways from those stories about paintings, with photographs posing a new set of problems for viewers. This essay is about how writers of picture stories explored those problems, and aims to uncover how and why paintings and photographs work differently within this genre of short fiction.
In her essay, Caroline’s draws from her PhD thesis that looks the visual habitus of transcultural photography. She concentrates her writing on the genre of studio photography, specifically early English studio photography and argues that the conceptual framework established in early photographic studio practices still has its legacy in contemporary digital photographic studio practices. To illustrate this argument, she draws from a contemporary case-study in her local, digital photographic studio in North London and discusses a selection of photographs in relation to early photographic studio practices. She suggests that rather than a radical break caused by digital technologies, digital photography has opened up imaginative ways in which to make studio portraits that blur boundaries between the real and symbolic. Keywords: anthropology, digital form of photography, photography, studio photography
My artistic practice and family genealogy create the opportunity for a change in the perception of family history. I seek to illuminate and reframe family history and definitions of self while exploring an alternative to, or an addendum to, the patrilineal model of genealogy. Using the photographs and information gathered from my matrilineal bloodline and my preconceived definitions of self, I have created artworks that are places-of-memory. The places-of-memory, sometimes locations, sometimes objects, or sometimes the interaction with objects in an environment, provide an opportunity for discussion regarding the omitted or dismissed nature of the matrilineal line. This paper outlines the theoretical background of family history and identity, using photographs as methodology. In analyzing my family photographs, I have found I can use photographs as a tangible grounding for exploring abstract concepts such as memory and transgenerational family dynamics. Providing examples of my artwork and the work from a selection of my contemporaries, I show photographs used as a prompt for conversations and the impetus for my artistic practice. The visual components of this thesis work consist of seven portraits of my matrilineal bloodline. The organization of my artwork is modeled after the photo album while managing to challenge the traditional book-bound layout. In place of a book-style format, rendering the work in mediums such as cyanotype, resin molded into cube shapes, and 24inch x 36inch film-negatives creates a new arrangement of the photo album.
The article deals with the early history of photographic industry in Kyiv as a complex cultural phenomenon. Special attention is focused on the portrait photography as a ‘technology of memory’. It involves methods of social history of art, prosopography and visual anthropology. The study is based on the wide scope of archival documents, including the correspondence of publishing facilities inspector, who supervised the photographic activity in Kyiv from 1888 to 1909. By the early 20th century, making, collecting, displaying and exchanging the photographic portraits became an important memorial practice for townspeople throughout the world. In the pre-WWI Kyiv dozens of ateliers produced photographic portraits in large quantities. While the urbanization and economic growth boosted migration activity and washed out traditional family and neighborhood networks, the photography provided an instrument for maintaining emotional connections between people. The author emphasizes the role of a professional photographer who acted as a maker of ‘memory artifacts’ for individuals and families and, therefore, established aesthetic standards for their private visual archives. It is stated that the professional photography played a noticeable role in modernization and westernization of Kyiv. With its relatively low barrier to entry, it provided a professionalization opportunity for women, representatives of the lower social classes or discriminated ethnic groups (such as Poles after the January Insurrection, and Jews). While working in a competitive environment, photographers had to adopt new technologies, improve business processes and increase their own educational level. At the same time, their artistic freedom was rather limited. The style of photographic portrait was inherited from the Eighteen and Nineteen-century academic art, so it is usually hard to distinguish photographic portraits made in Kyiv or in any other European city of that period. Body language of models, their clothing and personal adornments as well as studio decorations and accessories aimed to construct the image of successful individuals, faithful friends, closely tied family members with their own strictly defined social roles etc. The old-fashioned style of the early twentieth century portraiture shaped the visual aesthetics of photographic portrait that was noticeable enough even several decades later.
This article focuses on a small community of elite ‘colored’ women in Memphis. The origins of this community began with a limited number of free people that established roots in the city during the1830s. Using photography as the main resource, this article examines the role of controlled image-making in three ‘families of color,’ headed by Jane Wright, Louisa Ayres, and Martha Ferguson. The article argues that following the Civil War, photography offered those of mixed-race the means to reveal and document a legacy they could not previously claim, strengthening their sense of shared identity and status in the urban South during Reconstruction.
This article discusses the material culture of the commercial photography studio in nineteenth-century America, examining a succession of objects that made portrait photographs work: technologically, by controlling and shaping bodily movement in order to meet the shifting demands of photographic apparatuses, but also socially, by helping to construct and display bodies in culturally appropriate and putatively revealing ways. It focuses on three varieties of photographic objects, which appeared in studios in roughly chronological order: first, the ubiquitous and much-discussed head rest; second, purpose-built photographic furniture; and third, supplementary accessories intended to produce photogenic states of absorption. Taken together, these materials — and contemporaries’ responses to them — demonstrate how early commercial portrait photographers and their subjects understood photography’s capacity to represent the body and to mediate social identity. They also demonstrate how, through bodily expression aided by industrially produced objects and calibrated to anticipated spectators, contemporaries negotiated and normalized rapid changes in imaging technologies in modernity, and exploited the possibilities that modern visual media offered for the presentation of the self.
Studies exploring the link between the representation of judges, photography and mass media tend to focus on the appearance of cameras in courtrooms and the reproduction of the resulting photographs in the press at the beginning of the twentieth century. But more than fifty years separate these developments from the birth of photography in the late 1830s. This study examines a previously unexplored encounter between the English judiciary and photography that began in the 1860s. The pictures where known as ‘carte de visite’. They were the first type of photographic image capable of being mass produced. It is a form of photography that, for a period of almost twenty years, attracted a frenzy of interest. Drawing upon a number of archives, including the library of Lincoln's Inn, London's National Portrait Gallery and my own personal collection this paper has two objectives. The first is to examine the carte portraits of senior members of the judiciary that were produced during that time. What appears within the frame of this new form of judicial portraiture? Of particular interest is the impact the chemical and technological developments that come together in carte photographs had on what appears within the frame of portraits. The second objective is to examine the manner in which they were displayed. This engages a commonplace of scholarship on portraiture; the location and mode of display shape the meaning of what lies within the frame of the picture. Carte portraits were produced with a particular display in mind: the album. They were to be viewed not in isolation, but as part of an assemblage of portraits. Few albums survive. Those that do offer a rare opportunity to examine the way carte portraits of judges were used and the meanings they generated through their display. Three albums containing carte portraits of judges will be considered.
The introduction poses two questions that run throughout the book: what motivated Stevenson’s photography and what were the circumstances in which photography took place during his family’s travels? The study contributes to the field of Stevenson studies and it enriches scholarship on Victorian travel literature, and the history of photography generally. The book grounds Stevenson’s photographic and literary practice in late-nineteenth-century Pacific Island history and contextualizes his writing and photography as a response to places, people, and politics. Building on current studies of colonial photography, however, it also offers readings of photographs that emphasize Islander agency and the medium’s potential to produce a counter-colonial discourse that challenges the assumed correlation between ideology and image.
This chapter investigates King Kalākaua’s request for Stevenson to compose a brief account (“A Samoan Scrapbook”) of the Hawaiian government’s efforts at forming a political alliance with Sāmoa in 1886–1887. This chapter explores how Stevenson’s little-known pamphlet entitled “A Samoan Scrapbook” engages with Joseph D. Strong’s photographs of Sāmoa (taken during the Hawaiian delegation to Sāmoa in 1886). The chapter situates Strong’s photographs within the political ambitions of the Hawaiian monarchy for regional dominance. In particular, this chapter demonstrates that the Hawaiian delegation’s sense of superiority and appeal to kinship underwrote its ambitions and shaped the “anthropological” gaze trained on Sāmoa by the delegates of the Hawaiian Embassy.
This article focuses on Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, designed by Edwin Landseer Lutyens and unveiled to the public in 1924 at the British Empire Exhibition. The Dolls’ House epitomised the characteristics of Britain as a nation and an empire through its English exterior and British world objects within. Marginalised in academic discourses and regarded as a plaything, this article brings the Dolls’ House back to discourses of British material and visual culture as well as Lutyens scholarship. To this end, it analyses how the design and contents of the House encapsulated the British imperial world and materialised Britain’s position in the postwar world.
Journeys Exposed: Women’s Writing, Photography and Mobility examines contemporary literature written by women that are all related to Italy in different ways. It argues that photography provides women with a means to expose aspects of their nomadic self and of others’ mobile lives within and beyond the writing process. By resorting to the visual, women individualistically respond to forms of hegemonic power, fragmentation, displacement, loss and marginality and make these experiences key to their creative production.
This final chapter treats the idea of ‘visual deviance’ as an aesthetic and thematic principle in selected neo-Victorian works of figurative art, so as to show that the notion of ‘Making It New (by Making It Old’)—a misquotation from Ezra Pound’s famous phrase—is also one of the standpoints of neo-Victorian culture. After an extensive treatment of the subject of ‘visual art’ in the Victorian age (with a reference to the famous case of the Benson’s ‘queer’ family), the chapter deals with selected works by Anthony Rhys, Dan Hillier and Colin Batty. In his oil paintings Rhys depicts the Victorian dejected, the criminals, the mad, and all those individuals whose story has been neglected. As for Dan Hillier, he portraits late-Victorian gentlemen and gentlewomen hybridised with monsters, whereas Colin Batty, in his photomanipulations of ‘real’ nineteenth-century cabinet cards, turns Victorian anonymous individuals, couples or family groups into the protagonists of disquieting visual narrations.
This paper will focus on Woolf as a literary practitioner and on two humble activities of hers, photo-cinematography and printing, which deeply influenced her approach to the ‘craft of words’ and helped her make of her humble publishing craft a hybrid revolutionary art. I will thus see in what ways Woolf was ceaselessly challenging the identity of literary creation as she exploited photography in Orlando, Flush and Three Guineas, mainly focusing on her use of amateur photography in Orlando and the home-made cover for Flush, as well as on the handmade scrapbooks that paved the way to the bold Three Guineas. Also analysing some of the stigmas in her texts (punctuation, typographical gaps, narratorial structure), I wish to underline that Woolf’s literary work can be considered as an elaborate montage reminiscent of both her practice of album composition and contemporary photo-cinematographic theories.
The surveillance model, most notably expounded by John Tagg, has long held orthodoxy in photographic theory. In this reading, the lowering of the gaze of the camera, far from being inclusive, acts when a tool of state, to be a means for exclusion. In essence, what we recognise as the mugshot is a highly coded form of portraiture. I argue that a general knowingness about the conventions of photographic portraiture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries allowed the intended discursive power of a regime of visibility to be undermined, contested and destabilised through acts of dissembling, resistance and counter-strategies that drew on the conventions of honorific portraiture. To support this argument this article focuses on photographs of the Fenians (a secret, oath bearing separatist Irish nationalist organisation) who both were photographed as prisoners and commissioned portraits of themselves to further their radical cause.
James Cook’s expeditions to the Pacific were unprecedented in late eighteenth-century Britain, and in the years following the expeditions, extraordinary images of the region were presented to the public. The drawings and paintings made by the artists during the expeditions became the basis for dozens of artworks, which brought to life areas of the world that had previously been little known to Europeans. While these were available to a limited public, tens of thousands of British consumers encountered images of the Pacific through magazine illustrations that were subsequently based on those art works. Published in several leading British magazines in the 1770s and 1780s, these illustrations circulated widely and reached people across Britain and in the American colonies, integrating the Pacific into consumer culture in a way that no other product could. They constituted a rich discourse about the Pacific which was informed by the written accounts and ambitious post-voyage art works, but ultimately separated from them: they were a unique set of representations, the production of which was determined above all by the magazine industry. The magazines presented their readers with the most exotic and spectacular glimpses of the Pacific that they could possibly offer, and they achieved this primarily through a focus on indigenous peoples’ bodies and dress; accuracy, context, and nuance were often diminished as images were adapted and edited for magazine production. Ultimately, these engravings played a critical role in the construction of the idea of the Pacific, at a time when British colonial activity in that region was just beginning.
Dynamically written and richly illustrated, the Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology offers the first foundational primer on visual criminology. Spanning a variety of media and visual modes, this volume assembles established researchers whose work is essential to understanding the role of the visual in criminology and emergent thinkers whose work is taking visual criminology in new directions. This book is divided into five parts that each highlight a key aspect of visual criminology, exploring the diversity of methods, techniques and theoretical approaches currently shaping the field: Part I introduces formative positions in the developments of visual criminology and explores the different disciplines that have contributed to analysing images. Part II explores visual representations of crime across film, graphic art, documentary, police photography, press coverage and graffiti and urban aesthetics. Part III discusses the relationship of visual criminology to criminal justice institutions like policing, punishment and law. Part IV focuses on the distinctive ethical problems posed by the image, reflecting on the historical development, theoretical disputes and methodological issues involved. Part V identifies new frameworks and emergent perspectives and reflects upon the distinctive challenges and limits that can be seen in this emerging field. This book includes a vibrant colour plate section and over a hundred black and white images, breaking down the barriers between original photography and artwork, historic paintings and illustrations and modern comics and films. This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to criminologists, sociologists, visual ethnographers, art historians and those engaged with media studies. © 2017 selection and editorial matter, Michelle Brown and Eamonn Carrabine; individual chapters, the contributors. All rights reserved.
This paper examines 3 of Carmen Martín Gaite’s texts that unfold in New York: her posthumously published collage notebook Visión de Nueva York (2005), the poem “Todo es un cuento roto en Nueva York” (1983) and the short novel Caperucita en Manhattan (1990). Through the critical lenses of Lefebvre, de Certeau, Baudrillard, Wilson and others, this paper explores how Martín Gaite depicts women’s spatial practice, as they make their way out of interior spaces to access urban space. By focusing on collages in Visión de Nueva York that contain windows or personal photographs, one can observe that, as time passes, the author’s assemblages communicate an increased sense of belonging after her initial anxiety about inhabiting a new city. Connections can be drawn among specific pages of Visión de Nueva York and the poem “Todo es un cuento roto en Nueva York”, where it is possible to see how the author develops ideas that she will later use in Caperucita en Manhattan. Scholars to date have paid little critical attention to Martín Gaite’s poetry, and this study attempts to fill in this gap by analyzing a poem that can be read as a precursor to her short novel.
For veteran anti-slavery campaigner Mary Anne Rawson, 8 July 1877 was a red-letter day as people say—It quite did me good to look on so beautiful a countenance—The only thing that spoiled my pleasure (besides the shortness of the visit which made us feel rather hurried) was the feeling that it was rather selfish not to give more persons the great treat of seeing him.1
In chapter 22 of David Copperfield (1850), the enterprising beautician Miss Mowcher sums up her view of society as a ‘set of humbugs’ by displaying the nail-clippings of her most prestigious client, a Russian prince. The grotesqueness of valuing an aristocratic émigré’s nail-clippings (‘Fingers and toes!’) as precious relics is articulated through Mowcher’s speculation that young ladies ‘of the genteel sort’, who pride themselves on their refined sensibilities, enshrine them in a socially sanctioned medium: the album. Carried as it is on the stream of Mowcher’s ‘volatile’ patter, the import of this satire of bourgeois materialism and snobbery might easily be overlooked. At mid-century, the album was synonymous with the culture of respectable middle-class women. As a young, usually unmarried, woman filled her blank album with personally significant texts and images it became a record of her values and interests, her friends and connections, and, most important, her subjectivity. At the same time, the album, whether carried on the body, or kept, with other intimate and private belongings, in close physical proximity, functioned as a symbolic stand-in for the feminine body. Thus Mowcher’s robust humour insinuates an impropriety in the incorporation of the male body’s intimate waste products into the feminine album.
What happens to the objects that make up a ‘literary and visual culture’ when we try to imagine them not only through our minds, but also through our bodies and our senses? When we ‘re-member’ their different materialities? In his Italian Journey Johann Wolfgang von Goethe remembers his experience of Rome through the story of Pygmalion and Galatea, ‘the living woman’ emerging from ‘sculptured stone’. Encountering Rome ‘in the flesh’ gives a new life to the city which had so long been an object of the imagination, yet also felt already so familiar through etchings, drawings, paintings, or three-dimensional models in cork, woodcut, and plaster.1 Through the physical pleasure implicit in the overlap between the experience of the city and the erotic discovery of the woman in the flesh, Goethe’s Pygmalion stands for a multisensorial model of cultural encounter in which images are given a body and enlivened through touch.
In the remarkable Sir Harry Page Collection of nearly 300 albums and commonplace books at the Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections, there is an elaborate scrapbook created by E. and T. Wilson between 1800 and 1830. The Wilson album is skilfully painted with trompe-l’oeil watercolours which make each page seem like a confusion of papers and objects piled upon one another, pinned and tied together with ribbons, partially concealing each other. On one page, a nautical map is painted on a scroll and titled ‘Rules for Sailing into Felicity Harbour’. The map charts in detail the ‘Bay of False Delicacy’, the ‘Lake of Contempt’, ‘Hesitation Point’ and ‘Consummation Straits’ which have to be navigated to enter the ‘Harbour of Marriage’, although the waters are still treacherous here with the ‘Rocks of Jealousy’ and the ‘Whirlpool of Adultery’ (see Figure 2.1).1 A verse is added: ‘Fair Virtue must your Pilot be / Your Compass Prudence, Peace your Sea / Your Anchor Hope, your Stowage Love, / (To your true course still constant prove) / Your Ballast Sense; and Reason pure / Must ever be your Cynosure’. In the corner of the same page of the album is a tiny watercolour sketch which is titled ‘Seacomb Ferry Boat’, a sailing skiff that ferried passengers between Birkenhead and Liverpool from 1817 onwards.
An Italian aristocrat renowned for her spectacular beauty, the Countess de Castiglione (1837-1899) arrived in Paris in 1855 and became a short-lived star in Napoleon III???s f??te imp??riale. For a considerably longer period, between 1856 and 1895, she staged more than four hundred portraits of herself in collaboration with the commercial photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson (1822-1913), creating an elaborate and anomalous corpus in the context of the history of photography. This dissertation examines how at the hands of Castiglione photography became a productive means for the figuring of the feminine subject in nineteenth-century France. The study argues that Castiglione???s consistent and considered relationship with the medium of photography has much to offer in terms of expanding our understanding of how photography provided particular inroads for women???s authorship and agency in the period.
The medium of photography and the early photographic portrait have been understood to objectify photographic sitters and Castiglione???s corpus has historically been interpreted to represent vivid proof of this process. Rather than focusing on the objectifying function of the camera, it is suggested that photography???s status as an autogenic medium???one in which the subject inscribes itself in the image???provides a compelling metaphor for Castiglione???s creative practice. By attending to a series of significant trials involving Pierson???s firm that sought to define photography as art under French law, this study analyzes how photography???s indeterminate status as an art or an industry enabled Castiglione to mobilize the medium for her own ends.
As a subject who figured prominently in the popular press, Castiglione employed photography as an autobiographical means through which to formulate counter-narratives about herself. While the corpus is usually described as a private collection of images that she compulsively created to satisfy her narcissistic desires, three series of costume portraits that had important public purchase are examined. This dissertation proposes a correspondence between Castiglione???s photographic practice and memoir culture in Second Empire France (1852-1870). It argues that Castiglione???s photographic strategies and practices bear witness to an artistic agency and urgency for self-expression that reconfigure our understanding of female subjectivity in the context of nineteenth-century French photography.
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