The ubiquity of camera phones today has made us all photographers, and as these nano-devices attest, the history of photography, perhaps more so than any other art, is also a history of technology, one best revealed in the very vehicle that makes it possible—the camera. Through brief, illustrated chapters on fifty landmark cameras and the photographers who used them, Michael Pritchard offers an entertaining look at photography as practiced by professionals, artists, and amateurs. A History (...) of Photography in Fifty Cameras is organized chronologically, beginning with William Henry Fox Talbot’s wooden “Mousetrap” camera of 1835. Other entries include the Brownie, the Coronet Midget, the Kodak Instamatic 100, and, of course, the Polaroid SX-70. Photographs within each chapter show not only the cameras themselves but also samples of the images made with them. Pritchard uses each camera as a point of entry for talking about the people who used them and the kind of photos they produced, from Weegee and his Speed Graphic to Cartier-Bresson and the Leica’s role in the invention of photojournalism. In the hands of individual photographers, he reveals, cameras came to represent unique styles of depiction. Together, the stories of the fifty cameras gathered here present an approachable and informative take on a medium that continues to fire the imagination, whether we’re perfecting the selfie or longing for the days of Fotomat. (shrink)

Essays discuss the development of photography, and how it promotes class and national interests.

This article sets out to draft a preliminary sketch of an environmental history of photography, as opposed to a history of environmental photography. It shows that such a history should be rooted in a conceptualization of our geological epoch as the Capitalocene: the age of capital. Seen in this light, photography can be understood as part of a longer history of what the article describes – building on the work of activist and journalist (...) Raj Patel and environmental historian Jason W. Moore (2018) – as the ‘cheap image’. In this way, photography is shown to offer a succinct expression of the Cartesian dualism that Patel and Moore see as being at the heart of the Capitalocene: the externalized image of capital N nature that this world ecology necessitated. The article considers Mining Photography: The Ecological Footprint of Image Production (Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, 2022) a recent exhibition and catalogue that attempted to narrate in exhibition form a history of photography from such a perspective. Finally, it concludes with a discussion of the work of several artists from this exhibition who are seen as exemplifying ‘metabolic realism’, a new critical photo-based artistic approach. (shrink)

Editor's errata: Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52.2 (Spring 1994): 167.

Four Arts of Photography explores the history of photography through the lens of philosophy and proposes a new understanding of the art form for the 21st century.

This book traces the history and techniques of underground photography, from the first pictures taken in the catacombs beneath Paris to the pyramids of Egypt, from American caves to Cornish tin mines. The opening chapters are concerned with the earliest experiments to record images without the aid of the sun in the 1860s. Innovative photographers have since used techniques ranging from limelight, Bengal fire, arc lights, and even magnesium mixed with gunpowder to specially designed electronic flashguns and powder (...) burners. Ten years in the writing, this is the only book of its kind and is based on primary sources of information throughout. Howes’ extensive use of quotations retains the immediacy of the challenges both amateur and professional photographers have had to overcome. The book is illustrated with 160 engravings, line drawings, and photographs, many of which have never been published before. Fully referenced and indexed, it can be used to identify and trace photographers and rare photographs worldwide. (shrink)

An abrupt break in the prevailing modes of artistic expression, for many, marks the advent of modernism in the early twentieth century, but revisionary attempts to pin down a precise moment of its emergence remain disputed. History of a Shiver proffers a different approach, tracing the first inkling of modernism instead to the nineteenth century's fascination with music.As Jed Rasula deftly shows, melomania--the passion for music--gave rise to concepts like Richard Wagner's "endless melody" and the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work (...) of art, which in turn infused the arts of the fin de siècle with an aura of expectancy, challenging them to induce musical effects by their own means. With each art aspiring to produce the effects of another artistic medium, a synesthetic yearning ran like a shiver through the body of art that would emerge over the next half century. Rasula traces this pan-arts polyphony from German Romantic theory to early experiments in "visual music," encompassing such diverse phenomena as American fixation on Arcadia, early film theory, and the lure of the fourth dimension. All the while, he keeps focus on the paramount historical consequence in elevating music to a new universal aesthetic standard, arguing that Wagnerism was first among modern "isms."In surveying this momentous interplay among arts, History of a Shiver ranges from literature, music and painting to theatre, cinema, dance, photography, and civic pageantry. It retells the story of modernism by recovering not an idea, but a feeling--the hair-raising potential for each painting, literary text, or musical composition to herald an unprecedented domain of human enterprise. (shrink)

The theory that photographs are images made by belief‐independent feature‐tracking is not a philosopher's invention. It gives concise, precise, and unifying expression to an assemblage of ideas about photography with a long and influential history. Traditional theory ironically flubs the line between photography and drawing precisely because it attempts to put them in opposition to each other. Photographs made by drawing can have a special significance because they originate in richly embodied action with a distinctive expressive character. (...) Making marks by printing has different expressive resources. Photography avails itself of the expressive power of printing and drawing too. The new theory of photography prevails over the traditional theory if it helps to make sense of how the authors use photographs in art and communication. The traditional theory was developed partly in order to explain photographs’ special epistemic power. (shrink)

A comprehensive look at photography's most dynamic era, this book surveys the rich variety of innovation that characterised the 1930s, exploring the aesthetic and cultural achievements of leading photographers and mapping the impact on the ...

This lavishly illustrated book establishes the towering influence of the scientist Victor Regnault in the earliest decades of photography, a period of experimentation ripe with artistic, commercial, and scientific possibility. Regnault has a double significance to the early history of photography, as the first leader of the Société Française de Photographie and as the maker of more than two hundred calotype portraits and landscapes. His photographic and scientific careers intersected a third field with his appointment in 1852 (...) as director of the Sèvres porcelain works. Readers are treated to Regnault's own beguiling pastoral, garden, and forest scenes; striking portraits of the scientists and artists in his circle of friends; quirky images of acoustic experiments; and an insider's view of the Sèvres porcelain works. Regnault's richly varied photographs also encompass perhaps the most extensive group of family portraits in early photography, and his romanticized landscapes reflect a moment when the rural outskirts of Paris were being aggressively suburbanized and industrialized. Occupying a unique and powerful position in the overlapping spheres of photography, science, industry, and art, Regnault was elected president of the newly formed S.F.P. in 1855. By examining his intertwined activities against the backdrop of French photography's nascent pursuit of institutional legitimacy, this book illuminates an important and overlooked body of images and the irregular cultural terrain of early photography. (shrink)

Georges Didi-Huberman's study is concerned with epistemological and ethical questions that arise from visual representations of the Shoah, while Michael Fried's is concerned with the ontological possibilities explored by contemporary art photography. The books have two things in common: an argument against postmodern skepticism, and an insistence that photography has become a field in which questions of history, truth, and authenticity are being explored with particular acuity. Rather than reject even the possibility that photographs have something to (...) tell us about the Shoah, Didi-Huberman shows that they can offer important insights into the difficulties and the possibilities of apprehending some aspects of the past.Fried shows that contemporary photographic work has taken on the ambitions of high modernism by accepting the challenge of “to-be-seenness.” Photography as a “historical practice” does not escape from the difficulties of evidence and of the “constructed” nature of historical understanding; photography functions neither as a pure trace of the past, nor as a mere invitation to spectacle. (shrink)

This article takes inspiration from Allan Sekula’s remarks on New Topographics photography, as well as his own ‘geography lessons’, to interrogate how photographs of ‘man-altered landscapes’ give visual form to the problems of temporality, natural history and historical agency that mark life in the Capitalocene. It proposes that combining Fredric Jameson’s analysis of the way that capital congeals ‘quantities of the past’ into dead labour with Andreas Malm’s diagnosis of our ‘warming condition’ allows us both to diagnose and (...) counter the temptation to a sublime inhumanity that so often haunts contemporary panoramas of ecological devastation. (shrink)

Photographing archaeological labor was routine on Egyptian and other Middle Eastern sites during the colonial period and interwar years. Yet why and how such photographs were taken is rarely discussed in literature concerned with the history of archaeology, which tends to take photography as given if it considers it at all. This paper uses photographs from the first two seasons of work at the tomb of Tutankhamun (1922–4) to show that photography contributed to discursive strategies that positioned (...) archaeology as a scientific practice – both in the public presentation of well-known sites and in the self-presentation of archaeologists to themselves and each other. Since the subjects of such photographs are often indigenous laborers working together or with foreign excavators, I argue that the representation of fieldwork through photography allows us to theorize colonial archaeology as a collective activity, albeit one inherently based on asymmetrical power relationships. Through photographs, we can access the affective and embodied experiences that collective effort in a colonial context involved, bringing into question standard narratives of the history and epistemology of archaeology. (shrink)

Though photography reaches as far back as the sixteenth-century’s camera obscura projects, it wasn’t until the British colonial period that amateur photographers introduced their technology to the Indian subcontinent. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, India was at the center of a representational revolution. Was photography in India simply a void, waiting to be filled by pre-existing cultural and historical practice? Or was it disruptive, throwing up new opportunities, prophesying new social formations, and bringing anxieties about (...) formerly secluded events and practices into a newly visible sphere? The Coming of Photography in India transcends traditional cultural and technological narratives in order to present a subtle and compelling account of the limits, possibilities, and consequences of photography. Examining technology in order to explain the dynamic incarnation of photographic practice as cure, poison, and prophecy, Christopher Pinney presents a bold account that will reward anyone with an interest in India, photography, or the history of the book. Accompanied by beautiful illustrations and a large number of previously unpublished images, this volume presents a sophisticated account of the “disturbance” that photography has brought to all of our lives. (shrink)

I discuss the early history of holography and explore how perceptions, applications, and forecasts of the subject were shaped by prior experience. I focus on the work of Dennis Gabor (1900–1979) in England,Yury N. Denisyuk (1927-2005) in the Soviet Union, and Emmett N. Leith (1927–2005) and Juris Upatnieks (b. 1936) in the United States. I show that the evolution of holography was simultaneously promoted and constrained by its identification as an analog of photography, an association that influenced its (...) assessment by successive audiences of practitioners, entrepreneurs, and consumers. One consequence is that holography can be seen as an example of a modern technical subject that has been shaped by cultural influences more powerfully than generally appreciated. Conversely, the understanding of this new science and technology in terms of an older one helps to explain why the cultural effects of holography have been more muted than anticipated by forecasters between the 1960s and 1990s. (shrink)

In 1943 Dr J.C.B. Grant, of the University of Toronto, published the first anatomical atlas ever fully produced in North America, An Atlas of Anatomy. Within the history of biomedical teaching, the publication of this textbook is remarkable for at least two reasons, both connected to the themes of animation and automation. The visual narrative of the anatomical body found in Grant’s Atlas encapsulated a paradigmatic shift in gross anatomy from a systemic approach (dividing the body into its systems) (...) to a regional anatomy (dividing the body into areas containing interlocking systems). The contextually contingent reasons for this shift in medical training are represented in the production of this textbook. What is crucial is that anatomy is thus conceived as directly applicable to surgical practice, which intervenes on the bodies of the living, rather than the dead. The second important dimension of Grant’s Atlas was his rigorous, yet invisible, incorporation of photography into the practice of medical illustration. Grant’s Atlas systematically deployed hand-drawn tracings of photographic images in the production of his bestselling textbook to affirm an indexical connection to a ‘real body’. At the same time, this use of photography is erased within the visuals, which rely instead on hand-drawn illustrations (line-drawings and carbon-dusting) to produce this particular pedagogy of the anatomical body. The production of ‘textbook anatomy’ is thus articulated to changes in technical modes of representation (photography) and to the new techniques in print-technologies from the late 19th until the mid 20th century. (shrink)

This paper confronts the interpretations of Eugène Atget’s photography given by Robert Desnos and Walter Benjamin. In the first part, it discusses Atget’s reception among the surrealists, particularly his relationship with Man Ray and the publication of some of his views from Paris in Littérature and La Révolution surréaliste. The second part is focused on the paragraphs that Benjamin has devoted to Atget in “Short history of photography” and "The work of art in the age of its (...) technological reproductibility”. Finally, it introduces, establishes and comments two texts by Desnos to highlight his idea of a history of photography, the place he attributes to Atget in it, and the presence of topical and figures of fundamental significance for Benjamin’s own perspective. (shrink)

Focusing on Walter Benjamin's discussions of the flashes and images of history, this book argues that the questions raised by this link between photography and history touch on issues that belong to the entire trajectory of Benjamin's ...

If narrating—the feeling of stories, fictional or otherwise—is an inherent possibility of motion pictures , then Kracauer's distinction between the realist and formative tendencies must be questioned and, in effect, the two must be synthesized. Wasn't the practical problem for the earliest films how to construct a formative sequence of events within an absolutely real-looking visual context? Wasn't the paradox of film narrative the combination of an obviously unreal sequence of events with an obviously real visual and social setting? And (...) isn't that paradox the most intriguing and complex problem of narrative film today, when the visual and social setting have become increasingly real-seeming? And doesn't this paradox have something to do with the fact that narrative film today seems richer and more important than it did a decade ago, at a time when various admirers of both cinéma vérité and cinéma pur had announced the death of fictional filmed narrative? Kracauer's realist aesthetic, concentrating exclusively on the photographic surfaces of things in the material world , overlooks this paradox altogether. It overlooks the fact—extremely relevant to the cinema—that the term "realist" means one thing in its common application to a painting or photograph and quite another thing in its equally common application to a novel or play. A realistic visual image is one that is said to "look like," "resemble," "reproduce," "iconically represent" the surfaces of the visual world. We see—or think we see—in a painting what we see—or think we see—in the real world.1 But a realistic story is one that is said to chronicle "credibly," "probably," and "believably" the way we think people feel, think, or act, the way things happen, and the reasons they happen, all of which are consistent with the reader-audience-society's beliefs about psychology, motivation, and probability. The standard of one sense of realism is primarily visual while the standard of the other is primarily psychological. One might see the early films groping, then, toward a synthesis of the visual realism of late-nineteenth-century painting/photography with the psychological realism of late-nineteenth-century novel/drama. · 1. This equivocation deliberately avoids the question of whether there is anything actually real about what one sees in a painting or photograph. The fact is that a very large number of viewers operate in this assumption because they think there is something real about what they see, despite the theoretical imprecision of their holding such a belief. Gerald Mast is the author of, among other works, A Short History of the Movies, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, and Film/Cinema/Movie: A Theory of Experience. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "What Isn't Cinema?," appeared in the Winter 1974 issue. (shrink)

Firstly, this contribution proposes to address synthographies – images generated through Text-to-image technologies – by deepening the epistemological shift related to the possibility of transposing the image-creation process from the analogue arts to the notational ones (or, by drawing on Nelson Goodman's terminology, from the “autographic” to the “allographic” forms of art). Secondly, the paper highlights how synthographies can be considered partly autographic and partly allographic, since the linguistic prompts constitute only the notational aspect of the generated images. Furthermore, this (...) contribution argues that the recent critiques around such images, which referenced aspects related to the absence of authorial presence and mechanicality, characterised the history of photography since its beginning. Finally, the contribution explores how the possibility to create synthographies that are almost indistinguishable from photographies easily might further separate the interaction between the detective and the depictive functions to the advantage of the latter, erasing what remains of the visual reliability and documental value of images. (shrink)

Photographs are used as documents, evidence, and records every day in courtrooms, hospitals, and police work, on passports, permits, and licenses. But how did such usages come to be established and accepted, and when? What kinds of photographs were seen seen as purely instrumental and able to function in this way? What sorts of agencies and institutions had the power to give them this status? And more generally, what conception of photographic representation did this involve, and what were its consequences?

Sarah Angelina Acland is one of the most important photographers of the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods. Daughter of the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, she was photographed by Lewis Carroll as a child, along with her close friend Ina Liddell, sister of Alice of Wonderland fame. The critic John Ruskin taught her art and she also knew many of the Pre-Raphaelites, holding Rossetti's palette for him as he painted the Oxford Union murals. At the age of nineteen (...) she met the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, whose influence is evident in her early work.Following in the footsteps of Cameron and Carroll Miss Acland first came to attention as a portraitist, photographing the illustrious visitors to her Oxford home. In 1899 she then turned to the challenge of colour photography, becoming, through work with the 'Sanger Shepherd process', the leading colour photographer of the day. Her colour photographs were regarded as the finest that had ever been seen by her contemporaries, several years before the release of the Lumière Autochrome system, which she also practised.This volume provides an introduction to Miss Acland's photography, illustrating more than 200 examples of her work, from portraits to picturesque views of the landscape and gardens of Madeira. Some fifty specimens of the photographic art and science of her peers from Bodleian collections are also reproduced for the first time, including four unrecorded child portraits by Carroll. Detailed descriptions accompany the images, explaining their interest and significance. The photographs not only shed important light on the history of photography in the period, but also offer a fascinating insight into the lives of a pre-eminent English family and their circle of friends. (shrink)

Photography has been part of Irish cultural life since 1839 but little is known of its long and sometimes complex history. Outside Ireland there has been scant attention given to Irish photography beyond picturesque tourist views of the Irish landscape and photojournalistic representations of 'The Troubles'. This book changes the picture, casting its focus between these polar, and often clichéd, extremes to address the political upheavals, social transformation and geographical re-imaginings of Ireland as a colony, a nation, (...) a province and a sovereign state. As Justin Carville demonstrates, photography has not only documented these transformations but has also helped shape how Ireland is viewed, both by itself and the rest of the world. Photography and Irelandexplores the role of the photographic image in colonial and post-colonial visual cultures of Ireland from the nineteenth century to the present day. Furthermore, it emphasises the transnational dimensions of photography in Ireland, discussing foreign photographers who have contributed to cultural imaginings of Ireland as well as indigenous Irish photographers. Beginning with a brief history of photography in Ireland the book discusses the tensions between colonial and global representations of Ireland and the formation of an indigenous photographic culture. Featuring commercial portraits and landscapes, as well as ethnographic photography, photojournalism and documentary works it explores Ireland’s photography through a number of interrelated themes. Accessibly written and accompanied by a wealth of images, Photography and Irelandis essential reading for all those interested in photography history, as well as Irish history and culture. (shrink)

The book is not a history of photography, but a history of the theories of photography.

As time goes by we will increasingly be marked more by abstract, distanced and imaginative renditions of the traumatic historical rupture of the Holocaust than by any personal or tangible connection - this article explores a bookwork/filmwork by artist Daniel Blaufuks engaging questions of what that might mean for us.

From Ansel Adams to Carleton Watkins, Diane Arbus to Weegee, Richard Avedon to James VanDerZee, American photographers have recorded their vast, multicultural nation in images that, for more than a hundred years, have come to define the USA. In Photography and the USA, Mick Gidley explores not only the medium of photography and the efforts to capture key events and moments through photographs, but also the many ways in which the medium has played a formative role in American (...) culture. Photography and the USA encompasses the major movements, figures and works that are crucial to understanding American photography, but also pays attention to more obscure aspects of photography’s history. Focusing on works that reveal many different facets of America, its landscapes and its people, Gidley explores the ambiguities of American history and culture. We encounter images that range from an anti-lynching demo in 1934 to Dorothea Lange’s poster “All races serve the crops in California;” an early photographic view of Niagara Falls against the painstaking detail of Edward Weston’s Pepper, No. 30; a fireman’s fight in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 to the Ground Zero images of 2001 by Joel Meyerowitz; an 1890s “Wanted” image to Elliot Erwitt’s shot of the Nixon–Kruschchev “Kitchen Debate.” Organizing his narrative around the themes of history, technology, the document and the emblem, Mick Gidley not only presents a history of photography, but also reveals the complexities inherent in reading photographs themselves. A concise yet comprehensive overview of photography in the United States, this book is an excellent introduction to the subject for American Studies or visual arts students, or for anyone interested in US history or culture. (shrink)

Of the generation of post-1960s artists who looked to photography for a new set of conceptual tools, Gerhard Richter stands apart because he has uniquely professed a desire to “use painting as a means to photography,” that is, to bring painting to the structure and sensibility of the photograph.2 To ascribe sensibility or perceptive acuity to a process so mechanical as photography may strike the reader as either romantically fey or even offensively anthropomorphizing, given that the aesthetic (...) questions at stake have exactly to do with philosophy's “mind-independent” designation of the medium. But the metaphor has pedigree among historians of photography, having been articulated by Walter Benjamin in his “Little History of Photography,” where he characterizes photography as a medium possessed of an “optical unconscious,” a nature specifically “other” in its ability to present the “spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has seared the subject.”3 It is precisely on the basis of this picture making outside of human agency, Benjamin insists, that “the dubious project of authenticating photography in terms of painting” fails, for it is an attempt to “legitimize the photographer before the very tribunal he was in the process of overturning.”4 Certainly, it is from this premise of photography's revolutionary capacity that the first critical assessments of the work of “artists using photography” proceeded in the 1970s and continued through the 1980s into the present decade.5 This is particularly important to keep in mind when assessing what has been called the recent turn to the pictorial in photographic practices because this move has been accompanied by, on one hand, a general pulling away from easily legible, unambivalent documentary content in photographic practices—a tendency that may itself be considered part of a quietly growing, renewed interest in the critical capacity of painting among a new generation of artists—and, on the other, a nuanced exploration of the appropriative lessons of postmodernism, manifested in recent interest in the repurposing of found, or what Benjamin might call “other-determined,” imagery.6. (shrink)

In this article I analyse the hidden genealogical link between portrait photography, used for criminological and psychiatric purposes, and contemporary systems of biometric identification of the human face. The aim is to highlight the shift between the emphasis on the importance of the human ‘expert eye’ in recognizing the face when talking about nineteenth-century photography and the use of computer technology that produces and reads digital facial images. In both cases, however, these are modes and variants of reducing (...) and flattening the human face; the face itself disappears under the onslaught of technologies of vision and mediation, becoming a mere data set. Special attention is devoted to the pose, the frontal view, which is the technological a priori of the empirical possibility of recognition, articulated through the history of visualization of the face from early portrait photography to facial recognition systems. Consequently, what we call the ‘face’ is a simulacra of individual the face presented to the apparatus: the ‘real’ face is transposed upon multiple technological layers (camera – plates – photographic surface), losing its characteristic features to be re-written according to specific techniques of measurement. (shrink)

In this beautifully illustrated book Maria Antonella Pelizzari traces the history of photography in Italy from its beginnings to the present as she guides us through the history of Italy and its ancient sites and Renaissance landmarks. Pelizzari specifically considers the role of photography in the formation of Italian national identity during times of political struggle, such as the lead up to Unification in 1860, and later in the nationalist wars of Mussolini’s regime. While many Italians (...) and foreigners— such as Fratelli Alinari or Carlo Ponti, John Ruskin or Kit Talbot—focused their lenses on architectural masterpieces, others documented the changing times and political heroes, creating icons of figures such as Garibaldi and the brigands. Pelizzari’s exploration of Italian visual traditions also includes the photographic collages of Bruno Munari, the neorealist work of photographers such as Franco Pinna, the bold stylized compositions of Mario Giacomelli, and the controversial images created by Oliviero Toscani for Benetton advertising in the 1980s. Featuring unpublished works and a rare selection of over one hundred images, this book will appeal to art collectors and students of art history and Italian culture. (shrink)

The essays collected in this special issue of Critical Inquiry are devoted to reflection on the shifts in photographically based art practice, exhibition, and reception in recent years and to the changes brought about by these shifts in our understanding of photographic art. Although initiated in the 1960s, photography as a mainstream artistic practice has accelerated over the last two decades. No longer confined to specialist galleries, books, journals, and other distribution networks, contemporary art photographers are now regularly the (...) subject of major retrospectives in mainstream fine-art museums on the same terms as any other artist. One could cite, for example, Thomas Struth at the Metropolitan Museum in New York , Thomas Demand at the Museum of Modern Art , or Jeff Wall at Tate Modern and MoMA . Indeed, Wall's most recent museum show, at the time of writing, The Crooked Path at Bozar, Brussels , situated his photography in relation to the work of a range of contemporary photographers, painters, sculptors, performance artists, and filmmakers with whose work Wall considers his own to be in dialogue, irrespective of differences of media. All this goes to show that photographic art is no longer regarded as a subgenre apart. The situation in the United Kingdom is perhaps emblematic of both photography's increasing prominence and its increased centrality in the contemporary art world over recent years. Tate hosted its first ever photography survey, Cruel and Tender, as recently as 2003, and since then photography surveys have become a regular biannual staple of its exhibition programming, culminating in the appointment of Tate's first dedicated curator of photography in 2010. A major shift in the perception of photography as art is clearly well under way. (shrink)

Hysteria, a mysterious disease known since antiquity, is said to have ceased to exist. Challenging this commonly held view, this is the first cross-disciplinary study to examine the current functional neuroimaging research into hysteria and compare it to the nineteenth-century image-based research into the same disorder. Paula Muhr's central argument is that, both in the nineteenth-century and the current neurobiological research on hysteria, images have enabled researchers to generate new medical insights. Through detailed case studies, Muhr traces how different images, (...) from photography to functional brain scans, have reshaped the historically situated medical understanding of this disorder that defies the mind-body dualism. (shrink)

Psychiatric genomics research protocols are increasingly incorporating tools of deep phenotyping to observe and examine phenotypic abnormalities among individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders. In particular, photography and the use of two-dimensional and three-dimensional facial analysis is thought to shed further light on the phenotypic expression of the genes underlying neurodevelopmental disorders, as well as provide potential diagnostic tools for clinicians. In this paper, I argue that the research use of photography to aid facial phenotyping raises deeply fraught issues from (...) an ethical point of view. First, the process of objectification through photographic imagery and facial analysis could potentially worsen the stigmatisation of persons with neurodevelopmental disorders. Second, the use of photography for facial phenotyping has worrying parallels with the historical misuse of photography to advance positive and negative eugenics around race, ethnicity and intellectual disability. The paper recommends ethical caution in the use of photography and facial phenotyping in psychiatric genomics studies exploring neurodevelopmental disorders, outlining certain necessary safeguards, such as a critical awareness of the history of anthropometric photography use among scientists, as well as the exploration of photographic methodologies that could potentially empower individuals with disabilities. (shrink)

If the cliché about garbage – ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ – is true, its inverse, unfortunately, is not. Heaps and masses of garbage brought into direct view still somehow manage to escape acute recognition, let alone social responsibility or global political activism. This article investigates this trend as a growing problem between the human world and representation. Focusing on historical and contemporary landscape photography, the article questions whether data visualization trends, particularly those that attempt to visualize the (...) post-industrial consumer landscape, help or hinder our capacity to understand our environment, and possibly even ecological endeavors. The article charts the history of photography’s landscape genre, mapping the contours of a shift from the classical ‘nature’ aesthetic, to an industrial, post-industrial, and eventually a mathematical aesthetic contingent on emergent techniques and data visualization in the attempt to depict ever amassing magnitudes of environmental despoliation. (shrink)

From the earliest silver-chloride calotypes of inventor of photography William Henry Fox-Talbot to developments in digital photography and the tiny but surprisingly capable cameras that are a component of every smartphone today, photography has changed dramatically over the past 150 years. As technology has advanced, so too has photography as a living, dynamic art form, as evidenced by the innovative techniques and compositions of contemporary photographic artists. Drawing on a diverse collection of historical and contemporary photographs (...) held by Bank Austria and on display at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Focus on Photography provides a rich visual record of the history of photography. The photographs reproduced here date from the 1840s to the 1970s and include works by Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll, André Kertész, Josef Sudek, Eadweard Muybridge, Alexander Rodchenko, Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, and Arnulf Rainer, among others, and range from landscapes and portraits to cutting-edge modern compositions. Together, they offer readers a series of invaluable reference points for thinking about of the important trends and developments throughout the history of photography. A stunning, kaleidoscopic portfolio featuring nearly two centuries of photographic art with representation from among many major movements and figures, Focus on Photography will be welcomed by all with an interest in this powerful medium. (shrink)

Gustave Le Gray was one of the most technically accomplished and aesthetically enlightened of the early "artist-photographers." Trained as a painter of portraits and landscapes, Le Gray was attracted in the 1840s to the artistic potential of photographic processes. As a photographer he evolved and refined much of photography's primary aesthetic theory. By 1855 he had influenced, if not taught, every important photographer in France. Drawing on entirely new material Eugenia Parry Janis fully analyzes the life and work of (...) Le Gray and demonstrates the originality of his artistic achievement in the context of discoveries about his personal and professional history. Janis, approaching the photographs of Le Gray with the methods and sensibilities of an art historian, reveals telling connections between Le Gray's choices of subject matter and formal means of presentation and the existing pictorial practice of other media such as painting. This same approach makes her sensitive to Le Gray's departures from such traditional practice, and she skillfully illustrates how he evolved from student painter into master photographer. In doing so she gives us a glimpse of the way in which Le Gray's manipulation of the photographic process was always informed by his pictorial needs and by his developing style. (shrink)