Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2022.2060289
Meghan L. E. Kirkwood
This article examines work from three South African artists—Vincent Bezuidenhout, Renzske Scholtz, and Jabulani Dhlamini—and argues that they use landscape images to find alignment or clarity between themselves, the social and political history of their country, and its land. Caught between a generation of activists who immersed themselves in views of a contested landscape, and another generation who did not experience life under apartheid, these photographers must balance what they see in the landscape in a contemporary context and its history into their representations. In “Separate Amenities,” Bezuidenhout examines how segregated recreational areas inscribed racist views into the South African coastline. In her series “The Farm,” Scholtz uses triptychs to combine archival imagery, contemporary photographs, and personal artifacts from a family property that was bought by the apartheid state and used as a prisoner camp. Jabulani Dhlamini revisits locations in the Sharpeville township connected to the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre. Finally, this article asserts that the landscape medium offers artists such as Bezuidenhout, Scholtz, and Dhlamini a space in which to mediate and engage the influence of the social documentary tradition in a post-apartheid art-making context—all while developing their identities as professional artists engaged in a global photographic dialog.
{"title":"Between social documentary and a global aesthetic: the use of landscape by early-career South African photographers","authors":"Meghan L. E. Kirkwood","doi":"10.1080/17540763.2022.2060289","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2022.2060289","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines work from three South African artists—Vincent Bezuidenhout, Renzske Scholtz, and Jabulani Dhlamini—and argues that they use landscape images to find alignment or clarity between themselves, the social and political history of their country, and its land. Caught between a generation of activists who immersed themselves in views of a contested landscape, and another generation who did not experience life under apartheid, these photographers must balance what they see in the landscape in a contemporary context and its history into their representations. In “Separate Amenities,” Bezuidenhout examines how segregated recreational areas inscribed racist views into the South African coastline. In her series “The Farm,” Scholtz uses triptychs to combine archival imagery, contemporary photographs, and personal artifacts from a family property that was bought by the apartheid state and used as a prisoner camp. Jabulani Dhlamini revisits locations in the Sharpeville township connected to the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre. Finally, this article asserts that the landscape medium offers artists such as Bezuidenhout, Scholtz, and Dhlamini a space in which to mediate and engage the influence of the social documentary tradition in a post-apartheid art-making context—all while developing their identities as professional artists engaged in a global photographic dialog.","PeriodicalId":39970,"journal":{"name":"Photographies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43497464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2022.2060288
J. Scanlan
This article examines the work of late British photographer Raymond Moore (1920–1987) and the ways in which his images of landscapes and objects allow us to understand his work as being driven towards encounters with what I term uncertain places, which is to say places in transition or between states of being that also point the observer of these images to that which lies beyond even photographically-aided perception. This idea is further examined in terms of Moore’s acceptance that as a photographer he was but one element in a human-technological process, something that separated his work from the predominant trends in documentary realism that dominated public perceptions of photography during the late period of his career. The uncertain places of Moore’s photography, it is argued, matched his temperamental attitude towards his craft and his willingness to allow landscapes and objects, in a sense, to emerge or reveal themselves rather than objectifying or representing them in any conventional sense.
{"title":"Raymond Moore’s uncertain places","authors":"J. Scanlan","doi":"10.1080/17540763.2022.2060288","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2022.2060288","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the work of late British photographer Raymond Moore (1920–1987) and the ways in which his images of landscapes and objects allow us to understand his work as being driven towards encounters with what I term uncertain places, which is to say places in transition or between states of being that also point the observer of these images to that which lies beyond even photographically-aided perception. This idea is further examined in terms of Moore’s acceptance that as a photographer he was but one element in a human-technological process, something that separated his work from the predominant trends in documentary realism that dominated public perceptions of photography during the late period of his career. The uncertain places of Moore’s photography, it is argued, matched his temperamental attitude towards his craft and his willingness to allow landscapes and objects, in a sense, to emerge or reveal themselves rather than objectifying or representing them in any conventional sense.","PeriodicalId":39970,"journal":{"name":"Photographies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41801199","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2022.2060287
A. Peraica
Although mental illnesses and personality disorders are largely destigmatized in the contemporary age, some genres, such as self-portraiture and consequently selfies, are still framed in interpretation by diagnostic labeling. One of the disorders that was often taken into reference when approaching self-picturing is narcissism. However, such an approach to the visual genre is limiting its interpretation. This article analyses two sets of self-portrait photographs of a Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, who spent some time in psychiatric asylums. This episode divides his work into two phases. In the first period, Munch self-records his various actions in space, while in the second one, he focuses on his face and a static half-a-figure. While the first one is actively reinterpreting the world through the self-image, the second one is centering the self as the world itself. Rather than defining which sets are more narcissistic, this article proposes distinguishing between performative/extravert and contemplative/introvert definitions of self-pictures by defining anthropocentric and solipsistic self-portraits. Distinguishing between anthropocentric and solipsistic self-portraiture may have impact not only on analysis of Munch’s photographic and painterly self-portraits but also on the interpretation of contemporary genre of selfies as well.
{"title":"Anthropocentrism and solipsism in photographic self-portraits of Edvard Munch","authors":"A. Peraica","doi":"10.1080/17540763.2022.2060287","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2022.2060287","url":null,"abstract":"Although mental illnesses and personality disorders are largely destigmatized in the contemporary age, some genres, such as self-portraiture and consequently selfies, are still framed in interpretation by diagnostic labeling. One of the disorders that was often taken into reference when approaching self-picturing is narcissism. However, such an approach to the visual genre is limiting its interpretation. This article analyses two sets of self-portrait photographs of a Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, who spent some time in psychiatric asylums. This episode divides his work into two phases. In the first period, Munch self-records his various actions in space, while in the second one, he focuses on his face and a static half-a-figure. While the first one is actively reinterpreting the world through the self-image, the second one is centering the self as the world itself. Rather than defining which sets are more narcissistic, this article proposes distinguishing between performative/extravert and contemplative/introvert definitions of self-pictures by defining anthropocentric and solipsistic self-portraits. Distinguishing between anthropocentric and solipsistic self-portraiture may have impact not only on analysis of Munch’s photographic and painterly self-portraits but also on the interpretation of contemporary genre of selfies as well.","PeriodicalId":39970,"journal":{"name":"Photographies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42584003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2021.1986851
Erika Larsson
This article explores two works by Swedish artists Emanuel Cederqvist and Henrik Andersson that relate to the vast alpine areas of Norrland in the far north of Sweden. In both works, the artists relate their experiences of the area as it exists today as well as the layers of its history through both archival material and their own photographs. More specifically, both artists use material that show how the area was becoming an increaingly popular destination for researchers, explorers, and tourists in the beginning of the last century. Other archival material reveal aspects of military and colonial history as well as the history of the Sámi populations of the region. In the article, I explore these works and the multi-layered histories that they relate to with the help of Walter Benjamin’s version of historical materialism, in which history is approached through images in the present, rather than a narrative of events structured in chronological order. From this perspective, the history of the area is engaged with as physical and emotional, as well as cognitive, experiences, taking place in what Benjamin refers to as now-time, with associations that take off in many different directions.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2021.1979633
Boyoung Chang
Gwangju Story (1995) incorporates the diverse dimensions of reality surrounding the filming of a movie recreating the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, a democratic struggle against a martial law government that took place in Gwangju, Korea. For the reenactment, Gwangju citizens intermingled with actors and played the roles of protesters and soldiers. They were joined by civic groups demanding the truth about the event and policemen overseeing the filming. Hence, the past and the present intertwined, fact and fiction overlapped, and memories and personal experiences were incorporated into existing history. In contrast to this heightened complexity, Heinkuhn Oh’s photographs are muted documentary images, disguising their constructed nature by conveying uncertainty and lacking violence or drama. This paper associates this ambiguity with Korea’s transition to democracy in the 1990s, wherein the uprising began to be reevaluated as a heroic struggle for democracy. With this newly obtained liberty, the photographer embodied the unstable status of the event in Korean history and offered a critical response to the historicization currently in progress. The use of the medium in the series also marks a break with the past. Destabilizing the conventions of documentary-style photography, Gwangju Story demonstrates the expanded use of the medium in contemporary Korean photography.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2021.1986852
Philip Charrier, Shantel LaBar
This article explores Christer Strömholm’s depictions of trans women in his 1983 photobook Vännerna Från Place Blanche (Friends of Place Blanche). Specifically, it queries the inclusion of portraits that unmask his subjects’ projected trans identities in a work about friendship and solidarity with gender non-conformity. The first part of the article considers the photographer’s use of French Nouvelle Vague film stills as templates for his sixties’ era Place Blanche portraits. The photographs, provided to his subjects as gifts, depict them as movie heroines. Unlike comparable imagery produced by Parisian trans cabarets, the film still portraits do not undermine or qualify the women’s gender presentations. The second part of the article considers Strömholm’s artistic use of portraits where the women subtly or blatantly fail to “pass”. We argue that because the photographer represented himself artistically as an adventurous explorer of liminal peoples and places, and a collector of abject things, his project required that he “out” some of his subjects; otherwise, it would simply come across as unoriginal copying of cinematic still styles. The unmaskings were achieved variously, with a few full-frontal naked shots being the most direct and uncompromising.
本文探讨了Christer Strömholm在1983年出版的摄影书《布兰奇之友》(Vännerna Från Place Blanche)中对跨性别女性的描述。具体而言,它质疑在一部关于友谊和团结性别不合规的作品中是否包含揭露其拍摄对象投射的跨性别身份的肖像。文章的第一部分考虑了摄影师使用法国新流浪电影剧照作为他60年代Place Blanche肖像的模板。这些照片作为礼物提供给他的拍摄对象,将他们描绘成电影中的女主角。与巴黎跨性别卡巴莱制作的类似图像不同,这部电影的静态肖像并没有破坏或限制女性的性别表现。文章的第二部分考虑了Strömholm对肖像的艺术运用,在这些肖像中,女性微妙地或公然地未能“通过”。我们认为,因为摄影师在艺术上把自己描绘成一个对边缘民族和地方充满冒险精神的探险家,一个对卑鄙事物的收藏家,所以他的项目要求他“走出”一些主题;否则,它只会给人留下对电影静态风格的非原创复制的印象。揭开面纱的方式多种多样,其中几张正面全裸照片是最直接、最不妥协的。
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2021.1986854
Ariel Evans
This article surveys poet David Antin’s ideas about photography at the turn of the 1970s. Then-new Chair of the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego, Antin shepherded the department’s now-landmark photography program while also experimenting with photography himself as a medium for his philosophy and poetry. Closely reading the cover of Antin’s poetry book Talking (1972), I consider how Antin used photography to represent “real space” — to Antin, the pulse and texture of thinking and talking, its shifts and pauses in response to internal and environmental stimuli. Setting Talking alongside Antin’s critical essays of the same years, I argue that Antin was working toward an art of conversation; specifically, an attention to artist-audience relationships. I also suggest that Antin’s interest in representing the conversational offered an influential theory of photography that Antin’s mentees Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula (among others) elaborated in their landmark “reinvention of documentary” of the late 1970s-early 1980s.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2021.2018167
Philip Charrier, Shantel LaBar, H. Pereira, Allan Sekula, M. Rosler
The papers in this issue suggest a renewed interest in what used to be a dichotomy between the ‘politics of representation’ or the ‘representation of politics’. The debate seems no longer a dichotomy, the old distinction about either paying attention to the matter of the images themselves or the political subject represented are combined in new interrogative interests. Cherine Fahd tackles the image of the mother across different fields of media articulation in ‘The Mother Thing in Pictures: from Antagonism to Affection’. Philip Charrier Shantel LaBar considers the image of the trans body in the early 1980s photobook by Christer Strömhom. The 1980s figure again in Louise Bethlehem and Norma Musih’s essay on Afrapix collective photography of late-Apartheid South Africa. Boyoung Chang’s essay addresses absences and presences in Chinese photography of the 1990s. Hugo Silveira Pereira takes up the longer narrative of ‘progress’ in engineering and social infrastructure that photographers in Portugal were employed to supply. Ariel Evans considers the influential 1970s theoretical framing by the poet David Antin and impact photography and education in California and photography work informing later work by Alan Sekula, Martha Rosler and many others. Erica Larsson examines the representation of the Swedish Sarek alpine areas and the role of the photographic image in its public presentation. All of these papers, submitted independently to the journal, are informed by different traditions, locations and modes of argument, yet at the same time show a renewed interest in critical writings that engage with actual practices and their effects on the constitution and ‘social construction’ of the world. Perhaps one of the inadvertent effects of Covid-19 ‘lockdown’ is an increased attention to the question of the social image and its value? Later this year we shall be hosting our Third International Photographies conference, this time in Texas USA. See https://www.tandfonline.com/action/ newsAndOffers?journalCode=rpho20.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2021.1986855
Cherine Fahd
The maternal embrace is an iconic pose for women posing with children. Characteristic of mother and child depictions in Christianity, even contemporary images appear as loaded patriarchal symbols. This essay examines the taxonomy of the mother across a range of photographic images from 1920 to the present. Looking for representational alternatives to the passive, silent mother images that dominate photography and visual culture, I want to show the mother to be more diverse than widespread representations will have us believe. I find autobiographies and photographic self-portraits by ambivalent mothers, lesbian mothers, black mothers, and childless mothers. These offer new possibilities and critical voices often absent from feminist discourses that usually deride or celebrate motherhood in overly simplistic terms. In turn, I have sought to complicate representations of the mother and the maternal embrace by analysing my embodied experience of being her. As a photographer-mother, I have floundered between antagonism and affection toward pictures of women with children. In response, I transport the mother from one world of appearances to another: from the symbolic realm of passivity, stillness, softness and silence to the affective and embodied realm of touching seen in the close-up zoomed-in details of mother and child imagery.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2021.1979087
H. Pereira
Starting in 1850, Portugal embarked on a technical-scientific agenda (historically known as Fontism, after its main advocate, Fontes Pereira de Melo) that pursued the modernisation of the country or, in its broader sense, progress, until the turn of the twentieth century. These efforts were captured through the lens of a German photographer living in Portugal, Karl Emil Biel. For the purposes of this paper, I have analysed around 200 of Biel’s works in which he recorded progress in Portugal. I argue that Biel felt inspired by the sublime inherent to technology to create a technological landscape and a narrative of progress in Portugal, marked by a variety of icons of modernity, similar to those found in cities of Europe’s most advanced countries, especially structures that promoted mobility and contributed to the territorial appropriation of the peripheral provinces. Furthermore, I contend that the publication of his photographs in the illustrated press contributed to the dissemination of this technological landscape and this narrative of progress nationwide and to the promotion of a nationalism fuelled by technology. Finally, I speculate how the current uses of Biel’s photographs at public events still share similar notions of progress, based on technological modernity and sublime.
从1850年开始,葡萄牙开始了一项技术-科学议程(历史上被称为Fontes Pereira de Melo,以其主要倡导者命名),追求国家的现代化,或者从更广泛的意义上说,进步,直到20世纪之交。这些努力都是通过生活在葡萄牙的德国摄影师卡尔·埃米尔·比尔的镜头捕捉到的。为了本文的目的,我分析了大约200个Biel的作品,他记录了在葡萄牙的进展。我认为,Biel受到技术固有的崇高的启发,在葡萄牙创造了一个技术景观和进步的叙述,以各种现代化的标志为标志,类似于欧洲最先进国家的城市,特别是促进流动性和促进外围省份的领土占有的结构。此外,我认为,他的照片在插图报刊上的发表有助于传播这种技术景观和这种对全国进步的叙述,并促进了由技术推动的民族主义。最后,我推测目前在公共活动中使用的比尔的照片如何仍然共享类似的进步概念,基于技术现代性和崇高。
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