Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2021.1986853
L. Bethlehem, Norma Musih
Documentary photography has undergone a process of devaluation in post-apartheid South Africa. In response, Patricia Hayes has introduced the term “empty photographs” into the scholarly conversation, using it to designate images that have been derided as “‘bad,’ ‘boring,’ or repetitious” in post-apartheid settings (“The Uneven Citizenry,” 189). This article revisits a subset of such images to contest their seeming emptiness—pallbearers escorting dead activists to their graves during political funerals in late-apartheid South Africa. Focusing specifically on Afrapix photographer, Gille de Vlieg’s images of Themba Dlamini’s funeral in Driefontein in 1990, the paper restores their local history to view and unpacks the visual cultural and material cultural circuits of militant mourning in which they were embedded. It then uses various orders of metonymy in the visual field to comment on the “necropolitics” of the apartheid regime (Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”). The paper concludes with a reflection on Ariella Azoulay’s notion of the “civil gaze” (Civil Imagination) and considers what unfolds when a reckoning with the differential distribution of death that characterizes necropower reorients this faculty away from the individual photograph towards series, genre or corpus.
在种族隔离后的南非，纪实摄影经历了一个贬值的过程。作为回应，Patricia Hayes在学术对话中引入了“空照片”一词，用它来指代在后种族隔离环境中被嘲笑为“无聊”、“无聊”或重复的图像（《Uneven Citizenry》，189）。这篇文章重新审视了这类图像的一个子集，以对抗它们看似空虚的一面——在种族隔离晚期的南非，抬棺人在政治葬礼上护送死去的活动家走向坟墓。本文特别关注非洲裔摄影师Gille de Vlieg 1990年在Driefontein拍摄的Themba Dlamini葬礼的照片，还原了他们当地的历史，以观察和揭示他们所处的激进哀悼的视觉文化和物质文化回路。然后，它在视野中使用了各种转喻顺序来评论种族隔离政权的“亡灵政治”（Achille Mbembe，“亡灵政治学”）。最后，本文反思了Ariella Azoulay的“公民凝视”（公民想象）概念，并考虑了当对死亡的差异分布进行清算时会发生什么，这种差异分布是死亡力量的特征，将这种能力从个人照片转向系列、流派或语料库。
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Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2021.1960412
Liz Watkins
Photographic records of early 1900s polar expeditions encapsulated a paradox: the spectacle of “monotonous” “numbing whiteness” in images of “nothing” that were intended for public exhibition. This article examines expedition photography as an ecosystem of materials and meanings to reconsider the status of the “failed” photographic experiments that have remained sublimate to the iconic images of polar exploration. Light sensitive materials — photographic emulsion layered onto glass plates and strips of flexible transparent celluloid nitrate film — are integral to the registration of the image. However, these materials are also susceptible to the effects of humidity, touch and variations in temperature. Anomalies, such as details that were effaced by overexposure to light and watermarks registered the effects of labour in a polar climate These “failed photographic plates were occluded from exhibition, yet remain integral to the ideation of the incomprehensible in polar expedition narratives. In this context, experimental and “failed” images can be read as part of an ecosystem of interactions and begins to decipher the popularity of Ponting’s 1911 photograph “Ice-Blink”, the image of a seemingly featureless ocean horizon, as the commodification of “nothing” in discursive spaces of exhibition.
{"title":"The Spectacle of “Nothing”: the image, material, and object in a photographic ecosystem of Antarctica","authors":"Liz Watkins","doi":"10.1080/17540763.2021.1960412","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2021.1960412","url":null,"abstract":"Photographic records of early 1900s polar expeditions encapsulated a paradox: the spectacle of “monotonous” “numbing whiteness” in images of “nothing” that were intended for public exhibition. This article examines expedition photography as an ecosystem of materials and meanings to reconsider the status of the “failed” photographic experiments that have remained sublimate to the iconic images of polar exploration. Light sensitive materials — photographic emulsion layered onto glass plates and strips of flexible transparent celluloid nitrate film — are integral to the registration of the image. However, these materials are also susceptible to the effects of humidity, touch and variations in temperature. Anomalies, such as details that were effaced by overexposure to light and watermarks registered the effects of labour in a polar climate These “failed photographic plates were occluded from exhibition, yet remain integral to the ideation of the incomprehensible in polar expedition narratives. In this context, experimental and “failed” images can be read as part of an ecosystem of interactions and begins to decipher the popularity of Ponting’s 1911 photograph “Ice-Blink”, the image of a seemingly featureless ocean horizon, as the commodification of “nothing” in discursive spaces of exhibition.","PeriodicalId":39970,"journal":{"name":"Photographies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41686312","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 : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2021.1961847
Niharika Dinkar
Bengal light was among the earliest commercial sources of artificial lighting for photographic use, patented as Photogen in February 1857. Essentially, a pyrotechnic flare whose vital ingredient was saltpeter, it was mined by low caste laborers in Bengal, which had emerged as the leading global producer of saltpeter by the eighteenth century. Saltpeter was a coveted global commodity because it served as the primary material for the manufacture of gunpowder and also had wide-ranging industrial applications. Its use for photography provides an early instance of the commodification and trade in lighting technologies and materials, challenging dominant assumptions about photographic light as a freely available natural resource accessible to all. It asserts the presence of artificial lighting in early photography to contest invocations to the sun and divine light that dominate characterizations of the period. Finally, saltpeter ties early photographic lighting into a wider imperial trade of commodities for war, to further cement the analogies between the camera and the gun noted in many photographic studies. Encapsulated in its use is an imperial history of global trade that hinged on extraction of natural sources, colonial labor, and alliances between military and industrial technologies of light.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2021.1959387
J. McKim
Computer art emerged in the 1950s and 60s as a strange hybrid of analogue and digital technologies. Although not always acknowledged, photography plays an important role within this early history. During a period when computers were first being coaxed into generating images, photography was often a necessary technology of capture for screen and projection effects that would otherwise remain undocumented. Photography served as the preservational memory of these early visual experiments. This essay will consider two examples of early computer art documented photographically: Ben F. Laposky’s “Oscillon” works (produced with an analogue oscilloscope) and the digital images produced by A. Michael Noll at Bell Labs. These early examples of computer art are images that reveal the porous boundaries between science and art, the analogue and the digital, the computational and the photographic. They offer an important precedent to our current moment of digital post-photography, in which the technological status and very definition of the photographic is under review. These early moments of computer art encourage us to consider the complex nature of digital images and the complex material infrastructures involved in their creation, preservation and distribution.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2021.1957003
P. Buse
This article explores “the play element in photography”, to adapt a key phrase from Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938). The context for this exploration is the melancholic paradigm that dominates much of contemporary writing and thinking about vernacular or popular photography, a paradigm that emphasises memory, death and mourning, at the expense of other practices and dispositions, not least the ludic. It notes that the existing literature on photography and play concentrates almost entirely on humorous images: optical jokes, trick photography, and a wide variety of distorted pictures. But play is an activity, a practice, as much as it is a product or an outcome. In other words, the ludic in photography is not just a quality of the object photographed, but of a photographic doing. Following this principle, the article shows the ways in which key modes of play such as competition, chance, make-believe and vertigo, are at work in photographic practices old and new, including in the aerostatic photography of Félix Nadar, with which it begins and ends.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2021.1960411
Elizabeth Howie
Michael “Nick” Nichols’s 2012 portrait of the 3200-year old, 247-foot tall giant sequoia named the President, the second largest tree known, for National Geographic, comprised of 126 separate photographs which have been digitally combined to make one image, challenges cultural plant-blindness and confronts the ethics of representation of plants, in particular trees, when the images are printed on plant-based paper. Neither art nor scientific illustration, the photojournalistic image draws connections between trees and photography, and both individualizes the tree and metaphorically references the biocommunity in which it participates. Nichols’s approach to the portrait, which recognized the intimacy between himself, his team, and the tree, draws attention to plant sentience. The materiality of the image, published as a fold-out poster printed on paper that includes tree content, has the capacity to alert the viewer to the ethics of plant representation.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2021.1957005
Howard Caygill
The recent surge of interest in the sensory, cognitive and communicative strategies of plant life and the development of neurobotany and phyto-philosophy resumes a debate that briefly flourished in the early twentieth century. Francis Darwin and Gottlieb Haberland then proposed that plants possessed vision and memory, a position rapidly abandoned until its recent revival. A striking contribution to the earlier debate was botanist Harold Wager’s showing of a series of photographs purported to have been taken using lens extracted from plant leaf epidermis. The article will reflect on the status of this photographic practice, in which plants are posed as the photographing subject rather than photographed object, and consider its wider implications for non-human photographic practices.
{"title":"Harold Wager and the photography of plants","authors":"Howard Caygill","doi":"10.1080/17540763.2021.1957005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2021.1957005","url":null,"abstract":"The recent surge of interest in the sensory, cognitive and communicative strategies of plant life and the development of neurobotany and phyto-philosophy resumes a debate that briefly flourished in the early twentieth century. Francis Darwin and Gottlieb Haberland then proposed that plants possessed vision and memory, a position rapidly abandoned until its recent revival. A striking contribution to the earlier debate was botanist Harold Wager’s showing of a series of photographs purported to have been taken using lens extracted from plant leaf epidermis. The article will reflect on the status of this photographic practice, in which plants are posed as the photographing subject rather than photographed object, and consider its wider implications for non-human photographic practices.","PeriodicalId":39970,"journal":{"name":"Photographies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43944038","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 : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2021.1957004
Tomáš Dvořák, J. Parikka
This article investigates relationships between photography and measuring. It outlines main types of visual measurement within scientific photography (such as spectroscopy or photogrammetry) and proposes to broaden the analysis by understanding measuring as a visual cultural technique, which has a particular reach outside scientific institutions and uses. Here it connects arguments from media theory with questions of photography and argues that the centrality of measurement and metrics can be backtracked from current focus on questions of digital data to earlier techniques and discourses of visuality. It traces the conjunctions between the practices of imaging and measuring in the Renaissance, offering a genealogy that aligns photography with acts and processes of measuring, comparison, standardization and scaling as both their effect and cause. Making or looking at photographs always implies sighting, gauging, measuring and co-measuring, which as cultural techniques can be approached as recursive chains of operations.
{"title":"Measuring photographs","authors":"Tomáš Dvořák, J. Parikka","doi":"10.1080/17540763.2021.1957004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2021.1957004","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates relationships between photography and measuring. It outlines main types of visual measurement within scientific photography (such as spectroscopy or photogrammetry) and proposes to broaden the analysis by understanding measuring as a visual cultural technique, which has a particular reach outside scientific institutions and uses. Here it connects arguments from media theory with questions of photography and argues that the centrality of measurement and metrics can be backtracked from current focus on questions of digital data to earlier techniques and discourses of visuality. It traces the conjunctions between the practices of imaging and measuring in the Renaissance, offering a genealogy that aligns photography with acts and processes of measuring, comparison, standardization and scaling as both their effect and cause. Making or looking at photographs always implies sighting, gauging, measuring and co-measuring, which as cultural techniques can be approached as recursive chains of operations.","PeriodicalId":39970,"journal":{"name":"Photographies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47335323","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 : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2021.1962230
M. Henning, J. Mikuriya
Why do heliotropes move together with the sun, selenotropes with the moon, moving around to the extent of their ability with the luminaries of the cosmos? All things pray according to their own order and sing hymns, either intellectually or rationally or naturally or sensibly, to heads 10 of entire chains. And since the heliotrope is also moved towards that to which it readily opens, if anyone hears it striking the air as it moves about, he perceives in the sound that it offers to the king of the hymn that a plant can sing. Proclus, On the Priestly Art According to the Greeks.
{"title":"Light sensitive material: an introduction","authors":"M. Henning, J. Mikuriya","doi":"10.1080/17540763.2021.1962230","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2021.1962230","url":null,"abstract":"Why do heliotropes move together with the sun, selenotropes with the moon, moving around to the extent of their ability with the luminaries of the cosmos? All things pray according to their own order and sing hymns, either intellectually or rationally or naturally or sensibly, to heads 10 of entire chains. And since the heliotrope is also moved towards that to which it readily opens, if anyone hears it striking the air as it moves about, he perceives in the sound that it offers to the king of the hymn that a plant can sing. Proclus, On the Priestly Art According to the Greeks.","PeriodicalId":39970,"journal":{"name":"Photographies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44035139","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}
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