Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2022.2069657
Wendy A. Woloson
ABSTRACT This article explores the quickening pace of visual time in the nineteenth century from ‘slow’ portrayals, evidenced in long series showing gradual change over time, to ‘fast’ visual time conveyed through ‘before-and-after’ jump cuts. Drawing from film studies, it argues that popular image makers not only played a central role in creating innovative ways to represent people’s new experiences of accelerated time, but also, in the process, contributed to that acceleration themselves. Often using state-of-the-art printing and distribution technologies, image makers exposed Americans, and particularly nascent consumers, to ever-more-sophisticated forms of commercial representations that helped not only to accustom them to the faster pace and disorientation of mass transportation, communications, and production but also to embrace it. Radically different from their pictorial precursors, before-and-after images, which became common visual tropes late in the century, were key to this new temporality. Because they compressed time by distilling its passage into two succinct images – using what film historians refer to as ‘the cut’ – these illustrations did not simply function as innovative forms of commercial information selling specific goods. More significantly, they encouraged consumers to place themselves at the center of a much larger story of modernity, progress, and transformation.
{"title":"Moving at the speed of sight: before-and-after imagery in nineteenth-century American print culture and the acceleration of visual time","authors":"Wendy A. Woloson","doi":"10.1080/17460654.2022.2069657","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2022.2069657","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores the quickening pace of visual time in the nineteenth century from ‘slow’ portrayals, evidenced in long series showing gradual change over time, to ‘fast’ visual time conveyed through ‘before-and-after’ jump cuts. Drawing from film studies, it argues that popular image makers not only played a central role in creating innovative ways to represent people’s new experiences of accelerated time, but also, in the process, contributed to that acceleration themselves. Often using state-of-the-art printing and distribution technologies, image makers exposed Americans, and particularly nascent consumers, to ever-more-sophisticated forms of commercial representations that helped not only to accustom them to the faster pace and disorientation of mass transportation, communications, and production but also to embrace it. Radically different from their pictorial precursors, before-and-after images, which became common visual tropes late in the century, were key to this new temporality. Because they compressed time by distilling its passage into two succinct images – using what film historians refer to as ‘the cut’ – these illustrations did not simply function as innovative forms of commercial information selling specific goods. More significantly, they encouraged consumers to place themselves at the center of a much larger story of modernity, progress, and transformation.","PeriodicalId":42697,"journal":{"name":"Early Popular Visual Culture","volume":"57 1","pages":"98 - 135"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73655696","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2022.2065726
Saumya Agarwal
ABSTRACT This article uses depictions of mechanical clocks in wall paintings of the Shekhawati region in Rajasthan to study the transition to a mechanized temporal order in a context that was both linked to cosmopolitan trade cities and separate from them. At one level, an increased visual citation of the mechanical timepiece is proof of an increased influence of clock time, while the diversity in these depictions highlights the multiple perceptions of the most visible artefact of a new temporal order. Tracing the development in depictions of temporality in the paintings from 1750 onwards, the article also explores the continuities and breaks with depictions of time pre-dating the introduction of imperial clock time (which only gained influence in the region towards the end of the nineteenth century). Moving beyond treating the paintings as sources of historical enquiry and traces of historical change, the article focusses on the decorative qualities of the wall paintings, as well as the ornamental aspect of the mechanical time-piece, to explore their agency in mediating attitudes towards a new temporal framework.
{"title":"The auspicious and the mechanized: exploring transitions in temporalities through the wall paintings of Shekhawati (1750–1940)","authors":"Saumya Agarwal","doi":"10.1080/17460654.2022.2065726","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2022.2065726","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article uses depictions of mechanical clocks in wall paintings of the Shekhawati region in Rajasthan to study the transition to a mechanized temporal order in a context that was both linked to cosmopolitan trade cities and separate from them. At one level, an increased visual citation of the mechanical timepiece is proof of an increased influence of clock time, while the diversity in these depictions highlights the multiple perceptions of the most visible artefact of a new temporal order. Tracing the development in depictions of temporality in the paintings from 1750 onwards, the article also explores the continuities and breaks with depictions of time pre-dating the introduction of imperial clock time (which only gained influence in the region towards the end of the nineteenth century). Moving beyond treating the paintings as sources of historical enquiry and traces of historical change, the article focusses on the decorative qualities of the wall paintings, as well as the ornamental aspect of the mechanical time-piece, to explore their agency in mediating attitudes towards a new temporal framework.","PeriodicalId":42697,"journal":{"name":"Early Popular Visual Culture","volume":"23 1","pages":"166 - 205"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87392209","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2022.2072564
Baird Jarman
ABSTRACT Scholars of cinema history have long identified the variety-theater tradition of lightning artistry among the most crucial influences upon the emergence of motion-picture animation. This article looks specifically at the work of the prominent illustrator and animator Winsor McCay, and examines his popular vaudeville routine entitled “The Seven Ages of Man”, first performed in June 1906, both as an innovative lightning-sketch routine and as a proving ground for his trailblazing techniques of motion-picture animation. The article surveys the history of the lightning-sketch performance mode prior to McCay, then considers what can be gleaned about McCay’s own theatrical career as a lightning artist from written descriptions of his vaudeville appearances, and concludes with a discussion of how McCay’s years of frequent lightning-sketch performances may have influenced his approach to cinematic animation.
{"title":"Drawing time: Winsor McCay’s lightning sketches on stage and screen","authors":"Baird Jarman","doi":"10.1080/17460654.2022.2072564","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2022.2072564","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Scholars of cinema history have long identified the variety-theater tradition of lightning artistry among the most crucial influences upon the emergence of motion-picture animation. This article looks specifically at the work of the prominent illustrator and animator Winsor McCay, and examines his popular vaudeville routine entitled “The Seven Ages of Man”, first performed in June 1906, both as an innovative lightning-sketch routine and as a proving ground for his trailblazing techniques of motion-picture animation. The article surveys the history of the lightning-sketch performance mode prior to McCay, then considers what can be gleaned about McCay’s own theatrical career as a lightning artist from written descriptions of his vaudeville appearances, and concludes with a discussion of how McCay’s years of frequent lightning-sketch performances may have influenced his approach to cinematic animation.","PeriodicalId":42697,"journal":{"name":"Early Popular Visual Culture","volume":"20 1","pages":"136 - 165"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89668365","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-30DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2022.2075106
Justin T. Clark, A. McCrossen
When the Colgate Company began advertising its roll-on shaving soap dispenser in 1914, its advertisers experimented with a narrative form as novel as the ‘Magic Shaving Stick’ itself. Over the course of three dozen sequential panels of image and text, the protagonist of “A MOVING PICTURE: The Conversion of Mr. Prejudice” (Figure 1) decides to abandon his old-fashioned shaving brush for Colgate’s Shaving Stick. The use of an invented character as an avatar for the consumer was a bold if not entirely original move. The potential of the gimmick had been proven a decade earlier, by the successful licensing of comic strip star Buster Brown’s name and image to countless businesses across the nation (see Gordon 1995, 58–61). Mr. Prejudice and Buster Brown joined a large cast of trademarked characters who began to appear in American advertising in the 1890s (see Strasser 1989, 115–121). The truer breakthrough of “A MOVING PICTURE” lay in its manipulation of narrative time. Along with its close-up panels, the advertisement used cinematic intertitles to transition through time and space, moving the action forward, for instance, through its twenty-first panel: ‘Next day after shaving Mr. Prejudice sees much lather left in his mug’. The Colgate Shaving Stick advertisement, through the juxtaposition in its opening sequences of two scenes unfolding at the same time, gestures toward simultaneity. After eleven panels reveal Mr. Prejudice’s old-fashioned shaving routine, a second sequence of only five panels shows his son Tom’s similar but faster routine with Colgate’s Shaving Stick. The unequal number of panels devoted to the shaving routines of father and son implicitly demonstrates the Shaving Stick’s time-saving properties. A freshly shaven Tom arrives at the family breakfast table in panel fifteen; when the next panel shows his father lumbering in, the hands on the mantle clock have leapt forward fifteen minutes. The quasi-jump-cut between panels, precisely indexed to the clock image, was itself pioneered only a few years earlier by films such as D.W. Griffith’s The Fatal Hour (1908). “A MOVING PICTURE” offers an early instance of an advertisement narrating two simultaneous actions, while indicating their differing speeds with a moving clock. Although somewhat novel in its form, “A MOVING PICTURE” is but one of many early twentieth-century advertisements to make pitches related to the multilayered time consciousness of North American consumers. This archive feature offers a brief tour of
{"title":"Deploying ‘all[-]important moments’: seeing time in Duke University’s collections of early North American advertisements","authors":"Justin T. Clark, A. McCrossen","doi":"10.1080/17460654.2022.2075106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2022.2075106","url":null,"abstract":"When the Colgate Company began advertising its roll-on shaving soap dispenser in 1914, its advertisers experimented with a narrative form as novel as the ‘Magic Shaving Stick’ itself. Over the course of three dozen sequential panels of image and text, the protagonist of “A MOVING PICTURE: The Conversion of Mr. Prejudice” (Figure 1) decides to abandon his old-fashioned shaving brush for Colgate’s Shaving Stick. The use of an invented character as an avatar for the consumer was a bold if not entirely original move. The potential of the gimmick had been proven a decade earlier, by the successful licensing of comic strip star Buster Brown’s name and image to countless businesses across the nation (see Gordon 1995, 58–61). Mr. Prejudice and Buster Brown joined a large cast of trademarked characters who began to appear in American advertising in the 1890s (see Strasser 1989, 115–121). The truer breakthrough of “A MOVING PICTURE” lay in its manipulation of narrative time. Along with its close-up panels, the advertisement used cinematic intertitles to transition through time and space, moving the action forward, for instance, through its twenty-first panel: ‘Next day after shaving Mr. Prejudice sees much lather left in his mug’. The Colgate Shaving Stick advertisement, through the juxtaposition in its opening sequences of two scenes unfolding at the same time, gestures toward simultaneity. After eleven panels reveal Mr. Prejudice’s old-fashioned shaving routine, a second sequence of only five panels shows his son Tom’s similar but faster routine with Colgate’s Shaving Stick. The unequal number of panels devoted to the shaving routines of father and son implicitly demonstrates the Shaving Stick’s time-saving properties. A freshly shaven Tom arrives at the family breakfast table in panel fifteen; when the next panel shows his father lumbering in, the hands on the mantle clock have leapt forward fifteen minutes. The quasi-jump-cut between panels, precisely indexed to the clock image, was itself pioneered only a few years earlier by films such as D.W. Griffith’s The Fatal Hour (1908). “A MOVING PICTURE” offers an early instance of an advertisement narrating two simultaneous actions, while indicating their differing speeds with a moving clock. Although somewhat novel in its form, “A MOVING PICTURE” is but one of many early twentieth-century advertisements to make pitches related to the multilayered time consciousness of North American consumers. This archive feature offers a brief tour of","PeriodicalId":42697,"journal":{"name":"Early Popular Visual Culture","volume":"59 1","pages":"275 - 289"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79538762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-30DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2022.2072563
A. McCrossen, J. T. Clark
How does time make itself evident? The easy answer is to point toward timekeepers. Chronicles trade in epochal time of years, decades, and centuries; calendars pinpoint dates, days, and weeks; mechanical timekeepers indicate hours, minutes, and seconds; and the sun’s position in the sky tells us whether it is morning, afternoon, or night. We see the time when we consult these various devices. This special issue about “Seeing Time” is not focused on the innumerable ways that people have told the time; instead, it addresses representations of time as both an object (a fixed moment conveyed by a timekeeper) and as a subject (a variable agent whose passage in and of itself may effect change). The distinction between the two is often elusive. As Roland Barthes famously observed, photography simultaneously a) conveys the viewer’s distance from a past moment and b) induces a hallucinatory experience of that moment as still present, something ‘false on the level of perception, true on the level of time’ (115). That duality extends beyond photography into other visual media, as one might gather from the cover image of this special issue (see also Figure 1). Instead of the modern age’s ubiquitous clock-watcher gazing at a timepiece, Man Ray’s sculpture presents the timepiece as returning the viewer’s gaze (for more about clock-watchers see Sauter 2007; McCrossen 2013, 18–31 and 41–62; for more about clocks as objects see Birth 2012). Man Ray meant for the metronome to remind him of time’s relentless beat, duration, and passage. He paperclipped the eye to the metronome’s hand to underscore his sense that time literally kept him under watch, unblinkingly rendering its judgment. First created in 1923, and originally titled “Object to be Destroyed”, it appears here in the form of its 1964 replica, of which a hundred copies were made. The new title, “Indestructible Object”, announces the sculpture’s refusal to remain within the past (for its complex history, see Lee 1999; Mileaf 2004). While the work objectifies specific moments of the past – those signified by the date of its creation, recreation, and documentation – it also casts its unblinking gaze on the viewer’s ever-shifting present. Another way of acknowledging time’s dual role as the object and subject of representation is to observe that the visual representation of time itself has a history. That history is the subject of this special issue. “Seeing Time” explores some of the many different ways that early popular visual culture made its audiences aware of the many opportunities and imperatives to tell the time, even as time altered those opportunities and imperatives. Each essay in the issue addresses the long nineteenth century, the period during which
{"title":"Seeing time","authors":"A. McCrossen, J. T. Clark","doi":"10.1080/17460654.2022.2072563","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2022.2072563","url":null,"abstract":"How does time make itself evident? The easy answer is to point toward timekeepers. Chronicles trade in epochal time of years, decades, and centuries; calendars pinpoint dates, days, and weeks; mechanical timekeepers indicate hours, minutes, and seconds; and the sun’s position in the sky tells us whether it is morning, afternoon, or night. We see the time when we consult these various devices. This special issue about “Seeing Time” is not focused on the innumerable ways that people have told the time; instead, it addresses representations of time as both an object (a fixed moment conveyed by a timekeeper) and as a subject (a variable agent whose passage in and of itself may effect change). The distinction between the two is often elusive. As Roland Barthes famously observed, photography simultaneously a) conveys the viewer’s distance from a past moment and b) induces a hallucinatory experience of that moment as still present, something ‘false on the level of perception, true on the level of time’ (115). That duality extends beyond photography into other visual media, as one might gather from the cover image of this special issue (see also Figure 1). Instead of the modern age’s ubiquitous clock-watcher gazing at a timepiece, Man Ray’s sculpture presents the timepiece as returning the viewer’s gaze (for more about clock-watchers see Sauter 2007; McCrossen 2013, 18–31 and 41–62; for more about clocks as objects see Birth 2012). Man Ray meant for the metronome to remind him of time’s relentless beat, duration, and passage. He paperclipped the eye to the metronome’s hand to underscore his sense that time literally kept him under watch, unblinkingly rendering its judgment. First created in 1923, and originally titled “Object to be Destroyed”, it appears here in the form of its 1964 replica, of which a hundred copies were made. The new title, “Indestructible Object”, announces the sculpture’s refusal to remain within the past (for its complex history, see Lee 1999; Mileaf 2004). While the work objectifies specific moments of the past – those signified by the date of its creation, recreation, and documentation – it also casts its unblinking gaze on the viewer’s ever-shifting present. Another way of acknowledging time’s dual role as the object and subject of representation is to observe that the visual representation of time itself has a history. That history is the subject of this special issue. “Seeing Time” explores some of the many different ways that early popular visual culture made its audiences aware of the many opportunities and imperatives to tell the time, even as time altered those opportunities and imperatives. Each essay in the issue addresses the long nineteenth century, the period during which","PeriodicalId":42697,"journal":{"name":"Early Popular Visual Culture","volume":"33 1","pages":"93 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83736748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-30DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2022.2065732
Justin T. Clark
ABSTRACT In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to the histories of waiting, particularly in medicine, business, politics, and culture. This essay contributes to that history by tracing the evolving visual representation of waiting in popular American culture between 1870 and 1930. As contemporary illustrators, photographers and artists interpreted a metropolitan landscape populated by waiting subjects, they helped inscribe an increasingly routine experience with an enduring set of meanings – efficiency, convenience, equality, comfort, and alienation, for instance – while at the same time drawing upon and reinventing older visual traditions of social representation. The original subjects of waiting imagery were queues, which cartoonists and sketch artists used to imagine the shifting boundaries of citizenship. As urban realism and ‘muckraking’ came into vogue in the century’s final decades, the imagery of waiting shifted from allegorical queues to literal scenes of migration, poverty and unemployment. In the twentieth century, the archetypal scene of waiting shifted once again, this time to a more consumer-oriented landscape of monumental railroad stations, department store waiting rooms, and private and public bureaucratic spaces. By the 1920s, this article concludes, waiting imagery had transitioned from a tool of critique – a means of articulating social crisis – into a common advertising trope. This article attempts a thematic rather than formal analysis of the origins of that trope, in order to reveal how slowness, as much as speed and acceleration, became an essential part of the modernizing United States’ self-image.
{"title":"Motionless pictures: the waiting public in popular American visual culture, 1870-1930","authors":"Justin T. Clark","doi":"10.1080/17460654.2022.2065732","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2022.2065732","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to the histories of waiting, particularly in medicine, business, politics, and culture. This essay contributes to that history by tracing the evolving visual representation of waiting in popular American culture between 1870 and 1930. As contemporary illustrators, photographers and artists interpreted a metropolitan landscape populated by waiting subjects, they helped inscribe an increasingly routine experience with an enduring set of meanings – efficiency, convenience, equality, comfort, and alienation, for instance – while at the same time drawing upon and reinventing older visual traditions of social representation. The original subjects of waiting imagery were queues, which cartoonists and sketch artists used to imagine the shifting boundaries of citizenship. As urban realism and ‘muckraking’ came into vogue in the century’s final decades, the imagery of waiting shifted from allegorical queues to literal scenes of migration, poverty and unemployment. In the twentieth century, the archetypal scene of waiting shifted once again, this time to a more consumer-oriented landscape of monumental railroad stations, department store waiting rooms, and private and public bureaucratic spaces. By the 1920s, this article concludes, waiting imagery had transitioned from a tool of critique – a means of articulating social crisis – into a common advertising trope. This article attempts a thematic rather than formal analysis of the origins of that trope, in order to reveal how slowness, as much as speed and acceleration, became an essential part of the modernizing United States’ self-image.","PeriodicalId":42697,"journal":{"name":"Early Popular Visual Culture","volume":"56 1","pages":"235 - 274"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74996821","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-12DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2022.2065727
Mikko Toivanen
ABSTRACT The article examines the uses of visual culture and visual representations of time in two major public anniversaries in nineteenth-century colonial Southeast Asia: the 35th anniversary of Singapore in 1854 and the 250th anniversary of Batavia (now Jakarta) in 1869. The authorities in these two major colonial cities, capitals of the British Straits Settlements and the Dutch East Indies respectively, made use of these occasions to celebrate colonial rule, but also to project specific and contrasting messages to their intended audiences. These messages were embodied in a range of visual cues, representations, and events throughout the anniversary programmes, including images, sculptures, decorations, architecture, theatrical performances, and balls. Analysing this range of visual materials and focusing on the fleeting and spatially specific experience of the ceremonies rather than durable material representations, this article shows that the two anniversaries embodied strikingly different conceptualisations of historical time and imperial self-fashioning: one broadly presentist and forward-looking, the other far more past-oriented. Connecting these cultural differences to the diverging historical circumstances of the two colonies at the time, the article argues that imperial visual culture, especially in relation to practices of commemoration, was both global and transnational in its re-employment of metropolitan models on the one hand and highly locally specific on the other, responding to needs that were specific to the time and the place.
{"title":"Putting imperial time on show: visual culture in the mid-nineteenth-century anniversaries of Singapore and Batavia","authors":"Mikko Toivanen","doi":"10.1080/17460654.2022.2065727","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2022.2065727","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The article examines the uses of visual culture and visual representations of time in two major public anniversaries in nineteenth-century colonial Southeast Asia: the 35th anniversary of Singapore in 1854 and the 250th anniversary of Batavia (now Jakarta) in 1869. The authorities in these two major colonial cities, capitals of the British Straits Settlements and the Dutch East Indies respectively, made use of these occasions to celebrate colonial rule, but also to project specific and contrasting messages to their intended audiences. These messages were embodied in a range of visual cues, representations, and events throughout the anniversary programmes, including images, sculptures, decorations, architecture, theatrical performances, and balls. Analysing this range of visual materials and focusing on the fleeting and spatially specific experience of the ceremonies rather than durable material representations, this article shows that the two anniversaries embodied strikingly different conceptualisations of historical time and imperial self-fashioning: one broadly presentist and forward-looking, the other far more past-oriented. Connecting these cultural differences to the diverging historical circumstances of the two colonies at the time, the article argues that imperial visual culture, especially in relation to practices of commemoration, was both global and transnational in its re-employment of metropolitan models on the one hand and highly locally specific on the other, responding to needs that were specific to the time and the place.","PeriodicalId":42697,"journal":{"name":"Early Popular Visual Culture","volume":"29 1","pages":"206 - 234"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87147003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-09DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2022.2067206
J. Horrocks
ABSTRACT For most of the nineteenth century, letterpress design in Britain followed conventions established in the pre-industrial era, paying little attention to matters of colour, form, and display. Decorative typefaces competed with a profusion of type ornaments, leaving job printing, especially, with no visual logic in its composition. In the final decades of the century, however, some Victorian printers began to search for aesthetic principles that could do two things: reform letterpress design, and teach the public to embrace this new style of composition. Their search led printers to the tenets of design reform, popularized by Henry Cole and his coterie of artists and designers at mid-century. While design reformers discussed printing solely in terms of factory-produced commodities on which designs were stamped (fabrics, wallpapers, tiles, etc.), the principles guiding their notions of morally- and economically-uplifting visual display were well-suited for adaptation to letterpress design. Key to the dissemination of these ideas throughout the printing trade became a globe-spanning project called the Printers’ International Specimen Exchange. For nearly twenty years, reform-minded printers near and far exchanged letterpress specimens with each other via the PISE. This effort united participants in a global fraternity of fellow-tradesmen, popularized new technologies and printing techniques, and spread the gospel of design reform. In this way, the PISE became a nineteenth-century grammar of typography, a sourcebook of design principles and exemplary practices that turned letterpress printers toward the horizon of professional graphic design. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT
{"title":"The grammar of typography: The Printers’ International Specimen Exchange and Victorian letterpress design reform","authors":"J. Horrocks","doi":"10.1080/17460654.2022.2067206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2022.2067206","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT For most of the nineteenth century, letterpress design in Britain followed conventions established in the pre-industrial era, paying little attention to matters of colour, form, and display. Decorative typefaces competed with a profusion of type ornaments, leaving job printing, especially, with no visual logic in its composition. In the final decades of the century, however, some Victorian printers began to search for aesthetic principles that could do two things: reform letterpress design, and teach the public to embrace this new style of composition. Their search led printers to the tenets of design reform, popularized by Henry Cole and his coterie of artists and designers at mid-century. While design reformers discussed printing solely in terms of factory-produced commodities on which designs were stamped (fabrics, wallpapers, tiles, etc.), the principles guiding their notions of morally- and economically-uplifting visual display were well-suited for adaptation to letterpress design. Key to the dissemination of these ideas throughout the printing trade became a globe-spanning project called the Printers’ International Specimen Exchange. For nearly twenty years, reform-minded printers near and far exchanged letterpress specimens with each other via the PISE. This effort united participants in a global fraternity of fellow-tradesmen, popularized new technologies and printing techniques, and spread the gospel of design reform. In this way, the PISE became a nineteenth-century grammar of typography, a sourcebook of design principles and exemplary practices that turned letterpress printers toward the horizon of professional graphic design. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT","PeriodicalId":42697,"journal":{"name":"Early Popular Visual Culture","volume":"14 1","pages":"339 - 367"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90546976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-25DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2022.2064322
D. Klahr
ABSTRACT Between the invention of photography and the advent of film there arose a singular visual medium: tissue paper stereoviews of the 1860s that permitted the viewer to change a scene from greyscale and unilluminated to colour and illuminated when viewed through a stereoscope. These dual images, photographed using a camera with two lenses, were printed, hand-coloured, and perforated on layers of tissue paper and then placed side-by-side in cardboard mounts. The shifts along the greyscale/color unilluminated/illuminated continua merely depended upon the angle of light striking the stereoview, and the viewer could vary the pace and direction of the transformation. Objects did not move, but intensely three-dimensional scenes of receding planes of depth changed at will, sometimes depicting a shift from day to night, but often producing ambiguous scenes that challenged such a binary division of time. The narrative and temporal fluidities that tissue paper made possible differentiated these stereoviews from their counterparts produced on glass or card stock. The seamless, silent, flicker-free transformation of scenes offered viewers a deeply immersive, three-dimensional visual experience that was distinctly different from the plethora of mechanical animated stereoscopes that arose at the same time. Likewise, it was different from dioramas because unlike those communal visual experiences, the tissue paper stereoview experience was entirely in control of the user. Because the shifts back and forth between greyscale and colour comprise the most salient feature of the medium, experience glancing toward the colouring of early film stock that can help establish a frame of reference in which to assess tissue paper stereoviews. It is for this reason that an analysis of applied colour of early film is pulled into the discussion.
{"title":"Shifting scenes of colouration and illumination: the narrative and temporal fluidities of tissue paper stereoviews","authors":"D. Klahr","doi":"10.1080/17460654.2022.2064322","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2022.2064322","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Between the invention of photography and the advent of film there arose a singular visual medium: tissue paper stereoviews of the 1860s that permitted the viewer to change a scene from greyscale and unilluminated to colour and illuminated when viewed through a stereoscope. These dual images, photographed using a camera with two lenses, were printed, hand-coloured, and perforated on layers of tissue paper and then placed side-by-side in cardboard mounts. The shifts along the greyscale/color unilluminated/illuminated continua merely depended upon the angle of light striking the stereoview, and the viewer could vary the pace and direction of the transformation. Objects did not move, but intensely three-dimensional scenes of receding planes of depth changed at will, sometimes depicting a shift from day to night, but often producing ambiguous scenes that challenged such a binary division of time. The narrative and temporal fluidities that tissue paper made possible differentiated these stereoviews from their counterparts produced on glass or card stock. The seamless, silent, flicker-free transformation of scenes offered viewers a deeply immersive, three-dimensional visual experience that was distinctly different from the plethora of mechanical animated stereoscopes that arose at the same time. Likewise, it was different from dioramas because unlike those communal visual experiences, the tissue paper stereoview experience was entirely in control of the user. Because the shifts back and forth between greyscale and colour comprise the most salient feature of the medium, experience glancing toward the colouring of early film stock that can help establish a frame of reference in which to assess tissue paper stereoviews. It is for this reason that an analysis of applied colour of early film is pulled into the discussion.","PeriodicalId":42697,"journal":{"name":"Early Popular Visual Culture","volume":"48 1","pages":"312 - 338"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80772987","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2022.2052923
Corinne Doria
ABSTRACT This article analyses how nineteenth-century medical science apprehended the eye and its functions. It disputes Jonathan Crary’s claim of the alleged mistrust towards human vision as a source of reliable information from the 1830s onwards. It is based on the analysis of scholarly and popular scientific publications from the early 1850s to the first decades of the twentieth century, a typology of sources overlooked by Crary as well as by most of the works in the field of Visual Studies. It focuses on French documents because of the progress undertaken by medical research on the eyesight in the country at the time and the number and scope of both scientific and popular publications. In the first part, I analyse the new set of knowledge about the anatomy and physiology of the eye that physicians developed at the time – notably through the use of newly introduced instruments such as the ophthalmoscope and the ophthalmometer. In the second part, I describe how contemporary medical research led to the acknowledgment of the subjectivity of visual perceptions and the fragile nature of human visual capacities. In the last section, I show how, through a process of classification and rationalisation of the newly acquired knowledge, physicians managed to reinstate the objective character of visual perceptions on the basis of their research.
{"title":"The spectacle of vision: eye and eyesight in the nineteenth-century scientific press","authors":"Corinne Doria","doi":"10.1080/17460654.2022.2052923","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2022.2052923","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article analyses how nineteenth-century medical science apprehended the eye and its functions. It disputes Jonathan Crary’s claim of the alleged mistrust towards human vision as a source of reliable information from the 1830s onwards. It is based on the analysis of scholarly and popular scientific publications from the early 1850s to the first decades of the twentieth century, a typology of sources overlooked by Crary as well as by most of the works in the field of Visual Studies. It focuses on French documents because of the progress undertaken by medical research on the eyesight in the country at the time and the number and scope of both scientific and popular publications. In the first part, I analyse the new set of knowledge about the anatomy and physiology of the eye that physicians developed at the time – notably through the use of newly introduced instruments such as the ophthalmoscope and the ophthalmometer. In the second part, I describe how contemporary medical research led to the acknowledgment of the subjectivity of visual perceptions and the fragile nature of human visual capacities. In the last section, I show how, through a process of classification and rationalisation of the newly acquired knowledge, physicians managed to reinstate the objective character of visual perceptions on the basis of their research.","PeriodicalId":42697,"journal":{"name":"Early Popular Visual Culture","volume":"17 1","pages":"293 - 311"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87482675","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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