Pub Date : 2021-03-19DOI: 10.1080/17514517.2021.1889127
Marie-Luise Kesting
Abstract This essay considers human and nonhuman well-being, looking through a culturally-engaged visual analysis of three different groups of photographic images depicting planet earth seemingly in quarantine that were shared widely on social media during the lockdown imposed in many countries due to the Corona pandemic and that seemed to be in a (subconscious) dialogue with each other. They consist of 1. empty city spaces, 2. the proclaimed return of ‘wildlife’ (e.g., the fake images of dolphins in Venetian canals), and 3. satellite images of improved air and water quality. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s Short History of Photography and Eugène Atget’s works in comparison to current photographs, it examines why certain images proliferate and what type of narratives, for example, of ‘healing’ the environmental crisis, they may propose.
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Pub Date : 2021-03-19DOI: 10.1080/17514517.2021.1889121
E. Payet
Abstract The First Gulf War (1990–1991) is typically remembered as a virtual, video-game war, in which close to no pictures of human bodies were seen. In its aftermath, images of the devastating Kuwaiti oil fields’ fires were frequently described as visions of apocalypse, conjuring a posthuman world. Some Gulf War photographs depicting oil damage, among which those taken by Steve McCurry, Bruno Barbey and Sebastião Salgado, feature animals from soiled sea birds to horses and camels irretrievably lost in the polluted desert. This article, by focusing notably on three photographs by Salgado as published in his 2016 book Kuwait: a Desert on Fire, proposes a close observation of those easily overlooked pictures, to question the hegemonic understanding of the Gulf War as a “war without bodies” (Sekula). On the contrary, using notably the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, I will argue that the animals’ bodies, and specifically their liminal character akin to ghosts and zombies, convey the damage wreaked by this war, not in terms of battle casualties, but rather of its wider environmental damage. The belated publication of Salgado’s Kuwait: a Desert on Fire and the relationship of that timing with the evolution of the visual representation of climate change will thus be examined.
第一次海湾战争(1990-1991)通常被认为是一场虚拟的、电子游戏式的战争，在这场战争中几乎看不到任何人体图片。在灾难之后，毁灭性的科威特油田大火的画面经常被描述为世界末日的景象，让人联想到一个后人类的世界。海湾战争期间，史蒂夫·麦柯里、布鲁诺·巴贝和塞巴斯蒂安·奥·萨尔加多拍摄了一些描绘石油破坏的照片，其中包括从被污染的海鸟到在污染的沙漠中无可挽回地消失的马和骆驼等动物。本文主要关注Salgado在其2016年出版的《科威特:燃烧的沙漠》(Kuwait: a Desert on Fire)中的三张照片，对这些容易被忽视的照片进行仔细观察，质疑对海湾战争的霸权理解，即“没有尸体的战争”(Sekula)。相反，我将引用雅克·德里达(Jacques Derrida)的哲学，认为动物的身体，特别是它们类似于鬼魂和僵尸的模糊特征，传达了这场战争造成的破坏，而不是战斗伤亡，而是更广泛的环境破坏。萨尔加多的《科威特:燃烧的沙漠》姗姗来迟的出版，以及这个时间点与气候变化的视觉表现演变的关系，将因此得到检验。
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Pub Date : 2021-03-16DOI: 10.1080/17514517.2021.1890919
J. Peck
Abstract The Prix Pictet is a photography prize focussing on sustainability. Anthropocentric in its world-view, the prize was endorsed and supported by Kofi Annan, who until 2006 was the Secretary-General of the United Nations. This article argues three points. Firstly, that the Prix Pictet’s model of sustainability is anthropocentric and produces a framework in which myriad inequalities in human relationships become representable. The prize as a symptom of the contradictions created through neoliberalism will be analysed, particularly as the prize celebrates the commodification of art whilst also enabling the articulation of concern about people and environment. This produces the second argument, where the prize is seen as symptomatic of a neoliberal economy that both offers opportunities for artists to express concern about social, economic and environmental inequalities, whilst also ‘greenwashing’ sustainable investments. Thirdly, I will argue that, photography’s ambiguity occasionally escapes the anthropocentric framework, leading to other possible interpretations. The Prix Pictet, then, mainly represents a human-centric view, and this is reproduced at the expense of nature-human-technology frameworks. However, close readings of some of the shortlisted projects see eco-centric and posthuman sensibilities emerging.
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Pub Date : 2021-02-18DOI: 10.1080/17514517.2021.1884327
Alexis Romano
Abstract This short article examines a photograph in a 1956 catalogue for the French department store Galeries Lafayette in the context of the country’s postwar modernization, Paris renovations and the development of the readymade garment industry. It relates the production of image to the construction and dissemination of fashion and femininity in the print media. In particular, it notes how the use of changing technologies in image production, notably Kodachrome color film, shaped and exposed these constructions. Drawing on the notion of myth, as formulated by Roland Barthes, this article asks how the image spoke to modernity’s inherent contradictions, notably between old and new, in its depiction of bodies, plastic and synthetic fabric. Finally, it shows why this was particularly relevant in the culture of postwar France.
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Pub Date : 2021-02-03DOI: 10.1080/17514517.2021.1872198
Gabrielle Moser
School photographs abound in the history of photography, but are rarely the object of study for photography theorists. Categorized alongside other banal and formally repetitive forms of portraiture...
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Pub Date : 2021-01-29DOI: 10.1080/17514517.2020.1848070
S. James
Abstract In 1967 IBM (International Business Machines) commissioned Henri Cartier-Bresson to produce a portfolio of photographs depicting human relationships with technology around the world. These images, along with a selection from the photographer’s archive were realized in 1968 as the touring exhibition and photobook Man and Machine. In contrast to the images of war, revolution and protest, so often mobilized as the documentary imaginary and record of these years, Man and Machine appears to celebrate a harmonious technologically mediated world over which man was still in control. More than this, it seemingly flattens the stark divides between First and Third World experiences under the leveling glow of liberal humanism and what was being naturalized as its equivalent: global Capital. Approaching Man and Machine retrospectively – from the perspective of the New Left’s 1970s critique of documentary humanist photography – as well as in terms of its own contemporaneousness, resituating it in the contemporary image cultures of the Cold War – I propose that documentary photography’s ideological mobility at this juncture might be understood not only as an inherent weakness or limit – as the means of its compromise and ultimate failure – but also as a resource: a potential arsenal of unpredictable, disjunctive and even radical political affects and effects.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-04DOI: 10.1080/17514517.2020.1857978
J. Zylinska
Postcards from the End of the World arises out of my work as a theorist-practitioner with a longstanding interest in “the end of the world”. This interest has been fuelled by the multiple crises of...
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17514517.2021.1877437
Deanna Ledezma
The northern New Mexican village of Las Trampas (Spanish for “The Traps”) was established with a communal land grant in 1751 by twelve ethnically and racially mixed families of Gen ızaro, Tlaxcalan, African, and Spanish descent from El Barrio de Analco, a lower-class district located on the south side of the Santa Fe River (McDonald 2002, 36). Bestowed by the provincial governor, the original land grant included 46,000 acres for the development of agriculture and livestock. The place name of Santo Tom as del R ıo de las Trampas is presumed to reference beaver traps along the river; however, writer William DeBuys infers a grim irony in the etymology of the isolated settlement founded as a redoubt (Julyan 1998, 294). These early residents “must have been keenly aware that their future home might eventually be a trap for them,” speculates DeBuys (1981, 72). Although the United States Congress upheld the validity of the Las Trampas Land Grant in 1860, the Anglo-American legal system set another series of traps that dispossessed villagers of their communal property in the early 1900s. After the Las Trampas Lumber Company declared bankruptcy in 1926, the United States Forest Service took ownership of the Las Trampas Land Grant (Guthrie 2013, 183). Held in the David Jones Collection at the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives, folders of contact sheets (c. 1966–67) made by Jones (1914–88) and his National Park Service colleague Fred E. Mang Jr. (1924–) depict Las Trampas, its residents, and their built environment. Mang, a staff photographer who specialized in scientific and
新墨西哥北部的Las Trampas村(西班牙语为“The Traps”)是在1751年由12个种族和种族混合的家庭建立的，这些家庭来自El Barrio de Analco，这是一个位于圣菲河南岸的下层阶级地区。最初由省长授予的土地包括4.6万英亩，用于发展农业和畜牧业。圣汤姆的地名为del R ıo de las Trampas，据推测是指河边的海狸陷阱;然而，作家William DeBuys从词源中推断出一个残酷的讽刺，这个孤立的定居点被建立为一个堡垒(Julyan 1998,294)。这些早期的居民“一定敏锐地意识到，他们未来的家最终可能成为他们的陷阱，”戴贝斯推测(1981,72)。尽管美国国会在1860年支持拉斯特朗帕斯土地赠款的有效性，但英美法律体系又设置了一系列陷阱，在20世纪初剥夺了村民的公共财产。1926年，拉斯特朗帕斯木材公司宣布破产后，美国林务局获得了拉斯特朗帕斯土地赠款的所有权(Guthrie 2013, 183)。在新墨西哥州记录中心和档案馆的大卫·琼斯收藏中，琼斯(1914-88)和他的国家公园管理局同事小弗雷德·e·芒(1924 -)制作的联系表文件夹(约1966-67)描绘了拉斯特朗帕斯，其居民和他们的建筑环境。他是一名专门从事科学和科学摄影的专职摄影师
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17514517.2020.1726043
Jessie. Thomas
A creature tattered and alone wanders through urban and desolate spaces on earth and above, in search of respite. The Polymorph is a story of belonging, a story that follows a lonely alien, unidentifiable no face to be seen. What does it mean to belong in today’s world? As Franz Kafka described of the character Odorak in Cares of a Family Man, ‘the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished’ (Kafka, 2002, p.77). I am perplexed by the production of narratives, by the definitions of what it means to be useful, what it means to belong, to be human enough to be considered in today’s world? The story of The Polymorph focuses on an imagined creature that replicates the icons and characters regurgitated in an age-old narrative, repeating itself over and over; as if on a carousel with a formula seemingly forever identical searching for home a place to be ‘me’ with ‘you’. Where has the constructed creature come from? The creature is an amalgamation of broken bits of iconography, imagery, mythology, media and so on, found within societies culture, that suggests to us what our sense of power, belonging and identity should look like. The shape that the creature takes is a poorly constructed spaceman. The creature has been created in the image of human betterment, but come closer, you shall see, it is a fragile, tangible, otherly creature composed of earthly materials. Over layered and stuck together, the creature is trapped and alone in this alien body. This isolated creature, The Symbol, finds anOther along his journey The Sibling. The Symbol wanders through landscapes, isolated in the urban, alienated in the barren. Until it sees a figure; It was tall and stood upright like him, as he came closer, he saw the familiar smooth shape of body. The figure turned around and there, in the stranger’s face, The Symbol saw himself. Knowable, visible, graspable, it was the Other, the Sibling. Integral to this work is the notion of the Other, a concept derived from Edward Said’s the Orient. ‘Its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of text ... or some bit of previous imagining’ (Said, 2003, p.177). The Other is not a human, it is part of a simulacra to control individuals and to dehumanise and disempower an individual or group of people. As well as commenting on this aspect of dominant narratives, the Other within The Polymorph, evolves to explore wider philosophical tropes of existing and ideas of self fractured and mirrored, searching for a space to belong to come home to.
一个衣衫褴褛、孤独的生物在城市和荒凉的空间中徘徊，寻找喘息的机会。《变形》是一个关于归属感的故事，讲述了一个孤独的外星人的故事，他无法辨认，连脸都看不见。融入当今世界意味着什么?正如弗朗茨·卡夫卡(Franz Kafka)在《一个顾家男人的烦恼》(Cares of a Family Man)中描述的人物奥多拉克(Odorak)，“整件事看起来毫无意义，但以自己的方式完美地完成了”(卡夫卡，2002年，第77页)。我对叙事的产生感到困惑，对什么是有用的定义，什么是归属的定义，什么是在今天的世界中被认为是人类的定义?《变形记》的故事集中在一个想象中的生物身上，它复制了一个古老叙事中反复出现的图标和人物，一遍又一遍地重复;就像在旋转木马上，带着一个似乎永远相同的公式，寻找一个家，一个和你在一起的地方。构造出来的生物是从哪里来的?这个生物是图像、图像、神话、媒体等碎片的混合体，在社会文化中发现，它向我们表明我们的权力感、归属感和身份应该是什么样子。这种生物的形状就像一个构造拙劣的宇航员。这种生物是按照人类的美好形象被创造出来的，但走近一点，你会发现，它是一种脆弱的、有形的、由世俗材料组成的另类生物。这个生物被困在这个外星人的身体里，被层层粘在一起。这个孤立的生物，符号，在旅途中找到了另一个兄弟。符号在景观中游荡，在城市中被孤立，在荒芜中被异化。直到它看到一个人影;它像他一样高大直立，当他走近时，他看到了熟悉的光滑的身体形状。那个身影转过身来，在陌生人的脸上，符号看到了自己。它是可知的，可见的，可把握的，是他者，是同胞。这部作品不可或缺的是他者的概念，这个概念来源于爱德华·赛义德的《东方》。它起源于一句引语或一段文字……或者之前的一些想象”(Said, 2003, p.177)。他者不是人类，它是一个拟像的一部分，用来控制个人，使个人或一群人失去人性和权力。除了对主导叙事的这一方面进行评论外，《变形》中的他者还探索了存在的更广泛的哲学修辞和自我断裂和镜像的想法，寻找一个属于回家的空间。
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