Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/17514517.2022.2126160
Matthias Johannes Pfaller Schmid
Abstract This article investigates photography as a tool of neocolonial territorial politics in the Cordillera of the Andes Boundary Case of 1902, in which Chile and Argentina re-negotiated their border in Patagonia. To avoid an impending war, they brought their case to the English King for arbitration. Scientists from all three sides compiled reports, maps and notably, photographs, providing proof for each country’s interpretation of the border. In a first step, I argue that the images of the hitherto uncharted land posed a challenge to the understanding of this land as national territory, having first to undergo a process of overcoming the uncertainty of empty space and acquiring scientific meaning during the arbitration. In a second step, I trace how the photographs and the case itself were resignified as expressions of neocolonial modernity and nation building. In this process, the previously limited capacity of photography was extended to support legal claims. The analysis of the development of the visual material in the trilateral negotiation distills the key factors that made the survey photography of this case successful in terms of contemporary imperial standards, or in other words, an example of ‘best practice’.
{"title":"Between Topographical Groundwork and Neocolonial Aspirations: The ‘Best Practice’ of Survey Photography in the Chilean-Argentine Boundary Case of 1902","authors":"Matthias Johannes Pfaller Schmid","doi":"10.1080/17514517.2022.2126160","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17514517.2022.2126160","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article investigates photography as a tool of neocolonial territorial politics in the Cordillera of the Andes Boundary Case of 1902, in which Chile and Argentina re-negotiated their border in Patagonia. To avoid an impending war, they brought their case to the English King for arbitration. Scientists from all three sides compiled reports, maps and notably, photographs, providing proof for each country’s interpretation of the border. In a first step, I argue that the images of the hitherto uncharted land posed a challenge to the understanding of this land as national territory, having first to undergo a process of overcoming the uncertainty of empty space and acquiring scientific meaning during the arbitration. In a second step, I trace how the photographs and the case itself were resignified as expressions of neocolonial modernity and nation building. In this process, the previously limited capacity of photography was extended to support legal claims. The analysis of the development of the visual material in the trilateral negotiation distills the key factors that made the survey photography of this case successful in terms of contemporary imperial standards, or in other words, an example of ‘best practice’.","PeriodicalId":42826,"journal":{"name":"Photography and Culture","volume":"15 1","pages":"377 - 396"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44121777","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/17514517.2022.2147706
Lorraine Sim
Abstract Many women were actively engaged in photography in Australia from the nineteenth century. However, women’s contributions to the field are under-represented in extant histories of Australian photography, particularly photography prior to the 1970s. This essay explores some of the reasons for that erasure and offers two acts of historical and textual recovery. Drawing on new archival research, I examine the lives and work of two little-known Australian women photographers of the early twentieth century: Pegg Clarke and Eleanor Georgina Shaw. Pegg Clarke (1890–1956) was a successful studio, portrait and art photographer who was active from the 1910s through to the 1950s. Eleanor Georgina Shaw (E. G. Shaw; 1870–1954) was an amateur street, urban and architectural photographer who was active in Sydney from the 1910s through to the 1930s. In navigating some of the epistemological and practical challenges of working with these archival collections, and at times engaging in what Saidiya Hartman calls ‘critical fabulation’, I weave together the fragmentary remains of these two women’s careers in an attempt to place them on the critical map. I also offer some speculations as to how their work might provide an opportunity to revise, if in modest ways, extant histories of Australian photography.
19世纪以来，澳大利亚有许多女性积极投身于摄影事业。然而，女性对这一领域的贡献在现存的澳大利亚摄影史中，尤其是在20世纪70年代之前的摄影史中，代表性不足。本文探讨了这种抹除的一些原因，并提出了历史和文本恢复的两种行为。根据新的档案研究，我研究了20世纪初两位鲜为人知的澳大利亚女摄影师的生活和工作:佩吉·克拉克和埃莉诺·乔治娜·肖。佩吉·克拉克(1890-1956)是一位成功的工作室、肖像和艺术摄影师，活跃于20世纪10年代至50年代。埃莉诺·乔治娜·肖(E. G. Shaw;(1870-1954)是一名业余街头、城市和建筑摄影师，从20世纪10年代到30年代活跃在悉尼。在处理这些档案收藏的认识论和实践挑战时，有时会参与赛迪亚·哈特曼(Saidiya Hartman)所说的“批判性虚构”，我将这两位女性职业生涯的碎片碎片编织在一起，试图将她们置于批判性地图上。我还提出了一些猜测，关于他们的作品如何提供一个机会，以适度的方式修改澳大利亚摄影的现存历史。
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Pub Date : 2022-09-14DOI: 10.1080/17514517.2022.2116899
L. O’Hagan, Elisa Serafinelli
Abstract This article seeks to situate drone imagery within a more extensive lineage of practice by focusing on one particular form with which it is comparable: pigeon photography. Using a combination of visual social semiotic analysis, literature from Drone Studies, and archival research, it highlights four overarching characteristics shared between photographs taken by pigeons between 1908 and 1912 and contemporary drone visuals produced by hobbyists: verticality, geographical reimaginations, access to inaccessible places, and aerial self-portraits. In doing so, it aims to develop a better understanding of the social and material affordances/constraints of aerial photography, its meaning potentials and how they may have changed across space and time, and the social relations that are reflected in and shaped by its images. The article concludes by suggesting a nuanced perspective into the relationship between “new” and “old” media, arguing that images taken by drones and pigeons have similarities in their forms and functions, but their creation is guided by different ideological values and bounded by the potentials, norms, and traditions of the time. This perspective builds upon the recent turn in media studies toward transhistorical approaches to place seemingly novel contemporary communication technology within historical patterns of practice and use.
{"title":"Transhistoricizing the Drone: A Comparative Visual Social Semiotic Analysis of Pigeon and Domestic Drone Photography","authors":"L. O’Hagan, Elisa Serafinelli","doi":"10.1080/17514517.2022.2116899","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17514517.2022.2116899","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article seeks to situate drone imagery within a more extensive lineage of practice by focusing on one particular form with which it is comparable: pigeon photography. Using a combination of visual social semiotic analysis, literature from Drone Studies, and archival research, it highlights four overarching characteristics shared between photographs taken by pigeons between 1908 and 1912 and contemporary drone visuals produced by hobbyists: verticality, geographical reimaginations, access to inaccessible places, and aerial self-portraits. In doing so, it aims to develop a better understanding of the social and material affordances/constraints of aerial photography, its meaning potentials and how they may have changed across space and time, and the social relations that are reflected in and shaped by its images. The article concludes by suggesting a nuanced perspective into the relationship between “new” and “old” media, arguing that images taken by drones and pigeons have similarities in their forms and functions, but their creation is guided by different ideological values and bounded by the potentials, norms, and traditions of the time. This perspective builds upon the recent turn in media studies toward transhistorical approaches to place seemingly novel contemporary communication technology within historical patterns of practice and use.","PeriodicalId":42826,"journal":{"name":"Photography and Culture","volume":"15 1","pages":"327 - 351"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60115300","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-24DOI: 10.1080/17514517.2022.2096280
Carol Payne
Abstract This article examines the role of visuality in both the imposition of settler colonial authority and its contestation. As a specific case study, I discuss a group of images made by photographer Gar Lunney under the auspices of the National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division (NFB) during the historic 1956 Arctic tour conducted by then Canadian Governor General Vincent Massey. I argue that these images thematize visuality itself and, as such, expose the colonized North American Arctic of the 1950s as a field of racialized visuality. In the first part of the essay, I closely read Lunney’s 1956 images and their histories, with particular attention to indications of the gaze. In the second part of the essay, I turn to recent decolonizing strategies for approaching the colonial photograph, again using Lunney’s photographs of the 1956 tour as a case study. I identify two key decolonizing strategies: first, attention to the agency of the sitter in the photograph and, second, recent Inuit re-narrativizations and remediations of images.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-19DOI: 10.1080/17514517.2022.2083372
Juma Kasadha, Rajab Idd Muyingo
Abstract This article explores photographic education in Uganda. It presents exploratory observations in the study of photography at Ugandan Universities. Specifically, it examines the nature of students admitted to study Photography and students’ practice of photography. It also explores the use of student-centered learning techniques; and highlights the drawbacks, Government policy and photographic funding in Uganda. We deduce that for photographic education to thrive in Uganda, there is need for government to establish specific policies that encourage and reward photography; and the need for academic institutions to engage in photography research, and introduction of photography programs at degree, master and doctorate levels.
{"title":"Photographic Education in Uganda","authors":"Juma Kasadha, Rajab Idd Muyingo","doi":"10.1080/17514517.2022.2083372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17514517.2022.2083372","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article explores photographic education in Uganda. It presents exploratory observations in the study of photography at Ugandan Universities. Specifically, it examines the nature of students admitted to study Photography and students’ practice of photography. It also explores the use of student-centered learning techniques; and highlights the drawbacks, Government policy and photographic funding in Uganda. We deduce that for photographic education to thrive in Uganda, there is need for government to establish specific policies that encourage and reward photography; and the need for academic institutions to engage in photography research, and introduction of photography programs at degree, master and doctorate levels.","PeriodicalId":42826,"journal":{"name":"Photography and Culture","volume":"15 1","pages":"449 - 462"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47990584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-18DOI: 10.1080/17514517.2022.2063600
Warren Neidich, Erik Morse
Abstract This interview between the writer and critic Erik Morse and the artist and theorist Warren Neidich took place over the course of two months in the fall/winter 2021–2022. The interview focuses on a body of work entitled the Hybrid Dialectics produced between 1997–2002 that served as bridge between his earlier perfomative reenactments and fictitious documents entitled, American History Reinvented,1985–1993, and his more recent neon sculptures most notably the Pizzagate Neon, 2017–2021 and his A Proposition for an alt Parthenon Marbles Recoded: The Phantom as Other (2021–2022). Neidich's project extends his interdisciplinary experiments carried out in the fields of cinema studies, structural film and apparatus theory which foregrounded cinematic devices and tools at the expense of the image. This forms the foundation of Neidich’s engagement with photographic medium as a form of politicized aesthetics embedded in a bidirectional embodied and extended cognition. His hybrid dialectics take off where artists like Michael Snow and Tony Conrad left off. They are the result of grafted neuro-opthalmologic devices, used in the measurement of squint and skewed gaze, upon the photographic lens which results in a destabilized and estranged image; making them other and queered while at the same time challenging the stillness of the photographic object. The neuro-photographic assemblages release the vibrant energy of their human and non-human subjects distributing them across the surface of the photographic paper. These portray a lexicon of control that would later appear again, in his recent neon sculptures in the form of the Google effect, meme magic, and click bait. The Hybrid Dialects represented forms of dissensus against what Guy Debord called the Society of the Spectacle where as Neidich’s recent neon work is a rebuttal of the consciousness industry of social media and Big Data.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17514517.2022.2175482
Hongfeng Tang
In July 2021, MaoWeidong, a Chinese researcher and translator of photographic theory and history, died at 53 at his home due to illness. During his lifetime, he spent 20 years working for a Chinese state enterprise where he led a stable life. Later, out of his love for photography, he gave up his job in the system of the state and joined Three Shadows Photography Art Center, a major institution dedicated to art photography in China, and China National Photographic Art Publishing House, a leading publisher of photographic theories and photo books of the country. During his tenure at the latter, he and a group of young scholars who used to study photography abroad introduced, compiled, and translated the “Image Series” (Yingxiang wencong影像文丛), a series of 12 books that had appeared by the time of his sudden death. This series, which included critical works by Western researchers at the forefront of photographic theory and history, such as Geoffrey Batchen, Vil em Flusser, and Lucy Soutter, significantly advanced the understanding of international photographic research among local Chinese researchers and practitioners. Prior to this, most of their theoretical understanding of photography was derived from the classic photographic treatises of Walter Benjamin, John Berger, Susan Sontag, and Roland Barthes, among others. Therefore, as Wu Yiqiang, a university teacher and art critic, puts it, Mao Weidong can be described as “the ferryman of Chinese photography theory” (Wu 2021). The sudden death of this “ferryman” triggered mourning in the Chinese art and photography circles but also revealed the difficult situation and the many problems that exist in photographic research in China. At the beginning of Wu Yiqiang’s essay, the author pointed out that “He (MaoWeidong) died in poverty, which brings shame to those of us who claim to love photography and the studies of photography. The photographic art scene is full of too many money-spinning exhibitions and projects, full of vanity and frivolity. Yet, we cannot even guarantee someone devoted to academic translation a slightly decent life.” (Wu 2021) As a scholar of art theory and visual culture at the university, I deeply resonate with Wu’s lament. On the one hand, China’s photography industry is thriving: Year after year, more and more Chinese students are studying photography in European and American universities;
2021年7月，中国摄影理论与历史研究者、翻译家茅卫东因病在家中去世，享年53岁。在他的一生中，他在一家中国国有企业工作了20年，在那里他过着稳定的生活。后来，出于对摄影的热爱，他放弃了国家体制内的工作，加入了中国主要的艺术摄影机构三影堂摄影艺术中心和全国领先的摄影理论和摄影书籍出版机构中国摄影艺术出版社。在他任职期间，他和一群曾经在国外学习摄影的年轻学者介绍、编辑和翻译了“映象文丛丛书”，这是他突然去世时已经出版的12本丛书。这个系列包括了西方研究人员在摄影理论和历史前沿的重要作品，如Geoffrey Batchen, Vil em Flusser和Lucy Soutter，大大提高了中国当地研究人员和从业者对国际摄影研究的理解。在此之前，他们对摄影的理论认识大多来源于Walter Benjamin、John Berger、Susan Sontag、Roland Barthes等人的经典摄影论著。因此，正如大学教师、艺术评论家吴益强所说，毛卫东可以说是“中国摄影理论的摆渡人”(Wu 2021)。这位“摆渡人”的突然离世引发了中国艺术界和摄影界的哀悼，也暴露了中国摄影研究的困境和存在的诸多问题。吴益强在文章开头就指出:“他(毛卫东)死于贫困，这让我们这些自称热爱摄影、热爱摄影研究的人感到羞耻。”摄影艺术界充满了太多的赚钱展览和项目，充满了虚荣和轻浮。然而，我们甚至不能保证从事学术翻译的人过得稍微体面一些。(吴2021)作为一名艺术理论和视觉文化的学者，我对吴的悲叹产生了深刻的共鸣。一方面，中国的摄影产业正在蓬勃发展:年复一年，越来越多的中国学生在欧美大学学习摄影;
{"title":"Theorizing New Photographies in Contemporary China: An Introduction","authors":"Hongfeng Tang","doi":"10.1080/17514517.2022.2175482","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17514517.2022.2175482","url":null,"abstract":"In July 2021, MaoWeidong, a Chinese researcher and translator of photographic theory and history, died at 53 at his home due to illness. During his lifetime, he spent 20 years working for a Chinese state enterprise where he led a stable life. Later, out of his love for photography, he gave up his job in the system of the state and joined Three Shadows Photography Art Center, a major institution dedicated to art photography in China, and China National Photographic Art Publishing House, a leading publisher of photographic theories and photo books of the country. During his tenure at the latter, he and a group of young scholars who used to study photography abroad introduced, compiled, and translated the “Image Series” (Yingxiang wencong影像文丛), a series of 12 books that had appeared by the time of his sudden death. This series, which included critical works by Western researchers at the forefront of photographic theory and history, such as Geoffrey Batchen, Vil em Flusser, and Lucy Soutter, significantly advanced the understanding of international photographic research among local Chinese researchers and practitioners. Prior to this, most of their theoretical understanding of photography was derived from the classic photographic treatises of Walter Benjamin, John Berger, Susan Sontag, and Roland Barthes, among others. Therefore, as Wu Yiqiang, a university teacher and art critic, puts it, Mao Weidong can be described as “the ferryman of Chinese photography theory” (Wu 2021). The sudden death of this “ferryman” triggered mourning in the Chinese art and photography circles but also revealed the difficult situation and the many problems that exist in photographic research in China. At the beginning of Wu Yiqiang’s essay, the author pointed out that “He (MaoWeidong) died in poverty, which brings shame to those of us who claim to love photography and the studies of photography. The photographic art scene is full of too many money-spinning exhibitions and projects, full of vanity and frivolity. Yet, we cannot even guarantee someone devoted to academic translation a slightly decent life.” (Wu 2021) As a scholar of art theory and visual culture at the university, I deeply resonate with Wu’s lament. On the one hand, China’s photography industry is thriving: Year after year, more and more Chinese students are studying photography in European and American universities;","PeriodicalId":42826,"journal":{"name":"Photography and Culture","volume":"15 1","pages":"223 - 226"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48193997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17514517.2022.2156170
Hao Hu
Abstract Homecoming has been a complex concept affecting Chinese people of every generation since ancient times. As China underwent accelerating urbanization from the mid-1990s to the early 2010s, the landscape of urban and rural China witnessed unprecedented change. Out of sensitivity to the evolution of social landscape and the participants of the great migration from the countryside/towns to big cities, Chinese photographers of the late 1970s and the early 1980s took photographs with high self-consciousness and knowledge of the characteristics of the time. Against the backdrop of globalization, they continued with various endeavors on the “photography of social landscapes,” which emerged in world photography in the 1960s, recording the people and stories in their hometowns and offering a series of personalized works with distinctive local features. This article will focus on three representative photographers from this generation—Muge, Park Il-kwon, and Zhang Xiao—and their new stories of homecoming to discuss how photographers, during a period of significant changes in rural China, recreated the identity of individuals and their communities by capturing the social landscape and took it as a remedy for their identity anxiety as “internal migrants.”
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17514517.2022.2099339
Yueqi Luo
Abstract Inspired by the ancient Chinese canonical poetry anthology The Book of Odes (Shijing), the photographer Taca Sui created the Odes (Shishan hekao) series through textual research and field investigation. While the poems in The Book of Odes depict the natural landscape and social environment of the Zhou Dynasty and the thoughts and feelings of ancient people, the Odes seeks Chinese cultural roots and, in retrospect, reveals the tension between historical contemplation and present aliveness. By highlighting one plate entitled “Chou Feng Series, Lamb” from the Odes project, this essay aims to shed light on several points regarding the photographer’s working mode, as well as the underlying paradoxical ways of seeing. He attempts to stagnate the historicity in The Book of Odes with photography. However, history itself is in constant movement and this dimension of motion cannot be eliminated. The photographer tries to approach the present at close quarters, but the historical gaze has already saturated the artist’s work. These tensions in Taca’s photography imply that photographic images, as one of the most contemporary forms of media, hold the possibility of resisting time.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17514517.2022.2099329
Boyuan Zhang
Over a hundred years ago, explorers, adventurers, and archaeologists from the West and East alike arrived to Southern Xinjiang, a region that was known in dynastic China as the Western Region (xiyu). They came here for different purposes—discovery expeditions, archaeological excavation, smuggling cultural relics, and many more. Whatever had been covered by the dunes of Taklimakan, they wanted to unveil it. In 1993, I was born to a Han migration family in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in northwest China. Even though I was raised in Urumqi (the capital of Xinjiang) and told the stories and legends of adventures in the desert, my recognition of the region has been excluded from the multi-ethnic and vast land of Southern Xinjiang. To uncover those customs and culture, relate them to my growing-up memories that make me who I am, I have been photographing the Tarim Basin in Southern Xinjiang since 2017. These photographs, most of which were taken during road trips along the still-thriving Tarim River traversing the desert land, are compiled into a project called “My Tarim”. In my second journey to Taklimakan, I looked at the tedious but pressing desert, starting to wonder whether I had managed to capture what the sand truly looks like. I had a dozen collections of sand samples. They were in different materials, sizes, and came from separate locations of the desert. Despite their distinctions, however, they are generally identified as mere “yellow sand”. Once I realized this and tried to pick up and observe the sand, I further found it impossible to isolate one piece of sand from the others. From this point, I decided to make “portraits” for the sand. After failing countless times with macro-lens and microscopes, I consulted an optic scientist, who was interested in my project and introduced me to the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). In March 2021, after pilot
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