{"title":"Light Writing on the Lathi Raj: Bombay, 1930–31","authors":"Avrati Bhatnagar, S. Ramaswamy","doi":"10.1080/03087298.2022.2118434","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2022.2118434","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the intersection between policing and photography in the course of the Civil Disobedience Movement in colonial Bombay in 1930–31 by focusing on historical photographs compiled in a recently discovered album. When the ‘disobedient’ men, women and children of Bombay repeatedly challenged the colonial state by breaking laws deemed unjust under the leadership of Mohandas K. Gandhi, they came into direct confrontation with the most visible expression of imperial authority: the cross-racial Bombay Police armed with the ubiquitous baton (lathi). While Indian historiography is particularly rich in its exploration of both exceptional and quotidian forms of colonial violence, the visual history of violent policing remains underexplored. Through our analysis of photographic images from two specific episodes of the disobedient drama that unfolded in Bombay in 1930 – the raids at the salt pans in Wadala in June, and the national flag salutation ceremony at the Esplanade in October – we explore the complex and conspicuous entanglement of race and gender in a moment of heightened anti-colonial action and police violence in British India. In underscoring the work of the camera in documenting the history of violent police action against non-violent civil demonstrators, we reveal its role as a historical actor and an active participant in history-making.","PeriodicalId":13024,"journal":{"name":"History of Photography","volume":"45 1","pages":"304 - 319"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49258152","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What the Police are Not Trained to See: Wisconsin Death Trip and the Blind Spots of Photographic Evidence","authors":"Yechen Zhao","doi":"10.1080/03087298.2022.2143099","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2022.2143099","url":null,"abstract":"Wisconsin Death Trip, the 1973 book by Michael Lesy, juxtaposes Charles van Schaick’s nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographs of townspeople in Black River Falls, Wisconsin with local newspaper clippings of grisly murders and crimes. Drawing from police laboratory protocols, forensics manuals and case law, I show how Lesy’s book imitates contemporaneously developed law enforcement techniques for presenting, justifying and interpreting photographs as evidence, which it uses to make a historical claim about death and madness in rural America. Ironically, the book’s mimicry of these techniques creates its blind spot: Lesy is unable to see how Van Schaick’s photographs actually relate to the indigenous Ho-Chunk people of the region and their struggle against forced removal by the US government. Studying Wisconsin Death Trip demonstrates how the interpretive momentum generated by a forensic approach to archival photographs too easily identifies the wrong crimes and perpetrators.","PeriodicalId":13024,"journal":{"name":"History of Photography","volume":"45 1","pages":"335 - 350"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49411558","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Countersurveillance, Photography and Revolution in the Irish War of Independence","authors":"Orla Fitzpatrick","doi":"10.1080/03087298.2022.2118452","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2022.2118452","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines a photographic album compiled by an Irish Republican Army unit during the Irish War of Independence, a guerrilla struggle fought in Ireland from 1919 to 1921 between the Irish Republican Army and the British Army, along with the quasi-military Royal Irish Constabulary. The employment of techniques and surveillance methods similar to those of the British state and police forces in Ireland enabled the group’s intelligence squad to track the movements of their enemies. Those depicted were monitored and sometimes targeted for elimination, thus turning this photographic evidence against the state and its representatives. The article is based on witness statements, memoirs and parliamentary proceedings, thus revealing the importance of photography in the intelligence war against the British Empire. Studio portraits originally taken for familial or occupational uses, newspaper cuttings reflecting society events and covertly taken snapshots were triangulated with handwritten notes detailing the daily routines of those pictured. The album’s multiplicity of formats constitutes a type of conflict photography that differs from the usual depictions of ruins and raids that dominated imagery of the Irish revolutionary period.","PeriodicalId":13024,"journal":{"name":"History of Photography","volume":"45 1","pages":"292 - 303"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46167718","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The New Woman Behind the Camera","authors":"Sarah M. Miller","doi":"10.1080/03087298.2022.2064637","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2022.2064637","url":null,"abstract":"commercial studio","PeriodicalId":13024,"journal":{"name":"History of Photography","volume":"45 1","pages":"197 - 199"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46112051","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Latin American Colloquia and the Institutionalisation of Brazilian Photography","authors":"Erika Zerwes, E. Costa","doi":"10.1080/03087298.2022.2079231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2022.2079231","url":null,"abstract":"This article describes the institutionalisation of Brazilian photography in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the context of the other events relating to photography in Latin American countries. This process has close links with the first two Latin American Colloquia of Photography held in Mexico City in 1978 and 1981. These Colloquia promoted the creation of connections between Brazilian photographers and photographic institutions and those in Spanish-speaking Latin America. They also made it possible to bring European and North American institutional photographic experiences to Latin America, and helped to disseminate a version of Latin American photography in Europe, one that was based on a socially engaged documentary, the genre which was showcased and foregrounded at the Colloquia.","PeriodicalId":13024,"journal":{"name":"History of Photography","volume":"45 1","pages":"182 - 195"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45021976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Faux Nudes: Body Stockings and Photography at the fin de siècle","authors":"Mary Bergstein","doi":"10.1080/03087298.2022.2050049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2022.2050049","url":null,"abstract":"The visual culture of the female nude in Western art, after decades of attention, possesses a considerable genealogy of critical scholarship. The photographic imagery of women’s bodies occupies a significant place in this legacy, yet there are areas of inquiry that have to date remained little examined. In this article I consider a small and eccentric group of images, made by commercial photographers for popular consumption, posed by the American socialite Clara Ward around the turn of the twentieth century, as a case study of faux nudes – studio photographs in which models were encased in semitransparent body stockings, thus generalising, protecting and idealising the female body in its representation. If nudity is – ideally – an absolute state, it is nevertheless culturally complex in its various guises. The faux nudity constructed in these glamorous photographs was an invention of modern technology made possible by advances in commercial textile production as well as photography, as the stockinet body stocking provided a fiction of marmoreal whiteness further enhanced by being rendered in monochrome, and then widely distributed through cabinet prints and postcards. Around 1900 such artefacts further mystified the woman’s body in visual culture, producing a fantasy woman for modern times.","PeriodicalId":13024,"journal":{"name":"History of Photography","volume":"45 1","pages":"128 - 138"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44383857","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"(W)Archives: Archival Imaginaries, War and Contemporary Art","authors":"Gary Bratchford","doi":"10.1080/03087298.2021.2079234","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2021.2079234","url":null,"abstract":"also contributed to the journal’s end in 1986. Interestingly, Stacey concludes the chapter with a brief meditation on a methodological problem likely familiar to scholars working with oral histories. Of the conflicting accounts of this period generated by the participants themselves, Stacey writes, ‘The level of engagement needed to secure the contemporary testimonies of those mentioned here is a metaphor for dashed hopes in HMPW and Camerawork’. While the triumphs and accomplishments of these groups were many, the conflicts between participants themselves, it would seem, had lasting effects. Near the book’s beginning, Stacey offers her more academically minded readers a note of caution. Some of the elements one might expect of a typical academic publication, such as literature reviews that situate an author’s particular scholarly intervention within extended theoretical discussions, are in general not present in Photography of Protest and Community. This is intended, Stacey alerts us, to make the text more accessible to those outside the academy, perhaps engaged in social and political struggle of their own. The gesture can be viewed as a self-conscious echo of Camerawork’s founding question, ‘Who is it for?’ At the same time, I found myself wishing at moments for at least some of the more analytical and theoretical synthesis that might help underscore the historical significance of the archival record Stacey so diligently recreates. Among the well-trodden political debates surrounding documentary, photojournalism and the mass media, ‘community photography’ has remained an overlooked and undertheorised subject. Stacey corrects this oversight with an intervention that is sure to be an indispensable resource for scholars in this area. Beyond this, I share Stacey’s hope that this text might serve as an historical resource for current-day activist photographers engaged in local political struggles for freedom and liberation, for in such struggles we must draw strength from wherever we may find it.","PeriodicalId":13024,"journal":{"name":"History of Photography","volume":"45 1","pages":"204 - 207"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47269006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Photography and the 1851 Great Exhibition","authors":"Ella Ravilious","doi":"10.1080/03087298.2021.2079233","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2021.2079233","url":null,"abstract":"Photography and the 1851 Great Exhibition aims to provide the first comprehensive study of the role of photography at the Exhibition of the Work of Industry of All Nations held at Hyde Park in 1851 and the impact this event had on the burgeoning medium. Given the frequency with which photographic research collides with the ‘Great Exhibition’ – as it became known – or its many key players, both famous and obscure, this book certainly is a worthwhile endeavour. It gathers together twenty years of research by the author, whose previous book, ‘A Higher Branch of the Art’: Photographing the Fine Arts in England 1839–1880, has proved to be a foundational text for researching photography in museums. In this new volume Hamber succeeds in providing the researcher with a thorough guide to the photographs and photographic equipment exhibited at the exhibition, providing insight into how they were selected and by whom. The seminal photographically illustrated Exhibition of the Work of Industry of All Nations, 1851: Reports by the Juries – specially commissioned volumes which comprise the official photographic record of the exhibition and document prize-winning or notable exhibits – are systematically illustrated, analysed and explained for the first time. New research also details where each extant copy is now. This section on such reports is perhaps destined to be one of the most widely used parts of the publication, as it identifies and discusses the exhibited objects portrayed in each image – ranging from sculpture to paintings, machinery and products – as well as the photographers involved and the methods they used, thereby bringing together different disciplines and supporting wider scholarship beyond the photographic. Anyone studying material histories of photography, histories of display and exhibition, and histories of industry will therefore also find much to interest them in this work. This volume adds to the significant body of research on the exhibition of photographs in nineteenth-century Britain, such as the online databases Photographs Exhibited in Britain 1839–1865 and Exhibitions of the Royal Photographic Society 1870–1915. However, what this book brings is narrative, analysis and illustrations to the available data. The interest Hamber demonstrates in photographic equipment shown at the exhibition supports a deeper understanding of the business of photography. His knowledge of the practicalities and technicalities in turn furnishes a more grounded and accurate analysis of the photographic negatives and prints. In bringing this technical understanding to bear on the photographs in the Reports by the Juries, Hamber helps us determine which aesthetic effects were deliberately chosen and which were by-products of the many practical or technical compromising circumstances with which the photographers had to contend. Chapters setting the scene in the photographic milieu of the time and introducing the key players are meticulously researched and o","PeriodicalId":13024,"journal":{"name":"History of Photography","volume":"45 1","pages":"196 - 197"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41445793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Creative Collaborations: Australian Photomurals and International Expositions 1937–40","authors":"C. De Lorenzo","doi":"10.1080/03087298.2022.2027139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2022.2027139","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores innovations in photographic production and experimentation in Australia, especially Sydney, from 1935 to 1940. While many photographers and photographic societies were still promoting the aesthetics of Pictorialism, others were responding to new demands and opportunities provided by publishing, advertising, international expositions, local exhibitions and architecture. After introducing some of the forces for change, where there was often an easy exchange between photography and design, the article examines four case studies from 1937 to 1940. Three of these were generated by international expositions; all involved different types of photomurals and collaborations across the arts. These collaborations were instrumental in helping to shape Australian modernism and a postwar recovery within the arts.","PeriodicalId":13024,"journal":{"name":"History of Photography","volume":"45 1","pages":"162 - 181"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48423366","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Asserting Photography’s Social Function: Exhibitions of Soviet Photography in Interwar Czechoslovakia","authors":"Fedora Parkmann","doi":"10.1080/03087298.2022.2069814","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2022.2069814","url":null,"abstract":"Several large-scale photographic exhibitions featuring substantial participation from the USSR were organised in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Despite the number of local and foreign actors they involved, and the critical response they triggered, they have raised limited scholarly interest so far. To shed light on the conditions under which these events were planned and realised, it is necessary to turn to exhibition catalogues, archives of the organisers and press reviews. Based on this data set, this article questions the part these displays played in propagating Soviet photographic discourses and aesthetic models in Czechoslovakia. New evidence from the archives of the Soviet All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (Vsesojuznoe obščestvo kul’turnoj svjazi s zagraničej [VOKS]) suggests that the Marxist critic Lubomír Linhart was the most committed mediator of Soviet photography and promoter of its documentary and utilitarian approach. By orchestrating the Soviet participation in the two exhibitions of social photography in 1933 and 1934, the International Exhibition of Photography in 1936 and in several unrealised projects, Linhart and other supporters of the USSR had succeeded, by the late 1930s, in asserting the photographer’s social function in Czechoslovakia, in close relation to the Soviet discourse on functional and politically committed photography.","PeriodicalId":13024,"journal":{"name":"History of Photography","volume":"45 1","pages":"139 - 161"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47187367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}