On the Daguerreotype / Elizabeth Barrett Browning 2
A Lady Photographer who Never Photographs Men / Alice Hughes 3
Annals of My Glass House / Julia Margaret Cameron 8
Photography During the July Monarchy 1830-1898 / Gisele Freund 14
The Camera Against the Paris Commune / Gen Doy 21
Extending the Grand Tour / Maria Morris Hambourg 32
Tracing Nadar / Rosalind Krauss 37
Germany: The Weimar Republic / Ute Eskildsen 53
Photomontage / Varvara Stepanova 64
The Supremacy of the Message - Dada / Dawn Ades 66
A Hundred Years of Photography / Lucia Moholy 70
I Worked with Man Ray / Lee Miller 74
The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism / Rosalind Krauss 76
A Mutable Mirror: Claude Cahun / Therese Lichtenstein 91
The Armed Vision Disarmed - Radical Formalism from Weapon to Style / Abigail Solomon-Godeau 96
Photography, 1914 / Olive Edis 119
Exhibitions and Commercial Work / Madame Yevonde 121
In Pursuit of Perfection / Dorothy Wilding 125
Early Years / Louise Dahl-Wolfe 127
Life Begins / Margaret Bourke-White 133
Looking at Life / Carol Squiers 140
The Assignment I'll Never Forget / Dorothea Lange 151
A Crisis in the Intimate / Andrea Fisher 153
One Time, One Place / Eudora Welty 161
The Photo League / Anne Tucker 165
Documentary Photography / Elizabeth McCausland 170
The Politics of Photography / Jo Spence 174
The Seige of St Malo / Lee Miller 178
Star Wars: The Photographer as Polemicist in Vietnam / Jan Zita Grover 185
Photography at the Crossroads / Berenice Abbott 203
What Shall We Tell the Children? Photography and Its Text (Books) / Mary Warner Marien 207
Crowned with Thorns: Creative Camera 1965-1978 / Val Williams 223
On Photography / Susan Sontag 230
What Becomes a Legend Most: The Short, Sad Career of Diane Arbus / Catherine Lord 237
Tina Modotti: Letters to Edward Weston / Amy Rule 251
On Photography / Tina Modotti 260
Re-reading Edward Weston - Feminism, Photography and Psychoanalysis / Roberta McGrath 261
Ansel Adams: The Eloquent Light / Nancy Newhall 270
Good Intentions / Ingrid Sischy 272
Witkin's Others / Cynthia Chris 283
The Other Side / Nan Goldin 291
Time Exposure: The Photographs of Patrick Faigenbaum / Lauren Sedofsky 295
Cindy Sherman: Burning Down the House / Jan Avgikos 300
Winning the Game When the Rules Have Been Changed: Art Photography and Postmodernism / Abigail Solomon-Godeau 307
Two Types of Photography Criticism Located in Relation to Lynn Silverman's Series / Meaghan Morris 319
Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An Inquiry into the Cultural Meanings of Landscape Photography / Deborah Bright 333
Dykes in Context: Some Problems in Minority Representation / Jan Zita Grover 348
Dialogue with Spectatorship: Barbara Kruger and Victor Burgin / Laura Mulvey 377
Between Frames / Susan Butler 386
The Pleasure of the Phototext / Jane Gallop 394
Interview: Fetishism of Black-and-White and the Vulgarity of Colour / Karen Knorr 403
Partial Recall / Lucy Lippard 413
The Unveiled: Algerian Women / Carole Naggar 422
Through Indian Eyes / Judith Mara Gutman 427
Essential Differences, Photographs of Mexican Women / Coco Fusco 434
A Strategy of Appearances - The Australian B

Urban Collective is a monthly submission site dedicated to showcasing the creative talents of designers from all points of the globe. Original works are submitted and displayed on the Urban Collective website and this inturn leads to worldwide exposure to fellow designers.  Urban Collective is a place where you can find ideas and be inspired by the diversity of work that is on show. There's a different theme every month so the work and designers are always changing. Please take the time to explore and see the variety of work that is on display and see what Urban Collective is all about.

Aerial photography of  Philadelphia, the Delaware Valley, and the Mid-Atlantic region  produced by the Dallin areial Survey Co., 1924-1941.

Accessible via the Hagley Museum & Library's Hagley Digital Archives.

Bledsoe, Elliott. "Lessig's Use of Flickr Photos: is Creative Commons Really a Community?" Creative Commons Through the Looking Glass.

          Bledsoe's blog was inspired by a comment Lessig made on his own blog about how, after using a photograph from Flickr in a post, the photographer actually came up to him in Hong Kong. According to Lessig, it was "the most amazing fact of the day". This led Bledsoe to question how, or even if, Creative Commons functions as a community since it relies not only on legal permission but on the idea of sharing and the relationships that sharing facilitates. What makes CC different is that things are not directly shared like they would be in the real world. He compares CC to borrowing a cup of sugar from your neighbor, which involves a direction need and interaction. Using a CC license, however, preempts sharing. Even though someone may not need or want to use the work, permission has been granted anyway without any direction interaction between parties. CC also lacks direct membership which even other online communities have. The point here is that with no central hub and no obvious boundaries in the community, it's actually likely that "members" (those using CC licenses) will feel very isolated. CC then becomes a community only in the fact that it facilitates smaller subcommunities which have come to use it.

        This article emphasizes this idea that Creative Commons facilitates communities and, in turn, the commons. Some of the examples of subcommunities that Bledsoe mentions are Flickr and DeviantArt, places that my project hopes to emphasize as models of the value of the commons online and how Creative Commons plays a role in it. Both of them are made possible, at least in part, but the larger CC community. However, the article points out an important distinction. CC itself is not (at least not yet) a community in the same way that Flickr and DeviantArt are. No one has to sign up or login to use CC licenses. No one discriminates against who can and cannot use these licenses and therefore little is shared among users except for their willingness to share. But smaller communities that embrace CC licenses offer the boundaries and distinctions necessary for a community to really flourish.      

Impact of the camera on American lit

June 05, 2008

The War on Photography

What is it with photographers these days? Are they really all terrorists, or does everyone just think they are? Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We've been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.

Except that it's nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn't photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn't photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn't photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren't being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn't known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about -- the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 -- no photography.

Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don't seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets? Why are our fears so great that we have no choice but to be suspicious of any photographer?

Because it's a movie-plot threat.

A movie-plot threat is a specific threat, vivid in our minds like the plot of a movie. You remember them from the months after the 9/11 attacks: anthrax spread from crop dusters, a contaminated milk supply, terrorist scuba divers armed with almanacs. Our imaginations run wild with detailed and specific threats, from the news, and from actual movies and television shows. These movie plots resonate in our minds and in the minds of others we talk to. And many of us get scared.

...

Henderson, Brian. “Notes on Set Design and Cinema.” Film Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 17-28

    Brian Henderson elaborately describes certain key techniques in classic and modern filmmaking by citing examples from famous films such as Citizen Kane, Bringing Up Baby, North by Northwest and Johnny Guitar.  Henderson begins his article by discussing distinctive creators among set designers and production directors in “the latest stage of auteurist dialectic.”  He moves from a comparison of Hollywood set designers to the architectural profession and discusses the value of production stills taken during the filming of movies.  Production stills, though giving a simple and concise summary of the visual set which can preserve our knowledge of the filmmaking, don’t preserve the full knowledge of the filming because no single vantage point can be used to reproduce or understand a set.  A photograph only presents a view from a single angle.  One would need multiple shots from different angles to accurately learn about the styles of different film sets.  Henderson argues that production stills are most valuable simply for publicity purposes – he cites examples of sets from Bringing Up Baby.  The author also describes visual and illusionary techniques in filming, such as the use of large foreground models and miniature background models to simulate depth.  Some filmmakers replace parts of the sets with miniatures that are built to scale or they use devices that create composite images such as rear projection, glass shots, travelling mattes, the Shufftan process, or an optical printer.  Some of these special effects are used to supplement the narrative of the film.  The Shufftan process which uses a semitransparent/semi-reflective mirror can be good at showing before and after images – a technique used in documentary filmmaking.  He also mentions techniques used by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, and techniques by Alfred Hitchcock.

    Henderson elaborates in some detail the extent of the use of special effects in Welles’s Citizen Kane.  An interview with optical printer, Linwood Dunn, reveals that not very many people know about the extent of the post production work and modifications made to the film.  Many photographic effects used and only a handful of people actually worked on the post production special effects.   Dunn says that special techniques other than advanced hardware had to be used to get the deep-focus shots that Welles desired.  In scene of Susan Alexander’s suicide attempt, the girl and poison are featured in the foreground while the doctors and Kane contrasted as they enter in the far background.  To achieve this effect, in-camera editing techniques were used.  First the foreground was shot with a dark background, then film was rewound, the lens refocused, and the film stock was exposed again with the background lit and foreground dark.  Over 50% of footage involved special effects, but this was not well known for about 40 years after the film was released.  Shots of Xanadu (Kane’s palatial estate) were filmed as miniature models.  This common technique saved money on set design.

A photo essay of and about MIT's Glass Lab.  The text doesn't blow me away, but some of the photos sure do.

 Click here for more information about MIT's Glass Lab.

Fletcher Street

Photographs by Martha Camarillo

Deep in the heart of Philadelphia, past row houses and vacant lots, run-down playgrounds and dilapidated schools, is a little place called Fletcher Street. It has everything one would expect to find down an alley in the ghetto, with one addition: horses. The men and boys of Fletcher Street have used their passion for riding and bonds with their rides to build their and their community's sense of worth. They describe their passion for horses as having kept them from the temptations of street life. Fletcher Street by Martha Camarillo documents the lives of these men and the boys they mentor, who board their horses in abandoned houses or makeshift stables, and ride them through the streets of Philly.

Camarillo's work is valuable not only because it illuminates a fascinating new aspect of culture, but also because it challenges those who see it. Her photographs force viewers to confront their own preconceptions of sport as representative of social status, and race as a demarcation of class. The power of Camarillo's exploration of this underrepresented community is based on the strength of the men themselves: urban horsemen who have ridden away from the 'hood and toward a better future.

Martha Camarillo is a self-taught photographer from Texas. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Telegraph, Numéro, Journal, i-D, and many others. Her first book, Remote Photos (Janvier/Léo Scheer, 2005), a collaboration with artist Avena Gallagher, was an in-depth look at the identity of teenage male and female models, made by giving the models themselves disposable cameras to be used by whomever they saw fit. Work from the project was exhibited at Léo Scheer Gallery, Paris, in 2005. Camarillo was the winner of the Hyères Festival 2001, and the 2002 Art Director's Award.

Horses/Photography/Urban Cowboys

Hardcover, 10 x 11.7 inches, 128 pages, 65 four-color photographs

ISBN 1-57687-328-5
$39.95 / Cnd $53.50

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The photo trade show was in Philadelphia. By E. Fuld

ETS-HOKIN v. SKYY, a decision centering on photographs of Skyy vodka used for advertisement, raises key factors in judging copyrightability of the work. First, is the photograph an original, or a derivative artwork? Secondly, which originality requirement should be applied? The difference in the answer to part one cost a photograph a copyright protection.

The case was brought to motion when Ets-Hopkin, who was hired by Skyy to photograph the vodka bottle for their advertisement campaigned, sued the company for copyright infringement when the Skyy Inc. used his image in various advertisements under limited license without his consent. Also, he argued that other photographers who photographed the vodka for the campaign had copied his photos, virtually producing identical images. The company argued in defense that the plaintiff’s photograph is not subject to copyright protection, since the work is a derivative work of Skyy’s signature vodka bottle itself. The district court has concluded that the photography was in fact a derivative work, since Skyy vodka bottle, from the color, font, to the label, is a “pre-existing work.” Since the photograph was a derivative work, the “substantial originality” clause was used to evaluate copyrightability of the photo. The court ruled that photos were “insufficiently original” and denied photos’ copyright protection.

However, the Court of Appeals concluded differently. The court declared Ets-Hopkin’s photos original work of art. The argument to consider vodka bottle as a work of art, was not subject to copyright because the bottle was driven mainly by function, and could not be protected by copyright law as a result. The court recognized that the label might have been protected by copyright, but it was ruled to be incidental part of the photograph, not a substantial part. Since the first work of art, especially photography, only require “minimal amount of originality” by the Copyright Act, the court stated that the photography demonstrated sufficient creativity and granted the photograph copyright protection, but the issue of infringement was not settled in the case.

This case is a fascinating study of how one subjective of thought, in this case in what the court believes to a derivative work, can influence so far as being the key determining factor in granting copyright protection for a work. Especially by the weight of value that comes from copyright monopoly, there is a need for a more rigid standard to match the gravity of power granted by copyright law. 

Burrow-Giles Lithographic Company v. Sarony. 111 U.S. 53; 4 S. Ct. 279; 28 L. Ed. 349; 1884 U.S. LEXIS 1757

 

This landmark Supreme Court case rose about when Burrow-Giles lithographic company when Napoleon Sarony, a photographer of “Oscar Wilde No. 18,” sued the company for copyright infringement when it distributed lithographs of the photography without author’s consent and permission. The Company’s main argument was that photographs are products of a mechanical process, and is therefore not an art, and are not protected under article I, section 8, clause 8 of the United States Constitution—photographs are not produced under authorship as other means of art, such as writing and painting, are. Supreme Court concludes that Congress has the constitutional power to extend copyright protection to new emerging medium of expression, such as photography that represent “original intellectual conceptions” and “ his own genius and intellect.” The Court first argued that since Sarony included “Copyright, 1882, by N. Sarony,” at the corner of his photograph, it gave sufficient notice to the public of his exclusive right to the work. Secondly, although the Constitution does not include photographs under works of authorship in which are protected under copyright, it is only because the technology, when the statute was written in 1790, was not in existence. Providing the evidence that charts and maps were included under protection in Copyright Act of 1790, the court concludes that since photographs are a medium in which “idea of mind given a visible expression,” they also qualify under copyright protection under the constitution. Court goes further on, stating no ordinary photography of which “transferring to the plate the visible representation of some existing object” will not be given a copyright. Only photographs that are “useful, new, harmonious, characteristic, and graceful…entirely from his own original mental conception” and in effectively doing so—showcasing enough expression and originality to be granted such a protection. With this case, Supreme Court demonstrated a great activism in promoting and introducing new medium of expression to the culture. However, the last clause to the court’s argument, that a photograph must express sufficient originality according to court’s standard to be considered an art, creates a very subjective and aesthetic basis to which future photographic art/and recreations of the medium are to be judged. Words that were used by Justice Miller to describe an original photography are words conceptualized with different meanings according to every person’s mind and artistic taste. Law should be a concrete rule which should be understood and interpreted, to an extent, on a same level, and the aesthetics required by the court’s decision set minimal base to which people can agree on. This was the first real case in which the court’s decision in granting the copyright based entirely upon a subjective and aesthetic decision. I will argue the loosely set standards in the decision created inconsistency and unpredictability in future cases and did little to mold society a clear conception of photography as art.

"It would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only to the law to constitute themselves final judges of the worth of pictorial illustrations, outside of the narrowest and most obvious limits" Justice Holmes, Bleinstein v. Donaldson(1903) Despite Court's reservation about being judges of aesthetics values which grants 2D art an authorship, great display of judicial activism by courts have been demonstrated since Burrow-Giles v. Sarony(1884), where the court has reshaped copyright law through "aesthetic" determinations that newly define originality and authorship in two dimensional art. As a result, couple issues are at stake. 1) The change in the norm and societal definition of originality and authorship in 2D art. 2) Should such qualitative (subjective) analysis be used, or new quantative standards of determining originality is needed? 3) Lack of consistency and coherency in court's decision over time, and no predictability; does it promote progress? The fundamental question arises: should courts be making aesthetic decisions? I will be focusing on judicial activism displayed in cases about authorship of 2-D art determining what is copyrightable, most importantly in photography. Looking through landmark cases starting with Burrow-Giles v. Sarony(1884) to as recent as Bridgman Art Library v. Corel Corp(1999), I will argue that court's lack of "quantitative standards" in determining originality of each work created inconsistency and failed to create a societal norm of authorship and originality in 2D art realm. I will propose that legislation is needed in which the government clearly defines consistent, more quantative standards to judge "originality" of a two dimensional art to determine its qualifications for copyright privilege.

chapter 9 "The Photographic Essay" on James Agee

maps/aerial photographs where users contribute information about a map by highlighting an area on the map and adding a description.

Loretta Lux
May 18–June 24, 2006
Reception for the artist
Saturday, May 20, 2006, 6:00–8:00 pm

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO (Japanese, b. Tokyo, 1948) show at the Hisrshhorn in DC.

Over 3000 bunkers, built between 1882 and 1995, are scattered around Swizerland. Over the course of four years, Leo Fabrizio has documented these military strongholds. Real fortresses camouflaged amidst the rocks, hidden behind greenery and beneath improbable decorations, the Swiss bunkers, through a series of unconventional images, bear witness to an "armed neutrality" and provide a useful instrument for analysing the relationship between landscape and architecture.

JN: Wide Angle
SO: Wide Angle Vol IX nr 1 (1987); p 11-31
PY: 1987
CP: United-States-of-America
TI: Photo-gravure: death, photography, and film narrative.
AT: Article; Illustrations; Bibliography

Despite its overly flowery writing style, the Wide Angle article “Photo-Gravure: Death Photography and Film Narrative” formulates an interesting analysis of the relationship between film, photography, narrative and death.  Author Garrett Stewart explores the filming techniques utilized to convey death across several films, but his analysis of the “photo finish” “freeze frame” employed at the climax of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is especially salient to his final argument.

            According to Stewart, both the photographic image and death itself “characterize a pointed and irreversible arrest of time.”  He goes on to argue that although film is a composite of still photographic images, the streaming of these pointed images breathes life into the actions that are captured one frame at a time.  By introducing the “radical stasis of a freeze frame” into a film like Butch Cassidy, however, the director creates a simultaneous death of the film in conjunction with the death of his characters in the film.  The “stop-action frame” turns Butch and Sundance into a still “image…the mirage of future movement.”  As Stewart writes, the viewer “does not imagine the heroes…stumbling and falling.”  “The contingencies of their narratives are over with their lives,” but Hill is able to glorify his heroes by concluding their story in a moment of bravery rather than degradation.

            Stewart explains that “the temporal violence of dying” is what creates the “readability of the photo finish” in cinema.  Yet he applauds Hill for expanding upon this standard trope by having his final image “fade to sepia monochrome” as though the shot were an old photograph taken by a sympathetic observer of Butch and Sundance’s last stand.  By fading the image in this way, Hill reintroduces the self-reflexivity of his work (previously seen through the still photos intertwined with the opening credits of the film) and reminds his viewer that the story he tells is ultimately a nostalgic tale of a period long-gone in American history.  Just as Butch and Sundance could not escape the changing times they were a part of, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid can only serve as a fond remembrance of the days of the Wild West by reminding us that those days and heroes are gone for good.

 

Karl Baden, a photorgapher and teacher at Boston College, likes to spend time browsing through book stores.  He was struck how many book covers featured well known photographs.  He was also surprised by the variety of books that would feature the same image - books that otherwise had nothing apparent in common.  As his interest in the subject increased, he began buying books for their covers.  His collection was featured in an exhibit at Harvard's Carpenter Center, which ran through November 13, 2005.  The exhibit illustrates the variations of the same photograph as featured on different books.  As this article explains: "The same photograph might be cropped or tinted or have type on it.  In those various uses, the covers became a kind of history, at once revelatory and warped, of not just photography but also book design, literary taste, and marketing considerations."

An exhibit that pioneers a new synthesis of photography and painting.