Jordan Bear | University of Toronto (original) (raw)
Papers by Jordan Bear
Chapter 1 of "Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Viewer" (Penn State Univers... more Chapter 1 of "Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Viewer" (Penn State University Press, 2015).
Nineteenth-Century Contexts
Philosophy of Photography, 2012
Photoresearcher: Journal of the European Society for the History of Photography, 2013
This essay explores the task of visual discernment as both a recreation and a prerequisite for pr... more This essay explores the task of visual discernment as both a recreation and a prerequisite for productivity in the modern economy in Britain in the 1860s. The investigation is anchored by the close analysis of two exemplars of the second generation of British photography, O. G. Rejlander and his student and sometime rival Henry Peach Robinson, whose photographs evince a complex repertoire which engages the viewer's ability to discern the mode of their constructedness, cultivating a game of visual discrimination with a series of coherent and consistent pictorial clues. Indeed, one might say that Rejlander and Robinson's central project was interrogating the dubious claims of photographic neutrality. This dubiousness was the basis through which the two photographers elaborated an iconography that made the process of discerning the specific modalities of their intervention the basis of their production. They fashioned a body of work that harnessed the kind of visual acuity developed for educational and scientific improvement to the pursuit of commercial pleasure and in so doing sacrificed the primary feature through which the photograph has traditionally been thought to have secured its influence: its transparency and access to an unmediated referential world.
Chapter 1 of "Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Viewer" (Penn State Univers... more Chapter 1 of "Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Viewer" (Penn State University Press, 2015).
Nineteenth-Century Contexts
Philosophy of Photography, 2012
Photoresearcher: Journal of the European Society for the History of Photography, 2013
This essay explores the task of visual discernment as both a recreation and a prerequisite for pr... more This essay explores the task of visual discernment as both a recreation and a prerequisite for productivity in the modern economy in Britain in the 1860s. The investigation is anchored by the close analysis of two exemplars of the second generation of British photography, O. G. Rejlander and his student and sometime rival Henry Peach Robinson, whose photographs evince a complex repertoire which engages the viewer's ability to discern the mode of their constructedness, cultivating a game of visual discrimination with a series of coherent and consistent pictorial clues. Indeed, one might say that Rejlander and Robinson's central project was interrogating the dubious claims of photographic neutrality. This dubiousness was the basis through which the two photographers elaborated an iconography that made the process of discerning the specific modalities of their intervention the basis of their production. They fashioned a body of work that harnessed the kind of visual acuity developed for educational and scientific improvement to the pursuit of commercial pleasure and in so doing sacrificed the primary feature through which the photograph has traditionally been thought to have secured its influence: its transparency and access to an unmediated referential world.