History of Photography Editorial -- May 2018 issue (original) (raw)
Related papers
Imaged Communities: Putting Canadian Photographic History in its Place
“Imaged Communities” imagines Canada as a network of photographic knowledge. Co-written by six members of Canadian Photography History/Histoire de la photographie canadienne (CPH/HPC), a research team based at Concordia University in Montreal, this essay examines the meeting places created by photographic technology. The mapping of these histories addresses the central questions about photographic history and mediated experience that have motivated this research—What did Canadians know about photography, and when did they know it?–and supplements it with a third—Where did these encounters take place? The introduction establishes the sites and parameters of the contribution. First, the research draws on the digital anthology of Canadian photographic literature that the authors are putting forward as a history of the medium in Canada—a community imaged at every stage of its mutation from colony to nation and thereby imagined, in Benedict Anderson’s well-known formulation (1991). This is a fragmentary photographic history, which accounts for the polyphonic nature of this text. Second, the authors write as art historians and photographic specialists, mindful of the various turns in the humanities and sciences that have engaged with, and sometimes emerged from, discoveries in photographic studies, the spatial turn most pertinent to this inquiry. The authors point out, however, that photographic practice has more than kept pace with theory. There is much to learn from artists’, documentarians’, snapshooters’, and compilers’ projects: their uses of photography as instruments of investigation; their photographic formulations of philosophical ideas and social conditions; the heuristic circle formed by the circulation of their work; and the penetration of that circle by neglected interests. For that reason, this group includes a creation-researcher, whose art historical practice is informed by the making of a photographic work. His armchair-tourist colleagues write at the intersection of photographic knowledge and photographic experience; the introduction seeks to elucidate the structure of that space. A third element of the introduction is an explanation of the lack of an authoritative history of Canadian photography, and how CPH/HPC and its network of individual and institutional collaborators are working within that gap to create new historiographical models. Five short studies follow, each using the intersection of photography and place as an organizing principle. In the first, a brief survey of photographic literature on or about the Canadian West focusses on two bodies of work: a professional tourist’s travelogue of the West (and further West) as he constructed it in 1909 from his railcar, his hotel, and his campground; and a photographer/filmmaker’s lifelong investment in the representation of his diverse community, the North End of Winnipeg, Manitoba. The second study closes in on a single city—Toronto—as celebrated and chronicled in two nineteenth-century publications, and as revisited in a late twentieth-century exhibition and catalogue project based on the photographic collection of Library and Archives Canada. These curatorial perspectives on the city illuminate the social values of their day. In the third study, post-Centennial selection and uses of photographs from the Isaac Erb studio (c1870-1924) in Saint John, New Brunswick, are closely compared with the uses of those photographs at the time of their making and with a more complete version of the Erb oeuvre preserved in the provincial archives, revealing a photographic record of material culture that reflects the port city’s emergence as a transnational, consumer economy. The fourth study moves to another Canadian port via the photographic holdings of the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, an ocean liner terminal and immigration shed-turned-museum. Through online display of its primarily digital collection, this doorway to Canada, selectively open between 1928 and 1971, is photographically preserved as a relational space, forever in between. Finally, a contemporary artist’s photographic study of photography and walking, conducted on boulevard Saint-Laurent in Montreal, creates a processual space of creation, bringing this essay full circle to the image and its imaginer. The conclusion underscores the dialogical structure of our relationships with photography, wherever we find it.
Photography as a Cultural Industry: A Historical-theoretical Overview
Handbook of Photography Studies ed. Gil Pasternak, Bloomsbury, London, 2019
Photography scholars have long acknowledged that photography is the progeny of industrial society. However, despite the increase in historical studies of the medium’s industrial-commercial dimensions, and a smaller number of contemporary sociological and cultural investigations, no attempt has been made to produce an overall account of photography as a cultural industry. This chapter aims to help fill that gap. Moving across public and private photographic contexts, and popular and elite genres, it elaborates photography’s relation to four core problematics: the historical phases of industrial cultural production; cultural labor and economic and cultural capital; the tension between standardization and innovation; and dominant production logics of digital culture. In the process it draws upon traditions of analyzing cultural industries in media studies, the political economy of communication and the sociology of culture to rethink photography’s long-term trajectories as a modern cultural endeavor.
Material Matters: The Transatlantic Trade in Photographic Materials during the Nineteenth Century
Panorama: Journal of the Association of Art Historians of American Art, 2020
Through an analysis of photographic papers and lenses identified in the popular early photography journals The Philadelphia Photographer and Wilson’s Photographic Magazine, this essay foregrounds the essential though underappreciated role of transatlantic trade relations in the flourishing of photography in the nineteenth-century United States. Further, by privileging the materiality of photographs over the figure of the photographer in understanding how early photographs were made and classified today, this essay also emphasizes the labor of those who produced photographic commodities to offer a more inclusive history of the development of the medium in the United States than is often understood.
On 13 July 1979, The Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for Continuing Education opened an ambitious exhibition on contemporary Canadian art photography. Curated by Lorne Falk and Hubert Hohn, the exhibition included a stellar group of photographers, with the goal of establishing The Banff Centre as a place for serious photographic study. This was a time of transition and growth for the institution. Hired to teach photography at the Banff Centre in 1977, Hohn quickly became involved with the development of the Centre's new educational master plan, published in 1979 as "A Turning Point," which transformed the school into a creative arts colony. Newly employed by the Walter Phillips Gallery, Falk set out to establish a collecting practice for the growing institution, where works by visiting artists and prominent Canadians could be used for both teaching and curating. The Banff Purchase was part of this larger goal. By the 1970s, the medium of photography was becoming prominent in art galleries and museums around the world, dominated by the U.S.A. Yet concern over the status of art photography in Canada reverberated throughout this period as writers, curators, and critics struggled to differentiate "Canadian photography" from photography "made in Canada." Falk, in a 1979 article entitled "The Dilemma of Photography in Canada," published in the nascent magazine Photo Communiqué, worried about the lack of professional and artistic standards as young artists began to experiment with in the medium. Through their curatorial and pedagogical project, Falk and Hahn wished to challenge the place of the medium in the Canadian imagination by using the exhibition, the collection, and its accompanying publication "as a catalyst" for growth and professional development within the photographic and photo curating communities. As part of their curatorial strategy, Hohn and Falk focused on a small group of photographers who could be universally acknowledged by both peers and art professionals as unfailingly talented, professional, and devoted to the medium of photography. The Banff Purchase, which travelled across Canada in the following years, promoted a particular style of photography, one based on a late photographic modernism. What is noticeable in the work chosen is an absence of experimental and performance-based photography. While some critics saw the exhibition as exclusionary and conservative, others embraced the aesthetic and technical professionalism that the photographs represented. Alongside their ambitious curatorial and educational programming, Falk and Hohn produced a hard-cover photobook. The Banff Purchase is an exemplary object which stands out in quality, materiality, and production value. At a time when photographic exhibition catalogues were often done as cheaply as possible in Canada, if produced at all, the book was a serious statement—if not critique—that aimed to raise the standards in Canadian art photography publishing. While today The Banff Purchase photobook only hints at the many concerns of this cultural moment, through careful re-reading it offers insight into the past and ongoing dilemma of contemporary photography in Canada. The Banff Purchase, both the exhibition and the publication, express a vision for contemporary Canadian art photography grounded in critical vigour, formal exceptionalism, and artistic professionalism.
The development and growth of British photographic manufacturing and retailing, 1839-1914
2010
This study presents a new perspective on British photography through an examination of the manufacturing and retailing of photographic equipment and sensitised materials between 1839 and 1914. This is contextualised around the demand for photography from studio photographers, amateurs and the snapshotter. It notes that an understanding of the photographic image cannot be achieved without this as it directly affected how, why and by whom photographs were made. Individual chapters examine how the manufacturing and retailing of photographic goods was initiated by philosophical instrument makers, opticians and chemists from 1839 to the early 1850s; the growth of specialised photographic manufacturers and retailers; and the dramatic expansion in their number in response to the demands of a mass market for photography from the late1870s. The research discusses the role of technological change within photography and the size of the market. It identifies the late 1880s to early 1900s as the...
A new kind of history? The challenges of contemporary histories of photography
2010
Since the late 1970s, when the history of photography became an academic subject, and with increasing interest in photography in the art market, there have been frequent calls by various scholars for a 'new kind of history' of photography. These calls were part of what Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson described in a special photography issue of October (Summer 1978,) as a renewed scholarly 'discovery' of the medium, characterized by the 'sense of an epiphany, delayed and redoubled in its power.' This rediscovery carried the message that photography and its practices have to be redeemed 'from the cultural limbo to which for a century and a half it had been consigned.'1 The calls for a new history of photography suggested that the time has come to substitute Beaumont Newhall's hegemonic modernist classic The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present with new text/s.2 Newhall was a librarian and later the first director of photography of t...