The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (original) (raw)
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Journal of War & Culture Studies, 2016
The familiar cultural figure of the photojournalist emerged relatively late in the history of photography, taking a shape only in the 1930s and developing quickly in the unique conditions provided by the conjunction of the new, picture-driven mass print media and their coverage of the global conflict of World War II. This article asserts that market and business demands drove this invention, focusing primarily on the career of Margaret Bourke-White and her symbiotic relationship with Life magazine. By analyzing the management hierarchy and business model of Life, I show how the majority of staff photographers were in fact constrained by the corporate structure, while only a few, such as Bourke-White, were accorded star status as ‘independent’ and intrepid photojournalists. Finally, the ideological function of the romanticised photojournalist as a proxy of freedom is analysed in relation to the rise of corporate/technocratic bureaucratic structures that came to dominate the post-war ...
International Journal of Fashion Studies, 2021
While the figure of the fashion photographer has been widely discussed, little has been written on image-making as a collective endeavour. Fashion photography indeed results from technical innovations, publishing strategies, editorial policies, behind-the-scenes negotiations and, ultimately, decision-making. This article analyses ‘The Condé Nast Papers’ – a series of internal documents held at the Condé Nast archives in New York – together with US Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar’s editorials and covers to explore how fashion photographs resulted from the collective labour of photographers, editors, artistic directors and many others in the early 1940s. Through these unique historical sources, this article gives a voice to the workers involved in the making of fashion images and shows how decision-making and creativity were distributed across occupations. It also unpacks the negotiations, arbitrations and power relations that underpinned work relations at US Vogue, showing the collaboratio...
War, Photography, Business: New Critical Histories
2016
Co-authored article with Pippa Oldfield Journal of War & Culture Studies, 9 (2016), 94-114 ABSTRACT: This article offers a critique of conventional histories of war photography which have tended to have a narrow focus on the biographies of individual renowned photojournalists or particular aesthetically striking images of conflict. We argue the need in addition for an expanded conception of war photography which encompasses not only reportage, but myriad of other uses in wartime of photographic images and technologies, from reconnaissance imagery to the application of innovations made by photographic companies in the development of weaponry and other military hardware. In parallel, we argue for an appreciation of the broader network of actors, organisations and institutions relevant to war photography in this sense—a network encompassing not only the military and the state, but also photographic companies, weapons manufacturers, individual entrepreneurs, media companies and the public. We proffer the term ‘war photography complex’ as shorthand for this broad cultural phenomenon encompassing visual material and technologies developed and deployed within the extensive field of wartime image production, circulation and consumption. In illuminating this war photography complex, we aim to prompt a broader sustained engagement with the reciprocity between, on the one hand, the strategy and prosecution of war and, on the other hand, photographic practices and products. The case is also made for the contribution of business history (representing a valuable array of critical approaches and concepts) to examining war photography, acting as a much-needed supplement to methodologies from cultural history and critical theories of photography studies. Finally, discussing war photography from the Second World War to the Cold War, we articulate the key research questions which constitute this proposed research agenda, as well as exemplify aspects of the war photography complex relevant to this historical moment by drawing from the articles which constitute the remainder of this special issue.
Hand over fist: a chronicle of Cold War photography
Visual Studies, 2015
Group Material's Timeline: The Chronicle of US Invention in Latin and Central America (1984) at P.S.1's Center for Contemporary Art explored the framing devices of installation art and photography in tandem, as a means of reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible at the height of the Cold War. In response to escalating crisis (including continuous Central Intelligence Agency operations being carried out in Nicaragua and El Salvador), this activist project employed postmodern strategies such as appropriation, pastiche and a resistance to conclusiveness in order to suggest provocative and unexpected dialogues between disparate artworks and artefacts across time and geopolitical difference. Artists ranging from Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger to John Heartfield, Tina Modotti and Arellano Bolivar, among others, come together as signs of political and aesthetic conflict, as networks of visual culture that complicate dominant narratives of spatial and temporal reality during the Cold War era. Closer analysis of such works reveals historical ruptures alongside continuities, relayed by official government policy, mass media and the art world more broadly. By excavating a long-standing history of conflict, Timeline addresses the stakes of the ownership of meaning itself in the mid-1980s, with implications regarding art production and politics for generations to come. Rather than ask, 'What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time?' I should like to ask, 'What is its position in them?' Walter Benjamin ([1938] 1978) Imagining and imaging the reconfiguration of perceptual forms is a political act. In theorist Jacques Rancière's (2009, 25) formulation, politics itself 'consists in reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible'. Moreover, since '[p]olitics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent [la qualité] to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time' (Rancière 2004, 13), visual culture and discourse compose deeply connected and fraught political terrain. For Rancière (2009, 59), 'the dream of a suitable political work of art' then 'is […] the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable'. Such an act entwines politics with poetics, creating the possibility of rethinking crucial relationships between space, time and people. Between 1979 and 1996, Group Material produced more than forty-five projects linking political and artistic issues, and provocatively reformulating aesthetico-political relations. 1 This New York-based collaboration of young artist activists repeatedly insisted on exposing the complicity of the culture of capitalism, as embedded in daily life in the United States, with atrocities abroad, as well as making visible the collapsed spaces between public and private realms. Throughout the Cold War, Group Material attempted to unsettle oversimplified binaries (democracy versus socialism, capitalism versus communism, radical versus conservative) and demystify the commercial and aesthetic guises of capitalism, by complicating and clarifying the connections between photographic alignments and political alliances. In other words, in highlighting the instrumental role of visual culture in that system, Group Material raised awareness of the exploitative relationship between the United States and Latin and Central America. Timeline: The Chronicle of US Invention in Latin and Central America presents a compelling example of Group Material's focus on social interaction and collaboration. Installed in a single room of P.S.1's Center for Contemporary Art in Queens from 22 January to 18 March 1984, Group Material desired 'to illustrate the crucial issues of the Central and Latin American-US relationship', through the installation of 'disparate objects, artworks, commodities and historical documents' (Ault 2010, 83). 2 Staged within a publicschool-turned-modern-art-gallery, the institutional choice for this ephemeral project appropriately underscored the artists' pedagogical impetus. Group Material's assembled mélange of art, artefact, commodities and mass culture confused aesthetic expectations by exceeding the traditional categories of 'art'. By combining a range of visual forms, Timeline positioned the viewer in an interrogatory space, as an active agent. Moving through the space, one was
The Critical Eye: Reading Commercial Photography
American Quarterly, 2006
The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929. By Elspeth H. Brown. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 344 pages. $49.95 (cloth).