Practising photography: an archive, a study, some photographs and a researcher (original) (raw)

Out and About: Photography, Topography and Historical Imagination

Double Exposure: Memory and Photography ed Olga Shevchencko. pages 185-209, 2014

This essay considers the ways in which the relationship between photography and historical imagination was figured through the embodied experience of the photographer as they moved through the landscape, with a heightened awareness of historical topography, and translating this into photographs. The essay examines in particular the practices of amateur photographers in England around 1900, whose efforts to record the historical landscape were articulated through competing rhetorics of subjective experience and objective observation, and thus competing claims of the historical imagination. It argues that the historical landscape was defined not through a disembodied gaze, but through experiences of light, wind, space and above all historical imagination.

The Use of Photography as a Mode of Social and Historical Investigation

Critique d’art

American Readers at Home by Ludovic Balland, Against Photography by Akram Zaatari and Qu'est-ce qui est différent ? by Wolfgang Tillmans all have in common the fact they consider photography as a decisive element in the construction of histories, while also integrating it into the narrative chain text is also part of. Akram Zaatari and Wolfgang Tillmans both include pre-existing photographs in their work, thus questioning the medium per se. This is a far cry from the unique, context-less photograph admired as if on an altar, following the probable desire of Roger Théron, the ex-editor-in-chief of Paris Match, a tabloid now controlled by Matra, a weapon manufacturer. Théron recommended that the magazine's photographers should go study the old masters at the Louvre. All three of the artists discussed here have in common the urgent need to take action in the present. Ludovic Balland and Wolfgang Tillmans lead their investigation in Western countries, where, in the past two or three years, authoritarian, nationalistic and discriminating political movements have rocketed. In a completely different context (Lebanon and its neighbouring countries), Akram Zaatari questions current affairs through old photographs. All three use photography as an instrument in the field of politics. The Use of Photography as a Mode of Social and Historical Investigation Critique d'art, 51 | Automne/hiver Recently, the exhibition Zerrissene Gesellschaft: Ereignisse von langer Dauer [Torn Society: Long-Term Events], curated by Anne König and Jan Wenzel 3 , had a starting point The Use of Photography as a Mode of Social and Historical Investigation Critique d'art, 51 | Automne/hiver

The Historian, the Picture, and the Archive

Isis, 2006

One of the persistent features of historical writing about the sciences in the last twenty years has been the concern of a number of historians who insist on the need for a new awareness of the role of visual images and image making. The author believes that, rather than reducing the analysis of visual culture to a single set of principles, the point of the academic study of scientific images is the recognition of their heterogeneity, the different circumstances of their production, and the variety of cultural and social functions they serve. This essay challenges historians to discover new ways of framing the historical meanings of scientific images within the larger contexts of signifying symbols, images, and mediations that make up culture. The study of nineteenth-century practices of building collections of scientific photographs provides the background for a discussion of the significance of picture archives in the history of science, of the historical mechanisms that frame some pictures as "scientific" and others as "unscientific," and of the need for further research on how scientific images generate meaning.

Photography's Fits and Starts: The Search for Antiquity and its Image in Victorian Britain

History of Photography, Volume 40, 2016 - Issue 3, Photography, Antiquity, Scholarship. Guest Editors: Mirjam Brusius and Theodor Dunkelgrün This article investigates the relationship between ancient objects and their visual depiction in British archaeological expeditions in the Middle East in the mid- nineteenth century. The article focuses on the exploration of Ancient Mesopotamia initiated by the British adventurer Austen Henry Layard. Modern scholarship on Layard’s excavations and their reception in Europe has mostly presented them as well-organised, purposive, and logical enterprises in which finding objects and depicting them had a clear, well-defined purpose. Little attention has been paid to the fact that the excavated items were initially objects without a clear status, even after they had arrived in Europe. This article examines how the application of visual media – whether used for scholarship or for publicity – in the field and the museum reflected this uncertainty. In this context, photography as a new medium entered the chaos of the field and the museum as one among several media that brought along its own insecurities rather than a tool ready and able to solve a problem.

Pictures of the past: Benjamin and Barthes on photography and history (Tim Dant & Graeme Gilloch)

European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2002

This paper explores the key moments in Benjamin's and Barthes's analyses of the cultural significance of the photograph. For Benjamin these are; the optical unconscious, the transmission of aura, the representation of cultural and political decay and proto-surrealist political commentary. For Barthes they are; the techniques of the photographer, the studium, the punctum and the ecstasy of the image. These rather different approaches to photography reveal a common concern with history. Both authors have written about the nature of historical understanding and photography has provided both with a powerful metaphor. What emerges from their analyses of photographs is that each evokes a double moment of historical awareness; of being both in the present and in the past. For Benjamin this is the 'spark of contingency' with which the aura of past existence shines in the present. For Barthes it is the 'ça-a-été', the emotional stab of awareness that what is present and visible in the photograph is irretrievably lost in the past.