Chinese Photographers and Their Clientele in the Netherlands Indies, 1890-1940

This article examines the position of Chinese photographers in the visual colonial landscape. The Chinese toekang potret were involved in both commissioned photographs and the production of commercial images, but the latter was less widespread. Contrary to the image that Chinese photographers' clients were from the lower strata of society, this article shows that they were commissioned by the European, Chinese and Javanese elite. The image materiality of the portraits reveals the visual traces of circulation and exchange. Hence, the Chinese photographers were indirectly involved in these elite networks as well

Chinese Photographers and Their Clientele in the Netherlands Indies, 1890-1940

This article examines the position of Chinese photographers in the visual colonial landscape. The Chinese toekang potret were involved in both commissioned photographs and the production of commercial images, but the latter was less widespread. Contrary to the image that Chinese photographers' clients were from the lower strata of society, this article shows that they were commissioned by the European, Chinese and Javanese elite. The image materiality of the portraits reveals the visual traces of circulation and exchange. Hence, the Chinese photographers were indirectly involved in these elite networks as well

Empty hands and precious pictures: post-mortem portrait photographs of children

In an 1882 article on ‘A Grave Subject’, the photographer George Bradforde wrote: How the relatives can bear to look upon these photographs I cannot understand, unless they have a peculiar love of the horrible. For my part I cannot see the necessity of photographing the dead at all. If the departed were truly beloved, nothing that may happen in this world can ever efface the dear features from the mind’s eye: it needs not a cold, crude photograph representing the last dreary stage of humanity to recall those lineaments. Indeed, I should imagine it would in time lead to the forgetting of the pleasant smile or the lightsome laugh, and supply, in place, a ghoul-like resemblance of anything but a pleasant nature (394- 5). This sums up the reasons why photographic portraits of the dead are no longer widespread. Such images would today be viewed as ghoulish and morbid, and a photograph of a dead body now strikes us as bearable only in the form of news images in which horror is the main thrust of the story. Such pictures bear witness to the obscenity of violent death: they are a necessary record of atrocity rather than the portrait of a dead person. Victorian photographs of the dead, however, were for the most part not those of murders or victims of war; they were family members, most commonly children, who had died at home. They are not news photographs distributed widely among strangers, but portraits, commissioned by family members and kept in the home

Visual witness: a critical rereading of Graciela Iturbide’s photography

This article underlines the importance of Latin American photography at a time when the visual turn of Hispanism is increasingly evident. At the time of writing, Graciela Iturbide is one of the foremost living photographers in Latin America. This article reengages with Iturbide’s work using notions of photography as witness and drawing on photography scholar Ariella Azoulay’s structure of the civil contract of photography—in addition to concepts from other visual experts—to identify and underline the several fundamental elements to which Iturbide’s photography testifies. To achieve this result, this article studies her first solo visual narrative, Los que viven en la arena

Levels of reality: portraiture in African art

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 3

The Figure in Art: Selections from the Gettysburg College Collection

The Figure in Art: Selections from the Gettysburg College Collection is the second annual exhibition curated by students enrolled in the Art History Methods class. This exhibition is an exciting academic endeavor and provides an incredible opportunity for engaged learning, research, and curatorial experience. The eleven student curators are Diane Brennan, Rebecca Duffy, Kristy Garcia, Megan Haugh, Dakota Homsey, Molly Lindberg, Kathya Lopez, Kelly Maguire, Kylie McBride, Carolyn McBrady and Erica Schaumberg. Their research presents a multifaceted view of the representation of figures in various art forms from different periods and cultures.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1017/thumbnail.jp

Julia Margaret Cameron\u27s Photographs as Paintings

This paper argues that in order to better understand the photographic techniques, and compositional choices employed by Julia Margaret Cameron, one must analyze them in terms of the language of paintings. By using photography to stage painterly tableaus, Cameron blurred reality and fiction, the result of which is the equalization of all those she photographed, be they famed Victorian poets or female maids

Framing Gender: Ellis Island Immigration Portraits

Currently, the United States is experiencing renewed debates over immigration and its immigration policy, which range between arguments for increased or decreased admittances. These conversations are not new; there is an uncanny familiarity in how arguments have remained the same over the span of a hundred years. Through looking at the historical representation of immigrants at Ellis Island in the early twentieth century, perhaps we can foster further critical dialogue about how we currently understand the “foreign” and the “other” with respect to gender. While this paper focuses specifically on gender subversion within the photograph versus typical representations of gender, it is also important to understand issues of race and disability at Ellis Island, as it was a site for the medical gaze to determine which bodies were fit to enter the United States. Within portraits of Ellis Island immigrants, we see a similar fascination with the “other” that mirrors the visual dissemination process of the institution

How to humiliate and shame: A reporter's guide to the power of the mugshot

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Social Semiotics, 24(1), 56-87, 2014, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/The judicial photograph – the “mugshot” – is a ubiquitous and instantly recognisable form, appearing in the news media, on the internet, on book covers, law enforcement noticeboards and in many other mediums. This essay attempts to situate the mugshot in a historical and theoretical context to explain the explicit and implicit meaning of the genre as it has developed, focussing in particular on their use in the UK media in late modernity. The analysis is based on the author's reflexive practice as a journalist covering crime in the national news media for 30 years and who has used mugshots to illustrate stories for their explicit and specific content. The author argues that the visual limitations of the standardised “head and shoulders” format of the mugshot make it a robust subject for analysing the changing meaning of images over time. With little variation in the image format, arguments for certain accreted layers of signification are easier to make. Within a few years of the first appearance of the mugshot form in the mid-19th century, it was adopted and adapted as a research tool by scientists and criminologists. While the positivist scientists claimed empirical objectivity we can now see that mugshots played a part in the construction of subjective notions of “the other”, “the lesser” or “sub-human” on the grounds of class, race and religion. These dehumanising ideas later informed the theorists and bureaucrats of National Socialist ideology from the 1920s to 1940s. The author concludes that once again the mugshot has become, in certain parts of the media, a signifier widely used to exclude or deride certain groups. In late modernity, the part of the media that most use mugshots – the tabloid press and increasingly tabloid TV – is part of a neo-liberal process that, in a conscious commercial appeal to the paying audience, seeks to separate rather than unify wider society

“Picture perfect”: hand-coloured photographic portraiture in South Africa in the 20th century; a study of the collection of the Aqua Portrait Studio, Johannesburg.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (History of Art), 2017This research was instigated by a collection of uncollected portraits (completed and incomplete), photographs, letters, papers, documents, passbooks, and other materials, left behind when an airbrush portraiture studio, The Aqua Portrait Studio, closed in about 1998 after fifty years of continuous business. The portraits were created by enlarging small original photos – sometimes from two separate sources – and then colouring them with an airbrush and other materials. Because of the nature of the airbrush technique, it was possible to change the original image completely: to clothe the sitters in completely imaginary attire, for example, and pose them together with someone they had possibly never been photographed with. This process gave rise to a genre in which people could re-imagine themselves, enact other personas. Because the fifty years of existence of this studio almost coincided with the years of apartheid (the studio was open from about 1950 to about 1998), it seemed that the collection of uncollected images and notes left behind could be a source of rich information about the people who were the studio's clients, the process of acquiring airbrushed portraits, and the social and historical context in which those involved lived. I start with three fundamental questions: Since this portraiture form grew so exponentially in popularity, especially during the apartheid years, what specific significance and meaning had it taken on for the communities who were buying the portraits? What need was it meeting? What can we learn about these lives from this collection? The research takes two forms. First, it closely interrogates the material objects in the collection; and second, it tracks the routes of clients and salesmen to what were some of the former homelands of the northern part of South Africa. Both these investigations attempt to understand the possible roles and contribution of these pictures to the construction and reconstruction of self-identity under apartheid.XL201