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

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

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

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

Recent Acquisitions, 2007-2017: Selections from the Gettysburg College Fine Arts Collection

This exhibition reflects the breadth of Gettysburg College’s significant art collection and acknowledges the generosity of its donors. Major acquisitions have been made possible by The Michael J. Birkner \u2772 and Robin Wagner Art and Photography Acquisition Fund, which was established in 2013 to enhance the Gettysburg College curriculum, to offer curatorial opportunities for students, and to provide first-hand access to significant works of art. Purchases made possible by this endowment include works by prominent, internationally renowned artists Kara Walker, Wafaa Bilal, John Biggers, and Michael Scoggins. Other recent donations include important works by Andy Warhol, Glenn Ligon, Leonard Baskin, Raphael Soyer, Marion Greenwood, William Clutz, William Mason Brown, Sally Gall, and Jules Cheret’s Les Maîtres de l\u27Affiche lithographs. The Fine Arts Collection at Gettysburg College is comprised of over 500 museum-quality works, in addition to over 2000 Asian art objects that are featured routinely in Schmucker Art Gallery exhibitions and studied in Gettysburg College courses. The College has acquired over 200 fine art works in the past ten years, and this exhibition marks the first occasion to celebrate and view the scope of the collection. Some of the objects have been featured in recent exhibitions, while others, including large-scale color silkscreens by Andy Warhol and a rare print by MacArthur “Genius” Award recipient Carrie Mae Weems, have not yet been exhibited.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1024/thumbnail.jp

Photography, care and the visual economy of Gambian transatlantic kinship relations

This article examines transnational kinship relations between Gambian parents in the United Kingdom and their children and carers in The Gambia, with a focus on the production, exchange and reception of photographs. Many Gambian migrant parents in the U.K. take their children to The Gambia to be cared for by extended family members. Mirroring the mobility of Gambian migrants and their children, as they travel between the U.K. and The Gambia, photographs document changing family structures and relations. It is argued that domestic photography provides insight into the representational politics, values and aesthetics of Gambian transatlantic kinship relations. Further, the concept of the moral economy supports a hermeneutics of Gambian family photographic practice and develops our understanding of the visual economy of transnational kinship relations in a number of ways: it draws attention to the way in which the value attributed to a photograph is rooted in shared moral and cultural codes of care within transnational relations of inequality and power; it helps us to interpret Gambian’s responses to and treatment of family photographs; and it highlights the importance attributed to portrait photography and the staging, setting and aesthetics of photographic content within a Gambian imaginary