The Commodification of the Celebrity Portrait: An Analysis of Photographic Business Practice in Relation to Image Mass Production in London c.1857-1880

The mass-produced carte de visite was a new kind of celebrity portrait. It was affordable and available to a wide middle-class market, and it was hugely popular in the 1860s and 1870s. The cartes are extant in large numbers today and offer a valuable Victorian archive ripe for investigation, yet they have, so far, been deemed of little historical value, and consequently have been under-researched in the history of photography. This thesis is centred around a large collection of over one thousand celebrity cartes de visite in the author’s possession. Patterns running through the archive have been identified, and show that a great deal can be learnt about photographers’ business strategies and middle-class society from the images. The first half of the thesis explores the structure of the new carte de visite business in two chapters: in its commercial organisation and in the construction and presentation of the product to a target middle-class market. The establishment of a new profession is highlighted in which commercial activity was displayed more openly on the product as the century progressed, and in which widened middle-class interests were presented in content. Three following case studies provide a deeper investigation in relation to particular subject areas, those of monarchy, government and Church, chosen especially as they were traditional portrait areas used to define the British constitution. These case studies show that studios adapted their output to meet collectors’ changing views on the role of celebrity whilst retaining an underlying representation of the ‘character’ of a new enlightened society. The thesis spotlights a new archive through which a clearer understanding of mid-Victorian business and society can be gained: the research therefore not only fills a gap in photographic history, but adds to knowledge on mid-Victorian middle-class culture

Photo finish: the memorialization of death through photography in nineteenth-century America

Images of the dead have been made throughout human history in the forms of drawings, carvings, death masks, busts, and paintings. When photography became a reliable and widely available practice, spreading to the United States from France and England in the early 1840s, Americans applied that technology to capturing the likenesses of the deceased. Death was a much more familiar, constant, and intimate experience for nineteenth-century Americans than it is now. High infant mortality, unchecked epidemics, limited medical intervention, and generally short life expectancy made the experience of loss through death common to most individuals. Photography, with its nearly magical quality, and mysterious nature, captivated people and became part of nearly all aspects of their lives. It was a reasonable progression for people to extend photography to include taking pictures of the dead. Many times these pictures were the first or only pictures taken of a person, particularly in the case of children, or in rural areas where access to the technology might be limits. Many factors contributed to the climate of acceptance of photography and its use as a tool of preserving postmortem images. The romantic and emotional nature of the time, the influence of Victorian England, the rising technological/industrial tide, the growing funerary business, the Civil War, and the death of Abraham Lincoln. Grieving families brought their own motives to the hiring of a photographer for this purpose, and likewise photographers had their own motives for offering their services. Postmortem photography reflects the union of technology and humanity in a most profound way--the most natural and yet the most extreme of responses

Transitory States: Becoming and Continuity in the Drawing Process and Object

This thesis explores the influences and content of the visual artist Ming Ying Hong and in particular, examines her drawings created during her Master of Fine Arts degree program at Washington University in St. Louis. In theorizing about the practice of drawing, this document investigates the instability in meaning found in both her motifs of explosions and wounds, placing her research in larger philosophical context regarding the transformative potential of Giles Deleuze’s “becoming” and George Batailles’s “continuity.” Ultimately, the intersection of these two terms is exemplified in the in the paradoxical conflation of binaries, upsetting clear categorization and suspending concise meaning. As a result of these fluid boundaries, there is an inability to delineate abstraction from representation, calm from violence, and presence from absence. Furthermore, this document examines the practice of drawing as a means of obtaining an embodied state of becoming and continuity, enabling a sense of cohesiveness between self and world

ROTOЯ Review

The ROTOЯ partnership between Huddersfield Art Gallery and the University of Huddersfield was established in 2011. ROTOЯ I and II was a programme of eight exhibitions and accompanying events that commenced in 2012 and was completed in 2013. ROTOЯ continues into 2014 and the programme for 2015 and 2016 is already firmly underway. In brief, the aim of ROTOЯ is to improve the cultural vitality of Kirklees, expand audiences, and provide new ways for people to engage with and understand academic research in contemporary art and design. Why ROTOЯ , Why Now? As Vice Chancellors position their institutions’ identities and future trajectories in context to national and international league tables, Professor John Goddard1 proposes the notion of the ‘civic’ university as a ‘place embedded’ institution; one that is committed to ‘place making’ and which recognises its responsibility to engaging with the public. The civic university has deep institutional connections to different social, cultural and economic spheres within its locality and beyond. A fundamental question for both the university sector and cultural organisations alike, including local authority, is how the many different articulations of public engagement and cultural leadership which exist can be brought together to form one coherent, common language. It is critical that we reach out and engage the community so we can participate in local issues, impact upon society, help to forge well-being and maintain a robust cultural economy. Within the lexicon of public centered objectives sits the Arts Council England’s strategic goals, and those of the Arts and Humanities Research Council – in particular its current Cultural Value initiative. What these developments reveal is that art and design education and professional practice, its projected oeuvre as well as its relationship to cultural life and public funding, is now challenged with having to comprehensively audit its usefulness in financially austere times. It was in the wake of these concerns coming to light, and of the 2010 Government Spending Review that ROTOЯ was conceived. These issues and the discussions surrounding them are not completely new. Research into the social benefits of the arts, for both the individual and the community, was championed by the Community Arts Movement in the 1960s. During the 1980s and ‘90s, John Myerscough and Janet Wolff, amongst others, provided significant debate on the role and value of the arts in the public domain. What these discussions demonstrated was a growing concern that the cultural sector could not, and should not, be understood in terms of economic benefit alone. Thankfully, the value of the relationships between art, education, culture and society is now recognised as being far more complex than the reductive quantification of their market and GDP benefits. Writing in ‘Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century)’, Ernesto Pujol proposes:‘…it is absolutely crucial that art schools consider their institutional role in support of democracy. The history of creative expression is linked to the history of freedom. There is a link between the state of artistic expression and the state of democracy.’ When we were approached by Huddersfield Art Gallery to work collaboratively on an exhibition programme that could showcase academic staff research, one of our first concerns was to ask the question, how can we really contribute to cultural leadership within the town?’ The many soundbite examples of public engagement that we might underline within our annual reports or website news are one thing, but what really makes a difference to a town’s cultural identity, and what affects people in their daily lives? With these questions in mind we sought a distinctive programme within the muncipal gallery space, that would introduce academic research in art, design and architecture beyond the university in innovative ways