Focusing the lens: the role of travel and photography in the personal and working lives of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant

This thesis addresses how the photographic image contributed to the formation of the public and private identities of the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. I propose that Bell and Grant primarily conceptualised photography as a medium of movement and it is this element that defines photographic images of them and their circle. Further, I suggest this definitive photographic element of their work situates them and the Bloomsbury Group in the development of English modernism in a new way. Chapter One explores the presence of movement in travel and tourism related photographic images from Bell and Grant’s own generation and previous generations in their families. It compares images of alpine adventures, colonial life and first journeys to Europe alongside sections of personal correspondence by both generations offering a ‘verbal sketch’ of the sights and sounds of the travel experience. Chapter Two considers how the photographic reproduction informs the development of public identity through an analysis of how Bell, Grant, Clive Bell and Julia Margaret Cameron used photographic images in the public arena and how contemporary media used photographs in assessments of their work. Chapter Three focuses on the nature of private physical and psychological photographic exchanges among both Julia Margaret Cameron’s circle and the Bloomsbury Group and looks at paintings by Bell and Grant that were inspired by personal and private photographs in their possession. Chapter Four examines how the visual expression of monumentality and movement in photographs taken by Bell, Grant and their predecessors demonstrates a clear interest in making connections with past artistic and photographic traditions. The culmination of this discussion identifies defining features of the Bloomsbury photograph as created by Vanessa Bell and shows how it incorporates movement as a primary element of her photographic aesthetic

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

Warhol’s Hustler and Queen Assembly Line: Deconstructing Factory Produced Genders and Their Roles in Contemporary Queer Culture

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College

Travelling Miniatures: Kerry and Co’s Postcards of the Pacific, 1893-1917

This thesis examines postcards of Pacific peoples that were produced in Sydney by the photographic firm Kerry & Co. during the first decade of the twentieth century. Like other visual images and technologies of that period, postcards have played an important role in shaping contemporary understandings of indigenous peoples, and, despite created for commercial purposes, they also relate to the production of anthropological knowledge at the turn of the century. This study is divided into three parts. The first part is devoted to the socio-cultural and historical contexts in which the Kerry & Co. postcards are embedded. Particular attention will be given to the company‟s postcard sample book around which the discussion of the Kerry postcards body will revolve. The second part, focusing on the three Aboriginal series, is characterised by a microhistorical approach to a photographic encounter on Wailwan land, and by the consideration of „contact zones‟ for the understanding of the social dynamics in front of Kerry‟s camera. The focus of both chapters is on the excavation of the origins and identities of the nameless Aboriginal „postcard people‟, and on the identification of their agency during the shared moment of the postcard imagery‟s production. The third part of the thesis focuses on the Samoan series which, for the „recycled‟ nature of its twelve motifs, assumes an even more „exotic‟ role within Kerry‟s body of indigenous people. The headdress tuiga becomes a cultural marker for Samoa in Kerry‟s stereotyping apparatus, and the whole series can be considered as born as a metaphor – their motifs being stripped of personal meanings already before entering Kerry‟s factory. I argue that, focusing on postcards as material objects in their own right, discloses many aspects of the dynamic relationships between societies, and reveals how active they are in creating meanings about cultures

Western name authority file: An open data approach to digital collections authority control

presentationA presentation conducted at the NISO Open Data Virtual Conference in 2018

The Visual Syntax of a Postcolony: Photographs in Zambia, 1930s – 1980s

This dissertation investigates how photographs and photographic practices have both shaped and have been shaped by the political, cultural and performative demands of the project of postcolonial nation building in Zambia. Drawing on both visual and textual materials from the 1930s to the 1980s, collected from the National Archives of Zambia as well as several private collections, including that of the Fine Art Studios in Lusaka, this dissertation attempts to understand the different ways in which critical attention to the role of the mechanically reproduced images can allow us to reconsider the given boundaries between the colonial and the postcolonial, the public and the private, and the nation and the individual. The first chapter explores the methodological possibilities and the archival limits of writing a social history of photography in Zambia that still remains largely undocumented. The second chapter sifts through thousands of images haphazardly stored in the National Archives of Zambia, reflecting on the shift from the ethnographic mode of observation in the late colonial period to the concerted imaging of developmentalist spectacles in the early postcolonial period. The focus of the third chapter is on the politics of official images of Kenneth Kaunda, the first president of independent Zambia. This dissertation combines uses of photographs, archival documents, semi-structured interviews and brief auto-ethnographic observations

Western Name Authority File: Preparing Charles Savage for Linked Data

presentationPresentation given at the 2017 OLAC Conference, Linked Data Initiatives Panel, in Richmond, VA

Western name authority file: Linking people and corporate bodies

PresentationPresentation about Digital Library Services grant at the ALCTS Linked Library Data Interest Group at ALA Midwinter in Denver, Colorado