Mollusk species at a Pliocene shelf whale fall (Orciano Pisano, Tuscany)

The recovery of an intact, 10 m long fossil baleen whale from the Pliocene of Tuscany (Italy) offers the first opportunity to study the paleoecology of a fully developed, natural whale-fall community at outer shelf depth. Quantitative data on mollusk species from the whale fall have been compared with data from the sediments below and around the bones, representing the fauna living in the muddy bottom before and during the sinking of the carcass, but at a distance from it. Although the bulk of the fauna associated with the fossil bones is dominated by the same heterotrophs as found in the surrounding community, whale-fall samples are distinguishable primarily by the presence of chemosymbiotic bivalves and a greater species richness of carnivores and parasites. Large lucinid clams (Megaxinus incrassatus) and very rare small mussels (Idas sp.) testify to the occurrence of a sulphophilic stage, but specialized, chemosymbiotic vesicomyid clams common at deep-sea whale falls are absent. The whale-fall community is at the threshold between the nutrient-poor deep sea and the shallow-water shelf, where communities are shaped around photosynthetic trophic pathways and chemosymbiotic specialists are excluded by competition. © SEPM (Society for Sedimentary Geology)

DARKROOM NETWORKS: Mundane subversiveness for photographic autonomy, 1880s-1900s

This article investigates the role of the darkroom in the experiences of British amateur photographers who, between the 1880s and 1900s, chose to process their negatives themselves while travelling. It focuses, in particular, on the reasons underpinning the development of a network of facilities for changing and developing plates available to tourists, and on how photographers’ engagement with this infrastructure expanded its function in ways that implicitly challenged dominant approaches to both photography and travel. It does so by examining the darkroom, first, as an alternative tourist bureau that put travelling photographers in contact with local knowledge, and secondly, as the site of a material culture that empowered photographers. These experiences demonstrate that close to the heart of these practitioners was not simply photographic mobility but, most importantly, photographic autonomy

The Postal Service, Circulating Portfolios and the Cultural Production of Modern Networked Identities

The launch of the Royal Mail’s parcel post service in 1883 was concurrent with the increase of amateur photographers in Britain, supporting new ways for this group of practitioners to come together: the postal photographic clubs. This article explores the influence that members’ active participation in assembling and distributing the portfolios that each club shared had on photographers’ understanding of their own role in the production of photographic meanings and values. It does so by discussing the postal service as a technology of communication and transport; the virtual space created through circulating portfolios as a modern network; and the conjoint acts of writing, reading and looking at photographs that constituted each portfolio as reframing photographers’ idea of self. It covers the period that goes from the early 1880s to the early 1910s, by which time postal photographic clubs had become almost ubiquitous in Britain. The article demonstrates that this process implicitly challenged the institutionalisation of this period’s dominant photographic discourse

New Mobile Experiences of Vision and Modern Subjectivities in Late Victorian Britain

This article looks at the relationship between two very popular middle-class activities in Late Victorian Britain, photographing and cycling, and explores the influence that the new technology of physical mobility had on visual experiences and related photographic practices. It focuses, in particular, on the significance that new practices of mobility and visuality had for a growing body of amateur photographers as they negotiated these experiences as a temporality of late nineteenth century modernity. Drawing on the everyday historical experiences of cycle and photography users as these were articulated at the time, the article offers new insight into the role that such body-machine interactions had on the development of what was, effectively, a modern, moving, gaze. My argument is that the sense of control over the new ways of moving and seeing enabled by cycling contributed to shape a new visual self and that, in turn, this fuelled the desire for a new visual language and means of representation that could challenge dominant photographic practices, in a manner that foresees the emergence of snapshot photography

From the Proliferation of the Photographic to the Nullification of Truth: Personal and Commercial Narratives of Travel in Britain, 1890s-1930s

This article explores the impact that the democratisation of photography had on notions of photographic truth. It does so by focusing on the proliferation of visual narratives of travel produced by tourist photographers and travel firms in Britain between the 1890s and 1930s, a period that saw the emerging travel industry shift from using lens-based images to mixed-media. The article argues that people’s increasing familiarity with the means of representation displaced the ‘truth’ of the travel photograph from the image itself to one’s own experience of travel, forcing travel marketing to re-invent itself in an attempt to control the responses of customers

‘Cyclo-Photographers’, Visual Modernity, and the Development of Camera Technologies, 1880s–1890s

The intertwined development of popular photography and cycling in Britain was felt so close that, in the 1880s, contemporary commentators could write of ‘cyclo-photographers’. The camera apparatus available at this time, bulky and fragile, was largely impractical to carry on a ride, and thus cyclo-photographers joined outdoor photographers in asking manufacturers for simpler and easier to operate cameras. However, a close reading of primary sources reveals that such demands were also the result of a new engagement with the possibility of seeing enabled by cycling itself. What was the cyclo-photographers’ experience of visual modernity? This article explores whether, and in what ways, the parallel emergence of a desire for compact cameras was linked to the new, and interconnected, ways of moving and seeing that the engagement with these two modern cultural technologies had made possible

Generalized Heine Identity for Complex Fourier Series of Binomials

In this paper we generalize an identity first given by Heinrich Eduard Heine in his treatise, {\it Handbuch der Kugelfunctionen, Theorie und Anwendungen (1881), which gives a Fourier series for $1/[z-\cos\psi]^{1/2}$, for $z,\psi\in\R$, and $z>1$, in terms of associated Legendre functions of the second kind with odd-half-integer degree and vanishing order. In this paper we give a generalization of this identity as a Fourier series of $1/[z-\cos\psi]^\mu$, where z,\mu\in\C, $|z|>1$, and the coefficients of the expansion are given in terms of the same functions with order given by $\frac12-\mu$. We are also able to compute certain closed-form expressions for associated Legendre functions of the second kind.Comment: 12 page

Molluscs from a shallow-water whale-fall and their affinities with adjacent benthic communities on the Swedish west coast

We conducted a species-level study of molluscs associated with a 5-m long carcass of a minke whale at a depth of 125 m in the Kosterfjord (North Sea, Sweden). The whale-fall community was quantitatively compared with the community commonly living in the surrounding soft-bottom sediments. Five years after the deployment of the dead whale at the sea floor, the sediments around the carcass were dominated by the bivalve Thyasira sarsi, which is known to contain endosymbiotic sulphur-oxidizing bacteria, while background sediments were dominated by another thyasirid, T. equalis, less dependent on chemosynthesis for its nutrition. The Kosterfjord samples were further compared at the species level with mollusc abundance data derived from the literature, including samples from different marine settings of the west coast of Sweden (active methane seep, fjords, coastal and open marine environments). The results show high similarity between the Kosterfjord whale-fall community and the community that developed in one of the Swedish fjords (Gullmar Fjord) during hypoxic conditions. This study indicates that at shallow-water whale-falls, the sulphophilic stage of the ecological succession is characterized by generalist chemosynthetic bivalves commonly living in organic-rich, sulphidic environments. © 2014 Taylor & Francis