On Either Side of the ‘Gatekeeper’

A gap exists between the publication of images made using the halftone process in French newspapers circa 1880 and the widespread use of photography in the press at the end of the nineteenthcentury. Histories of press photography generally offer no explanation for this gap of nearly two decades. In order to shed light on this period, a few key images are presented as pivotal to the development of the illustrated press. Among them are images by Nadar for Eugène Chevreul’s centennial jubilee, the view of ‘Shantytown,’ and the depiction of the ‘gatekeeper’ published in L’Illustration in 1891. These images represent milestones which usher in the era of the modern illustrated press. Yet through analysis of the original gatekeeper montage and other photographs of the time conserved in the archives of L’Illustration, we see that the images do not reflect a sharp division: rather they reveal the convergence of techniques and hybridization of various types of visual information, indicating a slow assimilation of photo­graphy into the illustrative process

The Economics of Research

In 1997, when we first decided topost a selection of the journal’s articlesonline, we already suspected that the Internet would alter the landscape of research in visual history. But how ? A historian by training, I am once again reminded that it is easier to analyze the past than to predict the future. Now, in 2011, we are in a position to observe the transformations in both the subjects and tools of research as well as the dissemination of the results. The production of images using new tec..

A Delicate Transition

There are developments that come as welcome news in the world of scholarly research. Among them, the establishment of a research seminar on the history of photography, led by Dominique de Font-Réaulx, at the École du Louvre, for work linked to France’s national collections; the announcement by De Montfort University in Leicester, at the dynamic Photographic History Research Centre, and under the direction of Elizabeth Edwards and Kelley Wilder, of a doctoral grant for theses that explore the ..

Approaches to History

There are some photographic corpora that are difficult for the historian to grasp. In 2008, in his article on family photography, Geoffrey Batchen noted how the sheer volume of this type of production, which every second increases by 550 images in the United States alone, overwhelms the research methods developed for more finite collections. He also explained that the historian’s quandary is only compounded by the poor aesthetic quality of these images, which he deemed ‘repetitively uncreativ..

A Matter of Method

In his book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, Michael Fried offers an analysis of art photography since the late 1970s. From the early light boxes of the Canadian Jeff Wall to the recent work of the French Luc Delahaye – and without omitting the iconic oeuvre of the German Andreas Gursky – Fried extends the modernist reading of art he began in the 1960s to include photography. Theatricality, absorption, the role of the beholder, and the tableau form are invoked as parameters not..

A Matter of Method

In his book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, Michael Fried offers an analysis of art photography since the late 1970s. From the early light boxes of the Canadian Jeff Wall to the recent work of the French Luc Delahaye – and without omitting the iconic oeuvre of the German Andreas Gursky – Fried extends the modernist reading of art he began in the 1960s to include photography. Theatricality, absorption, the role of the beholder, and the tableau form are invoked as parameters not..

The Multivalued Free-Field Maps of Liouville and Toda Gravities

Liouville and Toda gravity theories with non-vanishing interaction potentials have spectra obtained by dividing the free-field spectra for these cases by the Weyl group of the corresponding $A_1$ or $A_2$ Lie algebra. We study the canonical transformations between interacting and free fields using the technique of intertwining operators, giving explicit constructions for the wavefunctions and showing that they are invariant under the corresponding Weyl groups. These explicit constructions also permit a detailed analysis of the operator-state maps and of the nature of the Seiberg bounds.Comment: 47 pages, plain Tex, 5 Postscript figures, uses epsf.tex. Repackaging to permit Postscript generation, no changes to pape

Photographies de presse ?

La rencontre entre la presse et la photographie est fréquemment présentée par l’historiographie comme relevant d’une évidence ontologique. Cependant, si le journalisme revendique une quête impartiale de l’information et que le processus mécanique de la photographie tend vers une objectivation de la représentation, le croisement de leurs chemins résulte d’une économie générale aux variables techniques, financières et culturelles. L’étude des usages de la photographie dans le journal L’Illustra..

Bodo von Dewitz, Robert Lebeck, Kiosk, Eine Geschichte der Fotoreportage (cat. exp.), Köln, Museum Ludwig/Agfa Foto-Historama, 2001, 328 p., 666 ill. coul., biog., bibl. allemande, ind., 39 E.

Présenter une histoire du photojournalisme à partir de documents imprimés est le but que s'est fixé Bodo von Dewitz en confiant à Robert Lebeck la réalisation du catalogue de l'exposition "Kiosk, Eine Geschichte der Fotoreportage" qui s'est tenue à Cologne à l'été 2001. Photojournaliste et collectionneur, Robert Lebeck a vendu sa collection d'épreuves du XIXe siècle aux musées de Cologne (environ 11 000 images) avant de commencer en 1989 celle de journaux illustrés de photographie. S..

Yves LEBREC, Jean Puel, photographe à Granville, Cherbourg, éd. Isoète, 1999, 188 p., ill. NB & coul., bibl., chronol., ind., nombreuses annexes, 180 F.

L'histoire de la photographie au tournant du XIXe siècle concentre généralement son attention sur les amateurs, pictorialistes ou excursionnistes, mais s'est rarement penchée sur les professionnels qui se consacrent à l'édition de cartes postales ou au photoreportage. En s'attachant à l'une de ces figures anonymes, la monographie d'Yves Lebrec sur Jean Puel (1862-1928) évoque la pratique et l'iconographie d'une nouvelle génération de photographes qui apparaît à cette époque. Installé ..