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It is well known that engravings were used by artists as models for their paintings. Another visual source employed by painters was the photograph. This occurred in Turkey after photography was introduced into Ottoman territories as a result of visits made by Europeans to the Ottoman states. In addition, courses on photography were added to the curricula of the schools. Although photography was initially received negatively by the public, the positive attitude of the Ottoman Sultans determined the popularity and acceptance of this branch of art. The introduction of photography and its adoption by the Istanbul public occurred first during the reign of Sultan Abdülmecid (1839-1861). Sultans Abdülaziz (1861-1876) and Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) played significant roles in the development of Ottoman photography. In addition, Abdulhamid II appointed photographers to document the events, institutions and structures in the empire and had around 800 photograph albums prepared. In these albums important settlements, structures and gardens of the period are documented. In wall paintings and in paintings on canvas, photographs were notably used as sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cuadernos de Música, Artes Visuales y Artes Escénicas is the property of Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

An essay is presented on the "Stockholder Meeting, Diptych" of artist Andreas Gursky. It offers information on the invisibility of the art's concept and its importance to the German photography. It notes that the Stockholder Meeting photographs of Gursky are rejected by some artists for it introduces formalist montage.

To explore photography's material history, we followed the collecting career of musician Graham Nash. A photographer and photography collector, Nash's activities link the changing views of photography from the late 20th century to the present as the medium became an accepted area of fine art, a lucrative investment, and, most recently, digital. Private collections today play an important role in museums' photography acquisitions and Nash's collection exemplifies how a collector's taste may create new meaning for existing works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to highlight the emergence of new forms of artistic legitimation on the Internet, through the online galleries. This takes place together with the process of digitalization of the social interaction, for instance, the appearance of online communities, and also with the new status of photography, which is communicating identities. In my analysis, I used Bourdieu's conceptual framework of "artistic field", "social and symbolic capital", "mediation", "legitimation" to understand how the online gallery functions and how it generates these mechanisms of recognition, such as the online comments, the number of views, adding works to the "favorites" category or having a constant public of viewers. The online feedback (comments, opinions about photographs) plays a crucial role in shaping the online identity, but also in legitimating it through users who are defined as "instances of legitimacy". Promoting artworks in virtual galleries becomes an opportunity for amateurs to know other artists and to become known, to share the same interests and to become a part of the greater community, but the final stake is to be recognized as an artist by others. So, the online galleries become sources of social capital and are empowered to legitimize its members as artists through specific mechanisms that I identified through my research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the classification of the Victorian architecture photographs by Walker Evans which were featured in the "American Photographs" exhibition and photobook of 1938 by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in NewYork City. It states that the MoMA exhibition in 1933 was financed by Lincoln Kirstein and Jack Wheelwright. It mentions that the photographs were taken in the suburban areas in New England and New York. It highlights the archival practice of Evans in the 1930s which was believed to function as a device for social regulation.

Reflexive photography for individual interviews and the use of art with focus groups provides a valuable method for exploring the psychosocial issues encountered by adults with dyslexia. Reflexive photography and art is particularly appropriate when interviewing adults with dyslexia who may have difficulty expressing and focusing on what they want to say. This article explores the potential of reflexive photography and art as an innovative method to generate statements by participants in concept mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Making use of my observing ego, I, an octogenarian psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and photographer, take note of the way the organizing function of my creative spirit serves as an integrating force, binding myself together in the face of the anxieties that accompany getting old. My thoughts drift back to the time when I was temporarily lost after graduating from the analytic institute: “What will my future be?” By taking time to immerse myself in nature—awakening the spirit of my happy childhood when I had accompanied my father to the woods—my creative Eye sprang into existence. I became a pioneer in the acceptance of color photography as fine art. My photography has played a crucial role in the treatment of several of my patients. In a number of vignettes, I illustrate how my creativity has also been at work in the way I have adapted each patient's therapy to meet his or her individual needs. I feel that the humane therapy I have received from my own analysts helped to solidify my own shaky foundations caused by a serious family crisis when I was 1 to 3. With camera or pen in hand, I have been able to experience and express my feelings, whether they be happiness or the inevitable loss of dear ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the photographs titled "Hall of Thirty-Three Bays," by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. The author examines the images in the context of traditional concepts related to this Japanese type of art. The photographs directly reference an essential as well as well-known traditional art which involves the application of the rhetorical technique that is commonly translated as allusive variation. According to him, such compositional practice is a significant device which is associated with Japanese poetry.

The article profiles U.S. photographer Paul Lewis Anderson who strongly believed in the ability of the camera to generate creative results that were fine art. It mentions that five photographs who were featured in the photography collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) span most of their career starting from the 1910s to the 1940s. According to the author, all of the photographs depict his primary subjects from landscape to genre scenes. He adds that some of the arts that are of particular interest to viewers include "A Berkshire Meadow" as well as the "Shadows and Sun."

Often university libraries or archive/special collections house large fine art and photographic collections by African American and Latino artists. These collections are frequently hidden due to inadequate funding to promote them, minimal exhibit space, insufficient staffing with requisite exhibition and curatorial expertise, and/or diminished cataloging or digital priority. This article seeks to address the concerns and issues that affect this lack of exposure within academic special collections in both large and small institutions. The intent is to highlight successful strategies that can be used by other repositories seeking to diversify their art and photography holdings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the interrelationship of photography and sculpture in 21st century art. It notes that the artist Katie Grinnan creates sprawling sculptures that redefine spaces, using constructed forms, found objects and photographs. Sculptor Tom Burr uses a collage approach to combine image and abstract forms. Artist Sara VanDerBeek creates intricate three-dimensional structures which she transforms into two dimensions by using the camera and then destroying the three-dimensional object. It notes that these artists' work shows that an artist is not bound to one medium, and that the norm involves crossover, overlap and influence.

This essay focuses on the documentary photography of Chinese photographer Zhang Xinmin to consider how he portrays China's twentieth and twenty-first century rural-to-urban migration. The author considers the photographer's representation of blankness and the dispossessed in Zhang's works. Also discussed are China's cultural politics, post-colonialism, and the theories of photography scholar Gu Zheng.

Copyright of Co-herencia is the property of Universidad EAFIT and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The visual construction or re-construction of traumatic events whether through art, photography or celluloid representations is an intrinsic aspect of human propensity to remember and work through trauma. The assembling of images, its display and invitation to gaze are mediated by political, social, cultural, historical and aesthetic processes. Visual culture functions both as a memory archive but it is equally implicated in the 'critique of inadequacy' in any representation where limits are imposed both through the vantage points, access and what may be visible or invisible to the naked eye. The integration of visual culture into our contemporary consciousness through electronic technologies embedded into our everyday lives thrusts the visual into an arena of the everyday where images work through both individual imagination and collective-meaning making. The tenuous relationship between visual culture, memory and trauma is discussed through the remembrance of the Holocaust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a discussion of the essay "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction" by Walter Benjamin. It emphasizes topics related to photography, noting that there is a difference between a photograph and a photographic reproduction of a work of art. Sound recordings are also discussed in this context, as illustrating a philosophical distinction between a singular event and its reproduction. This leads to commentary on the history of art, and it is argued that renaissance painters such as Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn and Michelangelo Buonarroti have no more in common with a modernist painter such as Jackson Pollock than with pinstripers of motor vehicles.

This paper focuses on the International Photographic Exhibition (Iphad), held in Dresden in 1909, offering a case study to illustrate the dynamics of exhibition practice during a time of dramatic artistic and social shifts. By the end of the 1920s, a movement known as the 'New Vision' had emerged in Germany and was on its way to becoming an international style, largely through its exposure in high profile exhibitions such as Film und Foto. The New Vision rejected the pre-war mode of Pictorialist photography with its reliance on static subjects and methods borrowed from nineteenth-century painting. But rather than being a sudden development of the late 1920s, the new ways of exhibiting photography that fed into the New Vision's expansive and non-hierarchical approach can be traced back to Iphad, where critics were stunned by the sheer variety of material on display. This earlier critique of Pictorialism was sociocultural as well as technical in character and involved dialectics of juxtaposition, rigorous debates, and jockeying for influence, as is demonstrated through analysis of accompanying publications, installation shots, and published critical reception. This establishes the developmental roots of many elements of the New Vision and its display before it gained international prominence at Film und Foto, particularly the mixing and equating of scientific and artistic photography in exhibitions. The purpose of this paper is to show the complexity and social engagement of art historical shifts and to demonstrate how exhibitions, including those previously under the radar, can often hold a key to understanding these changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo presenta un análisis sobre la intermedialidad. Entre los aspectos principales destaca la relación entre los medios de comunicación masiva, la relación entre la fotografía y la literatura, entre la fotografía y la pintura, entre el cine y la televisión y entre la música y la arquitectura, entre otras.

This article studies Paul Valery's personal reflection on photography, as it appears in his essay “Le Discours du Centenaire de la Photographie,” based on a speech given at the Sorbonne in 1939 to members of the French Academy. It stresses the relationship between this essay and the French poet's writings on painting and aesthetics, in particular his work on Corot. Moreover, it analyzes the synthetic character of Valery's critical approach, which attempts to bring together the language of poetry, philosophy and science when dealing with this utterly modern visual language. Photography is celebrated here as a unique art form that can at the same time imitate and reproduce nature perfectly, while allowing mankind to create a cosmological vision of life and the universe. In other words, the poet underlines in this text the utmost modernity of photography, at a time when many in France were still reluctant to acknowledge its artistic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author responds to commentaries about his work on aesthetics. He starts from the subject of photography because the matters raised by the commentaries include one of the most precise questions in aesthetics. He recognizes the effort of writer David Davies to defend his points from the criticisms of Dominic Lopes. He raises the question of making photography into a representational art-form. In addition, the article explores the relation between aesthetics and culture, focusing on a radical defect in analytical aesthetics.

Photography and science have a symbiotic relationship; they always have. It was in the context of science that photography was first announced to the public by Francois Arago in 1839. And it was the rhetoric of observation and objectivity that was so beloved of scientists in the mid-nineteenth century that photography very soon acquired. It was, in fact, photography's close ties to science that hindered its bid to claim fine-art status. It is photography's close and continued ties to science that have also been utilised by artists through the decades, artists who played with the concepts of objectivity, truth, documentary and surveying. The author discusses the unique place that photography has taken up in the art of science and the science of art, dwelling on moments when the two appear to be one and the same, and moments where they appear to diverge. Rather than writing a sort of survey, the paper will dip in at various points in history, looking at the debates from various historical perspectives so as to consider the paradigm 'art science' as it has variously been applied to photography. The paper will take up the conflicting rhetorics of passivity and control, mechanical and creative, showing how each is used in its place, but always emphasising the back-and-forth, the give-and-take between science and art. It will be argued that photography's dual nature is exactly what makes it interesting to artists, and what makes it valuable to the sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the more interesting aspects of the dialogue between the mediums of the still and moving image that has taken place over recent years has been a concern within fine-art photography for the cinematic. Photographers have turned to the style and iconography of the established genres of cinema as a means of reinventing the pictorial form of the tableau and thereby to explore the possibilities of narrativity within the static image. However, beyond any aesthetic interest the contemporary genre of the 'cinematic photograph' may hold, it is argued here that it may be indicative of an important shift in the social, economic and technological bases of fine-art photography. This essay suggests that the significance of the 'cinematic photograph' lies in its complex forms of technical production, the mobilisation of skilled labour and professional expertise, and the deployment of substantial economic resources, which are to be found in the film industry. Through an analysis of the work of the American photographer Gregory Crewdson, the authors demonstrate how the formal and iconographic properties of his images are inseparable from his adoption of the cinema's specific modes of production and that the latter is central to a reading of Crewdson's photographs. The consequences this holds for our understanding of the medium of photography are developed with reference to Raymond Williams's concept of 'medium as social practice'. The authors conclude that the 'cinematic photograph' might be regarded as symptomatic of a trend within contemporary art practices to model themselves on cinema as the emblematic form of cultural production of 'late capitalism', a trend that has significant implications for the dominant conceptions concerning the nature of the work of art and the role of the artist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper emerged out of a talk given at the Photography and Education Symposium at South Bank University in March 2009. As the title indicates, photography education, while thriving as never before, also faces some challenges both old and new. The key questions addressed are the purposes of photography education and the impact of new technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of the triumph of the digital photograph as the basic semantic unit of New Media, this paper investigates the response of photographic education to the culture of ubiquitous mobile and networked photography. It argues that photographic education fails to address such contemporary conditions as the crisis of the visual, the demise of the still photograph and the redundancy of the notion of authorship because it perceives the digital turn in technological terms. This paper suggests that if the digital moment in photography will be approached conceptually rather than technologically, it will present photography educators with a unique opportunity to place the study of the digital photograph at the centre of a culture which is based on reproduction, multiplication and copying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With its point of departure in a box containing Anita Corbin's 1981 travelling exhibition “Visible Girls”, this text unveils an art/research/teaching project, with the aim of creating a counter-archive of current youth culture. It describes an artist's engagement with archival practices and the way this presents opportunities to develop personal everyday histories that cross online-offline spaces that work as counter-memory narratives; narratives that are counter to academic, media and state accounts of youth culture as shaped by institutional agendas and moral panics. To locate the archive within the framework of counter-memory and counter-archival practices in this way is to work towards visibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

F. Holland Day has long been recognised as a pioneer American pictorial photographer and uncompromising advocate for photography as a fine art. His work, particularly his depictions of the male nude and the crucifixion of Christ (for which he was his own model), was somewhat controversial in his lifetime and remains influential. His advocacy culminated in the mounting of the all-important New School of American Photography exhibition in London and Paris more than a century ago. Thomas Langryl Harris, on the other hand, was primarily a painter of miniature portraits and had a questionable reputation. He led a short, tragic life and today is totally unknown in the art world. This article explores the relationship between F. Holland Day and Thomas Langryl Harris, the creation of a nude study of the young man by Day and its subsequent erroneous identification as a 'study for the crucifixion'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the representation of photographs. It considers photographs as the collection of memories on the experiences shared by a group of related people. It cites the role of photographs in constructing the identity of a person. It also highlights the author's construction of still-life photographs using the family photograph.

The article presents a discussion of the techniques of the early 20th century American itinerant photographer Francis Marion Steele, commonly known as F. M. Steele. Introductory details are given noting his unique self-title as a "tourist photo artist." Discussion is then given describing each element of the title, including his traveling photography business chronicling people in their own environments, his pioneering of the photography field in its early decades, and his influences from the visual artists of his generation and earlier. Multiple examples of Steele's work are given alongside contemporary paintings, comparing and contrasting styles.

The author discusses the danger of moral criticism directed at works of art in descending into moralism. He refers moralism as a kind of vice that involves the distortion of moral reflection and judgment. He also differentiates moralist and moraliser and cites examples of both. He focuses the moral criticism against the work of Australian photographer Bill Henson in an exhibition at the Rosly Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney, New South Wales. The author mentions that there were many commentators that condemn Henson's images displayed in the exhibition such as nude images of a girl. He notes that the commentators showed concerns in relation to morality.

The article focuses on the practice of painting photographs by German artist Gerhard Richter and its impact on the relationship between painting and photography in the contemporary art works. It states that Richter has painted photographs in his work since the 1960s, and discusses the development of hybrid media and the role of medium in art. It presents opinions of several artists including Clement Greenberg, Rosalind Krauss and Michel Foucault on the relationship between media and how medium functions in post-modern art. It states that singularity or purity of medium has been viewed as outdated after modernization. It describes the role of the medium where abstract art should be artistic and needs a constraint to be generated and against which to be judged.

The article provides information on some basic elements of drawing and equally basic behavior with respect to drawing. It discusses one of the most repeated assumptions or stereotypes of the Western drawing discourse, which characterizes drawings by their potential for revelation. It explores issues of relevance in coming to terms with drawing including lines and dots, signs and marks, figure and ground as well as space and erasure. Furthermore, it considers the ways in which drawing is compared to painting and photography, and linked to shadows and projection.

Since the late 1970s, amateur photographs have become increasingly popular within art, the academy, and journalism, featuring in works of art and exhibitions, historical studies, on newspaper pages and in other projects. The tacit (and sometimes not so tacit) assumption underlying this increased presence is that amateur photographs are more "authentic" than the pictures taken by professional photojournalists, art photographers, or documentarians; moreover, amateur photography is often heralded as the epitome of democracy, especially when stored in a large body, or archive, of amateur photographs. This article traces the historical and ideological roots of these two credos and the way they tie into each other, going back to the invention of amateur-friendly Kodak cameras, taking into account the postmodern "representational crisis" of the 1970s and 1980s, and ending with the camera-equipped cell phones sported by American soldiers in Iraq today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author reflects on the nature of phototherapy or the therapeutic use of the photograph and the photographic process. She relates the therapeutic nature of photography to her personal experiences of teaching and writing about psychoanalysis, art therapy, and its relationship to mental health for most of her working life. Moreover, she emphasizes that the use of photography changes the context in which the picture is viewed for therapist and client.

This article concerns the photographic collection of Paka anak Otor, the Bidayuh owner of a 'mini-museum' in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, and how it became entangled in his claims to status within and beyond his village. Superficially, the situation is easily apprehended via two analogous approaches within photographic theory and Southeast Asianist ethnography, which treat objects and images as representations or bearers of power and meaning. Here I suggest that such approaches end up eliding the action-centred nature of Paka's 'big name'-making ambitions. In response, I approach his photographic collection through an analytical framework deriving from Alfred Gell's seminal theory, Art and Agency (1998), which has hitherto remained marginal to Southeast Asianist anthropology. I argue that, more than merely symbolising or bearing his 'big name', Paka's photographs were agentive image-objects that actively instantiated it. I conclude by asking how such an analytical shift might encourage a reconceptualisation of 'power' and 'objecthood' in Southeast Asianist anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate about the nature and purpose of representation in photography and other art forms which took place in Germany from the 1920s onwards was part of a larger discussion which began with the opposed positions of Realism and Symbolism and was continued in a slightly alteredform in the work of the Russian Formalists and Futurists and the German Expressionists. This essay sketches out that debate and its antecedents with special reference to Brecht and Benjamin. In the process it sheds particular light on the Brechtian notion of Verfremdung and on the intellectual relationship between Brecht and Benjamin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sources cited within this issue are presented, including "Visual Thinking," by Rudolf Arnheim, "Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography," by Roland Barthes, and "The Art of Photography: 1839-1889," by Julia Margaret Cameron.

The article presents a conclusion to the book "Touching Surfaces: Photographic Aesthetics, Temporality, Aging." The author goes back to the issue of aging and raises the question of the problematic segregation of aging in the study of art works. She suggests seeing photography as a component of both individual and social constructions. She presents a view of photographs not as presentations of moments in time that will no longer be, but as an accumulation of moments located in different time planes, capable of showing a progression of states.

The article presents the author's view of photography as an instrument that structures private and collective perceptions of identity. The author sees the help it gives people in reconsidering the notion of invisibility side by side with the idea of reflexivity. The works of Duane Michals, such as "Man As Animal" and "Man As God" are shown and discussed. Cited is French video artist Thierry Kuntzel's staging of a disturbing aspect of people's bond with photographic images as what the author calls repositories of memory and witnesses of selfhood.

The article looks at man's separation from the younger self and his continuity toward a new self that goes on getting older. The author views this progression as what provides a tension that helps people accommodate change. Life's many contrasts are presented, such as loss and mourning that accompany the process of aging, and accumulation, which accompanies losses. Photography is portrayed as playing an important part in the building of people's personal stories and in molding perceptions of aging.

An introduction to the book "Touching Surfaces: Photographic Aesthetics, Temporality, Aging" is presented, in which the author considers the varied ways in which such processes as consciousness and aging are visualized in the field of art photography, relates aging to consciousness, temporality, and subject construction, and likens photography to aging in that the first is as well inevitably linked with various time dimensions.

The article discusses the evolving aesthetic views of critic Susan Sontag through her commentaries on German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and U.S. photographer Diane Arbus. The amorality expressed in Sontag's key essays from the 1960s, "Against Interpretation" and "On Style," is discussed, and contrasted against her views a decade later in "Fascinating Fascism" and "On Photography."

The article explores the concept of motion in animation through allusion to snowflakes, snow globes, and animated artworks. The author reflects on the role of photography in establishing reality. The author explores the comic strip "Little Nemo in Slumberland" by Winsor McCay and the artwork of Guillaume Paris. Other topics include the critic Walter Benjamin, repetition, and the myth of production.

The use of visual research methods has become increasingly widespread throughout the social sciences. From their origins in disciplines like social anthropology and sociology, visual research methods are now firmly entrenched in major fields of inquiry, including sociology, health and nursing studies, educational research, criminology, human and cultural geography, media and cultural studies, discursive and social psychology, management and organisation studies, political science and policy analysis. The rapid development of information technology, facilitating the creation and editing of digitised data, and computer-based techniques for the storage and management of visual data, means that new methodological approaches are being developed and are envisaged for the near future. Some important and promising approaches are presented in this issue by a number of researchers from different angles of the interpretive social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores points of contact between Stanislavsky's detailed 1898 "mise en scène" for the Moscow Art Theatre's production of Chekhov's "The Seagull," on the one hand, and discursive practices—specifically X-ray photography and hypnosis—striving to map the vaguely perceptible interior spaces of bodies upon their visible surfaces, on the other. For each of these discourses, this act of mapping was dependant upon the work of an interpreting authority—the stage director, master hypnotist, or clinician—who penetrated, arrested, and forcefully rearticulated the meanings of the body's interior. The bodies of "The Seagull's" actors thus vividly conveyed not their own psychic material but that belonging to Stanislavsky, the intervening master interpreter. In this, they joined hypnotized hysterics and X-rayed patients in presenting a referential psychosomatic palimpsest, displaying at once a perceptible surface and a safely reordered and coercively reinscribed interior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the exhibition of photography of Cambodian genocide victims as art. Thousands of negatives found at the S-21 torture center and extermination camp in Phnom Penh, Cambodia were developed and reached a larger audience. The author considers the moral aspects of the photography and the curating of the exhibit by director Christian Caujolle. Other topics include the functions of art museums, artistic intentions, and the duty of memory.

Photography has always had a precarious relation to cultural value: as Walter Benjamin put it, those who argued for photography as an art were bringing it to a tribunal it was in the process of overthrowing. This article examines the case of Polaroid, a company and technology that, after Kodak and prior to digital, contributed most to the mass-amateurization of photography, and therefore, one might expect, to its cultural devaluation. It considers the specific properties of the technology, the often skeptical reception Polaroid cameras and film received from the professional photographic press, and Polaroid's own strategies of self-presentation, and finds that in each case a contradictory picture emerges. Like fast food, the Polaroid image is defined by its speed of appearance - the proximity of its production and consumption - and is accordingly devalued; and yet at the same time it produces a single, unique print. The professional photographic press, self-appointed arbiters of photographic value, were often rapturous about the technical breakthroughs achieved by Polaroid, but dismissive of the potential non-amateur applications and anxious about the implications for the 'expert' photographer of a camera that replaced the expert's functions. For obvious marketing reasons, Polaroid itself was always keen to emphasize what the experts scorned in its products (simplicity of operation), and yet, equally, consistently positioned itself at the “luxury” end of the camera market and carried out an ambitious cultural program that emphasized the “aesthetic” potential of Polaroid photography. The article concludes that this highly ambivalent status of Polaroid technology in relation to cultural value means that it shares basic features with kitsch, a fact that has been exploited by, among others, William Wegman, and has been amplified by the current decline and imminent disappearance of Polaroid photography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on vernacular photography as a visual medium and practice. It offers an analysis of photography's vernacular history. The visual structures and aesthetics of photography are discussed, along with the concept of ordinary photography, in which photographs are taken by non-artists for non-artistic purposes. Picture postcards, jewelry embellished with photographs, and tintype portraits are all discussed.

This article pursues the varying understandings of the photograph in archival literature. An in-depth review of the scholarship uncovers several possible reasons why archivists and those writing about photographic archives apparently continue to struggle with the photograph, including: the sheer difficulty that photographs as an elusive medium present; past debates about photography in art history, history, and archival literature; and the challenges that the photograph as an evasive document presents to the contradictory nature of archives themselves and to conceptions of archival science. Having evolved from an understanding of photographs that conflated content with meaning to postmodernist notions of contingent and plural meanings in which photographs participate, archival writings on the photograph hold promise as they begin to tread the waters that Schwartz charted in the last 15 years. This paper follows that historical progression in order to trace the discourse on photographic archives that has emerged over the past three decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Documenting victory and defeat today does not need months of painting or sculpting art works anymore. Contemporary means of communication such as movies, television shows and photos sent via newspapers, mobile phones and internet have become faster and more influential than traditional art forms. When Saddam Hussein was hung, both recording the incident and sending the MPEG file to the world via Bluetooth and GPRS took few minutes. Documenting torture and abuse of Iraqis in every humiliating position in Abu Ghraib prison by means of photography showed how proudly some soldiers deal with victory. It is interesting to ask, if the artists of Narmer Palette and Arch of Titus were alive today, would they have documented Bush's victory by a memorial relief or a new triumphal arch? Do satellite television channels and World Wide Web substitute traditional art forms in documenting war and alternate galleries and museums? With the accelerating development of new media technologies visual art seems to lose its documentation and propagation functions. The paper discusses three historical artworks from nineteenth and twentieth- century that documented wars; Goya's The Third of May 1808, Delacroix's Massacre at Chios and Picasso's Guernica. Another kind of abuse is documented in old relieves, Baptism of Moors and Conversion of the Moor from sixteenth-century Spain and The Spoils of Jerusalem from first-Century Rome. The paper concludes in some contemporary journalistic photos that show the influence of technological advances in covering wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the circulation of a series of photographs taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia, in 1899. It looks first at their display in the context of the American Negro Exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1900; second, it considers an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1966; and third, it discusses an exhibit at the Williams College Museum of Art in 2000 in which the Hampton photographs were paired with work by contemporary artist, Carrie Mae Weems. The article analyzes the context and the display techniques of each exhibition in order to show how the function of the photographs shifted from public relations material to art. In tracing this shift, the article demonstrates that the meaning of the photographs is not fixed; rather, it was constituted through different discursive frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]