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Unlike most of the immigration novels created by contemporary Polish American female writers, How to Get into the Twin Palms written by Karolina Waclawiak, does not focus on the hardships of assimilation into American culture but depicts experiments with ethnic cross-dressing. Waclawiak, a representative of the so-called one-and-a half generation of Polish immigrants from the 1980s Solidarity wave, reinvents the immigration story as her protagonist, Zosia, a Polish American resident of Los Angeles, yearns to become Russian in order to be granted entrance to the mysterious and appealing Russian nightclub. The protagonist’s transformation into Anya goes hand in hand with her exploration of the City of Angels, thepostmodern megalopolis with neon lights and pavements reaching the horizon. Thus, Zosia/Anya becomes a Californian flâneuse, the urban scrutinizer and strolling observer of the what is known as the most photographed but least photogenic city in the United States. In this context, the main aim of this presentation will be to explore Californian flânerie in Waclawiak’s novel: while walking down the city streets the narrator flâneuse reflects on her home (Polish) culture, underscores her status as an immigrant outsider, and delves into the questions of alienation as well as defamiliarization. Hence, one may assume that flânerie itself contributes to the transformation of Waclawiak’s protagonist.

Landmark check-in behaviour, the ritualistic uploading of a picture or video from a photogenic spot by tourists to social media, is common at tourist destinations. This study considers the effect o...

Robots don’t seem to be vain creatures taking snapshots of themselves. As functional machines, their purpose is to create a picture of the world without dwelling on the pleasures of self-presentation and self-admiration. However, robots have been taking selfies for quite a while. When Gigapan, a robotic camera mount designed to capture pictures of artwork for Google’s Art Project, traveled through the world’s most famous museums, it took a whole series of selfies by reflecting itself in the galleries’ mirrors. Another prominent photogenic robot is NASA’s Science Laboratory rover Curiosity. When it landed on Mars, it held its camera at robotic arm’s length to take head shots: truly authentic selfies, as they seem. Robot selfies raise questions about self-reflection and the concepts that are associated with it. Why does a robot take a selfie? What does it mean for a machine to capture and present itself? Is the robot selfie a way of android self-recognition and self-monitoring? Could it be that camera robots do not just circulate images but are capable of creating machinic self-awareness? The chapter addresses these issues to discuss what new territories the form of the robot selfie could explore. The first section considers the optical effect of reflection and its contribution to the formation of robotic self-depiction; the second discusses the process of technological transformation and the shift of knowledge constellations that is linked to it. The peculiarity of robot selfies, Gotto argues, lies in their aptitude to mediate between self-reflection and self-transformation. Robot selfies exist both as an effect and an alternative mode of selfie culture. As such, they are a prime site for investigating not only the logics and aesthetics of selfies but also the future potential of digital media culture.

The world has witnessed many species on the way of getting endangered during the last few decades. It has become modern to ultramodern leaving no space to the homeland for different animals as well as plants. For various reasons, there are also many birds streaming down the lane of extinction and one of them is house sparrows. The house sparrows are declining in numbers rapidly. In this piece of article, we are intending to find the current ecological distribution of house sparrows in the specific areas of the southern parts of Asansol. We preferred direct photogenic tracking for roosting sites and used new instrumentation for measuring home ranges and density calculation. The data of the birds' distribution is very much needed to focus on their rapidity of getting endangered. Currently, the house sparrow density per square meter is 0.0161315. Every element of an ecological niche plays a crucial role in maintaining nature, similarly does the sparrow. This paper directly points out the causes of the decreasing rate of frequency of the house sparrows to make sense among the common people as well as, focuses on the hamper caused by the Electromagnetic pressure which is not endurable for the thin skulled species. Finally, this write-up encounters a new and intriguing way of counting the number of birds with better precision as well as it produces unbiased data regarding their ecological importance, distribution, home ranges, and, activation hours, which eventually infers the foremost causes of extinction leading to possible researches in different subsections. The piece of the article also reflects on future management and planning regarding the safety of these species.

In his debut feature film, Knife in the Water (1961), and then in the subsequent films Cul-de-sac (1966), Pirates (1986), Frantic (1988), Bitter Moon (1992), Death and the Maiden (1994), and The Ghost Writer (2010), Roman Polański uses the element of water in a significant way. It is particularly interesting when water is visible and constitutes a crucial element of the films’ narrative—woven from water images and aquatic landscapes. So, how do aquatic landscapes function in Polański’s films? I believe that he develops his individual film style in which the element of water—its being filmed—both emphasizes the protagonists’ motivation, often conditions it, and is also a very important detail which shapes images and, therefore, affects the aesthetics of those images. Does a specific kind of aesthetics created by aquatic landscapes—which are characterized by a particular form of photogeneity—exist? Polański certainly does not use common visual clichés. The beauty of his aquatic landscapes is of a different type. They are interesting, original, non-intrusive, yet noticeable—even if they do not dominate the whole image. The text follows the director’s visual strategies which prove the photogenic potential of his films. I argue that this photogeneity—stemming from, inter alia, aquatic landscapes—determines the attractiveness of Polański’s films.

The Harrison D. Horblit Collection of Early Photography comprises more than 7000 items from the 1830s to 1900. Of special interest are approximately 1000 salt prints, 50 photogenic drawings, and 30...

This study explores how domestic cats and their connections to humans are represented in a modern photo-sharing context through content analysis of Reddit, a popular social media website. By examin...

Photography having one less dimension than Architecture, is one of the main elements of modern-day public user. With the growth of social media, the influence of media on the daily tasks of the average user has increased exponentially in the last decade. This study analysed the perception of public spaces in this new context of photography and social media, in relation to the photogenic quality of a space. The identification of reasons behind the perception of photogenic quality in public places would help both the designers and the government administration to create better public spaces. The study was executed with reference to three selected spaces of the Arcade Independence Square in Colombo considering 3 user groups ( n=94 ) selected based on their knowledge base namely; architecture, photography and a neutral group from general public adopting an online questionnaire survey. The findings identified visual elements of the space/composition as the significant reason behind the perception of the photogenic quality of a space followed by cultural influence and social media.

One of the consequences of the public outcry over the 1929 St Valentine’s Day massacre was the establishment of a Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory at Northwestern University. The photogenic ‘Lie Detector Man’, Leonarde Keeler, was the laboratory’s poster boy, and his instrument the jewel in the crown of forensic science. The press often depicted Keeler gazing at a female suspect attached to his ‘sweat box’, a galvanometer electrode in her hand, a sphygmomanometer cuff on her arm and a rubber pneumograph tube strapped across her breasts. Keeler’s fascination with the deceptive charms of the female body was one he shared with his fellow lie detector pioneers, all of whom met their wives – and in William Marston’s case, his mistress too – through their engagement with the instrument. Marston employed his own ‘Love Meter’, as the press dubbed it, to prove that ‘brunettes react far more violently to amatory stimuli than blondes’. In this article, I draw on the psychoanalytic concepts of fantasy and pleasure to argue that the female body played a pivotal role in establishing the lie detector’s reputation as an infallible and benign mechanical technology of truth.

A leading physician in New York during the last quarter of the 19th century, Henry G. Piffard, MD, was a pioneer dermatologist in New York. He had a propensity to invent, and he used that ability to advance the nascent field of instantaneous photography. The recent discovery of a few survivors of Piffard's patented "photogenic (flash) cartridges" prompted an examination of his connection to a leading photographic supply house of his time. The study provided insights into his system and revealed that Piffard had combined the use of his patent with his passion for skin diseases. As a result, Piffard's publications were among the first to document diseases of the skin photographically.

News photos of refugees and migrants tend to be highly evaluative since they capture the moments of human suffering, vulnerability and helplessness. Informed by the works of Martin and White (2005) and Economou (2009, 2008) on Appraisal Theory and evaluative stance, the current paper identifies the visual evaluative resources in Reuters’ Pulitzer-winning photos of refugees and migrants’ crisis in Europe for the year 2016. When considering photos evaluative stance, this paper argues, news photos should not be merely viewed as witness or proof of the events, rather they should be acknowledged for their aesthetic properties and compositional perspectives. This marks the importance of introducing delicate refinements to Martin and White’s (2005) APPRECIATION model by adding, replacing and removing subcategories to account for the range of visual resources deployed in the photos under discussion. Photos’ visual cues and semiotics codes are added to the APPRECIATION model. Doing so, a distinction between the evaluative stances infused by photos aesthetical properties and those arising from photos’content and the depicted participants is established. Two authorial voices are then proposed: the Witness voice and the Artist voice. The delicate modifications introduced to the APPRECIATION model helps to dig deep into the embedded evaluative stance of the photos. Applying the suggested APPRECIATION resources, it is found that Pulitzer-winning photos aestheticize the suffering of the refugees and render it beautiful and photogenic. However, the evoked positive APPRECIATION resources instantiate negative JUDGEMENT values of social exclusion, impersonalization, and Otherness.

Outdoor cultural heritage is exposed to several detrimental factors, so involving people in its care can greatly help in its preservation. We conducted four focus groups with participants recruited through a screening questionnaire to find ways of including travelers in a citizen science project by learning about how they interact with monuments through photography, travel apps, and location-based games, as well as their preferences regarding these apps. Since people can be apprehensive about installing new apps, we also verified the potential of games like Geocaching and Pokémon Go for cultural heritage conservation. We found that monuments appear as a photographic motif if they allow for interaction, are part of a photogenic scene or the visitor is attracted to their story. Some use travel apps to get additional information about the sights and discover hidden sites. Since cultural heritage is frequently part of the Pokémon Go and Geocaching gameplay, there is significant potential to use these apps, not only for tourism, but also for citizen science projects involving cultural heritage. While descriptive in nature, these findings provide useful insight into how to combine ubiquitous devices, smart tourism, consumer behavior, and cultural heritage protection for a more sustainable future.

This chapter explores food culture in social media. It focuses in particular on the affordances offered by social media platforms to create, develop and negotiate individual digital identities, which mediate personal, social and professional relationships with and investment in food, nurture and wellbeing. It examines the adoption of specific social media platforms for commercial and societal use, as well as the significant impact that the digitally curated food culture identities of influential others such as celebrity chefs, food bloggers, lifestyle gurus and self-styled ‘experts’ can have on their followers. There is, for example, Twitter’s role as a monitor of food choice decisions and a data source for food-related consumer behaviour research, and the use of Instagram by brands and companies in contrast to Facebook’s deployment as a community‑building social media tool where interest groups can share information, views and mutual support. The photogenic, young female lifestyle guru is the object of special scrutiny in which the apparent effortlessness with which they have achieved the self they present and their legitimacy to pronounce on health and nutrition is called into question. Finally, the chapter does not offer comprehensive nor conclusive findings on the experiences and exchanges depicted here which develop an overview of social media food cultures. Rather, it presents a flavour of the complex nexus of issues surrounding engagement with the topic in terms of reflections on society itself and on the role such interactions play in the creation of self-identity.

The photographic process that prevailed until relatively recently is based on the invention of William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877), who was born in Dorset in South West England. He was a brilliant man who studied the classics at Cambridge and contributed papers on mathematics and optics to the Royal Society and other organizations. In his early 30s, he became frustrated by his attempts to use the camera obscura as a drawing aid, which motivated him to figure out how to capture its image, a process he would call “photogenic drawings.” The medium for his effort was paper rather than Daguerre’s silver halide coated on a copperplate. In Talbot’s process of 1834, which he did not disclose at the time, the first step was to moisten paper in a dilute bath of silver chloride and then to wash it in a solution of silver nitrate. These experiments did not use a camera obscura but rather involved placing flat objects, such as leaves and lace, on the treated paper to produce reverse silhouettes that required many hours of exposure to sunlight. These photograms produced an image using a process called printing-out, which did not require chemical development but would fade with time and exposure to light. By February 1835, he realized that he could make positives from his negatives by contact printing the original on sensitized paper thus giving the world the negative-positive photographic process. He used a salt solution in an attempt to fix his images, a process that merely slowed the fading. He also found that repeated washes of salt and silver solutions increased the sensitivity of the paper, which he exposed in his camera obscura when still wet. During the summer of 1835, he was taking photos of buildings and had reduced the exposure time from hours to 10 minutes. Upon learning of Daguerre’s work in 1839, Talbot announced his own method (Newhall 2012, p. 20).

On August 23, 2020, the leadership contest of the Conservative Party of Canada ended with Erin O’Toole defeating Peter MacKay, the presumptive leader, on the third ballot, thereby replacing Andrew Scheer and becoming the third leader of the CPC. Like all political leaders, O’Toole is guided by an image of Canada that is and one that will be should he lead the Conservatives to victory in the next general election. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the foreign policy outlined by O’Toole during the leadership contest, as well as in his first few months in the position. The image being crafted by O’Toole is the common “handyman”, someone who is competent, professional, trustworthy and dependable but someone more comfortable with repair rather than construction or design. This is in contrast to Justin Trudeau, who is depicted as a photogenic leader more worried about hashtags, tweets and likes than making hard decisions, a “poster boy”.

The notion of designed space often comes up with the tendency of perfection. This approach, which connects the design to perfection, is mostly reflected in the overall design, even in the representations. In this approach, the power of representation advances in direct proportion to its perfection and perfection is expected in the designed spaces. The situation created by this perfect representation and the reflection of perfection to the design also emerges in the “home” where daily encounters and routines are most intense. Rather than a flawless photogenic object, interiors are dynamic and variable environments containing daily encounters. The interior design practice can be handled from this context and actively influence the design methodology itself. The study shows that as the concept of “home” moves away from a photogenic object, the potential of designing a multi-layered and flexible living space in interior design studios increases. This situation provides alternative spatial articulations in the final product and representations as well as in the interior design process.

Jean Epstein escribía que, al filmar un rostro de cerca, el cinematógrafo había sido capaz de mostrar el alma humana. Así es como, en el período mudo, se instituyó la teoría de la fotogenia. Esta tesis parte de una voluntad de imaginar la historia del cine desde el punto de vista de los rostros que la han ido poblando y despoblando, apareciendo y desapareciendo del plano. Por un lado, nuestra intención es volver a pensar las ideas de Epstein desde el cine contemporáneo, razón por la cual el relato se abre con el rostro fluorescente de Margarete en Fausto (2011), de Aleksandr Sokurov. Por el otro, se trata de explicar la fotogenia como un lenguaje del tiempo de las imágenes y su manera de funcionar, en consonancia con el vocabulario espectral de Aby Warburg y, en especial, con el concepto de supervivencia, que encierra una doble vocación de memoria y porvenir. Jean Epstein wrote that the cinematographer, by filming a face up close, managed to show the human soul. This is how the theory of the ‘photogénie’ was established during the era of silent films. This thesis starts from an intention to imagine the history of cinema from the point of view of the faces that have filled it and been cleared from it, appearing and disappearing from the shot. One part of this examination is to rethink Epstein’s ideas as regards to contemporary cinema, which is why this story opens with Margarete’s illuminated face in the film Faust (2011), by Aleksandr Sokurov. The other part is about explaining the photogenic quality as a language of the time of images, in accordance with the spectral vocabulary of Aby Warburg and, especially, with the concept of survival, which encompasses both memory of the past and ideas for the future.

Since many tourists share the photos they take on social media channels, large collections of tourist attraction photos are easily accessible online. Recent research has dealt with identifying popular places from these photos, as well as computing city tourism routes based on these photo collections. Although current approaches show great potential, many tourism attractions suffer from being overrun by tourists, not least because many tourists are aware of only a few tourism hot spots that are trending. In the worst case, automatic city route recommendations based on social media photos will intensify this issue and disappoint tourists who seek individual experiences. In the best case, however, if individual preferences are appropriately incorporated into the route planning algorithm, more personalized route recommendations will be achieved. In this paper, we suggest distinguishing two different types of photo contributors, namely: first-time visitors who are usually tourists who "follow the crowd" (e.g., to visit the top tourist attractions), and repeated visitors who are usually locals who "don’t follow the crowd" (e.g., to visit photogenic yet less well-known places). This categorization allows the user to decide how to trade the one objective off against the other. We present a novel method based on a classification of photographers into locals and tourists, and show how to incorporate this information into an algorithmic routing framework based on the Orienteering Problem approach. In detailed experiments we analyze how choosing the parameter that models the trade-off between both objectives influences the optimal route found by the algorithm, designed to serve the user’s travel objective and preferences in terms of visited attraction types.

In the 1920s, the LEF project moved the discussion about the role of “things in film” – as metonymic and metaphoric, photogenic and functional, and as tools that filled gaps in the narrative, stood in for actors, or operated as generic markers – in a distinctly materialist direction. Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov were sharply criticized for turning things into symbols in their films. To avoid this aesthetic dispute, Tret’iakov advocated production scripts based on the dominance of material things over plot. Eisenstein, in his unfinished text ‘Play of Objects' (‘Ob igre predmetov’), offers another understanding of things in film. A film-thing (kinoveshch’), in his reading, is first an image and therefore an attraction, a conglomeration of heterogeneous circuits, awakening different areas of association and triggering social emotions. Eisenstein’s ideas may have influenced Tret’iakov’s concept of the “biography of things”. At the same time, as this analysis demonstrates, theoretical discussion about things in film had no lasting impact on the material world depicted on the Soviet screen. Films and historical documents (diaries and memoirs, customs declarations or detention inventories) tell different stories about the life of objects in Soviet Russia.

In White Noise (1985) by Don DeLillo, two characters visit a famous barn, described as the “most photographed barn in America” alongside hordes of picture-taking tourists. One of them complains the barn has become a simulacrum, so that “no one sees” the actual barn anymore. This implies that there was once a real barn, which has been lost in the “virtual” image. This is in line with Plato’s concept of the simulacrum as a false or “corrupt” copy, which has lost all connection with the “original.” Plotinus, however, offered a different definition: the simulacrum distorts reality in order to reveal the invisible, the Ideal. There is a real building which has been called “the most photographed barn in America”: the Thomas Moulton Barn in the Grand Teton National Park. The location—barn in the foreground, mountain range towering over it—forms a striking visual composition. But the site is not only famous because it is photogenic. Images of the barn in part evoke the heroic struggles of pioneers living on the frontier. They also draw on the tradition of the “American sublime.” Ralph Waldo Emerson defined the sublime as “the influx of the Divine mind into our mind.” He followed Plotinus in valuing art as a means of “revelation”—with the artist as a kind of prophet or “seer.” The photographers who collect at the Moulton Barn are themselves consciously working within this tradition, and turning themselves into do-it-yourself “artist-seers.” They are the creators, not the slaves of the simulacrum.

The concept of visuality proposed by Norman Bryson, which refers to conscious perception determined by a system of concepts and knowledge of the visible, is related in the paper to the relationship between two kinds and ideas of photography, introduced respectively by Louis J. Daguerre and William H. Fox Talbot. The discourse about daguerrotypy stresses the quasi-telescopic properties of the picture whose visually ungraspable surface triggers an effect of reaching with the eye far beyond it toward even the farthest details, invisible without a looking glass but still clearly visible in the picture. In response to this feature, Talbot connected the photographic picture primarily with the effects of transferring the relations of shadow and light to contrast on the surface of photosensitive paper. He referred the “photogenic drawing” to a tradition older than the Albertian paradigm of the illusion of perspective adopted by Daguerre in his famous views of the streets of Paris from the window. His technique, called “skiagraphy,” Talbot associated with an ancient legend about the origin of drawing as the art of fixing shadows on a flat surface. His photographs of Lacock Abbey windows were a paradigmatic example that determined the understanding of each photo on the level of its basic self-reflexive content: in the first place, the photographic picture shows how reality before the camera lens projects its “skiagraphic” drawing – a “stamp,” as it were – on the paper surface, and how the forms of objects are reduced to that surface and grasped on it. In his Pencil of Nature, Talbot connected photographic pictures with text, determining the visual status of print photography as replica – both repetition of the highly appreciated daguerrotypy, and a rival response to it, showing the advantages of Calotypy based on the visible proximity of the picture and the surface. Thanks to the properties of Calotypy, precise “fixing of shadows” allows one to arrest despite the flow of time and fix in a visual structure what is the most volatile and changeable.

In fireflies, the bioluminescent system involves a benzothiazolic luciferin, ATP, a luciferase, and complex lanterns consisting of different tissues including a photogenic one. Whereas the biochemical reaction and the structure of lanterns are quite well known, the evolutionary and developmental origins of photogenic tissue as well as the biosynthetic origin of luciferin remain enigmatic. One approach to better understand the origin of the photogenic tissue and biosynthetic origin of luciferin is to investigate the molecular differentiation among photogenic and non-photogenic tissues. Thus, here we compared - for the first time - the transcriptomes of the photogenic tissue of lanterns (specialized tissue) and the fat body (non-specialized tissue) of larvae, adult lanterns, and eggs stages of the common Southeastern Brazilian firefly Aspisoma lineatum . The similarities between the photogenic tissue of lanterns and the fat body, with the occurrence of several luciferase isozymes, luciferin-regenerating enzyme, L-DOPA metabolism related enzymes, and nitric oxide synthase, support the hypothesis that in fireflies, the photogenic tissue evolved from the fat body.

For far too long, there was tendency to portray young women and men either as angry trouble-makers, or as photogenic, helpless victims. This is a false narrative.

Focusing on visual arts in Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction, this chapter seeks to examine the intricate relationship of photography and death in Nabokov’s novels. Borrowing from Derrida’s “spectropoetics” in Specters of Marx and relying on Barthes’s reflections on photography in Camera Lucida it aims first to show how photographic references disseminate their lethal function in the text that surrounds them. This preliminary analysis is then used to discuss the stake of the “photogenic” presence of Humbert’s mother in Lolita.

This article consists of a study of the professional relationship between Greta Garbo and Clarence Brown, her most regular Hollywood director, who directed her in seven feature films—no other filmmaker directed her in more than two—and whom film critics and historians have invariably indicated as her “favourite director”. Although in the late twenties and during the first half of the thirties the Garbo-Brown duo was considered the most successful actress-director team of the time, their association is virtually unknown today. Was Brown really, as so often stated, her “favourite director”? What was the reason for Garbo’s reluctance to repeat with the same filmmaker more than twice? Why did she allow Brown to direct her in seven films? What was his success in directing her? Was Garbo a technical or instinctive actress? Was she a great performer or simply endowed with a magnificently photogenic face? In order to uncover the answers to these questions, an in-depth chronological analysis has been undertaken of their seven joint films, made over an eleven-year period of collaboration, by consulting a wide range of period and contemporary sources, in addition to an unpublished interview with the director. This article consists of a study of the professional relationship between Greta Garbo and Clarence Brown, her most regular Hollywood director, who directed her in seven feature films—no other filmmaker directed her in more than two—and whom film critics and historians have invariably indicated as her “favourite director”. Although in the late twenties and during the first half of the thirties the Garbo-Brown duo was considered the most successful actress-director team of the time, their association is virtually unknown today. Was Brown really, as so often stated, her “favourite director”? What was the reason for Garbo’s reluctance to repeat with the same filmmaker more than twice? Why did she allow Brown to direct her in seven films? What was his success in directing her? Was Garbo a technical or instinctive actress? Was she a great performer or simply endowed with a magnificently photogenic face? In order to uncover the answers to these questions, an in-depth chronological analysis has been undertaken of their seven joint films, made over an eleven-year period of collaboration, by consulting a wide range of period and contemporary sources, in addition to an unpublished interview with the director.

‘Mussolini’s photogenic charisma’, assesses the concept of charisma when considered in photographic terms. His projected image over the years was never linear but subjected to modification as, like other charismatic leaders, he made compromises and adopted a variety of different attitudes and guises. Yet the dominant image, historians agree, was that Mussolini was Il Duce whose orders were carried out. His authority was expressed through physical traits, which were central to Fascist visual communication. Mussolini’s corporeality was an essential mechanism in regime propaganda, in which the composition emphasised his seemingly most recognisable aspects of his photographic iconography.

This chapter explores the work of studio photographers and in particular the very successful Ghitta Carell whose work has only recently been revalued. In the representation of power, and except for the last photograph in uniform in 1937, Carell’s portraits of the Duce in the early 1930s are unusual in portraying Mussolini in civilian clothes and transforming the Duce from a glowering and stern subject into a ‘docile’ model. A propaganda strategy that could have been used instrumentally for private correspondence, diplomatic ‘gifts’ or for political ends.

In 1926, the Fox Film Corporation held a “Masculine and Feminine Photogenic Beauty Contest” to find Hollywood’s newest “Latin” star in Brazil and other countries. North American film representatives asked for contestants who were “white with Latin blood.” The exotic allure of this racialized category contradicted Brazilian elites’ preference for eugenic, chaste, white beauty. Brazilian film critics, advertisers, and beauty contestants negotiated transnational standards of beauty as they sought faces, bodies, and sexual appeal that would conquer Hollywood. Ultimately, Brazilian films intellectuals forged their own meanings of “white with Latin blood” even as they upheld the supremacy of white beauty. However, the contest demonstrates how the transnational contours of cinema offered a liminal space for competing standards of racialized beauty in Brazil. Resumen Em 1926, para descobrir um novo astro “Latin,” a Fox Film Corporation lancou no Brasil e em outros paises “O Concurso da Belleza Photogenica Feminina e Varonil.” Os representantes norte-americanos pediram que os concorrentes fossem “brancos com sangue latino.” O encanto exotico dessa categoria racializada ia contra a preferencia das elites brasileiras pela beleza eugenica, pura e branca. Cinefilos, anunciantes e concorrentes negociaram padroes transnacionais de beleza enquanto buscavam rostos e corpos atraentes que conquistariam o Hollywood. No final, cinefilos brasileiros construiram seus proprios sentidos de “branco com sangue latino,” ainda que reforcando a supremacia da beleza branca. No entanto, o concurso revela como o aspecto transnacional do cinema oferecia um espaco temporario dos padroes contraditorios da beleza racializada no Brasil.

Cameras play an important role in capturing precious moments of people's lives in a photograph that can be seen and cherished by them or by their loved ones any time in their lives. This makes it imperative to have a perfect photograph which can describe that moment well. However, it is very difficult to time and capture a group photograph where everyone is looking their best. There are instances when multiple group photos are taken but in one of the photographs a particular person might have his/her eyes open and is smiling whereas someone else's eyes are closed because he/she was blinking. However, in another photograph that person has his/her eyes closed or is not smiling but rest of the people look good. Whatever the case may be, it becomes very difficult to have one perfect group photograph. Thus, if we can pick and blend the good facial features of each person from these multiple photos and merge into a single photo, we can get a better resultant group photograph with the best of their facial features in it. To do this, one could use softwares like Abode Photoshop or other such image editing tools. However, it requires the user to be well versed with that software and demands a lot of effort and user's valuable time to correct the photographs. To make this process easy and better, we have developed a tool that uses OpenCV at its core and follows a sequence of steps for generating the best photograph out of multiple group photographs clicked at a particular instance. By using this tool one can effortlessly get the best group photograph where everyone is smiling with their eyes open.

What makes a great bird photo? To examine this question, we collected over 20,000 photos of birds from the photo-sharing platform Instagram with their corresponding liking data. We standardized the total numbers of Likes and extracted information from the image captions. With this database, we investigated content-related image properties to see how they affect the ubiquitous online behavior of pressing a Like button. We found substantial differences between bird families, with a surprising winner in the category “most instagrammable bird.” The colors of the depicted bird also significantly affected the liking behavior of the online community, replicating and generalizing previously found human color preferences to the realm of bird photography.

Resumo O presente artigo visa a apresentar como os arquivos de autobiografia contemporânea surgem e como podem ajudar no estudo da memória e do esquecimento, matéria-prima dos escritos do eu. O gênero autobiográfico que ganha força com publicações como As Confissões de Jean-Jacques Rousseau mostra-se cada vez mais atual. A luta contra o esquecimento, o desejo de fazer ouvir sua própria voz, de registrar sua existência, deixando para a posteridade um testemunho do que foi sua vida, nunca foi tão atual como nesse início de século XXI, em que diariamente há pessoas partilhando com conhecidos e desconhecidos sua vida pessoal. Blogs, Facebook, páginas profissionais repletas de fotos e testemunhos se multiplicam na web. Certamente, são muitos os que fazem dessas redes sociais uma válvula de escape de sua realidade e acabam criando personalidades e vidas que pouco têm a ver com o que realmente estão vivendo. As fotos são com boa resolução e tiradas em locais “fotogênicos”, por vezes retrabalhadas no Photoshop. Mas, em meio a todo esse afã de publicações imediatas, ainda existem associações que se preocupam com a autobiografia contemporânea escrita nos moldes tradicionais. No presente artigo, voltamo-nos para uma análise da APA francesa, para mostrar o lugar que ocupam os escritos autobiográficos em suporte papel na era das mídias digitais. Abstract This article aims to present how the archives of modern autobiography begin and how they can help the studies of memory and forgetfulness, the raw material for the writings about the self. The autobiographical gender becomes stronger after Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions and is now more and more common. The struggle against the forgetfulness, the desire of being heard, of registering one’s existence, leaving behind one’s own testimony of what has been one’s life, this has never been so current as it is now in the beginning of the 21st century, when everyday people are sharing their personal life with friends as well as with people they don’t know. Blogs, Facebook, professional pages filled with photos get multiplied on the net. There are many who transform the social networks into outlets for reality and build up personalities and lives which have little to do with what they actually live. The photos have a good resolution and are taken at “photogenic” places, edited with Photoshop. But, in the middle of these millions of instantaneous publications, there are associations which are still concerned about the contemporary autobiography written in traditional molds. In this article, we develop an analysis of the APA (Association pour l’Autobiographie) to investigate the role played by autobiographical writings on paper in the digital era. Résumé Cet article a comme but de présenter comment les archives de l’autobiographie contemporaine surgissent et comment il peuvent aider l’étude de la mémoire et de l’oubli, matière-première des écritures du moi. Le genre autobiographique qui devient plus fort avec la publication des Confessions de Jean-Jacques Rousseau se montre très actuel. La lutte contre l’oubli, le désir de faire entendre sa propre voix, d’enregistrer son existence, laissant à la postérité un témoignage de ce qu’a été sa vie, ceci n’a jamais été aussi actuel qu’au début de ce XXIe siècle, où tous les jours il y a des personnes qui partagent leur vie personnelle avec des inconnus et des personnes de leur connaissance. Les blogs, le Facebook, les pages professionnelles remplies de photos se multiplient sur internet. Il y en a beaucoup qui font des réseaux sociaux un exutoire pour fuir leur réalité et créent des personnalités et des vies qui ont peu à voir avec ce qu’ils vivent effectivement. Les photos ont une bonne résolution et sont prises dans des endroits “photogéniques”, retravaillées sur Photoshop. Mais, au milieu de cette multitude de publications immédiates, il y a encore des associations qui se préoccupent de l’autobiographie contemporaine écrite de façon traditionnelle. Dans cet article, nous nous tournons vers une analyse de l’Association pour l’Autobiographie française pour enquêter sur la place qu’occupent les écrits autobiographiques en support papier à l’ère du numérique.

The target of Architecture has shifted from “attending the person in all its dimensions” to “generating a universe of surprising, beautiful and photogenic forms and spaces” relegating those who will use them to a second level or total oblivion. The phenomenon is easily detected by studying the traces of photographic memory, and this helps to focus on what really matters. This worrying evidence questions the role assigned to the inhabitant when making project decisions, the relationship between the inhabitants, architects and photographers, the teaching impact of these lifeless images of architecture, and how this affects our present and the future of the profession. Photography, the incorruptible witness of recent history, shows behind a filter of “makeup” what can be seen, and reveals what we don’t want to see. The still life architecture is contagious when teaching and leads us also to design and photograph “empty” spaces instead wishing them to be “interestingly habitable”, thinking more about the “appearance” rather than the “experience”. This needs an urgent revision and a global change of awareness or we will end up reducing the architecture to a superficial, marginal and dispensable social role associated with the Botox-shop.

This chapter offers a critical account of a docu-drama that portrays a group suicide of some ethnic left-behind children to question the dehumanisation of those unwanted others by the ruling class, which is accompanied by the bankruptcy of trust in the interdependency between photogenic reality, its authenticity, and credibility.

Civil War photographers visited the battlefield south of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in the days immediately after fighting had ceased and captured some of the most important images of combat fatalities ever produced. These iconic photographs were shocking to citizens on the home front, and at the same time, they proved immensely popular. To historians, the photographs document the nature of the landscape as well as the dress and physical condition of the soldiers. Unfortunately, the photographers often provided erroneous, vague, or even fraudulent captions and descriptions for their images, much to the confusion of postbellum historians. A century after these photographs were published, local historian William Frassanito used the geomorphology of the battleground, and specifically the unusual mechanical and chemical weathering patterns, systematic joints, and exfoliation forms of the outcropping diabase, to identify the location of many of these photographs. This combination of forensic analysis and geological study also allowed Frassanito to prove that the image many scholars consider the most famous photograph to emerge from the Civil War—Alexander Gardner’s “Rocks could not save him at the Battle of Gettysburg”—was, in reality, staged and the dramatically-positioned cadaver had been transported by the photographer and his assistants across Devil’s Den to a more photogenic location.

Several species of the luminescent tubeshoulder fish (family Platytroctidae) show extensive ontogenetic transformations in the development of bioluminescent structures from larvae to adults. Several types of luminescent tissues are present in platytroctids, although these tissues are poorly known for most species because specimens are rarely observed. The present study describes the ontogenetic transformation of photogenic structures in Sagamichthys schnakenbecki, a species that is found in meso and bathy-pelagic depths of the Atlantic Ocean. Five newly described luminous structures are included in addition to a review of all known bioluminescent tissues described in the family. The newly discovered photogenic tissues were observed at the pectoral-fin base in early juveniles, as a pair of large globule-like tissues inside the caudal peduncle of early juveniles, at the pelvic girdle of late juveniles and early adults and as photogenic tissue observed as pigment over the cleithral bone in adults. A peculiar skin-slit structure, which was observed only in S. schnakenbecki, is described and discussed. Skin slits were associated with certain bioluminescent structures during the transformation into adulthood. In addition, coI sequence data from nine of 13 recognized platytroctid genera were used to construct the first molecular phylogenetic tree for the family. Finally, the first photographic evidence of the rarely observed luminous discharge of a tubeshoulder shoulder organ is presented from observations off south-east Greenland.

Repetitive, messy, and often hard to see: survival is rarely photogenic. Relative to spectacular scenes of violent dying or heroic living that comprise familiar images of military conflict, survival may look rather dull, if it appears at all. Militarized violence typically becomes visible in mortality, but survival blurs the distinctions between life and death in the precarious environments that war creates, thus eluding or confounding predominant visual modalities for representing war zones. Related to this, survival is often illegible in politicized wartime fantasies about life and death, an incomprehensibility rooted in its deviation from mythologized visions of living and dying. In part, mainstream news media may find it difficult to depict survival-and consequently, distant spectators may find survival difficult to envision-because it is ubiquitous and temporally expansive. Dramatic events lend themselves to capture in single-frame photographs or short film clips, while the ongoing task of surviving war lasts as long, or longer, than the conflict itself, a duration that is inimical to the narrative constraints of news media and entertainment genres.Wartime survival is the maintenance of life in an extreme form of what Lauren Berlant characterizes as "crisis ordinariness" (2011, 10), a concept that encapsulates the everyday traumas and forms of precarity generated by the current global political economy. Structural violence nourishes crisis ordinariness, while circumscribing its visibility through corporate and state control of the media. Yet as generative as the idea of "crisis ordinariness" is, the "crisis" that modifies the "ordinariness" in this evocative phrase also risks overshadowing it. To focus too narrowly on abiding crisis (or interlocking crises) is to risk overlooking the active, inventive, everyday survival strategies that crisis elicits, and the ways that those innovations mitigate the crisis that begets them. Shifting our gaze away from crisis, we look here to a visual document of livable forms of ordinariness that emerge in fissures within the protracted crisis of militarized violence.Confronting survival in visual cultures of war often requires departing from ideological absolutes (for sometimes the work of survival is ugly) and fantasies about resistance (for sometimes the work of survival is primarily utilitarian). Instead, this visual departure opens up alternative critical, political, and spectatorial possibilities. Here, we consider the interweaving of survival, catastrophe, and ordinariness in the needlepoint artwork of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz to illustrate this potential. Krinitz, who lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland, juxtaposes the luscious materiality and pastoral settings of thirty-six fabric collage and embroidered panels with a visual narrative of surviving genocidal violence (Krinitz and Steinhardt 2005). Arresting both for its virtuosic level of detail and frank rendition of the occupation and attendant traumas, Krinitz's needlework ornaments the conjunction of the horrific and the quotidian. This jarring combination confronts viewers even as the haptic richness and sensory elegance of her craft pulls us toward spectatorial pleasures.Building on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's insistence on the importance of reparative practices that work to ameliorate the traumatic impacts of structural violence, we consider how the sensory lure of Krinitz's needlepoint grates against knowledge about the miseries these scenes depict (2003, 144). Reparative practices, as Sedgwick defines them, constitute the "many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture-even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them" (150-51). Through an exploration of the haptic and visual aspects of Krinitz's reparative artistic practice, we argue that her creations visualize survival as a process of extracting sustenance from an imperiled material world. …

The poaching and the subsequent illegal trafficking of wildlife has become a booming local and global business (Alacs and Georges 2008) and is directly related to significant population losses for many species (Schneider 2012). In the last decade, countless media stories have been shared about the rise in poaching incidents particularly as they relate to the more photogenic animals, such as elephants, rhinos, and tigers. Many of these animals are critically endangered or have already gone extinct in the wild. For example, both the Western Black Rhino (Save the Rhino International 2015) and the Northern White Rhino are believed to be extinct in the wild (WWF 2015) as a direct consequence of rhino poaching for their horns. The poaching and illegal trafficking of animals and/or their by-products is not limited to only photogenic species. Pangolins, an insect-eating mammal that is similar to an armadillo, are not particularly attractive (Gill 2012) and do not receive much media attention, but are among the most poached mammals in the world for their meat and scales (Sutter 2014). The illegal wildlife trade is driven by a number of factors including the pet trade, accessories or luxury items, bush meat, and alternative medicines. As a result of the increased attention to ‘wildlife crime’, researchers from a variety of disciplines have begun to give this problem more attention. One of those disciplines is criminology. In fact, many criminology-related publications on the topic have been published within the last couple of years. For instance, a quick search of Criminal Justice Abstracts using Bwildlife conservation^ produced 236 articles or books published from 1937 to 2005, and 247 articles and books in the ten years spanning 2006 to 2015. Clearly, criminologists have become more interested in the sub-discipline of wildlife crime, also known as ‘conservation criminology’, and have made great progress in explaining why it happens, how the trade operates and offer solutions to reduce its frequency. The purpose of this special issue on BWildlife Crime^ is to create awareness of this global issue, increase dialogue with conservationists, and promote partnership research with park rangers and others on the ground. This special issue on wildlife crime covers a broad range of topics and includes conceptual and empirical papers. Eur J Crim Policy Res (2015) 21:299–302 DOI 10.1007/s10610-015-9290-x

John Opera is an American photographer who works at the intersection of photographic materiality and light-derived abstraction. Since graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (where he earned an MFA), Opera has lived and worked in Chicago. His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions in New York (2013), Los Angeles (2014), and Miami (2014). The preoccupation of his practice in the last few years has centered on the relationship between the material origins of photographic processes and the way those processes can be manipulated to express form, texture, and tone. Drawing on the most primitive components of imagemaking, Opera has reclaimed processes such as the anthotype and cyanotype and applied them to the representation of abstractions as well as everyday objects. Especially in his recent work, Opera addresses the peculiarity of organic, light-sensitive materials that give rise to two-dimensional tableaus. For this reason, many of his recent pieces evoke the parameters, conditions, and effects of paintings. In order to reflect on these latest projects, especially in the light of his long history of work as a photographer, I discussed the origins and development of Opera's work with him during the winter of 2014, via phone and email. DAVID LAROCCA: You're a photographer who is known for working at what might be called the origins of imagemaking-that is, with light-sensitive organic material, indeed with the most elemental or rudimentary attributes of photographic media. What are you working on now? JOHN OPERA: In an exhibition held in Los Angeles in the fall of 2014, (1) I showed wall works that are cyanotype-on-linen--a process that I've been exploring since 2011. During this period of experimentation and production, I've been continually drawn to artists whose work returns to photography's chemical origins while simultaneously questioning tendencies in art photography today that deemphasize surface and materiality. I'm reminded here of Barbara Kasten's cyanotype and Van Dyke brown photogenic paintings from the mid-to-late 1970s (for example, Untitled 74/13 from 1974) as well as Liz Deschenes's silver-toned sculptural/photographic works (Stereographs #1-4 from 2013). Cyanotype is one of the oldest and most recognizable of all photo processes, in part owing to its signature Prussian blue color. With this latest work, however, I've managed to modify the steps of the process so the results are not blue per se, but almost neutral. This shift in coloration is exciting (for me at least!) because it will allow me to continue experimenting with the physicality of the process but not be bogged down by such a limited, even cliche, color palette--although I do love the color blue. It's an incredibly simple process as it only requires water as a developing agent. Some pieces are framed and some are not. None are behind glass. Some are in small editions while others are unique. These cyanotypes seem to exist somewhere between painting and photography. Their physical qualities trade between those two representational worlds or models. They feel both indexical and also strangely free of referentiality. DL: I can't help but see an apparent and appealing coincidence between the Blinds images (2014) and the kinds of photographs commonly made in a chemical darkroom without negatives--namely, contact prints. Do you have a sense of the resonance of this latest work with your earliest images, made when you were a teenager growing up in Buffalo, New York? JO: I suppose there is a stylistic similarity between how my photo works look and how photograms look, and technically speaking, all of the cyanotype prints are contact prints, meaning the negative required to make my images must be the same dimensions as the final format size. If I want my final image to be 3 by 4 feet, my negative must also be that size. Deschenes's work may be instructive here, especially in how she addresses issues of tone and silhouette as they are expressed in response to light--for instance, in her cameraless photograph Moire #25 (2009). …

Official Instagram account of department of design for contemporary life in Gifu city women’s college is discussed. Instagram is a SNS that mainly used visual images. We have been operating official account since July in 2016. "Likeness" attached to 145 posts was analyzed. As a result, the evaluation on posts on flowers blooming in the college and posts on architecture lessons was higher than other posts. Moreover 145 posts are divided in to 11 types. As a result, it was found that the evaluation on posts on "presentation" "exercise" "lecture" was higher than other posts.

Knapp, Andrew. Let’s Find Momo. Quirk Books, 2017.This hide-and-seek board book is the latest from photographer, Andrew Knapp and his extremely photogenic border collie named Momo. The black and white border collie loves hiding and invites young readers to find itself and other objects. Left-hand pages list three different objects and Momo who are hidden in the corresponding right pages. Each page explores different environments along with objects that are typically found therein, but not always. For instance, in the library, readers are tasked to find a lollipop, a banana, a balloon, and Momo.Similar to Where’s Waldo, this picture book allows readers to find objects and the cute little dog that does his very best at staying hidden. The border collie takes readers on many adventures such as to a merry-go-round, gymnasium, garden, bedroom, and even a farm. With themes carefully selected, they provide a wide range of new words for young readers to learn. Each location is beautifully photographed with vibrant colours and unique angles while, at the same time, teaches new vocabulary to young children, aged 2-4. Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Janice KungJanice Kung is a Public Services Librarian at the University of Alberta, John W. Scott Health Sciences Library. She obtained her undergraduate degree in commerce and completed her MLIS degree in 2013. She believes that the best thing to beat the winter blues is to cuddle up on a couch and lose oneself in a good book.

Drawing on cultural geography, visual cultural studies and theories of media ecology, this essay lays out a framework for collaboration between media scholars, architects and critics, positioning photographic social media such as Instagram as a means for pursuing questions about the changing role of landscape in the visual mediation of urban social life and public culture. While buildings and urban infrastructure also have mediating functions, I focus on designed landscapes such as public parks because they mediate visual perception in a manner that is historically intertwined with that of photography. Responding to existing interest in the critical reading of landscape values as well as research on new photographic forms and practices arising from social media use, I suggest that we take seriously the idea that landscape is itself a form of media. Attending to its ongoing interactions with other media will enable us both to specify the nature of its intermediality in a given time and place, and open a new space for reflexivity and critique. Beginning with an account of what is at stake in the visual mediation accomplished through urban landscapes on the one hand, and in the study of social media use on the other, I make a case for a critical, qualitative analysis of photographic content as opposed to quantitative analytics of the data associated with it. I then present an example of the kind of analysis I have in mind, drawing from an exploratory case study of photographs from Grand Park in Los Angeles (Rios Clementi Hale). In the process, I flesh out the concept of intermediality as it pertains to designed landscapes and demonstrate the kinds of questions and pedagogical opportunities such an approach may open.

For the full article, please visit Project MUSE or click here (subscribers only). How are digitized manuscripts affecting the theory and practice of philology? I use historical and artistic photographs to explore the implications of the new ‘photogenic philology’ that has developed with the expansion of digital archives for medieval manuscript studies. Rather than choosing between ‘real’ manuscripts and their digital avatars, scholars can foreground how their modes of accessing documents shape their questions and conclusions. This kind of analysis helps us understand more directly how technology constrains our views of history, texts, and manuscripts. Resume Comment les manuscrits numeriques affectent-ils la theorie et la pratique de la philologie ? J’utilise des photographies historiques et artistiques afin d’evaluer les implications de la nouvelle « philologie photogenique », qui a ete developpee suite a l’expansion des archives numeriques pour l’etude des manuscrits medievaux. Plutot que de choisir entre les « vrais » manuscrits et leurs avatars numeriques, les chercheurs peuvent mettre une plus grande emphase sur la maniere dont leurs modes d’acces aux documents faconnent leurs questions et conclusions. Une telle analyse nous aide a comprendre plus directement comment la technologie modele nos visions de l’histoire, des textes et des manuscrits.

After its sixty anniversary (and in spite of the fact that its architecture was left unprotected till the early 90s), the Secondary Modern School in Hunstanton by A+P Smithson remains as a perfect example of modernity in its own photogenic appearance. From the very moment it was built (1949-1953) till now, the dialectics formulated by its skin has been able to integrate into the landscape, as well as reconcile the functionality of their teaching program with it. The success of the language used in its different facades lies in the compositional rigor of mathematics taken to the extreme. The repetition as a projectual mechanism –both its constructive elements and the few necessary detail– makes this architecture an abstract entity, allowing dematerialize the perception of its large size. At the same time, each facade shares the ambiguity which is implied in combining simultaneously the visual permeability and the reflexes which are able to camouflage the interior. Variables as “velocity” and “approach” with which the covering is perceived –both from the inside and from the outside– make possible a game of gazes from this duality that resembles the facade elements as a “cinematographic frame”. Consequently, and placing this in the context of the inauguration of the building, Secondary Modern School in Hunstanton reminds the Free Cinema Movement.

Allen Ginsberg's little volume of poems, Howl, which got the San Francisco renaissance off to a screaming start a year or so ago, was dedicated to Jack Kerouac (“new Buddha of American prose, who spit forth intelligence into eleven books written in half the number of years … creating a spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature”), William Seward Burroughs (“author of Naked Lunch, an endless novel which will drive everybody mad”), and Neal Cassady (“author of The First Third, an autobiography … which enlightened Buddha”). So far, everybody's sanity has been spared by the inability of Naked Lunch to find a publisher, and we may never get the chance to discover what Buddha learned from Neal Cassady's autobiography, but thanks to the Viking and Grove Presses, two of Kerouac's original classics, On the Road and The Subterraneans, have now been revealed to the world. When On the Road appeared last year, Gilbert Milstein commemorated the event in the New York Times by declaring it to be “a historic occasion” comparable to the publication of The Sun Also Rises in the 1920's. But even before the novel was actually published, the word got around that Kerouac was the spokesman of a new group of rebels and Bohemians who called themselves the Beat Generation, and soon his photogenic countenance (unshaven, of course, and topped by an unruly crop of rich black hair falling over his forehead) was showing up in various mass-circulation magazines, he was being interviewed earnestly on television, and he was being featured in a Greenwich Village nightclub where, in San Francisco fashion, he read specimens of his spontaneous bop prosody against a background of jazz music.