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This article explores the place of photography in the formation of a racial imaginary in which it was possible to conceive of the Indian as at once distant and inferior, degenerate and noble, viscerally “other” and sentimentally “ours.” I suggest that photographic images, such as the anonymous indigenous child, played a double role in the historical formation of a racial "common sense" that is both shifting and ambiguous. In Oaxaca, this ambiguous racial discourse took shape in conversation with a series of cultural and political projects. in which Oaxacan artists and intellectuals set out to articulate a distinctive regional identity that could accommodate—or at least acknowledge—the undeniable fact of ethnic diversity in Oaxaca. Photographic images of ethnic, racial, and regional types played a crucial role in these projects, forming icons or images around which Oaxacans could begin to imagine their politically fragmented state as the sum total of its several, regionalized, parts
Image & Text
Minna Keene: A Neglected Pioneer2018 •
Born in Germany in 1861, Minna Keene lived in Cape Town during a prolific phase of her photographic career. Whilst at the Cape (1903-1913), she achieved international acclaim as a pictorialist photographer. Her photographs of South African subject matter were shown at exhibitions across the world. She was quick to recognise opportunities to translate her photographic success into financial profit and was one of very few women to operate a photographic studio in early-twentieth century South Africa. Keene actively circulated reproductions of her photographs as self-published postcards and in popular publications. Through these interventions, she made a substantial contribution to popular visual culture at the Cape and was celebrated by local and international audiences. Despite her pioneering status, she has been overlooked in the existing literature on South African photography, and, although she has received limited attention in Euro-American histories of photography, much remains unknown about her life and work, especially in relation to her time in Cape Town. Drawing on multi-sited research, I present a biographical account of Keene which analyses the ambivalent gender politics in her photographs as well as her uncritical adoption of colonial categories of race.
Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism
Early Arab Photography2016 •
“Early Arab Photography,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism (London: Routledge, 2016); entry also found https://www.rem.routledge.com/articles/overview/photography
Through the mediating element of travel, European and Latin American visual artists contributed to turning the physical space of Harlem into a central metaphor of modernity. Artists such as the German immigrant Winold Reiss, the Mexican caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias, and the African American student of Reiss, Aaron Douglas, played an integral part in Alain Locke's idea of an international approach to African American culture. [1] By turning to concepts of space as cultural space (Winfried Fluck), processes of mediation, and the role of cultural mobilizers (Stephen Greenblatt), the essay traces how Winold Reiss' Mexican experience shaped the visual narrative of the Harlem Renaissance.
Edward Steichen. Photography
The Artist and Propagandist: Steichen's Role at Two Decisive Moments in the History of American Photography2015 •
Edward Steichen's name is associated with the emergence of two aesthetically and thematically different and even oppositely oriented movements in photography. At the beginning of the 20th century Steichen was a pioneer of Pictorialism, and his 1904 photograph The Pond- Moonlight is a textbook example of this artistic style: intimate, romantic, timeless, and painterly. Yet in the mid-20th century Steichen became a master of American political propaganda in photography and remains known for the creation of a radically new and different type of photography exhibit. In Steichen's curated photography exhibits, Road to Victory (1942) and The Family of Man (1955) at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, photographs lost their individuality, and the participating photographers' original intentions were sacrificed for the sake of creating an atmosphere of patriotic pathos. This article examines the two contradictory directions in Steichen's career and their interpretations by art historians in order to establish a broader context for the work on view in the exhibition Edward Steichen. Photography (Latvian National Museum of Art, The Arsenals Exhibition Hall, June 26 – September 6, 2015).
Reviews by Robert Lapsley on Zupancic, Simon Harvey on Heller-Roazen, Jamie Hakim on Pitcher, Katherine Harrison on visual culture, Felicia Chan on Cosmopolitanism
in Giorgio Bertellini ed., Italian Silent Cinema: A Reader (New Barnet, Herts: John Libbey/Indiana UP, 2013), 49-68.
The History of European Photography, 1900 – 1938
The History of Polish Photography 1900-19382010 •
The history of the 20th century comprises several historical periods of change in the socio-political, cultural and artistic spheres. The first half of the century is par- ticularly complicated, because nearly two of its first decades belong historically, if not chronologically, to the 19th century and were the direct result of the historical processes of that era, ending only with the climax of World War I and the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The next two decades, the 1920s and 30s, shaped and developed the phenomena characteristic of the 20th century. A similar distinction can be observed in the history of Polish photography. The 1900-1918 period ends its 19th century phase, the last chapter of Polish photog- raphy to develop in partitioned Poland (1795-1918), a politically nonexistent state whose territories were divided between and administered by Russia, Prussia and Austria. During that time Polish photographers participated in international events not as Polish citizens, but as citizens of the occupying countries. The period between 1918 and 1939 was a time of short-lived independence in Polish history, during which efforts were made to unify the administratively, economically, socially, and to some extent culturally divided territories which had previously been ruled by the three occupying countries. Similarly intensive efforts were made in the artistic fields, including photography.
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The Journal of Romance Studies
Henri Cartier-Bresson and a photographic Mexico2008 •
Photographies
"Venturing Out on a Ledge to Get a Certain Picture": The "authentic" spaces of Alvin Langdon Coburn's Grand Canyon2012 •
Visual Anthropology Review
A Cannibal in the Archive: Performance, Materiality, and (In)Visibility in Unpublished Edward Curtis Photographs of the Kwakwaka'wakw Hamat'sa2009 •
Plains Anthropologist
Picturing the People: Kiowa, Comanche and Plains Apache Postcards2015 •
Alquimia, México DF, Sistema Nacional de Fototecas
La exportación de lo mexicano: Hugo Brehme en casa y en el extranjero2002 •
Photography and Culture
“De Meyer at Vogue: Commercializing Queer Affect in First World War-era Fashion Photography,” Photography and Culture, November 2009 vol. 2, issue 3, 253-275.2009 •
International Journal of Tourism Research
Surveying the 'empty land'in selected South African landscape postcardsVilis Rīdzenieks (Riga: Neputns)
Fifty Year Eclipse: Illuminating the Forgotten Legacy of Photographer Vilis Rīdzenieks2018 •
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13602365.2016.1248854
Building with Artificial Light. Capturing the City and its Architecture at Night in the 1920s and 1930sThe PhotoHistorian
Robert Demachy: apostle of the gum bichromate process [2015]2015 •
International Journal of the Humanities
A Distant Face: Inside Beirut’s Postcard City2008 •
2007 •
2009 •
Mexicon, Vol. XXXV, Nr. 4, pp. 84-86
The Maya Site of Xtablakal, Yucatán, Mexico2013 •
Revolutionary Russia
POPULAR CULTURE AND VISUAL NARRATIVES OF REVOLUTION: RUSSIAN POSTCARDS, 1905–222008 •