photography-visualculture

[photography-visualculture]

My new book!

We live in a time in which photographs have become extraordinarily mobile. By being digitally networked, they can be exchanged and circulated at the swipe of a finger across a screen. Images on screens are constantly refreshed, photo and video are frequently indistinguishable. The digital photographic image appears and disappears with a mere gesture of the hand.

This book argues that this mobility of the image was accelerated but not inaugurated by digital media and telecommunications. Photographs, from the moment of their invention, set images loose, by making them portable, reproducible, able to be projected, miniaturised, multiplied. The fact that we do not associate analogue photography with such mobility has much to do with the limitations of existing histories and theories of photography, which have tended to view photographic mobility as either an incidental characteristic or a fault. These histories and theories have their own genealogies, emerging in specific cultural and historical contexts that predisposed them to particular understandings and values.

Photography : The Unfettered Image traces the emergence of these ways of understanding photography while at the same time presenting a differently nuanced and materialist history, in which photography is understood as part of a larger development of media technologies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, linked to telegraphy, to new print technologies and to television. It is also situated in a much broader cultural contexts: caught up in the European colonial ambition to  “grasp the world” and in the development of a new, artificial “second nature” dependent on the large-scale processing of animal and mineral materials. Focussing primarily on Victorian and 1920s-30s practices and theories, this book demonstrates how photography was never simply a technology for fixing a fleeting reality.

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Michelle Henning is Professor in Photography and Cultural History in the School of Film, Media and Design at the University of West London, UK. Her previous publications include Museum Media (2015), Museums, Media and Cultural Theory (2006). Her writings on photography include: “The Floating Face: Garbo, Photography and Death Masks”, in Photographies (forthcoming 2017);  “With and Without Walls: Photographic Reproduction and the Art Museum” in Museum Media (2015), “New Lamps for Old: Photography, Obsolescence and Social Change” in Acland (ed) Residual Media (2007),  “Skins of the Real: Taxidermy and Photography” in Snaebjörnsdóttir / Wilson (eds) Nanoq: Flat Out and Bluesome (2006), “The Subject as Object: Photography and the Human Body” in Wells (ed) Photography: A Critical Introduction (5th ed. 2015), “The Cosmic Symbol” in Candlin /Guins (eds) The Object Reader (2009),  “Digital Encounters: Mythical Pasts and Electronic Presence” in Lister (ed) The Photographic Image in Digital Culture (1st ed. 1995).

[photography-visualculture]

Woman working on an airplane motor at North American Aviation, Inc., plant in Calif.  By Alfred T. Palmer, June 1942. Colour transparency in the collection of the Library of Congress.

[photography-visualculture]

Great photograph. No date...

Shomei Tomatsu

[photography-visualculture]

Fac-simile of microphotograph of a flea. Illustration from Gaston Tissandier, Les Merveilles de La Photographie, 1874. Tissandier was unable to illustrate his book with direct mechanical copies of the actual photographs as photographic reproduction techniques were not yet sufficiently advanced, so this is a drawing of a microphotograph.

[photography-visualculture]

Helen Levitt, New York c.1940. © Film Documents LLC. Blocks of stone barricade us from seeing further, even while the writing implies another world beneath the surface world of appearances. A photographed button (a doorbell, for example) would suggest that action can be taken to enter this not-so-secret passage even while the informality of the writing casts doubt. A drawn button places us more clearly in the world of magic, where the act of representation becomes an invocation, and reality is called forth through its depiction.  

[photography-visualculture]

Untitled, 1998, Hannah Starkey

[photography-visualculture]

I love Fukase but have never seen this image before - no date though?

Masahisa Fukase - Slaughter

[photography-visualculture]

Early dental x-ray glass lantern slide, circa 1910, of the jaw of a 16 year old young woman. Taken by George Cunningham for use in his dental education lectures. Courtesy of the British Dental Association Museum.  Illustration from my forthcoming book Photography: The Unfettered Image (2018)    

[photography-visualculture]

Gordon Parks, Untitled, Los Angeles, California, 1963

[photography-visualculture]

Rare and beautiful to see a colour Gordon Parks photo

Gordon Parks, Cafe window, Paris, 1964

[photography-visualculture]

National Science and Media Museum - from their Flickr site - Group of photographers posing in a studio Creator:  Unknown, Date:  1890, Collection: The Kodak Collection at the National Media Museum. Inventory no:  1990-5036/6032/0012

The original title is 'Ein Photograph und seine Mitarbeiter' - a photographer and his staff.

We're happy for you to share this digital image within the spirit of The Commons, although certain restrictions apply. For obtaining reproductions of selected images, please visit the Science and Society picture library, which represents the visual collections of the National Media Museum, the Science Museum and the National Railway Museum.

[photography-visualculture]

Submit your best shots to our 15th Annual Photo Contest, open now!

Photo of the Day: Chinese Opera

Photographer caption: This shot was taken in the back of a theater in Penang, Malaysia. This person was practicing expression in front of the mirror.

Photo by Zilong Qin (Sugerland, Texas); Penang, Malaysia

[photography-visualculture]

Reposted from Secretcinema1 - another Ilse Bing photo - the immaculate “eternal”Garbo not so eternal in poster form.

Greta Garbo Poster, Paris, 1932, Ilse Bing

[photography-visualculture]

One of mine, Lake Garda, 2017

[photography-visualculture]

Illustration from Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations (3rd Edition) 1902 - how an eye (of a mustachioed man!.) frames the world

[photography-visualculture]

Ilse Bing , Self-Portrait with Staccato (1957?) - I have written about this photograph in my forthcoming book. In 1959, Bing turned to other writing poetry (which she also considered photographic “snapshots without a camera”) because “everything moves, nothing stays and I should not hold on... I wanted to make mobility felt”  (cited in Brozan, 1993). http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/08/nyregion/chronicle-892693.html

[photography-visualculture]

Jos Jansen, from Battlefields series - another great post from Francis Hodgson at https://francishodgson.com/2016/05/27/pinch-swipe/