Search

The book is dense with Susan Andrews's photographs of the exhibition, the visitors, and the post-exhibition journey of the objects. As befits its open-endedness Daniels does not draw one final conclusion as to whether the exhibition was successful or not in transforming the stereotypes that visitors had of Japanese domesticity. i challenges perceptions of contemporary exhibitions by a reversal of power from the curator to the visitor, thus looking at what exhibitions could be - "technologies of the imagination.". [Extracted from the article]

The discursive turn in heritage studies has made major contributions to our understanding of heritage as a set of processual practices, demonstrating how they are inherently contingent while acknowledging their role in the legitimation of specific relationships of power. More recently, there has been a related interest in the rhetorical uses of heritage, and the paper builds on these debates to explore the ways in which the National Gallery (London) mobilised a rhetoric about access as part of its scheme of post-WWII reconstruction. The popular 'Exhibition of Cleaned Pictures' (1947) sheds light on the rhetorical devices employed by the Gallery. These were a cogent example of the Gallery's intended programme of emancipatory viewership, premised on visitors' the right to look, but simultaneously reinforced the Gallery's authoritative discourses. The paper shows how photography's reportedly unbiased language became embedded in the Gallery's democratising agenda and helped shape distinctive forms of publicness which fostered a consensual view about the Gallery's practice of cleaning. Rather than seeing both episodes as mutually exclusive, the paper investigates the internal logic of democratisation and professionalisation as a series of co-dependent rhetorical operations that simultaneously enabled freedom and coercion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of six internationally recognised ‘Sites of Conscience’ in South Africa, District Six Museum in Cape Town has been at the forefront of the community museum movement since its inception in 1994. Organised by those directly affected by apartheid’s Group Areas Act, the Museum is dedicated to preserving and fighting for the rights and memories of those who were forcibly removed from their District Six homes between 1966 and 1982. A uniquely intimate space, the Museum seeks to balance empathy alongside what it calls ‘critical non-racialism’, as it engages in the ambitious project of re-defining racialised communities in post-apartheid South Africa. This paper explores the tensions between criticality and empathy in relation to District Six Museum’s photographic collection. Focusing particularly on the problem of perspective-taking, this paper analyses the ways in which gradual changes in the Museum’s visitor demographic are compromising its non-racial project. Based on qualitative research that suggests contemporary visitors are less likely to engage in the kind of reconstructive, politicised imaginings that the Museum’s displays require, this paper suggests that empathy, rather than a tool for critical engagement with District Six’s history, is increasingly becoming the means through which alternative memories of District Six are silenced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a 9-month project commissioned by Halton Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and Liverpool photography organisation, Open Eye Gallery. Socially engaged photographers worked with local residents from the Windmill Hill estate in Runcorn to describe healthy and unhealthy aspects of the area. Six women were trained to use cameras to document everyday things that mattered to them. Through focus groups they discussed what these photographs revealed about the health and ill-health of the area. The resulting exhibition, As and When, told their story. Despite being a deprived area with more than average incidence of illness, they identified many positive things that enhanced their sense of wellbeing and resilience. The benefits of the project included increased social engagement and participation, an improved sense of vitality and rejuvenation, emotional benefits, a feeling of greater political agency and increased visual literacy. This paper outlines the model of practice developed with the support of CCG and in collaboration with local stakeholders. It makes a case for the value and the ways in which clusters of general practices could develop links and work with health assets in their local communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of six internationally recognised ‘Sites of Conscience’ in South Africa, District Six Museum in Cape Town has been at the forefront of the community museum movement since its inception in 1994. Organised by those directly affected by apartheid’s Group Areas Act, the Museum is dedicated to preserving and fighting for the rights and memories of those who were forcibly removed from their District Six homes between 1966 and 1982. A uniquely intimate space, the Museum seeks to balance empathy alongside what it calls ‘critical non-racialism’, as it engages in the ambitious project of re-defining racialised communities in post-apartheid South Africa. This paper explores the tensions between criticality and empathy in relation to District Six Museum’s photographic collection. Focusing particularly on the problem of perspective-taking, this paper analyses the ways in which gradual changes in the Museum’s visitor demographic are compromising its non-racial project. Based on qualitative research that suggests contemporary visitors are less likely to engage in the kind of reconstructive, politicised imaginings that the Museum’s displays require, this paper suggests that empathy, rather than a tool for critical engagement with District Six’s history, is increasingly becoming the means through which alternative memories of District Six are silenced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1971, men from Musrara, an impoverished Jerusalem neighbourhood, formed the Black Panthers in protest against institutionalised discrimination against Jews from Muslim countries (Mizrahim). This article examines Born in Israel, a photography project by Ya'akov Shofar that appeared as a photography book in 1984 and as an exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 2017, to unpack the differences between these two instances. Shofar's 1984 project portrayed young Mizrahi Musrara men while being interviewed by a Jerusalem municipality social worker. This collaboration had political potential but only fragments of these interviews are reproduced in the book. Although the men participated in the Black Panthers' protests, the book underscores their ethnicity and avoids mentioning this movement. My study explores the visual and discursive elements that depoliticised the book due to the Black Panthers' perceived threat to the hegemonic social order and in relation to local developments in photography as fine art. I show that, unlike the book, the 2017 Israel museum exhibition promotes Born in Israel's relation to the Black Panthers, but also had limitations and contradictions. Finally, I argue that accounting for the unabridged interviews uncovers hegemonic Israel's patronising attitude towards the marginalised photographed men, and compensates for lacunas in this project's presentations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1968 two generations of Japanese photographers came together to research and curate the most comprehensive exhibition of the history of Japanese photography to date. Examining five hundred thousand photographs from public and private collections across the archipelago, they ultimately presented 1,640 images in a widely attended Tokyo exhibition. Moving beyond photographic nationalism, A Century of Japanese Photography was one of the only instances of public critique of the role of photographers who collaborated with the Japanese state during the Fifteen Year War (1931–45) and the exhibition's popularity launched the movement to build the largest photography museum in Japan. Through analysis of the exhibition and establishment of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, I illuminate how the process of writing the first major history of Japanese photography and building an institution to house its archive was a practice informed by the changing meanings of the role of photographers and museums within Japanese society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a contribution to the current debates in conflict and peace studies that examines the contributions of creative approaches to postwar peacebuilding. It mainly asks how post-conflict peacebuilding can be achieved and promoted through the use of creative approaches and what the potential challenges and limitations are in realizing postwar peacebuilding through creative approaches. We relied on primary qualitative visual data and interview data generated on the photographic exhibition of 'War of Memories' curated in 2017 by the Centre for Non-Violent Action, a civil society organization working on the theme of postwar peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and Serbia. Findings suggest the creative initiatives can play a positive role at individual level, but their translation into macro-level sustainable social peace is challenging, as long as the structural impediments to peace, prevailing unequal ethnic power relations and ethnicised social and political ordering of the society remain unaddressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several large-scale photographic exhibitions featuring substantial participation from the USSR were organised in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Despite the number of local and foreign actors they involved, and the critical response they triggered, they have raised limited scholarly interest so far. To shed light on the conditions under which these events were planned and realised, it is necessary to turn to exhibition catalogues, archives of the organisers and press reviews. Based on this data set, this article questions the part these displays played in propagating Soviet photographic discourses and aesthetic models in Czechoslovakia. New evidence from the archives of the Soviet All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (Vsesojuznoe obščestvo kul'turnoj svjazi s zagraničej [VOKS]) suggests that the Marxist critic Lubomír Linhart was the most committed mediator of Soviet photography and promoter of its documentary and utilitarian approach. By orchestrating the Soviet participation in the two exhibitions of social photography in 1933 and 1934, the International Exhibition of Photography in 1936 and in several unrealised projects, Linhart and other supporters of the USSR had succeeded, by the late 1930s, in asserting the photographer's social function in Czechoslovakia, in close relation to the Soviet discourse on functional and politically committed photography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developments in the digital field have introduced new opportunities not only for museums to engage with their visitors, but also for researchers to learn about visitors' experiences through their online behaviour. This article discusses how the mediation and perception of exhibited photographs in museums can be researched through an analysis of Instagram posts, using text-mining methods. A case study examining the World Press Photo 20 exhibition at the WestLicht museum in Vienna was used to explore three different framings of the World Press photos: first, how the photographs were initially used within newspaper articles as a news source; second, how the museum communicated the exhibited photos on social media; and third, how visitors reflected on the exhibition and the museum visit on Instagram. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study draws on several thousand images submitted by 56 fine art photographers for the largest exhibition of photographs about the American South yet undertaken, Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South, to investigate the cultural landscape of the region in the early twenty-first century. The prevalence of the flags of the Confederacy in cultural landscapes in the South highlights the endurance of longstanding white political identities there. More telling, however, is the understated power of the Stars and Stripes, often so taken for granted as to be almost invisible in photographs of the region. Fine art photographs open a window onto the cultural landscape of the New South that showcases charged political identities in the region while underlining the salience of Americanness there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits an obscure episode in the early history of colour photography, the collaboration between poet and inventor Charles Cros and painter Édouard Manet. I consider the genesis of a colour photographic copy of Manet's Jeanne (Le Printemps) painting of 1882, a work featured in the recent exhibition Manet and Modern Beauty. I argue that more can be said about the intermedial layers of this experiment from a social, historical and theoretical perspective. Based on letters previously unexamined in the scholarship, I provide additional historical context about the experiment and reveal that it was not a one-off whim of the inventor, but rather a project that involved Jules Carpentier, the engineer who, among other achievements, would go on to collaborate with the Lumière brothers in building their cinématographe camera. Finally, I consider more closely the sentiments expressed by Cros in a letter to Manet about the experiment, sentiments that, I argue, help open onto broader questions about the progress of chemistry at that historical moment. I conclude with a theoretical question about the incunabula of new technologies and their connections to an 'environmental unconscious'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Richard Daintree is well known as an Australian colonial photographer and geologist. I look at six international exhibitions he created from 1872 to 1879 that promoted the colony of Queensland by systematically integrating spectacular grids of painted photographs with displays of scientific samples. By analysing installation views, I argue that the popular success of these exhibitions came from the use of various new photographic technologies within the space of the exhibition, where the frontier directly interacted with the metropole. Further, I argue that Daintree's personal passion for the science of geology profoundly structured the colonialist narrative of his exhibitions, which combined the latest apparatuses of scientific knowledge and imperial communication, revealing him to be an innovative and internationally significant creator of synthesised exhibitionary experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Kenneth Burke visited the Museum of Modern Art exhibition "Road to Victory: A Procession of Photographs of the Nation at War" in the summer of 1942, he most likely did not expect to leave with such intense and intensely contradictory impressions. His visit there offers rhetoric scholars an opportunity to examine the exhibition – important for museum rhetoric because of its propagandistic political message and its innovative visual and material design. Considering the exhibition on its own terms, and the way designers managed problems of circulation and implemented new methods of "extended vision" helps us to present Burke's then-developing theories (placement, the pentad) as themselves decidedly visual – photographic, even – and concomitantly, for that moment at least, as decidedly war-directed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the documentation of political issues concerning the U.S.-Mexico border through photography. Topics explored include the intention of photojournalist Don Bartletti to document the immigration process through his photographs "Interstate Pedestrians," different perspectives on illegal immigration captured by Border Film Project photographs, and the 2010 photography exhibit "Working the Line," presented by photographer David Taylor in Chicago, Illinois.

Among the various new modes for making photographs that were explored by Australian photographers in the first decades of the twentieth century, three in particular – Pictorialist images, authentic records, and personal snapshots – had far-reaching implications for the institutions of Australian photography. Pictorialist photographs are now the foundation of many Australian art museum collections; photographic records produced at the time have become iconic in Australian public history, forming the backbone of many social history collections; and personal snapshots from the period are increasingly reproduced in social histories. Historians of Australian photography have discussed and analysed each of these modes1, but they have tended to treat them separately, or even in opposition to each other, and to concentrate on the distinct careers of individual photographers. This article looks at this crucial period, and these key photographic modes, from the point of view of the worldwide networks and systems for the distribution, exhibition, collection, and indexing of photographs. We show how these modes, far from being distinct, overlapped one another as each grappled with the same issues of nation, history, and memory, and as each articulated their nationalistic concerns through international networks and idioms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-war experimental and conceptual photography in former Yugoslavia has only rarely been the subject of detailed study and interpretation. In considering this period, it is necessary to take into account several factors, including the absence of permanent exhibition spaces for photography, the lack of magazines in which photographic themes were presented and discussed, the impossibility of studying the field of photography and, finally, the inadequate knowledge and application of contemporary criticism and theories of photography. Nevertheless, from the mid-1950s onwards it is possible to note a variety of innovations in the field, in terms of both form and subject-matter. This article considers rare instances of institutional support for progressive photography-related events and unique, intellectual-poetic works. After the break-up of Yugoslavia, there is a dominant tendency to nationalize art created in the former state, thus ignoring the specific Yugoslav cultural field as well as the European context. Based on a methodology which surpasses the national (but still acknowledges it) and searches for meaning within the broader socio-political space to which art is referring, the research aims to change the paradigm of the peripheral position and general ignorance of the circumstances under which this innovative practice emerges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1980s, the United States general public learned and formulated opinions about human rights conflicts in Nicaragua largely through photography. To counter misperceptions perpetuated by these images, in 1984, a group of photographers and critics organized The Nicaragua Media Project. The exhibition relied on two primary strategies: postmodernism’s critique of representation and so-called oppositional images. These seemingly antithetical approaches are taken up here to both enlarge the global scope and function of postmodernism’s critique of representation and consider some of its limitations, especially as a model for addressing photography’s potential to forge international solidarity in affective and visual terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid-1950s, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) sponsored two substantial photographic exhibitions in Britain, on South Africa and the British West Indies, promoting its mission activities and forming the centrepieces for fundraising campaigns. This article takes the latter exhibition – ‘Window on the West Indies’ – as an opportunity to examine the Society’s evolving approach to the medium, and its photographic archival legacy. Departing from an earlier practice of relying primarily on missionaries to supply photographs from the field, and unlike the somewhat serendipitous circumstances of the South Africa exhibition, ‘Window on the West Indies’ resulted from a professional commission. In addition to raising issues of ownership and control of photographic production and the photographic image, the commission signalled an increasingly ambitious use of the medium to promote the Society’s Christian missionary world view. Yet, I suggest, this very photographic ambition opens the door to alternative readings that escape the limits of the Society’s intentions. Beyond its role as mission propaganda, including some highly controlled uses of the photographs within its publicity material, the project can be located in the context of a post-war convergence of international humanist and humanitarian narratives expressed in visual form, and a belief in the capacity of photography as a medium for mutual understanding. Although a Christian future, secured in the act of donation, underpinned the narrative the Society sought to promote through its selective deployment of the photographs, taking a wider view of the collection it is evident that the photographs also speak to a more open, uncertain and imaginative relation to the world depicted. This latter not only draws attention to the specific presence of the photographer but also provides an opening to enable the collection to be refigured for future audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the properties of photography might mediate voice, defined as the capacity to speak and to be heard speaking about one’s life and the social conditions in which one’s life is embedded. It focuses on the affordances that the image provides for migrant cultural minorities to articulate such a voice within the context of collaborative research. I look at the case ofShutter Stories, a collaborative photography exhibition featuring the photo stories of Indian and Korean migrants from Manila, The Philippines. Using participant observation data, I show that it was photography’s ability to be all at once indexical, iconic, and symbolic that became important in voice as ‘speaking’. It allowed migrants to tell rich, multimodal narratives about their lives, albeit with some key limitations. I also show that it was photography’s inability to fix meanings with finality that mattered in voice as ‘being heard’. Although the locals who visited the exhibition engaged with the photo stories in an overwhelmingly positive manner, they often did not completely grasp the migrants’ complex narratives. All these data indicate that collaborative photography exhibition projects should not just be about how migrants speak and are heard. They should also be about how migrants can listen, so that they can adjust what they say to how they are being heard. This is a valuable reminder that in conceptualising photography and migrant cultural minority voices, we also need to take into account the broader process of multicultural dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reviews several exhibitions and books on the work of photographer Lee Miller including "Lee Miller: A Woman's War" at the Imperial War Museum in London, England October 15, 2015-April 24, 2016, "Lee Miller" at the Walter Moser Albertina Museum in Vienna, Austria, and "Lee Miller" edited by Water Moser and Klaus Albrecht Schroder.

This article examines a little-known but important moment in the history of the London art market and exhibition scene, namely, the organization of the General Exhibition of Pictures by the Living Artists of the Schools of All Countries, which was set up in London by Ossian Verdeau and Henry Mogford in 1851, concurrently with the Great Exhibition. It argues that the General Exhibition was not only the first universal art exhibition, but also constituted a major step towards the development of the London art district as a vast universal exhibition in its own right, featuring art from all countries and based on a logic of ‘national branding’ and cosmopolitanism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article looks closely at the critical and curatorial discourse concerning colour in the work of two contemporary photographers, David Goldblatt (Intersections, ‘In the time of AIDS’, South Africa, 1999–2005) and Richard Mosse (Infra, Democratic Republic of Congo, 2010–2011). Specifically, the article explores ideas regarding colour's moral and political effects and how they may – or may not – be changing in the contemporary moment, when documentary images are subject to heightened critical scrutiny. Readings of Goldblatt's and Mosse's images are framed by ideas drawn from political philosophy as well as from other critical and theoretical treatments of documentary photography, in an effort to pinpoint whether, and how, digital photography is changing the stakes of longstanding arguments over the relationship between aesthetics and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Six camera obscura installations by New York-based artist Zoe Leonard, made between 2011 and 2014, offered spaces of imagination that were both primal and timely. These darkened rooms, with their wondrous projected images, did not ‘redefine photography’ – an untenable claim that is all too readily made in the discourse of contemporary art. Rather than look at photography and its many technologies categorically, it would be better to assess the perceptions that individual photographic works afford on the technological situation of their time. Leonard’s installations threw into relief the false interactivity and utter commodification of the self that dominate in today’s e-culture – problems addressed in recent writing by Jonathan Crary as well. They heightened awareness of our fleeting human vision, leading to an intensity of thought and feeling without a portable or recorded image. With their invitation to contemplate reversibility at several levels – including, importantly, the switching between oneness and aloneness that stands at the heart of a living community – these works permitted a critical and poetic respite from conventions of our all-too-mobile moment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]