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Between 1852 and 1868, the architect and amateur naturalist Pierre Trémaux (1818–1895) produced three groups of plates and accompanying texts on the geography, architecture, and people of African and Anatolian regions. These luxe publications, produced with the support of the French government, exploit an array of graphic techniques; they combine salted paper prints, engravings, tinted and colour lithographs, photolithographs, and texts in ways never previously attempted. Their examination provides insights into the ways these media interacted, and how comfortably photography in fact sat amongst its predecessors within the long-established context of the travel narrative. This paper will probe the implications of photography for Trémaux’s project through an investigation of his first book,Voyages au Soudan oriental et dans l’Afrique septentrionale. To what extent did the new, mechanical medium clarify or confound his effort to “explain” parts of Africa still hardly known to Europeans? What does this reveal about the role of photographic authenticity in familiarizing imperial audiences with distant places, during a transitional moment in visual culture? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Photographic negative images on paper are certainly the earliest types of photographs ever produced, giving access to multiple photographic prints using a unique matrix. As early as 1841 in France, many variants of the paper negatives processes have been developed by skilled chemists and photographers covering a wide spectrum of practical and aesthetic concerns. Nowadays, due to their inherent historical and esthetical values, those negatives are getting an increasing interest from the art and museum community. However, their materiality has been poorly studied despite a large variety of processes involving many different chemicals and organic coatings; limiting our possibilities of identification, attribution or even preservation. The aim of this work was to develop a methodology to better assess the way those images were produced based on physical and chemical characteristics. A non-invasive approach combining optical, vibrational and X-ray spectroscopies was implemented on a collection of 138 historical images between 1841 and 1856 from French collections. A survey was carried out on these negatives to provide a series of relevant physical data (dimensions, thickness, weight, etc). Non-invasive reflectance FTIR showed great potentiality in revealing the presence of organic sizing (gelatin) or impregnation (wax). Multivariate analysis was applied on XRF data to help clustering negatives that have similar elemental composition and highlight relationships between makers. Finally, the morphological, physical and chemical results were all combined to answer historical questioning on the paper negative process. • A multi-analytical study of 138 historical paper negatives was undertaken. • A survey was carried out on these negatives to provide a series of relevant physical data. • The results provided new insights into the photographers' processes and materials. • Non-invasive reflexion FTIR revealed the presence of organic substances such as gelatin and wax. • Multivariate analysis of XRF data helped to highlight relationships between makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work of Eadweard Muybridge as a pioneer of chronophotography has undergone a major reevaluation and historicization in recent years that has nonetheless left intact certain myths about his artistic interests and intentions: his purported disinterest in image synthesis and the tendency of scholars to consider his career in distinct, unrelated phases. This paper carefully examines Muybridge's landscape photography (especially of Yosemite in 1867 and 1872) to argue that this work is directly related to his chronophotographic experiments on the levels of intention and technical execution. I employ a number of historical artifacts and compare Muybridge's output to that of his contemporaries like Carleton Watkins and Etienne-Jules Marey to show that the rendering of landscape was a major catalyst of Muybridge's subsequent (and in some cases directly contemporaneous) experiments in motion imaging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Henry Peach Robinson’s method of making composite photographs in the context of widespread belief that the photographer’s ‘mechanism’ was perceptible in the appearance of his prints. By examining Robinson’s preparatory and darkroom procedures, as well as the photographer’s extensive writing about his photographic practice, I suggest that composite photographs invited viewers to pay attention to process, and to take it into account in their evaluation of an image. This attitude challenged key tenets of academic art theory – the paradigm for nascent concepts of art in photography – by refusing to subordinate manual labour to that of the mind. While many nineteenth-century critics rejected Robinson’s approach, the debates engendered by composite techniques reveal a persistent fascination with making that advanced photographic practice as a marker of artistic value. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reexamines Germaine Krull's seminal 1928 photo book Métal, tracing the implications of the speculative analogy drawn by the project between metal and photography. Following this analogy through nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century architectural discourse, it newly situates the photographer's investigation against Sigfried Giedion's contemporaneous theorizations of iron construction and modern photography. Rather than critiquing or celebrating industry, Krull focuses on metal as it manifests the peculiar and fraught experience of living amid large-scale technical systems. In a singular way, Métal mobilizes its driving analogy to invoke—and, moreover, to theorize photographically—the infrastructures organizing Western European modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the representation of British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien envisions and American statesman Frederick Douglass in ten-screen installation Lessons of the Hour: Frederick Douglass (2019). It mentions that Julien's Lessons of the Hour inspired by a combination of Douglass's own genre-breaking autobiographical writing, personal letters; also focuses on the nascent technology of photography and the renewed struggle for liberation in the mid–nineteenth century.

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]

In the mid-1870s, Robert Crawshay started a now-forgotten contest designed to promote the development of direct life-size photography in Britain and the advent of a more objective photographic portrait. The contest saw much enthusiasm and many entries, but, as this article argues, ultimately ended up setting back the very causes it sought to advance. The competition shone a spotlight on problems with focus, tone, and especially scale when it came to the 'life-size' direct portrait, and it managed to promote the role of subjectivity and the superiority of enlargement instead of its preferred ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Mathew Brady's attempts to use copyright to protect his photographs. For a time, Brady received so much credit in the press that his name became synonymous with all photographs of the Civil War. This prominence in the photography trade and in the public imagination makes Brady's use of copyright an ideal case for considering the relationship between photography and authorship. The research of this study cites relevant archival sources, including copyright registration practices, copyright notices on printed photographs, and the case of Brady & Gibson v. Bellew (1865), to demonstrate deliberate attempts by Brady to protect his work from infringement, secure economic compensation, and link his name legally with the images he believed would have enduring value. While copyright ultimately failed to protect Brady's long-term financial interests, part of his attribution strategy established him as a photographic "author" and ensured that his name would remain linked with his photographs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studio portrait photographs were wildly popular in coastal eastern Africa already by the 1860s or 1870s. While this early engagement with photography very much attests to Africa's global interconnectivity, it does not explain why it was so immediately desirable to locals, particularly since there existed no previous tradition of picture making. It emerges that, especially before the British colonial period, photographs were primarily associated with mercantile wealth, collected and displayed as exotica in one's home. Here, photographs often communicated in ways that had to do with their ability to act as exotic things, laden with textures and surface minutiae. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Photographs of mid-Victorian cities evoke an unsettling perspective of modernity by calling attention to the spasmodic process of societal and environmental change in this period. Focusing on four diverse commissions undertaken by the professional photographer Thomas Annan in Glasgow in the latter half of the nineteenth century, this article explores intriguing exchanges between photography and other media in an enlarging Victorian print market. This material suggests that we have yet to fully appreciate the ways in which photography participated in the often-fraught public debate on urban space and civic identity in localised environments. The article also explores how recent interventions in digital humanities, particularly in the field of mapping technologies, have opened up new possibilities of animating and reexamining the remote, conventional and impersonal viewpoints that characterise photographic representations of metropolitan areas in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An optogram is an image fixed on the retina by a biological, photochemical process. In the late nineteenth century, it was widely believed that optograms could be excised from dead bodies to procure their final visions. Optograms were most frequently compared to photographs, so that the retina of the eye was likened to the sensitive plate in a camera. Just as photography became capable of superseding human vision in the 1870s, optograms discursively came to light as latent photographs, making photography the original for preconscious sight. These historical inversions of primacy challenge our conceptions of the relation between nature and culture in photography, with the cultural invention preceding the natural discovery of optography. This article examines how an incidental, speculative, and ultimately forgotten discovery in the physical sciences was deployed rhetorically to reinforce personal or disciplinary beliefs about what photography was and what it could do, in realms ranging from physiological laboratories to science fiction, from police departments to courtrooms. Analysis of optographic discourse indicates that the true value of photography in the late nineteenth century was not primarily in the photograph’s relation to its indexical referent, but in the possibility that it might grant access to seeing as another living being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intertwined development of popular photography and cycling in Britain was felt so close that, in the 1880s, contemporary commentators could write of ‘cyclo-photographers’. The camera apparatus available at this time, bulky and fragile, was largely impractical to carry on a ride, and thus cyclo-photographers joined outdoor photographers in asking manufacturers for simpler and easier to operate cameras. However, a close reading of primary sources reveals that such demands were also the result of a new engagement with the possibility of seeing enabled by cycling itself. What was the cyclo-photographers’ experience of visual modernity? This article explores whether, and in what ways, the parallel emergence of a desire for compact cameras was linked to the new, and interconnected, ways of moving and seeing that the engagement with these two modern cultural technologies had made possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the works of optician Noël Paymal Lerebours as a photographer in France in 19th century, and discusses his travel to other countries, his interest in painting and aesthetic aspects of photography.

One of the earliest and most persistent standards of the motion-picture industry was the rectangle of projected images with a four-to-three ratio. Related media in the late nineteenth century, such as still photography and the magic lantern, advocated for rectangular borders (rather than alternatives such as circular masking), a trend that motion pictures codified with a fixed technical standard. Industry publications provided a powerful rhetorical justification for this standard by presenting the rectangle as an aesthetic preference, a display of skill, and a means of erasing a viewer's consciousness of borders. This rhetoric-and the (slightly wider) rectangle-still influence twenty-first-century media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors reflect upon preserving photographic heritage. Particular focus is given to how photographic materials are susceptible to physical and chemical changes. Additional topics discussed include twentieth-century negatives, silver gelatin prints and works by famous photographers including Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham.

The author’s discovery of a set of inscribed photographs of the ‘Bandits of La Jalancha’, made in La Paz, Bolivia in 1871 and now in the collections of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, has made possible the identification of the photographed gang’s leader ‘Salvador Chico’ with the Afro-Aymara anti-hero known in contemporary folklore as El Zambo Salvito. On their photographic journeys out of Bolivia, Salvador and his men were transformed into anonymous ‘Indian bandits’ and became generic illustrations of ethnic Aymara types in the service of racialised evolutionary science. Back in La Paz, however, the photographs were forgotten but the legend of the infamous son of an African slave from Chicaloma, a coca-producing hacienda in the region of Yungas, grew in the public imagination. Whereas nineteenth-century racial discourse only recognised his indigeneity, twentieth- and twenty-first-century folklore and illustrations have instead emphasised his blackness. In tracing the split legacies of Salvador of Chicaloma, through exported photographs and the formation of local legends, this work reveals how identity was constructed, evacuated, and made anew. This fluidity of representation was made possible, in part, by the relative archival invisibility of afrodescendientes in Andean South America, whose lives and histories remain largely uninscribed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates late nineteenth-century Ottoman illustrated journals as a key site for the articulation of new, popular, and visualised forms of historical knowledge and sensibility in the imperial domain. Focusing on the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II, a period from 1876 to 1909 marked by the beginnings of print industry and rising levels of literacy in the Ottoman world, the article situates photography within a mixed, hybrid, and highly image-based media environment that radically transformed Ottoman modes of looking and remembering. Allowing new forms of reading, viewing, and popular participation, the journals helped refashion and pluralise collective images of the empire’s material past. The article argues that the new visions of history and antiquity that emerged in the Ottoman journals were not merely an ideological package imposed by the state and passively consumed by the readers. The journals played an essential role in creating a highly visualised interface where popular and official forms of historical imagination mingled and interpenetrated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

William J. Stillman’s 1870 photographic albumThe Acropolis of Athensdetails, with extraordinary sensitivity, the classical monuments of the Athenian Acropolis. But the album itself is part of a larger transnational history of the production, representation, and circulation of Greek antiquity. It is also a central artefact of Stillman’s own life and affiliations. Tracing these two interlocking histories is to place the album’s imagery, narrative, and informational material within the larger ambit of individual, national, and Euro-American politics, historical ideology and aesthetics. Stillman’s album is centrally influenced by the German-led archaeological activity on the Acropolis, reflecting both its widely-held assumptions on the worth of Greek antiquities and the proper way to view them, as well as an ambivalence verging on antipathy toward indigenous Greek archaeological (and photographic) activity. This tendency complicates (but does not completely erase) Stillman’s powerful sympathy and outspoken activities on behalf of Greek and Cretan independence and self-determination. The moment that produced Stillman’s album is not the only one in which he photographed the Athenian Acropolis. Comparing his photography of 1870 with his 1882 rephotography of the site is to find changes and slippages that highlight the vicissitudes of Stillman’s own complex history. It also has significant implications for the imagery he produced earlier, connecting Stillman’s work to the larger constellation of nineteenth-century imagery of the Athenian Acropolis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent theoretical work on the Mediterranean has emphasised the sea as an agent of ‘connectivity’ over a highly fragmented space, bringing peoples, goods, languages, and ideas into contact. Early photography in the Mediterranean manifests this connectivity and mixedness across the whole field of its practice: among photographers, sitters, printers, dealers, consumers, patrons, and even the photographs themselves. Focusing on the eastern Mediterranean, this article treats early photography in its ‘Mediterranean’ context: located within a space of multiple languages, ethnicities, and religions, of personal and commercial networks between cities and across borders, and of spatial and social circulation and exchange. Such an approach complicates the two prevailing scholarly narratives of Mediterranean photography: one based on place, nationality, or ethnicity; the other on Orientalism. Seen in this light, the early history of photography in the Mediterranean may have implications for understanding the ways in which modernisation took hold and operated in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Visual representations of biological states have traditionally faced two problems: they lacked motion and depth. Attempts were made to supply these wants over many centuries, but the major advances were made in the early-nineteenth century. Motion was synthesized by sequences of slightly different images presented in rapid succession and depth was added by presenting slightly different images to each eye. Apparent motion and depth were combined some years later, but they tended to be applied separately. The major figures in this early period were Wheatstone, Plateau, Horner, Duboscq, Claudet, and Purkinje. Others later in the century, like Marey and Muybridge, were stimulated to extend the uses to which apparent motion and photography could be applied to examining body movements. These developments occurred before the birth of cinematography, and significant insights were derived from attempts to combine motion and depth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1855, Nadar and his brother Adrien Tournachon produced a series of large format photographs of the mime Charles Deburau in the costume of Pierrot. Here I argue that these photographs severed the figure of Pierrot from his previous environmental ground, as this ground had been produced and mythologized by the authors Jules Janin and Champfleury. Prior to 1855, Janin and Champfleury had successively insisted upon the relationship between Pierrot and the "popular" milieu of a working class theater on the Boulevard du Temple. Yet the photographs, for technical, aesthetic, and cultural reasons, exclude this milieu. Instead, the photographs perform and reform Pierrot's identity, detaching the identity of the character from the popular and attaching it to the distinctive features of Charles Deburau. Through the photographs, Pierrot loses the particularity of a historically specific cultural ground - however mythologized that ground had become - and is now free to move between any ground whatsoever. This transformation of the character thematizes one of the effects of photography as an emergent technology, which was to exacerbate the fissures between figures and grounds that haunted nineteenth-century art. Pierrot proved only too ready to lose a determining historical ground and to float instead into the immateriality of spectacle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article maps out the genealogy of the Korean term sajin, which began to be used as a translation for photography in late-nineteenth-century Korea. A genealogical study of the term sajin and its extension to the naming of photography provides a foundation to comprehend the processes in which the reception of photography as a new cultural product was framed by Korean indigenous practices of representation and their related cultural discourses. One of the main objectives of this essay is to highlight the fact that the concepts of photography and photographic technology were not simply imported into Korea from the West, but were actively recoded in ways that responded to established cultural and political discourses of Korea, and intercultural dialogues between East Asian countries. Emphasising the discursive specificity of photography in Korea, I move beyond the familiar discourse of centre and periphery that has shaped the narrative of western globalisation. This article will be of interest to contemporary historians and theorists of photography who are seeking alternatives to Euro-American notions of photography and its history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904 was an occasion for celebrating the USA’s purchase of the State of Louisiana and the American government’s recent annexation of the Philippine Islands. So that Americans could familiarise themselves with the people from their latest acquisition, hundreds of live Filipinos were placed on display at the fair. Also featured were Asian people from a variety of Pacific Rim nations. A small group of women photographers were charged with the responsibility of photographing these visitors. This essay focuses on the work of two of these women – Emme and Mayme Gerhard from St. Louis. The essay examines some of the more stereotypical images of Japanese, Chinese, Alaskan and Filipino subjects they produced at the fair alongside images they created that awarded the same ethnic groups humanity and identity, asking how should we understand this seeming tension in their work? Was it the result of an implicitly imperialist mode of photography practised by white middle-class women as Laura Wexler has claimed, or were there other important factors at play? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman empire's large-scale development was illustrated by the new medium of photography. Different territories of the empire were photographed and Ignác Alpár, a significant architect of Hungarian Historicism, purchased some of these photographs. Alpár's interest in oriental art derived from the ideology of Turanism believing that a Hungarian national style could be developed with the use of oriental motifs. One of the photographs ('Tombs of Mamluks, Cairo') of the collection provides some evidence of this idea. The essay develops the background and evidence for the Hungarian-oriental relationship at the turn of the nineteenth-twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay aims to examine the beginnings of photography in the Moravian capital of Brno, which, albeit for a short period between 1839 and 1842, was the gateway for the dissemination of photography to Moravia, Silesia and Bohemia. With the support of learned societies and other institutions in the region, local photographers were able to keep up with recent advances in daguerreotype processes. The most proficient among these enthusiasts was the Premonstratensian and Professor of Physics at the local Philosophy School, Friedrich Franz. Six daguerreotypes preserved in collections in Brno, as well as our knowledge of the social and institutional context of their origin, provide the foundation for this study of the beginnings of photography in Brno, and in Central Europe in general. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article looks at how aesthetic concerns inflected the dynamic of imperial relations during the 1857 Indian Uprising and its aftermath. The invention of photography inaugurated a period in which aesthetic imperatives increasingly came to structure the engagement of colonial bodies with the traumas of warfare in British India. The formal conventions of image-making practices were not consigned to a discreet virtual sphere; they were channelled into the contested terrains of the subcontinent through the poses that figures were striking for the camera. I trace how one pictorial convention – picturesquestaffage– had the capacity to engender politically and psychologically disruptive tableaus on the contested terrains of empire, as colonial photographers arranged for Indian figures to pose on landscapes that were marked by disturbing wartime violence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the history of the shroud that Jesus Christ was wrapped in for burial, with a particular focus on French biologist Paul Vignon's critique of 1890s photography of the shroud. Vignon's perspective that the photograph did not show an image of Christ's dead body outlined in the shroud, including through analyzing the negative of the photograph, is discussed. An overview of the late 1890s and early 1900s scientific analysis of the image in Christ's burial shroud is provided.

The author responds to three essays published within this issue: "Surround, Background, and the Overlooked," by Kate Flint; "Cartomania: Sensation, Celebrity, and the Democratized Portrait," by Rachel Teukolsky; and "Champagne in the Shrubbery: Sex, Science, and Space in James Tissot's London Conservatory," by Samantha Burton. Topics include late-nineteenth century visual culture, the use of foreground and backgrounds in art and photography, and technological innovations and popular culture.