Search

The article reviews the exhibition "Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage" at The Photographers' Gallery in London, showcasing the late 20th-century American photographer's blend of art and fashion photography. Turbeville's work, known for its somber and timeless mood, diverged from the high-gloss glamor of her contemporaries, featuring mainly black and white imagery that felt situated in a past time. The exhibition is organized into five sections, highlighting Turbeville's avant-garde approach to fashion photography and her significant contribution to the art form. [Extracted from the article]

The article "Invasion Images and Seeing Gaza" by Simon Faulkner discusses the visual representation of migrants in the UK tabloid press, focusing on the use of images to create a sense of threat and nativist understanding of the nation. The article also highlights the use of similar visual rhetoric in political campaigns, such as the UKIP billboard and Reform UK party posters, which depict migrants as invading the national space. Additionally, the article explores contemporary visual culture in the UK, referencing demonstrations in support of Gaza and the importance of looking beyond ethno-nationalism towards a more inclusive perspective. [Extracted from the article]

This article takes a reflective approach to an overlooked area of ethical discussion in archival and cultural heritage studies: the ethical practice of how to relate to children's and young people's own donations of archival material when used in research. This is an ethics that must often balance between a children's rights rhetoric and formal research ethics. The empirical material consists of one drawing donated to the Swedish Archive of Children's Art and two photographs donated to a museum collection in the aftermath of the 2017 terrorist attack in Stockholm. These pictures have all, in one way or another, required ethical pauses and halts for the authors due to doubts, dilemmas, and emotional turmoil. Methodologically, the idea is to hold space for the ethical dilemmas that arise, in order to analyze how ethics is enacted in practice. Aspects such as access, copyright, anonymization, naming, and the relationship between archival metadata and research data are analyzed from and with a youth perspective. The analyzes show the intricate interplay of different norms, values, and ethics that are enacted when pictures are donated by young people to heritage institutions and then used in research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the integration of 3D modeling techniques in photography, aiming to enhance traditional photography and expand its artistic scope. By combining 3D models with real photographs, this approach preserves the authenticity of images while adding creative three-dimensional elements. The findings show that this integration broadens the subject matter and creative possibilities within photography, providing visual communication artists with a richer language of expression. This method aligns with contemporary advancements, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and pushing the boundaries of visual storytelling. Practical applications and case studies demonstrate the significant potential of 3D modeling to elevate photographic art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "Epilogue: Saying Goodbye: Are We Really?" from Psychoanalytic Inquiry discusses a therapy session with a patient named Pia, focusing on her behaviors and the therapist's observations. The text also delves into the life and final days of Joe Lichtenberg, a prominent figure in psychoanalysis, who determined how he would die and maintained a sense of power despite physical decline. The article emphasizes the importance of listening to patients and reflects on enduring collaborations with Joe, highlighting his spirit of inquiry and impact on those who knew him. [Extracted from the article]

This essay recharacterizes Edward Weston, Paul Strand, and others' use of 'straight photography' as a deliberate modernist strategy that invites the viewer to distinguish between what the photographer foresaw in their photographs and what they intended. As such, 'previsualization' is shown to be a method that engages genre conventions inherited from fine art painting and not a necessary quality of art photographs. The first portion of this essay illustrates how versions of previsualization and foresight informed the aesthetic theories of John Ruskin and Peter Henry Emerson. Then, it shows how 'straight' photographers pushed against this tradition, inviting viewers to distinguish between photographic foresight and artistic intention. I conclude by suggesting ways the separation of foresight and intention could ramify into our understanding of other arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the transformation of photography in China during the 1980s, specifically the shift from state-controlled visual culture to a more diverse and independent artistic expression. It discusses the concept of the "third realm," an intermediate space between the state and society, and how it influenced photography during this period. The article explores the role of camera clubs in promoting aestheticism and propaganda photography, as well as the emergence of independent photography groups that challenged these dominant modes. It highlights the tensions and negotiations between different approaches to photography in China during the 1980s, and how collaboration between the state and society shaped its development. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines two photographic series by Kang Yong Suk that explore the landscapes and lives of people living in state villages near the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). These villages were established for ideological propaganda and to prevent military conflicts within the DMZ. Kang's photographs focus on Yugok-ri village and show how it has changed over time. The article also discusses the importance of border art in understanding border transformation and representing individuals in border regions. Kang's photographs challenge traditional visual styles and aim to bring attention to marginalized individuals and challenge dominant narratives. [Extracted from the article]

This article, titled "The Art of Observation," features the work of Chad Gordon, a self-taught still life photographer from Hellshire, Jamaica. Gordon's photography is heavily influenced by American photographer Edward Weston and focuses on capturing the beauty and elegance in seemingly trivial and mundane subjects. His process involves going for walks at different times of the day to find interesting things to photograph from various angles and perspectives. Gordon's work encourages viewers to be mindful of the little things and highlights the theme of gratitude. [Extracted from the article]

This article provides a review of the Do Ho Suh exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. The author, Anuradha Chatterjee, explores the artist's exploration of migration, home, and belonging through textile-based works. The exhibition showcases a range of mediums, including installations, sculptures, drawings, printmaking, and video works, spanning three decades of Suh's career. Chatterjee also reflects on the impact of social media, particularly Instagram, on the reception and experience of art, and contemplates the themes of placelessness and impermanence in Suh's work. The author's involvement in a forthcoming publication on women in architecture suggests a commitment to promoting inclusivity and highlighting the achievements of women in the field. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the human fascination with replicating and improving upon creation and nature throughout history. It explores the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its potential to supersede human capabilities. The article explains how AI systems work by combining large sets of data using algorithms to learn from patterns and features. It also raises questions about the impact of AI on creativity, intellectual property, and the potential risks and rewards of this technology. The article includes AI-generated artworks created by four artists. [Extracted from the article]

The aim of this study is to understand the 'photographic selves' – the collective competences and skills required for making, interpreting, and communicating through photographs — that are articulated in the educational framework for future photographers in Russia and Sweden. These are two countries with very different histories in relation to photographic practices. Theories on photography from recent decades have emphasized that digital photography is a different medium from analogue photography. This study seeks to understand whether and how this is addressed in two different cultural contexts, based on interviews with teachers and department heads, combined with written descriptions of courses and educational programs. The material makes visible different ideal photographic practices. One, the most common in both countries, is firmly embedded in the international documentary tradition. Other ways, represented by teachers at a Russian art school for photography, stress a more critical perspective toward established conventions. However, absent at the studied schools are more freer understandings of photography in the wake of digitization. Photography is still framed by the historically anchored indexical relation to the surrounding world and as a fixed object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although many social scientists employ visual media in their research and teaching, the connection between the 'visual' and the 'social science' is often tenuous. Photographs often are reserved for illustrating textual concepts, or making standard findings more interesting to readers than the normal textual exposition in tables, pie charts, graphs, or other methods of data visualization. In my research about urban lives and cultures, I have extensively photographed what John Brinckerhoff Jackson called 'vernacular landscapes.' Although photojournalists, as well as documentary and street photographers, have also engaged in similar image capturing practices, as opposed to their more aesthetic and artistic accomplishments, I have tried to firmly connect my images to normal social science theories and methods. This visually enhanced essay will describe, discuss, and give examples from my own photographic studies of urban vernacular landscapes over several decades and across the globe. It is hoped that in this autobiographical process, the difference between artistic and scientific photography as to theories of class, globalization, race, and other social issues will be made clearer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text is a summary of a special issue that explores the themes of collecting, archives, and the commodification of cultural artifacts. The articles within the issue cover a range of topics, including the role of zinc in colonialism, the commodification of the work of illustrator Mario Miranda, and the re-narration of nomadic traders' journeys in Australia. The conclusion reflects on the concept of collectables and the challenges posed by digital morbidity. The special issue was based on a workshop titled "Re-creating Certitude: The Aesthetics of History in Art and Photography Collections in a Transoceanic Perspective." [Extracted from the article]

Creswell and Ott provide many examples of the numerous links between physical mobility and social, cultural and aesthetic one. This monograph is part of the I Defining Moments in Photography i series by the University of California Press and analyses Eadweard Muybridge's photographs to discuss studies of motion. Creswell and Ott also analyse the use of horses in art history, in depictions of hunting and rural landscapes, and the images of horse racing. [Extracted from the article]

This article analyses the development of Conceptual Art in Bratislava during the communist period, with specific emphasis on the practices produced throughout the so-called 'Normalisation' (1968–1989). The text starts by introducing the functioning mechanisms of the Czechoslovakian artistic scene of the time. It then moves on to analyse the work of Július Koller, Rudolf Sikora and Ĺubomír Ďurček. It is argued that, despite the difficult conditions for art production present in Bratislava during Normalisation years, Conceptual Art served its precursors as an escape valve for their political convictions, which they manifested through the use of puns, parody, irony, metaphors and the design of elaborate cosmological fictions through utopian and dystopian projections of their own political and cultural reality. In doing so, the unique properties of photography, such as its reduced size, low cost and indexical qualities, turned the medium into the most suitable form to materialise their conceptual practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aida Chehrehgosha's award-winning photography series To Mom, Dad and My Two Brothers (2008) in which the artist controversially stages the death of her abusive mother and father is examined in this essay as exemplifying a form of screen memories — a conscious psychodynamic strategy, introduced by Sigmund Freud, employed here to both expose and heal traumatic experiences. Challenging the dominant views in trauma theory and psychoanalysis regarding the role of visuality vis-à-vis narrativization, I claim that in Chehrehgosha's series the visual works both to indicate the trauma as well as to point to its overdetermined, complex nature. Moreover, the photographs are revealed to be palimpsestic and hybrid in their implicit photographic gaze, blurring the line between scientific and aesthetic uses of photography, legal and artistic discourses, fundamentally questioning the experience of being a victim and a criminal. As such, the artwork is understood as a unique and complex photographic way to represent and address painful experiences and mixed affects — a palimpsestic approach to screening trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how contemporary artistic practice seeks to re-evaluate, re-interpret and re-imagine (historical) Arctic exploration narratives that have generally been considered gendered and dominated by men. It particularly examines the work of contemporary Norwegian artist Tonje Bøe Birkeland, whose entire practice emerges from embodying and staging imagined turn of the century woman explorers. One of Birkeland's explorers travels to the Arctic and the circumpolar North and explicitly references persisting narratives deriving from the so-called heroic era of polar exploration. In order to change these narratives, I argue, Birkeland employs two feminist strategies: firstly, by storytelling and speculative fabulation (Haraway); secondly, by simultaneously complying with and disrupting re-occurring Arctic motifs and representations. Photography, travel writing and found objects are hereby her primary artistic mediums and "accomplices" in fulfilling these strategies, carefully orchestrated in a photobook in order to establish her story and view on the Arctic world. As a result, Birkeland not only reveals which stories about the Arctic are missing and could have been told. She also asks us to imagine how our relationship to the Arctic could have been shaped differently and how, through this process, it is possible to influence a future narrative of a (still) gendered Arctic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developed through a series of conceptual analyses (Edmund Husserl, Vilém Flusser, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin) and case studies (Fernando Lopes's Belarmino and Jeff Wall's Mimic), this article delves into the relationship between gesture, attunement and atmosphere and how it unfolds in photographic works dealing with urban space. The first section focuses on the role played by photography in the film Belarmino, which raises questions about both the representation of urban phenomena and issues related to expression and gesture in boxing. The second section discusses Husserl's thinking on image consciousness and his surprising reference to a "photograph" of a boxer, which reveals the relevance of his phenomenological approach when it comes to defining the aesthetic properties of gesture-images. The third section examines the principles of Flusser's philosophy of gestures, focusing on the semantic field of attunement and its connection with various elements related to photography, gesture, moods and affects. The question of gesture in photography—both the gestures of the photographed and those of the photographer—can be articulated with the notions of attunement and atmosphere, which go beyond semiological, psychological and communicational approaches and are important for our understanding of aesthetic and artistic experiences. Finally, if photography is a privileged way of studying atmospheres and gestures (as suggested by the Benjaminian notion of optical unconscious) and their connection with the inner life of the subject, in relation to urban space this study often acquires an intersubjective, social and political dimension, as in Jeff Wall's Mimic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A photograph of a performance is, literally, an act of interruption. Although technically it doesn't interrupt the continuity of the 'real' performance, nor the energy flow that passes between the actor and the audience, photography inevitably produces a suspension, establishing a new temporality that overlaps and interacts with the unfolding of time of performance. Based on the photographic sequence of La Méditation (1957), the highest result of the artistic collaboration between the mime Etienne Decroux and the photographer Etienne Bertrand Weill, the essay intends to emphasize the profound ontological affinities between photography and mime, and to suggest the essential performative nature of the photographic interruption, rather than the widespread idea of 'petrification' of the moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "Internet Directory for the Earth Sciences" is a comprehensive resource that provides information on various topics related to rocks, minerals, and earth sciences. It includes sections on art and photography, associations, geology departments, government agencies, mineral vendors, museums, publications, and shows. It is a valuable tool for individuals interested in exploring the world of rocks, minerals, and earth sciences. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores innovations in photographic production and experimentation in Australia, especially Sydney, from 1935 to 1940. While many photographers and photographic societies were still promoting the aesthetics of Pictorialism, others were responding to new demands and opportunities provided by publishing, advertising, international expositions, local exhibitions and architecture. After introducing some of the forces for change, where there was often an easy exchange between photography and design, the article examines four case studies from 1937 to 1940. Three of these were generated by international expositions; all involved different types of photomurals and collaborations across the arts. These collaborations were instrumental in helping to shape Australian modernism and a postwar recovery within the arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following a particular interest in memories and stories of exile and their representation in artistic photography, I draw critical attention to the notion of diasporic aesthetics. I ask why visual and performative strategies of storytelling matter as fundamental methods not only of self-representation, but also of transcultural expressions of "belonging" across various cultural and geographical borders. Reflecting on Parastou Forouhar, an Iranian artist living in exile in Germany, and her photographic series Das Grass ist Grün, der Himmel ist Blau, und Sie ist Schwarz [The Grass is Green, the Sky is Blue, and She is Black] (2017), I argue that artistic photography constitutes a social practice that carries the potential to create relations of solidarity with other migratory groups. These groups may share similar diasporic aesthetics, or be familiar with experiences of migration and exile or discrimination and exclusion. Moreover, within the scope of photography and migration and its particular expression and performances of belonging, the practice produces a creative space where cultural differences and boundaries may generate shared forms of identification and contestation that transcend national and ethnic identities. After arguing for photography as a medium that expresses the multiple notions and struggles of the ongoing processes through which "belonging becomes", conclude that photography can generate a sensorium, a space that provides possibilities of critical transcultural engagement and encounters in post-migration societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paul de Man makes a distinction between interpretation and reading as that which finds meaning in a text versus an analysis of the relationship between a text's rhetorical and grammatical dimensions, respectively. Interpretation, as he defines it, assumes that a text's meaning is largely transparent and that there is no disharmony between how it means and what it means. Reading, on the other hand, makes no such assumptions: it shows how a text's meaning cannot be reduced to grammar and seeks out moments of indeterminacy between its literal and figurative meanings. I propose a "reading" of Francesca Woodman's photographs that demonstrates how the critical, largely feminist, literature on the artist engages in interpretation and thus fails to appreciate the artist's exploration of photography's conditions of representation. In the process, I argue that her photographs function like hypograms, a concept of de Man by way of Saussure, or infra-texts. In short, Woodman's photographs are readings of photography and womanhood and her art defies conventional understandings of artistic identity and agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Landscape photography is a visual construction of nature. Viewing recurrent representations of landscape photographs can contribute to the creation of national and political visual heritages, appropriation, and cultural claims over lands. Thus, landscape photographs serve as mediums for influencing political agendas and ideologies. These ideas are illustrated in this study by analysing European, Palestinian, and Zionist landscape photographs of the Holy Land (Zion/Palestine) from the middle of the nineteenth century and up to contemporary artistic Israeli photography. I contend that landscape photography was employed as a political tool at the hands of European and pre-statehood, Zionist photography for cultural land appropriation in their political struggles, while local Palestinian documentation was absent from this arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the "algorithmic turn" in light of the "forensic turn" and seeks to consider the relevance of Forensic Architecture's work for the theory of photography. First, I will analyze the role of photography as testimony in light of the concept of "forensic aesthetics," and argue that with it, the role of photography as evidence is less related to its visible dimensions and more to its being a material trace—an invisible latent image that needs to be developed and animated. Second, I will diagnose the implication of the concept of "forensic aesthetics" in one of the agency's first research projects: an investigation of US drone warfare in Pakistan from 2011 and argue that the concern that arose with the emergence of digital photography from a "post-photographic" era—in which the effect of digital technologies was perceived as the virtualization of the world—takes a material twist with forensic aesthetics. It is precisely the digitization of photography that enables it to maintain its indexical power, even at the cost of losing its limits as a medium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Rediscovering Lost Landscapes: topographical art in north-west Italy, 1800–1920" is a book that explores the methodological innovation of using landscape paintings and drawings, along with photographs and personal correspondence, to understand and appreciate past landscapes. The book focuses on the landscapes of maritime, agrarian, and Alpine Liguria, with an emphasis on waterscapes, uplands, productive spaces, the built environment, landscapes of modernity, and luxurious spaces. The authors successfully compare the historical representations with the current landscapes, without making value judgments about the changes. While the richness of the archive and the success of the method in Liguria are highlighted, there are reservations about applying the same approach to other places with less storied histories. Overall, the book is beautifully written, richly illustrated, and offers a fascinating approach to landscape history. [Extracted from the article]

And together the combination of her text with Hurley's photographs brings the drama of the expedition to the fore, along with an appreciation of the incredibly outstanding natural beauty that is the Antarctic. Considering that the Antarctic in 1914, and for many years after, was an unknown and remote continent, to most it is obvious that Hurley was cognizant of not just recording the expedition itself, for which he was of course the official photographer, but also of the landscape he was photographing. This is a welcome reprint of a paperback book first published in 1999 (although it was deserving of being reprinted as a hardback). [Extracted from the article]

This study examined the intent, preparatory processes and challenges of nature photographers mainly shooting plants and animals in northern Japan. Findings revealed efforts to actively absorb scientific knowledge related to subjects during the preparatory process. Thus, a core intention is to capture nature in a scientifically credible manner, thereby demonstrating intimate understanding of subjects acquired from both scientific knowledge and first-hand field observations. In constructing their self-identity and attributing purpose to their work, photographers are grappling with internal tensions and contradictions when deciding the optimal distance to place between their field and related professions such as stock photography and artistic expression. We also observed cases where the original intentions of scientifically credible images from nature photographers might be lost as images are freely diffused via digital stock photo libraries. This harbors implications for the ability of the public to knowingly view photographs with a sort of "quality assurance" based on natural science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A reprint is provided of the article "Cut and Paste: Charlie White on the Collage Impulse Today," by Charlie White, which appeared in the March 2009 issue of the "Artforum" journal. The article discusses contemporary photocollage within the context of its history from the 1930s through the early 21st century, including in regard to aesthetics, photomontage and the relationship between the digital technology and photocollage.

Over more than 30 years of commercial and fine art photographic practice, I have often noticed remarkable disparities between the scenes, objects, events or moments 'out there' I had attempted to record – and the images within the resulting photographs. These (sometimes subtle, sometimes profound, but rarely anticipatable) disparities between what I had seen and what the photograph shows me offer the tantalising suggestion that there may be something else going on here – but something which the popular conception of photography may hinder our ability to recognise. This article explores the implications of four central assumptions implicit within the popular conception of photography that may impede alternative ways of thinking about photographic practice. Supported by a number of photographs that depict scenes, events and 'moments' that I will argue were not 'taken' but were instead created by the act of photographing them, I will suggest that new opportunities for practice may be available by 're-imagining' the practice of photography as an active – or as an act of – collaboration between medium and practitioner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the series Disko by Lithuanian-American photographer Andrew Miksys. After moving to Lithuania, Miksys photographed discotheques in villages and small towns between the years 2000 and 2010. The series Disko sparked controversy beyond its artistic context when it was appropriated by foreign and Lithuanian mass media and was said to represent Lithuanian nationhood. The contradiction between the denotative and the connotative aspects of Disko and between the different actual and possible functions of the series in particular social, political and cultural contexts are the main issues analysed in this article. It concludes with an assertion that this contradiction can be resolved by understanding the photographs as an opportunity to prevent the common and idealized myth of nationhood from becoming established ideology in art and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like past avant-garde movements, glitch and noise in the twenty-first century are used to reveal the materiality of the medium. But instead of providing insight or clarity into the politics or social conditions of a technology, they demarcate broader conditions of opacity and blockage, contributing to what Jodi Dean has called ‘communicative capitalism’. The work of German photographer Thomas Ruff alongside the Düsseldorf School, New Photography and JPEG technology are used in this article to illustrate this tendency as a move away from meaning and toward visual noise and communicative breakdown. I use three core analytic registers: the deliberate failure to adhere to visual norms, communicative failure and machine failure and breakdown. Ruff’s work uses visual noise as art to at once reaffirm pervasive conditions of breakdown, failure and decline in high-tech global capitalism, while simultaneously providing a temporary reprieve from these conditions through an emergent form of visual beauty. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to acknowledge the contribution and significance of the manuscripts published in the 2015 double issue of theJournal of Business-to-Business Marketingcelebrating its 21st.anniversary. A precis of each articles’ contribution is highlighted. The author explores the distinct and relevant themes that marked the orientation and positioning of the journal as the premier specialized front runner outlet in the business-to-business (B-to-B) domain and provides reflections about what is next. Finally, further recognition of David T. Wilson as founder of theJBBM, his role as educator and his teaching are remembered. Methodology/approach: A content analysis on each of the manuscripts was performed in an attempt to identify central themes, orientations, findings, and recommendations. The approach is qualitative and focused on identifying common voices from the authors that provide light to the sustainability and relevancy of theJBBMin the future. And, my reflections are enmeshed with my participant observer status as a bonafide B-to-B scholar. Findings: TheJBBMhas succeeded by proposing new theoretical frameworks, conceptual spaces, appropriate methodologies, and an overall rigor to a variety of themes, problems identified by the business community, international contexts, and cross functional perspectives. Our understanding of B-to-B problems, and the marketing concerns of practitioners and industry have improved but still has challenges related to value, relevancy, validity, practical implications, and usefulness to managers and industry. Research implications: As an applied field, B-to-B has borrowed theoretical frameworks and perspectives from other disciplines. It is clear that a more conceptual refinement is needed. Now is the time to organize our findings, thoughts, propositions, and observations. It may be necessary to create venues that allow for a more intense dialogue between the academic and business community. Some of these partnerships are conducted within the framework of research institutes, centers, alliances with regional and national chambers and professional associations, practitioner forums, executive training, and alliances within ecosystems networks and others. I suggest that we focus more on the “exploration” of concepts and particular organizational realities rather than on the theory testing alone. Researchers in B-to-B may require an immersion and evaluation of the situational relevancy (deep dive and thick descriptions) through an experiential validation process, interpretation, and “being there.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does not every poem long to be taken up and embodied by performers, rather than left in the inner sounding of a solitary reader’s consciousness? This article dissects the theory and practice of adapting poetry for performance as tested during a three-year project funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and hosted at the University of Victoria. It explores the various dimensions of this work – methodological, ethical, aesthetic, epistemological and economic – the production component of which was concluded in May 2014. Using the theoretical frame established by Linda Hutcheon inA Theory of AdaptationI demonstrate a procedure whereby lyrical text in print may be selected, edited, rendered as speech, embodied by actors and dancers, and staged by means of various directorial and choreographic strategies. I assess the results of these explorations using the lens of the ‘postdramatic’ as defined by Hans-Thies Lehmann in hisPostdramatic Theatre. I go on to reflect on the economics of such adaptations at the periphery of the current English-Canadian cultural marketplace, by considering select examples of similar work in Canadian theatrical production over recent decades. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The art photography of Fuchikami Hakuyō and his circle in Japanese Manchuria is commonly and benignly treated as hybridized modernism, a product of the bending of conventional 1930s Japanese styles (pictorialist, constructivist, realist) through contact with the unfamiliar and the exotic. As such it is deemed reflexive in relation to the stimuli of a new land and peoples, but disconnected from the political, economic, and social processes of imperialism and colonialism in Northeast China. The following article uses both structuralist and post-structuralist theoretical approaches to challenge this interpretation, arguing that through the skillful erasure of colonial violence and disruption, the lyrical images of villages, agriculturalists, and factories produced by Fuchikami and his Manshū Shashin Sakka Kyōkai (Manchuria Photographic Artists Association) participate directly in processes of state construction in Manchukuo. The development of a quasi-documentary pastoral aesthetic by Fuchikami and the Manchuria photographers is given close attention in the analysis, particularly as it relates to the influence of French Barbizon school painting on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the work of Asian American photographer Tseng Kwong Chi and the repetitiveness and transparency of his Mao series photographs, also know as "East Meets West." The author discusses stereotypes found in art and additional topics such as Chi's background, other projects and exhibitions, photograph themes and aesthetic form.

The work of Artür Harfaux, a member of Le Grand Jeu between 1927 and 1932, deserves to be reassessed. Harfaux produced a number of more or less staged photographic portraits of his friends Roger-Gilbert Lecomte, René Daumal, Josef Šíma, Maurice Henry and other protagonists of the movement. He created fancy and inventive photomontages, double-exposed portraits and almost abstract pictures of veils blowing in the wind. Beyond their diversity, Harfaux’s works are characterised by a subtle humour. Sometimes the humour that prevails is ironic or self-derisive, while on other occasions the works are informed by black humour or the burlesque. A study of the work of Harfaux leads to a reconsideration of the importance of humour and laughter – formidable forces of destabilisation and of detachment – in the revolt of the members of Le Grand Jeu as well as in the endeavours of the Surrealists. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article offers close analyses of three photofilmic artworks – pieces blurring the boundaries between photography and film – that confound iconic, charged images in the mass media in order to speak to the problematic of imagining a New Europe. The artist collective Superflex, film-maker Harun Farocki, and cultural theorist and artist Mieke Bal, have all recently produced moving-image works that address the hypervisibility of such fraught images within a public domain, such as burning cars, cartoons of Islamic figures, and veiled women, but each works to disrupt or reconstruct such visual tropes. Through hybrid forms each artist attends to crossover media coverage and how such mediated translations today produce and disseminate the images in socially novel and complex ways. Bal's installation, in particular, through a strategy of photofilmic portraiture, offers a complex counter-aesthetic of the migratory, one that emphasizes everyday, lived and embodied instances of positive, cross-cultural encounter on the continent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the visual artist Willie Doherty’s use of the photo-text diptych in works produced in Northern Ireland between 1985 and 1992. An examination of Doherty’s photo-text diptychs demonstrates what the postmodern geographer Edward Soja has called ‘Thirdspace’ – a flexible way of thinking about fluctuating milieux of ideas, events, appearances and representations, and how these affect the ways geographical spaces change, both materially and in the way they are perceived. This article argues that through the photo-text diptych Doherty invokes a Thirdspace, where representations of landscape, word, image and identity all converge spatially. This creates a borderland analogous to that separating Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates how select works by contemporary artist Jeff Wall (b. 1946) compare in subject and style to those by early twentieth-century photographer Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952). Curtis serves as a significant predecessor for Wall, because the issues of factuality and staging in what Wall calls his "near documentary" style are central both to Curtis's reputation and to Wall's process. Wall's photography, in its similarity to Curtis's work, simultaneously contends with current sociopolitical issues of class and race while emphatically recalling photographic precedents. Likewise, Curtis's carefully composed photographs interpret the fraught realities of Native cultures in order to re-picture an American past. This examination of the two photographers' analogous interests initiates a new approach not only to Wall's work, but also to how "artistic" photography is defined in both the early and late twentieth century [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the practice and theory of complex, multi-layered photographic images in contemporary art. Methods of working in which photographers use the medium to explore variously memory, identity and time in images are examined, and a philosophical case is made for the mandate of plurality as a starting point for art practice, as well as the teaching of art and design. Images that beckon with implicit references are examined and compared, with implications for 'reading' multi-layered images. Given the attention to the Other in contemporary thought and culture, the multifaceted adoption of difference and attunement to multiculturalism suggests that perhaps multiplicity as an imaging technique - rather than single perspectives - is appropriate as an artistic device for our times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past thirty years, the city as represented by art photography has been shown as progressively empty and alienating. While the emptiness of nineteenth-century streets was due to the limitations of photographic technology, it was actively pursued as a formal device by the New Topographics photographers. Recent art photography shows an even more pronounced trend towards showing the city as vacant. This contrasts starkly with the densely populated, bustling, urban environments typical of twentieth-century street photography. This essay argues that images of an empty contemporary city can be understood as a symptom of disciplinary relations internal to photography as an art form, and as a consequence of art photography's distancing of itself from vernacular representations of the city when the distinction between art photography and vernacular photography is at risk of collapsing. Empty urban images tell us about modes of experience in the contemporary city and about photography itself. This essay uses the trope of the banal as a way of locating the ‘extreme form of the everyday’ that typifies the contemporary photographic discourse of the street. Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Melanie Manchot both address the everyday street as an acute site for understanding the negotiation of public space and contemporary experiences of the city. Both refer to yet go beyond the dichotomy of the city as empty or full and reveal a different set of relations to the street through photography. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]