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The National Portrait Gallery's Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography (2018) was the first exhibition to examine photography as 'the art of the future' (Cullinan 6). Defying earlier conventions of still, dull portraiture, mid-century Victorian photographers turned the medium into an art form. While recent scholarship draws parallels between photography and painting, this essay gestures toward connections between art photography and Pre-Raphaelite poetry by examining the photographic process of Julia Margaret Cameron alongside her poem 'On a Portrait' (1876). Positioning Cameron within a larger Pre-Raphaelite tradition, this essay argues that discourses surrounding nineteenth-century photography can help us to understand the characteristics of literary Pre-Raphaelitism and to broaden scholarly conceptions of Pre-Raphaelitism beyond the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood., Victorian photography is en vogue. Recent London exhibitions have demonstrated the centrality of this technological medium--specifically, the photographic lens--to the Victorians. Photography enables a looking outward and formulates an artistic [...]

Victorian photography served as an elegiac medium for Dante Gabriel Rossetti to mourn his wife, Elizabeth Siddal. This essay explores Rossetti's anxieties about photography that led him both to destroy portrait photographs of Siddal and to preserve her artwork in a photographic album that he created after her death. To understand the artist's conflicted use of the medium, this essay turns to Rossetti's elegiac 'Willowwood' sonnets from The House of Life (1870), which present a metaphor for the concealment and exposure of the lost beloved, demonstrated by an overpainted photograph of Siddal., Twenty-four sonnets into the 1870 edition of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The House of Life, a woman comes to the speaker from the depths of a woodside well. Over the course [...]

'I'm taking pictures of life today.' --William Eggleston When the color photographs of William Eggleston first appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, they had no clear antecedents. [...]

I am at war with the obvious,' wrote William Eggleston as he reflected on his own photography in a brief afterword to his book The Democratic Forest. (1) Like other [...]

Several color photographs by Charles Cushman of his wife Jean and the landscape that reveal an involved representation of changing midcentury everyday America are discussed.

Si le mode discontinu caracterise notamment l'oeuvre de Jean-Luc Moulene, et si, a l'interieur du vaste champ que constituent ses photographies, la question du travail y est aussi fondamentale que [...]

As Ansel Adams prepared for the exhibition of his Singular Images at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1974, he looked back over his illustrious career and complained. 'Curator after [...]

'Cesar Chavez really knew the value of photography .... He was very visually aware. I don't think he did anything during the first year of the strike without considering how [...]

By way of 'figuration,' 'implicatedness,' and other interdisciplinary concepts, this essay contextualizes and critiques Lincoln Clarkes's acclaimed book of photographs of unnamed women pictured as heroin addicts on Vancouver's Downtown [...]

Meatyard's Ambrose Bierce and Lucybelle Crater photographs may be seen as literary due to their narrative aspect and the fact that the underlying stories are especially compelling. Direct and indirect [...]

Current photo-historiography largely ignores the influence on nineteenth century photographers of Alexander von Humboldt's co-examination of poetry, painting, and the cultivation of exotic plants. This essay argues for a Humboldtian [...]

This essay explores the banal as a contemporary photographic aesthetic, examining banality in relation to notions of boredom and ennui. The 'perceptual boredom' of the banal image--its resistance to emotional [...]

This essay reads the photographs and compositions of Montreal artist Nicole Jolicoeur, examining her use of famous nineteenth-century archival collections. It argues that Jolicoeur's reconstructions of old images of women [...]

Taking Emerson's 'Nature' as its starting point, this paper argues that in Lincoln Kirstein's and William Carlos Williams's readings of Evans as a visionary artist of the vernacular, Emersonian ideals [...]

This essay shows the decisive role photography played in Julio Cortazar's literary evolution. It examines the ways Cortazar appropriates some of the features of journalism and travel writing in his [...]

Aristotle, Augustine, and Heidegger describe the phenomenon of 'suddenness.' Interpreters of Greek tragedy such as Holderlin and Jacob Bernays relate suddenness to the cathartic effect of tragedy--violent agitation of the [...]

SERVING MORE as emblems of our times than as a clarion call for social change, Burtynsky's photographs are neither political missives nor simple exercises in colour and form. As a [...]

ONE CHRISTMAS, WHEN I WAS about TWELVE YEARS OLD, I RECEIVED A pictorial history of the Arthurian legend. As I paged through it, I was startled to find, amidst splendidly [...]

The photography of Anthony Goicolea is provided. The images portray boys experiencing puberty and examining their sexual curiosity with each other.

The author examines the projects of three artists, Nikki S. Lee, Anthony Goicolea, and David Henry Brown, Jr. In the form of self-portraits, Lee explores the images of social identity through subcultures, Goicolea focuses on childhood innocence and sexuality by creating photographs with his own image, and Brown looks at self-valuation in a culture obsessed with celebrities.

Photographer Jorge Ribalta uses miniature images of human beings in shadows and light to create his own atmosphere of reality. The images test traditional notions of photographic realism. Even the actions of the figures represented possess an evocative ambiguity. Blurred images compound the effect and give the photographs a timeless quality.

The photographs of Chema Madoz reveal the activity that exists within inert objects. Photographs of objects provide an insight that objects exist in a dynamic realm between desire and the world. Such objects may be shoes, a ladder against a mirror, books artfully piled to form an arch, and a table whose legs are set in glasses of water.

Ana Teresa Ortega's photographs reveal the impact the media can have on society's view of itself. Common occurrences are distorted into new meanings by the photographer's perspective. Such occurrences may be the signing of a pact or a glance exchanged between two individuals. The photographer can also manipulate images to reveal the internal splits in characters.

Photographs in Joan Fontcuberta's series, 'Hemograms,' are of blood drops from friends. The blood is dropped on film and Fontcuberta immediately makes a photographic enlargement. Blood can carry troubling connotations in the age of AIDS, and it also carries the deepest significance of human identity, passion, birth, and death. The enlargements create diverse images of imprint.

Maria Jose Gomez Redondo's photographic self-portraits concentrate on face, objects, hand, and darkness. One's own face is always the least known and may be best discovered in its similarity to others. Identity can be discovered in objects one uses daily. The hand can appear as a disembodied aspect of the self. Background darkness in photographs define settings and allow the photographic subject to be revealed.

Valentin Vallhonrat's series of photographs, 'Dark Glass' explores the ambiguity of photography and the meaning society places on substitutes for authentic human experience. Dark glass is something one can both see through and see one's reflection in. Such glass appears over photographs of objects in dark space. Valhonrat's photographs of mannequins and wax figures contemplate the meaning of cultural substitutes for human beings.

Manuel Vilarino's photographs explores the mythic figures of human beings and animals as they might appear in dreams. They are contemplations of the mysterious, multifaceted world from which life is born. They at once liberate and reveal the feelings of humanity. Images are of human heads that reveal both the outer and inner features, and of animals in stark locations.

The subject of Pablo Genoves's photographs can be as fleeting as a point of paint on a surface or the the question implicit in a woman's smile or dress. The photographs themselves can be of different textures and tones. However, after the process is complete, the photographs may stare back at the photographer as strangers to the person who made them.