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It is a critical moment to reevaluate photography—its various practices, functions and discourses, whether recent or well established, that surround it and that inform how one not only reads a photograph, but analyzes visual representation. When PART 8 was first conceived, the editors envisioned a forum in which many writers would debate, question and challenge the perceived roles of photography—both “artistic” and “vernacular” ––and what was implied by such a separation. Many contemporary photographers were making work that embraced an aesthetic of heightened artificiality achieved through devices such as digital manipulation. This work, characterized by monumental scale, an extraordinary amount of detail and hyper-saturated color, to name only a few of the most visible traits, was both praised for redefining the medium and criticized as pure spectacle. However, what was undeniable was that the market for these works had exploded. Museums, galleries and art journals supported this photography through numerous exhibitions and catalogues, resulting in previously unimaginable prices for works at the galleries and then later at auctions, and a myriad of articles and journals devoted the subject. Further blurring the lines between fashion and art, between critique and spectacle, the work transcended the gallery and museum circuit. Not only was it both featured in and its aesthetic imitated in glossy fashion and lifestyle magazines, but several prominent photographers were commissioned to produce work for designer boutiques. This moment appeared to be temporarily interrupted by the events of September 11th when images of the twin towers on fire were immediately transmitted, copied and consequently sold worldwide. Suddenly, the same photograph seemed to be everywhere at once—from the covers of local and international newspapers and magazines (reproduced both with and without captions) to the streets of New York City, where the same image was downloaded from the Internet, rephotographed and sold, matted and framed, as a morbid memento. The market for this image appears unabated as vendors near Ground Zero continue to do brisk business selling both photographs and gruesome books comprised of images documenting events of that day. The concept that photography, particularly vernacular photography, is inherently structured by death has been stated by many writers, perhaps most eloquently and explicitly by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida. This connection was nakedly revealed in the hastily made photocopied montages of snapshots clutched by grieving friends, relatives and co-workers outside hospitals, morgues, and television vans. These snapshots—private, personal, fundamentally anonymous—suddenly appeared to blanket the city, whether taped to street lights and storefronts, framed and displayed in impromptu shrines or transmitted in pixilated form on news programs, the internet or public service announcements. Structuring the paper notices was the gap between the photographic image (where the subject, whether posing at a formal event or snapped in a candid shot, was captured in a moment full of life) and the text surrounding it. The multiple photos would later be edited down to a single image, designed to convey the essence of a life, reproduced in a grid or with a short biography in the newspaper. Occasionally, one will come upon a photocopy that has remained—by now faded, streaked, speckled and torn—and experience the uncanny shock brought by encountering a revenant from the fall. The methodology of representing historical trauma is discussed by Allison Moore, Tina Gregory, and Marguerite Shore. In her article “The Beauty of Evil?,” Allison Moore reviews on european ground, a book of contemporary photographs by Alan Cohen documenting the physical sites of three major wars of the 20th Century—World Wars I and II and the Cold War. Moore discusses these places, which range from trenches in Northern France, to Nazi concentration camps, to the pavement and sidewalks of post-war Berlin, as both contemporary physical sites and as locations of trauma, and analyzes their memorial function. In addition, she reflects on the profound disconnect between physical site and photographic representation, particularly in view of the historical and cultural distance many readers have to these places and events. Tina Gregory examines an exhibition and book published by Magnum Photo documenting September 11th and the days immediately following. By chance, several members of Magnum Photo, the cooperative founded by photojournalists such as Henri-Cartier Bresson, met in the New York office on September 10th, 2001 to analyze and debate issues surrounding the future of documentary photography. The very next morning, discussions were interrupted as these photographers took to the streets to capture the carnage and confusion that covered downtown Manhattan. Central to Gregory’s analysis of the exhibitions and the book, are her meditations on the ability of both amateur and professional documentary photography to bear witness. Marguerite Shore focuses on the work of Letizia Battaglia, a contemporary Italian photographer whose politically informed work was shown this fall in the exhibition and publication, Passion Justice Freedom. Since the 1970s, Battaglia has been documenting life in her native Sicily. The majority of her work focuses on the brutality of the Mafia, visible in her images of death, destruction and emotional terrorism. Held barely a month after September 11th, the artist declared her desire that her exhibition would express her solidarity with and support of the city. Kate Bussard and Jin Han analyze the work of Walker Evans in their articles about scale and about art’s relation to social activism. In her article “Big Impact,” Kate Bussard discusses the effect of scale in photography, comparing exhibitions of large-scale works by Walker Evans and Philip Lorca diCorcia. Billboards, wooden slats, walls hung with religious objects are the subjects of Evans’s mural-like photographs, whose raw physicality is reinforced by the masonite mount and the visible screws and holes that mar the photographic surface. Whereas Evans’s images are devoid of human presence, save for utensils and debris, diCorcia’s heads (1999-2001) are life-sized photographs of pedestrians shot in Times Square. Selected by diCorcia and illuminated by a hidden strobe light, diCorcia presents chance encounters, frozen and made monumental, which Bussard argues function as “portraits of social vision itself.” Jin Han examines the complex relationship, both artistic and personal, that existed between Evans and Ben Shahn in his article “Ben Shahn’s Two Portraits of Walker Evans: A Critique Painted.” Noting that Evans introduced Shahn to photography, Han examines how the close relationship between the two men and their differing conceptions about the use of the medium and its potential for social and political activism was reflected in their work. Whereas Shahn’s work, particularly of the 1930s, was more humanist, often based on historical events, Evans project, described as “objective realism” was structured more by a seemingly detached neutrality and formal concerns. Through complex visual analysis, Han shows how their work and ideology both conflicted and overlapped, and ultimately, the effect that each had on the other. Melody Davis, Caterina Pierre, Rich Turnbull and I explore the construction of gender and its photographic representation. Issues of biography, gender and artistic production structure Melody Davis’s essay “Androgyny and the Mirror-Photographs of Florence Henri, 1927-1938.” On a formal level, Henri’s use of mirrors signaled her involvement with and attempt to make visible through photography issues that preoccupied an avant-garde enamored with technology. Yet Davis further interprets her mirrors as metaphors for ambiguity, for “play” and for a general destabilization achieved through optical effects such as doubling, the fracturing of surfaces and the shifting of planes. Davis not only explores her formal advances but how these photographs ultimately represented “a woman engaged in conceptualizing androgyny, and committed to synthesizing what to others are contradictions.” Caterina Pierre reviews a recent exhibition of photographs of La Divine Comtesse—the Countess de Castiglione—the legendary muse, mistress, and amateur diplomat who thrived in Second Empire Paris. In an extraordinary act of self-reinvention, the Countess commissioned numerous photographs from the studio of Mayer and Pierson, the official photography studio to the Emperor Napoleon III. Yet it is not so much the number that is exceptional—more than 400 photographs made over 42 years—but the relationship between the Countess and the photographers. The photographs were more than collaboration between the parties, as the Countess, the driving force behind their production, was the subject, author and patron of the works. Although Pierre asserts “…certainly by today’s standards there is no question that the Countess was truly the artist, and Pierson simply the technician,” she does not attempt to debate authorship, rather she concentrates on the significance of the Countess engagement with self-representation, gender construction and societal constructs through the emerging medium of photography. Over one hundred years separate the photographs of the Countess and the work of Luke Smalley, photographs of male high-school athletes in various states of exercise. Rich Turnbull reviews Smalley’s recent exhibition and publication entitled “Gymnasium,” the title a reference to both the athletic male body and the high school culture of sports and fitness. Although the works are structured by a nostalgia evoked through the clothing and the equipment photographed and the aesthetic of the work itself, they are actually contemporary re-enactments staged and directed by Smalley. Turnbull reads the photographs as “question(s) about fabricated identity and possibly fabricated desire,” acknowledging the connections to postmodernist photographers, 19th century portraitists and a homoerotic photographic tradition. In my article, I investigate the overlaps between the portrait photography of Nadar and the construction and representation of gender in Second Empire Paris. Nadar was best known for his archive of Parisian artists, a project funded by commissions for society portraits and cartes des visites. Despite his affiliation with the avant-garde, Nadar’s photography, I argue, reveals how dominant societal stereotypes of gender, race and class pervaded this world. His representations of young dancers and actresses, who as Abigail Solomon-Godeau noted, represented “the spectacle within the spectacle” and his images of wet nurses and models reveal a semiotics of class and race, gender and labor perhaps less visible in many of his portraits of male artists. The relationship between photography and the archive, specifically its ability to allow for classification, order and comparison, is explored by Lisa Jaye Young, Sarah Stanley and Fred Gross. In her article “Taking Inventory: William Henry Fox Talbot” Young approaches Talbot’s photography as “an inventorial photograph,” a photograph that not only acts as a recording—of possessions, of situations, of data—but rather reveals itself to be a more complex system of organization, something that “turns images into depositories of facts, recorded instances, points of view, measures or light sources, chemical combinations, and times of day—a virtual inventory in and of itself.” (Young) Acting as an archive of both the spatial and temporal, Young compares the inventory to the photograph, arguing for an expansion and revision of photographic history to accommodate a project such as Talbot’s, one that reflected both the material process of its creation and nineteenth-century scientific concerns of collection, classification and comparison. Sarah Stanley writes about the architectural photography of Roland Fischer in her article “From Gothic to Modern: the Faces/Facades of Roland Fischer.” In this series of ten works, Fischer creates a sort of architectural archive, comparing the facades of gothic cathedrals with contemporary office towers whose architects they inspired. Fischer focuses on the facades of these buildings, which he isolates from their surrounding environment in order to analyze patterns of structure and light. Stanley interprets the properties of Fisher’s photographs such as monumental size, glossy finish, and a fascination with scale, and his use of digital manipulation as a commentary on global capitalism. Fred Gross looks at how the artists Georges Mathieu, Jackson Pollock and Salvador Dali were portrayed through photographic documentation, arguing that their photographic representation was central to their critical and public reception. Photography, Gross argues, was central to the “mythologization” of the artist, a condition that characterized post-War artistic production due in part to the rise of popular photographic magazines. Gross examines the photographic documentation of Mathieu at work, in particular the article “Mathieu Paints a Picture,” which he interprets as connecting Mathieu’s performed work of creating a painting to the photographic representation of the “artist-penseur,” the Surrealist flâneur and the Action Painter. However, rather than adding Mathieu to this lineage, Gross argues, the photographs were interpreted by many as confirming negative cultural and political stereotypes, if not being an outright farce. In the practice section, Vanessa Rocco engages the exhibition design of Andrée Putnam for Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer, a retrospective that ran at the International Center of Photography. Although neglected in the literature, Rocco argues that the exhibition design contributed significantly to the reevaluation of Bellmer’s work as proposed by the exhibition curator, Therese Lichtenstein. Rocco examines how the layout, construction and design of the exhibition enabled the visitor to engage Bellmer in an expanded context—beyond misogynistic or Surrealist fantasies to include social and political critique against the Nazi government and his relatives who supported the regime. Many thanks are due to the contributors, the editors (especially Dan Quiles for his work with the images) and to Emily Pugh and Paige Poling for making this issue possible. It is appropriate that this issue should coincide with the recent appointment of Dr. Geoffrey Batchen to our department and we would like to extend our greatest welcome to him. We hope that you enjoy this issue.
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