Kris K Belden-Adams

A set of albums by Amherst College and Harvard Law School student William Belcher Whitney provides richly adorned accounts of a bustling social life involving courting many women at once, bonding with classmates, participating in “masculine” activities such as sports, and upholding his family’s social expectations as a “Whitney.” He would have been a fine prospect for marriage for many women at nearby all-female colleges, which encouraged their students to become dutiful wives and mothers who supported their husbands and tended the family’s social profile. Only at a closer look does this cisgender narrative falter and reveal messages apparent to members of the LGBTQI+ community, while simultaneously upholding the appearance of active engagement in cisgender courting norms. This paper rebuilds Whitney’s narrative in view of the album’s subcultural meanings, and it examines Whitney’s struggle to conform to cisgender norms. Collage, it will be argued, allows metaphors to enjoy more tangible form, while speaking in the language of a genre (the photo album) that had an established cisgender normativity. This is to say, collage enabled Whitney to use the visual language of a heteronormative cultural artifact (the album) to subvert its usual expectations while being in the closet in plain sight.

Immediately following their presentation in the form of a visible image by German physics Professor Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen in 1895, 'X-rays' became the subject of widespread global public fascination. The rays' mysterious ability to penetrate solid objects and provide a lasting image of interior forms of an object - without even piercing its surface - revolutionized and liberated scientific consciousness. In an X-ray image, the unseen could be seen.
Instantly, the X-ray's revelations made conceptions of reality much more complicated and imaginative, because scientific knowledge was proven to no longer be limited to only phenomena observable by the human eye. Acceptance of the X-ray was predicated on the logic of empiricism. People believed what they could perceive first-hand with their senses, and 'light writing' (or 'photography' - which had a privileged ability to capture fleeting events with a relative fidelity to reality) was positioned as a trusted source of authentication. Because the X-ray, also called 'new photography', could capture the unseen, it was given credence for having a greater sensitivity than the sense perception of human beings.
This paper takes a closer look at the mass-cultural reception of this photographic practice to examine how the 'Rontgen Rays' both complicated and liberated scientific notions of reality.
Keywords. x-ray, Rontgen, new medicine, indexicality, photography, Spiritualism

https://ojs.letras.up.pt/ojs/index.php/RL/article/view/10328

Through a variety of case studies by global scholars from diverse fields of study, this book explores photographic album practices of historically marginalized figures from a range of time periods, geographic locations, and socio-cultural contexts. Their albums' stories span various racial, ethnic, and gender identities, sexual orientations and dis/abilities.

The vernacular albums featured in this volume present narratives that move beyond those reflected in our existing histories to examine the visual strategies that album-makers have used to assert control over the presentation of their histories and identities, and to direct what those narratives have to say, especially as their albums move out of private domestic space and into public archives, institutions, and digital formats. This book does not consider photographic albums and scrapbooks as separate genres, but as a continuum of creative visual practices of photographic self-expression and narrative-building that co-evolved and were readily accessible.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, history of photography, visual culture, and media studies.

In White Noise, Don DeLillo wrote of a well-trafficked tourist destination he called “The Most Photographed Barn in America.” Because it is known through a proliferation of photographs, he suggests, “no one sees the barn” anymore. Thus, making a picture of the barn is not about ‘looking’, but akin to “taking pictures of taking pictures” – a performative mass social ritual of image-making. This behavior also is a relational means of collapsing physical space to connect psychologically and virtually with larger narratives of the human experience for both the selfie subject and their social media followers. Thus, travel selfies remediate physical and psychological distances and, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, “bring things spatially and humanly closer.”
This essay examines the reframing of both physical distance and psychological presence by digital travel selfies. Rather than being a means of producing subjects/objects to behold and to archive as ‘embalmed’ memories or artifacts of personal history for later review, digital social-media travel photographs are driven by different relational impulses: the collapse of material conceptions of time and space, the performance and promotion of self-as-‘avatar’, the dissolution of psychological space between viewer and subject, and by communal/network participation.

Composite class portraits were natural heirs to the nineteenth-century social-anthropological/ethnographic photographic discourses that effectively defined “the other,” functioned differently. Only, rather than visually defining “marginality,” composite class portraits idealized a semi-aristocratic group of white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant stock as the ideal models for an American, New England-focused, Positive Eugenics agenda that was indoctrinated at institutions including Harvard University. The photographs – which made using founding father of Eugenics Francis Galton’s composite techniques – discursively conveyed specific gender-role and hetero-normative norms for the consumption of college and university students. While men were expected to become captains of their industries, upper-class New England women were taught that they should lead a “proper” social life, which involved marrying within their caste, supporting their husbands, and maintaining the family’s social profile. As upper-class society saw itself as threatened by waves of immigrants, the women of colleges such as Smith College, for instance, therefore were reminded of their critical roles as mothers whose shared destiny included raising “well-bred” offspring to preserve their own elevated social caste in faithful adherence to the mission of the Positive Eugenics movement.
This book takes a closer look at composite portraiture and other related photographic practices that documented an idealized “reality” of the New England social-caste experience. Despite these images’ didactic and rhetorical functions as a reminder of “class” unity and duty, when the portraits are positioned in relation to the individual stories and portraits of members of the class, they reveal points of non-conformity and rebellion with their own rhetoric.

Within a decade of the announcement of the invention of photography, a series of time-and- space-collapsing innovations emerged in rapid-fire succession: the passenger train (1830 - which quickly brought the institutionalization of standardized time), computer (1833), photography (1839), and the trans-Atlantic telegraph (1844). From the 1870s to 1940s, another surge of time- and-space-reconfiguring inventions appeared, including the telephone (1876), automobile (1890s), cinema (1894), radio (1900-1910), the airplane and assembly line (1903), and television (1939). In the century following photography’s introduction, the speed of life accelerated dramatically as a result of the explosive growth of technological advances that forever altered conceptions of space and time. Photography grew up alongside these scientific advances by figures such as Albert Einstein, who proved time’s relativity. The medium emerged as a medium uniquely able to visually reflect the struggle to reorganize and visually reconfigure our perceptions of time’s passage. It travels across time-space nexuses. Photography can capture and sometimes "defy" time, giving form to its fluctuating and highly subjective experience.

This book – which is part visual object-study, part scientific and philosophical history – examines photography’s unique capacity to represent the passage of time with a degree of elasticity, simultaneity, and abstraction. It features a sample of understudied photographic practices from the first century of the medium’s existence, early motion studies, composites, workplace efficiency studies, and extended- as well as high-speed exposure images.

The medium’s ability to represent many levels of temporal experience and indexical slippage illustrates photography’s role as both symptomatic of modernity, and one of its catalysts.

At first glance, selfies may seem to be unlikely objects for rigorous academic study. They are ubiquitous, their exchange is guided by the rapidly mutating social trends of the millennial- and post-millennial-generations, and they occupy the dynamic, spectral “walls” of social-media sites rather than art galleries and museums. Selfies operate at the nexus of many fields of study: media studies, sociology, psychology, digital culture studies, theater, family folklore, oral tradition, the study of narrative, visual culture, archival studies, photography history, art history, and the history of technology.
Although the selfie is difficult to fully encapsulate within the analytical framework of any one field, a closer examination of the origin of selfies through a look at the history of photography reveals this genre of image-making to be surprisingly multifaceted, rapidly mutating, and it is intensely relevant to discussions about the impact of the medium’s instantaneous taking and dissemination. Almost as soon as photography was invented in the early 19th century, the first selfie also appeared.  While various dimensions of the selfie find their roots in the history and theorization of photography, the selfie is just as much of an ahistorical, precedent-setting practice. This essay positions the selfie within the history of photographic self-portraiture, in an effort to distinguish it from history, while exploring its uniqueness as an image-making practice.

In his writings on photography, Vilém Flusser suggested that the invention of the medium marked a radical “break in history,” rivaled only by “the invention of linear writing” for its ability to convey, shape, and influence thought (Flusser, 1980, p. 195). At the precipice of the digital age, Flusser writes of a photograph as a “technical image” that has anything but a clear one-to-one relationship to “the real” (Flusser, 2000, 14-20). Although Flusser did not live to see the full evolution of a “Post-Photography” around the year 2000 – as it was increasingly accepted that the medium could express a range of realisms – his words are particularly prescient of the reception of photographs in the digital age.
The making and online-sharing of photographs is a means of conveying a desired persona, and maintaining relationships. Photography functions as visual rhetoric that weaves a calculated personal narrative, rather than functioning as an “objective” document. This shift also has shaped habits of taking photographs in the digital age – one that has prompted commentators such as Craig Richards to quip that “[p]eople take photographs because they can, not because they should” (Brown, 2013).
This proposed chapter will take a closer look at the way by which social-media photographs create and maintain a persona, challenge traditional notions of the photograph’s documentary status, and condition performed behaviors. It will conclude with a longer Flusserian meditation on the way that seeing has been altered by the ubiquity of vernacular digital photography, which is scanned, skimmed, and consumed quickly.

Throughout photography's history, failure has played an essential, recurring part in the development and perceived value of this medium. Exploring a range of failures – individual and institutional, technological and historiographical – Photography and Failure asks what it means to fail and considers how this narrative of failure has shaped our understanding of photography.

From the trial-and-error beginnings of photochemistry to poor business decisions influenced by fickle public opinion and taste, the founders and early practitioners of photography frequently faced bankruptcy and ignominy. Alongside these individual 'failures', this collection of essays examines the role of museums in rediscovering, preserving and presenting photographs within institutions, as well as technological limitations, such as the problematic panoramic lens or the digital, archival failures of Snapchat. Moving beyond the physical photograph and these processes, the book also investigates the limitations of photographs themselves, as purveyors of truth, time, space, documentary realism and social change, whether these failures are used to effect or not. Finally, the book probes the historiographical failures affecting the discipline, drawing on key debates, such as the perceived over-emphasis on European and American photography, and the place of photography theory in contemporary art practice.

Blurring the boundaries between traditional binaries of art and non-art photography, amateur and professional practice, and individual and corporate perspectives, Photography and Failure presents a new approach to understanding and evaluating photographic history.

Contents:
1. Introduction: Noble Failure: Photography as Tragic Muse / Kris Belden-Adams -- 2. "Nothing Worthy of Notice"? The Daguerreian Gallery of T P. and D.C. Collins in Philadelphia / Anne Verplanck -- 3. Rodchenko's Photographic Communism / Todd Cronan -- 4. Exile and Erasure: Forgetting Ilse Bing / Donna West Brett -- 5. Mechanisms of Institutional Failure, Or the Impossible National Museum of French Photography, Eleonore Challine -- 6. Crimes Seen and Unseen: Fantasies and Failures of Photographic Truth in Joel Sternfeld's On This Site and Trevor Paglen's Limit Telephotography / Catherine Zuromskis -- 7. Toward an Ontology of African Studio Portraiture, Allison Moore -- 8. "Composita," the "Mascot" of the Smith College Class of 1886: Picturing Sisterhood, Social Caste, and Gender Roles / Kris Belden-Adams -- 9. Capturing the Invisible: Affect, Loss, and the Problematics of the Panoramic Image in Josef Sudek's Sad Landscapes / Amy Hughes -- 10. Default Delete: Photographic Archives in a Digital Age / Kate Palmer Albers -- 11. Copies and Clouds: Charles Negre and the Death of Emulation / Jacob W. Lewis -- 12. Thirty Times Failed: Valerio Vieira and Experimental Photography in Brazil / Cezar Bartholomeu -- 13. Success and Failure in African Photography / Kevin Mulhearn -- 14. Failure, Glorious Failure / Geoffrey Batchen.

Thispersondoesnotexist.com offers a refreshable, seductively realistic, series of images of exactly that: a steady supply of amalgamated images of fictional people. Built from an unknown number of Flickr photographs gleaned from the open archives of the internet, these photographically hyper-realistic images enjoy the appearance of veristic "truth," yet are framed by their status as synthetic products generated by Artificial Intelligence, or A.I. Like other images generated using A. I. algorithms (General Adversarial Networks, or GANs), thispersondoesnotexist is known as a "DeepFake" generator. Thispersondoesnotexist, its spinoffs (thisAirBnBdoesnotexist, thesecatsdonotexist, thiswaifudoesnotexist.net, and thisstartupdoesnotexist), FakeApp, DeepFaceLab, DeepDream, Lyrebird, AIMonaLisa, DeepNude, and a proliferation of others, create images and videos so seemingly realistic usingan archive of materials that they hardly – if at all – can be distinguished from actual video clips and photographs of real people. This technology, currently in its adolescence, is feared by many for its capacity to create "fake news." It feeds fears of a digitally-kindled, "post-truth," fake news, era of "alternative facts," and widespread information illiteracy. This essay examines the recent phenomenon of A.I . – generated DeepFakes and looks past the anxieties they have raised, in order to address their veracity and pace of machine learning. It considers that these images are extensions of digital photo/video montage practices that predate the digital era (even if the use of A. I.'s human-generated algorithms to make them is new). The emergence of digital media simply calls us to the task of articulating the complicated nature of ThisPersonDoesNotExist's "data portraits" – ones that may be produced independently by computers following human-provided directives.

This chapter takes a closer look at the way in which digital vernacular social-media photographs—the “selfie,” in particular—are used to create and maintain a social persona, and to present a version of the self as the poster/author wants to appear to others. As it is shared online, the selfie often conveys a deceptive sense of closeness between the picture-taker and audience. Selfie-taking, to some staff of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, also presented an opportunity to co-opt the assumed intimacy of the selfie to appear to connect with millennial voters. This essay examines the manner in which the selfie challenges traditional notions of critical distance between subject and photographer, subject and social-media audience, and between the selfie-taker and the Clinton Campaign.

During a 1998 interview, German photographer Andreas Gursky stated that since the photographic medium has been digitized, "a fixed definition of the term 'photography' has become impossible."(1) His statement echoes the written thoughts of several current photographers and scholars who have announced that photography is in the midst of an identity crisis with various apocalyptic names and explanations, including: "post-photography," "the post-medium condition," "photography after photography," and "the death of photography." These discussions are premised on the argument that the emergence of digital-manipulation software in the 1980s caused the medium to lose touch with one of its defining characteristics: its relationship to the real, or its indexicality. Digital photography has failed to measure up to those revolutionary prophecies. Since its invention, the medium of photography has had a malleable relationship to the real. In the essay accompanying his Plate XX: Lace from the book The Pencil of Nature (1844), William Henry Fox Talbot notes the photogram's ability "to exhibit the pattern with accuracy."(2) However, Talbot also dedicates a significant portion of that text to explaining the image's inaccuracy: the piece of lace, originally black, appears to be white in the photograph. Early published comments about Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre's 1838 photograph Boulevard du Temple remark on the photograph's fidelity to the appearance of the Paris street. These accounts also note the puzzling way in which the image's extended exposure omits moving objects such as carriages and pedestrians. Another often-overlooked founding father of photography, Hippolyte Bayard, "faked" - or rather, staged--his own death in Self Portrait as a Drowned Man (1840). The contingent nature of pre-digital photographic "truth" is the central thesis of the upcoming exhibition "Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop" (October 2012-February 2013) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Before the digital age, photography's conditional relationship to the real was reiterated with techniques such as lateral reversals, montage and collage, multiple exposures, retouching, hand-painting, and composite image-making practices. Lenses, filters, fast-moving shutters, swiveling cameras that sequentially exposed plates, moving film, masked apertures, and flash illumination further enabled photography's expressions of a malleable realism. Captions, shifting reception contexts (further accentuated by reproduction), and varying cultural functions reframed and destabilized notions of singular interpretations. As Corey Dzenko argued in Afterimage, viewers' expectations of photographic truth have not radically changed with the advent of digitally altered photography.(3) Prior to the introduction of digital-alteration software, photography's representational business-as-usual included a variable and sophisticated rhetoric of realisms that persists in the digital manifestation of the medium. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Perhaps digital photography's apparent status as yet another means of expressing a variable realism prompts its commentators to rise to a different challenge: the examination and articulation of the medium's variegated constructions and interpretations of the real. We might ask: How do photography's peculiar and elastic expressions of realism correspond to the conditions and limits of our fluid understanding of truth? More provocatively, this question could be reversed: How has photography shaped or conditioned our conceptions of the real at different inflection points in history? Indeed, this is an ambitious project that begs for discursive tools with a bandwidth for nuance and an intrinsic: embrace of contingency. Given its common use as a synonym for an essential, prescribed degree of photographic realism, the sometimes vilified term indexicality might seem an unlikely candidate for the task. …

Within a decade of photography’s unveiling, the passenger train (1830), computer (1833), and transatlantic telegraph (1844) were introduced, followed by the invention of the telephone (1876), automobile and X-ray (1890s), cinema (1894), radio (1900–1910), airplane (1903), television (1939), Internet (1969), first personal computer (1976), and cell phone (1982). Photography and this flurry of technological advances have accelerated, and even “annihilated,” the material foundations of the time/space nexus dramatically, forever redefining our already-malleable perceptions of space and time. As a consequence, time itself has been the subject of insistent theorization, speculation, and anxiety.

It was a notorious, dreaded, rite of passage for new students at the Northeastern USA’s elite, all-female colleges. As part of a mandatory “posture” class focused on personal and physical refinement, female students were regularly weighed, rigorously measured, and photographed fully nude 50 times more often than their male counterparts. The information and the images were reported to the college’s state government and to the national Eugenics Record Office (ERO). Students were photographed repeatedly if their posture needed improvement. Almost everyone’s did. These images helped the ERO create a set of aspirant pre-World War II “norms” by which students (and society as a whole) were measured and scrutinized: that of the New England, WASP/Protestant-descended gentry. It also helped identify students with physical disabilities, who were deemed incompatible with the eugenics movement’s goal of “good breeding”, while encouraging young women (eugenics’ primarily mute actors) to have children to drown out the genes of “[t]he morally worst, the most deformed” (Lavater 99). Posture pictures also physically regulated female students so their access to higher education might not make them overly “masculinized”, independent, and resistant to their plights as mothers, socialites, and supporters of their husbands’ careers. The “compulsory visibility”, in Michel Foucault’s terms, of these women also expressed “disciplinary power” by affirming their innate subject-hood. Thus, this photographic practice assisted in the training of generations of college women to accept, rather than challenge, existing patriarchal power structures and gender-based behavioral expectations.

During a 1998 interview, German photographer Andreas Gursky stated that "since the photographic medium has been digitized, a fixed definition of the term 'photography' has become impossible." His statement echoes the written thoughts of several current photographers and scholars who have announced that photography is in the midst of an identity crisis with various apocalyptic names and explanations, including: post-photography, the post-medium condition, photography after photography, and  the death of photography. These discussions are premised on the argument that the emergence of digital-manipulation software in the 1980s caused the medium to lose touch with one of its defining characteristics: its relationship to the real, or its indexicality. Digital photography has failed to measure up to those revolutionary prophecies. Since its invention, the medium of photography has had a malleable relationship to the real. In the essay accompanying his Plate XX: Lace from the book The Pencil of Nature (1844), William Henry Fox Talbot notes the photogram's ability to exhibit the pattern with accuracy. However, Talbot also dedicates a significant portion of that text to explaining the image's inaccuracy: the piece of lace, originally black, appears to be white in the photograph. Early published comments about Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre's 1838 photograph Boulevard du Temple remark on the photograph's fidelity to the appearance of the Paris street. These accounts also note the puzzling way in which the image's extended exposure omits moving objects such as carriages and pedestrians. Another often-overlooked founding father of photography, Hippolyte Bayard, "faked" - or rather, staged -- his own death in Self Portrait as a Drowned Man (1840). The contingent nature of pre-digital photographic "truth" is the central thesis of the upcoming exhibition "Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop" (October 2012-February 2013) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Before the digital age, photography's conditional relationship to the real was reiterated with techniques such as lateral reversals, montage and collage, multiple exposures, retouching, hand-painting, and composite image-making practices. Lenses, filters, fast-moving shutters, swiveling cameras that sequentially exposed plates, moving film, masked apertures, and flash illumination further enabled photography's expressions of a malleable realism. Captions, shifting reception contexts (further accentuated by reproduction), and varying cultural functions reframed and destabilized notions of singular interpretations. As Corey Dzenko argued in Afterimage, viewers' expectations of photographic truth have not radically changed with the advent of digitally altered photography.(3) Prior to the introduction of digital-alteration software, photography's representational business-as-usual included a variable and sophisticated rhetoric of realisms that persists in the digital manifestation of the medium. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Perhaps digital photography's apparent status as yet another means of expressing a variable realism prompts its commentators to rise to a different challenge: the examination and articulation of the medium's variegated constructions and interpretations of the real. We might ask: How do photography's peculiar and elastic expressions of realism correspond to the conditions and limits of our fluid understanding of truth? More provocatively, this question could be reversed: How has photography shaped or conditioned our conceptions of the real at different inflection points in history? Indeed, this is an ambitious project that begs for discursive tools with a bandwidth for nuance and an intrinsic: embrace of contingency. Given its common use as a synonym for an essential, prescribed degree of photographic realism, the sometimes vilified term indexicality might seem an unlikely candidate for the task.

Thispersondoesnotexist.com offers a refreshable, seductively realistic, series of images of exactly that: a steady supply of amalgamated images of fictional people. Built from an unknown number of Flickr photographs gleaned from the open archives of the internet, these photographically hyper-realistic images enjoy the appearance of veristic "truth," yet are framed by their status as synthetic products generated by Artificial Intelligence, or A.I. Like other images generated using A. I. algorithms (General Adversarial Networks, or GANs), thispersondoesnotexist is known as a "DeepFake" generator. Thispersondoesnotexist, its spinoffs (thisAirBnBdoesnotexist, thesecatsdonotexist, thiswaifudoesnotexist.net, and thisstartupdoesnotexist), FakeApp, DeepFaceLab, DeepDream, Lyrebird, AIMonaLisa, DeepNude, and a proliferation of others, create images and videos so seemingly realistic usingan archive of materials that they hardly – if at all – can be distinguished from actua...

In an exhibition-catalog essay for the 2012 exhibition “Lifelike” at The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, curator Siri Engberg suggested that “the utterly mundane reimagined through an artist’s careful hand or sly recontextualization can appear striking, even radical.” Thus, the Walker claimed that the meticulous, studied trompe l’oeil realism of the work in this exhibition aspired to make the familiar unfamiliar. While this is one approach to defining the goal of contemporary “hyper-realism,” another might include the reclaiming of the everyday “non-art” objects of Marcel Duchamp’s “readymade,” only to render them an extremely well-crafted form. For instance, Tom Friedman’s Untitled (2001) presents a convincing, realistically scaled bee made of clay, wire, hair, plastic, and paint. Only instead of fleeing the bee, viewers are encouraged to approach the insect as it sits quarantined and still in its vitrine, and to inspect the object at great detail. Friedman’s bee is refined and m...

This chapter takes a closer look at the way in which digital vernacular social-media photographs—the “selfie,” in particular—are used to create and maintain a social persona, and to present a version of the self as the poster/author wants to appear to others. As it is shared online, the selfie often conveys a deceptive sense of closeness between the picture-taker and audience. Selfie-taking, to some staff of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, also presented an opportunity to co-opt the assumed intimacy of the selfie to appear to connect with millennial voters. This essay examines the manner in which the selfie challenges traditional notions of critical distance between subject and photographer, subject and social-media audience, and between the selfie-taker and the Clinton Campaign.

In White Noise, Don DeLillo wrote of a welltrafficked tourist destination he called “The Most Photographed Barn in America.” Because it is known through a proliferation of photographs, he suggests, “no one sees the barn” anymore. Thus, making a picture of the barn is not about ‘looking’, but akin to “taking pictures of taking pictures” –a performative mass social ritual of image-making. This behavior also is a relational means of collapsing physical space to connect psychologically and virtually with larger narratives of the human experience for both the selfie subject and their social-media followers. Thus, travel selfies remediate physical and psychological distances and, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, “bring things spatially and humanly closer.” This essay takes a closer look the reframing of both physical distance and psychological presence by digital travel selfies. Rather than being a means of producing subjects/objects to behold and to archive as ‘embalmed’ memories or artifacts...

At first glance, John L. Lovell’s Harvard class portraits appear to represent one man and one woman. But instead, these composite photographs personify the “average” appearance of the entire classes of 1887 at Harvard University and the “Annex,” or Boston’s Protestant Brahmin elite. Composite photographs such as these, which held scientific gravity as part of the Harvard-entrenched Positive Eugenics movement, were composed of an incomplete data set. Thus, they offer a revised view of Allan Sekula’s ideas about composite photography’s requisite statistical potency. In addition, the Harvard composites call for a more nuanced articulation of their indexical functions, within the context of late nineteenth-century trends in the production of visual statistics and knowledge.

Immediately following their presentation in the form of a visible image by German physics professor Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen in 1895, “X-rays” became the subject of widespread global public fascination. The rays’ mysterious ability to penetrate solid objects and provide a lasting image of interior forms of an object – without even piercing its surface – revolutionized and liberated scientific consciousness. In an X-ray image, the unseen could be seen. Instantly, the X-ray’s revelations made conceptions of reality much more complicated and imaginative, because scientific knowledge was proven to no longer be limited to only phenomena observable by the human eye. Acceptance of the X-ray was predicated on the logic of empiricism. People believed what they could perceive first-hand with their senses, and “light writing” (or, “photography” – which had a privileged ability to capture fleeting events with a relative fidelity to reality) was positioned as a trusted source of authentification. Because the X-ray, also called “new photography,” could capture the unseen, it was given credence for having a greater sensitivity than the sense perception of human beings. This paper takes a closer look at the mass-cultural reception of this photographic practice to examine how the “Röntgen Rays” both complicated and liberated scientific notions of reality.

Call for Book Chapters for Proposed Volume

Despite their lively expressions of social histories, personal and group identities, and of family cohesion, photographic albums made by “the Other” rarely receive extended scholarly study.
In our histories, subjects and album-makers whose albums and images express a difference based on gender, sexual orientation, class, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and disability, for example, have been shunned in favor of exploring album practices by a Victorian-era upper class, or a twentieth-century, Euro- and U.S.-centric middle class dazzled by “Kodakification.”

This proposed volume seeks papers addressing a range of photographic practices by “Others” from around the globe, from any time period, and from a variety of social/cultural contexts, whose albums present narratives that move beyond those reflected in our existing histories. We are particularly interested in the visual strategies that album makers have used to assert control over the presentation of their histories and identities, and what those narratives have to say.

Questions of specific interest may include: To what degree (and via what processes) have photographic albums allowed marginalized people a greater level of agency in the recording of their representation than that which existed before the 1839 invention of photography?  On the other hand, to what degree (and via what processes) have albums fostered the inculcation of conformist ideas (or their opposite) about the expected appearance of individuals, families, and communities? How do albums create alternative spaces for the private expression of identities not always acknowledged in the broader photographic media? Or, may domestic albums reinforce in private the photographic norms circulating in public? In what ways might the migration of albums to digital platforms have changed the function, circulation, narrative functions, and expectations of photographic albums?

Proposals can focus on single albums as unique case studies or on broader album-making traditions in a period and/or location. A range of methodologies and international contexts are encouraged.

Please direct questions to Mary Trent (trentms@cofc.edu) and Kris Belden-Adams (kkbelden@olemiss.edu). E-mail proposals of 250 words (plus 1-2 images, as needed) and cv to trentms@cofc.edu and kkbelden@olemiss.edu by 4/1/20.

During an interview in 1998, German photographer Andreas Gursky stated that “since the photographic medium has been digitalized, a fixed definition of the term ‘photography’ has become impossible.” His statement echoes the written thoughts of several photographers and scholars surrounding the year 2000, who announced that photography is in the midst of an ontological identity crisis (which has been given various names and explanations, including: “post-photography,” “the post-medium condition,” “photography after photography” and “the death of photography”). These discussions are premised on the following: that the emergence of digital-manipulation software in the 1980s and eventual viral ubiquity caused the medium to lose touch with one of its defining characteristics, its relationship to “the real.”
These questions ultimately have led us to consider whether digital-manipulation technology did indeed bring about a radical and unprecedented displacement of the photograph’s ontological status as a truthful document. This essay will examine that question through a brief look at the “Post-Photography” viewpoints and at exemplary photographs from throughout the medium’s history that suggest that as long as photographs have existed, their expression of “the real” has been malleable.
The “Post-Photography” debates, though, have given scholars an opportunity to move from a discussion of ontology to more flexible theoretical discussions that allow for explorations of a varying range of photographic “realisms,” and for the medium’s slippage between Peirceian indexicality to iconicity. With reference to the work of Gursky, it will be argued that today’s “Post-Digital” age is shaped by the absorption of such a view of the complexity of photographic “truth” that emerged from the “Post-Photographic” discourses. As the medium’s digitization and has become almost entirely uncontroversial, it has been accepted as a state of being for photography, and one with roots in analog explorations.

Walter Benjamin wrote about the revolutionary impact that the ubiquity of photographic circulation had upon human consciousness, and upon previously stable conceptions of time and space. He defined the term “aura” – a quality possessed by an “original” material image – as a “strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be.” Benjamin suggested that an object’s “aura” is essentially and necessarily related to that object’s unique relationship to a particular, physical, original, temporal and spatial context. Photographic reproduction, he noted, carried images across multiple spaces and times, made them ubiquitous, and replaced the “aura” with easy familiarity, contingency, and invitations for viewers to weave new contexts and multiple meanings for images.
Although Benjamin was writing about the effects of photographically induced visual stimulation ubiquity in the 1930s, his ideas are particularly prescient of the state of photography in our current Post-Digital age, during which photography’s digitization and its diversity of social practices have become normalized and entrenched in our sensorium to such a degree that their effects may be studied and theorized. Smartphones enable photographers to share their digital images online with a global audience almost as quickly as they are made. The voracity of image exchange exceeds the ubiquity that Benjamin witnessed, but not necessarily its numbing effects upon the human visual sensorium. This essay examines those effects with reference not only to Benjamin’s observations, but also to contemporary commentators who have argued that the act of photographing has become a mere reflex that lacks reflection: “we will photograph everything and look at nothing.”
As images that are rooted in no material “original,” digitally circulated photographs lack a connection to an original space/time/singular presence, or “aura.” They inhabit an ephemeral nexus as digital facsimiles available for recirculation on the ephemeral walls of social-media sites – which make unstable semi-public archives. Thus, with such images, Benjamin’s fear, that photographic reproduction would, in effect, obliterate the material specificity of the “aura,” finds fruition. 
This proposed book chapter examines these aspects of digital photography, and explores the conundrums that its transitory nature and its near-instantaneous exchange pose for the human senses. Specifically, it will be argued that digital photography is a fittingly immaterial form for exploring the fluctuating conditions of time and space in the digital age, a time in which all previously held “solid” conceptions of material time and space have been thrown into contention in an unprecedented manner.

At first glance, photographer John L. Lovell’s Harvard class portraits appear to represent one man and one woman. But instead, these composite photographs personify the “average” appearance of the entire, all-male and all-female classes of 1887 at Harvard University and the Harvard “Annex,” or the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women (which would be chartered in 1894 as Radcliffe College). To make these portraits, Lovell carefully aligned and re-photographed dozens of portraits on a single negative to create singular accumulated images from the multiple layered exposures. Individual students’ facial features and bodies are obscured in a ghostly haze as they coalesce (with the aid of generous retouching) to form pictures of human beings who never existed.

These photographs, which were archived by Harvard and sold as keepsakes to students and their parents, function as a representation a particular social caste: Boston’s Protestant Brahmin elite. Lovell employed Francis Galton’s technique of composite portraiture – which enjoyed great popularity in those decades at the Brahmin-funded institution of Harvard, for its capacity to evoke the connections between a group’s physical attributes and its perceived intelligence, talents and even – deviant inclinations. Placed within their socio-cultural context, Lovell’s Harvard class portraits represent a visual typology of a class of Bostonian semi-aristocrats whose inherited wealth and elevated social position enabled them to enjoy and wield considerable social, economic, and political power. The figures in Lovell’s portraits are “real” without being “actual.”

This essay takes a closer look at the history of this practice of image-making and the unique questions the Harvard composites conjure about photography’s flexible representations of “the real.” As it does so, this essay offers a revised view of photographer and theorist Allan Sekula’s ideas about composite photography’s relationship to the archive. It also examines the connections between the Harvard class portraits and “Positive Eugenics,” the maintenance of power structures and social classes, and to late-nineteenth-century trends in the production of visual statistics and knowledge.

This essay takes a closer look at Lange’s intended readings of the two Plantation Owner/Overseer, Mississippi Delta, Near Clarksdale, Mississippi photographs, and the manner by which Lange used these images to point out problems that the R.A.’s relief efforts overlooked or enabled. Her goals for the images will be supplemented with new research about the identity of her subjects, the specific setting, and the social/economic/racial conditions unique to that particular part of the Mississippi Delta.
Lange’s stated intentions for the Plantation Owner/Overseer photographs differed from the mission statement for Lange’s division expressed by her supervisor Roy Stryker. This clash of goals is particularly apparent in R.A./F.S.A. photography technicians’ creation of a third, cropped version of the Plantation Owner/Overseer image that removed the African American men from the steps to accentuate the prominence of the plantation owner/overseer. This altered print based on Lange’s Plantation Owner negative better met Stryker’s stated goals for R.A./F.S.A. photographs, and was circulated widely. It appeared most notably in the poetry book Land of the Free (1938) by National-Book-Award honoree and Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Archibald MacLeish. This essay will trace these various intentions and reception histories for Lange’s Plantation Owner/Overseer negatives and will contemplate differing functions and meanings of those two photographic exposures.

Dr. Belden-Adams was selected to receive a grant endowed by the Swiss National Science Foundation to travel to the IAWIS (International Association of Word and Image Studies) conference at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), and to present this paper in the session titled “Ironic Reproductions: Benjamin’s Blind Spot and Baudelairean Modernity,” on July 13, 2017.

Kris Belden-Adams presented the 40-minute invited lecture titled “Memory-Embalming No More: Digital Vernacular Social-Media Photographs and the Reframing of Remembrance” at the University Paris VII - Denis Diderot on Feb. 24, 2017, as part of the LARCA-François Brunet Seminars on the History of Photography.
https://camemoria.hypotheses.org/category/resumes-des-communications-summaries-of-past-contributions