Pictorialism

Völlig neue Bild- und Erfahrungswelten versprechen die jüngsten Produkte der Medienindustrie ihren Usern. Euphorisch investieren Google, Microsoft und Co. Unsummen in digitale Medientechnologien wie Virtual-Reality-Displays. Jeder Blockbuster muss in 3D gedreht werden. Entwicklungen wie diese verdeutlichen nicht nur den hohen Stellenwert, der sowohl der technologischen Seite als auch den ästhetischen Strategien visueller Medien zukommt. Sie werfen auch eine Reihe von Fragen auf: Wie adressieren multimodale Medienarrangements die Sinne der Rezipienten? Welche Rolle spielen Technologie und Wahrnehmung bei der Modellierung von Bildwirkungen? Um diese Fragen zu beantworten, legt der vorliegende Band den Fokus auf die Analyse medialer Interfaces. Konzentrierte sich die Bewegtbilder-Reihe bislang auf den Film, widmet sich Bild und Interface auch interaktiven Digital- und Computerspielbildern. Dadurch sollen weitere Bausteine einer kritischen Bewegtbildwissenschaft herausgearbeitet werden.

John Cyril (Jack) Cato, F.R.P.S. (4 April 1889 – 14 August 1971) was a significant Australian portrait photographer in the Pictorialist style, operating in the first half of the twentieth century. He was the author of the first history of Australian photography; The Story of the Camera in Australia (1955).
This is a Design and Art Australia Online (DAAO) entry I have written and uploaded, also to Wikipedia (uploaded 1–4 December 2014), and pending publication on Luminous Lint

Looking Away: the Critical Reception of the Work of F. Holland Day in Paris in 1901

A key figure of the studies dedicated to the homoerotic photograph, American pictorialist F. Holland Day (1864-1933) patiently built a poetic world inhabited by obviously sensual male nudes. Yet, the critical reception of his work by his contemporaries shows no acknowledgment of this sensuality no more than it takes into account his taste for the nude. The “Exhibition of the Work of F. Holland Day and the American New School”, shown in Paris in 1901, reveals the paralysis of the critics when confronted to the unusual eroticism of Day’s nonstandard aesthetic. Despite its obviousness, his constant fascination for the male body is thoroughly ignored. Examining the critical reception of the Parisian exhibition of 1901, this article aims to study the willful blindness of the critics and the way Day’s contemporaries completely overlooked the sensuality and homoeroticism of his photographs to refocus the debate on the more conventional characteristics of his work, thus denying it one of its main specific features.

Figure incontournable des études consacrées à la photographie homoérotique, le pictorialiste américain F. Holland Day (1864-1933) est l’auteur d’un œuvre peuplé de nus masculins à la sensualité manifeste. Pourtant, l’analyse de la réception de ses photographies par ses contemporains révèle que cette sensualité n’est jamais prise en compte pas plus que son goût pour le nu n’est véritablement analysé. L’exposition des « Œuvres de F. Holland Day et de la nouvelle école américaine », présentée à Paris en 1901, illustre cette paralysie des critiques face à l’érotisme inhabituel des créations hors normes de l’Américain. Bien qu’évidente, la récurrence du motif du corps masculin n’y est jamais prise en compte. À travers le prisme de la réception critique de cette exposition, cet article présente l’histoire d’un aveuglement volontaire et examine la manière dont les contemporains de Day occultèrent délibérément la dimension sensuelle et homoérotique de ses photographies pour recentrer le débat sur des spécificités plus « acceptables » de son œuvre, niant au passage l’une de ses principales qualités.

The paper reveals the history of photographic exhibitions which were held in Kyiv from the mid-19th to the early 20th cc. It demonstrates how Kyiv became one of the most important centres of the artistic photography in the Russian empire. In Kyiv the first photographic exhibition took place in 1867, however, only after the establishment of the Kyiv photographic society “Daguerre” in 1902 the photographic exhibitions became true artistic events holding on the regular basis. As far as the Daguerre society maintained close relations with the Paris photographic club as well as other photographic associations from all over the Europe, a lot of photographers from France, Germany, the United Kingdom and other countries were able to exhibit their works in Kyiv. In particular, the works by famous European and American pictorialists, such as Robert Demachy, Constant Puyo, Rudolf Dührkoop, Alfred Stieglitz, were featured in the exhibitions of 1908 and 1911. Both exhibitions contributed significantly to the promotion of photography in the Russian empire and integration of its amateur photographers into the worldwide artistic community. There were about one hundred members of the Daguerre society. Most of them were amateur photographers who worked as railway engineers in Kyiv and nearby towns. Their creative work was inspired mainly by classical styles of painting, including the Russian realist school, as well as the European pictorial photography. The most prominent member of the Daguerre society was Mykola Petrov who launched teaching of photography in Kyiv Polytechnic institute for the first time the Russian empire. Petrov and his followers strongly supported an ‘artistic’ approach to photography. In 1908-1908 they arranged the International photographic exhibition and All-Russian conference of photographers in Kyiv. The conference approved a resolution, which proclaimed photography as a separate branch of visual art and encouraged organizing committees of photographic exhibitions to accept only the images of significant artistic value. This proclamation caused a negative feedback from the supporters of documentary and scientific photography. Among them was the well-known Russian photographer and chemist Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky. Different views on the goals of photographic exhibitions caused fierce debates between him and Mykola Petrov.
Key words: photographic exhibitions, pictorialism, artistic photography, Kyiv photographic society “Daguerre”, Mykola Petrov, Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky.

The development of the interdisciplinary studies has influenced how critics conceive of literary works. Approaching literature through another artistic discipline such as the painterly or the theatrical allows interpreters to explore in depth the artistic dimension of literature as to the visual and the performative. These pictorial paradigms in the Modernist short stories, for instance, are one of the founding stones of the very meaning of the tales in that they are the concrete embodiment of how form serves content. As a proto-Modernist, Joseph Conrad is no exception. His short stories adhere to those paradigms. His "The Informer" is a story of anarchists where action reigns supreme, evoking certain visual elements in the audiences' minds, next to the abundance of descriptions and portrayals which add to the pictorial aspect of the tale. Within this framework, this essay attempts at exploring how the pictorial paradigm (as an aesthetic and structural/formal element) serves the thematic focus of the narrative (basically the social and political.) It thus addresses the characters' portrayal, the tale's style, and their thematic implications by means of satire to establish that latter aspect. This is with reference as to how the author's philosophies about those themes are being performed in relation with the storytelling process as a guiding line throughout the essay. In a first part, this essay will tackle the different character portrayals and their entailed mental images. In another part, it will deal with another aspect of the pictorial, which is the performative, and how the latter has to do with scene creation.

Zhuang, Wubin. “政治與身份認同：泰國當代攝影”. "現代美術", March 2015, 29-34.

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This is a translated and abridged version of my earlier essay, titled "Politics and Identity: Contemporary Photography in Thailand" (2011). This Chinese version is published on "Modern Art" in Taiwan.

Bertellini traces the origins of American cinema's century-long fascination with Italy and Italian immigrants to the popularity of the pre-photographic aesthetic—the picturesque. Once associated with landscape painting in northern Europe, the picturesque came to symbolize Mediterranean Europe through comforting views of distant landscapes and exotic characters. Taking its cue from a picturesque stage backdrop from The Godfather Part II, Italy in Early American Cinema shows how this aesthetic was transferred from 19th-century American painters to early 20th-century American filmmakers. Italy in Early American Cinema offers readings of early films that pay close attention to how landscape representations that were related to narrative settings and filmmaking locations conveyed distinct ideas about racial difference and national destiny.

In 1895, Robert Demachy (1859-1936) exhibited his first gum bichromate prints in Paris, London and Brussels. Viewers of these new photographs were amazed by their general appearance, their colour, their aesthetics and considered them as a photographic revolution at a time when pictorial photographers were struggling to find new and artistic printing methods. Demachy’s masterly gum prints made him immediately famous throughout Europe and in the United States, and he thus became the most well-known and respected member of the Photo-Club de Paris. He kept this position until 1914, when the outbreak of the First World War suddenly put an end to his photographic activities. In the meantime, he was unanimously considered as...

A “frying pan” of some interest, since it depicts a longboat, (Syros Museum 1163)  was found in a rescue excavation conducted under the direction of the author in the Roussos field at Chalandriani in Syros in 2002-2008. The field lies in the West Sector of the Early Cycladic Chalandriani cemetery . The excavation revealed 28 undisturbed graves of the corbelled type with grave goods more or less similar to those from Tsountas’s excavations, and distinguished by their variety and wealth. The new find (from Grave VII), besides enlarging the corpus of known depictions of longboats on ‘frying pans’, provides an opportunity, because of its well-documented contexts, to understand better certain aspects of these intriguing objects and the EBA II Chalandriani society they reflect.

El pictorialismo moderno. Amanda Bouchenoire y sus visiones poéticas es un ensayo que aborda cómo la obra de la fotógrafa gala ilustra con claridad la delimitación entre sus creaciones y la fotografía utilitaria con el propósito de beneficiar los atributos pictóricos.

The result of recent research and discoveries, this exhibition catalog offers an updated and broader vision of the pictorialist endeavor in Europe from the 1890s to the 1950s. It reproduces the work of about fifty different photographers both well-known and newly discovered. Most of the selected photographs are published for the first time.

Este artículo es un ensayo sobre las diferentes teorías en torno a las
relaciones entre la fotografía y la tradición alquímica a lo largo de su historia. Partiendo de un análisis del contexto cultural en el que se forjó el nuevo sistema de representación, bajo la doble influencia del romanticismo y la filosofía positivista, se examinan las conexiones entre el estudio de los materiales fotosensibles realizado por los alquimistas y por los inventores de la fotografía, así como su posterior interpretación metafórica en clave simbólica, caracterizada por su naturaleza epistemológica y espiritual ligada a la creación artística

This is an abridged article revisiting the life of K.F. Wong (b. 1916, Sibu-d. 1998, China) who was once the most famous photographer in Southeast Asia. It is not easy to reappraise his work today without speaking on behalf of the people whom Wong befriended and photographed. Unfortunately, I am unable to expound on it in this essay.

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Zhuang, Wubin. “From the Archives: The Work of Photographer K.F. Wong”. BiblioAsia, July-September 2019, 52-58.

Born in Germany in 1861, Minna Keene lived in Cape Town during a prolific phase of her photographic career. Whilst at the Cape (1903-1913), she achieved international acclaim as a pictorialist photographer. Her photographs of South African subject matter were shown at exhibitions across the world. She was quick to recognise opportunities to translate her photographic success into financial profit and was one of very few women to operate a photographic studio in early-twentieth century South Africa. Keene actively circulated reproductions of her photographs as self-published postcards and in popular publications. Through these interventions, she made a substantial contribution to popular visual culture at the Cape and was celebrated by local and international audiences. Despite her pioneering status, she has been overlooked in the existing literature on South African photography, and, although she has received limited attention in Euro-American histories of photography, much remains unknown about her life and work, especially in relation to her time in Cape Town. Drawing on multi-sited research, I present a biographical account of Keene which analyses the ambivalent gender politics in her photographs as well as her uncritical adoption of colonial categories of race.

Historians occasionally use timelines, but many seem to regard such signs merely as ways of visually summarizing results that are presumably better expressed in prose. Challenging this language-centered view, I suggest that timelines might assist the generation of novel historical insights. To show this, I begin by looking at studies confirming the cognitive benefits of diagrams like timelines. I then try to survey the remarkable diversity of timelines by analyzing actual examples. Finally, having conveyed this (mostly untapped) potential, I argue that neglecting timelines might mean neglecting significant aspects of reality that are revealed only by those signs. My overall message is that, once we accept that relations are as important for the mind as what they relate, we have to pay closer attention to any semiotic device that enables or facilitates the discernment of new relations.

Robert Demachy. Impressions of Normandy (photographs of the Calvados county, 1880-1920) – At the turn of the 20th century, Robert Demachy (1859-1936) was the leader of the French school of pictorial photography. A true artist and lover of Normandy, he had elected, as a means of expression, not the brush, the pencil or the chisel, but the camera. He dedicated his whole life to it, fighting tirelessly for the recognition of photography as a means of artistic creation.

Zhuang, Wubin. “Teaching Photography in Southeast Asia: A Tentative Mapping.” In Goodearth: Expressions of Creative Energy, exh. cat., 74-80. Kuala Lumpur: Galeri Petronas, 2017.

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This is a mapping of the evolving ways in which photography has been taught since the colonial era in Southeast Asia.

Mit dem Band „Fotografie zwischen Inszenierung und Dokumentation“ liegt der letzte Band der Veranstaltungsreihe vor, der sich mit dem oft problematischen Wechselverhältnis von Fotografie, Abbild und Wirklichkeit befasst. Fotografie zeigt sich demgemäß nicht ausschließlich als Authentifizierungsgeste und Indiz realistischer Fakten, sondern vor allem in künstlerischer Dimension, als inszeniertes Artefakt und Modus des Fiktiven. Fotografie wird, und in diesem Tatbestand sind sich die einzelnen Beiträge einig, zu einem Wahrnehmungsexperiment, welches die Wahrnehmung des Rezipienten herausfordert.

El perpetuo retorno de la fotografía pictorialista, es una mirada breve a algunas obras representativas del movimiento fotográfico que acoge la perspectiva pictórica que hoy se revela como un superviviente estético entre la enorme oferta de un mundo hiperdigitalizado, redimido, aquí, por la extraordinaria obra de Edward Weston, Amanda Bouchenoire, Sarah Moon y Lara Zankoul.

Edward Steichen's name is associated with the emergence of two aesthetically and thematically different and even oppositely oriented movements in photography. At the beginning of the 20th century Steichen was a pioneer of Pictorialism, and his 1904 photograph The Pond- Moonlight is a textbook example of this artistic style: intimate, romantic, timeless, and painterly. Yet in the mid-20th century Steichen became a master of American political propaganda in photography and remains known for the creation of a radically new and different type of photography exhibit. In Steichen's curated photography exhibits, Road to Victory (1942) and The Family of Man (1955) at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, photographs lost their individuality, and the participating photographers' original intentions were sacrificed for the sake of creating an atmosphere of patriotic pathos. This article examines the two contradictory directions in Steichen's career and their interpretations by art historians in order to establish a broader context for the work on view in the exhibition Edward Steichen. Photography (Latvian National Museum of Art, The Arsenals Exhibition Hall, June 26 – September 6, 2015).

During the turn of the nineteenth century, Edward Sheriff Curtis embarked upon an epic mission to photographically document the Indigenous peoples of the North American continent. His pseudo-ethnological, pictorialist approach often portrayed romanticized images of ‘the vanishing race’ through representations of a simulated and constructed Indigenous subject. Curtis’ photography reinforced the reduction of unique Indigenous identities by absorbing, assimilating, and re-translating his subjects into a monoethnic identity. His published body of work The North American Indian became the source document by which all future North American Indigenous cultures’ ethnographic information would be archived, romanticized, and caricaturized by the dominant Western world. Curtis’ photographs of Indigenous peoples are compelling, in part because of the impetus they provide for critical reflection, but more importantly, for the visual analysis of the past, present, and future of contemporary Indigenous people. Curtis’ photographs misrepresent and, in some cases, ignore the experiences of the individuals they are subjugating. When a dominant culture engages in the act of representing a conquered minority, it is prudent to question the motives behind the act, only then can considerations about the subjects be made. These photographic representations leave the canon of marginalized cultures to be viewed through a settler’s-lens that circumvents the more complete picture of colonial American history, one of violence and brutality against the Indigenous peoples of this continent. Through postIndian theorist, Gerald Vizenor’s concepts of survivance, and a postcolonial mode of critical visual analysis, this essay will deconstruct and reinterpret selected works of Edward S. Curtis’ paradoxical representations of Indigenous people, and detail acts of contemporary Indigenous survivance as a way to examine contemporary Indigenous photographer, Will Wilson.

La Heráldica como ciencia auxiliar de la Historia no se funda, en puridad, hasta bien entrada la Baja Edad Media con motivo de la fijación de la lengua de los blasones. Tal acontecimiento ha quedado recogido en la Comedieta de Ponza del marqués de Santillana, en cuyas coplas percibimos la presencia de tres descripciones de escudos de armas blasonados conforme al código heráldico introducido por Jean Courtois a principios del siglo XV. Sin embargo, al ser adaptado el procedimiento en cuestión al contexto literario, Santillana propicia, en calidad de poeta heraldo, la aparición de un nuevo género ecfrástico: el blasón poético. En este artículo trataremos de identificar los referentes de los escudos nobiliarios descritos en la Comedieta de Ponza y discutiremos el significado ideológico y político que encierran los emblemas al interpretarlos en función del convulso marco histórico en el que se enmarca la obra. Asimismo, ponderaremos la índole del blasón poético como variante de la écfrasis y su condición como manifestación temprana de la doctrina ut pictura poesis, poniendo el énfasis en la forma en que esta miniatura poética refleja los ideales estilísticos del autor.     

As auxiliary science to History, Heraldry is not founded, strictly speaking, until the late Middle Ages due to the strengthening of the language of blazon. Such an event has been recorded in Little Comedy of Ponza by the Marquis of Santillana. We find three descriptions of coats of arms in its pages, emblazoned according to the heraldic code introduced by Jean Courtois in the early 15th Century. However, by adapting the procedure itself to the literary context, Santillana contributed, as herald poet, to the emergence of a new ekphrastic genre: the poetic blazon. This article will try to locate the references for the nobility badges described in Little Comedy of Ponza and will discuss the ideological and political meaning within the coats of arms as well, in order to interpret them considering the period of upheaval in which the work is framed. In addition, we will analyse the nature of poetic blazon as a sort of ekphrasis and its status as an early manifestation of the doctrine ut pictura poesis, emphasizing how this poetic miniature reflects the stylistic ideals held by the author.

Mathilde Weil was once listed among "The Foremost Women Photographers in America"; however, her work is relatively little known today. This article places her in the context of the development of Pictorialism and also looks at her pioneering work in portraiture beyond the studio.

The article appears in 19th Century, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Spring 2015).

Son los teóricos neoaristotélicos italianos quienes consolidan en la segunda mitad del siglo xvi la doctrina de las unidades dramáticas. Los autores españoles, sin embargo, proceden a una redefinición de los preceptos clásicos, a fin de proporcionar a la dramaturgia unos parámetros teóricos novedosos y una dimensión social mayor acorde a los nuevos tiempos. Nace así la comedia nueva del Siglo de Oro, apuesta teatral que aboga por la mezcla de géneros y asimismo por una mayor libertad creativa con respecto a las rígidas unidades dramáticas. Con todo, el nuevo modelo teatral español no supone tanto un rechazo de los principios y mecanismos poéticos introducidos por Aristóteles, cuanto una reformulación de la doctrina neoaristotélica procedente de Italia. La mímesis, la unidad de la obra o el decoro se mantienen como pilares poéticos. La comedia nueva comulga, por tanto, con el espíritu neoaristotélico de la época, pero desde una óptica diferente a la preceptiva italiana. La influencia del Estagirita se aprecia claramente en la renovación y actualización de la anagnórisis aristotélica, al convertir los dramaturgos áureos la pintura en un recurso de agnición característico de la comedia siglodorista. Tal aspecto será analizado en este artículo en razón del vivo diálogo que palabras e imágenes mantienen en el Barroco bajo la directriz ut pictura poesis.

Resumo: Este artigo pretende apresentar e discutir, no âmbito do surgimento e consolidação da fotografia como forma de expressão artística reprodutível, a produção fotográfica realizada pelo primeiro movimento artístico organizado ao redor da fotografia, o pictorialismo. Para tanto, serão consideradas as produções europeias bem como as norte-americanas, para assim permitir melhor compreensão e avaliação, de um ponto de vista materialista histórico, dos conteúdos sócio-históricos sedimentados em tais produções. Palavras-chave: Fotografia, Pictorialismo, Crítica de arte, História da Fotografia. Abstract: This article intends to present and discuss, considering the rise and consolidation of photography as a reproductible form of art, the photographic production of the first artistic movement organised around photography, that is, pictorialism. Both the European and the North-American productions will be considered in order to better comprehend and evaluate, from a materialist and historical standpoint, the socio-historical contents sedimented in such artistic productions.