rgscarter's visual [41 articles]

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This paper deals with comic books as both a textual and visual form, arguing that the present literatures on the geographies of reading and visuality neglect this kind of hybrid. Comic book producers' discursive construction of their audience is key to the way in which comic book visuality becomes a set of 'conventions' that are materialised through the printing process. These conventions are linked to cinematic visuality through their use of montage, but differ in several key ways, including the elasticity ...

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Both American and Iraqi women were affected by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq by coalition forces in March 2003. Yet women were shown in less than one-fifth of the 480 war-related photographs in a sample from 18 U.S. daily newspapers, three U.S. news magazines, and those publications websites. In addition, Iraqi women were less likely to appear than U.S. women, partly because of the news media's intense focus on injured American soldier Jessica Lynch during the early weeks of the war. ...

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Abstract

Women were widely represented through the medium of the real photographic postcard at the height of its popularity between 1902 and 1918. Through their images, writing and material culture, domestic photographic postcards taken by, for, and of women at home provide an underused resource for the study of womens lives. This article focuses on postcard portraits of British middle-class women in their gardens, and argues that the garden was at once a practical space for domestic photography and a symbolic place ...

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10.1177/14704129090080020201 ...

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This article considers the relation between news imagesimages captured, selected, written about, printed, and distributed in the course of the news processand cultural performancesthose everyday embodied modes of expressive enactment by which individuals meaningfully and collectively create their worlds. While scholarship on media from a ritual perspective has contributed a great deal to understandings of the cultural dimensions of the production of news images, it remains focused on the sites and practices of encoding. This article calls upon the concept of ...

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10.1177/0163443709344040 ...

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Prior to the formation of Sir Benjamin Stone's National Photographic Record Association (NPRA), a number of amateur photographic societies throughout Britain embarked on photographic surveys. The catalyst for these endeavours was Illustrated Boston, a set of slides visually describing the New England town sent from the Boston Photographic Society and premiered by the Liverpool Amateur Photographic Association in 1889. These slides were then shown in photographic societies throughout the United Kingdom. Although William Jerome Harrison had published erudite advice on how ...

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Photography and science have a symbiotic relationship; they always have. It was in the context of science that photography was first announced to the public by François Arago in 1839. And it was the rhetoric of observation and objectivity that was so beloved of scientists in the mid-nineteenth century that photography very soon acquired. It was, in fact, photography's close ties to science that hindered its bid to claim fine-art status. It is photography's close and continued ties to science that ...

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This article aims at scrutinising the narrative power of a medium which one considers unable to perform narrative tasks: photography. Not only has photography a problem when it wants to tackle issues of time, storytelling and fiction; moreover, the medium is suffering from the negative comparison with one of the media that has replaced it (remediated in the sense coined by Bolter and Grusin), film a medium initially called animated photography. Yet the analysis of an example, a picture by ...

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Ever since the advent of the medium in the mid-nineteenth century, photography and literature have been involved in an almost constant dialogue and process of intersemiotic cross-fertilisation. The scholarly field that has recently begun to develop around the critical study of this kind of aesthetic border crossing what will here be called phototextuality is as burgeoning as it is multidisciplinary, spanning over 150 years of literary, artistic, and cultural history. In this article conceived as a state of ...

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During the 1850s, the French government sponsored photographic missions to the Orient, the goal being to visually record and catalogue the monuments of Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. The missions, however, also had a commercial side, as many of the photographers published their photographs as photographic albums, the Orient circulating as an academic tool <i>and</i> a consumable good. Maxime Du Camp (18221894) and Auguste Salzmann (18241872) led the charge; their albums are exemplary in their documentation of Egypt and Jerusalem and ...

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On 20 March 1865, an advertisement appeared in the Dublin press announcing the opening of William Mervin Lawrences Great Bazaar and and Photographic Galleries, which throughout much of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth centuries was to become the dominant commercial photographers of Irish tourist imagery. Although the majority of Lawrences tourist imagery was of rural tourist sites and landscapes, the company also began to forge an image of the city through stereoscopic cards, tourist pamphlets and postcards. Indeed, ...

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While a handful of articles and book chapters have addressed Thomas Eakins' work with motion photography during the spring and summers of 1884 and 1885, with few to no exceptions his work and photographs have been described as an activity he engaged in to advance and inform his artistic practice. A contextualized reading of Eakins' work, however, suggests the scholarship is incomplete. While the motion photographs can be read aesthetically, an artistic reading or a reading that privileges Eakins-as-artist overlooks their ...

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The advent of photography in the nineteenth-century United States functioned as a new tool that racial scientists employed to illustrate their theories about racial differences. The focus in this article is on the ways in which the camera allegedly captured the essence of blackness, as Louis Agassiz, a prominent racial scientist contended. While racial scientists rendered slaves biological specimens, stripping them of their clothing, identity and anything other than their physiognomy, the former slave Sojourner Truth refuted such a reductive understanding ...

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This paper will examine the previously unconsidered link between the photographic family album and the sentiment album. The sentiment album was popular at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and was assembled mainly by young women. It contained poems, drawings and apothegms solicited from friends, family members and acquaintances. Little research has been undertaken on the sentiment album. However, an examination of the periods womens magazines reveals a substantial amount of information regarding this phenomenon. The sentiment album consolidated a tradition ...

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<i>This article is drawn largely from work in progress on criminal prosecutions for obscenity in the 1860s and 1870s, and particularly on the case of Henry Evans, which marks a distinct turning point in the relationship between photographers, artists and the Law in relation to the question of photographic obscenity and the policing of technological image production in mid to late Victorian Britain</i>. ...

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An examination of periodical literature from the period of the invention of photography in 1839 and onwards reveals that the reception of the medium on the part of the Victorians was characterized by an ambivalent response of enthusiasm as well as anxiety, an ambivalence that grew increasingly insistent despite familiarity with the medium as it became popular in the early 1850s. This article examines in depth the representations of photography in a selection of fictional and periodical texts from the 1840s ...

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For nearly 150 years, the photographic process has been attributed with the apparitional ability to reveal discarnate beings and miraculous phenomena. In the nineteenth century, members of the Spiritualist movement embraced photography as a technological medium that provided evidence of the afterlife and contact with departed loved ones. Today, traditions of supernatural photography continue to thrive, particularly among the Catholic faithful at Marian apparition sites who regularly use cameras to document miraculous phenomena. This article examines the meaning and appeal of ...

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Two 2006 vision events in southern California serve as case studies for investigation by a historian and a photographer of the current surge in reported religious visions: a well-publicized visit by world famous visionary Ivan Dragicevic (b. 1965) to a major Los Angeles area church and a vision by the relatively obscure Maria Paula Acuña (b. ca. 1952) in the Mojave Desert. Although both events included apparitions of the Virgin Mary, interactions between visionary and witnesses at each event revealed different ...

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The role of sight in the experience of the metropolis as a cultural artefact had a special significance in the opening years of the nineteenth century. The visual register of the city was at once static 2013 the panoptic vision 2013 and fluid 2013 the mobile and subjective gaze of the flâneur/euse. This scrutiny of the city as cultural capital operated on several levels. I want to demonstrate the complexities of the interaction of city, consumer/viewer and the role/agency of the ...

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This essay explores how an old snapshot of a group of friends perpetuates an idealised version of their childhood. When presented with the photograph during interview sessions, individuals expressed a longing for a racially integrated past. Posed together, seemingly relaxed and genuinely familiar with each other, the group embodied the hopes and dreams of the Civil Rights Movement. The story behind the veneer, however, is much more complicated than a cursory look at the photograph suggests. In reality, the lives of ...

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Documentary photography has always been confronted by criticisms and self-doubts about its method and purpose. Can pictures ostensibly intruding into the lives of the poor and the destitute, whether taken by academics, reformers or professional photographers, ever be legitimate? This article suggests that these concerns actually determine the way mainstream American social photography looks. Such is the case, at least, in a cliché which has run through the US documentary tradition since the 1930s, and which could be labelled doorstep portraits. ...

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This article analyses amateur video editing software and considers its use within a broadly defined context of cultural practices, or `everyday cinematic life'. The authors argue that such software must be understood in relation to specific cinematic discourses and in the context of longstanding promises of popular participation in `movie-making'. They situate the historically sedimented nature of audiovisual experience in terms of a geneaology of non-commercial film editing and filmmaking, and analyse the phenomenological mixture of constraints and potentials embodied by ...

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Much has been written about the 'production' of sexuality in Nazi Germany; the specific ways of constructing male heroes and frail (but also strong) women coming together in a cold and distant way in the service of eugenics and a new society. Thus it was a national and political concept of sexuality in the narrow sense whereby sexuality was inextricably linked with the benefit of 'Volk, Reich und Vaterland'. But an analysis of private photographs and the 'unpolitical' sections of the ...

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Visual media' is a colloquial expression used to designate things such as television, film, photography and painting, etc. But it is highly inexact and misleading. On closer inspection, all the so-called visual media turn out to involve the other senses (especially touch and hearing). All media are, from the standpoint of sensory modality, mixed media'. The obviousness of this raises two questions: (1) why do we persist in talking about some media as if they were exclusively visual? Is ...

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When pictures become journalistic, historical, and popular icons, there is a common belief that they also have a single, usable meaning, and media, political, and academic elites typically determine it. Yet, research on how people interpret images suggests that believing is seeing: pre-existing prejudices and experiences affect what meanings we draw from pictures. This is especially so when the viewer seeks out information that confirms strongly held notions, what mainstream audiences might think of in some cases as conspiracy theories. This ...

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This article makes use of London-based artist Shezad Dawood's 2005 reworking of Antonioni's 1966 Blow Up in his photographic and installation work Make It Big to explore a shifting regime of vision and power in Euro-American culture between the 1960s and the present. Via an analysis and comparison of the terms of vision and knowing in Blow Up and Make It Big, the author argues that Dawood's project articulates a subject that is newly hybrid and networked. ...

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One of the most popular of all nineteenth-century optical recreations was the stereoscope. Most previous studies, however, have focused on its initial popularity in the 1850s and 1860s, downplaying the fact that stereoscopy enjoyed a significant revival between 1890 and 1914 to the extent that its diffusion in schools, homes and libraries was probably at its greatest. This article explores the way the revival in stereoscopy was fostered by a significant updating of the marketing, distribution and exhibition of stereographs in ...

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What are the challenges and opportunities posed to the dominant interpretive paradigms of visual studies by the rise of a new fascination with the object? How can the study of visual culture respond to what has been variously termed a `pictorial' or an `iconic' turn? Can this phenomenological concern for the power of the image to determine its own reception be incorporated into approaches that emphasize its political implications? Is it possible to conceive of the image as both a representation ...