News for colleagues in the Netherlands and Belgium…

The Dutch Photography Working Group, convened by Marta Zarzycka (Utrecht University) and Martijn Kleppe (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) brings together academics and professionals to exchange ideas related to photojournalism, documentary photography, art, and photographic theory. The group functions as a platform for regional, national and international activities, bringing together researchers, practitioners, critics, curators, institutions and those working on various aspects of visual media.

The group acknowledges an increasing cultural interest in the study of photographs and its goal is to contribute to a growing understanding of the possibilities of research with, on, and by photography. Its monthly agenda of workshops/seminars taking place in the most prominent photographic institutions in the Netherlands or Belgium aims to strengthen scholarly debate, to provide links to further readings and discussions, to generate publication and exhibition opportunities, and to develop international partnerships between institutions and individuals doing research on photography.

The group is a part of the ‘Scherptediepte’ (‘depth of field’) network of Dutch and Belgian photography scholars.

F. Holland Day, Imperial Masculinity, and the Intimacy of Photography

Shawn Michelle Smith reflects on F. Holland Day’s exotic look and intimate looking

In the spring of 1901, F. Holland Day arrived unannounced at Frederick Evans’s studio in London, wearing a burnoose.  Evans invited him in to be photographed, and the two collaborated in making a series of intimate portraits of Day in Algerian dress.[i]  The portraits correspond to the height of Day’s international prominence as promoter and practitioner of the New American School of photography, a movement devoted to establishing photography as an art form through Pictorialist aesthetics.  After receiving mixed reviews in London, Day’s New American School exhibition was a huge success at the Photo-Club of Paris in the spring of 1901.  The exhibition showcased the work of Clarence White, Edward Steichen, and Day himself, among others, and included images from Day’s sacred series and his so-called “Nubian” series.  After the exhibition closed in Paris, Day and his young cousin, Alvin Langdon Coburn (who had several images in the show), traveled to Algiers.  As Estelle Jussim and Patricia Fanning tell the story, in Algeria, “Day and Coburn romped about in exotic costumes,”[ii] and upon their return to Paris, Day continued to go out in his “Arab togs.”[iii]

Day was well known for his “exotic” dress and costuming; reviews of his work often included reviews of Day himself and his eccentric habits of dress.  In this sense, it is not surprising that he would have been intrigued by Algerian trappings.  But I would like to suggest that the Algerian robes he collected had particular racial and gender associations that interested Day beyond their function as yet another form of “exotic dress up.”  As Kristin Hoganson explains in her discussion of the international circuits of American fashion at the turn of the century, for American women to participate in Parisian fashion was also to participate in racialized class distinctions that secured one’s civilized (and modern) status.[iv]  Although dressing in the height of Parisian fashion usually meant distinguishing one’s self (and one’s whiteness) from colonized peoples and their picturesque, folk costumes,[v] adopting elements of exotic dress might also mark one’s associations with imperial power.  For the fashionable American woman, “donning burnoose draperies meant donning the trappings of European imperialism.”[vi]  In this sense, we might say that dressing in Arab clothing allowed Day to participate imaginatively in French imperialism.

The robes also allowed him to participate imaginatively in an Orientalized Islamic masculinity.  As Timothy Marr has argued, several decades before Day made his trip to Algeria, American travelers in the Islamic east (deemed “howadji”) developed a romance of oriental masculinity focused on male liberty and patriarchal power associated with the harem.[vii]  Indeed, according to Malek Alloula, the harem was the central figure of an erotic Orientalist fantasy.[viii]  It was the intimate social structure that most obviously challenged Western ideas of heterosexual monogamy.  American men traveling in Islamic countries adopted Arab dress to signal their claim on an islamicized masculinity; their garb symbolized their male privilege and masculine liberation.  Travel writers in the early to mid-nineteenth century celebrated “‘the freedom from restraint,’” and from the “conventional confinements of race, religion, and gender”[ix] that they purported to experience in the Near East.[x]  Elsewhere I have sought to establish Day’s queer photographic practice,[xi] and here I would like to suggest that although Day may not have been interested in the specific patriarchal privileges of the harem, he might have enjoyed the power to transgress conventional Western ideas about gender.  The very idea of another model of masculinity may have offered Day a signifying space through which to imagine and perform his own alternative masculinity.

Fears about the kind of sexual encounters that might be had in foreign lands guided colonial regulations on intimate contact.  As Ann Stoler has taught us, intimate relations are a key site of colonial power and resistance, the place where colonial relations and racial distinctions are enacted and formed.  In the Dutch colonial context in Java that she has studied, inter-racial heterosexual relations of concubinage were historically condoned to dissuade European men from the more dangerous liaisons they might make with prostitutes in brothels — or with native men.[xii]  In other words, colonial regulations regarding inter-racial heterosexual relations implicitly regulated homosexual relations as well.  Homosexual liaisons were the shadow discourse of colonial regulations on inter-racial heterosexual sex.

Day clearly enjoyed the theatricality of his racialized masculine performance, and its multi-layered connotations, walking the streets of Paris and London in his burnoose.  But he also performed more quietly and intimately for Evans’s camera in the private space of Evans’s studio.  I would like to think further about the intimacy of Day’s photographic encounters, both in front of and behind the camera, focusing especially on the intimate looking relations he established with fellow photographers Evans and Coburn.

Day photographed on his trip to Algiers, experimenting with a new Dallmeyer lens that secured the soft focus that he preferred.[xiii]  A photograph of a street in Algiers presents a kind of cocoon extending back toward a diffuse light.  The hood of a figure standing part way up the stepped path echoes the pointed shape of the roofs that converge overhead.  A portrait of an Algerian man shows him seated on a tiled wall, his interlocking fingers mirroring his crossed legs and bare feet.  He looks up, but it is hard to tell at what exactly.  Do his eyes meet those of the photographer?  The scene is surely posed, requiring the man’s consent, as Day would have used his large format camera and tripod, and the man is quite tightly framed.  There is intimacy in proximity here, but not in a shared gaze.  The man wears robes remarkably like those that Day would adopt.

In Frederick Evans’s studio, Day stands looking back at the photographer who was also a friend (1901).  His head is wrapped like that of the Algerian man who was his own photographic subject.  But here Day stands, pulling back his cloak to reveal the garments he wears underneath.  His eyes half closed and heavy lidded, he looks dreamily back at his colleague and friend.

Day was interested in Evans’s look, and in Evans looking at him.  The previous year (1900) he made a remarkable photograph of Evans gazing upon a photograph, capturing him from behind, hands clasped in the drapery of his loose cape.  Evans seems to emerge out of the dark atmosphere with which he almost entirely blends, as if he has been conjured out of thin air to gaze upon the small light print that hangs before him at eye level.  It is a photograph of Day himself, posed as the ecstatic Christ, a tightly framed headshot of Day wearing a crown of thorns, head thrown back in (erotic) anguish.  Evans has come in close to view the image in the penumbra.  The doubling of looks and the staging of the photographic gaze is remarkable.  Day photographs Evans gazing upon a photograph of Day.

Day would also photograph and be photographed by his young traveling companion.  In a portrait of Coburn seated at his desk, the young man looks back solemnly at the older photographer, his cousin and mentor (1900).  His oversized jacket exaggerates his slightness.  The photograph is taken at a surprising remove.  A large expanse of carpet dominates the bottom half of the image.  The distance is inexplicable and does not accord with Day’s typical framing.  It seems to press Coburn back toward the wall of photographs, flattening him into a kind of photographic artifact.  (Gertrude Kasebier’s Blessed Art Thou among Women, 1899, is clearly visible propped at the edge of the desk.)

Coburn’s portrait of Day is a much more intimate scene, and one that remarkably brings the dark recesses of photography itself into view (1900).  Coburn’s photograph literally sheds light on Day’s darkroom, exposing that which usually remains unseen – the process through which photographic prints are made.  Standing, with his trays of chemicals at his feet, Day looks back over his shoulder at Coburn.  Day’s long dark robes mimic the drapes that shield his darkroom from exposure, and his hand reaches out as if to pull them closed again.  On the right side of the photograph the telltale swirls of a fingerprint mark the image with Coburn’s touch, inscribing his own chemically stained imprint on this photograph about printing.  Once again, the intimacy with which the photographers regard one another and expose their shared process is remarkably reflexive.

Coburn’s portrait of Day draws our attention closely to the photographic printing process.  Therefore we might consider further the platinum process that Evans, Day, and Coburn all favored.  There is something intimate about the process itself.  As we have seen, the printing takes place in a dark room.  Beyond that, however, platinum, unlike silver gelatin, seeps into the paper on which it is painted, merging photographic image with paper fiber.  (It does not have the gelatin that holds light-sensitive particles on the surface of the paper as in the silver gelatin process.)  This blending and merging has a kind of promiscuity about it.  Images become material, and their blending lends them a further diffuseness as the fibers of the paper soften hard lines and edges.  (The platinum process was so central to Day’s aesthetic that he famously gave up photography after platinum became scarce in World War I.[xiv])

Day would use his Algerian robes as props several years later, wrapping the head of his favorite model, Nicola Giancola, in a kind of turban (c. 1907).  Here the youth who often posed nude for Day stands, leaning against a rough support and looking away from the camera, his robe slipping off his right shoulder to reveal his chest.  Tightly framed, the photograph is intimate and erotic; it reveals and makes explicit the tensions cloaked in the earlier portraits of Day.

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[i] Patricia J. Fanning, Through an Uncommon Lens:  The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day (Amherst:  University of Massachusetts Press, 2008) 110.

[ii] Estelle Jussim, Slave to Beauty:  The Eccentric Life and Controversial Career of F. Holland Day, Photographer, Publisher, Aesthete (Boston:  David R. Godine, 1981) 156-57.

[iii] Patricia J. Fanning 131.

[iv] Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium:  The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920 (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) 80, 90.

[v] Hoganson 80.

[vi] Hoganson 94.

[vii] Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2006) 265.

[viii] Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1986) 3.

[ix] Marr, describing Bayard Taylor’s correspondence from Egypt with his Boston editor, James Ticknor Fields (The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism 269).

[x] John Lloyd Stephens quoted in Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism, page 268.

[xi] See my chapter “Photography Between Desire and Grief:  Roland Barthes and F. Holland Day,” in Feeling Photography, eds. Elspeth Brown and Thy Phu (Durham:  Duke University Press, forthcoming), and chapter two, “The Politics of Pictorialism:  Another Look at F. Holland Day,” in At the Edge of Sight:  Photography and the Unseen (Durham:  Duke University Press, forthcoming).

[xii] Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power:  Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2002) 2, 48, 212.

[xiii] Jussim 154-55.

[xiv] Jussim 197.

Market Empire and the Positive Affects

A note from Elspeth Brown on the study of positive affects in producing commodity relations.

Helen Bennett photographed by George Platt Lynes, c. 1938. Harry Ransom Center, GPL collection, Box 2.

Several of us involved with The Photographic Situation—myself, Thy Phu, Shawn Michelle Smith, and Ann Cvetkovich—have just returned from the American Studies Association annual meeting in Puerto Rico, where we collaborated with Laura Wexler on a roundtable concerning ‘photography, affect, and empire.’ In my short presentation, I wanted to think through how positive affects—love, longing, desire—are central to the history of U.S. market empires, and the role photography has played in producing the “look of love” in commodity relations. A lot of the excellent writing on affect and photography has focused on negative affects and/or political violence, such as Thy’s work on the S-21 photographs, Shawn’s work on lynching, Laura’s work on U.S. imperialism in the Phillipines, or Ann’s recent work on depression. This work is inspirational and indispensable. Yet the history of the U.S. has been, historically, as much about market hegemony as it has been about military violence and the colonization of peoples. For an empire built on market relations more than on sovereignty, U.S. business culture has required a different affective register, one based on the positive affects of desire, longing, and aspiration, as well as the violence of military rule. So in my ten minutes, I wanted to highlight the dystopic side of the ‘positive affects’ in producing and sustaining U.S. market empires, and the essential role photography has played in smuggling in imperial market relations through the Trojan horse of commodity pleasure.

And to complicate my scenario still further, I want to think about how queer relationality has been central to the production and maintenance of U.S. market empires. My examples are drawn from the history of fashion photography, which has been a queer industry since Baron de Meyer was hired as the first paid staff photographer for Conde Nast in 1917. Specifically, in the ASA presentation, I focused on the work of George Platt Lynes in the late 1930s and 1940s, when he was making two main bodies of work: fashion photographs for Conde Nast and Harper’s Bazaar, and gay male nudes for private circulation among friends and queer kinship networks. My presentation concerned the relationship between these two sets of images, in the effort to think though the dystopic aspects of the positive affects when tied to strategies of soft empire: the international garment trade.

Stephen Mayes on the unfixing of Smartphone photography

In September, Stephen Mayes, director of VII Photo Agency, spoke at our Photographic Situation workshop in Toronto on the unfixing of photography in the age of the Smartphone. Stephen elaborates on the experiential quality of the new fluid image here, in an interview with Wired magazine’s Pete Brook.

A man wipes a child’s nose in Pinhou, Ivory Coast. From Everyday Africa © Peter DiCampo.

Report from the Clark Symposium: Photography as Model?

Last week, the Clark Center hosted a one-day symposium at the Arts Club of Chicago that aimed to “reflect on the models we currently have for discussing photographs as art.” Organized by Matt Witkovksy, the curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, “Photography as Model?” drew its inspiration from art critic Yves-Alain Bois’s 1990 book Painting as Model and asked six speakers—mostly art historians—to think about how the frameworks we use to examine photographs might shape the ways that scholars approach modern and contemporary art in general.

In this sense, the aims of the symposium were ambitious. To convincingly argue that photography studies might provide a model for art history as a discipline, or that individual photographs might model new approaches for seeing, is no small task. Especially when, as Victor Burgin has so aptly put it, “photography theory has no methodology peculiarly its own.” It often feels like photography theory has been cobbled together from several disciplines outside of art history, including cultural studies, film studies, feminist and queer studies, semiotics, and post-colonial studies. This flexibility is one of the things I’ve always liked about photography studies, but it can also make the discipline feel a bit nebulous: a feeling that’s compounded by the difficulties in even defining what a photograph is, especially with the advent of digital technologies (see David Campbell’s excellent post on just this problem over at his blog).

Georges Didi-Huberman presents at “Photography as Model?”, October 13, 2012

But I think these can be productive problems to have, and the papers that resulted from Witkovsky’s prompt to think about the productive disunity that characterizes photography as a field of inquiry bore out some of this potential. In his opening remarks, for instance, Witkovsky offered detailed readings of two very different kinds of photographs. The first was a spare, conceptual series of photographs of “‘hyper-banal’ subjects” by American artist Lewis Baltz; the second a group of four nearly-anonymous photographs taken clandestinely by members of the Sonderkommando unit at Auschwitz during the Holocaust. While the first is the product of an individual artist’s time-consuming process and is meant to be exhibited in a fine art context, the second is a group-authored image taken under life-threatening circumstances that was never guaranteed an audience of viewers (indeed, Claude Lanzmann has argued these photographs should not be shown). By offering these two examples, Witkovksy hoped to ask whether we could create a field of photography studies where these two kinds of images could be adequately accounted for within one broad and general history, a comparison he described as a “travesty” under the current theoretical models used in art history which would insist on separating these two series of photographs based on the identity of their producers and audiences.