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John Thomson's Street Life in London
- 14 June 1837 - 29 September 1921 - Pioneering Scottish photographer, geographer and traveler - one of the first photographers to document his travels to East Asia - Lived in Singapore, Hong Kong among other Asian countries - Photographed a wide range of subjects - Produced monthly magazine, Street Life in London (1876-1877) with radical journalist, Adolphe Smith - later published in book - In Street life in London, aimed to show honestly the present condition of London street folks - Uses Image + text - Established social documentary photography as early type of photojournalism
The Grand Tour
- A rite of passage for young men of the upper-classes, nobility and landed gentry. Included exotic places, the religious middle east and places of antiquity. - Replaced by mass transit, the steam ship and train. Companies like Thomas Cook Tours offered group tours to both men and women. Established in 1841 with tours of the English countryside grew into an international travel company still in operation today. - Thomas cook, Cook Tours, often hired military as armed guards to protect wealthy tourists to palaces like to the Holy Land and Egypt. This also insured support for colonialist power by allowing the wealthy, who were the government and people of influence, to become complicit with their government in colonizing various countries
Thomas Annan (1829-1887)
- As European cities implemented modernization schemes, the people displaced by renovation were seldom photographed, although the buildings were. - An unusual picture was made by Thomas Annan (1829-1887), a photographer in Glasgow, Scotland, who was asked by the Glasgow City Improvement Trust in 1866 to record the vast slums that had grown up around mills and factories before the buildings were torn down and rebuilt (Fig. 5.11).
Photographic Studies and Classification of the Human Species
- John Lamprey, 1869 journal article "On a Method of Measuring the Human Form" proposed to base observation of race based on the nude human body, skin color , hair texture, physique and the like - this strategy re-enforced the belief that the basic differences among human races were observable through distinctions in physical appearances. - What are some of the consequences of this kind of approach?
Photomicrography
- Photomicrography became a photographic specialty beginning in the 1850s. - For the French physician and anatomist Dr. Jules-Bernard Luys (1828-1897), photomicrography provided an important aid to scientific objectivity. - In his work L' Iconographie photographique des centres nerveux (Photographic Iconography of the Nerve Centers) (1873), which was issued with an atlas of photographs and lithographs of neurological subjects, Luys wrote that photography substituted "the action of light for ... personality, in order to obtain an image both impersonal and accurate
Physiognomy
- is the assessment of a person's character or personality from his outer appearance, especially the face - Both were at best paternalistic and at worst racist - believed that the brain was made up of 27 individual organs that determined personality
Ethnography
the systematic study of people and cultures. It is designed to explore cultural phenomena where the researcher observes society from the point of view of the subject of the study.
Preservation of "Dying Cultures"
- Anthropological photography took on a moral urgency as the notion spread that indigenous peoples did not have the physical and mental strength to survive the encroachment of Western civilization. - At the 1866 Intercolonial Exhibition in Melbourne, Australia, a section was devoted to "The Last of the Tasmanians:' - The number of aboriginal Tasmanians was indeed severely reduced-in 1847, only forty-six individuals had remained. - Professional photographer C. A. Woolley (1834-1922) made a studio study, in the style of Western portraiture, of a Tasmanian woman named Trucanini (Fig. 5.8). - The notion of vanishing races was also applied to Native North Americans, though they ultimately fared better than the Tasmanians.
Oscar Rejlander (Working on Charles Darwin's Book)
- British Scientist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) published a book titled The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals ( 1872) which argued that the physical signs of emotional states were inherently the same in all humans, regardless of culture, and that animals had emotions that they expressed in ways similar to people. - Darwin's hypothesis is that humans were not a separately created species, but resulted from the processes of natural selection and evolution. - Darwin's introduction acknowledged his debt to the insights and photographs of emotion made by Duchenne de Boulogne. - In fact, Duchenne lent Darwin photographs, which he published as part of his study. - Darwin also included photographs commissioned from the London photographer Oscar Rejlander who personally acted out some of the emotion al states before the camera. - Believing that babies exhibited the purest, least acculturated signs of emotion , Darwin used photographs of babies made by Rejlander (Fig. 5.15) and the German photographer Adolph Diedrich Kindermann (1823- 1892). - In all, five photographers provided images to Darwin. - Utilized the Heliotype , a printing process that used printing-press plate to produce photographs, allowing the price of the book to be kept down. - The resulting images are not sharp and detailed, but they do convey facial gestures adequately. - Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872
Charles Marville
- Charles Marville, a French artist and photographer, was commissioned by the city of Paris to record old Paris, before the implementation of Baron Haussmaru1's ( 1809-1891) improvements (Fig. 5.14), and the new Paris of buildings like the Paris Opera House - Around 1855, Marville undertook a series of delicate cloud studies, made from the rooftop of his Parisian studio using the collodion negative process. - More rapid and sensitive than the paper negative process, the collodion negative enabled the photographer to capture delicate, luminous cloud formations on the city's horizon—an achievement that was noted by several critics at the 1862 Universal Exhibition in London
Aime Civiale ( 1821- 1893)
- From 1859 to l866, French geologist Aime Civiale ( 1821- 1893) made a striking series of twenty-eight large photographic panoramas in the Italian, French, Austrian, and Swiss Alps (Fig. 5.24). - Civiale did not conceive his photographs to show how a human might perceive the scene, nor to render the beauty of the Alps. - He wanted the panoramas to illustrate the tremendous geological uplift that originally formed the European mountain systems. - Civiale developed a scientific aesthetic for his purposes, in which the large patterns of the mountains' geological development were emphasized and the myriad surface details were decreased. - His work was shown in the exhibitions of the French Photographic Society for a decade, from 1859 to 1869
Charcot
- From 1877 to 1880, Charcot published L'Jconographie photograph ique de La Salpetriere ( Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere Hospital), a three-volume work that contained photographs of hysterics (Fig. 5.16). - Collaborating with the clinician Desire Magliore Bourn eville (l840-1909), and assisted by Paul Regnard ( 1858- 1927), an intern at La Salpetriere, Charcot sought to photograph the physical expression of mental states. - He chose subjects who were known throughout France to be able to respond well to hypnotic suggestion. - Like those of Hugh Welch Diamond, Duchenne, and Darwin, Charcot's work and his photographs emphasized facial expression as an infallible indicator of psychological states. - And like them, Charcot regarded himself as a neutral observer. - Of his visual recording, he stated: "I stand here merely as a photographer, I write down what I see"
"the whole archives of a nation might be packed away in a snuff-box."
- From the late 1850s on, proposals to miniaturize and store information in photographs became more frequent. - The American Journal of Photography for 1858 recommended storing public documents on photographic negatives. - With its usual exuberance, Photographic News opined that "the whole archives of a nation might be packed away in a snuff-box." - Businesses were founded to produce microscopic photographs, either as a means of record-keeping or for novelties, such as penholders fitted with a lens that magnified tiny calendars
Ethnographic Studies and Display Colonialism
- Grand schemes to compare and contrast races and to photograph them were launched throughout the later nineteenth century. - For instance, it was proposed that the Calcutta exhibition of 1869 should bring together "tribal" peoples from Asia, Polynesia, and Australasia, for purposes of examination and photography - Photographers assigned to colonial military missions used photo for ethnographic, topographic and other kinds of photographic research. - Example: Roger Fenton photographed the Crimean countryside in addition to his war photos thinking they could be useful. - During the American civil war Alexander Gardner copied maps and photographic terrain for the Union Army. - Often photographer adventurers would enlist the aid of military personnel for security as armed guards. - This was done with the blessing of the government involved because it was one additional way for the colonial power to infiltrate and collect information about a place or people. - In Russia, more systematic fieldwork aimed at describing physical types and local costumes began to use photography. - The Russian Geographical Society issued special instructions for photographers who were attempting to create a scientific study of difference. - Full -face, profile, and full-length views of people were considered to be the most scientifically useful. - The Moscow Ethnographic Exhibition of 1867 displayed dioramas showing about three hundred mannequins in regional costume
Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond
- Hugh Welch Diamond (1809 - June 21, 1886) was an early British psychiatrist and photographer who made a major contribution to the progress of the craft. - A doctor by profession, he opened a private practice in Soho, London, and then decided to specialize in psychiatry, being appointed to Brookwood Hospital, the second Surrey County Asylum. - Diamond was one of the founders of the Photographic Society, was later its Secretary and also became the editor of the Photographic Journal. - Diamond was fascinated by the possible use of photography in the treatment of mental disorders; some of his many calotypes depicting the expressions of people suffering from mental disorders are particularly moving. - These were used not only for record purposes, but also, he claimed in the treatment of patients - although there was little evidence of success. - Perhaps it is for his attempts to popularize photography and to lessen its mystique that Diamond is best remembered. - He wrote many articles and was a popular lecturer, and he also sought to encourage younger photographers. - Among the latter was Henry Peach Robinson, who was later to refer to Diamond as a "father figure" of photography. - Recognition for his encouragement and for his willingness to share his knowledge came in 1855, in the form of a testimonial amounting to £300 for services to photography; among those who subscribed were such people as Delamotte, Fenton and George Shadbolt. - In 1867, the Photographic Society awarded its Medal in recognition of "his long and successful labours as one of the principal pioneers of the photographic art and of his continuing endeavours for its advancement." The following year, at his own initiative, he relinquished any further salary as Secretary of the Society, and became its Hon. Secretary. - Diamond professed that the mentally ill could look at pictures of themselves and better understand their condition - One of the first to use the Wetplate Collodion process develop by Frederick Archer in 1851 - The conviction that a clear correspondence existed between inner moods and outward appearances also informed scientific experiments on human gestures and facial expressions, such as the photographs of mental patients taken by Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond in the L850s
women in orientalism
- In Western literature, travel accounts, and art before the invention of photography, Middle Eastern women were contradictorily described as closeted in harems, swathed in thick clothing and veils, and sexually aggressive. - Images of the odalisque, the drowsily reclining naked or semi -nude female pictured in an intimate or exotic setting, were frequent in Western art. - In photography, the mystery and unavailability of Middle Eastern women were enhanced by costume and pose - Not all pictures of Middle Eastern women were made to please foreign fantasies ~> Marie Lydie Cabanis Bonfils is reputed to have made the photographs of women who came to the Bonfils family's Beirut studio - In India, legitimate photography of women in purdah (in seclusion) was done by British women, such as a certain Mrs. Carrick, who is said to have run a studio in Calcutta. - By 1885, Indian women had taken up photography.
Thomas Barnardo ( 1845-1905)
- In the last third of the nineteenth century, photographs were used slightly more often in private social reform efforts. - Thomas Barnardo ( 1845-1905), who administered homes and training programs for poor and homeless children, made before-and after images to advertise his work and to raise funds (Fig5.13). - In most of the images, Barnardo exaggerated the children's poverty, dressing them in torn clothes and posing them in pitiful positions. The images could be purchased singly or in packets. - Generally photos like these showed the transition from poor to employed rather than the more often truth of the situation for the poor in most industrialized countries. - These were feel good images which re-enforced the public perception that there were programs to help and train the poor when in fact Carnagie's and Rockefeller's of the world were running sweat shops and most workers were really indentured servants, locked in cycle of working for the company, renting from the company and buying from the company store. - Homestead Steel Strike of 1892. Put down by Henry Frick for Andrew Carnegie who was in Scotland. - The Homestead strike was organized and purposeful, a harbinger of the type of strike which would mark the modern age of labor relations in the United States. - The AA strike at the Homestead steel mill in 1892 was different from previous large-scale strikes in American history such as the Great railroad strike of 1877 or the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886. - Earlier strikes had been largely leaderless and disorganized mass uprisings of workers. - Pinkerton agents aboard the barges then fired into the crowd, killing two and wounding 11. - The crowd responded in kind, killing two and wounding 12. The firefight continued for about 10 minutes.
Photography and social science
- Increasingly photography was used to collect evidence because of its "factual view of the world" - Science and social science were not firmly separated till the end of the 19th century, phrenology, physiognomy, anthropology, ethnography were all consider to be part of the hard sciences. - Things could be physically measured through observation of physical difference. - This led to colonial scientists using the observational power of photography to classify and rate races, intelligence etc. through the eyes of the colonist and justify colonial control of whole countries and peoples. - Even Charles Darwins theory of evolution was twisted to prove that some species of humans were inferior to others. - Usually the first world to the third world. - Grand schemes were launched to compare and contrast races and photograph them for "scientific study" and cataloging.
Kusakabe Kimbei
- Kusakabe Kimbei (1841-1934) was a Japanese photographer. He usually went by his given name, Kimbei, because his clientele, mostly non-Japanese-speaking foreign residents and visitors, found it easier to pronounce than his family name. - worked with Felice Beato and Baron Raimund von Stillfried as a photographic colorist and assistant before opening his own workshop in Yokohama in 1881, in the Benten-dōri quarter, and from 1889 operating in the Honmachi quarter. He also opened a branch in the Ginza quarter of Tokyo. - Around 1885, he acquired the negatives of Felice Beato and of Stillfried, as well as those of Uchida Kuichi. Kusakabe also acquired some of Ueno Hikoma's negatives of Nagasaki. He stopped working as a photographer in 1912-1913 - Nude and semi-nude images of Eastern women were marketed in many ways. - Sensual pictures, in which the model wore traditional clothing to mark her ethnic identity, were issued in CARTES-DE -VISITES, miniatures, postcards, and A LBUMEN prints (Fig. 5.7). - The academies, or figure studies of women ostensibly sold as aids to painters, sometimes featured Middle Eastern women, whose hairstyle and jewelry signaled their identity and class to the viewers.
Daguerreotypes at Harvard
- Louis Agassiz Swiss born naturalist and founder of Harvard's department of comparative zoology embraced the idea of using photography to do ethnographic studies of races and classes of people. - He hoped to provide visual evidence for his theory that the various of the world were created separately which the proponents of slavery felt would scientifically justify racial inequality and support the institution of slavery - Another question raised by his work was the fact that he did not photograph these people himself or ever meet them ~>. J T Zealy did, he was hired by an agent of Agassiz - Although these photos were meant to compare the races only blacks were photographed. - The main purpose of these photos by Zealy was to convince viewers of the truth of a racist racial theory.
Problems faced by Astronomical Photography
- Low Light - Movement of the Earth - Limitations of photosensitive materials - Brightness of the sun - Nevertheless, many astronomers, such as John Herschel, saw the potential to create systematic recording of the sun and its features. - Others, in the spirit of Francois Arago's original conjectures , considered that photochemical reactions might be used to measure light rays. - Photographers continued to have difficulty creating clear images of the moon. - Throughout the 1870s, American astronomer and photography advocate Lewis M. Rutherford (sometimes spelt Rutherford ) ( 1816-1892) circulated his 1865 photograph of the moon (Fig. 5.20).
the effect of photography during this age
- Photography made possible a new age of discovery comparable to that of the explorers who charted the globe from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. - From the mid-nineteenth century onward, great and small explorations were routinely photographed, as were medical achievements. - Topographical survey teams made pictures of the terrain, mineral deposits, and potential transportation routes, as well as the lives and customs of indigenous peoples along the way. - Scientists developed special instruments to record astronomical events, and planned lengthy expeditions, like those to view the transit of Venus in 1874. - Prompted by the premise that the psychological and moral qualities of human beings are unerringly written in their physical appearances, amateur and professional scientists sought to use the camera to create a visual dictionary of the inner life. - Like the earlier age of discovery, the photographically driven exploration of the mid-nineteenth century increased human knowledge while extending Western influence around the globe. - But where earlier explorers could paint and draw their discoveries, later ones could fix their finds with the camera's glass eye and disseminate their views as never before. - While more and more people were able to make virtual visits to the world's various cultures and natural wonders, they were able to do so often through a configuration of ignorant and prejudicial ideas. - Photographs of non-Western people exaggerated their physical and cultural difference from Westerners. - The falsehoods of science and social science, aided by the camera, were as undeniable as their advances
London labor and London Poor
- Published by Henry Mayhew newspaper reporter and Richard Beard (1851) - Henry Mayhew newspaper reporter and Richard Beard published 3 volumes of London labor and London Poor in 1851 - book contained engravings made from Beard's photographs - Brought some visibility to the conditions of the poor which was quite unusual during that time - Contained engravings based on photographs Mayhew commissioned Richard Beard to take - Did not fully escape the biases of its time but took a big step to show the conditions of the poor - Financially successful publication perhaps because public was starting to accept some government -sponsored welfare programs
Ethic and Economic types: "Rasnoshchiki" street sellers of St. Petersburg 1860-78. - William Carrick (1827-1878)
- The Scottish -born photographer William Carrick (1827-1878) worked in Saint Petersburg, Russia, photographing "Rasnoshchiki;' the street sellers of that city' ( Fig. 5.9). - He also made photographic expeditions to rural areas in Russia, gathering images o( workers, farmers, boatmen, and the landscape
Ethnographies of Economic Types and Everyday Life
- The idea of creating assemblages of thematically related photographs of people was not restricted to scientific pursuits. - ln Rio de Janeiro, a portraitist advertised "a large collection of black tipos [characters] and their customs, very appropriate for those who are leaving for Europe. - Studios around the world offered images of exotic types sort of a collection of photos tourists might take home to show the exotic difference between their culture and the one they visited.. - Craftspeople, laborers, factory became subjects for carte-de-visites. - These mostly heralded the positive or noble nature of manual labor and not the inequalities of labor especially child labor. - These photos were more inventory or collection of types, characters dressed to play a part of what was thought to be the ideal. - Tools, quaint clothes of a new immigrant and regional costume were popular. - The working poor, child labor, factory abuses, slums and workhouses were rarely photographed till the last years of the 19th century by photographers like Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. - ln the later nineteenth century, factories and industrial sites were photographed with increasing frequency, and studio shots of laborers, especially craftspeople dressed in work clothes and carrying their tools, became the subjects of many cartes-de visite - Nevertheless, the reality of the urban poverty associated with industrial capitalism was seldom photographed before the end of the nineteenth century. Despite the historical interests of photography's proponents, subjects with no evident scientific, archival, artistic, or commercial value were neglected. Child laborers, for instance, are largely absent from early photography. - images of working men and women, except when stiffly posed with tools or clothed in quaint ethnic and regional costume, are also uncommon. - Scenes of ordinary activities such as preparing food are exceedingly rare, unless these activities are performed in an exotic culture. - The absence of unpleasant and ordinary subjects is highlighted by their presence in other media, such as newspaper and book illustration, which showed child labor, the poor, factory abuses, workhouses, ramshackle homes, urban sanitation problems, and the effects of famine and overcrowded neighborhoods.
Charles Darwin
- The incorporation of genetics and Darwin's theory is known as "modern evolutionary synthesis." - Portrait photograph of Darwin, probably taken in 1854 when he was 45 years old and working towards publication of "On the Origin of Species" - Some commentators also interpreted his writings to validate a natural hierarchy of development, from the lower to the higher races, based on visible differences in anatomy, and on cultural characteristics. - The physical and behavioral changes that make natural selection possible happen at the level of DNA and genes. Such changes are called mutations. "Mutations are basically the raw material on which evolution acts,"
Thomas Henry Huxley and John Lamprey
- The lack of standardization in anthropological photography led scientists such as Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1925) and John Lamprey (active 1870s) to create systems by which humans could be photographed for observation and comparison . - Huxley's anthropometric poses were cumbersome, but Lamprey's recommendations in his 1869 journal article "On a Method of Measuring the Human Form" became influential (Fig. 5.4). - Both Huxley and Lamprey proposed that the scientific study of race should be based on observations of the nude human body, so that differences in skin color, hair texture, physique, and the like would be recorded. - Using a portable silk-thread grid for the background of anthropological studies was encouraged. - This strategy strengthened the belief that there were basic differences among human races, observable through distinctions in physical appearance
December, 1874 Venus passes across the face of the sun
- The largest international effort in astronomical photography during the period took place in December 1874, when scientists from Germany, Britain, and France entered into a friendly competition to record the passing, or transit, of the planet Venus across the face of the sun. - The French team included the scientist and photographer Pierre-Cesar Jules Janssen ( 1824-1907), who developed a revolver camera, in effect a gun fitted with a lens, to make sequential exposures on a DAGUERREOTYPE plate (Fig. 5.23). - Although outmoded for portrait and landscape photography, the daguerreotype was chosen by the French team, in part because its metal plates were not subject to breakage, as were glass plates
Photography in Medicine and Science - Civil War
- The number of amputations suffered by Civil War soldiers shocked both doctors and the general public. - In the May 1863 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Oliver Wendell Holmes described how photographs of able-bodied people walking on city streets might be observed in order to devise effective and comfortable artificial limbs. - Medical practitioners and hospitals, meanwhile, commissioned photographs of soldiers with wounds (Fig. 5.18). - During the war, the surgeon general founded the Army Medical Museum in Washington, D.C., one of whose purposes was to collect photographs of war injuries. - More than a thousand pictures were collected in compendiums of photographs and engravings based on photographs, including the eight volume Photographs of Surgical Cases and Specimens (1866). - Though thwarted by shortages of paper and printing supplies, Confederate doctors were also able to publish a journal largely devoted to battlefield medicine. - The Confederate States Medical and Surgical Journal , issued from January 1864 to February 1865, printed a few photographically derived woodcuts of injured soldiers. - Photographs were circulated to solicit funds and donation to the Red Cross and other agencies to aid wounded veterans of the Civil War
engineer James Nasmyth (1808-1890) and astronomer James Carpenter (1840-1899)
- Working together engineer James Nasmyth (1808-1890) and astronomer James Carpenter (1840-1899) created a unique series of astronomical pictures. - Among the images in their 1874 publication The Moon, Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, were WOODBURYTYPE PRINTS of photographs of plaster models of the moon, constructed in accordance with Nasmyth's drawings based on telescope observations. - Far from fakery, in their minds, the model was conceived as an instructional tool that provided clear, close-up details not technically possible in actual moon photographs. - Nasmyth and Carpenter even created events, such as a volcanic eruption on the moon's surface (Fig. 5.21), and drew parallels between such natural phenomena as the creases on the surface of the moon, a human hand, and an apple.
Louis Agassiz (May 28, 1807 - December 14, 1873)
- a Swiss-American biologist and geologist recognized as an innovative and prodigious scholar of Earth's natural history, with later American writings that have received scrutiny because of particular racial themes. - Polygenism, the idea that races were created separately, that they could be classified on the basis of specific climatic zones, and that they were endowed with unequal attributes. - believed the Book of Genesis recounted the origin of the white race only and that the animals and plants in the Bible refer only to those species proximate and familiar to Adam and Eve.
Phrenology
- a pseudoscience primarily focused on measurements of the human skull - classification of human species into a hierarchy of intelligence and ability, a way for ruling class and colonialism to justify occupation and subjugation of whole cultures and separation of the races
The People of India : A Series of Photographic Illustrations The Races and Tribes of Hindustan by The Great Britain India Office, Sir John William Kaye and Forbes Watson
- an 8 volume collection of people of India photographed as a "souvenir" edition for the British governor general, Charles John Canning it developed into a huge project involving civilian and military photographers. - The 468 tipped-in prints generally show people identified by tribe and caste, holding a tool or weapon denoting their work and social position
Re-contextualizing historical images : Carrie Mae Weems
- appropriated photographs of slaves in the American South and other 19th- and 20th-century photographs of Africans and African Americans that the artist found in museum and university archives. - The portraits of the slaves were originally taken by anthropologist Louis Agassiz - His motive was to collect evidence to validate the belief of physical inferiority of African Americans as part of an anthropological study. - Through the series, Weems overturns the prints that were formerly captured to support claims of white superiority and uses them to her advantage to portray the problematic role of photographs in shaping and supporting racism, stereotyping, and social injustice. - Weems re-photographed and enlarged these images and printed them through colored filters: two blue-toned images bookend a grouping of images printed in red. - She framed the red-toned prints in circular mattes, meant to suggest the lens of a camera, and placed all of the prints beneath glass sandblasted with text. - About her choice of text the artist has said: "I'm trying to heighten a kind of critical awareness around the way in which these photographs were intended." She hopes this strategy "gives the subject another level of humanity and another level of dignity that was originally missing in the photograph."3
G B Duchenne de Boulogne
- convinced that the expressions of the human face were a gateway to the soul of man - Duchenne was a physician at the Paris hospital La Salpetriere, which treated people suffering from epilepsy, neurological problems, and insanity. - Duchenne's Mecanisme de la physionomie humaine (The Mechanism of Human Physiognomy), published in 1862, was accompanied by an atlas of eighty-four photographs taken between 1852 and 1856 of human subjects whose facial muscles were stimulated by an electric current (Fig. 5.1). - With the technical advice of photographer Adrien Tournachon ( 1825-1903), brother of the famous Parisian photographer, Duchenne attempted to arouse through electrical stimulation the individual facial muscles that he considered to be involved in human expression. - Most of his photographs were of people with mental retardation; forty-five of the eighty-four images are of one retarded man.
John Karl Hillers (1843, Hanover, Germany - 1925)
- ln 1879, responding to the belief that the traditional life of Native Americans was endangered by development, the United States established the Bureau of Ethnology. - John K. Hillers (1843-1925) was appointed staff photographer under John Wesley Powel l ( 1834-J 902), the agency's first director. - Hillers had met Powell while working as a boatman for Powell's survey of the Colorado River in 1871. - The expedition's photographer, E. 0. Beaman (1837-1876), had taught Hillers how to use the camera, and when Beaman left the group, Hillers took over from him, making about three thousand images of the Grand Canyon and of Native Americans. - For the Bureau of Ethnology, he produced more than twenty thousand negatives. - After the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, when the Indian Wars all but ceased, photographers took up the "grand endeavor" to capture the likeness of Native Americans before they disappeared altogether.
Orientalism
- the representation of Asia, especially the Middle East, in a stereotyped way that is regarded as embodying a colonialist attitude - One of the most persistent of such types of ethnographic photography showed women from the Middle East and Asia in sexually suggestive poses. - - The term "Orientalism:' adopted by cultural critic Edward Said in a 1978 book of the same title, has come to mean the wholesale social labeling of non-Western peoples as passive, rather than active; childlike, rather than mature; feminine, rather than masculine; and timeless-that is, separate from the progress of Western history. - More specifically, it describes the phenomenon of titillating sexual interest or intrusive observation of people from non -Western cultures, especially women. - Orientalism is a term used by scholars in art history, literary, geography, and cultural studies for the depiction of Eastern, that is "Oriental" cultures, including Middle Eastern, North African, South Asian and Southeast Asian cultures, done by writers, designers, and artists from the West. - In particular, Orientalist painting depicting "the Middle East" was a genre of 19th-century Academic art. - The literature of Western countries took a similar interest in Oriental themes. - It is also used for the use of Asian styles in Western art, especially in architecture and the decorative arts. - Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, much academic discourse has used the term "Orientalism" in a more restricted sense, to characterize a perceived patronizing Western attitude towards Near Eastern societies that is used to justify Western imperialism. - In Said's analysis, the West essentializes these societies as static and undeveloped—thereby fabricating a view of Oriental culture that can be studied, depicted, and reproduced. - Implicit in this fabrication, writes Said, is the idea that Western society is developed, rational, flexible, and superior, while Oriental societies embody the opposite values. - Orientalism Edward Said 1978
Typology
a classification according to general type, especially in archaeology, psychology, or the social sciences.
Charles Darwin: Darwinism
all species arise and develop through natural selection, points to a common ancestor for all humans
During the middle of 19th Century, photography..
▸Ethnographic Studies and Display ▸Ethnic or Economic 'Types' ▸Studies of Human Expressions and mental health ▸Discovery and sciences - Medical Photography, Topographic/Geological Surveys, Astronomy Studies ▸How had photography helped in discovery and how did falsehoods and prejudicial ideas were aided by the camera -Photography continues to expand it's uses into social science and science, including the use in geology, biology, botany, medicine, astronomy, and chemistry used photography to collect and exhibit evidence. -Colonial expansion and economic interests during the mid-nineteenth century, photographers increasingly sought to highlight cultural, gender, and physiognomic differences among people. -Sexuality and ethnicity merged in images of the exotic; often the normal was implicitly defined with reference to images of people with mental disabilities. -As popular and professional science and social science proliferated, they helped to make photography a global activity.
