[TOC] Visual Resouces volume 26, nr. 2, june 2010 - Table of Contents

CONTENTS
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SPECIAL ISSUE Seeing and/or Believing the Photograph : GUEST EDITOR Jordan Bear
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Introduction: Photography's "And/Or" Nature by Jordan Bear
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Photography, History, (Dis)belief by Ulrich Keller.
Abstract: Challenging the common assumption that photography is entirely different from other visual media and possesses a historically unchangeable ontological "nature," this article investigates media competition and changing media characteristics. During the Crimean War (1854-1856), for example, slow photographic emulsions were still unable to record unstaged scenes, permitting the eyewitness sketches of reporters for the illustrated weeklies to lay claim to greater authenticity. The same is true of academic painting. The professionalization of historiography and warfare itself transformed history painting into a project of factual, scientific correctness, one further strengthened by the organization of French painting as a state-supported, professional pursuit governed by the imperative of maximum optical accuracy on canvas. In sum, historical narration, textual or pictorial, serves the transmission of social values; but values are a matter of mythology, rather than fact, explaining the constitution of modern history as a mythological grand reçu parading in objective disguise.
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The Eye of the Sun and the Eye of God by Josh Ellenbogen.
Abstract: The supposedly intimate relationship between photography and human vision has served as an enduring basis for asserting the medium's proximity to reality. Yet, a number of first generation theoreticians of photography posited a far more ambiguous connection between the two, not least the prolific critic Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894). By imagining photography as superior to human perception in accessing the comprehensive, serial nature of the reality of phenomena, Holmes implied that vision was in fact more akin to the selective judgment of the painter. It is in the representation of objects moving at rapid speed, and the series of photographs required to capture the entirety of this cycle, that photography's multiplicity emerges as a most distinct counterpoint to the capacity of human vision. The acts of judgment that comprise perception are, in the writings of Lady Elizabeth Eastlake (1809-1893) and others, important bases for infusing representations of social class into the realm of this human ability. The complex constellation of photography, vision, and artistic taste attests to the deeply contested nature of the medium in its earliest years.
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Photography, the Index, and the Nonexistent: Alfred Watkins' Discovery (or Invention) of the Notorious Ley-lines of British Archaeology by Michael Charlesworth.
Abstract: Some current debates about the history of photography revolve around its alleged indexicality. Emphasizing this aspect plays into the "white mythology of photography" at the expense of other ways of comprehending the medium's semiotics and epistemology. Consideration of the use of photographs by Alfred Watkins (1855-1935), the British photographer and archaeologist, offers a semiotic model for the working of photography that can answer to both ontological and epistemological questions raised by the medium in general and by Watkins' works in particular. Watkins photographed features of British countryside and terrain that rival archaeologists have consistently alleged not to exist. It is only by not taking sides over this question that we can use the case to help understand how photography works in a situation of epistemological ambiguity. On the way, we can conclude that although their reputation for representing plain fact is precisely what is called into question, photographs continue to work persuasively on the reader, maintaining a rhetorical force in excess of their documentary value.
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Persuading the Unseen? Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, Photography, and German Communism's Iconophobia by Andres Mario Zervigón.
Abstract: Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung [Worker's Illustrated Magazine] (known as the AIZ) is widely recognized as a highly successful and politically radical alternative to interwar Germany's mainstream illustrated press. Far less acknowledged, however, is the extent to which the magazine's famously persuasive use of photography arose from deep misgivings about the medium's accuracy. This article will take a fresh look at the AIZ's astonishing alchemy of image and text and suggest that this formula, meant to expose the unseen, arose not in an outright enthusiasm for photography but from an institutionalized German communism that strongly distrusted images.
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GALLERY
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Warren Neidich
Reinventing History: Warren Neidich, Photography, Re-enactment, and Contemporary Event Culture by Kathy Kubicki.
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REVIEWS
Ulrich Baer reviews: Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, by Georges Didi-Huberman
Kate Palmer Albers reviews: The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning, by John Tagg
Emerson Bowyer reviews: The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, by Victor Stoichita
Russell Lord reviews: The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer, by Louis Kaplan, and Photography and Spirit, by John Harvey
Fae Brauer reviews: Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics 1870-1940, by Anne Maxwell
Jutta Schickore reviews: Six Stories from the End of Representation: Images in Painting, Photography, Astronomy, Microscopy, Particle Physics, and Quantum Mechanics, 1980-2000, by James Elkins
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