Between 1910 and 1970, the vast majority of photographs printed and consumed around the world appeared on the pages of illustrated magazines. These pictures rarely surfaced as autonomous entities, set off from their paginated context as the sort of discrete objects that generally figure in our standard histories of photography. Instead they were presented in carefully edited sequences, set cheek-by-jowl against other photographic series, and placed into the integrated company of text and graphic work. Unlike the single prints from which it was heavily drawn, the illustrated magazine was a broadly expansive and alluring amalgam that regularly arrived on private doorsteps and local kiosks before spilling into the everyday lives of consumers of goods and politics. As the Internet does today, the illustrated magazine significantly defined a global visual knowledge of the world.
Despite such potent omnipresence, however, we have yet to devise a method for studying this plenitude of mass-printed matter that foregrounded the photograph so powerfully. At our workshop Print Matters, we are encouraging participants to address this lacuna by exploring a fundamental question: how do we isolate and define the illustrated periodical as an object of research? In approaching this question, we have encouraged studies that explore the magazine as a physical object and, in turn, a complex cultural artefact firmly embedded in any one location and time.
Our analytic point of departure is that illustrated magazines took shape as a rich ecosystem of multi-media representation, and provided an important transactional frame where artists, authors, advertisers and readers coalesced into communities not just through printed text, graphic work and image, but also, and most especially, through photography. This two-day discussion revisits paradigmatic cases of magazine histories in Europe and the United States. It also covers illustrated periodicals from areas of the world where the format thrived but has, until now, received limited scholarly attention, including Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia and Latin America.
The event is free and open to the public. But please RSVP at developingroom@gmail.com
Sponsors
Developing Room at the Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers
Department of Art and Art History, Hunter College
Art History Department, Rutgers University
Office of the Dean of the Humanities, SAS (Rutgers)
Schedule
Friday, April 8
10:10 Introduction: Antonella Pelizzari and Andrés Mario Zervigón
10:25 Magazines and Their Ontology: Jason Hill, Vanessa Rocco, Christopher Phillips (respondent
11:45 Keynote I: Thierry Gervais
1:00 Lunch
2:00 Magazines and Nation: Thy Phu, Iliana Cepero, Daniel H. Magilow, Romy Golan (respondent)
3:30 Coffee Break
3:45 Magazines and Cultural Transfer: Christian Jorschke, Isotta Poggi, David Forgacs, Paul Roth, Maren Stange (respondent)
Saturday, April 9
10:10 Magazines and Systems of Pictorial Organization: Jordana Mendelson, Sally Stein, Mary Panzer, Vince Aletti, Nadya Bair, Jennifer Greenhill (respondent)
12:30 Lunch
2:00 Magazines, Communities, Modernities: Joan Judge, Jennifer Bajorek, David Campany, Cara A. Fineman, Margaret Innes, Patrizia di Bello (respondent)
4:40 Keynote II: Susan Meiselas
Conveners
Antonella Pelizzari
BIO
Maria Antonella Pelizzari is a historian of photography who specializes in the culture of illustrated magazines in interwar Italy. She is Professor of Art History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. Pelizzari is the author of Photography and Italy (Reaktion Books, 2011); Painting in Italy, 1910s-1950s: Futurism, Abstraction, Concrete Art (Allemandi, 2015) and a contributing author to the exhibition catalog Futurism 1909-1944. Reconstructing the Universe (The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2014); Paul Strand (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2015); Lynne Cohen(Fundación MAPFRE, 2014); Kati Horna. Told and Untold (Americas Society, 2017); Bruno Munari: The Lightness of Art (Peter Lang, 2017); Luigi Ghirri: The Map and the Territory (Folkwang Museum, 2018). She has published essays in Artforum, Millennium Film Journal, Performing Arts Journal, Aperture, History of Photography, Photography and Culture, Perspectives. Actualités de la Recherche en Histoire de l’Art, Visual Resources, études photographiques, Journal of Modern Italian Studies. She was curator of photography at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, where she organized the exhibition and edited the catalog Traces of India: Photography, Architecture and the Politics of Representation (Montreal and New Haven: CCA and Yale Center for British Art, 2003; “CAA British Art Historians Prize”). In 2012 she curated the exhibition Peripheral Visions: Italian Photography in Context, 1950s-Present and in 2017 she curated Framing Community: Magnum Photos, 1947-Present, both at the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery at Hunter College. Pelizzari is currently working on a book project on photography and the politics of illustrated mass periodicals in interwar Italy (tentative title, The Allure of the Popular: Photography and Illustrated Periodicals in Italy, 1927-1943).
Andrés Mario Zervigón
BIO
Andrés Mario Zervigón is Professor of the History of Photography at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. His scholarship concentrates on the interaction of photography and the mass-printed page between the two world wars. He guest-curated Agitated Images: John Heartfield and German Photomontage: 1920-1938 (2006) at the Getty Research Institute. Zervigón is author of John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage (University of Chicago Press, 2012) and Photography and Germany, for the Reaktion Books Exposures series (2017). With Tanya Sheehan he edited Photography and Its Origins (Routledge, 2014), with Sabine Kriebel Photography and Doubt (Routledge 2017), and with Donna Gustafson Subjective-Objective: A Century of Social Photography (Zimmerli Musuem/Hirmer Verlag, 2017). Zervigón has published articles and reviews in New German Critique, Visual Resources, History of Photography, Rundbrief Fotografie, Études Photographiques, October, Photo Researcher, Art Journal, and CAA.Reviews. He has contributed to recent anthologies, such as Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images (Routledge, 2018), Photography and the Optical Unconscious (Duke University Press, 2017), Deutsche Illustrierte Presse (Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2016), Getting the Picture: The History and Visual Culture of the News (Bloomsbury, 2015), Photography, History, Difference (University Press of New England, 2014), Das Auge des Arbeiters. Arbeiterfotografie und Kunst um 1930 (Spector-Verlag, 2014) and Avant-Garde Art in Everyday Life (Art Institute of Chicago, 2010). His current book project is Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung --The Worker's Illustrated Magazine, 1921-1938: A History of Germany's Other Avant-Garde, for which he received a CASVA Senior Fellowship (2013-14).
Keynotes
The Making of (Modern) Magazines - Thierry Gervais
The Making of (Modern) Magazines
Thierry Gervais, Ryerson Image Centre
ABSTRACT
The interwar period is considered essential in the history of press photography and marks for many, the beginnings of “modern” magazines. German magazines the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung and the Münchner Illustrierte Presse, respectively edited by Kurt Korff and Stefan Lorant or the French VU directed by Lucien Vogel, appear in this history as key periodicals in the dissemination of printed images. This paper will question this particular history by analysing the publication of photographs in the Western illustrated press from a broader perspective. It will also focus on the Belle Époque era when photographs reproduced in halftone became the main tool to convey visual news. This shift from drawings to photographs resulted in an increase of published news images and major changes in the structure of illustrated weeklies. Artistic directors were hired to select and organize photographs in a design that transformed illustrated weeklies into magazines.
Presesented as Keynote Talk I
BIO
Thierry Gervais is assistant professor at Ryerson University and Head of Research at the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC), Toronto. He received his PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) in 2007 and he has been the editor in chief of Études photographiques from 2007 to 2013. Gervais is the author of numerous articles on photojournalism in peer-reviewed journals and scholarly publications and he is the author of La photographie. Histoire, technique, presse, art (with Gaëlle Morel, Larousse, 2008). He was the curator of the exhibition “Dispatch: War Photographs in Print, 1854-2008” (RIC, Fall 2014) and the co-curator of the exhibitions “Views from Above” (Centre Pompidou-Metz, Spring 2013), “Léon Gimpel (1873-1948), the audacious work of a photographer” (Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Spring 2008), and “L'Événement: les images comme acteurs de l'histoire” (Jeu de Paume, Paris, Winter 2007). His book titled La Fabrique de l’information visuelle. Photographies et magazines d’actualité will be released March, 2015 (Paris, Textuel editions) and will be published in English by Bloomsbury in 2017.
Revisiting the Magazine - Susan Meiselas
Revisiting the Magazine
Susan Meiselas, Magnum Foundation
ABSTRACT
This talk retraces Susan Meiselas’s involvement with Nicaragua, starting in 1978. How does this photographer position herself in relationship to image distribution and the media? Meiselas will show that her practice has unfolded from the original circulation through printed periodicals – international as well as local - to an expanded scenario that has involved the local community and included archival sources and interviews, leading to the overall reframing of her work. This mode of ongoing practice also raises questions about our current Internet culture and the photographer vis-à-vis contemporary image distribution. As Meiselas observes, "in this digital age, in which images are increasingly dislocated, it seems to me that we must, as artists, work all the harder to relocate those images."
Presesented as Keynote Talk II
BIO
Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer who lives and works in New York. She is the author of Carnival Strippers (1976), Nicaragua (1981), Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997), Pandora’s Box (2001),
and Encounters with the Dani (2003). She has co-edited two published collections: El Salvador, Work of 30 Photographers (1983) and Chile from
Within (1990), rereleased as an e-book in 2013, and also co-directed two
films: Living at Risk (1985) and Pictures from a Revolution (1991) with Richard P. Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti. Meiselas is well known for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. Her photographs are included in American and international collections. In 1992 she was made a MacArthur Fellow and most recently was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015).
Talks
PM – “This is Not A Magazine” - Jason Hill
PM – “This is Not A Magazine”
Jason Hill, University of Delaware
ABSTRACT
In my study of the great 1940s New York City picture tabloid PM I have encountered with growing irritation a stubborn tendency among otherwise fastidious historians and commentators to describe that publication not as a daily newspaper, which it was, but as a magazine, which it was not, but which, on Saturdays, it periodically contained. (“They did this not monthly, not weekly, but daily!”, I mumble beneath my breath.) For my contribution to Print Matters I will refrain from correcting the easy mistakes of others to instead honor the obscure but important kernel that such slippages contain, to take seriously the slipperiness of the newspaper/news-magazine distinction itself, whose borders I have so reflexively (if silently) policed, particularly as it concerns the operational lives of photographic news pictures. How, I propose to consider, did journalists, photographers, and publishers understand the task, form, and time of the newspaper and the news-magazine differently in the middle years of the twentieth century? As importantly: how did these differences—as temporal as thematic—in their institutional entrenchment play out in press-photographic practice? If we are to take photography’s print contexts seriously in our estimation of that difficult medium's work, this presentation suggests, it follows that we must attend with real care to the procedural conventions animating—indeed scheduling—the running of the presses.
BIO
Jason Hill is Assistant Professor at the University of Delaware, where he teaches in the history of American art, photography, and visual culture. He is the co-editor, with Vanessa R. Schwartz, of Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News, published in 2015 by Bloomsbury. His book on PM is forthcoming with the University of California Press. Hill's writings on photography's limits and their strategic negotiation have also appeared in a number of edited collections and journals, including American Art, caa.reviews, Études Photographiques, Oxford Art Journal, and X-TRA.
Lorant, Layouts, and Cinema: Metropolis to the Münchner Illustrierte Presse and beyond - Vanessa Rocco
Lorant, Layouts, and Cinema: Metropolis to the Münchner Illustrierte Presse and beyond
Vanessa Rocco, Souther New Hampshire University
ABSTRACT
Print Matters, with its emphasis on the illustrated magazine as a “transactional frame” is the ideal opportunity to fill out the background story of editor Stefan Lorant’s essential and innovative role in interwar magazine design. The Hungarian-born Lorant is best known for the brilliant editorial work accomplished during his London years after he escaped Nazi Germany in 1934. Under his watch, Weekly Illustrated, Lilliput, and Picture Post all pioneered new methods of juxtaposing dynamically positioned photographs by twentieth-century greats such as Brassaï, Bill Brandt, and Robert Capa, alongside captivating typography and captions. Yet, none of those famed layouts would have been possible without Lorant’s trailblazing German work of the 1920s.
Lorant began his working life in Vienna, taking film stills on various sets. He then progressed to second cameraman on the film Mozart (1921), and was recruited for the same position on films shooting in Berlin. Once settled in Berlin, he began meeting people in film publicity and decided to move more toward the page. He took on the editorship of Das Magazin in 1925, and his layouts for that publication became his breakthrough in visual editing, with combinations of photographs, montage, illustrations, and text. In 1926 he was hired to compile a special issue of Ufa Magazin to promote Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), anecdotally pointed to as the “first modern magazine,” before moving onto the Münchner Illustrierte Presse (MIP) in 1928.
Lorant’s innovations were revolutionary in the genealogy of illustrated magazines. He realized that perception and vision in the twentieth-century were changing into something highly dynamic and fluid. Modern vision was attracted to motion, but how could that possibly be serviced through photographic stills? Lorant saw the answer as carefully sequenced and overlaid stills within the photographic essay. He was uniquely positioned to understand the translation of still to moving image through his film work; he then segued that experience into a brand-new medium. These innovations had profound consequences for the explosion of innovative weeklies in Germany. The stories in the MIP derived their power from his ability to combine photographs into a compelling narrative, and Lorant’s styling of them spread into a national—and then international— visual phenomenon. I will use the workshop presentation to demonstrate that Lorant understood the importance of sequence; how he upended the concept of illustrating single ideas one at a time; and that by doing so he completely altered the terms of magazine layouts.
BIO
Vanessa Rocco is Assistant Professor of Art History at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester, and former Associate Curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. She is co-editor with Elizabeth Otto of The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s to the 1960s (University of Michigan Press, 2011; paperback, 2012), which was supported by a Pratt Faculty Development Award. Rocco organized numerous exhibitions and publications at the ICP, including Louise Brooks and the ‘New Woman’ in Weimar Cinema (2007), Modernist Photography: Selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection (2005), and Expanding Vision: Moholy-Nagy’s Experiments of the 1920s (2004). Her reviews and articles about photography and exhibitions have appeared in the journals History of Photography, Aperture, CAA Reviews, SF Camerawork, NKA, and Afterimage. Rocco’s current book project is Photo-fascism: Photography, Film, and Exhibition Culture in 1930s Germany and Italy. She is also the recipient of a 2016 Getty Research Institute Library Grant award.
Response - Christopher Phillips
Response
Christopher Phillips, International Center of Photography
BIO
Christopher Phillips has been a curator at ICP since 2000. He has organized such exhibitions as Delmaet and Durandelle: The Construction of the Paris Opera (2001), The Rise of the Picture Press (2002), Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China (2004), Atta Kim: On-Air (2006), Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan (2008), Eugène Atget: Archivist of Paris (2010), and Wang Qingsong: When Worlds Collide (2011). He was also a member of the curatorial team, which organizing the 2013 ICP Triennial, A Different Kind of Order. Before coming to ICP, Phillips worked for ten years as a senior editor at Art in America magazine and was a member of the curatorial teams responsible for The Metropolis and the Art of the Twenties (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, 1991), Montage and the Image of Modern Life (Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, 1992), and Cosmos: From Romanticism to the Avant-Garde (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, 1999). In 1998, he organized the sound art exhibition Voices at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. His books include Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913-1940 (1989), The New Vision: Photographs from the Ford Motor Company Collection (with Maria Morris Hambourg, 1989), and Shanghai Kaleidoscope (2008). He is an adjunct faculty member at New York University and Barnard College, where he teaches courses in the history and criticism of photography.
Vietnam Pictorial, Visual Restoration, and National Renovation (1954-75) - Thy Phu
Vietnam Pictorial, Visual Restoration, and National Renovation (1954-75)
Thy Phu, Western University
ABSTRACT
In May 1954, the Viet Minh gained independence for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam by defeating France at the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ. Shortly after smashing the shackles of French colonialism, the fledgling but still divided nation sought a new visual form for expressing its autonomy, and for urging reunification with the southern Vietnam. Shortly after its liberation, Hanoi launched Báo ảnh Việt Nam (Vietnam Pictorial) on October 10th, 1954. This paper explores the ways that the illustrated magazine reworked photography—which French colonial officers had introduced to Vietnam in the nineteenth century—to mediate the meanings of national independence. Focusing on the use of painted photographs in issues from the pivotal war years of 1954-1975, I argue that the illustrated magazine draws on an indigenous practice of visual restoration (phục hồi ảnh cũ or phục chế ảnh cũ), although this practice usually refers to the manipulation of old images.
BIO
Thy Phu is associate professor in the English Dept. at Western University, where she teaches courses on cultural studies, critical theory, and American studies. Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture (Temple University Press, 2012), her first book, explores the relationship between civility and citizenship. Feeling Photography, a collection of essays co-edited with Elspeth Brown, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. She is currently working on two related projects. The first, with Andrea Noble, is on the Cold War Camera, a collaborative exploration of the ways that photography mediates the global cold war. The second is a history of 20th-century Vietnamese photography. She also serves as editor of the Americas region for the interdisciplinary journal Photography and Culture.
The magazine Mundo Peronista in Perón's Argentina - Iliana Cepero
The magazine Mundo Peronista in Perón's Argentina
Iliana Cepero, The New School & New York University
ABSTRACT
Photography fulfilled an essential task in the construction of Juan Perón’s political paraphernalia. Mundo Peronista (1951-1955), the agitprop organ par excellence of the regime, represents an exemplary catalogue of visual and literary indoctrination through photographic means. My presentation will explore the symbolic narrative of this publication, which combined conventional photojournalism with visual tactics taken from popular culture—such as layouts borrowed from both Hollywood movie fan magazines and local photoplays highly popular at the time; as well as narrative techniques endemic to cinematic melodrama. Mundo Peronista satisfied Perón’s populist agenda through different strategies: it refashioned his image and that of Eva (as part common people, part celebrities, part religious redeemers), crafted an illusory atmosphere of political consensus, constructed a ‘renewed’ national identity, and mediated a new concept of modernity and progress.
BIO
Iliana Cepero is a Cuban art historian, curator, and art critic. Her dissertation Visual Propaganda, Popular Culture, and Nation-State Building under Peronism (1946-1955) was awarded in 2012 with the Fifth Annual Joan and Stanford Alexander Award in Photography Research from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She recently presented the paper Where is Sara Gómez? at the conference “Black Portraiture (s) II: Revisited,” NYU (February 2016), and curated the exhibition ¡Cuba, Cuba! 65 years of Photography, organized by the International Center of Photography at the Southampton Arts Center, Long Island, NY (August 2015); she was also assistant curator of the Montreal Biennal in 2007, and co-curated the exhibition "Cuba: Art and History. From 1868 to today" held at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2008. She has written and lectured extensively on Cuban art and photography. Her manuscript “Photographic Propaganda under Peronism (1946-1955). Selections from the Archivo General de la Nación Argentina” will be published in the upcoming May issue of the journal History of Photography. She teaches courses on Latin American art and photography at New York University, the New School, Cooper Union and Hunter College.
The Spectacular and The Banal: On the Visual Logic of the Illustrierter Beobachter - Daniel H. Magilow
“Beyond the Documentary Approach:” Arthur Tress’ Open Space in the Inner City
Daniel H. Magilow, University of Tennessee
ABSTRACT
In the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, scholarly discourse on Third Reich-era illustrated magazines (Illustrierten) understandably gravitates toward their more visually striking and explicitly propagandistic moments. The official illustrated title of the National Socialist German Workers Party, the Illustrierter Beobachter (IB), for instance, published hagiographic cover portraits of Hitler, antisemitic photostories about purported Jewish world conspiracies, and multipage panoramas celebrating the size and splendor of Nazi party rallies and electoral achievements. Nevertheless, reducing the IB to mere propaganda does not adequately account for how it and other illustrated titles used photography in rhetorically impactful ways to establish their political legitimacy. Particularly after the National Socialists became an electorally significant political party after 1930, the IB embedded its explicit photographic expressions of radical right-wing ideology within the familiar features of the illustrated press, including their jokes, cartoons, games, serialized novels, regular columns, and travel stories, all delivered each Saturday in a familiar, standardized tabloid format that could be easily read on a subway. This strategy of narrativizing spectacular imagery among the banal was typical of popular Illustrierten across the political spectrum, and in fact, the IB’s editors were consciously mimicking the strategies of popular mainstream titles such as the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung and the Münchner Illustrierte Presse. This identification of narrativized spectacularity as constituting the ontology of illustrated newspapers ultimately challenges us to view National Socialist visual culture as emerging from—rather than breaking with—the traditions and practices of interwar Illustrierten.
BIO
Daniel H. Magilow is Associate Professor of German and currently the Chair of the German Program in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research interests include Holocaust Studies, Weimar Germany, Cinema Studies, and the history of photography. Dr. Magilow has authored, co-authored, or edited four books about topics such as photography in Germany in the late-Weimar Republic, the history of Holocaust representation, and the image of National Socialism in low-brow cinema and culture. He has also published several articles on atrocity photography, Holocaust memorials, exile literature, and German film. He regularly teaches courses related to all of these topics. Dr. Magilow has received awards from the Getty Research Institute, the German Academic Exchange Service / DAAD, and the Tennessee Humanities Center. He is currently at work on a translation and scholarly edition of the theoretical writings of Albert Renger-Patzsch.
Respondent - Romy Golan
Respondent
Romy Golan, Graduate Center CUNY
BIO
Professor Romy Golan is Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center after having taught at Vassar College and Yale University. Recurrent themes in her work are non-synchronicities of art and politics, reversals between progressive and reactionary art, the display of monumental artworks in world fairs and exhibitions, and questions of transmediality. She is currently completing a book on Italian Art in the 1960s structured around two non-linear forms of temporality: the flashback and the eclipse. At Yale she received the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for outstanding scholarly publication by Junior Faculty Members of the Humanities for her book Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (Yale Univ. Press, 1995). She is on the editorial board of Modernism/Modernity.
The German model and the French singularity: the AIZ and Regards (1928-39), a cultural transfer - Christian Joschke
The German model and the French singularity: the AIZ and Regards (1928-39), a cultural transfer
Christian Joschke, University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre
ABSTRACT
Although most of the studies about interwar European communist magazines did not look beyond the national frames, we can hardly speak about the French monthly illustrated magazine Regards without evoking the international situation of communist illustrated press. This journal was indeed the result of a cultural transfer from Germany to France. The entire concept of Regards — the need to provide a class-shaped view over political and social matters, the appeal to amateur photographers to illustrate the journal, the entire business plan, the technologies and distribution system — was the adaptation of the German Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung–model, introduced in France by Babette Gross and Lily Corpus, the chief editors of the German worker’s illustrated magazine. Recent findings made in the Comintern archive in Berlin and Moscow enable us to back up the hypothesis of a cultural transfer.
Nevertheless, Regards was far to be a simple copy of the German AIZ, since the editorial board was French, led by Léon Moussinac, and was aimed at a French working class audience. We must therefore explore the temporal and local conditions that explain these differences. In order to do this, we should compare different ways of hybridization of images and texts. Starting from the circulation of photographs distributed by Sowjet agencies like Russ-Foto or Soyuz-Foto and ending with the final layout, we can try to define the French singularity, and explain the conditions for the raise of the French art of photo-reportage.
BIO
Christian Joschke is Assistant Professor at the University Paris Ouest – Nanterre – La Défense and lecturer at the University of Geneva. After studying Art History and German culture, he completed his PhD-Thesis at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales with Prof. Eric Michaud (2005). He became assistant of Prof. Hans Belting at the Collège de France in 2003, then assistant at the University of Strasbourg. In 2007 he became Assistant Professor (maître de conférences) at the University of Lyon 2. He has won several fellowships at the Centre Marc Bloch (Berlin), Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art (Paris) and Internationales Forschungsinstitut Kulturwissenschaften (Vienne). In 2009-2010, he was Visiting Professor at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). He is currently working on a research project with the Centre Pompidou in Paris about social and documentary photography in the 1930's. (See: http://www.captures.labex-arts-h2h.fr/) He recently published Les yeux de la nation. Photographie amateur dans l'Allemagne de Guillaume II, Dijon (Les presses du réel, 2013 et La Guerre 14 - 18, Photopoche, 2014).
The Stars of Vie Nuove - Isotta Poggi
The Stars of Vie Nuove
Isotta Poggi, Getty Research Institute
ABSTRACT
The illustrated weekly Vie Nuove, founded in 1946 by Communist leader Luigi Longo, was the popular voice of the Italian Communist Party until the 1970s. While it began as a Settimanale di orientamento e lotta politica (Weekly of political activism), it redefined its mission in 1952 as Settimanale di politica, attualità e cultura (Weekly of politics, current events, and culture). With its new identity, it aimed at remaining competitive in the growing market of illustrated news magazines which reached a broader public with lighter content that had popular appeal. In fact after 1952 it managed to increase its circulation to 400,000 households of the Left‐leaning Italian working class. Turning its attention, ideologically yet critically, to the Soviet Union, as well as to Hollywood glamour and American culture, this publication reveals the multifaceted political, cultural, and artistic debates which took place in Italy during the Cold War. Photography was used in Vie Nuove both to strengthen the articles’ narrative and to promote commercial products. In addition, the magazine offered collectibles such as posters of cultural and political icons and comic strip cartoon stories for educational entertainment. In October 1967, Vie Nuove issued a popularized cartoon version of John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The “great saga” was printed in four fascicles meant to be detached and bound together as a book. The color cartoon story was enhanced with reproductions of historical photographs accompanied by lengthy informative captions.
This study will provide an overview of the illustrated magazine Vie Nuove and then focus on how one photograph, from the Russian Revolution educational insert, inspired Hungarian avantgarde artist Laszlo Lakner (b.1936) to create his painting “Russian Revolution” in 1970.
BIO
Isotta Poggi is Assistant Curator of Photographs at the Getty Research Institute working on acquisitions and exhibitions of photography collections with a focus on the documentation of cultural heritage, history, and archaeology. She most recently co-curated the exhibition “Connecting Seas: A Visual History of Discoveries and Encounters” at the Getty Research Institute, and curated “Inside Out: Pompeian Interiors Exposed” at the Italian Cultural Institute, Los Angeles. Poggi’s most recent publications is “The Photographic Memory and Impact of the Hungarian 1956 Uprising during the Cold War Era” (2015). Currently she is developing an exhibition in collaboration with the Wende Museum of the Cold War on the visual and material cultural of Hungary during the Cold War. This exhibition will open in 2017 in Los Angeles.
Photographic Afterlives of Neorealism: the fotodocumentari of Cinema Nuovo 1955-56 - David Forgacs
Photographic Afterlives of Neorealism: the fotodocumentari of Cinema Nuovo 1955-56
David Forgacs, New York University
ABSTRACT
Magazines containing photo-stories and photo-strips became an important part of the media landscape in Italy from the late 1930s. The first Italian photo-weeklies appeared in 1937-1939, modelled largely on those published in Germany France, Britain and the USA. In the period 1943-1954 there was a close relationship, which has been relatively little studied, between the films critically identified as neorealist and still photographs published in magazines or photo-books, as well as between fiction film, documentary film and photography. The original nucleus of Vittorio De Sica’s 1946 film Sciuscià was a photo-story published in June 1945, with text by De Sica and photographs by Piero Portalupi, about the shoeshine boys of Rome. Director Alberto Lattuada and cinematographer G.R. Aldo (Aldo Graziati), whose credits included La terra trema (Visconti, 1948) and Umberto D (De Sica, 1952), both had a background as still photographers. This paper examines one piece of this relationship, namely the documentary photo-stories (fotodocumentari) published in the film magazine Cinema nuovo in 1955-1956 after the main wave of neorealist film production had subsided. These stories constituted one of the “photographic afterlives” of neorealism.
BIO
David Forgacs holds the endowed Guido and Mariuccia Zerilli-Marimò Chair of Contemporary Italian Studies at New York University. He formerly held the established Chair of Italian at University College London, and before that he taught at the universities of Sussex, Cambridge and Royal Holloway London. His most recent book is Italy’s Margins: Social Exclusion and Nation Formation since 1861 (Cambridge University Press 2014; Italian edition: Laterza 2015). His other books include Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War, with Stephen Gundle (Indiana University Press, 2007; Italian edition Il Mulino, 2007), L’industrializzazione della cultura italiana 1880-2000 (2nd edition, Il Mulino, 2000), The Antonio Gramsci Reader (NYU Press, 2000) His work on cinema includes a co-edited book on Rossellini (2000), essays on Antonioni (2000, 2009, 2011) and Pontecorvo (2007), and full-length audio commentaries for the DVD and Blu-ray discs of Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, 1943), The Leopard (Luchini Visconti, 1963), Il deserto rosso (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964) and Il conformista (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970).
Saving Flavio: Gordon Parks, LIFE Magazine and Poverty in Brazil - Paul Roth
Saving Flavio: Gordon Parks, LIFE Magazine and Poverty in Brazil
Paul Roth, Ryerson Image Center
ABSTRACT
This talk revisits a LIFE picture story by celebrated U.S. photographer Gordon Parks, a story once widely celebrated, but now nearly forgotten despite its extraordinary place in the magazine’s history. Published on June 16, 1961 across seven striking page spreads, “Poverty: Freedom’s Fearful Foe” featured an indigent family living in a mountainside favela near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s most populous city. Parks anchored his narrative around the eldest son Flavio da Silva, an indomitable 12-year-old holding his family together despite life-threatening asthma. Chapter II of a five-part series promoting the U.S. Government’s recently announced Alliance for Progress as an anti-communist bulwark in Latin America, the story was intended by LIFE’s editors to visualize regional destitution, identified as a significant challenge to U.S. commerce, trade, and international aid.
Parks’ photo essay triggered a flood of impassioned letters and nearly $25,000 to support the da Silvas and the rest of the favela. The photographer returned to Brazil to launch LIFE’s “rescue effort,” flying Flavio to Colorado to receive treatment for his asthma, and—not incidentally—social acculturation and a private school education. Time, Inc. moved the da Silvas to a new home and began a trust to improve the favela, administered by their Rio Bureau and the Office of the Publisher in New York. LIFE ran periodic updates in the weeks following publication, but the media corporation’s efforts outlasted the news value of the story, continuing for many years. In Brazil, where the story appeared in LIFE’s Spanish-language digest LIFE en Español, the affair was highly controversial. Many politicians and publications expressed suspicion of both the story and the magazine’s interference in local matters. In a bravura move, illustrated weekly O Cruzeiro “retaliated,” sending photographer Henri Ballot to document poverty in LIFE’s own backyard, New York City. Ultimately, Flavio himself became disillusioned with the unasked-for change in his fortunes.
This talk will highlight research in multiple archival collections, allowing for diverse analysis of this layered story—from Parks’ making of the photographs to the selection, sequencing and layout choices of LIFE’s editors; public reception in the context of the magazine’s coverage of the Americas; and the full dimension of Time, Inc.’s intervention in the lives of its subjects. Taken together, the rich primary source materials permit considerable insight into LIFE’s editorial and corporate worldview during the Cold War era, revealing the extraordinary reach and power of the “Great American Magazine” during its heyday.
BIO
Paul Roth is Director of the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto, Ontario. Previously, he served as Senior Curator of Photography and Media Arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and as Executive Director of The Richard Avedon Foundation in New York. Roth has organized numerous exhibitions and film series, including Scotiabank Photography Award: Mark Ruwedel (2015); Edward Burtynsky: Oil (2009), Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power (2008), Sally Mann: What Remains (2004), and I…Dreaming: The Visionary Cinema of Stan Brakhage (National Gallery of Art, 2002). Among his writings are: Gordon Parks, from the series Photo Poche (Actes Sud, 2013); Gordon Parks: Collected Works (Steidl, 2012); “Unholy Trinity” in Richard Avedon: Murals and Portraits (Gagosian, 2012); and Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power (Steidl/Corcoran, 2008).
Response - Maren Stange
Response
Maren Stange, The Cooper Union
BIO
Maren Stange was educated at Harvard University and at Boston University, where she received her Ph.D. in American Studies. She writes frequently on modern American culture. Recent publications include Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks, Bronzeville: Black Chicago in Pictures, and Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890-1950. She was a Fulbright Senior Fellow in Germany and has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Yale University, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Durham University, England, in 2008 and served as an NEH panel evaluator in 2009.
Albums and/as Magazine: The Commissariat de Propaganda's Photo Albums and the Design of the Picture Press during the Spanish Civil War - Jordana Mendelson
Albums and/as Magazine: The Commissariat de Propaganda's Photo Albums and the Design of the Picture Press during the Spanish Civil War
Jordana Mendelson, New York University
ABSTRACT
Among the photographs conserved in the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya's holdings of the Commissariat de Propaganda (the Generalitat de Catalunya's propaganda department during the Spanish Civil War), is a carefully staged and composed image of a man looking through the pages of a photographic album. The albums stacked in front of him on a desk, and illuminated by a lamp, are a center-piece of our attention. But, even more than the stacked volumes (which reinforce the idea that they form part of a larger collection), it is the opened page of the album, in which we can see the distributed photographs neatly organized, that is this image's protagonist. In this paper, I seek to explore the possible connections -- in terms of context, concept, and design -- between the Commissariat's photo albums, the publicity photographs taken of them, and the magazines produced by the agency to think about the ways the album served not only as archive for the photographs compiled and used by the Commissariat but also as a model for the design of war time illustrated magazines. More broadly, this paper explores the relation between album and magazine as a possible underlying principal that helped photo editors understand how to organize photographs on the page for readers already familiar with the logic of the family album (and its institutional counter part, the product catalogue or inventory). Not to be seen strictly as a "one way street", the paper will also consider the ways the proliferation of the illustrated press, especially magazines, served to reinforce, revitalize, or transform the practices of looking at photographic albums in light of the incursion of the magazine into both intimate and institutional spaces.
BIO
Jordana Mendelson is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, New York University. She is the author of essays on Spanish modern art, photography, and the illustrated press and curator or co-curator of several exhibitions that take the illustrated press as a central focus: Margaret Michaelis: Photography, Vanguard and Politics in Republican Barcelona (1998), Magazines and War 1936-1939 (2007), Other Weapons: Photography and Print Culture during the Spanish Civil War (2008), and Encounter with the 1930s (2012). She is the author of Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation 1929-1939 (2005) and co-editor of Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity (2010).
Mainstream Differences. The Distinctive Looks of Life and Look in U.S. Media Culture - Sally Stein
Mainstream Differences. The Distinctive Looks of Life and Look in U.S. Media Culture
Sally Stein, Emeritus, UC Irvine
ABSTRACT
In a scathing review of a 1972 biography of magazine publisher Henry Luce, the radical critic Dwight MacDonald underscored his disdain for Luce’s most popular (and least literary) magazine by stooping to the lowest form of negative advertising: “...it was better than Look is all one (me) can say.” As notable as MacDonald’s conspicuously awkward syntax was his deliberate invocation of Life’s major competition. Such comparisons were once quite common as well as logical, yet nearly all recent studies of U.S. picture magazines have granted Life’s singular authority by allowing that one periodical to define their conceptions of magazine photojournalism, and its audience, in America.
This presentation challenges the categorical judgment that Life was indisputably “better” than Look. Even if the verdict of overall quality persists unshaken by these efforts, I aim to specify a bit more the values underlying such a judgment. If it was better, in what manner was it better? Moreover, for whom did (and do) such distinctions carry weight? In addition to these questions linking sociology with (relativist) aesthetics, I briefly consider the historiographic issue, why has it grown so uncommon to compare the two?
Comparison seems the most productive method of analysis given that Look and Life were virtually coterminous forms of mass communication, starting up publication within a few months of each other (November 1936 for Life, January 1937 for Look), in each case attracting almost instantaneously audiences of more than a million that continued to grow, and expiring for the same structural reasons within a year (October 1971 for Look; December 1972 for Life). In actual numbers, Look grew even faster than Life during much of the 1950s, even matching and then surpassing Life’s circulation by the end of the 1960s when Look posted figures of 7.75 million. How, then, to explain the way Life came to dominate as a retrospective cultural symbol far more completely than it ever dominated the market or the public sphere? How did it become so customary in studies of modern print media to overlook Look by treating it as a negligible phenomenon, ignoring the fact that it existed in the same media environment, presenting both serious competition and unavoidable alter-image for all but twenty months of Life’s thirty-six year publishing history as a weekly picture magazine?
By considering the two publications’ process of jockeying, swapping, sorting and differentiating that contributed to the formation of both Life and Look, this research aims to shed a bit more light on that ever-buried issue in American life: class, or at least its cultural representation and reproduction, in the rapidly developing graphic discourses of 1930s print media.
BIO
Dr. Sally Stein, Professor Emerita, Department of Art History, UC Irvine, is an independent scholar based in Los Angeles who continues to research and write about photography and its relation to broader questions of culture and society. The interrelated topics she most often engages concern the multiple effects of documentary imagery, the politics of gender, and the status and meaning of black and white and color imagery on our perceptions, beliefs, even actions as consumers and citizens.
Before and After: Look, the FSA Legacy, and the Origins of MS Magazine - Mary Panzer
Before and After: Look, the FSA Legacy, and the Origins of MS Magazine
Mary Panzer, Independent Scholar
ABSTRACT
After World War 2, LOOK magazine employed several former FSA photographers, and for the next three decades continued the regular practice of humanist documentary that has long been considered an artifact of the 1930s, or a product of the photographers and curators of the Family of Man. Arthur Rothstein was head of the Photo Department for the entire run of the magazine, and in turn hired John Vachon and freelancers such as Esther Bubley as well as new photographers like Stanley Kubrick whose approach fit with the magazine. Never complacent, LOOK kept up with the times in both design and content. It covered contemporary social problems with surprising frankness — race in the north, teenagers and sex, even traveling behind the Iron Curtain. As New Journalism became fashionable in the mid 1960s, LOOK took on a new tone, employing writers such as Gloria Steinem and Betty Rollins to write from a young, hip, female point of view. As a journalistic genre, New Journalism favored words over pictures, which left LOOK’s pages increasingly filled with text. After LOOK folded in 1970, LOOK “graduates” such as Gloria Steinem and Managing Editor Patricia Carbine reunited at the founding of MS Magazine — beginning with the “one shot” issue appearing as part of NEW YORK magazine in December 1971, which evolved into a full fledged magazine in 1972. This presentation establishes LOOK as an essential historical bridge, providing social and aesthetic continuity between generations of photographers and journalists who have too long been considered apart.
BIO
Mary Panzer is a historian of photography and American culture, curator and writer. She is the biographer of Mathew Brady (1926-1896), Philippe Halsman (1905-1978), Lewis Hine (1874-1940), and William H. Rau (1855-1920). She is a specialist in the history of portraiture and commercial photography (1839 to the present) and former Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution (1992-2000). She is the author and curator of Philadelphia Naturalistic Photography, 1865-1906 (1982), on the history of amateur photography in America 1850-1910, with emphasis on the photographic community in and around Philadelphia. She is a frequent contributor to the Chicago Tribune and AmericanPhoto and her most recent publications include “Stanley Kubrick, Photojournalist at LOOK,” Vanity Fair (March 2005) and her forthcoming book “Things As They Are: Photojournalism Since 1955” (2006).
The Brief Wondrous Life of Junior Bazaar - Vince Aletti
The Brief Wondrous Life of Junior Bazaar
Vince Aletti, The New Yorker
ABSTRACT
Junior Bazaar, published as a spin-off by Harper's Bazaar from November 1945 to May 1948, was a product of post-war optimism and youthful high spirits. Although Alexey Brodovitch was credited as its art director, his assistant, Lillian Bassman, then in her twenties, was its driving force, and the magazine became a key testing ground for her friend, Richard Avedon; Junior Bazaar's launch issue carried his first cover photograph. The magazine also published photographs by Robert Frank, Genevieve Naylor, Paul Himmel, and Herman Landshoff, but its lively, colorful graphic design was what most distinguished it from what its staffers called Big Bazaar and any other magazines from the period.
BIO
Vince Aletti reviews photography exhibitions for the New Yorker's Goings on About Town section and writes a regular column about photo books for Photograph. He contributes occasional features and reviews to Aperture, Artforum, W, and Document. He was the art editor of the Village Voice from 1994 to 2005, and the paper's photo critic for 20 years. He is the winner of the International Center of Photography's 2005 Infinity Award in writing and was the co-curator of that museum's 2009 exhibition, "Avedon: Fashion 1944-2000."
Magnum on Holiday: Photographers, Editors, and the Demands of Postwar Magazine Photography - Nadya Bair
Magnum on Holiday: Photographers, Editors, and the Demands of Postwar Magazine Photography
Nadya Bair, University of Southern California
ABSTRACT
“The most professional American tourists call themselves foreign correspondents.” - Robert Capa (Holiday, September 1952)
Despite the growing literature on photography and the illustrated press, it has been difficult to understand how editorial features were produced behind the scenes; how they were meant to function alongside advertisements; and how specialty publications contributed to the cultural and visual landscape of illustrated journalism. My paper takes on such questions by examining the relationship between Magnum Photos, the photographic cooperative founded in 1947 by such photographers as Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and the editors of the American travel magazine Holiday, founded in 1946 by the Curtis Publishing Company. I argue that the collaborations between Magnum and Holiday worked to their mutual advantage as both sought to define their roles in postwar photojournalism, and I demonstrate the extent to which independent image suppliers could shape editorial decisions. Relying predominantly on free-lance labor, Holiday wanted to instill wanderlust in its educated, upper middle class readers through top-quality travel writing and photography. Magnum sought to cultivate new markets and generate the maximum number of assignments for its international network of photographers. Based in extensive research in Magnum archives, I study Magnum’s production of three photo essays about the lives of people around the world that were published in Holiday between 1953 and 1956. The photo agency brought its editorial aesthetic and penchant for human-interest photojournalism into the tourism industry, proving to Holiday editors that stories about “ordinary” people would make travel appear more personal and familiar than images of vistas alone. Holiday’s demands for more glamor and color, in turn, taught Magnum how to create stories that functioned both as international news and as promotion for global travel. The magazine would continue to blur the editorial-advertising divide in subsequent issues while Magnum photographers acquired the skills necessary for securing industrial and advertising assignments. Such projects would sustain the agency into the 1960s and 1970s while competition from television would lead illustrated magazines, including Holiday, to close their doors.
BIO
Nadya Bair is completing her doctorate in Art History at the University of Southern California with the support of an ACLS-Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship; she also holds USC’s Visual Studies Graduate Certificate. Bair’s dissertation, “The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Art of Collaboration in Postwar Photojournalism,” examines how a group of photographers and photo editors transitioned out of World War II and expanded the role of news photography in the postwar world. She has published a chapter on magazine photo editors in Hill and Schwartz, Getting the Picture (2015), and an article on the mythologies surrounding Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photo book, The Decisive Moment, is forthcoming in History of Photography (May 2016). This fall she will be the Nadir Mohamed Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ryerson Image Centre (Ryerson University, Toronto).
Response - Jennifer Greenhill
Response
Jennifer Greenhill, University of Southern California
BIO
Jennifer Greenhill is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California, and a faculty affiliate of the Visual Studies Research Institute. From 2007 to 2015, she taught at the University of Illinois, and in 2014, she served as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris, France. Greenhill specializes in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American art and visual culture, with an emphasis on intermedial and intercultural objects, race and the politics of visuality, and intersections between elite and popular forms of expression. She is author of Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age (University of California Press, 2012); and a co-editor of A Companion to American Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015). Greenhill’s current book project, The Commercial Imagination, focuses on mass-market illustration in the early twentieth century; an article drawn from this material is forthcoming in Art History as “Flip, Linger, Glide: Coles Phillips and the Movements of Magazine Pictures.” She is also at work on a study about the Gordon Parks’s use of color in his fashion spreads, social justice work, and first feature-length film, The Learning Tree (1969).
Portraits of Chinese Ladies in the Age of the Global Periodical - Joan Judge
Portraits of Chinese Ladies in the Age of the Global Periodical
Joan Judge, York University
ABSTRACT
The periodical press was the key medium for disseminating foreign ideas and enriching local imaginaries in early twentieth century China. The cacophonous content of these publications includes conceptually rich cover art; topical articles; translated essays, biographies and fiction; readers’ and editorial columns; and, perhaps most importantly photographs. Grouped at the front of the journals and spanning up to fourteen pages, these photographs constitute a unique and extensive archive otherwise lost to history. As eclectic as the journals themselves, they depict local landscapes, foreign buildings, Russian princesses, American presidents, and Chinese women.
This presentation focuses on these portraits of Chinese women in one particularly influential women’s journal published from 1911, the moment of China’s transition from an imperial dynasty to a republic. It probes the ways these photographs of respectable ladies contributed to the naturalization of women’s presence in public under the new political regime, and examines their complex and often aporetic interactions with the discursive content of the journals. Many of the portraits had been submitted in response to fervent solicitations in the editor’s column, all were in tension with certain strains of argument in discursive essays, and a significant number were of women who contributed essays or poems to the subsequent pages. At the same time, each of these photographs is suggestive of shifting gender paradigms. Exploring linked and changing notions of sexuality and visibility in this period, the presentation juxtaposes the photographs of upright women printed in the pages of a woman’s journal to portraits of women of the demi-monde that appeared in contemporary and highly aestheticized courtesan albums.
Grounded in a methodology that highlights the interplay among texts, images, and their print and historical contexts, the presentation helps to push the boundaries of how we think about illustrated print matter in the golden age of the global periodical.
BIO
Joan Judge is Professor in the Department of History at York University in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (University of California Press, 2015), The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford University Press, 2008), Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford University Press, 1996), and co-editor of A Space of Their Own? Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Global Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women’s Biography in Chinese History (Berkeley: Global, Area, and International Archive/University of California Press, 2011). She is currently engaged in an SSHRC-funded project with the working title “Quotidian Concerns: Everyday Knowledge and the Rise of the Common Reader in China, 1870-1949).
Decolonizing Print Culture: The Example of Bingo - Jennifer Bajorek
Decolonizing Print Culture: The Example of Bingo
Jennifer Bajorek, Hampshire College
ABSTRACT
“Decolonizing Print Culture” will situate Bingo, an illustrated magazine published out of Dakar, Senegal, starting in 1953, within the conceptual framework sketched by the workshop’s organizers, in hopes of contributing to their proposed exploration of new ontologies and methodologies of the photograph-printed page interface. The proposed paper responds directly to the organizers’ call to consider the temporal and local conditions that “encouraged, challenged, and otherwise shaped the magazine amalgam” in non-European and, specifically, in francophone African space. Bingo is unique among African magazines in this period in that it had a long-running policy of publishing reader-submitted photographs. Readers sent in their photographs—many of them the studio portraits now familiar to Western audiences—from all over the AOF and beyond (West Africans living, or stationed, in Morocco, Algeria, Indochina are all represented in its pages). Bingo’s readers used the magazine as a forum for sharing photographs, even as they were in the process of forging a progressive, pro-Independence, pan-African identity in the debates about social and political issues that unfolded in the magazine’s letters pages. Bingo’s reliance on reader-submitted photographs makes it particularly rich material for an analysis of the photograph-printed page interface in late colonial modernity.
Specific questions I will explore include those about the role of illustrated magazines in invoking the new “epistemologies of the everyday” (Newell and Okome) connected with popular media in urban West Africa; the role of Bingo in fostering a new transcolonial public (a public that is precisely not national or transnational); and those laying the groundwork for new histories and theories of creative participation and collaboration in the production of printed objects.
The paper builds on my previous research on the history of photography in francophone West Africa and forms part of a broader interrogation of the visual, photographic, and textual legacies of French colonial projects in Africa. This research contributes to a growing field of scholarship on an expanded conceptions of textual and visual literacy in West Africa; scholarship on bi-directional flows of literary, artistic, and cultural innovation between urban Africa and urban centers in other parts of the world, within and beyond imperial circuits; and scholarship on African media cultures, including new and digital media cultures. As such, it contributes to the ongoing project of rethinking African modernism in all of its forms, and it is part of our ongoing collective contestation of the Eurocentric concepts and intellectual traditions within which modernism continues to be framed.
BIO
Jennifer Bajorek is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Hampshire College and a research associate in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She teaches and writes on literature, philosophical aesthetics, and photography. Her publications include essays on lyric poetry, Marxist theories of labor, Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history, and historical and contemporary photography in Africa and have appeared in Aperture, Critical Inquiry, Diacritics, History of Photography, and the Autograph ABP (Association of Black Photographers) newspaper. She is the author of two books, Counterfeit Capital (Stanford, 2009) and of How to Write a Visual History of Liberation: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in Africa (Duke, forthcoming).
VU Magazine: Photography between the Avant-garde and the Mainstream Press - David Campany
VU Magazine: Photography between the Avant-garde and the Mainstream Press
David Campany, University of Westminster
ABSTRACT
The mass media environment heralded by the expansion of magazine culture in the 1920s and 30s was remarkable for its variety. It was not the ‘niched’ variety of today’s magazine culture (in which everyone’s specialism is provided for). Rather, ‘variety’ was in itself attractive and progressive, and many magazines looked to present a ‘cross section’ of subjects.
Moreover, the idea of ‘cross section’ informed both mainstream and avant-garde magazines. The weekly VU (1928-40), the most popular magazine in France in the 1930s, aimed to provide reports and commentary on everything from politics and employment to cinema, architecture and design. Meanwhile, many of the avant-garde journals brought disparate disciplines into productive tension. For example, Minotaure (1933-39) announced its scope as ‘The Plastic Arts, Poetry, Music, Architecture, Ethnology, Mythology, Spectacles, Psychology, Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis’. The short-lived Documents (1929-30) promised ‘Doctrines, Archéologie, Beaux-arts, Ethnographie’ (shifting in its second year to ‘Archéologie, Beaux-arts, Ethnographie, Variétés’). Other vanguard titles such as the French Jazz, Bifur and the Belgian Variétés gave themselves similar remits. Moreover, this was an era in which there were no clear lines between mainstream and avant-garde: the photographically illustrated page could be a heterotopic meeting ground for distinct subjects and disciplines. To explore this David Campany will look at the editorial parallels between VU and various avant-garde journals of the 20s and 30s.
BIO
David Campany is a writer, curator and artist. His books include A Handful of Dust 2015, Walker Evans: the magazine work 2014, The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip 2014, Jeff Wall: Picture for Women 2010, Photography and Cinema 2008, and Art and Photography 2003. The first three are also major travelling exhibitions. He has curated shows of the work of Victor Burgin, Hannah Collins, Mark Neville and Jo Spence.
An anthology of his essays, a book of his photographs and a book co-authored with Sara Knelman about the exhibiting of photography are forthcoming.
For his writing, David has received the ICP Infinity Award, the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award, a Deutscher Fotobuchpreis, the Alice Award and a Royal Photographic Society Award. He teaches at the University of Westminster, London.
Fortune Magazine and the New Visual Politics of the Candid Camera - Cara A. Finnegan
Fortune Magazine and the New Visual Politics of the Candid Camera
Cara A. Finnegan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
ABSTRACT
Beginning in the late 1920s, a new kind of photography appeared in Europe and the United States, made possible by small, portable cameras capable of producing intimate photographs of seemingly unguarded subjects. “Candid camera” photography provided the public with a decidedly different look at political power, revealing world leaders to be something different from the heroic, stern figures that the press frequently visualized them to be. In doing so, it brought to the political sphere new visual values of access, intimacy, and energy. The rise of these new values transformed expectations for how mass magazines of the era should depict political leaders. My presentation will explore what these new norms of representation meant for mass magazines’ representation of political elites. In particular, I will examine how the new norms of candid camera photography played out in the work of the most famous of the “candid cameramen,” Erich Salomon, which circulated widely in U.S. outlets such as Fortune, Time, and Vanity Fair in the early 1930s.
BIO
Cara A. Finnegan is Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she also holds affiliated appointments in Art History, Gender and Women's Studies, and the Center for Writing Studies. Her research explores the historical and contemporary role of photography in U.S. public life. She is the author of Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Smithsonian, 2003) and Making Photography Matter: A Viewer's History from the Civil War to the Great Depression (Illinois, 2015). Her articles and reviews have appeared in outlets across the fields of Communication and American History, including Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Journal of American History, and American Historical Review. During 2016-17 she will hold an NEH fellowship to support work on a new book, American Presidents and the History of Photography from the Daguerreotype to the Digital Revolution.
Light and Shadow on Machines: Industrial Photography in Fortune Magazine, 1930-1936 - Margaret Innes
Light and Shadow on Machines: Industrial Photography in Fortune Magazine, 1930-1936
Margaret Innes, Harvard University
ABSTRACT
Conceived at the height of the Hoover bull market and released four months after Black Tuesday, the first issue of Fortune went out to subscribers in February 1930. At the costly rate of $1 per copy, the magazine seemed to defy new economic realities, eschewing newsstand circulation to cultivate a select readership amongst the professional classes. Fortune was the second effort in Henry Luce’s publishing enterprise, launched seven years after Time and six before Life; but if these magazines proved generative of new periodical genres—the news digest and the mass photo magazine, respectively—Fortune’s historical impact has remained more obscure. With lavishly printed photographic reproductions that accompanied articles on American industry, Fortune constituted a strange amalgam: part statistical broadsheet, part business report, and part modernist luxury object. As one peer publication described a lyric photo essay on meat-packing, “it goes Carl Sandberg one better in poeticizing the stock yards of Chicago.”
This paper examines Fortune’s photographic rhetoric in the years before Life in order to assess the nature of its innovation. Focusing on the industrial-modernist idiom pioneered by in-house photographer Margaret Bourke-White, it considers Fortune’s integration of the previously distinct discourses of scientific management, social reform, advertising, and art. I argue that this brand of industrial photography inverted pictorial narrative formulas established by Lewis Hine in Survey Graphic and employed by worker-photographers on the left. Privileging the expressive potential of the production process over workers’ physiognomy, Fortune articulated a new position for American labor in distinct visual terms.
BIO
Margaret Innes is a doctoral candidate in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Her dissertation "Signs of Labor: American Photography after Photomontage, 1926-1951" examines the reception and assimilation of photomontage, pictorial statistics, and models of collective production in the American left-wing press of the interwar period.
Response - Patrizia di Bello
Response
Patrizia di Bello, Birkbeck, University of London
BIO
Dr. Patrizia Di Bello is Senior Lecturer in the History of Photography and co-director of the History and Theory of Photography Research Centre in the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London. Her recent publications include a Special Issue of History of Photography on ‘The Sculptural Image in the Nineteenth-Century’ (37:4, November 2013). She is the author of Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian Britain: Ladies, Mothers and Flirts (Ashgate 2007); editor of Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the present (Ashgate 2009), with Gabriel Koureas; and of The Photobook from Talbot to Ruscha (IB Tauris, 2012), with Colette Wilson and Shamoon Zamir. She is currently finishing a book on photographs of sculpture, 1844-2011, which includes a chapter on the earth-body works by Ana Mendieta published in the feminist magazine Heresies.