Photography & Fictions: Locating Dynamics of Practice

What happens to photographic truth when it is thwarted, subverted, stretched and even outwitted? The photography presented in this book provides a range of responses and practices- from the blatant to the exquisitely subtle- and all in the name of fiction. With full-colour images, Photography & Fiction: locating dynamics of practice illustrates and explains the latest issues and ingenious creativity involved in making pictures. The book is the consequence of a significant gathering of photographers, curators, and academics during the 5th Queensland Festival of Photography. Its themes include Fiction-as-Truth, deceptive photography, technology’s fictive potential, as well as the highly personal and inner worlds of human experience.

Through their eyes: Seeing experiences of Settlement in photographs taken by refugee background youth in Melbourne, Australia

Although “refugees” are frequently represented in visual media, it is predominantly as the central subject matter and rarely are they positioned as the photographers of their own journeys. In this article we present photographic images that have been taken by refugee background youth portraying their experiences of the first years of settlement in Australia. We consider how, in our longitudinal research conducted with 120 refugee background youth, visual materials can provide equally important yet different insights in comparison to written or spoken narratives on the experiences of refugee settlement. Through an examination of over 1,000 photos taken by these youth, we explore the ways in which they portrayed their early experiences of external suburban settlement environments and their depictions of interior spaces and home-making practices. We discuss how these visual insights capture an alternative way of seeing the experiences of becoming at home as the youth become emplaced post-resettlement in Australia. We argue that the photographs taken by these refugee background youth illustrate how visual methods and materials can provide equally important but often overlooked insights into early settlement experiences. Importantly, the photographic images offer a way of portraying the people, places and sentiments that are central to the everyday lives of refugee background youths in ways that oral and written narratives can not.

Landscape painting

The images in this exhibition were based on questioning relationships between the histories of painting and photography, which helped to establish the indexical references that became both photography’s most powerful attribute and most subtle illusion. Debates over the objectivity or subjectivity of the photograph and the uneasy relationship between painting and photography, as played out in the history of art, have been brought into sharp relief with the contemporary proliferation of digital images. The digital realm of photography gives rise to a general and relative skepticism of verity, but it can be argued that to artist/photographers, this representational malleability is precisely what their purpose becomes. In researching current issues of the indexical in photographic practice, landscape provides a potent vehicle for exploring issues of representation and illusion, the nexus of painting and photography, and the digital realm. One of contemporary photography’s most resonant themes is a return to pictorial subjects and methods, including a renewed interest in floribunda, still life and landscape. The resulting deconstruction and reconstruction of landscape ‘painting’ in this body of work- the monochrome, linear abstraction, painterly representationalsism and pictorialist detail is presented as a perceptual, aesthetic and digital act. The exhibition incorporates landscape painting’s simplicity and complexity, photography’s significance of representation and minimalist aesthetics in an over-mediated world.

Hugo Steiner-Prag and unidentified man discussing blueprints; Leipzig.

Photographers imprint bottom left

NAACP dinner for Professor Herbert Strauss; Mitzi's, 86th Street, New York.

Digital Image

Pianist Heida Hermanns née Goldschmidt seated at a piano; Berlin Portraits Women

Digital Image

Group portrait, welcome home dinner for ex-service personnel; Newark Beth Israel Hospital; Hotel Essex House, Newark, New Jersey Portraits Groups

Digital Image

Group portrait, testimonial dinner for Dr. Paul Klemperer's 10th anniversary at Mt. Sinai Hospital given by his students; Cavanagh's, New York City Portraits Groups

Digital Image

Seated portrait of Elisabeth Bell Portraits Women

Photographers stamp bottom left

Nachman Zonabend 1939-1944

The records reflect the organizational structure of the Jewish ghetto administration and consist of the following: Correspondence with German government agencies, 1939-1941, including the Police and Gestapo, the *Oberburgermeister* of Litzmannstadt (German name for Lodz), the *Gettoverwaltung* (German administration of the ghetto). The correspondence pertains to the establishment of the ghetto, expropriation of Jewish property, resettlement of Lodz Jews into the ghetto, sanitary conditions, ghetto industry, anti-Jewish ordinances. Announcements issued by Rumkowski, 1940-1944. A complete set of daily communications to the ghetto population on all subjects pertinent to ghetto life such as: confiscations of Jewish property, food rationing, availability of work, relief distribution, deportations, liquidation of the ghetto. Files of various departments of the Jewish ghetto administration including labor divisions and workshops, the Jewish police (*Ordnungsdienst*), Statistics Department, Ghetto Court, Archives, Resettlement Department, Deportation Commission. Of special interest are the Archives files which contain essays and reports written by the Archives staff expressly for the purpose of historical record on subjects related to ghetto life. Outstanding in this group are reports and literary sketches by Joseph Zelkowicz, including his extensive account about the *Gesperre* (Yid. Shpere) - the deportation of the children, the old and the infirm in September, 1942. In addition, the Archives files contain bulletins of the *Daily Chronicle* of the Lodz Ghetto, transcripts of speeches by Rumkowski, and issues of the *Geto-tsaytung*, a short-lived official publication of the Eldest of the Jews. Iconographic materials, including photographs and albums. The photographs taken by Mendel Grossman, Henryk Ross, Maliniak, Zonabend and others, provide an extensive visual record of ghetto life.

Relações de gênero na imprensa esportiva

O objetivo deste documento é apresentar os artigos que compõem a tese, cuja abordagem temática circunscreve-se sobre as relações de gênero na imprensa esportiva. Em nível de organização, sentimo-nos à vontade para dividirmos esta tese em dois blocos: o de BASE e o de APROFUNDAMENTO. O Bloco base é composto pelos artigos "Os estudos de gênero e masculinidade e seus reflexos para a Educação Física" e "O olhar da imprensa sobre o vôlei feminino: quando a sombra se destaca". O Primeiro versa sobre uma reflexão sobre as identidades e os desdobramentos das masculinidades para a área da Educação Física e esportes. Nessa empreitada, pudemos inferir que os estudos sobre as temáticas Gênero e Masculinidades apontam-nos para um terreno fecundo e promissor no que diz respeito à contemporaneidade e a abrangência teórica no universo da ciência com a qual esta área de saber dialoga. Destarte, somos levados a inferir que os esportes, ao que tudo indica, vem atuando como legitimadora e reprodutora de uma ideologia hegemônica, sexista, patriarcal e machista. O segundo artigo, abordamos a história da inserção e da permanência das mulheres no universo dos esportes, utilizando a técnica da análise de imagens. Verificamos que a imprensa esportiva ainda carreia a imagem das mulheres atletas mantendo padrões ainda subordinados a uma hegemonia masculina que legisla sobre o que se quer ver. Já no segundo bloco, é composto pelos estudos "Jogos Olímpicos de Londres 2012: brasileiros e brasileiras em foco" e "Revelações dos fotógrafos esportivos brasileiros sobre relações de gênero". No primeiro estudo, ao analisarmos as imagens publicadas em jornais no período olímpico de 2012, percebemos que é evidente a quantidade e dimensão superior das imagens masculinas frente às femininas. Também, nas poucas vezes em que o homem é retratado denotando emotividade, choro ou decepção, as imagens divulgadas são de dimensões médias ou pequenas. E nas raras vezes em que a mulher é registrada durante a execução de gestos técnicos, vale-se do mesmo ocorrido no masculino: fotos médias ou pequenas e restritas ao interior do jornal. No artigo seguinte desse bloco, constatamos que o discurso dos fotógrafos para clicar atletas seguem as premissas: focam o corpo feminino belo e sensual em detrimento da representação de seu movimento no esporte, o que explica a apresentação de conotação sexual; sua performance é relegada a segundo plano. Já o corpo masculino, quando exposto sugerindo algum tipo de apelo, é representado de forma diferenciada, não vexatória ou pejorativa e sempre em posição de altivez. Verificamos que o publicado nos jornais não condiz com os discursos proferidos pelos entrevistados, uma vez que em diversos momentos afirmaram não haver discrepâncias quanto ao registro do masculino e do feminino. Nas Considerações finais, elencamos as principais impressões da composição da obra. Nesse item, pudemos confirmar que atletas masculinos e femininos têm tratamentos diferenciados e desiguais nos discursos e nas imagens exibidas pela imprensa esportiva.

Changes in frost frequency and desert vegetation assemblages in Grand Canyon, Arizona

The effect of decreasing frost frequency on desert vegetation was documented in Grand Canyon by replication of historical photographs. Although views by numerous photographers of Grand Canyon have been examined, 400 Robert Brewster Stanton and Franklin A. Nims views taken in the winter of 1889-1890 provide the best information on recent plant distribution. In Grand Canyon, where grazing is limited by the rugged topography, vegetation dynamics are controlled by climate and by demographic processes such as seed productivity, recruitment, longevity and mortality. The replicated photographs show distribution and abundance of several species were limited by severe frost before 1889. Two of these, brittlebush (Encelia farinosa) and barrel cactus (Ferocactus cylindraceus), have clearly expanded their ranges up-canyon and have increased their densities at sites where they were present in 1890. In 1890, brittlebush was present in warm microhabitats that provided refugia from frost damage. Views showing desert vegetation in 1923 indicate that Encelia expanded rapidly to near its current distribution between 1890 and 1923, whereas the expansion of Ferocactus occurred more slowly. The higher frequency of frost was probably related to an anomalous increase in winter storms between 1878 (and possibly 1862) and 1891 in the southwestern United States.

In the Shadows of the Old Town: Thomas Anna and 19th-century Glasgow

In 1858, a volume entitled Midnight Scenes and Social Photographs – being sketches of life in the streets, wynds and dens of the city of Glasgow was published under the pseudonym of ‘Shadow’ by Alexander Brown, a Glaswegian flâneur and reformer. Its frontispiece is an etching which depicts a theatre-like proscenium arch whose curtains have been withdrawn to reveal to the audience all the poverty, destitution and disorder that one was likely to find after dark in the insalubrious quarters of the city. At the extreme left-hand side, partly obscured by the curtain a silhouetted figure stands behind an unwieldy camera perched on a tripod. Distinctly unaffected by the mêlée, an arm is calmly raised and a finger precisely arched in the moment before the shutter is clicked and the scene committed to record. The volume, however, relies exclusively on textual descriptions to evoke the underside of the city and contains no photographs at all. Instead, the use of the word photograph in the title can be understood as a metaphor for detached scientific objectivity, a quality much celebrated by nineteenth-century reformers and investigators of social ills. As it happened, a decade after Shadow disappeared into the labyrinthine back-lands of Old Town Glasgow, he was followed there by a real photographer. In 1868, Thomas Annan was commissioned by the City Improvements Trust to take photographs of the Old Town in its last moments of existence before it was pulled down under a series of legislative acts. But perhaps paradoxically, given Shadow’s faith in the analytical properties of photography, Annan’s work seems to refute much of the material contained in Midnight Scenes and other similar tracts. Instead of the dens, shebeens, labyrinths and rowdy crowds described by Shadow, Annan’s depictions of the Old Town convey a static, calm environment, one which is often sparsely inhabited by a curious but apparently orderly population.

Taking account of the sensational tendencies of many reformists’ texts, this paper investigates the discrepancies between the two representations, focussing in particular on the constraints which operated on Annan during his commission. It argues that Annan’s compositions – which became very influential on other 19th century photographers of everyday life such as John Thomson or Jacob Riis – far from being dispassionate analytical works, emerged as a result of a matrix of factors which included: photographic and artistic precedents; Annan’s own predilections as a photographer; technological limitations; the nature of the commission from the City Improvements Trust and political climate in which it was given; the medieval urban fabric in which he had to operate; and, perhaps, most importantly, the identity of the Old Towns inhabitants themselves.

Visualising London

This research investigates how photographs can be analysed to extract meaning. Two methodologies, visual anthropology and social semiotics, are used to analyse a collection of images and accompanying texts generated by a group of first year tourism students in London. Photographs are categorised into subject areas including iconic buildings, street scenes, people and analysed according to how they relate to the photographers’ characteristics, such as age and nationality. A group of images of Big Ben are then analysed using a social semiotics approach, considering both compositional and contextual information to extract meanings. Results and techniques are then contrasted and compared, noting how the complexity of the image makers’ experience of the city they are documenting lead to their images having multi-layered meanings, and that combining analytic methods can fruitfully reveal a range of these meanings.