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An interview with Csaba Almási J., a renowned Hungarian fashion-photographer.
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The Dolgozó Nő [Working Woman] was the most important Hungarian monthlymagazine for women from the Communist Romania, published in Cluj-Napoca between 1945 and 1989, which focused onfemale rights, the women’s condition in the modern society; moreover, the magazine also covered health, beauty, housework,literature and fashion topics. The article is an analysis of the covers of the magazine, of the photos and graphics published onthe front pages. The main focus is on the context, taking into account the historical background and the infl uence of censorship.The covers of the magazine bear the traces of the socio-historical change: in the fi rst period we see the military woman, in themild period we can see the intellectual, the mother in the center of her family, while in the late, very cruel years we can seeonly the portraits of Nicolae Ceaușescu. By presenting the propagandistic messages of this process the author tries to fi nd themagazine’s place in the history of press and photography.
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This paper deals with the last Tennessee Williams’s play "Clothes for a Summer Hotel: A Ghost Play". Its subject is the relationship between novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. The central figure of this play is Zelda, whose creativity and sexuality had been constrained. It is a very personal self-examination of Williams, through her character, to confront and come to grips with the mental issues that dominated his family. Zelda, whose love affair with a French aviator proves that Scott in this love triangle is, then, sexually inadequate and self doubtful, has something of a predatory female. The play is set after the deaths of all the principles, in a kind of mental asylum – ghostly purgatory. It is an almost unknown Williams play, which is both thematically consistent and radically new and fresh.
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The interview focuses on opinions of the photographer, lecturer, and Assistant Professor Jozef Sedlák. Last year, on the occasion of his 60th birthday, the photographer organized a recapitulatory author exhibition. The interview discusses the photographer’s creative concepts, his approach to photography as a medium, and it also comprises the function of photography in society. One of the topics he deals with from a long-term perspective is social documentary. However, the photographer deals in parallel with staged figurative photography, later on with the conceptual pictures. Each of his documentary photographs captures an event that articulates anonymous personae connected by momentary chance and situations. The author presents his authorial philosophy and stances to work with the medium of analogue photography. The practical experience and theoretical philosophy of Jozef Sedlák reflect his opinion and ideas regarding theoretical questions, such as the sense of family tradition, allusive warnings on evaluation and societal ladder, the need for lively humanistic tradition, decoding of developing and current tendencies in art, questioning the autonomy of photography, relationship patterns of artists and theoreticians, the necessity of critical thinking development among students and the continuity of an artist’s and creator’s life. The given interview declares the author ́s strong concept of creativity and provides an evaluating perspective of an influential figure in Slovak photography. The interview focuses on the author’s less presented productions. The same as with his other outputs, they have a certain mysterious depth and timelessness. This part of his production may reveal the personality of Jozef Sedlák, as a photographer in a broader context. It will be definitely interesting to have a look together with the author beneath the surface of the medium of photography, but especially, I dare to say, beneath the surface and thus into the depth of the author ́s intentions as a photographer, educationalist and last but not least a truly faithful person.
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The article examines the visual aspect of the novel The Life of Rebecca Jones by the contemporary Welsh writer Angharad Price. The book is an imaginary autobiography of the eponymous Rebecca Jones, Price’s distant relative, who died of diphtheria in 1916, aged 11. Apart from Rebecca’s family photographs reproduced in the text, ekphrastic descriptions of a photograph, a painting (by a blind artist) and the video recording of a television programme, the novel problematizes the dichotomy between seeing and blindness. The aim of this essay is to demonstrate how these elements in Price’s novel contribute to the production of meaning by generating tension between two different modes of discourse: verbal and visual. Price’s novel is read as an ‘imagetext’ which, by adopting photographic/visual features, creates an illusion of ‘photographic’ verisimilitude (described as a trompe-l’œil effect). This mechanism is interpreted as the manifestation of the narrator’s struggle to assert her authority as a perceiving subject and the text itself as a site where the memory of place and family history can be preserved.
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This paper proposes a relational history of media artifacts, which decentralizes the dominance of the photographer or filmmaker as the absolute author of the work. It adds an alternative account to understanding the creative process and the subsequent study of media forms by discussing film and photographic practices as the reciprocal affective relationship between the maker, their intentions, materials, technologies, non-human agents and the environment. By reorganizing the anthropocentrism of art historical narratives, which typically exclude corporeality and materiality as drivers of human history, we are able to discuss the complex dynamic meshwork of determinants that bring photographic artifacts into existence: the lived, animate, vital materialism at once emergent and mixing of different causalities and temporalities. Within this position, I will provoke discussions of cognition and photography by recalibrating the moment of acting to a model that recognizes a distributed nature of human action into the material world of things. This new materialist position has repercussions for the way we understand processes of creativity and the emergence of media artifacts—seeing these as always already entangled and enmeshed across various corporeal and material, platforms and scales. This paper uses photography as a case study to discuss the broader theme of co-creation between humans, machines and the environment. Using documentary evidence from the archive, I sustain this argument by making a close reading of a particular photographer’s contact sheet, which shows up some of the dynamics of the relational meshwork playing upon the photographer in the field. Through this reading we can begin to think about the implications for the way we understand the emerging aesthetic discourse of technological photographic practices and, more broadly, the co-creative domains of all human activity.
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What can an actor do to reduce the waste produced during his work? Sándor Anna, who works as an actress at the Theatre of Miercurea Ciuc, employs reusable makeup remover disks instead of disposable ones – as discussed in this short essay. The attached photo shows such a textile disk used by Anna.
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The American photographer Cindy Sherman created a new form of pictorialism, using the film still as basis for a series of feminine portraits which confronted visual arts’ world with the social pressure’s recurrences on women’s stereotyped imagery during some decades of the 20th century. Sherman’s critical perspective offers a fresh view on female’s identity quest by exaggerating the features of a series of old common places as well as their absurdity in terms of natural human behavior. This article gathers various interpretations of Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, explaining their impact and its sources, as balance between the artistic act and the simple documentation.
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Sara Romani, an Italian photographer based in Boston, Massachusetts introduces us two series of photographs: About Beauty, Love and Fear and Suspended Boundaries. The series titled About Beauty, Love and Fear is a visual poem from a documentation during her first pregnancy. In order to grasp full awareness of the many changes, she has been actively documenting her life and the life that surrounded her. Her photographs focus on the prosaic, the familiar and the simply ordinary, but the images can take on a deeper significance, and what at first materializes as subjective and intimate turns into a narration to share for its universal echoes. In the series Suspended Boundaries Sara Romani expresses her fascination with the myriad ways that photographs translate reality and how they invite us to question our knowledge of what is actual. Photographs represent unstable stages made of layered sheets of paper. She created pictures that stand on the fine line between abstraction and figurative representation, awareness of represented reality and pure aesthetic pleasure. Pictures, which can express simultaneously a chronicle, an intuition or a provocation, are the most valuable manifestation of the author, both as an artist, and as a human being.
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Photography, like any art, is connected with many aspects of human thought. It kindles the process of thinking and it gets across various aspects of understanding the reality by all photography lovers. From the beginning, photography has been considered as the mimetic medium and that fact contributes to its specificity. Does this mean that the term "abstract photography" is not self-contradictory? Doesn’t it destroy the specificity of the medium, which always reflects adequately trimmed or transformed reality? It can be considered that photography is never abstract, because it always registers some events and documents facts or at least their elements. However, it can be considered as abstract when we move to the level of meaning and narration which (paradoxically) lost their meaning. Photography becomes therefore a narrative without specific (original) meaning, saturated at the same time with other infinite meanings, which it reveals and which lie in its potential, and that the on-looker may see in a never-ending process.
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Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, series Film & Media Studies publishes only original, previously unpublished articles in English in various fields of Film and Media Studies. All papers are peer reviewed. The series is published in 1-2 volumes annually.
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Die Bilder von Adys Leibphotographen Aladár Székely bieten wahrscheinlich den schönsten und leichtesten Zugang zum Fremdling. Der bildende Künstler hat Gesten dieses sprechenden Körpers stilisiert, eingefangen und festgehalten, damit gehört Székely ganz sicher zu den erfolgreichsten Übersetzern des Unübersetzbaren.
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Die Bilder von Adys Leibphotographen Aladár Székely bieten wahrscheinlich den schönsten und leichtesten Zugang zum Fremdling. Der bildende Künstler hat Gesten dieses sprechenden Körpers stilisiert, eingefangen und festgehalten, damit gehört Székely ganz sicher zu den erfolgreichsten Übersetzern des Unübersetzbaren.
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The article introduces the oriental theme in the work of Pantaleon Szyndler, a slightly forgotten Polish painter from the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. He was trained at art schools in Warsaw, Munich,Rome and Paris. Oriental themes had appeared in his work since 1872, culminating in the 1880s and 1890s. Szyndler painted scenes with nudes in oriental stylisation - usually oriental beauties resting in the tranquillity of seraglio. He successfully presented these works at the Parisian Salon and on exhibitions in Warsaw. His works won acclaim of critics, were often reproduced in newspapers and found numerous buyers. The painter did not have a first-hand knowledge of the Orient and apparently used a few types of photographs as sources of inspiration Mr his paintings: anthropological, which showed exotic women; pornographic, representing European models in oriental stylisation; and photographs depicting
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