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The article reviews the book by Jeremy Howard, Irēna Bužinska and Z. S. Strother "Vladimir Markov and Russian Primitivism. A Charter for the Avant-Garde (Ashgate, 2015). The work is considered an important contribution to the research of this artist's legacy
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This article is concerned with a photograph of the Piwna Street in Warsaw with the characteristic bird sellers’ cages exposed outside the houses (ill. 1). The author of this article had previously attributed this photograph to Karol Beyer (D. Jackiewicz, Sztuka fotografii. Portret, pejzaż, reportaż w fotografii polskiej XIX wieku. Katalog wystawy, Warszawa 1990, cat. no. 127), and this attribution became accepted in the subject literature (W. Mossakowska, Początki fotografii w Warszawie (1839-1863), Warszawa 1994, vol. I, pp. 80, 109). The photograph was reproduced using the woodcut technique in the illustrated weekly Kłosy on the 26th July 1865 (ill. 2). The accompanying caption informed that the trade in birds had just been moved from Zapiecek Street to Piwna Street. Together, this allowed the dating of the photograph to July 1865 at the latest. Still, however, nothing was known about its author. Another copy of this photograph has recently been discovered in the archives of the National Museum in Warsaw. Below the photograph, on a cardboard background is a printed text: „Fotogra: Jan Mieczkowski | w Warszawie.” (ill. 3). In this way it became known that the authorship is other than what had previously been thought. This can also be applied to the photograph „Market on the Old Town Square” (ill. 4), also previously attributed to Beyer (Jackiewicz, Ibid., cat. no. 128; Mossakowska, Ibid., vol. I, pp. 80-81, vol. II, ill. 73). Its „painterly retouch”, similar to that on the photograph of Piwna Street, allows us to suspect that we are also dealing here with the work of the Warsaw photographer Jan Mieczkowski. On the basis of this example, the author analysed the problems of attributing unsigned photographs, especially early photographs from the third quarter of the nineteenth century. If one does not have access to other copies of the same photograph with the photographer’s signature provided (handwritten signature, facsimile of the signature, an ink or dry stamp of the photograph laboratory, the laboratory’s company overprint on the front or back of the cardboard background), neither access to its reproduction in a periodical giving the name of the author, nor to an archival record, a series of considerations should be taken into account, and conclusions should be reached on the basis of the technical analysis of the object in question. The following are significant: the method of composing and operating light, the shade of the copy and its retouching, fragments of the photographic atelier which may be visible on the photograph, the themes dealt with by the photographer according to which one might presume that he could be author of the photograph. Knowledge about the collector from whose collection the photograph comes could also be helpful, amongst other things concerning his preferences and contacts in the photographic community, and also concerning his travels and the history of his collection.
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An interview with Csaba Almási J., a renowned Hungarian fashion-photographer.
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Many details are still unclear in Hungarian historiography of photography about the date of origin and the awarding of Ernő Vadas's (1899–1962) famous photo entitled Geese. This study attempts to offer some clarifications of these uncertainties. Reasons for the success of “Hungarian style” photographs are also reflected upon by the author, who also shares current views on them.
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The photograph was taken by Krisztina Kiss about the performance titled A nép ellensége (An Enemy of the People), presented at the HolnapUtán (The Day after Tomorrow) Festival of the Szigligeti Theatre. Starting from this image, János Henn, who plays one of the leading roles, reflects upon the legitimacy of theatre by way of a reverse train of thought.
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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 topic of the article is nature photography. This type of human creative activity is currently very popular among artists and audiences. The article discusses several important issues related to the creation of the image of nature. Photographing nature can be enjoyed by both - beginners and professional photographers.
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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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In the history of photography, we come across many staged and manipulated photographs. Most of these are press photos that would be intended to show as accurately as possible the recording of an event, for those who could not be there and only learn about everything that happened based on the image. The most important requirement of press ethics forums for press photos is to be as objective as possible in presenting the event. The photographer may not use any intentional image modification or manipulation to take the image. After it became clear that many of the images, we were dealing with are staged or manipulated photos, despite a lot of controversies, the reputation of the images was slightly tarnished, making the image incidental to questions about the documentary value. The photograph has become a symbol, the symbols have their own truth, believes Hans-Michael Koetzle. These cases prove that even in the case of many iconic works or photographs, the image becomes so symbolic that it adds to the background, background history and behind-the-scenes of the making of the images. They are unable to deduct anything in retrospect from the value of the work.I consider it important to examine the changes brought about by the digital revolution, both in the field of photography and in the way a press photographer works. The fundamental difference between analogue and digital images stems from the fact that although it is possible to manipulate analogue photos, we rarely encounter this, while in the case of digital images, image manipulation is the default.
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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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