Rewriting Girlhood. Ambiguous Bodies in Contemporary American Visual Arts: Sally Mann’s At Twelve

Author(s): Ileana Botescu-Sireţeanu / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

Drawing on cultural studies, gender theories, feminist theories, visual culture and semiotics, the present study investigates the subversive ways in which particular visual representations of teenage bodies introduce the generic transgression of cultural boundaries and limits in order to reflect the process of identity formation. Departing from various theories of corporeality and the semiotics of the body as a cultural entity, this study looks at contemporary American photographer Sally Mann’s collection of photographs, At Twelve, in order to discern the visual mechanisms through which the staged representation of adolescent girls introduces the generous subversion of generic normative categories such as gender, age or social status. Furthermore, the present analysis suggests that trespassing boundaries is a necessary stage in the construction of self-sustainable identities in the aftermath of-postmodernism. Thus, the article tackles gender construction as a cultural edifice in which visual representation plays a significant part. Sally Mann’s photography is eventually viewed as an instance of the contemporary interrogation of norms and boundaries of classical Western culture, as well as an innovative visual documenting of the transgressions, transitions and avoidance of limits that characterize adolescence.

ANOTYPY – UNIKATOWE DZIEWIĘTNASTOWIECZNE FOTOGRAFIE NA PŁÓTNIE. OMÓWIENIE DWÓCH OBIEKTÓW ZE ZBIORÓW BIBLIOTEKI KÓRNICKIEJ ORAZ KILKA SŁÓW NA TEMAT HISTORII TECHNIKI PANOTYPY – UNIKATOWE DZIEWIĘTNASTOWIECZNE FOTOGRAFIE NA PŁÓTNIE. OMÓWIENIE DWÓCH OBIE

Author(s): Tomasz Kozielec,Marta Nalaskowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 38/2021

This paper presents two photographs referred to as pannotypes (from the Latin word pannus) from an album of photographs. It discusses the history of the pannotype technique, which was popular in the 1850s and 1860s in photography ateliers all over the world (it presents a review of materials and substances used in this technique and the transferring of the negative layer onto a black, flexible substrate). Pannotype is one of the most interesting techniques used in the 19th century. The paper then discusses the Kórnik photographs, the people they show, and their dimensions and structural features. Some conservation-related remarks on the susceptibility of precious objects of this type to damage also follow.

Прилог историографској анализи фотографија: Пример фотографије нацистичког злочина током Другог светског рата у Србији

Author(s): Radosav Tucović / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 2/2023

This article is a historiographical analysis of a disputed photograph of a Nazi crime during the Second World War in Serbia. Using knowledge about police organizations in occupied Serbia, theoretical literature and sources of German and Serbian origin, we tried to offer explanations for many details, but also for the photograph itself. This photograph of Nazi crimes has been controversial since its appearance. Its publication was accompanied by descriptions, for which, after a preliminary analysis, became clear that they were not correct. In addition, the photo reached other sites and was used for completely wrong purposes. Therefore, we tried to precisely analyze this photograph and draw at least basic conclusions and remove fundamental dilemmas. The analysis was created through a theoretical introduction, and analyzing the subject, origin, time, place and persons shown in the photograph. We came to the conclusion that the photo shows the crime of the German Order Police. The photo was probably taken by a German war reporter. In addition, we recognized the senior SS and police leader August Meyszner and generally noted that the photo was potentially taken in 1942 or 1943.

The group of paintings Oświęcim/Auschwitz (1947-1955) by Xawery Dunikowski - the artistic testimony of borderline experience

Author(s): Karolina Tomczak / Language(s): English Issue: 11/2023

This article presents an analysis of Xawery Dunikowski’s post-war paintings, a testimony to his stay in the Auschwitz concentration camp, i.e. the canvases of the cycle Oświęcim/Auschwitz (1947–1955). Based on this infrequently discussed kind of art, an attempt has been made to describe the visual representation of borderline experience, which, according to Georges Didi-Huberman, is a “tear-image” or a glimpse of an incomprehensible unprecedented truth, urging to a particularly cruel imaginability or, as Luiza Nader puts it, an expression of “affective memory”. At the same time, the considerations contribute to the research discourse on whether or to what extent it is possible to express the experience of a Konzentrationslager (or, more broadly, the Second World War) in visual representation. The complex issues and stylistics of these works are discussed in the light of methodology concerning the trauma of a witness, an affective observer, a surviving victim (Jacek Leociak, Aleida Assmann, Dominick LaCapra) and its evocation in the image (Didi-Huberman, Nader) thus allowing to consider them as a necessary artistic catharsis of the author of Tchnienie/A Breath of Air. At the same time, it has been pointed out that the painting of Dunikowski, a sculptor, individually reformulated in the artistic medium, non-masterly and in search of their own expression, is a recontextualising confirmation of his status as a modernist artist.

Obrazová příloha

Author(s): Not Specified Author / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2018

LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH PHOTOGRAPHY TERMINOLOGY

Author(s): Inga Stoianova / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

The purpose of the present investigation is to perform a linguistic analysis of the English vocabulary of photography as a means of professional communication. The research includes a brief historical introduction to the progress of photography (diachronic approach) to study the (co)relationship between the development of photographic science and enrichment of its specialized lexical fund based on newly formed scientific concepts. The concept and quantitative analysis of the studied corpus established the predominance of the terminological units that are part of the conceptual groups, denoting the photo camera and its settings, photo editing and printing, lighting, photography metering, and issues. The ways of formation of English terminology of photography were investigated using structural, morphological, and componential analyses. The data acquired showed a variable number of terminological units formed according to various structural models. In the process of photographic terminology formation, substantive type of terminological combinations predominates, followed by the derivative units, simple and compound terminological units. Photography abbreviations as a form of language, time, and space economy were also structurally and semantically studied.

Photographies

Author(s): Not Specified Author / Language(s): English,Russian Issue: 2/1974

Photographs

Author(s): Not Specified Author / Language(s): English,Russian Issue: 2/1976

Photographs

Author(s): Not Specified Author / Language(s): English,Russian Issue: 1/1977

Photographs

Author(s): Not Specified Author / Language(s): English,Russian Issue: 1/1978

Photographs

Author(s): Not Specified Author / Language(s): English,Russian Issue: 2/1978

Photographs

Author(s): Not Specified Author / Language(s): English,Russian Issue: 1/1981

Becoming-abject as a punctum of political resistance: abjection textures in the images from Silent Book by Miguel Rio Branco

Author(s): Gabriela Freitas / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

In this article I analyze the images on the photographic book Silent Book by the Brazilian photographer Miguel Rio Branco with the objective to understand how the photographer appropriates from an aesthetic of abjection to constitute the notion of becoming-abject (in dialogue with Deleuze, Guattari, Kristeva and Bataille), in a way that punctum (Barthes) in these photographs can be interpreted as a form of political resistance (Rancière). The book is composed by 77 photos, diagrammed in diptychs which, at times, become triptychs, and constantly alternate their relational meaning. The quasi-abstraction of the pictures in Silent Book directs our gaze to its visual aspect and, from there, to the divagation of the non-linear narratives that permeate them. Their warm and dark colors and, especially, rough textures take the spectator to the edge of interpretation and establish these images at the limit of the imaginary of abjection: the decadent ruin, the eroticism, the dirt, the horror, the fatigue, the death. In this context, the abject becomes a form of highlighting what before was placed aside, promoting the necessary perception of the different and of otherness, as an alternative to the overload of positivity and individualism in contemporaneity, as pointed out by philosopher Byung-Chul Han, constituting, therefore, a form of political resistance.

Cut and Paste Pictures in Surrealism

Author(s): Jarmila Gabrielova / Language(s): English Issue: 6/2006

Proceeding from the idea of the readymade, Marko Ristić’s, Vane Bor’s and Dušan Matić’s collages regroup readymade pictorial and textual matrices according to the rules of free associative syntax. Everything that they collected cut out and pasted bears the hallmark of personal choice, i.e. objective chance, as the Surrealists would say. In the new structure of the collage, picture and text were of equal importance. However, we should not forget that both picture and text were only fragments, of different origin, so that they could not function as autonomous elements in their own right, nor could they establish logical interlinks. Cut and paste picture in Surrealism are primarily registered as visual wholes, in which the former principle of harmony has been substituted by the principle of discontinuity. In fact, they do not aspire to establish closed and unambiguous semantic structures either on a single paper or within a cycle, disregarding as they do conventional narrative and illustrative order in representing reality.

Социализацията на фотографския образ в книгата на Антоан Божинов „Фотографският образ в комуникационен контекст“

Author(s): Vesselina Valkanova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2023

The monograph includes texts presenting naturally occurring trends in the history of photography that have acquired distinct forms and stylistic characteristics, such as "street photography" (without analog in traditional representational modes) and "social photography" as part of the broader field of documentary photography (also without analog in fine art). Explores the dynamic tension, attraction, and repulsion between the emerging art of photography and the established canons of classical representational methods. Traces the technologies that imperceptibly infiltrate the photographic image into public space.

Spuścizna audiowizualna Jerzego Ficowskiego w zasobie Narodowego Archiwum Cyfrowego

Author(s): Katarzyna Kalisz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 16/2016

The National Digital Archives stores the audio-visual contents of Jerzy Ficowski’s legacy – photos, audio recordings, and films. The most numerous type of data found there are photographs. Many of the photos are representative of Ficowski’s research interests. There are Gypsy photos (especially those taken by him while traveling in Gypsy caravans), Judaica, photos regarding Witold Wojtkiewicz and Bruno Schultz (particularly those taken by Jerzy Ficowski during his stay at Drohobych), photos taken by Ficowski as illustrations for „Karty z raptularza”, portraits and photos of Jerzy Ficowski himself and of his family. As far as audio recordings are considered, there are private records, monologues, radio interviews, Judaica, and recordings of poetry readings. Another important preserved form of Ficowski’s legacy are films of his family, recorded between 1930 and 1936, records of performances, klezmer concerts, poetry readings, video relation of the ceremony of awarding him with the “Man of Borderland” title, and drafts for film of Paweł Woldan “Amulety i definicje” (1998).

Wojna. Kobiece spojrzenie

Author(s): Katarzyna Bojarska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2023

In her article the author theorizes female gaze in relations to atrocity photography, especially war photography. In order to do so he revisits Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas and discusses the use of photography in Woolf’s anti-war narrative

Affected Stories, Sensed Memories, and Documented Voids

Author(s): Carlos Eduardo Lesmes López / Language(s): English Issue: 11/2023

In this article I will refer to a one-time performance piece called ‘Remember by Erasure’ (Lesmes 2020), which explores the relationship between photographs, memories, and the act of narrating the stories behind those memories and photographs. I put this in dialogue with Sarah Polley’s documentary ‘Stories We Tell’ (2012), which follows the filmmaker as she tries to piece together who her late mother was, through the stories and testimonies of her family members. The performance centered on how the act of telling a story, describing a memory, brings it back to life, while the film follows a cacophony of voices to reconstruct the character of Polley’s mother mixed with different techniques (interviews, archive material, staging) to illustrate memory and how this affects the way in which audiences connect to the film. I understand memory as an embodied experience in a relational and affective contact with the world, one that is constantly being reinterpreted and transformed. Relying on the notion of heterochronicity (Karlholm 2017, Moxey 2018) and the Bergsonian understanding of time, I explore how, in both the film and the performance, memories – or the lack of them – time, and narrative interact with each other. I propose the concept of a negative specter of memory, which refers to the things we can only recognize by their absence, the knowledge of the missing part, only possible because it is gone. A void. My goal is to explore how these ideas can have an impact on the possibilities that film and arts offer as ways to explore the relationship between memories, narratives, time, and their voids.

Art, Adornment, Abstraction: Thinking Perfume

Author(s): Larry Shiner / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2024

Some perfumers and users of perfume have claimed that the more complex perfumes should be appreciated as artworks and not merely as adornments. This essay contributes to the recent philosophical discussions of the issue. Part I explores the relation between adornment and art as Stephen Davies conceives of them. Part II examines the arguments Chiara Brozzo and Cynthia Freeland give for the current existence of art perfumes. Part III offers one kind of formal case for art perfumery by exploring some limited structural analogies between perfume and music. Part IV proposes a set of distinctions among types of art perfumes. Part V discusses whether certain perfumes can be both art and adornment.

Oksana Sarkisova and Olga Shevchenko. In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos

Author(s): Ilya Utekhin / Language(s): Russian Issue: 1/2024

Review of: Oksana Sarkisova and Olga Shevchenko. In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023. 438 pp. ISBN 9780262048279.