Martha Langford

Strange Bedfellows: Appropriations of the Vernacular by Photographic Artists

Abstract The article discusses a range of artworks that appropriate, emulate, or copy the photographic works of amateur photographers, especially the photographic album. Examining a variety of processes that have generated such works and taking issue with critical claims for originality and universality, the article questions whether anything of vernacular photographys specificity and private nature can survive its transformation into a public work of art.

Migrant Mothers: Richard Harrington’s Indigenous ‘Madonnas’

Canadian photographer Richard Harrington has been recognised since the 1950s for his photographs of the Arctic, and specifically for portraits of the Padleimiut taken at a hunting camp in 1950 during a winter of acute shortages. Three were selected for Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man (1955). Of that group, two focused on motherhood through depictions of childbirth and maternal love; the latter is sometimes referred to as ‘Canada’s Madonna and Child’, making a timeless secular icon from the representation of a crisis. Harrington was a documentary photographer who made his living as a freelance photojournalist specialising in human interest stories and travel features for magazines and newspapers. On assignment in British Columbia for the Hudson’s Bay Company magazine The Beaver, he photographed a First Nations mother and child, an image entitled ‘Madonna of the Peace’. This photograph later graced the cover of a Roman Catholic missionary magazine, Pôle et Tropiques. This article draws parallels between Harrington’s photographs of Indigenous mothers and children and Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, using Harrington’s diaries and community-based research to reconstruct the lives of his subjects, and considering the sacrifice of knowledge to iconicity.

The Canadian museum of contemporary photography

Abstract The collection of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (CMCP) was founded in the 1960s. No photographs marked this occurrence as an event. What in hindsight can be discerned as a cultural milestone was a gradual reorientation of a government agency mandated to deal with photographic activity. The creation of CMCP is a very human story, less an institutional history than a biography of a collection that wanted and was ultimately allowed to exist. Certain individuals played key parts in this story, but their various contributions are hard to separate one from the other, and from the social and political attitudes that shaped their working lives.

Women’s Views: The Narrative Stereograph in Nineteenth-Century America Melody Davis. University of New Hampshire Press, Durham, NH, 2015. 248 pages, with 16 colour and 126 black & white illustrations, and 3D viewer. Softcover £30.00, ISBN 978-1-611-68839-9

The vernacular turn in photographic studies brought all manner of new/old objects to the fore. Material inclusiveness was only the first step. As modernism’s prized photographic object – the authored or authorised fine print – made room for less securely pedigreed forms, the door was also opened to different definitions of authorship. The editor, the curator, the archivist, and the compiler lined up to succeed the photographer as producers of meaning. Slowly, but with steady progression, the average consumer also entered the fray. Transitional discourse focused on the intentions of those who had made and manipulated the image within systems of representation, whether public or private. But it was only a matter of time until the full ramifications of the vernacular turn could be felt, and feeling is the key word. Photographic studies, and specifically its systems of accreditation, is decisively being expanded by the reconceptualisation of the subject in terms of agency and performativity. We might say that meaning is under new management. The photographic image that was once seen to act upon a subjugated subject – the practitioner being only the point in the institutional spear – has been reframed as an instrument of subject formation, confirmation, or experimentation by active participants. In re-readings of studio practices, researchers are increasingly curious about the photographic experience of those who posed, whether paying, paid, or coerced into doing so. The afterlives of such images demand to be traced into different modes of engagement – they function differently under different systems of values. But the process of reinterpretation is further reaching. As photographic theorists consider the varieties of photographic experience, we are realising that we are not the first to take these pleasures – that we have been sold a bill of goods about photography’s role in anaesthetising the collective imagination. The power of photography is not in question, but the levers of power most certainly are. Some of the most interesting research being conducted today is reversing the dynamic of mediation, opening photographic discourse to everyday objects and consumer mentalities once deemed below notice of ideological and epistemological investigation. Enter the stereograph, which in the hands of photographic historian and poet Melody Davis exceeds its brief as a Victorian entertainment. Published in the University of New Hampshire Press series ‘Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies’, Davis’s Women’s Views is a contribution to the literature of Euro-American societal change, and her particular focus on photographic experience in the domestic sphere places the accent on gender and private life history. The camera is not in the woman’s hands, as we have seen in recuperative feminist histories; rather, her power rests in decisional consumption and regulation of activities within her sphere of influence, which is the bourgeois parlour. Davis argues that commercial production of the stereograph for the domestic market – not all types of stereographs, but the sub-genre of ‘narratives, also called comics and sentimentals’ – were not only comedic treatments of domestic space, but the instruments of its transformation. This position is vigorously and often entertainingly argued. ‘The bourgeois wife as the compass needle for narration’ is a good example of Davis’s colourful phrasing. In this sense, the societal transformation she has traced is triply performed by actors giving it a ‘gendered cast’ (original emphasis): the female models who pose for these staged photographs; the female consumers who brought such photographic entertainments into the family circle; and the female author, informed by her readings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Bishop George Berkeley, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray, who speaks for the mind/body experiences of nineteenth-century American ‘women who held the view’. An echo of American poet William Ross Wallace’s paean to maternal power, ‘The Hand that Rocks the Cradle is the Hand that Rules the World’, can be heard and felt in this phrase, and indeed throughout Davis’s study. Ross wrote his most famous line in 1865; Davis’s book covers stereography in the United States from 1870 to 1910. The introduction establishes the significance and popularity of stereo photography (‘billions’ sold), its place at the junction of science, art, and entertainment, and, most helpfully, a clear description of the object and the way it works in the brain. Davis recapitulates the histories and literature of the form, and provides a lexicon of technical and cultural terms. Along the way, she calls out a few neglecters or disparagers of the form, Beaumont Newhall among the usual suspects, and mounts a lengthy and virulent attack on Jonathan Crary who is ultimately accused of rehearsing Baudelairean misogyny and phobias. The case is perhaps overstated. Davis is more disciplined in the management of her extensive database of two thousand narrative stereoviews. Some of her evidence comes from Victorian England, as do some of her examples. The captions are silent on source collections, which is a shame. Davis compensates somewhat by correlating three stylistic periods – picturesque, narrative, and personal narrative – with national waves of production. Her clear favourite is the American narrative view, a phase that began with emulation and outright thievery of European models, and then flowered into home-grown genre scenes. Working with objects that have been undervalued, Davis has learned a great deal at the knee of the dedicated amateur: she acknowledges her debt to members of the National Reviews

Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images

but to be part of a crowd in the presence of photographs that have become generic by virtue of their quantity, makes us into a community and heightens our awareness of belonging, however temporarily, in a way that is comforting, even healing, as suggested by Olin’s reference to the Hindu concept of darshan – a transformative interaction in presence between devotee and god, guru or image. Being there in person, basking in the photographs, is what matters, rather than looking in detail. The main chapters of Touching Photographs are supplemented by an introduction on ‘Tactile Looking’ worth reading on its own for its useful introduction to theories of vision and touch, and by an epilogue on the now infamous snapshots taken at Abu Ghraib, which is also a useful coda to the debate on the ethics of photographs. What happens if the photographs are taken not by detached bystanders, not by victims, but by perpetrators who seem unaware of the abuse if not intent on glorifying it? Olin is not afraid to tackle ‘bad’ pictures to challenge her view of photography as a relational medium that can offer solace and empathy. Viewers of all photographs, whether good or bad, have to take responsibility for them. It is only when we close the book – even this one, rich and compelling as it is – and take action that photographs become really touching.