Mick Gidley

Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin

Don McCullin has photographed war for more than 50 years and many of his iconic black and white images have come to shape our awareness of modern conflict and its consequences. Shaped by War brings together McCullin’s frontline work from conflicts all over the world including the confrontation between East and West Berlin, Vietnam and Cambodia, the conflicts of the Middle East and the intense human suffering in Biafra and Bangladesh. These are displayed alongside McCullin’s photographs of more recent conflicts such as the Gulf War and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.

E. O. Hoppé's Ambiguous Photographic Autobiographies

Abstract Emil Otto Hoppé enjoyed an extraordinary photographic career, first as a maker of portraits but later in many other genres. He was also something of a celebrity, a status that both advanced his photographic work and gave him entrée into other aspects of culture. He fostered his fame by publishing a variety of autobiographical texts illustrated by his own photographs, the most important of which are a travel book, Round the World with a Camera and, more conventionally, Hundred Thousand Exposures. These and other works are not straightforward records: they contain obvious self-aggrandizement, “mistakes,” contradictions, and ambiguities that speak of elusive and unstable identity. They contain anecdotes—such as encounters with Mussolini and George Bernard Shaw—that threaten to conceal Hoppé as much as reveal him. They show evidence of change, self-fashioning, and role play—as “artist,” “author,” and “traveler.” Ultimately, perhaps the photographs themselves are the life, and that life is an embodiment of photographic trends in the first half of the twentieth century.

Making photography matter: A viewer’s history from the Civil War to the Great Depression by Cara A. Finnegan

This book does not have quite the range promised by its embracing title. It is not a comprehensive history; many technical developments in photography that occurred in this period, many significant practitioners too, go unmentioned, and we will not learn anything about such matters as the role of the camera in the exploration of the West or the Photo-Secessionists’ stress on the medium as an art form. But it does provide interesting, detailed and, often, new readings of four bodies of photographic work produced in the United States between the 1860s and c. 1940: depictions of the Civil War dead, portraits of Abraham Lincoln and others of his era, child labour pictures made in the early twentieth century and Farm Security Administration (FSA) images of the 1930s.

E. O. Hoppé’s Portraiture: The Maker, Patronage, the Public

Emil Otto Hoppé established himself as the leading producer of photographic portraits in Edwardian London, a position he augmented until the mid-1920s. Particular aesthetic, psychological and philosophical ideas undergirded his practices – practices which, in some respects, were then unconventional. His portrait work helped him to achieve some celebrity as an influential cultural figure, and this status in turn advanced his career as a portrait maker. Three important determinants of Hoppé’s portrait output are identified and elaborated upon: ‘The Maker’ (Hoppé himself); ‘Patronage’ (the actual or assumed demands of customers, including sitters); and – an entity that is less easy to define – ‘The Public’. Hoppé claimed, of certain eminent figures, that he had made ‘the recognised face’, and the sense of public recognition here implies that the likeness must combine intense insight with extensive circulation in the illustrated press. Viewed in retrospect, the range of Hoppé’s portraits – from such leading politicians as Philip Snowden, through such society beauties as Lady Hazel Lavery, to artists, including Jacob Epstein and Rudyard Kipling – punctuated a particular period of history, the cultural moment at which emerging aspects of twentieth-century modernity could be discerned. Exemplary in this respect, despite its unusual collage nature, is Hoppé’s depiction of the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

Marcus Cunliffe Writes America

Marcus Cunliffe (1922–1990) was incontestably an important figure in American studies. In the early part of his academic career he helped to found the subject area in Britain, and he was later both awarded professorial appointments at the Universities of Manchester and Sussex and elected to the chairmanship of the British Association for American Studies, from which positions he served as a personal inspiration and professional mentor to several “generations” of UK American studies academics. Those who knew him and worked with him were invariably struck by his tall good looks, charisma and charm – characteristics that no doubt also contributed to his successful career, in Britain and in the United States, first as a visiting scholar, and later, during his final years, as the occupant of an endowed chair at George Washington University in Washington, DC. As the correspondence in his papers attest, he was held in high – and warm – regard by many of the leading US historians of his heyday. More might be said about his charm here because it also permeates his writing and persists there as a kind of afterglow, and not only for those who encountered him in person – but this essay is a critical reconsideration of his published work that, though appreciative, at least aspires towards objectivity.

Edward S. Curtis speaks ...

Abstract Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952) 1 was born in Wisconsin and grew to early manhood there and in Minnesota, where he may have worked in a St. Paul studio. In 1887 he migrated to Sidney, now known as Port Orchard, across Puget Sound from Seattle. By 1892 Curtis was a partner in a Seattle photographic studio and later—though he was always assisted by family members, such as his nephew by marriage, William W. Phillips, and by professional operatives, notably Adolf F. Muhr—he came into sole charge of one that established itself as, perhaps, the leading portrait studio in the city. In about 1895 Curtis started to photograph local Indians, making mainly portraits and genre studies, which won prizes in major photographic competitions. By the turn of the century his Indian collection had achieved fame throughout the North-west.