Vanessa R. Schwartz

Cinema and the invention of modern life

CONTRIBUTORS: Richard Abel, Leo Charney, Margaret Cohen, Jonathan Crary, Tom Gunning, Miriam Bratu Hansen, Alexandra Keller, Jeannene M. Pryzblyski, Erika Rappaport, Mark Sandberg, Vanessa R. Schwartz, Ben Singer, Marcus Verhagen

Capturing the Moment: Images and Eyewitnessing in History

Images have a deeply ambivalent relationship to time. The single image appears to freeze it, capture it, and memorialize it, and in doing so works against the flow of duration. Yet images are also resolutely historical since they incorporate within their very material a history of their making: a long history of techniques, preferences for subjects, and expectations about viewers. The essays gathered here examine this intimate connection between image, time, and history by considering images, image making, and the historical use of images in different times and places. Taken together, they offer a panoramic view of some of the most significant cultural, technological and temporal developments in the ways images encode notions of historicity. Using a variety of historical, art historical, and media studies approaches, these essays set up a series of productive tensions about images and their historical qualities that will be of interest to anyone concerned with the study and production of visual culture.

Paparazzi: Media practices and celebrity culture by Kim McNamara

‘Humanist photography’, Caruso explains, ‘like social documentary photography or “concerned photography”, is considered to participate in a form of antifascism or social protest’ (4). Since half of Caruso’s book is concerned with the Mussolini era, she is obliged to pick among the historical debris for evidence of dissident photographers and their distinctive, antifascist ‘humanist’ photography. This is a difficult case to make: whilst there were, clearly, photographers who resisted fascism, and some who contributed to resistance propaganda in the closing stages of the Second World War, Caruso provides scant evidence of a developed antifascist photographic tradition in the pre-war period, or that such photography can be readily distinguished from the images published in pro-fascist magazines such as Tempo (21). For example, a 1932 image of welldressed Italian mothers and their babies, by the magazine editor Leo Longanesi, is ‘fascist’ in intent; a comparable photograph of a poor family, from the same year, becomes an example of Longanesi’s equivocal ‘humanism’ (34–35). According to Caruso, ‘[i]t is difficult to place Longanesi in the history of humanist photography because of the ambiguities of his persona’ (36); the problem, it seems to me, is that the author too readily equates photographs with the ideology and politics of their maker, and insists on single, univocal readings of their meanings. In the emerging global visual culture of modernism, images were, after all, instrumentalised for different causes, with magazines from across the political spectrum presenting similar photographs, and invoking the common ideal of a hygienic, prosperous, technological modernity.

Networks: Technology, Mobility, and Mediation in Visual Culture

It is not enough to shift the terrain of American art by enlarging its geospatial framework. Like many trendy and overused terms, “networks” can be employed to focus interrogations that connect the recent reconsideration of the field of American art beyond the traditional borders of the nation-state to reimagine one of the things for which the old American art history has already made a singular disciplinary contribution, namely, looking beyond conventional objects of fine art to a broader field of visual materials. To the established and rich literature regarding the production and reception of American vernacular and commercial culture, the idea of networked objects can globalize what otherwise stubbornly remains local while also foregrounding the role of technology, mobility, and mediation. This may additionally allow us to question certain recent returns to materiality and objecthood in favor of prioritizing visual culture more broadly considered as a system of meaning and communication in which objects are a necessary but hardly sufficient framework in and of themselves. American art’s spatial reconfiguration has produced a field that is more internationalized than it once was. Scholars living both inside and outside the United States are now engaged in generating rigorous new work that has made the field less nationalistic and also more oriented to the frequent exchanges of ideas, images, people, and objects across national boundaries; to the history of Americans making and studying art abroad; and to non-Americans who made art while living or working in the United States.1 Such research underscores transnational connections and helps move the field away from its earlier focus on what is exceptionally American, following broader trends across the humanities in which the United States is increasingly understood in a more global context.2 By emphasizing links—personal, professional, and material—we have also been able to liberate American art history from its singular burden of negative American exceptionalism based on cultural inferiority derived from its isolation from European centers of fine art. That’s certainly been a boon to the field. “Shifting Terrain: Mapping a Transnational American Art History,” the title of the symposium from which this group of essays emerged, participates in these recent trends, abounding in geographic metaphors of connection, but does not, I would suggest, put enough pressure on the term “art history.” Imagining a transnational American art history also means reimagining the borders between cultural forms as being equally porous as the geopolitical ones at the heart of so much of the important new research. At the core of any spatialized framework (whether across geography or representational form) is the need to interrogate different kinds of mobility. The nature and definition of mobility have underwritten a great many of the questions regarding the history of the globalization of culture, resting as it has on the analysis of the large-scale circulation of people and goods, the bedrock on which capitalism’s history sits. Historians of globalization have turned to such topics as trade, migration, and transport.3 In art history, that impulse has translated into work on imperial iconography (especially in the realms of scientific knowledge), plantation culture, human rights, and even transport itself.4 We have also studied such movement socially—in order to consider migration in art, trade’s influence on style, and the rise of the art market.5 The geographic expansion and reconfiguration of the subject of American art have enriched our histories at the descriptive level, but we have yet to consolidate what new arguments we seek to make with this new information and whether they will be about

Afterword: The Promise and Perils of Visual Culture's Big Tent

This commentary on the articles in this special issue of Visual Resources suggests that they provoke a consideration of the virtues of imagining a history of visual culture that is both distinct from a history of art, on the one hand, but also distinct from a general cultural history, on the other. In order to be a useful category of historical analysis, the differences as well as the similarities between visual culture and cultural history or material cultural studies, more broadly speaking, must be constantly and consistently interrogated. Visual culture has to be more than a “big tent” designed to include everything that the history of art (as Modernism) has excluded, overlooked or relegated to a second tier. At their best, these articles get us out from under that tent and onto a vast and open interdisciplinary terrain on which the future of visual culture will be written.