Book review: Finnegan, C. (2015). Making Photography Matter.

Finnegan, C. (2015). Making Photography Matter: A Viewer's History from the Civil War to the Great Depression. 1st ed. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Since mid-20th century, students of art, literature, and education have been taught something that for a very long time would have seemed counter-intuitive, that the books and images that make up the subject of their studies have no embedded meaning. The reading of texts and images is conceived as a process of construction, of an interaction between the creator and consumer, with the culture, or perhaps cultures, acting as mediator.  Texts are understood to have particular meanings to particular readers in particular contexts at particular times.  What Cara Finnegan (an associate professor of communication at the University of Illinois) sets out to do in this book, and seems to achieve quite ably, is to demonstrate the particulars of how this process played out in the reading of photographs within four historical contexts in the late 19th and early 20th century United States.

Book review: Wilson, R. (2013). Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation.

Wilson, R. (2013). Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation. New York: Bloomsbury USA.

Brady is perhaps one of the most well-documented photographers of the 19th century, perhaps even in the world, so it’s not entirely clear why this volume was necessary.  I’m not a Brady scholar, nor a scholar of 19th century American photography, but I don’t recall the author drawing the reader's attention to major findings, something he would surely do if he had something worth reporting.  The Afterward speaks of the necessity for a “reliable biography,” so perhaps it was just a matter of compiling facts and ideas scattered here and there among numerous sources.  If such is the case, then job well done on a readable account of an important figure in photographic and American history.  Wilson sets out his subject’s relevance early on:

Enough is known about Brady’s life and work...to argue that he was the single most important person in nineteenth-century American photography. His Broadway portrait galleries in the 1840s and ’50s helped popularize photography in its early days and establish the photograph as a thing of value in itself. He helped make being photographed (at least by him and others with fancy studios) a mark of prestige. His efforts to collect portraits of every important American helped create a unifying sense of one American nation, a goal he pursued up until the very moment the Civil War blew it apart. His photographs of the famous, from the Prince of Wales to General Tom Thumb, helped invent the modern idea of celebrity, and his photograph of the presidential hopeful Abraham Lincoln on the day of his Cooper Union speech helped make Lincoln president.

The single most important person in nineteenth-century American photography

Albert Berghaus - Mathew Brady's NY Studio, 1861

Enough is known about Brady’s life and work...to argue that he was the single most important person in nineteenth-century American photography. His Broadway portrait galleries in the 1840s and ’50s helped popularize photography in its early days and establish the photograph as a thing of value in itself. He helped make being photographed (at least by him and others with fancy studios) a mark of prestige. His efforts to collect portraits of every important American helped create a unifying sense of one American nation, a goal he pursued up until the very moment the Civil War blew it apart. His photographs of the famous, from the Prince of Wales to General Tom Thumb, helped invent the modern idea of celebrity, and his photograph of the presidential hopeful Abraham Lincoln on the day of his Cooper Union speech helped make Lincoln president.

Wilson, Robert. Mathew Brady. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013.

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Where the sun shines brighter

In the 1840s, writers on both sides of the Atlantic often seriously argued that American daguerreotypes were better than English ones because “an American sun shines brighter,” as one newspaper writer put it.

 Wilson, Robert. Mathew Brady. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013.

 (For more on this image, see here.)

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Book review: Hamaya, H., Yamamoto, K., Keller, J., Maddox, A., Iizawa, K., Kaneko, R., Reynolds, J. and Berland, D. (2013). Japan's modern divide: The photographs of Hiroshi Hamaya and Kansuke Yamamoto. Los Angeles, California: J. Paul Getty Museum.

Japan's modern divide presents the work of two photographers with differing techniques and objectives - one documentary, the other experimental art - practicing in a period when photographers were struggling to throw off the romantic, painterly style of pictorialism and define a new way forward for photographic practice.  Stuck at the literal edge of the world and reliant on ocean transport, Japan often lagged behind Europe and NA, where photographers had grappled with these issues many years earlier.  This period in Japan represented a brief flowering before the country's military ambitions resulted in persecution and cooptation of the country's arts communities.

The book's presentation is split evenly between Hamaya and Yamamoto, with approximately 100 pages of 50 plates and two essays devoted to each.  The opening essay presents both photographers in historical context.

Book review: Tucker, A., Iizawa, K. and Kinoshita, N. (2003). The history of Japanese photography. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Image from:  http://photographybooksforsale.blogspot.ae/

This volume was produced as part of a 2003 exhibit of 207 images curated by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Cleveland Museum of Art.  The book runs to just over 400 pages and includes 356 color illustrations.  Text is provided by six authors, beginning with an overview of scholarship in Japanese photography by Tucker, who organized 40 major exhibits as curator at the Houston museum.  She has also authored studies on female photographers, Brassai, and Korean photography. The remaining six essays are from five Japanese scholars, and a sixth from another American curator.

Fraser, K. (2011). Photography and Japan. London: Reaktion Books.

This volume on Japan is one in a series of short texts exploring various aspects of Photography and ..., such as Literature, Science, Death, Anthropology and Cinema.  Among the country specific titles are Australia, Egypt, Ireland, Italy and USA.  The Japan volume contains no information on its author, Karen M Fraser, apart from her being an Assistant Professor in Dept of Art and Art History at Santa Clara University.  Her university page does not list publications and a search of her name at Google Scholar is empty.  An internet search reveals she is an American scholar with a BA, MA and PhD in Art History, the last at Stanford, and that she teaches a course on the very subject of her book, suggesting it may function as a class text.

At 170 pages and containing a generous 104 images, the actual text is quite short.  Given Fraser’s direct and unaffected writing style, the book is easily and quickly digestible. If you are reading with or near an internet connected device, however, you may find your reading experience greatly lengthened by searches for images from the many photographers introduced within its pages.

Japan's forgotten history: The First Skyscraper, the Asakusa 凌雲閣 Ryōunkaku

The Ryōunkaku (凌雲閣 Ryōunkaku, lit. Cloud-Surpassing Pavilion or Cloud-Surpassing Tower) was Japan's first western-style skyscraper. It stood in the Asakusa district of Tokyo from 1890 until its demolition following the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923. The Asakusa Jūnikai (浅草十二階?, lit. Asakusa Twelve-stories), as it was called affectionately by Tokyoites, was the most popular attraction in Tokyo, and a showcase for new technologies as it housed Japan's first electric elevator.

- Wikipedia 

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