Full Description
Photography, both in the form of contemporary practice and that of historical material, now occupies a significant place in the citadels of Western art culture. It has an institutional network of its own, embedded within the broader art world, with its own specialists including critics, curators, collectors, dealers and conservators. All of this cultural activity consolidates an artistic practice and critical discourse of photography that distinguishes what is increasingly termed 'art photography' from its commercial, scientific and amateur guises. But this long-awaited recognition of photography as high art brings new challenges. How will photography's newly privileged place in the art world affect how the history of creative photography is written?
Modernist claims for the medium as having an aesthetic often turned on precedents from painting. Postmodernism challenged a cultural hierarchy organized around painting. Nineteenth-century photographs move between the symbolic spaces of the gallery wall and the archive: de-contextualized for art and re-contextualized for history. But what of the contemporary writings, images, and practices that negotiated an aesthetic status for 'the photographic'?
Photography and the Arts revisits practices both celebrated and elided by the modernist and postmodernist grand narratives of art and photographic history in order to open up new critical spaces. Written by leading scholars in the fields of photography, art and literature, the book examines the metaphorical as well as the material exchanges between photography and the fine, graphic, reproductive and sculptural arts.
Contents
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
INTRODUCTION Juliet Hacking and Joanne Lukitsh
PART ONE: THE ARTS OF REPRODUCTION
1. A Bug for Photography? Hippolyte Fizeau's Photographic Engraving and other Media of Reproduction Stephen C. Pinson
2. Casting History: The role of photography and Plaster Casting in the Creation of a Colonial Archive Sarah Victoria Turner
3. Modernising the Victorian: Readings of the Photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron, 1886 to 1914 Joanne Lukitsh
PART TWO: PHOTOGRAPHY & AESTHETICS
4. The Photographic and the Picturesque: The Aesthetic and Chemical Foundations of Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard's Activities Herta Wolf
5. Picturesque Conflict: Photography and the Aesthetics of Violence in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire Sean Willcock
6. Sun-struck: Elizabeth Rigby (Eastlake) and the Sun's 'Earnest Gaze' in Calotypes by Hill and Adamson Lindsay Smith
7. 'Carlyle like a Rough Block of Michelangelo's': Thinking Photography through Sculpture in Julia Margaret Cameron's Portraits Patrizia di Bello
PART THREE: PHOTOGRAPHY & PAINTING
8. Art, Reproduction and Reportage: Roger Fenton's Crimean Photographs Sophie Gordon
9. Impressionism in Photography Hope Kingsley
PART FOUR: ARTISTIC PHOTOGRAPHY
10. 'The Poetical Talents of Our Artists': American Narrative Daguerreotypes Diane Waggoner
11. 'Radically Vicious': Henry Peach Robinson, Alfred Henry Wall and the Critical Reception of Composition Photography 1859-63 Juliet Hacking
12. From 'Studies from Nature' to 'Studies for Painting': Julia Margaret Cameron in the South Kensington Museum Marta Weiss
