Editorial

History of Photography is delighted to welcome two eminent scholars to the journal board. Ahmet A. Ersoy is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey, and brings a specialist knowledge of photography in the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent nation-states that comprised its territories. Roberta Wue is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Irvine, USA, and is well known for her research on the photography and visual culture of late Qing and early twentieth-century China. Both are academics renowned for their work beyond their respective fields of expertise and have recently published significant articles in this journal.¹

For the first thirteen years after its inaugural issue in 1977, History of Photography carried the subtitle ‘an international quarterly’, but this arguably signified more of an aspiration towards which its founding editor, Heinz K. Henisch, steadily guided the journal with resolute determination than a reality in terms of its content, authors, or indeed readers. Since then, the journal has continued to expand beyond its European and American foundations, aided by special issues, online access, the digitisation of back issues, and the burgeoning academic and public interest in marginalised and vernacular histories of photography. Authors, reviewers, and readers of diverse backgrounds and affiliations around the world have been instrumental in making the journal a dynamic, imagined locus of debate and exchange, but this remains an ongoing process of invitation and affirmation of a collective investment in the field’s future directions. In short, this journal intends to contribute to the study of photography’s histories as a global and inclusive field of authors, readers, and practitioners. The journal board aims to reflect the intellectual rigour of the current state of photographic studies and its expansion into fields of enquiry and scholarship that are transforming not only its range of subjects and materials but inevitably its methodologies, premises, questions, and intellectual voices.

Marcia Pointon opens this issue with an article on a set of photographs by Robert Harris that depict the stages of physical inspection to which black labourers at De Beers’s diamond mines were subjected in late nineteenth-century South Africa. As the subject matter suggests, these are deeply disturbing photographs that testify to the degradations by which colonial authorities not only exploited the natural resources of its dispossessions but also instituted and codified procedures that enacted its violence on the bodies of its colonised workforce. Here the camera played its part in the dehumanising abuses of the colonial everyday. Pointon not only calls attention to a series that retains the power to shock but also emphasises the ethical issues faced by the contemporary scholar – as well as the journal reader – confronted with these photographs ‘both as problem and as resource’. In the current era with its popular apologists for the colonial past and its legacies, Pointon declares the imperative that ‘as scholars we have a responsibility not only to bear witness but to reconcile documentation with empathy’. By recounting the challenges and obstacles encountered during her own research into this series, Pointon also draws attention to the current archival and institutional constraints that can limit access to, and knowledge of, such overt colonial-era materials of racism and abuse.

In comparison to Harris’s series of colonial mineworkers’ body search procedures, the photographs by two young Americans, Frank Swift Bourns and Dean Conant Worchester, may appear less blatant and even innocuous in their content, but their work was nonetheless informed by similar attitudes of cultural superiority. Mark Rice charts Bourns and Worchester’s travels and ambitions as two recent graduates from the University of Michigan on an extensive zoological expedition around the Philippines in the early 1890s. Rice examines their photographic output and its principal colonialist tropes, highlighting the significance of their work in the formation of US attitudes towards the Philippines, which would eventually come under the colonial control of the USA in 1898. This article adds to a growing body of scholarship on photography’s role in US imperialist expansion in the Asia-Pacific region, as recently examined in a special issue of this journal.²

Whereas these opening two articles, however distinct the historical circumstances and conditions, emphasise disparate asymmetries of power in the photography of their subjects, Sara Dominici explores the modern experiences and desires that promoted the late nineteenth-century convergence of bicycle and camera technologies among well-to-do amateur enthusiasts in the UK. Drawing in particular on popular magazines such as the Amateur Photographer and Wheel World, Dominici examines the social interconnections between the amateur pursuits of cycling and photography that forged the hybridised concept of the ‘cyclo-photographer’. Rather than an analysis based on the outcome of such pursuits, Dominici examines the historical experience and social desire for such a merger of leisure-time pursuits, arguing ‘that the demand for new technological developments could be seen to reflect the materialisation of such desire’. Recent scholarship of this kind concerns itself not with the photograph as the ultimate outcome and privileged document of enquiry, but with the lived historical experience of photography’s users as ‘popular modernists’ who shaped and conditioned its technological possibilities.³

As the ‘cyclo-photographer’ transformed the concept of the human with prosthetic technologies that enhanced ways of both moving and seeing, so the biological, in turn, came to be reimagined in technological terms. Monica Bravo explores one of the more unusual instances of such reversed logic in the late nineteenth-century concept of the optogram – that is, the belief that an image was fixed to the retina by biological and photochemical processes. In such discourses, the eye and the retina found their technological equivalents in the camera and the light-sensitive photographic plate. As a result, it was widely believed that a murderer’s portrait could be excised from the retina of the deceased victim. However fanciful such ideas may seem to modern readers, Bravo charts the social belief in the optogram as evident in scientific reports, works of fiction, and legal debates into the early twentieth century, which ‘testifies to a sophisticated nineteenth-century epistemology undisturbed by deriving objective truths from subjective observations or interpretations’.

Although diverse in their geographical contexts and thematic concerns, the articles outlined so far in this issue all take as their subject roughly contemporaneous events from the final two decades of the nineteenth century. In contrast, Brian Stokoe investigates the vicissitudes of the photobook in interwar Germany and the conflicting cultural tensions and anxieties that shaped the content of such publications. The interwar photobook in Germany has been the subject of at least two recent English-language publications that demonstrate the current vitality of scholarship in this area.⁴ Stokoe has selected a range of lesser-known case studies for analysis – including Kurt Hielscher’s Deutschland, Baukunst und Landschaft (1924), Eugen Diesel’s Das Land der Deutschen (1931), and Erna Lendvai-Dirksen’s Reichsautobahn: Mensch und Werk (1937) – which provide a useful survey of the changes in approach and subject matter that occurred for the photobook from the Weimar period to the prewar years of National Socialist rule.

This issue concludes with book reviews by Valérie Gorin, Nadya Bair, and Nina Lager Vestberg, all coordinated under the direction of Sabine Kriebel.

Notes

1 Ahmet A. Ersoy, ‘Ottomans and the Kodak Galaxy: Archiving Everyday Life and Historical Space in Ottoman Illustrated Journals’, History of Photography, 40:3 (August 2016), 330–57; and Roberta Wue, ‘China in the World: On Photography, Montages, and the Magic Lantern’, History of Photography, 41:2 (May 2017), 171–87.

2 ‘American Photography in the Asia-Pacific’, ed. Prue Ahrens, special issue, History of Photography, 39:3 (August 2015).

3 For a recent article with similar methodological concerns, see Kate Flint, ‘The Cultural History of the Flash Gun’, History of Photography, 41:4 (November 2017), 395–411.

4 Pepper Stetler, Stop Reading! Look! Modern Vision and the Weimar Photographic Book, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2015; and Daniel H. Magilow, The Photography of Crisis: The Photo-Essays of Weimar Germany, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 2012.