The recent, unexpected passing of François Brunet, Professor of American Studies at Université Paris-Diderot and Director of the Collège Franco-Britannique of the Cité Universitaire Internationale, has come as a profound shock to many well beyond the field of photographic studies. To those who were fortunate to know him, François was the epitome of academic commitment, debonair charm, generosity, and intellectual acuity. It is difficult to read the dedications and obituaries that have appeared in recent weeks, but they testify to the genuine warmth of feeling and the magnitude of loss that have accompanied the news of his death.Footnote1 François joined the editorial board of History of Photography in 2007, and his influence and example are threaded through the pages of this journal. With François, ideas and arguments were matters not simply to be communicated, but enactments of a conversation with a reader, an author, or an audience listener. It is, perhaps, what made him an exceptional mentor – the ability to impart a sense of importance and empathy on those in his company and a curiosity with the topic at hand. To his family and those closest to him in Paris, we send our heartfelt condolences on behalf of his numerous friends and colleagues around the world.
Margareta Ingrid Christian opens this issue with an analysis of the occult photographic experiments and associated discourses of the fin-de-siècle researchers Louis Darget and Hippolyte Baraduc. For these experimenters, the body of a subject emitted thought projections as ‘vital fluids’ that could be registered directly on a photosensitive plate without the mediation of the camera. In a manner analogous to Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of x-rays and subsequent photographs of the inner structure of the human body, Darget and Baraduc made use of cameraless photography in order to register esoteric phenonema beyond human perception. In a careful analysis that compares these practices to contemporaneous scientific discourses and historical theories of nonvisible phenomena, Christian asserts the proximity of these occult photographic practices, and the intellectual concerns that underpin their use, to ‘mainstream’ scientific objectives and discourses of the era. ‘By revealing the afterlife of “magic” in science and the survival of science in the occult’, Christian concludes, ‘their photographic experiments show the very shortcomings of these categories’.
Whether scientific, occult, or religious, photography was employed throughout the nineteenth century to verify structures of knowledge across an extraordinary range of belief systems and intellectual disciplines. If Christian asserts the entanglement of late nineteenth-century occult experiments with histories of science and photography, Sheona Beaumont investigates the significance of biblical studies and theological debates on the early use of the daguerreotype in the Holy Lands. However distinct their subjects and concerns, Christian and Beaumont highlight the disciplinary and intellectual openness that this journal has sought to foster in the study of photography’s histories. Beaumont examines the thirty-seventh edition of Reverend Alexander Keith’s Evidence of the Truth of the Christian Religion (1859), illustrated with eighteen engravings after daguerreotypes of views in Palestine and Syria. This article brings the formidable tools of biblical reception studies to bear on an analysis of Keith’s theological worldview in which ‘the photographic landscape is biblical, and the biblical text is photographic, in a relation that may be measured against a photographic and prophetic truth so constituted’.
Although the next three articles in this issue examine different social and historical contexts, they share a concern for illustrated magazines and newspapers of the middle decades of twentieth-century Europe. They are presented in chronological order and highlight the shifts in political and social engagement that attended illustrated publications for distinct readerships. Simon Dell provides a detailed account of the French interwar magazines Nos Regards and Regards sur le monde du travail and their advocacy of a revolutionary proletarian struggle that was at once international, anticolonial, and domestic, through the use of such strategies as photographic and textual juxtaposition, collective authorship, and reader participation. Dell charts the shifting editorial policies and layouts of these two important journals parallel to the changing fortunes and debates of interwar left-wing politics.
By comparison, Marion Krammer and Margarethe Szeless investigate the prominence of the subject of returning prisoners of war in the illustrated magazines and newspapers of postwar Austria. Given the gradual repatriation of prisoners of war from Russian labour camps and the personal turmoil of long-separated families, the subject of the ‘homecomer’ (Heimkehrer) was one that resonated strongly in occupied Austria and which increased in use as the Cold War intensified. Finally, Jan Baetens examines the case of the French film photonovel – publications of immense popularity in the late fifties and sixties that combined serialised photographs and text in the photonovel format of original movies. Baetens is less concerned here with the historical significance of the genre (although this is clearly immense) than with the cultural politics of photographic preservation and archival value. Whether articulated or not, if archives constitute photographic value on the basis of claims of rarity, canonicity, and medium exclusivity, what are the ramifications for such popular ‘unoriginal’ forms as the film photonovel? Such questions might just as readily be asked of those other ephemeral photographic materials and publications examined in this issue.
It has been an honour to serve as editor of History of Photography over the past six years and to work closely with the dedicated academics and curators around the world of all career stages and backgrounds. I would like to thank Katie Johnson, production editor at Taylor & Francis, and Sabine Kriebel, book reviews editor for the past three years, for their work and support. What ultimately appears in the pages of this journal is the outcome of all those who engage with its aims and ideas – authors, readers, peer reviewers, and editors – as well as its function as an inclusive site of exchange and debate that aims to showcase the intellectual strength and diversity of current work in the history of photography, however defined or conceived. In particular, I hope that this journal will continue to expand its readership and prove relevant to those engaged in other fields of intellectual, material, historical, and cultural study.
Finally, I wish the new editor-in-chief, Patrizia Di Bello, all the very best in her stewardship of History of Photography. Patrizia has been an exemplary board member, a conscientious peer reader, a regular contributor, and the guest editor of a special issue on photography and sculpture.Footnote2 I am also delighted to announce that Sean Willcock, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Birkbeck, has agreed to serve as the new book reviews editor. With Patrizia’s and Sean’s appointments, the journal’s base of operations moves to Birkbeck, University of London, after eighteen years at the University of St Andrews. Patrizia is also co-director of the History and Theory of Photography Research Centre at Birkbeck, and so this appointment will complement the broader aims and activities of the research institute and enhance its already established reputation as a centre for the study of photography and its histories. It signals an exciting new chapter for History of Photography as it continues to promote innovative scholarship at the forefront of current research and critical thinking.
Notes
1 Jean-Marie Fournier, ‘Hommage à François Brunet’, at http://www.larca.univ-paris-diderot.fr/about-larca/in-memoriam/article/francois-brunet?lang=fr; and Marc Chénetier, ‘In memoriam: François Brunet’, European Association for American Studies, at https://www.eaas.eu/about-eaas/648-francois-brunet (accessed 1 February 2019).
2 ‘The Sculptural Photograph in the Nineteenth Century’, ed. Patrizia Di Bello, special issue, History of Photography, 37: 4 (November 2013).