This issue of Photography & Culture presents a rich and fascinating mix of research, from a study of the Australian picture magazine Walkabout to explorations of the participatory photography of the citizen photographers of Tafos in Peru, to a single and disconcerting image of a young woman at the races. And much more. Photography’s stories continue to be told, as the scholarship around them grows and matures – Vogue magazine, women and the space race; seaside photographs from the 19th century; funeral photographs hidden in a family archive; ragged palm trees on the English coast; feminism and photography in Italy in the 1970s.
Cherine Fahd’s Difficult Images: A Family’s Hidden Photographs of Grief and Mourning discusses the presence and meanings of a set of photographs, taken in 1975, of her grandfather’s funeral in Sydney. Cherine Fahd grew up in an émigré Lebanese family, and many of the photographs bequeathed to her by her grandmother show the family’s experience of migration from rural Lebanon to Sydney, Australia. The funeral photographs, 24 in all, contained in a frayed envelope are remarkable – they are more than snapshots – appearing to be carefully and professionally made and capture powerful scenes at the graveside and at the funeral service. Fahd’s essay raises important questions around the family archive, and her application of a theoretical framework, within which to discuss these issues, is illuminating.
Also emerging from Australian scholarship is Paolo Magagnoli’s exploration of the illustrated magazine Walkabout, published from 1934 to 1974. Walkabout Magazine and the Politics of Documentary in Post-War Australia discusses this intriguing and sometimes contradictory publication. Established to encourage tourism, Walkabout portrayed Australia as a canvas of people and place, exotic and alluring. Contemporaneous with a raft of picture magazines which emerged internationally, Walkabout employed many of Australia’s most active photojournalists.
Tiffany Fairey’s essay on TAFOS – a participatory photo project in Peru set up in the 1980s- explains how citizens became involved in this community photography project, using it to document both the everyday and the politically charged. Charting its existence from its early days to its eventual closure, Fairey documents a vital and influential historic initiative.
In her intriguing paper Where no Woman has Gone Before: Femininity, Fashion Photography, and the Race for Space, Patricia Vettel-Becker draws our attention to the July 1960 edition of Vogue, set against the background of the space race between the USA and the Soviet Union. Vettel-Becker writes about the ways in which women were used by the two superpowers as a metaphor for national identity in the new technological age and during the Cold War. While Soviet women were judged by western commentators as being badly dressed, housed and fed, American women who worked outside the home were assessed according to notions of femininity in the Vogue issue, ‘which addressed space exploration and women in scientific careers while retaining its traditional focus on feminine fashion and beauty’. Eleven women scientists were profiled in the issue, and portraits were made by photographers who included Magnum’s Eve Arnold. Against this documentary, Vogue’s editors commissioned a raft of photographers, including William Klein and John Rawlings, to make fashion stories on locations which referenced the space mission. Both ultra-modern and at the same time mindful of conservative American values, the Vogue issue was the perfect example of post-war attempts to marry tradition and progression.
In Another Measure: Photography and Feminist Art in Italy, Raffaella Perna charts the emergence of feminist photography practice in Italy during the 1970s. She explores the exhibition Altra Misura (Another Measure) organized in 1976 by Romana Loda, one of the key figures in the organization and promotion of feminist art in Italy in the 1970s, and with meticulous detail, presents her research into the many women artist photographers producing radical work during this period, including the remarkable Marcello Campagnano, Tomaso Binga and Verita Monselles.
For One Photograph, Alistair O Neill has chosen an image from Keystone Press, purchased online. A young Japanese woman stands between two spectators at a race meeting at Longchamps in France, wearing a kimono. O’ Neill remarks that the photograph was probably taken as one of a series of ‘racetrack fashions’, which were sold to newspapers, and popular in the 1920s. It is an uncomfortable photograph – it is unclear why the young woman is posing, and as O’ Neill points out, she seems uneasy. Such photographs, dislocated from their original meaning, situated in the distant past, acquired from an online auction site become anonymized, mysterious. Bewitching too are Karen Shepherdson’s 19th and early 20th century seaside photographs in The Archive. Their subjects are also anonymous, lost in history, acquiring new meanings as they are collected and notated.
In Time for Trees, in this issue’s Portfolio, photographer Julia Horbaschk has photographed palm trees in the English seaside resort of Worthing. The palms are battered, solitary and strangely out of context, reminding us that these are exotic species, transplanted to the windy south coast. As Horbaschk suggests: ‘In our modern times, the palm trees often stand as a reminder of luxury, faraway places, exotic beaches, and sunny shores’.
As well as peer-reviewed essays, the editors of Photography & Culture welcome submissions to the three non-peer reviewed sections, The Archive, One Photograph and Portfolio. For The Archive, we ask for from six to eight photographs and a text of up to 750 words, for One Photograph, a photograph and from 500 to 1000 words, and for Portfolio, from six to eight photographs plus a text by the artist of up to 750 words. Each submission will be reviewed by the editors and can be submitted in the usual way.