scholarly journals Wolfgang Tillmans’s Abstract Mediations and Other Ecologies

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-130
Author(s):  
Sara R. Yazdani
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
History Of Photography ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Image Production ◽  
Abstract Work ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
The Way

In 2003 the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans installed a selection of his Silver works—a body of abstract, nuanced, monochromic surfaces—together with ten almost identical editions of his Arctic works, images depicting the Arctic landscapes photographed from above. The result was a grid of unframed works appearing as mundane, monochromic yet meditative surfaces that changed and moved. The reflective play between the abstract and the representational, between media, matter, and nature, suggests that Tillmans’s abstractions take photography into a lively dialogue with the affective and diagrammatic means of image production and constellating. This essay takes Silver and the way in which those pieces were installed together with the Arctic works in the paradigmatic exhibition if one thing matters, everything matters at Tate Britain in 2003, as the place of departure for a closer inspection of Tillmans’s abstract work, connecting the history of photography with artistic practices of the historical avant-garde inevitably concerned with the formal forces of colors, light, and other matter. My inquiry revolves around questions of processes and relations, or, to be more precise, how the abstract and representational images at Tate Britain were less concerned with representation or the familiar 1990s concept of indexicality, than with processes of mediations evolving between matter, bodies, technologies, and the natural world. My assertion is that the Silver and Arctic works as constellated in one of seven rooms at Tate Britain in 2003 attest to how photography provoked new understandings of materiality and ecology in the late 1990s and early 2000s, while gesturing toward a politicization of “nature” and challenges to the anthropocentric worldview.

scholarly journals Geographical Imagination, Anthropology, and Political Exiles

Sibirica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-84
Author(s):  
Tatiana Saburova
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
History Of Photography ◽  
Local Society ◽  
Geographical Imagination ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Anthropological Research ◽  
Political Exile ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

This article is focused on several themes connected with the history of photography, political exile in Imperial Russia, exploration and representations of Siberia in the late 19th–early 20th centuries. Photography became an essential tool in numerous geographic, topographic and ethnographic expeditions to Siberia in the late 19th century; well-known scientists started to master photography or were accompanied by professional photographers in their expeditions, including ones organized by the Russian Imperial Geographic Society, which resulted in the photographic records, reports, publications and exhibitions. Photography was rapidly spreading across Asian Russia and by the end of the 19th century there was a photo studio (or several ones) in almost every Siberian town. Political exiles were often among Siberian photographers, making photography their new profession, business, a way of getting a social status in the local society, and a means of surviving financially as well as intellectually and emotionally. They contributed significantly to the museum’s collections by photographing indigenous people in Siberia and even traveling to Mongolia and China, displaying “types” as a part of anthropological research in Asia and presenting “views” of the Russian empire’s borderlands. The visual representation of Siberia corresponded with general perceptions of an exotic East, populated by “primitive” peoples devoid of civilization, a trope reinforced by numerous photographs and depictions of Siberia as an untamed natural world, later transformed and modernized by the railroads construction.

The Peripatetic Viewer at Heartfield's Film und Foto Exhibition Room

October ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 150 ◽  
pp. 27-48
Author(s):  
Andrés Mario Zervigón
Keyword(s):  
History Of Photography ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Exhibition Space ◽  
History Of ◽  
Photo Essay

The traveling exhibition Film und Foto, inaugurated in 1929 by the famous German Werkbund association, stands as a critical landmark in the exhibition of modernist photography and film. Yet walking through its inaugural venue, in Stuttgart, was as much like flipping through an instructional photo essay as navigating an exhibition space. The first of the show's thirteen rooms, for example, offered a large number of prints that recapitulated the history of photography, or more specifically the history of its practical use. Displayed on sleek scaffolds that efficiently expanded the available exhibition surface, these prints hung in what may best be described as modernist salon style meets the printed page. A lower register seems strung near thigh level while a second row pushed toward the ceiling. The left-page/right-page and vertical/horizontal dialogues this arrangement afforded encouraged viewers to compare photographs taken from the spheres of science and industry to avant-garde prints inspired by the former. Above this series of exchanges ran a prominent sans-serif caption, a punning query that framed the entire show: “Where is photography's development headed?”

scholarly journals Urban Societies in Europe since 1945: Toward a Historical Interpretation

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
MORITZ FÖLLMER ◽  
MARK B. SMITH
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Alternative Communities ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Eastern And Western Europe ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
The Way

How can we write the history of urban societies in Europe after 1945? This article offers an interpretative overview of key developments in both Eastern and Western Europe, while also discussing some key conceptual issues. Along the way, it takes stock of the relevant historiography (much of which is very recent) and introduces a selection of papers from a cycle of three international workshops held between 2011 and 2013. The papers range geographically from Britain to the Soviet Union and cover topics as diverse as post-war reconstruction and alternative communities in the 1970s. Their respective approaches are informed by an interest in the way societies have been imagined in discourses and reshaped in spatial settings. Moreover, the papers move beyond case studies, urban history's classic genre, and can therefore facilitate synthetic reflection. It is our hope that, in so doing, we can make urban history more relevant to contemporary European historians in general.

scholarly journals The space between photography and film : an object study from the Warner Bros.-First National Keybook collection

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Cullen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
History Of Photography ◽  
Cinema Studies ◽  
42Nd Street ◽  
History Of ◽  
Aesthetic Characteristics ◽  
Selection Of

Historically and conceptually, film stills occupy a precarious position between two academic disciplines: cinema studies and the history of photography. They are overshadowed in collections by more prominent and "valuable" cinematic or photographic objects competing for the same space and money; and they have received relatively little attention in scholarship, exhibitions and publications. The film still is a unique and distinctive genre of object, possessing its own history, physicality, and aesthetic. After establishing a historical and descriptive context for understanding the film still as an object with multiple incarnations - commercial, nostalgic, historical, educational, artistic - this thesis transitions into an analysis of actual stills. By examining the physical and aesthetic characteristics of a small selection of stills from George Eastman House's "Warner Bros.-First National Keybook Collection," drawn from the keybooks of Other Women's Husbands (1926), Lights of New York, and 42nd Street, an argument emerges for the establishment of the film still as a genre of photographic object distinguishable by its physical and aesthetic characteristics as much as by its origin.

scholarly journals Studying the cognitive states of animals: Epistemology, ethology and ethics

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 369-422
Author(s):  
Otto Lehto
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Relevant Literature ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Cognitive Ethology ◽  
Evolutionary Account ◽  
Cognitive States ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scientific Quest ◽  
Selection Of

The question of cognitive endowment in animals has been fiercely debated in the scientific community during the last couple of decades (for example, in cognitive ethology and behaviourism), and indeed, all throughout the long history of natural philosophy (from Plato and Aristotle, via Descartes, to Darwin). The scientific quest for an empirical, evolutionary account of the development and emergence of cognition has met with many philosophical objections, blind alleys and epistemological quandaries. I will argue that we are dealing with conflicting philosophical world views as well as conflicting empirical paradigms of research. After looking at some examples from the relevant literature of animal studies to elucidate the nature of the conflicts that arise, I propose, in strict Darwinian orthodoxy, that cognitive endowments in nature are subject to the sort of continuum and gradation that natural selection of fit variant forms tends to generate. Somewhere between the myth of “free” humans and the myth of “behaviourally conditioned” animals lies the reality of animal behaviour and cognition. In the end, I hope to have softened up some of those deep-seated philosophical problems (and many quasi-problems) that puzzle and dazzle laymen, scientists and philosophers alike in their quest for knowledge about the natural world.

Framing the Postmodern Waste Land

2021 ◽  
pp. 179-192
Author(s):  
Miles Orvell
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Superfund Sites ◽  
Mining Operations ◽  
Oil Drilling ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Polluted Rivers ◽  
Ansel Adams ◽  
The Way

The “Postmodern Waste Land” explores the way mining operations and other industrial processes have affected the Earth’s surface, leaving scarred mountainsides, polluted rivers, and residual poisons that will remain in the earth for centuries. Superfund sites are the subject of David T. Hanson’s photographic surveys, while Edward Burtynsky has dramatized the way the wilderness has been destroyed through oil drilling and mining. The earlier history of ecological photography is covered as well, through a discussion of the opposing strategies of mid-twentieth century environmental photography—on one hand, the representation of the exploited landscape, and on the other hand the celebration of the natural world, as in photographs of Ansel Adams.

scholarly journals Crisis of the Mythological? The Melting of the Polar Ice in Greenland in Alfred Döblin’s Berge Meere und Giganten

Nordlit ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 161
Author(s):  
Hanna Maria Hofmann
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Polar Ice ◽  
Central Thesis ◽  
Short Summary ◽  
History Of ◽  
Solid Form ◽  
The Way

The novel Berge Meere und Giganten was written in 1924. I would like to focus my attention on the 7th book in the novel, whose title is Die Enteisung Grönlands (The Melting of the Polar Ice in Greenland). To begin with, I will give a short summary of what the novel is about. The project to melt Greenland's polar ice forms the culmination of a history of the whole of humanity running from the 20th century all the way until the 27th century. Using all their military and technological might, the heat of the Icelandic volcanoes is captured in solid form and transported by ship to the Arctic. With the help of a gigantic net, this heat is then unloaded on to Greenland, thus melting its ice. Greenland ‘strikes back' however, firstly by casting a magical spell. My central thesis is that Döblin`s Greenland fiction is about the destruction of the myth of Greenland and that this ultimately documents a crisis of the mythological itself. 

scholarly journals The space between photography and film : an object study from the Warner Bros.-First National Keybook collection

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Cullen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
History Of Photography ◽  
Cinema Studies ◽  
42Nd Street ◽  
History Of ◽  
Aesthetic Characteristics ◽  
Selection Of

Historically and conceptually, film stills occupy a precarious position between two academic disciplines: cinema studies and the history of photography. They are overshadowed in collections by more prominent and "valuable" cinematic or photographic objects competing for the same space and money; and they have received relatively little attention in scholarship, exhibitions and publications. The film still is a unique and distinctive genre of object, possessing its own history, physicality, and aesthetic. After establishing a historical and descriptive context for understanding the film still as an object with multiple incarnations - commercial, nostalgic, historical, educational, artistic - this thesis transitions into an analysis of actual stills. By examining the physical and aesthetic characteristics of a small selection of stills from George Eastman House's "Warner Bros.-First National Keybook Collection," drawn from the keybooks of Other Women's Husbands (1926), Lights of New York, and 42nd Street, an argument emerges for the establishment of the film still as a genre of photographic object distinguishable by its physical and aesthetic characteristics as much as by its origin.

Theory of the Image

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Nail
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Art ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Copernican Revolution ◽  
Systematic Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Image Production ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Theory Of The Image ◽  
The Way

We live in the age of the mobile image. Our world is now saturated with moving images of all kinds, both analog and digital. This sea change in image production and circulation is nothing less than the Copernican revolution of our time. The centrality of the movement and mobility of the image has never been more dramatic. And just like the Copernican revolution, the aesthetic revolution of the image has consequences not only for the way we think about the contemporary image but also the way we think about all previous images. Theory of the Image offers a new and systematic philosophy of art and aesthetics from the perspective of movement—the first of its kind. Throughout history, the image has been understood in many ways, but rarely has it been understood to be, primarily and above all, in motion. Thus, Theory of the Image offers not only the first aesthetics of motion but also the first history of the mobility of the image in the Western art tradition, from prehistory to the present.

The Definitive Editor: Alfred Kreymborg and the Others Magazine-Anthology Duo

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 515-537
Author(s):  
Leah Budke
Keyword(s):  
Media Ecology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Annual Publication ◽  
The Way

This article examines two intrinsically linked periodical publications: Others: A Magazine of the New Verse (1915–1919) and Others: An Anthology of the New Verse (1916–1920) both edited by Alfred Kreymborg. To date, scholarship on the publications has focused either on the magazine or, to a lesser extent, on the anthology, but never on the dynamic between the two publications. The article begins by considering the way both publications challenged the boundaries of medial form in an effort to better characterize the respective functions of the magazine and the anthology in the Others dynamic. It demonstrates how the anthology, an annual publication, allowed Kreymborg to reclaim editorial agency over the Others brand, facilitating a secondary round of editing of the magazine's contents. By creating a secondary selection of poems increasingly collated by guest editors, Kreymborg was able to further shape the representation of the duo. The restoration of the Others anthology to the history of the Others project sheds new light on key contributors and resultantly requires us to further nuance our understanding of the Others magazine as a largely inclusive project. In uncovering the role the Others anthology played in the Others dynamic, this article ultimately underscores the need to include the serially published modernist anthology in our understanding of the diverse and interrelated modernist media ecology.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document