Communicating Photograph Content Through Tactile Images to People With Visual Impairments

Millions of people with a visual impairment across the world are denied access to visual images. They are unable to enjoy the simple pleasures of viewing family photographs, those in textbooks or tourist brochures and the pictorial embellishment of news stories etc. We propose a simple, inexpensive but effective approach, to make content accessible via touch. We use state-of-the-art algorithms to automatically process an input photograph into a collage of icons, that depict the most important semantic aspects of a scene. This collage is then printed onto swell paper. Our experiments show that people can recognise content with an accuracy exceeding 70% and create plausible narratives to explain it. This means that people can understand image content via touch. Communicating scene foreground is a step forward, but there are many other steps needed to provide the visually impaired with the fullest possible access to visual content.

Public Performance of Private Interviews: Reinserting the Self into the Family Narrative

Serban Oliver Tataru and Alfred Guzzetti are filmmakers that investigate on camera the role of memory in the construction of family history. They interview family members, gather old home movies and family photographs, and dig for public archival footage, in an effort to assume their position within a personal historical continuum, and to affirm their agency within their familial community. In their creative affirmation of generational subjectivity, they push against accepted familial narratives, and use the camera as a surgical tool that troubles lingering wounds beyond the surface of old images. In Anatomy of a Departure (2012), Romanian-German filmmaker Serban Oliver Tataru interviews his parents about their decision to emigrate from Ceausescu’s Romania while he was a teenager, scrutinizing on camera the conditions and consequence of a life-changing decision. While the dynamic of filming one’s own family is reminiscent of home movie tropes, and the tension built around sharing delicate memories reveals an intimacy usually intended to remain private, the film proposes a multilayered performance of the authorial self. As the film reveals a self-portrait set against the familial portrait (Marianne Hirsch), an inherent performative element acts as the necessary mediator between private and public, between ethic, aesthetic and politic. Negotiating between a restorative and a reflective nostalgia (Svetlana Boym), Tataru proposes a live performance of homecoming.

Photographs On A Refrigerator : A Display Of Visual Culture

This project will focus on family based vernacular photography and modes of display, with specific attention paid to the household refrigerator as a framing device. Photographs on refrigerators are in many North American homes. Since the invention of photography, the home has and continues to be an area of display for vernacular family photographs. These displays of family photographs are important to consider because they are an example of how people use photographs in their everyday lives, and provide a representation of a family, generation and culture. This investigation will show that people display similar photographs for similar reasons, and that photographs are a common form of record making and celebration for families. Finally, this project will address vernacular photographs within the context of institutional collections. What collecting biases do vernacular photographs confront, and how does the commonality of vernacular photographs raise new questions about institutional collection practices based on the rarified and the valuable cultural object?

Photographs On A Refrigerator : A Display Of Visual Culture

This project will focus on family based vernacular photography and modes of display, with specific attention paid to the household refrigerator as a framing device. Photographs on refrigerators are in many North American homes. Since the invention of photography, the home has and continues to be an area of display for vernacular family photographs. These displays of family photographs are important to consider because they are an example of how people use photographs in their everyday lives, and provide a representation of a family, generation and culture. This investigation will show that people display similar photographs for similar reasons, and that photographs are a common form of record making and celebration for families. Finally, this project will address vernacular photographs within the context of institutional collections. What collecting biases do vernacular photographs confront, and how does the commonality of vernacular photographs raise new questions about institutional collection practices based on the rarified and the valuable cultural object?

EVALUATION OF PHOTOREALISTIC AND ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONS IN GERHARD RICHTER WORKS

Gerhard Richter, who experiences different styles, production methods and methods together in his works; offers the audience different variations in artistic orientation and expressions. Gerhard Richter draws his own artistic boundaries with photorealistic paintings in which images and representations are reflected exactly, and abstract works created with an informal shaping attitude. While photographs, digital prints, blurring images are encountered in his photorealistic works, textured and vibrant colors are encountered in his abstract works. While Gerhard Richter includes figures, portraits, family photographs and landscapes in which grays are intense, with the traces of social associations formed in memory in the photorealistic period, he reflects the authentic values on the canvas surface in an ambiguous way. The abstract canvases reflecting the physicality and the intensity of the composition of colors, on the other hand, appear as the continuation, reflection and alteration of photographs, blur and ambiguity. In the research, it is aimed to examine the periods of the artist, which starts with photography and ends with abstract works, with production methods and methods. Diversity in production and styling, content representations reflected in the transformation of photographic images into pictorial forms; It turns into covered narratives with the transfer of the traces in the artist's memory to the artwork. The literature on Gerhard Richter and his works was scanned and the available data were analyzed with a descriptive method. In both periods shaped by social influence and spiritual impressions, it is observed that the artist diversified his production and included the language of expression shaped in concrete or abstract form through experimental practices in his works. Keywords: Gerhard Richter, photorealism, photography, abstract expressionism

Louis XIII, Richard I, and the Duchess of Devonshire: Nineteenth-Century Jews in Fancy Dress Costume

In the nineteenth century, fancy dress activities and their material record formed part of the mise-en-scène of the Jewish elite’s self-fashioning. Family photographs and press reports of Jews in costume cast new light on the visualization of wealthy Jews. These Jews actively participated in the fancy dress culture of the elites, a popular form of cultural expression that was deemed a powerful way to convey social messages. In the British Empire, Europe, and North America, affluent Jews negotiated their feelings of solidarity and difference among non-Jews. They explored and articulated their self-image and group identity by appropriating others’ history and culture in public and private dressing-up amusements. Fancy dress, this article argues, enabled Jews to question who they wanted to be and communicate their desires to their Jewish and non-Jewish peers.

The Ways in Which I Never Thought About My Great-Grandfather: An Essay on the Potentials of Photography as a Historical Document∗

This paper is on the trail of answering the theoretical question of the potential of photography as a historical source. The paper does not aim for a historical reconstruction in the classical sense but is an attempt to show the reach of this visual media in historical research, based on the correlation of a sample of family photographs, oral history, and theory. By employing the author’s “personal voice,” the paper attempts to correlate particularities with a broader context and general theory. The author uses photographs of his great-grandfather, made at a prisoner-of-war camp during the World War II, to show the limitations of photography as a historical source.