Agnès Varda: Photography and Early Creative Process

Agnès Varda frequently presented her career as encompassing three domains: photography, cinema, and visual art. While her cinema and late-career artistic work are widely accessible, her early photography remains a growing area of study. Moreover, it has often been repeated that Varda began her directorial career with little knowledge of cinema (stories Varda herself echoed). This article excavates little-known 1950s photographic studies from her archives to show how, in her early cinematic career, she utilized her training as a photographer to conceive her early films. The article demonstrates that Varda made extensive scouting photographs to plan the shots and motifs of her first film, La Pointe Courte (France, 1954), and sometimes sketched these compositions directly in her shooting script. The article also features photographs she made to develop themes in L'Opéra Mouffe (Diary of a Pregnant Woman, France, 1958). Photography, the author argues, enabled Varda to work aesthetically and economically, realizing these early films without the support of producers or state subsidies. Her photographs reveal her formal composition and thematic concerns; they also demonstrate the stunning scope of her planning and enable new understandings of her early creative process.

Giacomo Balla: A Painter in the Context of Neuroscience

Giacomo Balla, a famous Italian Futurist painter, was a great observer of both human motion and emotion. He showed a profound interest toward neurophysiological and neurological sciences. During his search of his personal artistic style, he attended the lessons of Cesare Lombroso, a criminal anthropologist, who at the time was also professor of neurology at the University of Turin. Some years later, he became a close friend of Doctor Francesco Ghilarducci, who had spent a few years in Paris at Jean-Martin Charcot’s “School.” Balla spent most of his career studying the dynamics of movement and speed. Some of his most famous paintings were inspired by photographic studies on the locomotor system, such as those of the French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey. His personal painting style reveals his deep interest in neurosciences. We hereby illustrate the role of some of Giacomo Balla’s paintings as historical records of the neuroscience environment at the turn of the 20th century.

Muybridge in the Parlor

Commonly regarded as one of the pioneers of motion-picture technology, Eadweard Muybridge carried out several photographic studies of animal and human movement in the late nineteenth century. One of Muybridge's lesser-known commissions was an album of interior photographs that he created in 1880 for his friends Kate and Robert Johnson. This article offers a close reading of this album and argues that it has more in common with Muybridge's motion studies than historians have previously recognized. Far from being a commercial outlier, the album offered Muybridge an opportunity to experiment with the technological and cultural possibilities of photography in a new way. Through ghosts, mirrors, and other forms of representational excess, these images make visible Muybridge's handiwork as a photographer and the intellectual complexity of his collaboration with Kate and Robert Johnson.