Contextualizing the Rhode Island School of Design group portfolios and the state of art photography in the 1960s and 1970s

The students and faculty of the Rhode Island School of Design produced fourteen annual group portfolios between the years 1967-1981. The George Eastman House collection contains nine of the fourteen group portfolios created. The group portfolios add to the discourse surrounding university photographic education programs in the late 1960s and 1970s. The tradition of annual university group portfolios creates a tangible link between photographic education programs, the photography market, and collecting art photography. The Rhode Island School of Design group portfolios demonstrate that professional art photographers taught photography to make a living while inspiring the next generation of art photographers. The seriousness of teaching photography further validated photography as an art form. Also during this time, the number of university photography programs increased, the photography market flourished, and institutions developed independent photography departments. The combination of these factors progressively led to photography’s acceptance as an autonomous artistic medium.

Contextualizing the Rhode Island School of Design group portfolios and the state of art photography in the 1960s and 1970s

The students and faculty of the Rhode Island School of Design produced fourteen annual group portfolios between the years 1967-1981. The George Eastman House collection contains nine of the fourteen group portfolios created. The group portfolios add to the discourse surrounding university photographic education programs in the late 1960s and 1970s. The tradition of annual university group portfolios creates a tangible link between photographic education programs, the photography market, and collecting art photography. The Rhode Island School of Design group portfolios demonstrate that professional art photographers taught photography to make a living while inspiring the next generation of art photographers. The seriousness of teaching photography further validated photography as an art form. Also during this time, the number of university photography programs increased, the photography market flourished, and institutions developed independent photography departments. The combination of these factors progressively led to photography’s acceptance as an autonomous artistic medium.

THE NATURE OF THE IMAGE WITHIN TECHNOLOGICAL ART IN THE MID – 20TH CENTURY. LUMINO KINETIC EXPERIMENTS BY FRANK MALINA

For the first time in the Russian-speaking academic environment the authors of the paper analyze the creative legacy of the scientist, aeronautical engineer and artist Frank Joseph Malina (1912–1981). His working practices reflected the most important ethic and aesthetic aspirations of the mid-twentieth century, what became an important contribution to the development of modern visual culture. The pioneer of Lumino Kinetic art F.Malina created several unique electromechanical systems for the production of an image, the media infrastructure and technological nature of which would later become the visual standard of the digital age. The discovery of electric light as a new artistic medium allowed him to focus on the production methods, control and processing algorithms for light that produces images. The Lumino Kinetic experiments of F. Malina are based on understanding the new nature of the image, born during the era of scientific discoveries. Several decades before the iconic turn was proclaimed by academic science, they presented the image as a system of relations that is formed in acts of perception and that is not based on visible, but felt, ideated, imagined reality. While creating his works F. Malina dreamed of modeling qualitatively new perceptual conditions for the existence of mankind aimed at further progress and traveling to the stars.

Teachers’ Views on the Use of Photography in Teaching Arts in Croatian Primary Schools

Contemporary art education relies on the use of diverse methods, approaches, art techniques, and technologies. Although photography is part of daily visual communication and gallery exhibitions, there is no structured approach to photography as a medium for learning the arts in Croatian primary schools. The objectives of the quantitative study were to determine art teachers’ views on (1) their knowledge about photography, (2) their abilities in using photography in art teaching, (3) obstacles to using photography in art teaching, and (4) the importance of photography in students’ visual culture. Regarding the fourth objective, we wanted to examine possible differences in terms of the teachers’ gender, age, and length of service. A survey was conducted with 112 teachers who teach arts in 5th to 8th grades in 17 Croatian counties. The results of the descriptive statistics were supplemented with a qualitative analysis of the teachers’ responses in the questionnaire. The results show that the teachers perceive their knowledge about photography obtained by formal education as average, but they assess their abilities to apply photography in their lessons as slightly better. The main problem, in their view, is a low number of art lessons in the Croatian curriculum. The teachers generally agree that photography is very important in a student’s visual culture, regardless of the teachers’ gender, age. and years of service. These findings indicate the need to place greater emphasis on photography as an artistic medium in primary school, as it may generate new visual knowledge and artistic skills.

Inside and Outside the Exhibition Space

This essay deals with issues of citizenship, artistic labor, and belonging in the context of the Dominican Republic. It examines the collaborative work of the Colectivo Quintapata to understand how artistic collaboration is used as a way for generating social transformation and reaching audiences beyond the artistic medium. Analyzing art installations, public interventions, and socially engaged art pieces produced by Quintapata between 2009 and 2014, this essay argues that artistic collaboration works in the case of Quintapata, not so much as a formula but rather as a flexible tool employed to face situations of economic and institutional precariousness, extending the outcomes of each project beyond its original temporality and audience.

Introduction

THIS BOOK CONSIDERS a complex artistic medium in a complex historical and geographical setting. It is about illuminated Islamic manuscripts produced in the Lands of Rūm between the 1270s and S1370s – a time of profound political fragmentation and frequent outbreaks of violence. In addition to analysing the manuscripts’ visual and physical characteristics, this study considers their production and patronage circumstances and what these may reveal about the wider contemporary artistic, intellectual and cultural context. Most of the fifteen illuminated manuscripts discussed are religious in nature and include Qur’ans and Sufi texts. However, advice literature and historical chronicles also form part of the corpus. All of the manuscripts are dated or dateable, and all are written in either Arabic or Persian. Most were produced in Konya, the former capital of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rūm, although some were copied in other towns, such as Sivas and İstanos (today known as Korkuteli)....

Introduction

Beginning in the 1820s, grand opera developed into a new artistic medium for the delivery of historical spectacles which, in turn, afforded audiences a new way of seeing and hearing the past. Afterwards, grand operatic spectacles fetischized the past while obfuscating the crisis of memory brought about by the 1789 revolution. They became vehicles for remembrance, relying on which Charles Baudelaire would later describe as a mnemotechnics. Jacques Fromental Halévy’s Derniers mémoirs et souvenirs (1863) provides us with a roadmap for reading opera as a medium of memory. Pursing a memnotechnical sense of grand opera, I investigate the introduction of new visual and musical technologies (gaslight illumination, the diorama, orchestration and singing) at the Opéra, and consider the role played by these technologies in shoring up the central concern with memory in grand opera.

Photography and the Perils of Automaticity: P. H. Emerson, Copyright, and the Agency of the Artist

The photographer Peter Henry Emerson (1856–1936) is known today for the splash he made on the Victorian photographic scene in the 1880s with his bold refusal to follow his fellow art photographers (collectively known as the Pictorialists) in latching the new medium on to the aesthetic conventions of painting. His conventional position within art history is thus as a precursor to the Modernist conception of photography’s medium-specificity. Yet even if Emerson’s work was ahead of its time in its proto-Modernist refusal of painterly conventions, it also has qualities that place it more squarely within late-Victorian discourses. In particular, I argue, Emerson’s ongoing efforts to secure his photographs via copyright law need to be understood as reflective of a distinctly nineteenth-century cultural imaginary. This essay addresses the relationship between Emerson’s aesthetic theory and copyright law by dividing Emerson’s career into two stages, before and after 1891, this being the year in which Emerson abruptly disavowed photography as an artistic medium in his short pamphlet ‘The Death of Naturalistic Photography’. Examining two photography books – Pictures of East Anglian Life (1888) and On English Lagoons (1893) – alongside late-Victorian debates about photographic copyright, I show that Emerson’s earlier belief in photographic copyright’s ability to retain the integrity of an artist’s vision breaks down after 1891. He loses faith in the ‘copyrightability’ of photography in 1891 when he recognizes the mechanical nature – or automaticity – of the camera. That is, Emerson realizes that the photograph is never purely the product of the artist. In sum, this case study shows that by the 1890s, photographic copyright was becoming detached from the notion of creativity and thus could no longer be the guarantee of a photographer’s claim to artistic individuality.