Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of St Andrews, May 2008.

The history, practice and aesthetic of the soft focus lens in photography is elucidated and developed from its earliest statements of need to the current time with a particular emphasis on its role in the development of the Pictorialist movement. Using William Crawford's concept of photographic 'syntax', the use of the soft focus lens is explored as an example of how technology shapes style. A detailed study of the soft focus lenses from the earliest forms to the present is presented, enumerating the core properties of pinhole, early experimental and commercial soft focus lenses. This was researched via published texts in period journals, advertising, private correspondence, interviews, and the lenses themselves. The author conducted a wide range of in-studio experiments with both period and contemporary soft focus lenses to evaluate their character and distinct features, as well as to validate source material. Nodal points of this history and development are explored in the critical debate between the diffuse and sharp photographic image, beginning with the competition between the calotype and daguerreotype. The role of George Davison's The Old Farmstead is presented as well as the invention of the first modern soft focus lens, the Dallmeyer-Bergheim, and its function in the development of the popular Pictorialist lens, the Pinkham & Smith Semi-Achromatic. The trajectory of the soft focus lens is plotted against the Pictorialist movement, noting the correlation betwixt them, and the modern renaissance of soft focus lenses and the diffuse aesthetic. This thesis presents a unique history of photography modeled around the determining character of technology and the interdependency of syntax, style and art.

This dissertation offers a new literary history of the tradition of the “sister arts” in England during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While previous scholarship has explored how canonical male poets conceived of their poetry in relation to painting, this project demonstrates that female poets also engaged in various forms of literary pictorialism. By attending to the work of these women writers alongside their male contemporaries, we gain a richer and more complex understanding of how poets evaluated the boundaries between verbal expression and visual composition. In line with my aim to offer a more nuanced historical account of the sister arts by including the contributions of women writers, I also examine the gendered conventions of this tradition. In my first chapter, I contend that poetry written by Anne Killigrew and Anne Finch calls into question common critical assumptions about the power dynamics of ekphrasis (the verbal description of visual art). The second chapter explores how Anna Barbauld, Anna Seward, and Amelia Opie respond to the influential model for verse epistles on the sister arts established by John Dryden and Alexander Pope, which assumes that poets and artists are male while the muses and objects of representation are female. In the third chapter, I argue that concepts derived from visual art animate the elegiac practices of Thomas Gray and Anna Seward, as they explore how acts of gazing can manifest same-sex desire. My final chapter shows how the concept of fancy, represented either as a mental creative process contrasted with imagination or as a personified female figure, comes to be associated with both visual power and femininity. I trace this poetics of fancy from essays by John Locke and Joseph Addison to Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard, the odes of William Collins, the sonnets of Charlotte Smith, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion by William Blake. The qualities that lead some writers to denigrate fancy—its association with femininity rather than masculinity, dreams rather than reality, and temptation or liberation rather than constraint—are precisely the same qualities that lead the major pictorial poets to seek to internalize it. / 2018-08-11T00:00:00Z

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Esta pesquisa aborda as aproximações da fotografia com a arte em Porto Alegre na transição para o século XX, tendo como foco a “fotografia artística” de Luiz do Nascimento Ramos (1864-1937), Lunara, fotógrafo amador da Belle Époque. O ponto principal da análise proposta é o álbum intitulado Vistas de Porto Alegre - Photographias Artísticas, produzido pelos Editores Krahe & Cia, provavelmente na década de 1900, com 20 imagens originais assinadas por Lunara. A participação de Lunara no circuito social da fotografia na cidade, durante as duas primeiras décadas do século, nos mostra as redes que se estabeleceram em relação ao fotoclubismo fotográfico internacional, espaço no qual a “fotografia artística” era produzida e exibida através de uma série de protocolos que visavam nortear e delimitar um campo artístico para a imagem técnica através do movimento pictorialista. Para tanto, as relações com os fotoclubes, com outros artistas e fotógrafos, como Pedro Weingärtner, Virgílio Calegari e outro fotoamador, o Ziul, são contextualizadas aqui, como forma de entender o conceito de artisticidade, o qual alimentava, de algum modo, as práticas de Lunara. A análise que privilegiamos nesta dissertação refere-se à noção de aura benjaminiana e à visão da fotografia de Lunara como uma forma de captação de outras relações com a cidade, para além da fotografia instantânea de fotógrafos profissionais, como se o artista pretendesse produzir os rastros de uma cidade em vias de modernização. O álbum propõe, portanto, narrativas visuais singulares sobre a cidade, ao refletir a trajetória poética de Lunara tanto na escritura, como na produção de suas imagens, nas quais somos conduzidos por um olhar sensível às transformações do seu tempo. / This is a study on the proximity between photography and the arts during the transition to the 20th century. It is focused on the “artistic photography” of Luiz do Nascimento Ramos (1864 to 1937), Lunara, he who was a Belle Époque amateur photographer. The most important source of the analysis is the album entitled Vistas de Porto Alegre – Photographias Artísticas, produced by Editores Krahe & Cia, probably in the early 1900s, with 20 original images signed by Lunara. Lunara participated actively in the social photography circuit in the city during the first two decades of the century and this participation shows us the network that was established with the international photo clubs, where “artistic photography” was produced and exhibited according to rules which aimed to organize an artistic field for the technical images from the pictorialist movement. In order to do so, the relations with the photo clubs, and other artists and photographers, such as Pedro Weingärtner, Virgílio Calegari and another amateur photographer, Ziul, are here contextualized to understand the concept of artisticity, which was somehow what Lunara did. We emphasize the Benjamin’s aura notion and the Lunara’s view of photography in this dissertation as a way of getting other relations with the city, beyond snapshots taken by professional photographers, as if the artist’s intention was to produce the traces of a city that is in the process of modernization. Accordingly, the album suggests novel visual narratives about the city because it reflects Lunara’s poetic trajectory on what is written and on its images, through which we are taken by a sensitive look at the changes of its times.

Esta pesquisa aborda as aproximações da fotografia com a arte em Porto Alegre na transição para o século XX, tendo como foco a “fotografia artística” de Luiz do Nascimento Ramos (1864-1937), Lunara, fotógrafo amador da Belle Époque. O ponto principal da análise proposta é o álbum intitulado Vistas de Porto Alegre - Photographias Artísticas, produzido pelos Editores Krahe & Cia, provavelmente na década de 1900, com 20 imagens originais assinadas por Lunara. A participação de Lunara no circuito social da fotografia na cidade, durante as duas primeiras décadas do século, nos mostra as redes que se estabeleceram em relação ao fotoclubismo fotográfico internacional, espaço no qual a “fotografia artística” era produzida e exibida através de uma série de protocolos que visavam nortear e delimitar um campo artístico para a imagem técnica através do movimento pictorialista. Para tanto, as relações com os fotoclubes, com outros artistas e fotógrafos, como Pedro Weingärtner, Virgílio Calegari e outro fotoamador, o Ziul, são contextualizadas aqui, como forma de entender o conceito de artisticidade, o qual alimentava, de algum modo, as práticas de Lunara. A análise que privilegiamos nesta dissertação refere-se à noção de aura benjaminiana e à visão da fotografia de Lunara como uma forma de captação de outras relações com a cidade, para além da fotografia instantânea de fotógrafos profissionais, como se o artista pretendesse produzir os rastros de uma cidade em vias de modernização. O álbum propõe, portanto, narrativas visuais singulares sobre a cidade, ao refletir a trajetória poética de Lunara tanto na escritura, como na produção de suas imagens, nas quais somos conduzidos por um olhar sensível às transformações do seu tempo. / This is a study on the proximity between photography and the arts during the transition to the 20th century. It is focused on the “artistic photography” of Luiz do Nascimento Ramos (1864 to 1937), Lunara, he who was a Belle Époque amateur photographer. The most important source of the analysis is the album entitled Vistas de Porto Alegre – Photographias Artísticas, produced by Editores Krahe & Cia, probably in the early 1900s, with 20 original images signed by Lunara. Lunara participated actively in the social photography circuit in the city during the first two decades of the century and this participation shows us the network that was established with the international photo clubs, where “artistic photography” was produced and exhibited according to rules which aimed to organize an artistic field for the technical images from the pictorialist movement. In order to do so, the relations with the photo clubs, and other artists and photographers, such as Pedro Weingärtner, Virgílio Calegari and another amateur photographer, Ziul, are here contextualized to understand the concept of artisticity, which was somehow what Lunara did. We emphasize the Benjamin’s aura notion and the Lunara’s view of photography in this dissertation as a way of getting other relations with the city, beyond snapshots taken by professional photographers, as if the artist’s intention was to produce the traces of a city that is in the process of modernization. Accordingly, the album suggests novel visual narratives about the city because it reflects Lunara’s poetic trajectory on what is written and on its images, through which we are taken by a sensitive look at the changes of its times.

Esta pesquisa aborda as aproximações da fotografia com a arte em Porto Alegre na transição para o século XX, tendo como foco a “fotografia artística” de Luiz do Nascimento Ramos (1864-1937), Lunara, fotógrafo amador da Belle Époque. O ponto principal da análise proposta é o álbum intitulado Vistas de Porto Alegre - Photographias Artísticas, produzido pelos Editores Krahe & Cia, provavelmente na década de 1900, com 20 imagens originais assinadas por Lunara. A participação de Lunara no circuito social da fotografia na cidade, durante as duas primeiras décadas do século, nos mostra as redes que se estabeleceram em relação ao fotoclubismo fotográfico internacional, espaço no qual a “fotografia artística” era produzida e exibida através de uma série de protocolos que visavam nortear e delimitar um campo artístico para a imagem técnica através do movimento pictorialista. Para tanto, as relações com os fotoclubes, com outros artistas e fotógrafos, como Pedro Weingärtner, Virgílio Calegari e outro fotoamador, o Ziul, são contextualizadas aqui, como forma de entender o conceito de artisticidade, o qual alimentava, de algum modo, as práticas de Lunara. A análise que privilegiamos nesta dissertação refere-se à noção de aura benjaminiana e à visão da fotografia de Lunara como uma forma de captação de outras relações com a cidade, para além da fotografia instantânea de fotógrafos profissionais, como se o artista pretendesse produzir os rastros de uma cidade em vias de modernização. O álbum propõe, portanto, narrativas visuais singulares sobre a cidade, ao refletir a trajetória poética de Lunara tanto na escritura, como na produção de suas imagens, nas quais somos conduzidos por um olhar sensível às transformações do seu tempo. / This is a study on the proximity between photography and the arts during the transition to the 20th century. It is focused on the “artistic photography” of Luiz do Nascimento Ramos (1864 to 1937), Lunara, he who was a Belle Époque amateur photographer. The most important source of the analysis is the album entitled Vistas de Porto Alegre – Photographias Artísticas, produced by Editores Krahe & Cia, probably in the early 1900s, with 20 original images signed by Lunara. Lunara participated actively in the social photography circuit in the city during the first two decades of the century and this participation shows us the network that was established with the international photo clubs, where “artistic photography” was produced and exhibited according to rules which aimed to organize an artistic field for the technical images from the pictorialist movement. In order to do so, the relations with the photo clubs, and other artists and photographers, such as Pedro Weingärtner, Virgílio Calegari and another amateur photographer, Ziul, are here contextualized to understand the concept of artisticity, which was somehow what Lunara did. We emphasize the Benjamin’s aura notion and the Lunara’s view of photography in this dissertation as a way of getting other relations with the city, beyond snapshots taken by professional photographers, as if the artist’s intention was to produce the traces of a city that is in the process of modernization. Accordingly, the album suggests novel visual narratives about the city because it reflects Lunara’s poetic trajectory on what is written and on its images, through which we are taken by a sensitive look at the changes of its times.

This thesis examines the photographs of terminal grain elevators produced by John Vanderpant, a successful Vancouver commercial photographer who also produced images that were consciously positioned within a high art discourse. Vanderpant turned to the grain elevator as subject matter in response to the remarks of an unidentified English critic who, while praising the images in a 1925 London exhibition of Vanderpant's work, noted they lacked an identifiably Canadian character. In taking up the grain elevator, Vanderpant positioned his work within the national visual culture constructed around the work of the Group of Seven. He also tapped into symbolic meanings which resonated around the elevator's modern functional architecture, an architecture which has been held up by Le Corbusier as a specifically North American expression of the engineer's rigor and purpose. In the midst of the prosperity enjoyed by Vancouver's urban bourgeoisie during the mid-1920s, the terminal elevators operating on Burrard Inlet embodied the promise of abundance held out by an increasingly centralized and modernized resource economy. Vanderpant's earliest elevator photographs employed the stylistics of Pictorialism, a genre of photography that relied on soft focus and hazy atmospheric effect to suggest a painterly surface. In response to the tension between his formal vocabulary and the modernity of his subject matter, Vanderpant rejected Pictorialism as a mode of representation that "travelled by horsecart midst the progress of motor power on wheel and wing." Throughout the 1930s he worked within a modernist idiom that emphasized what were seen to be the intrinsic properties of photographic technology: sharp focus, clearly delineated form, and tilted perspective. His modernist elevator photographs verged on geometric abstraction, in an attempt to penetrate "superficial appearance" and reveal the underlying "strength and sublime simplicity" of the elevator's structure. Combining an interest in mysticism and a Kantian understanding of aesthetic experience, Vanderpant accessed a version of modernism that held onto an optimistic, Utopian vision in the face of the social fragmentation of the Depression. My thesis addresses the position of Vanderpant's elevator photographs, and the shift in his aesthetic vocabulary marked out by these works, in relation to the construction of a national movement in Canadian visual art and an historical context in which the state and capital were employing specific measures to unify and transform a fractured social body. I argue that, within this context, Vanderpant's project was fragile and contradictory. Despite the antimaterialism he articulated as the Depression advanced, the ideological force of Vanderpant's Utopian vision would seem to have been aligned with the forms of modern scientific discipline, such as Taylorism, that promised Utopia through success in production while naturalizing dominative social relations.

Le portrait captive lorsqu’il est envisagé comme présence humaine et qu’il tend à se soustraire à l’interprétation analytique. Prenant appui sur ce constat, le mémoire se penche sur la réponse spectatorielle induite par des portraits photographiques dont l’opacité pose un défi à l’attribution de significations précises. Ces portraits, qui abordent le thème de la mort, appartiennent au corpus "What Remains" (2000-2004) de l’artiste américaine Sally Mann. Ils réactualisent le procédé obsolète du collodion, revisitent le vocabulaire formel du pictorialisme et évoquent l’imagerie mortuaire du 19e siècle. Par ces citations historiques, les œuvres gênent la lecture du référent et introduisent des renversements de sens: elles troublent toute certitude dans la perception et toute littéralité dans l’interprétation. Le mémoire étudie les diverses stratégies citationnelles à la source de cette opacification et examine comment celles-ci tendent à établir les conditions de l’expérience esthétique. Après avoir réévalué certains présupposés théoriques sur la photographie, les paramètres techniques, formels et iconographiques des œuvres sont passés en revue afin d’évaluer leur impact respectif. En s’appuyant sur un cadre issu de la théorie des médias et de la psychanalyse, le travail du médium émerge comme le principal déterminant de l’expérience de ces portraits contemporains. / Portraits captivate when they are considered as human presence and they tend to evade analytical interpretation. Building on this observation, the dissertation addresses the viewer’s response to photographic portraits whose ambiguity challenges attribution of precise meanings. These portraits, which deal with the theme of death, belong to the "What Remains" corpus (2000-2004) of American artist Sally Mann. They re-actualize the old wet collodion process, revisit the formal vocabulary of Pictorialism and evoke 19th century mortuary imagery. Through these historical quotations, the artworks hinder the readability of the referent and produce reversals of meaning: they blur any certainty in perception and any literal interpretation. The dissertation first discusses the various quotation strategies leading to this ambiguity and then examines how they tend to establish the conditions of the aesthetic experience. After re-evaluating some theoretical assumptions about photography, the technical, formal and iconographic parameters are reviewed to assess their respective impact. Based on a framework derived from media theory and psychoanalysis, the work of the medium emerges as the key determinant of the experience of these contemporary portraits.

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