Chapter 1 of "Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Viewer" (Penn State Univers... more Chapter 1 of "Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Viewer" (Penn State University Press, 2015).
Théodore Géricault's Le Radeau de La Méduse has always been an untimely representation. It famous... more Théodore Géricault's Le Radeau de La Méduse has always been an untimely representation. It famously dispenses with the traditional temporal distance with which history painting ennobled its subjects, instead fi xing on a recent, and hardly morally instructive, event. Unlike the sword-and-sandal essays of the young David and his followers, this work employs no ancient costume to veil its critique or elevate its fi gures. The gruesome scene of the survivors of a shipwreck caused by the ineptitude of a captain appointed by a corrupt government is a striking departure from the aesthetic and moral idiom of much painting of the time. Despite this strident contemporaneity, however, Géricault's picture was also a notably belated image, for by the time that the painting was presented at the Salon in August 1819, the painful topicality of the disaster it depicts had undoubtedly been diminished. 1 More than three years had elapsed between the grounding of the Méduse on the Banks of Arguin in July 1816 and the appearance of the painting, and in the interim the public had been furnished with two editions of the eyewitness account published by a pair of the tragedy's survivors, as well as two other books on the subject, and a number of prints. Curiously, the painting transgressed the temporal conventions of history painting, even as it emulated the painstaking, elongated process by which such a large-scale oil painting could be realized. Géricault's diligent investment in the minutiae of the event, and the immediacy of the reality effects that they would achieve, stretched the picture's temporal distance from its stimulus in reality. While he was busy breaking with the past, Géricault ran out of the present long before his work was complete.
w r i t i n g a h i s t o r y o f t h e i d e a t h a t " s e e i n g i s b e l i e v i n g " wou... more w r i t i n g a h i s t o r y o f t h e i d e a t h a t " s e e i n g i s b e l i e v i n g " would doubtless be an impossibly circuitous undertaking, but there would be certain junctures to which the meandering historian's attention would be quickly drawn. The traditional milestones of mimetic progress would seem the logical guideposts on this journey, as they confront their viewers with the inadequacies of settled representational practices and the structures of knowledge and conviction upon which those practices were predicated. It is tempting to think that excavating the historical specificity of photography's illusionism would constitute but one more chapter in such an enterprise. This book, however, posits a far tighter linkage between the emergence of this medium and the foundations of the study of the production of knowledge. That a shared historical milieu nurtured both the objects of this study and the conceptual approaches that underpin it poses challenges, but offers considerable opportunities, too.
This essay explores the task of visual discernment as both a recreation and a prerequisite for pr... more This essay explores the task of visual discernment as both a recreation and a prerequisite for productivity in the modern economy in Britain in the 1860s. The investigation is anchored by the close analysis of two exemplars of the second generation of British photography, O. G. Rejlander and his student and sometime rival Henry Peach Robinson, whose photographs evince a complex repertoire which engages the viewer's ability to discern the mode of their constructedness, cultivating a game of visual discrimination with a series of coherent and consistent pictorial clues. Indeed, one might say that Rejlander and Robinson's central project was interrogating the dubious claims of photographic neutrality. This dubiousness was the basis through which the two photographers elaborated an iconography that made the process of discerning the specific modalities of their intervention the basis of their production. They fashioned a body of work that harnessed the kind of visual acuity developed for educational and scientific improvement to the pursuit of commercial pleasure and in so doing sacrificed the primary feature through which the photograph has traditionally been thought to have secured its influence: its transparency and access to an unmediated referential world.
Chapter 1 of "Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Viewer" (Penn State Univers... more Chapter 1 of "Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Viewer" (Penn State University Press, 2015).
Théodore Géricault's Le Radeau de La Méduse has always been an untimely representation. It famous... more Théodore Géricault's Le Radeau de La Méduse has always been an untimely representation. It famously dispenses with the traditional temporal distance with which history painting ennobled its subjects, instead fi xing on a recent, and hardly morally instructive, event. Unlike the sword-and-sandal essays of the young David and his followers, this work employs no ancient costume to veil its critique or elevate its fi gures. The gruesome scene of the survivors of a shipwreck caused by the ineptitude of a captain appointed by a corrupt government is a striking departure from the aesthetic and moral idiom of much painting of the time. Despite this strident contemporaneity, however, Géricault's picture was also a notably belated image, for by the time that the painting was presented at the Salon in August 1819, the painful topicality of the disaster it depicts had undoubtedly been diminished. 1 More than three years had elapsed between the grounding of the Méduse on the Banks of Arguin in July 1816 and the appearance of the painting, and in the interim the public had been furnished with two editions of the eyewitness account published by a pair of the tragedy's survivors, as well as two other books on the subject, and a number of prints. Curiously, the painting transgressed the temporal conventions of history painting, even as it emulated the painstaking, elongated process by which such a large-scale oil painting could be realized. Géricault's diligent investment in the minutiae of the event, and the immediacy of the reality effects that they would achieve, stretched the picture's temporal distance from its stimulus in reality. While he was busy breaking with the past, Géricault ran out of the present long before his work was complete.
w r i t i n g a h i s t o r y o f t h e i d e a t h a t " s e e i n g i s b e l i e v i n g " wou... more w r i t i n g a h i s t o r y o f t h e i d e a t h a t " s e e i n g i s b e l i e v i n g " would doubtless be an impossibly circuitous undertaking, but there would be certain junctures to which the meandering historian's attention would be quickly drawn. The traditional milestones of mimetic progress would seem the logical guideposts on this journey, as they confront their viewers with the inadequacies of settled representational practices and the structures of knowledge and conviction upon which those practices were predicated. It is tempting to think that excavating the historical specificity of photography's illusionism would constitute but one more chapter in such an enterprise. This book, however, posits a far tighter linkage between the emergence of this medium and the foundations of the study of the production of knowledge. That a shared historical milieu nurtured both the objects of this study and the conceptual approaches that underpin it poses challenges, but offers considerable opportunities, too.
This essay explores the task of visual discernment as both a recreation and a prerequisite for pr... more This essay explores the task of visual discernment as both a recreation and a prerequisite for productivity in the modern economy in Britain in the 1860s. The investigation is anchored by the close analysis of two exemplars of the second generation of British photography, O. G. Rejlander and his student and sometime rival Henry Peach Robinson, whose photographs evince a complex repertoire which engages the viewer's ability to discern the mode of their constructedness, cultivating a game of visual discrimination with a series of coherent and consistent pictorial clues. Indeed, one might say that Rejlander and Robinson's central project was interrogating the dubious claims of photographic neutrality. This dubiousness was the basis through which the two photographers elaborated an iconography that made the process of discerning the specific modalities of their intervention the basis of their production. They fashioned a body of work that harnessed the kind of visual acuity developed for educational and scientific improvement to the pursuit of commercial pleasure and in so doing sacrificed the primary feature through which the photograph has traditionally been thought to have secured its influence: its transparency and access to an unmediated referential world.
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