This essay explores how selected 20th-century women’s photobooks resisted regional ideologies of settler mobility by focusing on sites of contact with the land, animating historical voices and ...visions, and intertwining social and environmental narratives. Through analyzing the arrangement of image and text in Anne Brigman’s Song of a Pagan (1949), Dorothea Lange and Pirkle Jones’s “Death of a Valley” (1960), Alma Lavenson’s “Mother Lode” project (1930s-1970s), and Joan Myers and William de Buys’s Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California (1999), I show how California photobooks both promoted the reader’s tactile and affective engagement with local landscapes at various scales and exposed critical, if incompletely documented, connections between the region’s native and settler histories. When read together with more widely circulated regional texts, I argue, these photobooks now have the critical potential to “unsettle” readers’ ways of seeing and redraw regional boundaries as they provide new opportunities to tell the many stories of California’s past, present, and future.
The photo album emerged in the late 1800s as place to collect portrait photos of visitors to a home, and was later appropriated by Kodak as a visual chronology of family history. With digital ...photography, the album has largely been replaced by online repositories of images shared on social media, and the selective printing of photobooks. In this paper, we present a ‘next-generation paper’ authoring system for annotating photobooks with multimedia content viewed on a nearby smartphone. We also report the results of a trial of this system, by nine travellers who used it to make augmented photobooks following a trip. These findings show that the augmented physical-and-digital photobook can heighten awareness of the multisensory aspects of travel, enrich memories, and enhance social interaction around photos. The social and technical implications for the future of the photo album are discussed.
This paper deals with photography in illustrated magazines and photobooks, and with what unfolds when photographs migrate from one media to the other. In such instances, we argue, reformatting is ...performed in distinctive affordances; yet such transfers also make visible the format conditions that underlie both the magazine and book media. By conducting an in-depth analysis of two exemplary photographs, by Horst P. Horst and Henri Cartier-Bresson, circulating between magazines and books, we aim to show how format markedly shapes photography in print and thus to demonstrate the work of format. In the process, matters of authoring and re-appropriating, as well as mechanisms of canonization and/or memorialization are brought to light. All contribute to structure and solidify the photographic field, as well as periodicals and books as media, in relationship to one another (and to their mediatic content). The established hierarchy of formats, in which photographs move up from magazines to books, in fact proved beneficial to both, bolstering the distinction – and thus the identity – of the media book and periodical.
How should one describe the irreducible relationships in photopoetry observed in intermedial literary photobooks? According to most authors, in literary photobooks, the verbal sign system is linked ...to the photographic image as a bidirectional interaction, creating a coupled system that can be seen as a new sign system. Mutually modulatory influences link verbal text and photography. But the nature of such influences needs to be explained in detail and with accuracy. What kind of relation are we dealing with? Many authors have tried to explain this phenomenon through several epistemic metaphors. The problem is that these metaphors are rarely subjected to any general theory of meaning. Surprisingly, this is not even mentioned as a problem. In this article, we propose a general semiotic model to describe the irreducible photography-poetry relation, derived from C. S. Peirce’s pragmatic theory of signs, and we also present some preliminary results of the analysis of
, a photobook by Paulo Leminski and Jack Pires. Our purpose here is to introduce and explore this model to describe the photography-poetry relationship in coupled systems. This relationship is decomposed, in the functional roles occupied by poems and photographs, into a sign-object-interpretant relation. The triadic irreducibility that characterizes semiosis (à la Peirce) is the main property applied to photograph-poetry coupling in
This paper presents, describes and analyses two photobooks: Palast der Republik and Domesticidades. We claim that, because of their highly iconic features, they can be regarded as epistemic artefacts ...(models) since they reveal information about their objects, as well as about their own morphological properties. The analysis focuses on (i) the kind of relations the photobooks establish with their respective objects (we claim that it is a mainly-iconic relation) and (ii) on the semiotic couplings that can be found in them – a type of interaction between semiotic resources (such as photographs, maps, written texts, illustrations, among others). We contextualize this analysis in relation to both a semiotic and an intermedial background. Further, we claim that the epistemic role of such artworks is directly related to their material and structural features that constrain the possibilities of manipulation and reasoning upon them. We conclude by presenting some of the information that was revealed by the manipulation of these photobooks, claiming that the semioticartefactual approach to models can be an epistemically interesting conceptual frame to thinking about artistic artefacts.
Los fotolibros constituyen uno de los soportes fundamentales para la difusión de la fotografía y su estudio en tiempos recientes se ha considerado como una recuperación de la “otra historia” del ...medio. Este artículo trata sobre cinco publicaciones de Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paul Graham, Carlos Spottorno, Roger Grasas y Federico Clavarino, cuyo tema fundamental es la idea de Europa. El análisis de la obra de estos autores muestra cómo se ha tratado un mismo tema, desde la posguerra que siguió a la Segunda Guerra Mundial hasta trabajos más recientes realizados tras la crisis de 2008. Esto permite percibir cuestiones fundamentales en la configuración de una identidad europea no exenta de conflictos: la herencia del pasado, las brechas norte-sur o este-oeste, los clichés culturales, o la forma en que el ejercicio del poder afecta a los ciudadanos. El artículo identifica los planteamientos conceptuales de cada uno de los fotolibros, así como los elementos temáticos y estéticos que los han definido, en estrecha conexión con sus respectivos contextos históricos y creativos.
This paper describes how individualized photobooks were used to support 3- and 4-year-old children in demonstrating their science learning and developing their science identity through participation ...in a science outreach program. Photographic images stimulate children’s visual thinking and allow them to provide explanations of complex concepts using their language, thus supporting children at their level of understanding. Twenty child/parent dyads were video-recorded interacting with the exhibits during a Science Outreach program into Western Australian community playgroups. Screen shots from the video-recordings were used to develop individual printed photobooks for each child. One week after the program, the photobooks were used in a photo-elicitation conversation with the children (accompanied by their parents) about how the exhibits worked. Children took their photobooks home and 7 weeks after the program parents were interviewed about how the photobooks were used. The photobooks were found to assist the children in demonstrating their science understandings by providing a context for conversation and allowing the children to show their competence, use multiple forms of communication (verbal, non-verbal and through parent), and participate or withdraw on their terms. At home, the photobooks were found to be a focus for the children to share their knowledge of the Outreach program with family members, give the children a voice, and provide them with time to express their understandings. Having the child as narrator of his/her story and the adult as listener empowered the child’s sense of identity. The use of individualized photobooks was found to contribute to the development of the children’s identity and increase their agency in science and enhanced the parents’ perceptions of their children as young scientists.
This paper describes group and community intervention work with individuals currently or formerly experiencing homelessness to create mutual connection and support using art, poetry, stories, pop-up ...porches, and photobooks. The group and community intervention work was enhanced by International Association of Social Work with Groups (IASWG) SPARC endorsement and funding to create photobooks which served to visualize the life stories and accomplishments of persons identifying as currently or formerly homeless. The two-decade journey of the author's work with individuals experiencing homelessness will be described to illustrate and celebrate how creative group and community interventions addressing homelessness (including photobooks) can connect individuals experiencing homelessness with people who have never experienced homelessness to facilitate group dialogue and mutual understanding.
This paper analyzes the photobooks produced by several Japanese and French photographers dedicated to the mining island of Hashima, better known today as Gunkanjima (Battleship Island). The ...publications were released mainly over the last two decades, around the time Japan began the UNESCO application proceedings for the Tentative List of “Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining”, which includes a total of twenty-three sites, among which is Hashima. This paper will first examine how the photobooks pictorialize the island beginning from the 1950s, through the period of Japan’s high growth, up until the closure of the mine and the years of abandonment and decay that followed. It will then highlight how, in the context of dissonant heritage, the narrative of these photobooks built a positive image of the island in order for it to be considered a place worth inscribing as a World Heritage Site. It also shows how the mere existence of these numerous photobooks allowed Hashima to enter into the artistic heritage of Japan as an iconic muse.
PDF
