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基本説明

An exploration of the historical moment when the photographic image became wedded to the printed page.
"An October Book"

Full Description

At the end of the 20th century we are accustomed to seeing photographs wedded to text - whether in the family album of daily newspaper - where the verbal framing of the photograph has become invisible. This text is internalized within the image, and the meaning of the photograph itself. It explores the experimental moment, at the inception of the new medium, when the word came to haunt photographic image, and the forty or so years during which the photographic image alternately resisted and became assimilited to the printed page. The author's emphasis is on British books. Not only was it in an English book that the paper photograph was first described and published, but the range of subject matter of 19th-century British photographically illustrated books prior to the 1880s was as rich as it was peculiar and sometimes recalcitrant. Carol Armstrong focuses on one book about photography (Talbot's "The Pencil of Nature"); one "scientific" book (Anna Atkins' "Photographs of British Algae"); two travel narrative, one factual and one fictional (Francis Firth's "Egypt and Palestine Photographed and Observed", and his illustrated edition of Longfellow's novel "Hyperion: A Romance"); and one book of poetry (Julia Margaret Cameron's "Illustrations to Alfred Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King); as well as some miscellaneous books from the 1870s. According to Armstrong, art history has tended to remove the historic photograph from its printed and published context. Moving back and forth between close looking and equally close reading, she aims to reinsert the photograph into the book from which it was taken.

Contents

Part 1 Looking forward to the 1870s - the natural method of photographic illustration: the book of nature, the book of man; "in the conduct of this verification" - succession and resemblance, or induction and the organon of proof; from microbes to the moon - experiments, instruments and photographs, 1; from the moon to man - experiments, instruments and photographs, 2. Part 2 A scene in a library - the first photographically illustrated book: "introductory remarks" - and "brief historical sketch of the invention of the art"; plates - a scene in a library; plates, 1 - two views through the camera obscura; plates, 2 - two inventories; plates, 3 - facsimiles; plates, 4 -cameraless photographers; plates, 5 - photographs like paintings; plates, 6 - Lacock Abbey and other places; plates, the end -variable prints. Part 3 Blueprints for (and against) scientific illustration - Anna Atkins's botanical albums: biotaxic negatives - a photographic botany; between the certificate and the code -from the natural illustration to the nature print; the remains of a ruined alliance - the rest of the cyanotypes. Part 4 Photographed and described - travelling in the footsteps of Francis Frith: Egypt and Palestine photographed and described; "in the footsteps of Paul Flemming". Part 5 Photographing literature -Julia Margaret Cameron's excerpts from Tennyson: the album's frontispiece - the photographer takes the poet, "From Life"; Cameron's women - Lynette, Enid, Vivien and Elaine; the pale nun and the dark queen; the end - a filmic postscript.