In naked repose

Angelaki - Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

Volumn 16, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 111-128

  Palmer, Daniel ^a  

^a MONASH UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79958056060     PISSN: 0969725X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2011.564367     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature [18 4 4[ (New York: Da Capo, 196 8).
2. Susan Sontag,On Photography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978) 4.
3. For an insightful essay on such work, see Julian Stallabrass, "What's in a Face? Blankness and Significance in Contemporary Art Photography," October122 (fall 2007): 71-90.
4. Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, trans. Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli (New York: Zone, 2008).
5. The results are championed by the writer Luc Sante in the introduction to a recent reprint of the series as "a parade of naked, uncomposed faces" and a collective portrait of the vast sea of humanity that is New York; a cross-section of one moment in history as expressed through its physiognomies and adornments and haberdashery; a reduction to essentials of the p or traitist's ar t; an exquisitely modernist application of chance procedures. (Walker Evans, Many Are Called (New Haven:Yale UP, 2004) 14)
6. See Walker Evans, Unclassified: A Walker Evans thology, ed. Jeff L. Rosenheim (Zurich: Scalo, 2000) 103
7. As Jeff Rosenheim observes, a year after hehad finished with the FSA, leaving under controversy, still out of work, Evans descended into "the sub ter-ranean half-light of the New York City subway system" (Evans, Many Are Called 197).
8. Vicki Goldberg, Margaret Bourke -White: A Biography (New York: Harper, 1986) 317-18.
9. Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have SeenTheir Faces (New York: Modern Age, 1937 ).
10. Photography theorist Allan Sekula has also suggested that Evans's subway photographs are "evidence of a sophisticated dialogue with the empirical methods of the detective police" (Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," October 39 (win ter 19 8 6) 5 8 ).
11. Walker Evans,"Interview withWalker Evansby Leslie Katz," Art in America 59 (Mar.-Apr. 19 71) 84.
12. As Tagg has suggested, "in Evans's thinking, the approach towards automatism was inseparably bound up with the threshold of the 'pure record"' ( John Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009) 175.
13. Judith Keller, Walker Evans: The Getty Museum Collection (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995) 160.
14. Tagg has shown that rather than humanist empathy, Evans's biography suggests a melancholic "withdrawal from identification" ( Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame 1 7 6).
15. Nor did he seek to conceal this cropping. In an application for a Guggenheim fellowship in 1941 he described the works as "semi-automatic record photography of people" and noted that a third of the prints were enlargements: "large picture-records of faces taken outof, away from, their surroundings in the subway" (Many Are Called 201).
16. See Daniel Mark Epstein,"The Passion of Walker Evans," New Criterio n 18.7 (2000) 21
17. Antlitz der Zeit (Munich: Transmare/Kurt Wolff, 19 2 9 ).
18. In a 2000 review essay, Daniel Mark Epstein notes that the passengers are "all terribly lonely, never making eye contac t with the skulking photographer, and rarely with one another" (Epstein, "The Passion of Walker Evans" 21).
19. Sarah Boxer, "Tunnel Visions," New York Times 17 Oct. 2004.
20. Michael Fried has recently suggested that Evans's blind accordionist is a figure for the photographer who was shooting "blind" in the subway. Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven:Yale UP, 2008) 366 n. 46.
21. See Luc Delahaye, L'Autre (London: Phaidon, 1999). The pic tures are literally "stolen," in that French law prohibits the publication of someone's image without their permission. As McGonagle writes, "Although apparently unaware at the time of this American antecedent, the parallels with Delahaye's project in mid-1990s Paris are striking"
22. Joseph M.McGonagle,"Photographing the Other in Luc Delahaye's L'Autre," Modern & Contemporary France 13.2 (2005) 164
23. Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Heads (Gottingen: Steidl, 2001).
24. Alex Farquharson, "Press Release: The Citigroup Private Bank Photography Prize 2002," London Photographers' Gallery (2002) n. pag.
25. (see Judy Peet,"Hasidic Man Upset Over Image," The Jersey Journal Monday 22 Aug. 2005). The suit claims that Nussenzweig suffered "severe mental anguish, emotional distress, humiliation and embarrassment." He sought a cut of photos already sold and a ban on any displays.
26. Mark Fass, "'Art' Photo is Not Subject to Privacy Law, Judge Finds," New York Law Journal 13 Feb. 2006, available 5http://www.law.com/ jsp/article.jsp?id=11395659123194 (accessed 16 Aug. 2007).
27. Thinking through such work as diCorcia's it is useful to reconsider the classic idea of the modern city as a community of strangers. Recall that Georg Simmel, examining the psychological effect of anonymous city life in his 1903 essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life," identified the "blase" attitude broughtonbyexcess nervous stimulation. Georg Simmel,"The Metropolis and Mental Life" [1903]
28. Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago: U of Chicago P,1971) 47-60.
29. Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography 113 .
30. As Lowry points out, much academic interest has focused on the notion of the pose because"It is in the pose that we both disguise ourselves and give ourselves away, and the eloquence of the photograph is in its double-edged revelation of precisely this ambiguity" (Joanna Lowry, "Portraits, Still Video Portraits and the Account of the Soul" in Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image, eds. David Green and Joanna Lowry (Brighton: Photoworks, 2006) 66).
31. Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves, trans. William Weaver (London: Secker, 1983) 50.
32. Martha Rosler, "Post-Documentary, Post-Photography?," Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001 (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2004) 221.
33. Sontag,On Photography 37.
34. Lowry,"Portraits" 65.
35. See Cherine Fahd, The Chosen, exhibition catalogue (Sydney: Stills Gallery and Gitte Weise Gallery, 2004).
36. As Linda Michael writesin her catalogue essay "Summer time":
37. Nils Ohlsen, "Stopping the Pendulum: The Trafalgar Square Series by Cherine Fahd" in Cherine Fahd:Trafa lgar Square, exhibition catalogue (Sydney: Stills Gallery and Gitte Weise Gallery, 2007) 5.
38. Cherine F ahd, Looking Glass, exhibition catalogue (Sydney: Gitte Weise Gallery, 2005) n. pag.
39. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility" [1936] in Selected Writings, ed Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2003) 4: 272.
40. Walter Benjamin, "Little History of Photography" [1931] in Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 199 9) 2 : 514 .
41. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2007) 24-25.