[...] The notion of record remains embedded deep within the art of photography, but equally ineluctable is remoteness of object from process. No need to register, buy now! For this astonishing cruelty Hooper was roundly skewered in the British press.” (Alex Selwyn-Holmes at, http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2011/08/27/w-willoughby-hooper-on-famine/, My thanks to my colleague Suzanne Nash for directing me to Apollinaire’s story. Given that the unavoidably long exposure times required his human subjects to remain absolutely still for several minutes, Annan clearly had to win their goodwill and co-operation. Painting can feign reality without having seen it. 104-05, 107. 5-7). (1839) quoted by the editors of the 1968 Stanford University Press edition of Engels on p. 46, footnote 2: “This district is bounded by the Clyde and the Trongate and extends in length from the Saltmarket to the Briggate. In France, in an 1851 article in, , the earliest of all photographic journals, Francis Wey explained that, unlike the daguerreotype, the calotype “works with masses, disdaining detail as a gifted master painter does [...] and choosing to emphasize formal qualities in one place and tonal qualities in another.” That is why “the taste of the individual photographer can be discerned clearly enough in his work for the experienced amateur, on seeing a photograph produced by the paper process, to be able to identify the photographer that made it.”, In 1896 James Craig Annan was elected to the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, the European equivalen. Martin Daunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. Critical opinion is divided or ambivalent on all those questions. R. Mitchell, This City Now: Glasgow and its Working-Class Past, A Glasgow Mosaic: Explorations among the City’s Architectural Icons, (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2013). Alarmed by the threat to all the city’s inhabitants — the well-to-do as well as the poor — from the filth, crime and disease at its very heart, the generally progressive city fathers moved to remedy the situation. The author apologized in his Preface for the gruesome picture his book presented of “the condition of the poor, and the classes generally inhabiting the lower depths of society,” but insisted on its honest and unembellished realism. It is worth quoting from a few of them in order to convey an idea of the problem that prompted the city fathers to seek the authority to purchase and demolish entire streets of the old city. W.O. The compelling street photos shot by Thomas from 1868 to 1877 were published in a book called Old Closes And Streets Of Glasgow, which is now considered important historical documentation of old Glasgow. The strength of Annan’s work may well lie precisely in its ability to stimulate a variety of different readings and responses corresponding to the function that the viewer chooses to perceive as dominant. In, (1844) Talbot himself associated his work with that of the Dutch school of painters, among whom artistic sensitivity and technique were generally considered to have been combined with faithful representation of the real. in Dominique de Font-Réaulx, [Paris: Flammarion, 2012], p. 122) In our own time Susan Sontag has insisted that a distinctive individual style is less characteristic of photographers than of painters inasmuch as photography remains more bound to an impersonal representation of its subject matter: “A photographer is not like a painter, the role of the photographer being recessive in much of serious picture-taking and virtually irrelevant in all the ordinary uses. Or should they be viewed rather in the context of the esthetic of the “picturesque”— a mid-nineteenth-century anticipation, according to many scholars, of the Pictorialism advocated by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen at the end of the century and in the early decades of the twentieth? 124-25) Similar reservations had been expressed by the poet and critic Sadakich Hartmann, a frequent contributor to Stieglitz’s. 28 Saltmarket,” from. Photograph reproduced by courtesy of Glasgow Museums Collection. 195-213 (pp. As a modern scholar has put it, “the picturesque became generalized to that which is multifarious, irregular, unevenly lit, worn, and strange. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. (Frankfurt: Societätsverlag, 1980), p. 217. The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow was created between 1868 and 1871 as part of a commission from the City of Glasgow Improvements Trust. In similar fashion, photographs may fulfil one or more functions of the medium. 207-309, and Tom Normand, Margaret Harker, “From Mansion to Close,” p. 91. & J. Boole and Henry Dixon, who took photographs for the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London in the 1870’s and 1880s.” So too Wolfgang Kemp, “Images of Decay: Photography in the Picturesque Tradition,”. [...] In the lower lodging-houses ten, twelve and sometimes twenty persons of both sexes and all ages sleep promiscuously on the floor in different degrees of nakedness. Trela, eds., Victorian Urban Settings: Essays on the Nineteenth-Century City and its Contexts (New York and London: Garland, 1996), pp. Fisher’s three-part catalogue of The Old Closes and Streets in Scottish Photography Bulletin, Part I (Spring 1987), 4-8 (p. 5). (New York: D. Appleton, 1865) several years before Annan began photographing the old closes and streets of Glasgow. Inevitably, disease was rampant, epidemics frequent, and crime endemic. Hinted at in Ian Spring’s reference to the vogue of Annan’s photographs of the old closes in twenty-first-century, post-industrial Glasgow, this issue is raised and discussed by Susan Sontag in her now classic essays on photography. See William Buchanan, James Craig Annan: Selected Texts and Bibliography. My photographs are intended to present something you don’t see.” (p. 200), 97 Neil Matheson, “Demand: Allegories of the Real and the Return of History,” in The State of the Real: Aesthetics in the Digital Age, ed. Albumen print. Riis was in any case likely to have been more aware of engravings made from photographs of slum tenements by the American photographer Edward Anthony than of Annan’s work. 6:1). The photographic image, rightly perceived, elevated reality to the level of symbol.” (“When Objects Dream,” p. 5). Fisher’s three-part catalogue of, The passage quoted concerning the second album was put together from the Glasgow Town Council minutes for 15 July 1877 and cited by Fisher, p. 6, and by Anita Ventura Mozley in her Introduction to the 1977 Dover Publications edition of, Thomas Annan: Photographs of the Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow 1868/1877, with a Supplement of 15 Related Views, [New York: Dover Publications, 1977]), p. v. For the numbers of sets produced, William Buchanan proposed a figure of “probably four” in 1871 and sixty in 1878 in his entry on Annan in John Hannavy’s, Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Photography, , vol. 378-79 (July 1, 1857) in The Complete Writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 22 vols., vol. 80. John Forbes Watson and John William Kaye, London, 1868-1875), Captain Hooper took a number of powerful and horrifying but carefully-composed photographs of skeletal victims of the famine (Fig. (26.7 x 21cm.) 150-173). Likewise, the English Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm used two of Annan’s photographs from. As suggested earlier, supporters of the calotype, as opposed to the more precise and detailed daguerreotype, had used the argument that Talbot’s process left more room than Daguerre’s for choice and decision-making on the part of the photographer. (My thanks to Mr. Maley for sharing the results of his research with me in an e-mail of July 8, 2014.) cit., p. 45. It has never been sentimental about its old buildings. Did they appeal to the viewer’s moral conscience in order to bring about an improvement in the slum-dwellers’ lot? Social. 6:14 Thomas Annan, “Close, No. Thomas Annan (1829–1887) was commissioned to document the rapidly changing urban landscape. Originally trained as a lithographer and engraver, Annan established a photography business in 1855 in Glasgow and initially specialized in the reproduction of works of art. While conscientiously executing the task assigned to him, however, Annan also seems to have wanted to give a human face to the often luridly described inhabitants of the condemned tenements. Thomas Annan (1829-1887) was the son of a Fife farmer and flax spinner and lived for most of his life in Glasgow. Taurus, 2007), p. 38. 25The portrait painter Sir William Newton, who also happened to be a vice-president of the Royal Photographic Society in the 1850s, urged photographers to seek artistic effects rather than a mere copy of nature. As Barthes’ argument seems to me relevant to the work of Thomas Annan, I will close this chapter by quoting from it at some length. Trela, eds., Victorian Urban Settings: Essays on the Nineteenth-Century City and its Contexts. It is impossible to look at a photograph such as Close, No. In fact, I know of very few photographers whose work is not evidence that at bottom they would prefer to paint if they knew how.” (Photographers on Photography, ed. 104-05, 107. (Figs. 6:8 Thomas Annan, “Closes, Nos. Jakobson’s text was written at a much earlier date, ca.1956. Because of this feature of Scott. Please note that artwork locations are subject to change, and not all works are on view at all times. Graphic Arts Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Annan is now best known for his series of photographs, made between 1868 and his death in 1887, documenting the narrow streets of the inner-city slums of Glasgow. [...] Documentary photography has been much more comfortable in the company of moralism than wedded to a rhetoric or program of revolutionary politics.” Ultimately, “the exposé, the compassion and outrage of documentary fueled by the dedication to reform has shaded over into combinations of exoticism, tourism, voyeurism...”. I call “photographic referent” not the, real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the, real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph. Both groups espoused the view of photography as art. (Glasgow: T. & R. Annan & Sons, 1900), Plate 6. Though the album is untitled and undated, the front cover carries in gilt tooling, below the city’s, The passage quoted concerning the second album was put together from the Glasgow Town Council minut, There is disagreement among the scholars even on the number of copies of the 1900 edition. 6:21-22). Do they or do they not depict the extreme filth and squalor emphasized, as we have seen, by all those who wrote about Glasgow’s slums, and if not, what to make of that fact? He was no John Thomson, whose texts to Street Life in London (1877-1878) were vivified with quotations from nomads, cabmen, boardmen and flood victims. 20 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1900). 109-10) Among many similar defenses of photography as an art and not simply a technique, see R.J. Chute, “Portrait Photography,”, , 24 (December 1872), p. 355: “Photographic chemistry, with all its attendant processes and manipulations, may be easily learned; [...] but in reference to art there is something indefinable that cannot be told or written, it must be felt. 74 See Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition (1842), p. 397: “When Dr. Arnott with myself and others were examining the abodes of the poorest classes in Glasgow and Edinburgh, we were regarded with astonishment; and it was frequently declared by the inmates, that they had never for many years witnessed the approach or the presence of persons of that condition” [i.e. Graphic Arts Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. It is worth quoting from a few of them in order to convey an idea of the problem that prompted the city fathers to seek the authority to purchase and demolish entire streets of the old city. , Plate 7. Whether they were ever primarily intended to provoke action in favor of the victims remains moot. Some of the streets and closes (small lanes) of Glasgow were in an unhealthy state in the 1860s. Catalogue Number DP 102568. 21-24), and in 1914 an entire number of the journal was devoted to J.C. Annan and his work. [...] Should we commend or condemn the Victorians for their redevelopment of the city? 138-207 and the moving account of the transformation of the city, section by section, from its industrial heyday to the present in two books by Ian. 173-79), http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acref/9780198662716.001.0001. Beside them, ten students of landscape painting set to copying the same site. Frontispiece. [...] Despite the possibility of the photograph existing in multiple copies, [photography is] not a process of mechanical reproduction in the sense in which stamping, casting and die-making are. In 1860, Thomas Sutton, the editor of, , the journal of the Photographic Society of Scotland and the Manchester Photographic Society, was more specific: “Although photography is certainly a mechanical means of representing nature, yet, when we compare a really fine photograph with an ordinary mechanical view, we are compelled to admit that it exhibits mind, and appreciation of the beautiful and skill of selection and treatment of the subject on the part of the photographer, to a degree that constitute him an artist in a high sense of the word.”, Photographers were even urged sometimes to model themselves on painters — though this strategy did not necessarily coincide with cultivation of the picturesque. Scottish architectural photography 76-77, 115. Thomas Annan was commissioned to carry out this assignment. The figures of 100 and 150 are those given by William Buchanan in John Hannavy’s Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, vol. 89-90). (Edinburgh: Alex Hill, 1832). A. G. Forbes, wrote. Par auteurs, Par personnes citées, Par mots clés, Par dossiers. There is no strong evidence, as we saw, that Thomas Annan deliberately and consciously used his camera “creatively,” to “make art”— as the Pictorialists were to do soon after him — rather than to record empirical reality. into warrens of small, usually one-room apartments and, to make matters even worse, crammed additional jerry-built tenements into the former yards or gardens between them. Contrary to what is often argued or simply assumed, it is thus unlikely, these critics hold, that he “used his camera as a social weapon,” photographing the old closes and streets of Glasgow in order to draw attention to urban blight and promote action to correct it. 157-85) to the debate provoked in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by photography’s claim to be art. Sontag quotes with approval a remark by Princeton photographer Emmet Gowin: “Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn’t attending to. 2 Points. [...] His work is more like that of A. And in photography, as in any speech act or verbal text, while the emphasis may fall or be perceived to fall by the viewer, as by the listener or reader, on one or another of these functions, the others are not thereby abolished. Glasgow: Thomas Murray, 1858. The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow 93 Alarmed by the threat to all the city’s inhabitants—the well-to-do as well as the poor—from the filth, crime and disease at its very heart, the generally progressive city fathers moved to remedy the situation. 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