Displaying Photography in Art and in Cultural & Creative Industries, Appunti di fotografia

Scarica Displaying Photography in Art and in Cultural & Creative Industries e più Appunti in PDF di fotografia solo su Docsity! LEZIONE 5 While a painting is always a personal interpretation of an artist, a picture Is an automatic writing made up with ligth, it's reality itself.  when you are in front of a painting of a drawing, you are in front of something always filtered by the fantasy, the imaginary and by the manual skills of an author, instead in front of a picture you are in front of a machine, scientific device, baptized with the idea of doubling the world, inside this process the first author is the machine and what happens inside thanks to the light, photochemical substances and processes. The French philosopher and semiotic scholar Roland Bartes who in 1961 read a brief essay where he expresses his ideas towards the philosophy and the identity of photography. “Photography is a message without a code” = he with these words says that photography is something very difficult to define, to say what it is. A message always needs a code in order to be understood, something impossible for the photography. A picture is something strange, is a bizarre sign, in some way non-sensical. The main reason is the fact that first of all photography is something produced as an analogon (analogico) of reality. Chapter 17 – Portrait of Alice Liddell (Lewis Carroll, 1863) pp. 155-58 We’ll not analyze classic or traditional photographic portraiture because they followed the pictorialism, because for them was natural to think it was the only example they had. If you want to discuss strange border line examples we have to find experiences out of code, out of pictorial tendences, and these experiences usually were not aware. When you have something urgent to say We photographers are nothing but a pack of crooks, thieves and voyeurs. We are to be found everywhere we are not wanted; we betray secrets that were never entrusted to us; we spy shamelessly on things that are not our business; and end up the hoarders of a vast quantity of stolen goods. Brassaï, 1970 Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, defined photography «the new wonder of the world». What was the eminent contribution that the English Reverend, writer and mathematician, acknowledged to photography to the point that he considered it such a wonder? Lewis Carroll learned about the photographic technique in 1856 while he was a student in a college in Yorkshire, when an uncle gave him as a gift a photographic device and all the necessary to set up a darkroom. From that moment on and until 1880, when he definitively gave up photography, he shot about three hundred pictures. His production remained almost unknown until the historic Helmut Gernsheim founded his pictures and published them together with a diary in Lewis Carroll Photographer: «while collecting material for my biography of Julia Margaret Cameron my attention was drawn to an album of another great mid-Victorian amateur photographer, Lewis Carroll. Turning its pages, I was struck first by the fertility of his imagination»1. In this way, the passion for this new scientific and technical device nurtured by Carroll became acknowledged, but the peculiarity of his production explains the long obscuring of it and the censorship adopted by a part of its heirs who destroyed a good part of it. Alongside the portraiture activity that he carried out for various personalities of his social circle (bishops, professors, writers, actresses and politicians), the most sought subjects, the most loved ones, the more usual for Lewis Carroll’s lens were the girls, most of them were the daughters of his colleagues or acquaintances in Oxford. The most intense and fervid period of his photographic activity was between 1863 and 1864, when Carroll conceived and then published his literary masterpiece: Alice in Wonderland. It seems that that novel, which made him well-recognized, had been developed on the little stories he used to invent to distract and enchant mothers and little girls (as happened the 4th July 1862, in the famous boat ride on the Thames with the Liddell sisters) which then, as habit, were invited to pop inside his studio for a photographic posing session: «His apartment, as his vast glass studio […] were for the kids an authentic paradise. How many wonders in that four-rooms and four-halls studio where the deacon lived alone! A rich assortment of dolls, a distorting mirror, jokes and hoaxes objects… And in the long shelves stood an entire collection of mechanical toys: teddy bears, bunnies, frogs, mice that run and jumped»2. In this fabled amusement park, purposely created to engage and amaze the little girls, Carroll set up some tableaux vivants in the same way his colleague Julia Margaret Cameron used to do and he shared with her also his passion for the theatre. After creating in his studio some sceneries of exotic or historical 1 GERNSHEIM 1949, preface. 2 BRASSAÏ 1972, p. 52. setting, and after having dressed up the little girls with kitsch costumes from the Theatre of Drury Lane, he positioned himself behind the photographic lens to start the photographic performance which had to mix up reality and dream but, above all, the photographic medium had to function as the primer for the sublimation of his erotic and voyeuristic impulse. Agnes Grace Weld became Little Red Riding Hood, Xie Kitchin was transformed in a little Chinese girl with fan and Mandarin cap or in a little Russian girl with fur hat and frogs, then it was the turn of Irene Mac Donald, Mary Millais and Alice Liddell, the real Alice of Alice in Wonderland and the daughter of the dean of the Christ Church college. He dedicated to the latter his most important work and in the last page of the manuscript he glued the photographic portrait of her photographed by him as a symbolic seal. He also proposed her in vain, and this fact proves that, during his existence, art and life were continuously connected. For him, not only Alice but also the photography itself was a real wonder and he was so grateful to photography because it gave him the possibility to conceptually experiment something: that mechanic, impassive, automatic device was for Lewis Carroll a special prosthetic thanks to which he could virtually scrutinize, touch and finally possess the little girls that posed for him. For the English writer the photographic lens was a licit method, and the only possible in order to violate the inviolable territory of childhood: «So photography allowed Lewis Carroll, this clergyman tempted by the Devil, to exorcise the demons that persecuted him. Thanks to photography, the capture of the image could substitute its possess»3. In the prudish and moralistic Victorian age, a religious man could not find a better tool entrusted with his relationship with the little girls than the enhanced eye of the photographic device and to its lens that almost could touch the bodies4. In their photographic poses Carroll’s little girls took a mischievous and demonic attitude, probably due to the consciousness that they were showing themselves to an adult’s eyes, but this is not enough in order to explain the morbidity of those images. The perturbing atmosphere emanated by his photographs is rather due to «the intrinsic sinful nature that Carroll attributed to the camera. It was the camera itself, not the subject, that he always perceived as a magical, seductive, and perverse medium»5. Lewis Carroll was an incurable voyeur and by being so he grasped the high-potential of intrusion in the other’s world that photography was able to realize. Plus, he was obsessed by the most taboo subject of all, the childhood and adolescent eroticism, and as a consequence he didn’t miss the sublimate experience of living it deferred, a dimension possible only through the photographic device. When in 1880 Carroll gave up to photography, he accounted only for technical explanations, due to his disaffection with the dry collodion process; but certainly the reiteration of even provocative6 little girls portraits, was the real cause of the problems arouse in his social circle that pushed him to give up forever to his passion for photography. It’s useful to remember that the novels Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass abounds with the fascinations and the references to the philosophy of the photographic and also in the minor production Lewis Carroll had a particular attention to the new photographic marvel, as it is in the short stories Photography Extraordinary and A Photographer’s Day Out7. «In addition to the invention of sublime characters, Alice in Wonderland could be intended as the literary transposition of the light of imaginary that enters inside the photographic device, where, in the intersection of the geometries of physics, the story develops in a continuous juxtaposition of positive and negative, of light and dark»8. LEZIONE 6 Chapter 12 – The Countess di Castiglione dressed as Carmelite Nun, in the hermitage of Passy (Pierre-Louis Pierson, 1863) pp. 109-112 I am their equal in birth, their superior in beauty, their judge in intellect. 3 Ibid., p. 74. 4 For a reflection on the photographic device as a metaphor for the sexual fantasy see F. ALINOVI in ALINOVI and MARRA 1981, pp. 59-60 and SONTAG 1978, pp. 11-14. 5 F. ALINOVI, in ALINOVI and MARRA 1981, p. 59. 6 The photographic albums in which Lewis Carroll photographed the little girls with few clothes on, or even naked, are the ones that have not been preserved. BRASSAÏ 1972, p. 69, remembered that Carroll himself, when he was alive, disposed that the plates had to be returned to the girl-models or to their parents. 7 See also MALLARDI (edited by) 2002. 8 MARCENARO 2004, p. 91. Historical, conceptual and semantic coincidences between Modem Museum and Photography The birth of the modern idea of Museum (1792, after the French Revolution and the planning of the Museum Central des Arts, after the Musee du Louvre) is very close to the birth of Photography....they're both son of the same philosophy (Positivism) and its faith in the rational possibility of humankind. This idea that there is an idea of progressive future, of science is inside philosophy and art (verismo by Verga, verisme by Zola) . The Idea of an immense archive of the world...of a Museum without walls (Les Musee Imaginaire by Andre Malraux) is inherent with the presence and the identity of a medium as the photographic one. The word exposition is both related with a museum display, an exhibition, but it's also related with the photographic terminology: when we take a picture, inside our device, there’s an exposition to sun= ex + porre  PULLING OUT THINGS FROM REALITY AND PUTTING THEM IN OTHER CONTEXT. We catch a frame of real time, pulling it from reality, isolating it, fixing it and make it eternal in another context.) 'The Image-Maker': Robert Delpire and the Centre National de la Photographie, Paris (his direction went from 1982-1996) The 1980s witnessed a photography boom in France thanks to political circumstances and a shift in the general perception of photography and a sudden increase in suitable venues. In 1978 opened the Fondation Nationale de la Photographie, but other main events and protagonist of this change: - The Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, nowadays one of the very important appointment for the world of photography - The Societe Francaise de Photographie in 1976 - The foundation of the Bibliotheque Nationale - The Centre Pompidou in 1977 - The creation of the Musee d'Orsay, including a photography department 1978 - The introduction of University courses in Photography - in Bologna started the 1st course in history of photography Whit Jack Lang Minister of Culture, there were two fundamental events occurred in 1982: - the founding of the Ecole Nationale Superieure de la Photographie in Arles - the foundation of the Centre National de la Photographie (CNP) in Paris. Robert Delpire was appointed by the minister and became the Director of CNP. Main goals for Delpire and CNP: foster 'expressive photography' among the 'wider public' and support creativity through: exhibitions, publications, audio-visual productions and educational projects. Robert Delpire had no background in government administration of photography, education or museums, he was a 'private', more known as a publisher or gallery owner, very charismatic man. He introduced a very personal style into the exhibitions he curated (not all the curators followed this idea of the role of identity; with him we read an experience in which the curator is something very close to an artist, the exhibitions must be marked by the style of the curator); aside from their typography and graphic design, the exhibitions created by him were immediately recognizable by the unusual scale of their photographic enlargements (ESTRANGEMENT/EXPERIENCE) In March 1984 the CNP obtained some rooms in the east wing of the Palais de Tokyo. The rooms at CNP might have seemed completely out of proportion, but they were so useful for Delpire's unusual vision and photography's new world order. The majestic solemnity of the space was very striking: with its big dimensions, Its loftiness, the beauty of the all-embracing view and the big the circular ceiling without any decoration, clear was the unique purpose to present artworks in large quantities. The uniqueness of Delpire's design consisted of modular display blocks that could be moved anywhere, and that could be placed alongside one another to form a continuous display or combined with other elements. Each exhibition was designed like a stage set (display and perception of the exhibition). He wanted to suggest an entire experience of art and photography, not just showing pictures. He considered an exhibition a very experience of art. This particular spot (of the balcony) provided a kind of introduction, its layout, the emphasis provided by the lighting, the colors of the display units and the graphics. Originally of CNP’s signage, designed by Delpire himself, and the CPN’s logo. Every element of the graphic design passed before Delpire’s eyes. Raymond Depardon's and its reportage of the hospital of San Clemente (1984): a series of photographs were designed to create a sense of enclosure, including a 'dark room'. The images themselves were mostly large-format enlargements (with no passe-partout or frames which are elements that connect photography to its pictorial dimension; instead here they are rough) creating a striking impression when seen from the balcony, alongside recent prints. One of the most extraordinary collaboration was that one between William Klein and Robert Delpire regarding Klein's Le commun des mortels (1986-87) exhibition pian. Photos of street and demonstrations mounted as panoramas formed a continuous sequence that round around the central rotunda of the photographic space in the Palais de Tokyo. Exhibition Pian: enlargements of images formed a continuous sequence that wound around the rotunda. The display was completely curved, the pictures shown without frames, multiple images joined together to create a kind of panoramic and temporal continuity between shots, as if you were among these people and these demonstrations. Visitors experienced the usual relationship between the Viewer and the photographic subject inverted. Technique is always important. We are going inside a special area of photographic experience, the area of reportage, which was changed by the invention of LEICA (LEITZ + CAMERA) invented by Oskar Barnack in 1925. With leica photographers could bring a very light and easy to use camera but also because the Leica used inside the cinematographic film, called the 35 mm  until 1911 Barnack thought to use the cinematographic film in 35 mm as a photographic film inside the Leica. It allows photographers to take photos very quickly. In 1956 Klein published the photobook ‘Life is good and good for you in New York’  photography was an experience to live in real time. So his pictures are not sometimes precise, they appear full of blurring, of highlighting of the grain, of wide angle forcing. Klein's technicality is always oriented on "incorrect" images, out of grammar, with a careless and impulsive flavor, or however not conditioned by any particular compositional anxiety (meaning a pictorial and traditional idea of photography). The same repeated use that Klein makes of the wide angle, a lens he allows to open one’s gaze to the limit of deformation by suggesting an even closer contact with the subject. He says: To take pictures as incomprehensible as life. There is not a unique message inside each picture, but you have to read the pictures as a whole. Robert Capa: «If your photos they are not good enough, it means that you have not done enough close », meaning close, in contact, immersed in the world, exactly what is predicated by the overall poetics of the Action Painting (Pollock, the dripping). What was important for them was to communicate an experience, an action. The same ideal parameters pursued by the painters of the Abstract Expressionism movement (or Action Painting movement) can be found in the general intentions of reportage photographers, that is of that photographic form characterized, almost for antonomasia, to intense and passionate immersion in the impetuous flow of reality. "If there is an irresistible force in photography, if there is something in it that seems to be of absolute gravity, then we must say that with photography it is no longer possible for us to think to the image outside the act that created it" (Philippe Dubois)  we can’t think about photography without thinking about its action, photography is always an experience. “Painting is no longer a deposit of pigments on a surface, but an "act" at the conclusion, a trace of which remains, the work, whose value does not need to be measured so much in itself, as for what was the process that brought it to completion (...) The work is what remains at the end of the action, but what matters is precisely the action” (H. Rosenberg). “Les Americans” was published in Paris in 1958 by Robert Delpire with essays by Simone de Beauvoir, Henry Miller e John Steinbeck. The English edition The Americans was published in 1959 with the essay by Jack Kerouac. The pictures on the road by Frank, based on the "indistinctness of which the fabric consists reality of our way of looking”, sensationally shun claim to "grasp the beautiful order of the world in one of those fleeting instant in which it seems to crystallize. No more "decisive" moments, but moments «in between». Frank's wandering reportage, however well founded on the figurative, once again demonstrates profound and undeniable analogies with that junction of informal painting in which "the ephemeral, the precarious, (...) the shred, the tranche de vie, the shapeless core yes oppose the complete image» MAGNUM AGENCY On 22 May 1947 the Magnum agency was founded in New York as a cooperative company to defend the copyright of photojournalists (who thus held the rights on the negatives, they could check layouts and captions and they could negotiate services and commissions with big magazines like LIFE). From an idea by Robert Capa, the founding members included: Henri Cartier-Bressonm David Seymourm George Rodgerm, Maria Eisner, The Vandiverts. “To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It's a way of life” (Bresson)  close to the poetic of Kline; photography it’s an experience. “I DISCOVERED THE LEICA IT HAS BECOME THE EXTENSION OF MY EYE” (Bresson)  connecting with a theory of McLuhan who defined some technical elements and tools like the photographic device as prosthesis of our sensorial potentiality, in this case the camera is an announcement of our gaze, of our eyes. (nelle slide mancano delle foto, guarda se le ha caricate). LEZIONE 8 The most spectacular of these shows was Identites: De Disderi au Photomaton (1985- 86), which dealt with the crucial problem of identity in photography. In particular, this exhibition wanted to valorize the in-btw territories which very often photography could play, regarding the possibility of photography to play different roles (in scientific area and artistic area). The borderline between the identity photo and the portrait is indefinable, since both the concept and the practice overlap; the exhibition concluded by focusing on this inbetween area. The idea you can use different sources (from advertisement to science, criminology, psychiatry etc) Every possible form of enlargement, format and framing was utilized in this show. It began with Disderi's visiting cards (c. 1860), which rapidly increased in popularity in the upper echelons of urban society, as an early example of individualization through images, and it arrives to an original Photomaton booth. Identites, de Disderi au Photomaton (1985-86) Delpire used the entire field of photography - found photographs, documentary work, press photography, studio photography, advertising images Display units and lighting were carefully employed to present each image as a separate work, establishing what is now a con vention in contemporary photography... History and Theory of the Automatic Photographic Portrait Since its original and natural dose association to the uses of science, photography was immediately exploited for its recognized ability to mirror reality. documenting human identity, studying ethnic diversity, identifying and classifying psychiatric disorders, eventually facilitating coercion, and the prevention of danger and civil insecurity. = starting from its invention photography was a great support to institutions and civil security. To do so, photographic portraits have been used since the second half of the 19th century for psychiatric, criminology and anthropology applications. These 3 containers are not the only ones but are the main containers we will analyze. All these adopts the same format and method for their goals, but these format must be chosen to assure the maximum fidelity  the first goal is to be true, to tell the truth. The use of a particular type of picture, is the one that is able to ensure maximum fidelity and objectivity possible in mirroring the salient physiognomic features of the subject. This cross-sectioning of the identity of the human psyche can be seen as the legacy of traditional ancient disciplines, especially physiognomy, an ancient science that found in the medium of photography the means for realizing the desire to objectively pin down human faces and features, which disappeared in the 19th century to re-emerge in the forms of anthropology, criminology and psychiatry, thanks to this new technique that could give to this science a new support. Leonardo's sketches  in catching human psychology through few lines  this is the goal of phisionomy, be able to catch the psychology to the characteristics of the body and face. Painters were great support to scholars in order to describe their theories in something visible. When photography arrived, this goal became more easy, with the idea of truth, this is what’s happening in front of him  one of the main scholar who used the power of photography in translating the physiognomic theory was C.Darwin, who in The Expression of the Emotions in Men and Animals, 1873 use Reilander. This mania for classification that infected all of the 19th-century social systems also contained elements of a particular and contradictory philosophical climate known as positivism which is generally characterized by the desire to legitimize the supremacy of science and techniques, while incurring the risks of excessive approximations and dangerous falls into deterministic fanaticism (fascism and Nazism) around 1/5 of it (twenty Francs, in respect to a hundred Francs which was the price fixed by Nadar for one of his photographs) and so it was obvious that, from 1854 on, many men, women, politicians, actors and common people went in Boulevard des Italiens (firstly at Disdéri’s studio, but then in every studio where there was an operating cartes de visites device, Nadar’s one too) in order to be photographed in this new and curious format. Following unverified anecdotes (shadowed by doubts) Napoleon III too, while he was marching with his troops through Paris, made them deviate from the preset route in order to reach Disdéri’s studio to get some commemorative cartes de visite. The first uses were dedicated to the idea of leaving a trace in the family. The carte de visite format became suddenly a widely spread fashion that made Disdéri’s studio produce up to 2500 photographs a day. Even under a sociological point of view, the carte de visite is an important step towards the massification of photography: although not so beautiful and refined (because the automatism didn’t allow a lot of attention to the pause, the light, the focus, so the evolution of technique which is so important in democratization, creates issues in pictorial values of pictures themselves, because the authomatic mechanism obliges the author to stay back, to disappear, to give less attention to the output, because the machine took the role of the author), being too small to have a perfect definition of its details, it was suitable for being exchanged and kept for memory, purchased for being collected or simply treasured in family photo albums. The little format pushed people to start a conceptual experience of photography which is the idea of collecting memories inside photoalbums (the big format made by famous photographer make people consider pictures something to read this pseudo pictorial images as paintings; instead the little piece of reality that carte de visite represented were little objects very easy to treasure, to collect, to put inside an album, so a conceptual and affective use of photography, objects to love; they became parts of life, not only beautiful objects). So, they are an emblematic example of the fact that on the one hand (the «higer» one of the artistic debates, of the clubs and the Salons) the photography in the Nineteenth-century still had the painting as a reference model and an approach essentially visual-formal to the artistic objects; but, on the other hand (the «lower» one of the private use, instinctive and sentimental), from the very beginning the photography was able to start some conceptual processes from the first decades of the Twentieth-century onwards, because of its connection with the mechanisms of memory, of conservation, of voyeurism, of the presence in absence and so on. In this sense, Michael Frizot gave a nice definition of the innovations that Disdéri’s patent produced, when he wrote: «With the carte de visite the photography exits from the frame on the wall and enters in the album on the table». As to say: it freed itself from a passive reception, typical of the painting model, and enters the interaction and performance mechanisms typical of conceptualism. Each picture only for the fact that it is always a piece of reality could be considered a conceptual object  carte de visite helped this process. Despite that (and especially despite what will be said hereafter), the photography historians (even the most celebrated ones) stopped themselves on the superficial and formal aspects of the carte de visite (it’s sufficient to remind Beaumont Newhall’s statement, in which he got rid of these images for their little value and scarce definition, and defined Disdéri a photographer little «serious») , because they read it only in its visual-pictorial aspects and totally ignoring its proto-conceptuality, both in the people’s fruition and, as we will see, in the experience of the subjects that stood in front of the curious device. Apart from all the issues regarding the processes of the popular and democratic diffusion of the cartes de visite, due to their cheapness and handiness, the interest on Disdéri’s invention isn’t restricted only on these aspects. From Disdéri’s accounts, we know that alongside the request of traditional portraits in uniform, or with the best suit on, in his atelier other common and seemingly innocuous customers started off some pretty embarrassing and bizarre situations, which were at the limit of the mutiny or of the aesthetic anarchy. Disdéri reported that there was no way to suggest them a pose, because people didn’t listen to his advice about the pose to take or the glance to hold. Even though he used all his aura of master in photography, his aura of important artist, there was nothing to do. People entered Boulevard des Italiens (where Disderi opened his studio) carrying carnival suits, theatre costumes, objects and trinkets that called to mind historical or mythological characters, political big-names and show vedettes. Among the well-known ones there was Madame Ristori’s maniacal fascination on Mary Stuart, that led the lady continuously press Disdéri in order to satisfy her desire to be portrayed in the poses and with the fetish objects of her idol: the jointed hands, the loose hair, the crucifix held in her hands. The play was perfect, and then the click of the shutter of the cartes de visite device did the rest. So, what did happen in those Parisian rooms, in the presence of the new mechanical patent and in front of a desperate photographer that tried in vain to be taken seriously? Just this: the supposed seriousness of the artist had finally disappeared together with his role as the director of the subject and his capacity to condition the final outcome of the work vanished too; the author had disappeared because his role was made useless by the machine, pulverized by the consciousness that, in that place and time, an incredible magic was turning into reality. This magic gave the people the chance to live the lives of others, even the dreamed and impossible ones, even the crazy and irrational ones, only for the few moments of the duration of the posing session. In this way an innovation of technological type (thanks to which the photographic device could action different shutters in an automatic sequence, and so with no man’s intervention) created in the anonymous Disdéri’s customers the instinctive reaction that led to the destitution of the role of the author: due to the thought of being left alone in front of an impassive machine (that, however, could certify this escape in the realm of dreams), man could play with the imagination and the identity disguise. In Disdéri’s studio paraded funambulists and jugglers, butterfly women and strange monsters, people grouped in safari dresses as if they were doing an expedition in the jungle (thanks to a kitsch backdrop), or disguised as Tuareg people in a desert created with papier-mâché. There were also queens and ridiculous heroes of the ancient times . In the Nineteenth- century it’s difficult to pinpoint another experience like this one, such an anticipation of the Twentieth-century conceptual performances, firstly of Body art. But, above all, it’s difficult not to see in this adventure of photography the warning signs of another event, the one that had inspired some of the most interesting ideas of the Twentieth-century art: the event of the photo booth. Already in 1981, Francesca Alinovi stated that the carte de visite was «the first photo card or warning photo-spy of the history» . “Disdéri, trying to reach an objective accuracy in his portraits, able to guarantee the resemblance of the portrait to the model, found himself embarrassed […] in front of the unpredictable behavior of his models: instead of inducing the subjects to disclose their personality, the photographic device seemed to excite in them the opposite: the impulse to conceal themselves, to disguise themselves, to distance themselves from their own identity”. FRANCESCA ALINOVI, 1981 After a great economic success, Eugène Disdéri retired in Nice where he worked as a beach photographer and then he died in misery in Paris in 1889. For some years Disdéri had been a photographer a little bit serious, he hadn’t been a real artist, and so it was if we consider his career under a point of view aligned with the Nineteenth century art conception. But for us, nowadays, his little seriousness is one of the most enthralling and premonitory chapters of the Nineteenth-century photography. Chapter 18 – Mug shot test of Alphonse Bertillon’s self-portrait (Alphonse Bertillon, 1912) pp. 165-68 From Disderi and Bertillonage to the Photobooth It can be said that the use of the photo booth in the arts will make allusion to the rigorous classificatory demands adopted by Bertillonage to release the imaginative energies experienced by the customers of Disderi’s studio. Briefly summarizing Disdcri's carte-de- visite and medical and police photography are the two main axes of the proto- photo ID. Within this functional ambiguity resides the charm that the photo ID booth held for some artists in the 20th century. even managing to describe a real macro-poetic of the practical aesthetics of the photo booth. The beginnings of photo booth technology go back even further to the 19th century. One of the first prototypes was invented by the German Conrad Bernitt who created a device called "Bosco” that could put out a photo in just four minute*. although the image it produced was too dark or bent sideways. There was than a model named Enjalbert after the name of its Builder, and dating back to 1890. The Enjalbert produced an image called "autophotography" based on the ferrotype technique. printed on a small sheet iron or other metal. In 1924 Anatol Marco Josepho, a socialist from Siberia. patented the first Photomaton in the city of New York in 1924. In 1926. the "Automatic Photography Salon" opened on Broadway in New York, where five automatic booths proclaimed in writing "Photograph Yourself! Eight poses in eight minutes The idea of automaticity and mechanical autonomy had to be re- evaluated. emblematically emphasizing the distance between this type of operation from that of the traditional artistic product (unique and original). All that is required is a voluntary choice. the act to undergo a perverse and irreversible mechanism. After this, nothing is left but to wait for the outcome. In 1926, the first machine for American public photographs was installed. On 20 June 1928 one Willy Michel, a clerk at the "Continental de Photographie" company, installed the first five automatic booths in Paris at the Galeries Lafayette, at Sam's, at the Petit-Journal. at Lumi Park, and the Jardin d'Acclimatation. ART AND PHOTOBOOTH IN 20™ CENTURY In 1923 Marcel Duchamp used the criminal portrait, and the bertillonage style, for his work entitled Wanted S2000 Reward. The conceptual dimension of photography is immediately exploited by the great father of Conceptualism. In this picture, Duchamp himself is portrayed in bertillonage style, as a criminal who lives a virtual, simply photographic, life. But Duchamp experimented also the other dimension; that one of portrait experience as an imaginary escape. Here he disguises, crossing the gender border. Dresses and hands belong to Picabia’s wife, Germaine Everling. Aggiungi le slide “from disderi and bertillonage to the photobooth In the judicial photography it’s sufficient to set aside every aesthetical consideration and only be preoccupied with the scientific point of view and more in particular with the police point of view […]. The point of view becomes only one and, as a consequence, easy to analyze: to produce an image the most resembling as possible. ALPHONSE BERTILLON, 1890 When on the 7th January 1839 Arago introduced the discovery of photography, probably he was not aware of the fact that simultaneously he was introducing an incredible, incomparable device that would be used by all the controlling systems of the social worldwide organization of the mid-Nineteenth century and even something more: a fundamental device able to support a philosophical thought and a system of ideas. In the positivist climate of the Nineteenth century, with its conventional faith in science as a light for history and for civilization, photography finally found in Daguerre and Talbot its founding fathers, which pinpointed the spaces where they could introduce it (and also the supporters in order to describe it) in the scientific and technical world. As said before, the photographic patent was regarded as a device at the service of the knowledge of the world and as so a fundamental one for the new scientific, sociological and anthropologic goals. In the same years in which photography took the first steps another story was going to reach its accomplishment: the one of a discipline called physiognomy . From Aristotle’s History of Animals to a supposed Leonardo da Vinci’s Physiognomy Essay, many scholars and scientists dedicated themselves to the study of the correspondences between the somatic traits and the subject’s psychological and character inclinations. If we think about Leonardo’s sketches (and, in different periods, to the works of Charles Le Brun, William Hogarth and Théodore Géricault) it’s easy to understand what kind of contribution photography could give to the art as an instrument for the visualization of the physiognomic theories. But after centuries of studies, theoretical contributions and also big obstacles (the physiognomic studies had been affected in 1586 by a papal bull in which Sisto V declared that they were heretical), during the second half of the Nineteenth century new sciences and disciplines took the place of the physiognomic theories and became an integral part of the system of the scientific knowledge. Among the new disciplines that took over from physiognomy there were the anthropology, criminology, psychology and psychoanalysis. But in that moment and in that new backdrop the attention turned again on the birth of photography (this time clearly in advantage compared to drawing and painting, which were doomed to be always interpretative and authorial) which couldn’t help proposing itself as a perfect tool able to realize images faithful to the truth, mechanical and automatic, useful in order to study the reality . In this way, serving the noble cause of curiosity and the desire of knowledge but also the more controversial defense of the established order and the labeling of the diverse, in the Nineteenth century photography faced one of its most fascinating chapters: the one of the psychiatric profiling in the asylums, of the judicial photography and of the anthropologic and ethnologic photography. A few years after the diffusion of the photographic patent the photography presented itself as a fundamental tool for the study, the diagnosis and the medical and pathological theorization, as a useful instrument for a new asylum science . In 1851 the first photographic laboratory was installed in a mental hospital, in the one directed by the English doctor Hugh Welch Diamond, himself a secretary of the Royal Photographic Society of London. The demonstrations of the famous neurologist of the Salpêtrière Hospital, Jean Martin Charcot, became almost a media phenomenon because he made the hysterics perform in front of both his students (among them a young Sigmund Freud) and of scholars arrived in Paris just to audit his lectures . Understanding the power of the new photographic device useful for the diagnosis, the cure and the study of mental diseases, Charcot created in the Salpêtrière (thanks to Albert Londe’s technique) one of the most famous photographic laboratories of the Nineteenth century, from whose great production it was published, between 1878 and 1881, the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, «a little illustrated atlas on the subconscious» . Italy too contributed to the effort of the description of the mental disease and in 1878, in the asylum of Reggio Emilia, the director Augusto Tamburini introduced the use of the photographic portrait in order to record the guests. Before Reggio Emilia, the photographic record had been previously introduced in two Venetian asylum, the male asylum of San Servolo and the female asylum of San Clemente (where Ida Irene Dalser would be interned, due of her unlucky encounter with Benito Mussolini). The so-called nosological table created by many mental hospitals (with photo, description and measurements of the patients) at the same time satisfied a need of order and classification of the patients, but also it was an attempt to record and therefore to verify the evolution of the disease. In the photograph that had to complete the nosological table of the mentally ills it was preferred the aseptic front view, a neutral background, an impassibility from which feelings and distractions could not transpire. With a zero grade language, it had to visually communicate that it was a matter of science, not of art. Not by chance the same qualities of neutrality and detachment were adopted in the judicial photography, which had its principal inventor in Alphonse Bertillon . From 1882 the judicial identity service of the French police developed a global system for the criminal classification: the so-called bertillonage. The bertillonage was constituted by an identification card in which every criminal was identified through a mug shot (i.e. a photo of the criminal in front and profile view), the indication of the personal identification marks and the measures of his or her anthropometric survey. Until its evolution to the fingerprint card, this system allowed the social systems to the creation of a vast visual archive on the criminality, but also to organize a system of study, of clear physiognomic derivation, which had to ascertain if there was a sort of visually relevant continuity or some recurring resemblances among the various criminal families. Starting from these observation, they were created some panels, called «speaking portraits» which had to demonstrate if a specific inclination, for example a murder inclination, was recurrent in subject with specific physical features or with equal anthropometrical distances between eyes, nose and ears. On this type of terrain of clear positivistic-deterministic influence, in Italy Cesare Lombroso, a physiognomic scholar and an eccentric scientist and academic, had already given his contribution. He attributed to photography a primary role in the study and classification of the human diversities and he had created, with personal bequests and acquisitions, one of the most fascinating photographic archive of the Nineteenth century . In 1878 in Italy, from an idea of Cesare Lombroso, Salvatore Ottolenghi (Lombroso’s