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June’s MQUP Top 5 comes from Anthony W. Lee, author of The Global Flows of Early Scottish Photography: Encounters in Scotland, Canada, and China. A timely book, it tells of an era when cameras emerged to give shape and meaning to some of the most defining moments brought about by globalization in the nineteenth century.
Lee’s selection stays true to this theme, and when paired with The Global Flows of Early Scottish Photography, offers a diverse reading list situating art and photography in the context of migration and industrialization of the nineteenth-century.
Nineteenth-century Scottish photographers, like other Scots from the Lowlands, eagerly ventured onto the international roads carved by the British Empire. They were seeking adventure – some were escaping debts, others thought they saw opportunities for advancement that were unavailable in the homeland. While the photographers were migratory, art historians haven’t really followed their trail, preferring to scrutinize them within the confines and concerns of Scotland. Luckily, today there are some good traveling companions to help track them and tell their stories.
1. Thinking about pictures in more expansive global terms can be a daunting task, but Timothy Brook’s Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (Bloomsbury Press, 2007) makes it surprisingly – and deceptively – simple. He looks at a series of paintings by the great Dutch painter and points to the random collection of objects within them, so casually strewn about as to seem unremarkable. Yet it’s precisely that quality of the commonplace that allows him to open the paintings to daily trade and encounters, facilitated by new technologies and the full-scale interconnectedness of people in a world full of exchanges. His is a heady, galloping trip from Delft to South America, East Asia, and more, and Brook is a very genial guide.
2. When the photographers took pictures of peoples and places they encountered, their images were very often informed by some prior assumptions about their subjects. How might we recover something of the ambitions and concerns of sitters – many of whom remain anonymous – and the pressures these people put on the photographers’ worldviews? Among the many books that ask these kinds of questions, Christopher Pinney’s and Nicholas Peterson’s Photography’s Other Histories (Duke University Press, 2003) is brilliant. It’s a collection of essays proposing different ways to think about the dynamic on the other side of the lens and pushes away from the attitudes of the metropole toward those that had previously been thought of as belonging to the murky margins. Especially for any kind of study dealing with imagery and the British Empire, in which the peoples who made up the empire’s distant holdings were usually understood in the flattest terms, this book is manna.
3. One challenge in studying early photography in China is the scarcity of archival materials, and it didn’t help that for years after the Cultural Revolution, Chinese officialdom put a hiatus on a scrutiny of the most embarrassing Qing episodes with the west. But Jeff Cody’s and Frances Terpak’s Brush and Shutter: Early Photography in China (The Getty Research Institute, 2011) is undeterred. Not only does it provide a hearty glimpse into the Getty’s vast photographic holdings, it also offers a series of illuminating essays about how one might go about making sense of these pictures without the usual benefit of broad and deep archival sources. Wu Hung’s essay, “Inventing a ‘Chinese’ Portrait Style in Early Photography,” is a jaw-dropper.
4. The Global Flows of Early Scottish Photography mixes biography, history, portraiture, landscape, art, technology, and migration to tell the story of early photography’s role during some fraught moments of historical change. Getting that mixture right is a fine balance, and Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (Penguin Random House, 2004) is a superb model. She uses Muybridge and his camera as lenses through which to see a wide range of radical transformations: of time and space in the nineteenth century and the sheer acceleration and industrialization of modern life. And she writes with an urgency that makes the changes in Muybridge’s day relevant to our own.
5. Ah, but how to tell the story well? T. J. Clark’s, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton University Press, 1999) describes the origins of French Impressionism by setting it against the uncertainties and demands of a rebuilding Paris. But perhaps “setting it against” isn’t quite the right description because, among its many virtues, the book doesn’t see art as a mere reflection of urban renovation or modern life-in-the-making but instead as itself breathing and giving form to those processes; conversely, it understands those same processes struggling to find shape through imagery. In his hands, interpreting images is a means of telling history. In addition, Clark writes in the most extraordinary language, with crisp turns of phrases and taut descriptions of paintings, and is completely accessible without compromising rigor. It remains for me one of the gold standards of art historical writing. I frequently heard his voice while typing away at the computer.
Read more on Anthony W. Lee’s The Global Flows of Early Scottish Photography: Encounters in Scotland, Canada, and China >
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