Victoria Olsen
About Me

Victoria Olsen writes about books, photographs, women's studies, and all things Victorian. She teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University

Member, Women Writing Women's Lives, CUNY

Alum and book reviewer, Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership

 

 

  • From Life: Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian Photography
    From Life: Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian Photography
    by Victoria C. Olsen
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Tuesday
09Mar2010

Sun Bathers

Miroslav Tichy, "Untitled."More from ICP this week: going to see the Atgets (below) and the surrealist visions of Paris, which were the star attractions there, I stumbled on this work by Miroslav Tichy. The Czechoslovakian Tichy, who is mostly unknown here in the U.S., has been photographing his small village for decades and produces striking, seemingly "artless" images like the one here. Of course there is "art" all over it, as the proximity of the surrealist work makes especially clear. But Tichy is an original too. Using handmade cameras and documenting his own community, he finds his own inspirations, from girls in bathing suits to couples on park benches. His surreptitious style means we see many retreating figures, and few people meet our gaze or his. If he implicates us in his voyeurism he does so gently.

Tichy's world is small and self-contained. There are no broad vistas, no long shots. He uses found materials like cardboard and pieces of plastic, reinforcing the impression of eccentric "outsider" art. Many of his photographs are manipulated by hand: he draws on the prints or creates elaborate painted frames for them. This one is as haunting for the scratches and smears on the negative as for the ghostly figures.  Like this one, the works seem spontaneous, intimate, and natural.  But they also seem to refer to Man Ray's sun prints and Matisse's bathers.  Are these women floating in science-fictional space or figures dancing on an Etruscan vase?

Saturday
27Feb2010

Atget's Ancien Regime

"Hôtel de Marquis de Chantosme, 6 rue de Tournon," 1900 (Printed 1900-1927), International Center for Photography.You may recognize this elegant photograph as one of Eugene Atget's portraits of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Paris. Atget specialized in these still, pristine, balanced compositions of windows and doors, storefronts and cobblestones. Few people live in his Paris, though there is every sign of human civilization.  An exhibit at the International Center for Photography, entitled "Atget: Archivist of Paris" gets at this quality: his documentation of lonely urban landscapes at a particular turning point in history.  On display until May 9, it puts Atget's clear, dispassionate eye on view.

What I like about this image, taken in 1900, is its strange perspective, where the courtyard doesn't square up and the corners aren't quite symmetrical.  Atget positioned himself so far off center that the near wall seems squeezed unnaturally into the frame.  As a demonstration of three-dimensionality it may fail: the left side of the image is much flatter than the right side.  But it succeeds beautifully as a haunting shadow of a long-gone world, now preserved in shades of brown. 

Monday
22Feb2010

Opening Doors

Browsing photograph archives in search of an image for this week, this early print struck me.  Or rather, itsWilliam Henry Fox Talbot, "The Footman," 1840 caption struck me: "The Footman.  The earliest photograph of a human figure on paper by William Henry Fox Talbot." Though Fox Talbot is known for his pioneer photographs of his home, Lacock Abbey, and solar prints of flowers and leaves, it is curious that his first known attempt at a portrait was of a servant.  Here the man is almost an accessory to the carriage, which is centered in the frame.  But the footman does return our gaze and cooperatively performs his role, holding open the door for us, his masters.  For that is what this photograph seems to reveal to me (apart from the interior of the carriage). It seems to start a tradition, now well precedented, of power relations between photographer and subject.  This image seems to document a certain conversation: "Stand still for me.  I will tell you what to do.  I will place you next to other symbols of my wealth and status." Dressed in his working-class identity, patiently holding the door open, the nameless footman waits on us.  Fox Talbot was an upper-class landowner and his photographs fall into an established artistic tradition of documenting the property and collectibles of the wealthy.  But photography has maintained some of that loaded interaction between portraitist and subject: even now it whispers, "stand still.  I will make you into a miniature object to be pasted into an album.  I will immortalize you, but you will always be at my mercy...."

If there is a "punctum" (as Roland Barthes described) in this photograph it is that open door, which exposes the reality of the photograph in perspectival vision.  The gaze retreating into the two-dimensional paper guarantees the verisimilitude, the life-likeness of the image.  Interestingly, Fox Talbot later made another photograph called "The Open Door," which he included in his pioneer photography collection The Pencil of Nature (1844). It is the door opening to a new way of seeing, a new kind of art.

Friday
12Feb2010

Rock of Ages

I've made this photograph as large as possible on purpose: to approximate its impact.  And also, perhaps, to play again with scale, which the photographer Edward Burtynsky manipulates here too. This is one of his "manufactured landscapes," to quote the title of Jennifer Baichwal's documentary about his work.  Burtynsky is best known for documenting the human impact on nature, at oil rigs, cement pits, mines, and, here, a marble quarry in Italy. Despite the apparent social critique, the photograph remains beautiful.  The red stripe of rubble running down the slope, the valleys and cliffs of the monumental stone, the abstract composition in gray, green, and pink are all lovely to look at. Though we know it is rock, the marble has a kind of flow that is reminiscent of a wave and Burtynsky makes use of that in this vertical slice of mountain.  Of course this is an ugly industry and of course this force of nature is ravaged, but the quarry also creates beauty: the beauty of a statue by Michelangelo and the beauty of a photography by Burtynsky.

Tuesday
09Feb2010

Eyeless

We've been looking at iconic female photographers (Arbus, Sherman) in class and it seems time to turn to Sally Mann. Yet I feel tired of the standard questions about her family photographs. That's their business. Browsing, however, I came across this self-portrait that astonished me. I am familiar with Mann's wet collodion work, images she prints on large glass plates using the same early photographic techniques as Julia Margaret Cameron. But here was a photograph both like and unlike Cameron's work: characteristically blurry and close-up, but also more obviously eerie and stark than Cameron's portraits, despite the deep black backgrounds. The face is carved by light and looks up as if to the heavens. The eyes, though, are blank: white space where the self should be. That absence seems critical: where is the photographer's eye here?  Where is her private self? She displays her face as mask, her hand on the glass. The self-portrait would seem to be an egoist's genre, but Mann avoids giving much away besides form and shadow. It is image as revelation, a new way to see and be seen.