W1 Global images

HildeMaassen
Feb 2, 2019
4 min read

Updated: Aug 16, 2020

This week is a bit about the history of photography and its global influence. The story is familiar to me although there are some differences and other details viewing the events from the Dutch point of view. It is very interesting to hear different stories. For example I was thought that the English were not allowed to use the daguerreotype process at all and that that was the reason that Fox Talbot came with the negative-positive process. In our high school books you can read that Daguerre was the inventor of photography instead of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce.

The stereocards are mentioned as a way to view places from around the world in 3D that spread photography as a medium. Viewers in the living room made it possible to see them. I know from my youth that we bought disks for the view master during the holidays with the same purpose. Later the Polaroid, instant images to see immediately and show after the holiday what we had done and seen. I sometimes get the idea that people nowadays make images during events and holidays to find out later, at home, viewing the images where they have been and what they could have seen with their own eyes, instead of looking at the screen all day long. Already at the airport I get a message and image that they are flying and everyday we can follow the holiday along.

The question is: "We accept that photography is a global medium, but how did photography become a global medium and how does your own work relate to the global nature of photography?"

I think that photography was a global medium from the beginning. I do not mean that everyone made their own images but it has opened the world. Photography made it possible to see how other parts of the world looked without traveling. Cartes-de-visite were was very popular in the early years and was exchanged for all sorts of events. When I got a small book with Cartes-de-visite, the first thing my daughter said was; 'you have a Facebook'.

And of course with the arrival of digital photography, social media and mobile devices with better cameras the amount of images shot every day is hardly countable.

Those images are not necessarily global known. Because of the amount of images it is harder to make that one special image everybody around the world knows. It is the same with watching television. In the early years with only one channel, everybody had seen the same program and was able to talk about it. People 'experienced' the same and felt a bonding. I think trying to share experiences is the reason people show their complete live through social media.

In November 1989 I was in Berlin when the wall fell. I took my images analogue. At home after developing the images I could see and show them.

Berlin was a global event; almost everybody in the world new about it and saw images, news or movies about it. I also think that, without telling where this image was made, all the people who are old enough to remember the event, will be able to tell what the image is about. Because of Trump plans to build a wall between the US and Mexico this photo is suddenly very current. History tends to repeat itself because of the arrogant assumption that the same mistakes will not be made again.

You can see more images I made in Berlin in the link. https://spark.adobe.com/page/Wrwk7/

Critics

Photography got a lot of critics through the years. An example is the "anthropological" and "ethnographic" portrait made in the colonies. The pictures of half naked adolescent girls were made under the guise of science. Provided with texts such as "Young Arabic girl". They were published in magazines but were also sold as postcards. And they are still collected. I ones helped an old lady moving to another house and found two maps with images. She was ashamed when I found the maps and referred to it as her fathers’ porn.

Making cards with "types", as you can see on the image here, was done for science purposes. Hitler, for example used the images to categorise and look for the real Aryan. It can always be dangerous to do something because others can always use images in another way as meant to be. But as a photographer you can't always foresee how your image will be used. Just placing a text with it can change the context and change the purport.

One page from the book; The Racial Characters of the Swedish Nation. 1926 The Swedish State Institute for Race Biology by Lundborg (H.) & F.J. Linders (Eds)

The photographer Ari Versluis and profiler Ellie Uyttenbroek started with a project Exactitudes in 1994. The way they work has similarities to the scientific ways people were documented in the early days of photography. They look for, often unidentified, subcultures. Here you see "Flexworkers" and "that's up G?" They work together because they have a shared interest in the striking dress codes of various social groups and have systematically documented identities. http://exactitudes.com/index.php?/series/overview/154

Edward Sheriff Curtis was criticized because of the way he took images of Native Americans who were disappearing really fast. Now Jimmy Nelson has the same goal for tribes with his projects "Before they pass away" and "Homage to Humanity" and he gets the same critiques and questions as Curtis 100 years before. https://www.survivalinternational.org/articles/3373-jimmy-nelson-before-they-pass-away

I did a project taking infrared portraits of people living in my street. Using infrared film and illuminating the, for humans visual light using a filter, I was able to 'catch' the reflected heat. It was my assumption that all people emit the same amount of heat. In the images the skin will become the same grey/white tone if I am correct. Since heat is white on the image and no reflection will show black. All the people will be "white". The critic I got is that I was told that I wanted to make everybody white. Which is not true at all. The idea was actually to show that people are alike. What I did notice is that by eliminating the skintone you could better see the shape of the face, the depth of the eyes and the shape of the mouth became more clearly visible. More images: http://www.hildemaassen.nl/infrared.html and the book for the exibition: http://nl.blurb.com/b/1526322-een-stralende-buur-t