ertem - the pose in early portrait photography

8/12/2019 Ertem - The Pose in Early Portrait Photography

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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X

Issue14. Painting / portrait

http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/painting/fulya.htm

The pose in early portrait photography:

Questioning attempts to appropriate the

past.

Author: Fulya Ertem

Published: July 2006

Abstract (E):In the early years of photographic

practice, we can observe a desire of making

photography a medium of artistic expression. In

that respect, photographers of the early period, who

were mainly coming from the painterly tradition,

were attempting to shoot photographs that looked

like paintings. One of the key factors in that attempt

was to borrow the poses and settings of the

painterly tradition. But was this attempt really

successful? Did the attempt of imitating the

artistic poses of the paintings made photography a

continuation of painting? This paper will attempt to

find some answers to those questions, departing
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borrow the poses and settings from the painterly tradition .

In this article, I will question this attempt of continuity

between early photography and the painterly tradition by

analysing some photographs and paintings of the end of 19th century, in terms of the poses of the models. In

examining and theorising the act of posing in early portrait

photography, I aim to answer the following questions:

Does barrowing the poses from the painterly tradition

make photography the extension and/or continuation of

painting? Is it possible that the poses of the models in the

early "artistic" photographs question the idea of imitationand therefore collapse the attempt or desire by early

photographers to imitate the painterly poses and settings?

1. A Photograph as a starting point of analysis

I want to let an image be the starting point of my inquiry.

Here is a photograph from 1865, entitled Divine Love byJulia Margaret Cameron (Figure 1). Until I saw this

photograph I underestimated the importance of colours in

our perception of black and white photographs. One who

faces this photograph for the first time, might indeed

think: "Here is a colourless photograph belonging to the

first years of photographic practice". However this

photograph is not colourless. On the contrary its colour isvery effective. So effective that it can evoke the idea of

sculpture. The greyish brown that governs this image

reminds me of the colour of a sculpture dirtied and aged

with time. Moreover, the grains producing that colour are


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visible and they give the impression that the two figures

have a textured body, a body made out of small particles

that could be felt if touched, like the particles of marble, of

clay or other residues one can feel while touching a statue.

Figure 1. Julia Margaret Cameron, Divine Love, Mary

Hillier 1865.

Image reproduction in Helmut Gernsheim,Julia Margaret

Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work , London :


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Gordon Fraser, 1975,13.

However colour and texture are not the only aspects of the

photograph that creates such a sculptural effect. The pose

of the two figures, their immobility without any trace of

tiredness, their subtle connection with each other where

the woman holds the child very gently and touches his

head with a tender kiss, increases the sculptural effect of

this image by creating the impression that every gesture is

perfectly arranged, calculated and performed without

leaving any room for chance, or unexpected occurrences

that would sharply blur the image.

Considering all these, we can ask some questions about

the nature of this photograph such as: Why it has such a

sculptural effect? Why the models pose in such a way? Is it

possible that they represent a mother and her child? If so,

why are they dressed up in old-fashion clothes, then? They

look as if they are acting or imitating other images, other

poses. Are they imitating Christian iconography? Are they

pretending to be Madonna and the child? And more

importantly, are they really "imitating" something? To be

able to answer those questions more in detail, let's first

look at the original conception of photography.

2. The conception of photography at the beginnings

of its practice

When, at end of 19th century, the French painter Paul

Delaroche exclaimed, "Painting is dead" (Delaroche qtd in


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Caffin, 1) in front of Louis-Jacques Mand Daguerre's new

"light-pictures" (12) he was perhaps initiating a debate

about the place of photography within the artistic realm.

Like other admirers of the new medium, Delaroche was

probably very impressed by the success of the

photographic image in representing nature. He was thus

recognising in this new invention, qualities and possibilities

that would bring it to the same level as other techniques of

visual representation.

Indeed the fascination exerted by photography was related

to a certain conception of art, one dedicated to the exactreproduction of nature. Photography could be that

dreamed of industry that could overcome the problems of

exactitude posed by the art of painting.

However it was not so easy to consider photography as the

newest art among the other arts. The main reason why the

new medium was not easily recognised as artistic was due

to its being understood as a scientific apparatus,

"substituting a soulless eye for the artist's individual

vision" (13) as Charles Caffin argues in his

book Photography as Fine Art.

In fact, like Caffin, Andr Bazin points out in "The Ontology

of the Photographic Image" that, the photographic lens,

which is considered as the basis of photography, is called

"objectif" in French and the objectivity of the photographic

camera comes, not from its ability to reproduce images but

from its ability to form images with limited human

intervention. For Bazin, photography, unlike other forms of


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visual representation that are based on the presence of

man, seems to derive an advantage from its absence. The

photographic camera seems thus to offer a more accurate

and objective image, creating a feeling of certainty about

the thing it captures.

For Roland Barthes, this feeling of certainty that a

photograph produces, is not a certainty in the sense of

restoring what has been abolished by time or distance, nor

in the sense of exactitude and perfect resemblance, (the

first photographic images lacked colour information and

details), but rather in the sense of certifying that, what isseen has existed. In a way, photography cannot lie about

the existence of its referent and it is this particularity which

makes it also distinct from painting.

From this perspective we can say that at the very

beginnings of its practice, photography was conceived as

an apparatus limiting the artistic touch of the

photographer, and becoming a source of "scientific"

evidence claiming an objective and accurate

representation. It was thus not immediately seen as an

artistic medium but rather conceived as an objective and

scientific tool of recording.

One of the names, who used photography in the 19th

century for such scientific purposes, was Duchenne de

Boulogne. He was one of the first photographers who didn't

use photography for artistic portraiture but for illustrating

his research on the electro-physiological analysis of the

human expression.


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Indeed, analysing the human expression and face in order

to have access to the inner character of a human being,

was an earlier desire, manifested in the proliferation of two

scientific disciplines that emerged between the end of 18th

and the beginning of 19th century: Physiognomy and

Phrenology. Physiognomy, systematised by Johann Caspar

Lavater, was a science seeking to isolate the profile and

the various anatomic features of the head, such as

forehead, eyes, ears, nose, chin, in order to have access to

the individual character. Phrenology, which emerged in the

researches of the Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall,

sought to analyse the topography of the skull in order to

reveal the correspondences between the skull and the

mental faculties, seated within the brain. Both of these

scientific disciplines were reducing an entire range of

human diversity into specific categories.

Allan Sekula, in his article "Body and the Archive" refers to

the coincidence between the emergence of photographicpractice and those disciplines, that categorise, archive and

control the individual body. For him, photography

subverted the privileges inherent in portraiture. As a result

photographic portraiture began to perform a role no

painted portrait could have performed in the same fashion.

This role did not come from the old honorific portrait

tradition but from the imperatives of medical andanatomical illustration that established and delimited the

terrain of the "other". Sekula adds that photographic

portraiture was a double system of representation,

functioning as both honorifically and repressively.


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On the one hand, photographic portraiture, unlike the

traditional 17th century portraiture that provides a

ceremonial presentation of the bourgeois self, was

popularised and extended to all realms of society. As a

result it democratised the honorific functions of bourgeois

portraiture. As quoted by Sekula, Jane Welsh Carlyle

describes the inexpensive portrait photography as a social

palliative:

"Blessed the inventor of photography. I set him

even above the inventor of chloroform! It has

given more positive pleasure to poor sufferinghumanity than anything that has been 'cast up'

in my time.- this art, by which even the poor

can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses

of their absent dear ones." (Carlyle qtd in

Sekula, 347)

On the other hand, this usage of portraiture was not

separated from its repressive use. Beginning with being a

cheaply affordable aesthetic pleasure, photography became

later on an utilitarian social machine which created a social

archive containing and creating the traces of the bodies of

"betters" and "inferiors", and thus providing a list of

heroes, leaders, moral exemplars, celebrities, as well as, of

the poor, the diseased, the insane, the criminal, the non-

white and the female. Those identities were created

through different social institutions of the period and

photographic camera played an important role in that

process.


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As early as 1843-44, police departments in all over Europe

started to use photographs in the research on criminalities.

Hugh Welsh Diamond was photographing the countenance

of the insane in Great Britain. The ethnographer Louis

Agassiz was having daguerreotypes taken of American

slaves. And, society portraitist Andr-Adolphe-Eugene

Disdri was patenting his first carte-de-visite.[1]

For Robert Sobieszek all these medical, psychiatric,

anthropological/ethnographic, scopophilic and judiciary

agendas of the period used portraiture to present the

appearance of a certain individual or type, without theflattering or idealising goals of artistic portraiture.

In addition to these, John Tagg in his book The Burden of

Representation: Essays on Photographies and

Histories argues that the evidential character of

photography at the beginning of its practice, cannot be

separated from the new practices of observation and

record keeping of the late 18 th and early 19th century

European societies. These practices play an important role

in the development of a network of disciplinary institutions

such as the police, prisons, asylums, hospitals,

departments of public health and schools, and they secrete

new and strategically connected discourses which function

as tools of power producing new objects and identities.

However, despite this "objective" power of photography,

working on a different level than the artistic realm, there

were still some photographers who claimed that

photography could be art if the photographer could
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emphasise his or her superiority over the limitations of the

apparatus. But to achieve such a freedom was not so

simple. The circumstances of the practice of photography

were different when compared to the practices of other

visual representations. Comparing the ways the painter

and the photographer deal with their models, Caffin argues

that the painter can correct and modify his model's

posture. But the photographer has to use devices such as

head clamps in order to make the sitter remain immobile

and to avoid any blurring in the picture, while at the same

time, he has to save the sitter from the oppressive feeling

of being operated upon. It was perhaps because of this

that the first photographers were called operators.

However, these operators in order to weaken the scientific

atmosphere created by the photographic setting and to

make the photograph look like other artistic

representations were also operating on their models and

the composition, by imposing the poses, the settings, andby barrowing the representation style of other artworks.

In Cameron's photograph (Figure 1) for example, we can

clearly see a desire to refer to Christian iconography and in

addition to that, we also find the influence of the sculptural

tradition, especially if we consider that both sculptors and

photographers had to suggest certain colours only by a

distribution of light and shade. However, painting has

always been considered to be much more influential on

early photography than sculpture.

"The first man who saw the first photograph must have


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thought it was a painting: same framing, same

perspective" (31) says Roland Barthes. In fact professional

photographers had the same scenic accessories as painters

in their studio. The painted backcloth, the brocade drape

tied back with a heavy cord and the tapestry footstool not

only denoted the class of the sitter but also created some

movement and richness in the frozen atmosphere of the

early photographic studios.

Figure 2. Gaspard Flix Tournachon Nadar, Sarah


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Bernhardt , 1859. Image reproduction in Beaumont

Newhall, The History of Photography: From 1839 to the

present day . London : Secker and Warburg, 1965, 54.

This relationship between painting and photography can

also be observed in the poses of the models. For example,

in one of the portraits of the famous French portrait

photographer, Gaspard Flix Tournachon Nadar, where he

took the photograph of the actress Sarah Bernhardt,

(Figure 2), we can see the traces of painterly tradition,

such as choosing a celebrity as his model, and imposing on

her a pose, which can be found in many painted portraits

of the same period, such as the portrait of Mme. Ins

Moitessier by Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingrs (Figure 3).


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Figure 3. Auguste Dominique Ingres, Mme. Ines Moitessier

Seated, 1856. Image reproduction in Robert

Rosenblum, Ingres . New York : Harry N. Abrams, 1975,

165.

If we compare these two images we can see that both of

the portraits have as their subject matter famous,

influential women. Moreover, they represent their model in

a posture borrowed from classical figures. The gesture

shared by both models in which the right hand is placed


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delicately on the face, and which can be interpreted both

as a sign of reflection and tranquillity, is a gesture found in

other classical representations, such as the frescoes

of Herculaneum (Figure 4).

Until now we have seen the classical debate brought up by

the invention of photography in 19 th century about the

place of photography within the artistic realm, and how

this debate resulted in a desire and attempt to make

photography look like previous artistic representations.

However, we can now put this attempt into question in

order to point our attention to a new question namely,whether such an attempt can really be possible.


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Figure 4. Roman fresco from Herculaneum , Hercules and

Telephus . Image reproduction in Michael D. Gunther /

www.art-and-archaeology.com

3. Is photography an imitative representation?

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, in an introduction to a book on

photography entitled Thatre des Ralites , bases himself

on Walter Benjamin's criticism of the debate on


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photography in the 19th century, arguing that, in only

asking whether photography can be art or not, we miss an

important question raised by photography, that is, what

can photography tell us about art or representation itself?

Lacoue-Labarthe noted that one of the important figures of

that period, which paradoxically and unwillingly pointed to

this issue, was Charles Baudelaire.

It is true that Baudelaire criticised photography harshly

and denied it the possibility of claiming a stake to art as he

sees photography as the antithesis of art, as something

anti-imaginative and the product of an industry. Moreover,Baudelaire sees this technique as one that replies and

corresponds to the most limited conception of art as simply

an imitation of nature, a form of reproduction. However in

a close analysis of Baudelaire's text entitled "Salon 1859",

Lacoue-Labarthe suggests that, rather than questioning

the duplicative aspect of the medium that ruins the artistic

gesture, Baudelaire unwillingly brings to the fore animportant and innovative aspect of photography. Let's

refer to a passage from this text:

".A madness, an extraordinary fanaticism took

hold all the new sun-worshippers. Strange

abominations took place. In grouping funny

men and women, dressed up as butchers and

as washerwomen for carnival, and imploring

these heroes to please hold, for as long as the

job would take, the grin pasted on for the

occasion, we flattered ourselves in depicting

glorious or tragic scenes from ancient history.


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Some democratic writer must have seen there

the cheap means of spreading disgust of

history and painting amongst the people, and

in so doing, committing a double sacrilege by

insulting both divine painting and the sublime

art of the actor." (Baudelaire qtd in Lacoue-

Labarthe, 114)

It seems indeed that the accusation by Baudelaire of

photography is not simply an accusation that the new

medium is a cheap reproduction of artistic gestures. Nor is

he questioning the accuracy of this reproduction. Rather,

Baudelaire seems to point to the connection that exists

between photography and theatricality when arguing that

photography is a bad imitation of painting, a bad theatre.

Why asks Lacoue-Labarthe, does Baudelaire conceive of

photography as theatre rather than reality? His answer is

that, Baudelaire, despite himself, would have felt that the

origin of both imitation and imagination is a mimique, a

form of theatre.

The connection between theatricality and artistic

representation is an important one for Lacoue-Labarthe

since it allows him to re-think the concept of mimesis

conceived until now as an indirect way of representation,

understood as imitation. Indeed for those who

condemn mimesis, thus primordially Plato, theatre is

essentially targeted because the miming of human action

not only provokes a certain number of emotions that are


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thought to be dangerous but also, because, the actors on

the stage have nothing to do with the characters they

incarnate. Thus the main disadvantage or immorality of the

theatrical act lies in its being an illusion where everything

can be offered without impunity and responsibility. For

Lacoue-Labarthe this conception of theatre comes from a

limited understanding of mimesis as imitative

representation.

However the word representation itself is a problematic

word for Lacoue-Labarthe. It has been understood as

imitation, as reproduction, because of the prefix re-thatgives it a value of doubling and seconding. But Lacoue-

Labarthe, basing himself on Diderot's analysis of the

theatrical act, argues that to represent is to render

present. Thus, an actor is not someone who reproduces the

gestures of another it is rather someone who presents and

makes a character exist, someone who "builds up" a

character. Thus, mimesis is not an imitation but rather it ismaking "present" something, some idea or some person

(mythical heroes in the case of the actors of Dionysos).

This "rendering present", argues Lacoue-Labarthe, is not to

make "present" what is empirically absent (the problem of

realism) or make "present" the pure absence (the

adventure of Modern Art) but rather to reveal the presence

of the presence itself, to reveal the being present of whatis present.

From this opening up of the concept of representation as

something other than imitation, we can now try to see the

early artistic photographs from a new perspective-as


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images that present the presentation, images that perform

the performance by relinquishing a definitive, stable

connection between the image and its referent. In order to

reveal this possibility, let's now focus on the act of posing

in general and then analyse the poses within some other

photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron to be able to see

how the poseurs of the early "artistic" photographs, failed

in "imitating" the poses of the painterly tradition.

4. Posing as an impossibility of imitation

In its general sense, posing can be considered as the way

in which the "subject" responds to the (implied) presence

of the beholder. It is, assuming a posture, an imaginary

self, in front of any captivating gaze. When in front of the

photographic camera, posing can be seen as a reaction to

the camera's deadly capture. Roland Barthes, extending

the pose to inanimate things, also describes it as an

"instant, however brief, in which a real thing happened to

be motionless in front of the eye." (Barthes qtd in Owens,

210).

Posing is thus a moment of immobility where the poseur

turns him/herself into a frozen image. It can also be

considered as a moment where the poseur tends to imitate

a certain image he/she has in his/her mind in order toproject it onto his body and gesture.

However, Kaja Silverman in The Treshold of The Visible

World claims that, posing is not imitative of a pre-existing

image, it is imitative of photography itself, as she says that


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the pose does not only arrests the body, "hyperbolising the

devitalising effects of all photographic representation"(202)

but also resembles the "three-dimensional photography".

Indeed Silverman adds that in the field of vision the

subject does not passively wait for the camera/gaze to

photograph him or her. On the contrary he or she "may

give him or herself to be apprehended by the gaze in a

certain way, by assuming the shape of a desired

representation."(201, 1996). When this happen the subject

does not simply hold up the imaginary photograph in front

of him/her but rather try to approximate its form. It is in

that sense that it resembles the "three-dimensional

photography"

Much like Silverman, Craig Owens also says: "What I do

when I pose for a photograph? I freeze as if anticipating

the still I am about to become; mimicking its opacity, its

stillness; inscribing, across the surface of my body,

photography's 'mortification' of the flesh." (210, 1992).

Considering these accounts of the act of posing we can

argue that posing is not an imitation of a specific image.

But rather it is a re-enactment of the some qualities

pertaining to photography. Indeed Silverman argues that if

posing resembles anything it resembles mimicry and

mimicry is not a simple imitation.

Silverman refers to Jacques Lacan's description of the

phenomenon of mimicry in his Four Fundamental

Concepts and argues that for Lacan, although mimicry is

the behaviour of certain species of insects, which seem to


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adopt the shape, and the natural colour of their

environment for protective reasons, mimicry is more an

attempt to become part of a particular picture rather than

an attempt to imitate a pre-existing image. Mimicry is thus

"a reproduction in three-dimensional space with solids and

voids: sculpture-photography." (Flusser qtd in Silverman p.

201) as Wilem Flusser also argues in Towards a Philosophy

of Photography.

In that sense what is significant here is that posing as

"mimicry" is not an imitation of an image or a person. It is

a mimicking of the stillness of photography.

Departing from all these accounts we can argue that

posing is a paradoxical experience that seems to collapse

and/or prevents any attempt of imitation, causing a

disappearance of the referent. Perhaps the poseurs who

tried to imitate the painterly poses were not imitating

anything but they were just re-presenting in Lacoue-

Labarthe's terms? And thus they were becoming something

unrecognisable, something that rejects resembling and

identification? In order to understand this better let's now

return to some other photographs by Julia Margaret

Cameron.

As one of the first women photographers working apart

from the mainstream professional photography, Julia

Margaret Cameron's work has long been subject to debate

in the artistic field. Some critics have devalued her

photographs because of their lack of focus. This was

considered a lack of artistic accomplishment because


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focusing was considered a sign of mastery of the

photographer over his medium. However others found her

work promising in terms of representing the emotions of

her models.

At a time where photographic practice was under the

influence of Cartomania , the impulse to own and

trade carte-de-visite portraits, Cameron was perhaps

trying to save photography from its commercial aspect by

giving it an artistic air through arranging her models and

her compositions like some of the pre-Raphaelite paintings

of her time.


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communication is possible through the body language of

the actor whose body generally stands out in front of a

dark background. This photograph that is devoid of voice

and that makes its actor emerge in front of its dark

background, provokes however a silence on the viewer

because what it tries to represent is nevertheless still

ambiguous.

After having read that Cameron chose her models among

the members of her friends and family, I can't escape

thinking about the real person behind the actor, since I

know, thanks to the particularity of the photographicimage, that the woman depicted here is an actual person

in front of a camera. Though invisible in the picture, she

has a personal narrative (her past, her relationship with

the photographer etc.) Although she looks aware of her

pose I wonder whether she was aware of the connotations

her pose has to the paintings of her era. Perhaps she had

in her mind some gestures, some expressions sheunconsciously appropriated from the paintings she saw.

Because of this intersection or superimposition of

narratives, it becomes impossible to claim that this

photograph imitates Rossetti's painting; rather, what it

represents is the process of representation. Perhaps

another photograph can help us to better grasp this aspect

of early artistic photographs.

Here is another photograph by Cameron entitled Lancelot

and Elaine. If I saw this image (Figure 7) as a photocopied

reproduction, I would not immediately be able to recognise

that it is a photograph. It could easily passed off as a


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photocopied reproduction of a painting. Yet getting closer I

can see some disturbing details which prevent my reading

of it as a painting: the blurs. The hands of the two models,

some details of their dress and the background are blurred

and unclear. In addition, the grains that I already

mentioned in Divine Love (Figure1) are much more obvious

in this photograph, especially in the areas of transition

between dark and light tones, such as the cheeks of the

models. Discovering that this is a photograph, I am filled

with wonder. This feeling emerges because, although this

photograph seems to represent two legendary figures

(Lancelot and Elaine), next to the title there are, strangely

enough, two other names, the names of the models:

William Warder and May Pinsep.


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Figure 7. Julia Margaret Cameron Lancelot and

Elaine, William Warder and May Prinsep, 1874. Image

reproduction in Helmut Gernsheim ,159.

Paintings where the names of the models are writtentogether with the title are rare, especially if they are

paintings that represent legendary stories. But in this case

the models and their narratives become as important as

the subject matter of the photograph because we know

that they really existed in front of the camera, they are not

the mere imagination of the artist. This increases the effect

that this photograph is not representing a legendary storybut rather represents the "representation" of a legendary

story by two models.

In other words, this photograph refers on the one hand to

the art of painting representing a legendary story (since

the pose of the models and the setting is very reminiscent

of a painterly setting), but on the other hand, it represents

the performance of the models representing their own

interpretation of the legendary heroes Lancelot and Elaine.

In either case, it is not easy to trace back or stabilise the

referent of this image. Like Cindy Sherman's History

Portraits where she re-creates the historical portraits by

using grotesque prostheses or heavy make-up on her own

body in order to point to the theatricality of our cultural

imaginary this photograph faints the possibility of

identification, recognition, and comparison.

Indeed Cindy Sherman's work, from her black and white

film stills of the late 1970's to the colour images of 1980's


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and her history portraits of the 1990's, is the result of a

project that calls into question any received notion of

subjectivity or identity by emphasising its performative and

theatrical character. She makes this emphasis through

parodying the illusion of mimetic representation that

dominates the conception of photography. But more than

that she also emphasises the paradoxes of the act of

posing.

Amelia Jones' reading of Cindy Sherman's photographs, in

her article "The 'Eternal Return': Self-Portrait photography

as a Technology of Embodiment" emphasises the fact thatin Sherman (but also in other cotemporary artists such as

Hannah Wilke), the act of posing (for photographic

camera) is a representation which predicates a freezing of

bodily motion where a death of the subject is enacted.

However she also mentions that, although posing is a

projected immobility on the past (in Barthian terms), this

immobility "can after all be transformed into a sign ofeternal life.sustained via deferral through the other."(956,

2002). Few paragraphs later she also adds: ".the

performative posing of the self, whether photographically

documented or "live" is always already a performance of

the other" (965,2002).

Considering all these, we can argue that what is happening

in Cameron's and Sherman's photographs is not only a

questioning of the theatricality of our cultural imaginary

but also, a relevance of the paradox of the act of posing:

the splitting of the subjectivity of the poseur under the

illusion of unity, revealing the never ending production and


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deferring of subjectivity, as it is best described in Roland

Barthes's words: "in front of the camera I am the one I

think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one

photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to

exhibit his art "(13).

As we have already seen the poseurs of Cameron's

photographs who tend to imitate paintings, are also

embedded in deferral of their referent. They are splitted

during their performance of classical figures because their

attempt of re-enactment of other poses and gestures,

becomes impossible and their pose point to theimpossibility of imitation.

Considering all these, we can argue that Cameron's

poseurs refuse in way to reveal their subject matter by

deferring the referent. It is perhaps in that sense that they

are "representing" in Lacoue-Labarthe's terms. They are

rendering present what is present because they are

breaking the continuous and comforting relationship

between the referent and its representation.

Moreover, Cameron's photographs also point to our

presence, to our being present in front of them. It is in that

presence that they make us aware of our participation in

and production of the narrative frameworks, which

constitute meaning. In that sense these photographs also

make us aware that meaning can be unstable, fleeting, and

fugitive.


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Bibliography

Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on

Photography . Trans. Richard New York :Hill and Wang.

Bazin, Andr. 1967. "The Ontology of the Photographic

Image." What is Cinma.Trans. Hugh Gray. London :

University of California Press.

Caffin, H. Charles. 1971. Photography as a Fine Art. New

York : Morgan&Morgan.

Flusser, Vilem. Towards a Philosophy of Photography

Jones, Amelia. 2002."The 'Eternal Return': Self-Portrait

photography as a Technology of Embodiment".

Signs:Journal of Women in Culture and Society , vol.27, no

4. University of Chicago Press.

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe.1996. Thatre Des

Realits. Trans. Christine Decruppe. Paris :Caves Sainte-

Croix .

Owens, Craig. 1992. "Posing" Beyond Recognition:

Representation, Power, and Culture. Ed. Scott Bryson,

Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Wienstock.

Introduction by Simon Watney. Berkeley , Los Angeles ,

Oxford : University of California Press.

Sekula, Allan. 1989. "The Body and the Archive" The

Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography , ed.

Richard Bolton. London : Mit Press.

Silverman, Kaja. 1996. The Treshold of the Visible World .


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New York and London : Routledge.

Sobieszek, A. Robert. 1999. Ghost in the Shell:

Photography and the Human Soul 1850-2000, Essays on

Camera Portraiture. California : Los Angeles CountryMuseum of Art.

Tagg, John.1988. The Burden of Representation: Essays on

Photographies and Histories London : The Macmillan Press.

Illustrations

Figure 1 Julia Margaret Cameron, Divine Love, Mary

Hillier 1865.

Image reproduction in Helmut Gernsheim,Julia Margaret

Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work , London :

Gordon Fraser, 1975,13.

Figure 2 Gaspard Flix Tournachon Nadar, Sarah

Bernhardt , 1859. Image reproduction in Beaumont

Newhall, The History of Photography: From 1839 to the

present day . London : Secker and Warburg, 1965, 54.

Figure 3 Auguste Dominique Ingres, Mme. Ines Moitessier

Seated, 1856. Image reproduction in Robert

Rosenblum, Ingres . New York : Harry N. Abrams, 1975,

165.

Figure 4 Roman fresco from Herculaneum , Hercules and

Telephus . Image reproduction in Michael D. Gunther /


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www.art-and-archaeology.com

Figure 5 Julia Margaret Cameron Enid, Emily Peacock ,

1874. Image reproduction in Helmut Gernsheim,Julia

Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work .London : Gordon Fraser, 1975,96.

Figure 6 Dante Gabriel Rosetti Christmas Carol 1867

image reproduction

inhttp://www.artmagick.com/artists/Rosetti.aspx?p=8.html

Figure 7 Julia Margaret Cameron Lancelot and

Elaine, William Warder and May Prinsep, 1874. Image

reproduction in Helmut Gernsheim ,159.

Notes

[1] A pocket-sized card, bearing a small and full-size

photographic likeness in place of the person's name.
http://www.artmagick.com/artists/Rosetti.aspx?p=8.htmlhttp://www.artmagick.com/artists/Rosetti.aspx?p=8.htmlhttp://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/painting/fulya.htm#01http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/painting/fulya.htm#01http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/painting/fulya.htm#01http://www.artmagick.com/artists/Rosetti.aspx?p=8.html

ertem - the pose in early portrait photography

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