| Newsletter for Collectors - Vol 9.1 | March 27, 2015 | | | Home • What‘s New • Photographers • Online Exhibitions
Contents • Alphabetical • Styles and movements • Articles
Visual Indexes • Galleries & Dealers • Timelines • Techniques
Library • Contact us Welcome to another Luminous-Lint Newsletter.
Going ever deeper into the many histories of photography |
So where is Luminous-Lint at the moment and what is the next step? A few statistics to get us started:
58,000 photographs from all periods and regions of the world
2,600 public and private collections have supplied material
17,932 photographer names included for 7,428 different photographers
1,120 themes with their own continually improving histories of photography [Subscribers]
3,800 fragments with over 5,000 footnotes to support the themes [Subscribers]
8,254 references to books, articles and conference papers [Subscribers]
1,381 online exhibitions (online or in planning)
The real power is in the millions of interconnections throughout Luminous-Lint
Most of the effort over the last year has been on improving the Themes but quite soon I will be starting again on Online Exhibitions. About time I hear you say...
On Luminous-Lint there are clusters of related online exhibitions and I'd like to explain why these are done and their purpose. Each online exhibition - Trees for example - can be enjoyed as a single topic but that is not the long-term intention. Groups of online exhibitions are used to support the Themes which are continually improving histories. If you are a casual visitor to Luminous-Lint you can see a listing of the topics covered - if you are a subscriber you will see textual descriptions with footnotes, innumerable examples, visual indexes, reading lists and many other features. Many of these single themes are now far larger than books.
So what does this mean for trees?
This is the structure for the Luminous-Lint theme on trees:
Examples
309.01 Early photographs of trees
309.02 Pictorialism and trees
309.03 Snapshots of trees
309.04 A 20th century perspective on trees
Photographers
309.05 Hill & Adamson: A tree at Colinston [Midlothian, Scotland]
309.06 Louis Crette: Trees
309.07 Eugène Atget: Trees
309.08 Paintings and prints based upon paintings or vice versa - The Bodmer Oak (Forests of Fontainebleau)
309.09 Carleton E. Watkins: Trees
309.10 Andrew Young: Woodburytypes of trees
309.11 Leonard Misonne: Trees
309.12 William Dassonville: Trees and the San Francisco skyline
309.13 Rudolf Koppitz: Trees
309.14 Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii: Early colour photographs of trees and tracks
309.15 Albert Renger-Patzsch: Trees
309.16 Jerry Uelsmann: Trees
Cedars of Lebanon
309.17 The Cedars of Lebanon
Forest of Fontainebleau
309.18 Photographs of the Forests of Fontainebleau
309.19 Eugène Cuvelier: France: Forest of Fontainebleau
309.20 William Drooke Harrison: France: Forest of Fontainebleau
309.21 Gustave Le Gray: France: Forest of Fontainebleau
309.22 Paintings and prints based upon paintings or vice versa - The road to Chailly (Forests of Fontainebleau)
Logging and forestry
309.23 Darius Kinsey: Forestry and logging in the American North-West (1906-1940)
No Theme is static and every day hundreds, if not thousands, of changes take place on Luminous-Lint allowing you to explore in considerable detail. On Luminous-Lint everything comes out of the photographs - first the images are classified and ordered and then texts explaining the history, the reasoning, original sources and the supporting footnotes are added in to bring the content together.
For subscribers every image is the starting point of an interwoven series of connections taking you through thousands of public and private collections.
A common misconception - Luminous-Lint concentrates on 19th century material |
When looking at the starting points for each theme an image is provided and as almost all themes start in the 19th century most of these images are from this period. There are many thousands of contemporary photographers on Luminous-Lint along with online exhibitions. What I do when preparing Themes is take them back to their origins and gradually come forward by building up Online Exhibitions and Visual Indexes in the background. As these mature and become stable they are integrated into the appropriate Themes and the texts and footnotes are added in. For subscribers you can go down the page for any Theme and see the raw material that is being prepared for enhancing the histories.
As you go through Luminous-Lint you will discover that there are histories of Conceptual Photography, Land Art, Appropriation, Photomontage, Fabricated Realities, Gender issues and many other issues in contemporary photography.
Looking ahead the Theme Trends will become significant as it will gradually bring together patterns within photohistory. As the website matures the analysis and theoretical underpinnings will become apparent - having said this everything relates back to the images as the bedrock of the website.
Extending the biographical information |
The improvement of biographical information on Luminous-Lint is an ongoing task. Two major sets of information have been arranged - the first from John Falconer of the British Library will cover photographers active in India and South-East Asia and the second on photographers active in the Ottoman Empire. Gracious thanks to John for sharing his decades of research with us.
Once integrated, and with supporting images, these will fill in many gaps in our knowledge. Emails with John Falconer have made me rethink how the biographies are handled on Luminous-Lint and I will start to add links, images and footnotes into them in the same way that the Themes are covered. Over time this will allow us a trace back on all information.
If you have biographies of photographers that you are willing to share for the benefit of the community let me know. Additions are always welcome.
On Luminous-Lint there are over 2,100 portraits of photographers and I'm always seeking examples. So if you know of a portrait, have one in your collection or you have taken one please let me know. Thanks.
As the website evolves it becomes apparent that there are regions where certain styles or movements did not occur. This may be because subjects are under-studied, the research is in languages I can't read (and that is most!) or there are regional / cultural differences and the knowledge gaps reflect that. So I'm interested in hearing about the following topics:
- Pictorialism in South America and Africa
- Experimental photography (abstraction, photograms, collages, different viewpoints etc) outside of North America and Europe
- Modernism in Asia
- Non-Western fashion photography (1920-1970)
Are there cultural reasons why abstraction appears not to be found in certain parts of the world? What knowledge gaps do you find intriguing in the histories of photography? Please share your thoughts with me on this as it will assist in planning. Thanks.
A subscription has been introduced for certain parts of the website to cover some of the costs of running this vast project. I‘ve carried the costs over the last 12 years happily but the scale of the project is such that support is necessary to ensure its long term future. I‘ve made the subscriptions as low as possible and I‘m confident that the unparallelled content is worth every cent.
Details about subscriptions
Each Theme progresses through an iterative cycle of four phases:
Collect – Here the Online Exhibitions and Visual Indexes for each Theme are added as a starting point. A number of Fragments are created that contain images, videos and starting texts. A Further Research section is created to list the supporting publications and relevant websites.
Document – Each section within a Theme is reviewed for supporting quotations and original sources. Footnotes are added for each piece of text: for example, take a look at the footnotes for the Documentary theme (be patient). At any stage the texts can be improved in the light of fresh research and new images added to illustrate the points made.
Analyse – Using the textual material patterns need to be teased out, introductions added and conclusions proposed. Linking texts will need to be added between fragments to ensure a flow between the texts and examples.
Improve – By the end of the “Analyse” phase the text should be pretty solid but nothing is ever fixed and so the improvement phase is continuous in the light of new research.
At the moment Themes are in the “Collect” and “Document” phases and these will provide many photographs to you, with intriguing connections and an ever-increasing range of supporting material.
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Malcolm Arbuthnot (1877, 27 March - 1967) was born - Great Britain, Surrey, Cobham. British photographer and an accomplished watercolorist who joined the ‘Linked Ring‘ in 1907. He also signed the Vorticist Movement manifesto ‘BLAST‘ in 1914. He was a friend of George Bernard Shaw who shared his interests in More...
Robert Flynt (1956, 27 March - ) was born - US, MA, Williamtown. American photographer.
Edward Grazda (1947, 27 March - ) was born - US, NY, New York. Series on Afghanistan and the mosques of New York.
Edward Steichen (1879, 27 March - 1973, 25 March) was born - Luxembourg. American painter and photographer born in Luxembourg. His career was varied with outstanding pictorialist work and a close relationship with the Photo-Secession movement of Alfred Stieglitz, interspersed with periods of photographic experimentation More...
Ueda Shõji (1913, 27 March - 2000) was born - Japan, Tottori-ken, Saihaku-gun, Sakai-cho. Japanese photographer.
Hercules Florence (1804, 29 February - 1879, 27 March) died - Brazil. Brazilian resident who, it has been claimed, independently invented photography in around 1832/1833 and may have preceded Fox Talbot and Daguerre. The evidence for this is uncertain and at times ambiguous.
[Further advice and More... |
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