Scientific Outputs
Presentations
Apresentado- Flores, Victor, ‘The rhetoric on stereoscopy: the discourses about stereoscopy in Portuguese specialized journals’, aceite (Fevereiro 2014) para apresentação na 6th International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science, 04-06 Setembro, Lisboa.
Resumo / Abstract
- Abstract: The present paper aims to characterize the reception of stereoscopy in Portugal and how it was communicated to the professional and amateur photographers through the discourses published in several specialized journals on photography. These publications help us to recognize what were the proposed stereoscopy qualities and advantages, and to analyse the beliefs expressed on this 'new technique’. We’ll present an analysis of the specialized journals on photography published in Portugal between 1869 and 1945 (respectively, the date of the first publication and approximate date of the last photographs). Unlike the more generalist publications, these journals were composed of articles on the photographic medium, its practices and progress. Their editorial currentness depended on frequent collaborations with foreign authors who fed the 'state of the art' of the journals and also their reflective vocation. The heuristic value of these publications is due to the fact that they don’t restrict themselves to the condition of 'technical manuals' or to the 'lessons of photography' that characterized the vast majority of books in this period. They are, in fact, a privileged site for observing how this new technology was appropriated and announced to the early practitioners of photography. On the other hand, these publications are supported by advertising, particularly advertising from the 'world of photography' (studios, cameras and technical material), which enables the understanding of the role that topoi and rhetoric played as cultural discourses in these mediation strategies.
Apresentado- Flores, Teresa M., ‘Stereoscopic Photography and the genderization of the gaze. The case of the 19th century Collection Fernando Santana Cardoso’, aceite para apresentação na Conferência Gender in Focus, 20-21 de Junho de 2014, Universidade do Minho.
- Aceite para apresentação- Painel “Stereo Visual Culture and the Cinematic Impulse”, aceite (Abril 2014) para apresentação na 5th European Communication Conference (ECREA), 12-15 Novembro, Lisboa
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Early stereoscopy played a decisive role in the modern industrialization of images. It launched photography as a mass medium by organizing a system of image production and distribution that laid the groundwork for the industrial language of cinema and for its renowned 'apparatus'. Stereoscopy standardized formats, patented cameras and viewers, marketed collections with thematic, pedagogical and narrative series, ensuring production from international editorial companies which kept photographic missions all over the world. Besides this infrastructural similarity, since the 1850s, the massive production of stereocards gave rise to a visual culture that prepared the viewers to experience images in isolated and immersive spaces and to be optically transported while their bodies remained immobile. There was a cinematic impulse in stereoscopy whether we consider its technical structure and market orientation, its contents or its visual effects. This panel is presented by the research project 'Stereo Visual Culture. The Visual Culture of Portuguese Stereoscopic Photography'. It aims to demonstrate how the Portuguese stereographs have contributed to our current perception of stereoscopy as a proto-cinematic medium. The large number of collections of stereographs in the Portuguese public archives and museums allows us to present a diversified set of papers that analyze the cinematic in different perspectives: in the visual effects of early paper stereo transparencies; in the 'narrative drive' developed in the series formats of stereo collections; in the frequent travel themes of the stereographs that created an early virtual tourism; in the actualities model followed by late stereoscopy to document the political and social reality; or in multiple technical experiments that searched for a virtual movement or fictional effects. Cinema had a proto-history in the stereo visual culture. This idea is brilliantly suggested by Walter Benjamin in his essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (1939) when he mentions the stereo device Kaiserpanorama: "Before cinema started to create its own audience, the audience was already meeting at the Kaiserpanorama to receive images (which were no longer static)." This panel intends to recover that proto-history through the multiple sensory experiments that later signaled cinema's attractions as magical.
Aceite para apresentação- Flores, Victor, “Estereoscopio Portuguez”. The Stereoscopic Actualities of Aurélio Paz dos Reis”aceite (Abril 2014) para apresentação na 5th European Communication Conference (ECREA), 12-15 Novembro, Lisboa
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Abstract: Early stereoscopy has played a crucial role in the industrialization and in the modern consumption of images. To ensure mass-produced images and worldwide distribution, stereocard editors created a standardized system that anticipated the industrial language of cinema. Furthermore, the similarity between early stereoscopy themes and visual effects to those later developed by cinema has enabled its description as a proto- cinematic medium or as a ‘prototypical attraction’ (Gurevitch, 2013). Although most studies about stereoscopy are stricted to the nineteenth century, foreseeing the rise of cinema as the decline of stereoscopy, in Portugal the cinematic was instead intensified in the late stereoscopy largely produced until the 1930s. One of the most paradigmatic examples are the stereographs of Aurélio Paz dos Reis. Aurélio Paz dos Reis (1862- 1931) was a Portuguese late stereographer whose interests in cinema were famous since he was the author of the first referenced film in Portugal, named Workers Leaving the Shirt Factory Confiança, after Lumiere Brothers’ famous film. Paz dos Reis was one of the most active Portuguese stereo photographers (his collection comprehends more than 8000 stereo plates) whose stereographs were awarded in the Universal Exhibitions of Paris (1900) and St Louis (1904), and regularly published in the press during his lifetime. His late stereoscopy met a completely new context in visual industry when compared with early stereoscopy. Halftone printing, photographic postcards and cinema had taken over as major systems of image distribution. Their market orientation led them to resume the representations of distant and exotic landscapes or monuments that stereoscopy first developed as its ‘attractions’. This context allowed Paz dos Reis to move his stereo camera towards another program that shaped cinema since the start: the ‘actualities’. Paz dos Reis’ actualities were the political and social realities that shaped that particular period in Portugal: the republican and freemasonry events and the leisure activities of the new industrial class. These themes are covered by Paz dos Reis with the same cinematic gaze specific to the cinema actualities: an interest for documenting reality and for capturing life, specially crowds, in its spontaneous movement with improvised shots. These instant views happen to be positive to stereoscopic effects because they often contribute to a disorder and greater distribution of the figures in the planes, and therefore to a greater perception of depth. In this presentation we will analyze how Paz dos Reis’ actualities, often commercialized in stereocards under the name “Estereoscopio Portuguez” (“Portuguese Stereoscope”), originally combined a stereo and a cinematic gaze that resulted in a dynamic and unique realism unmatched by later photojournalistic reportage. This study is included in the research project ‘Stereo Visual Culture’ which has done an extensive analysis of Paz dos Reis’ large collection and has found several cinematic experiments prepared by two different exposures in the same photographic plate. Selected sets of images will be presented and analyzed to demonstrate how the cinematic was intensified in late stereoscopy.
Aceite para apresentação- Flores, Teresa M.; Medeiros, Margarida, “The passage to cinema: photographic stereoscopic narratives and early film tradition”, aceite (Abril 2014) para apresentação na 5th European Communication Conference (ECREA), 12-15 Novembro, Lisboa.
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Most of the film historians of early movies pay attention to the moment, around 1900, when the previous one-shot movie that characterized first films and particularly Lumières’ cinematograph, gave its way to the multi-shot short narrative film, such as “Stop Thief!”(1901) and “Fire!” (1902) by Williamson, “La Voyage à la Lune” (1902), by George Méliès, or “Life of an American Fireman!” (1903), by Porter. This fact is often explained by the imperatives and desires of storytelling that demanded more complex films than those of only one shot. Moreover, this “narrative drive” has been recognized by film historiography as a major step towards the invention of film language and its special way of thinking through “montage” and “décopage” (Mitry; Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson; Gunning). Influences of magic lantern shows, travelogues, vaudeville and the Victorian novel have been stated (as in the influent 1944 essay by Sergei Eisenstein “Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today”). However, in this paper we will draw upon a rather less stressed influence: the narrative stereoscopic photographic series. Stereoscopy was among the most popular types of photographic technologies of the second half of the nineteenth century. It gave rise to a global mass media visual industry whose model would strongly shape film industry, not only in the type of distribution but also in the intertwining of production practices and photography aesthetics, envisaging popularity. Our focus will be a set of stereoscopic cards, staging different stories, that belongs to Fernando Santana Cardoso’s stereoscopic collection owned by the Portuguese National Archive Torre do Tombo. The stories are: “Un Marriage Sous Louis XV”, adapted from the famous play by Alexandre Dumas Father; “Fables de La Fontaine: Le Geai Paré des Plumes du Paon” and “Groupes et Scènes de Fantaisie” - all of which produced by the french stereoscopic editors Furne fils et H. Tournier. There are also english stories: “Out of Sight”; “The Old Bachelor” and “Mysterious Appointment”. These cards are often numbered to guide the spectator through the story. However, seriality and collections were common forms of stereoscopic consumption. We will analyze the adaptation of a previous text to the stereoscopic mode; the “montage” and “décopage” strategies in use; the use of “subtitles”; the most popular subject matters of these stories and image compositions regarding stereoscopic effects. We will relate it to early movies’ storytelling strategies and to contemporary 3D films and “staged photography”.
Aceite para apresentação- Reis, Vitor dos, “The Body as Hypothesis: Superimposition, Transparency and Succession in Francisco Afonso Chaves (1857-1926)”, aceite (Abril 2014) para apresentação na 5th European Communication Conference (ECREA), 12-15 Novembro, Lisboa. Abstract:
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In the extensive stereoscopic photographic work of the Portuguese naturalist Afonso Chaves (1857-1926), made between 1901 and 1926, there are multiple examples of double exposition and visual series of moving objects. The results are superimposition and interaction effects between different visions of the world, transparency and dissolution of bodies and successive transformation and disorganization of forms in space. These experiments were made after Eadweard J. Muybridge (1830-1904) and Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) but often before the photodynamics of Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1890-1960). They differ in various ways from the work of these authors but share with them the cinematic impulse that stands at the base of many transformations of the image and the visual culture of early film making. The consequence is the disbelief in the singularity of the image and of the instant (or in the wholeness and sufficiency of the single image and instant), as well as in its power. It is also the uncertainty about the idea of the body itself, seen as an organized, constant and recognizable representation. Therefore, the body emerges a hypothesis developed in space and time. The idea of the body as hypothesis in the work of Afonso Chaves is based on the effects of the incorporeal, the immaterial and the unstable resulting from the referred experiments of superimposition, transparency and visual succession made by the author. If we also keep in mind that these experiments were always made using a stereoscopic photographic machine, we understand that this dissolution of the idea of body occurs in the context of the immersion of the observing subject in a visual fiction – that is to say, through a systematic and persuasive sensorial appeal to a visual withdrawal from the real world. The consequence is, almost always and in different degrees, a powerful effect of cognitive dissonance, founded on a contradiction between the effect of reality, resulting from the media, and the fictional effect, resulting from the represented signs. In this sense, the hypothesis of body in Francisco Afonso Chaves refers to a paradoxical body in an equally paradoxical context. Above all because this derangement of the organic unity, of the constancy and of the familiarity of the bodies makes them uncertain and disturbing – uncanny or, more accurately, using Sigmund Freud’s (1856-1939) 1919 concept, unheimlich.
- Aceite para apresentação- Luz, Filipe; Peixoto, Rodrigo, “Digital Film Post-Production Remediates Stereoscopic Photography from 1860”, aceite (Abril 2014) para apresentação na 5th European Communication Conference (ECREA), 12-15 Novembro, Lisboa.
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In this paper, we intend to relate the production of visual effects for film and television with examples of stereoscopic photography of the 19th century. We will not reduce our study to methods of capture and production of three-dimensional effect of stereoscopy, but analyze how current processes of image manipulation remediate analogue technology, that could be seen on a set of stereoscopic images of the 19th century. We will try to understand whether the technological improvement has added any emotional gain to the spectator response to visual effects, as well as the importance of the stereo apparatus in this process. It was possible through the access to various Portuguese collections of stereoscopic photography consulted in the research project Stereo Visual Culture (PTDC/IVC-COM/5223/2012), to make a selection of images that use transparency effects and manipulation, by cutting or drilling the photographic paper. We aim to show that this analogue image manipulation is the basic concept for many compositions in digital cinema, and that the admiration and wondrous feeling is present in these early manipulations, as it is in state of the art 21st century visual effects. We shall also
address the importance of the stereo apparatus in the spectator response to visual effects, hoping to comprehend if, how, and in what extent, does the device influence the emotional response. Despite the complex programming of computer-generated effects in several contemporary film productions, it is a fact that these processes remediate analogue painting techniques such as the “glass shots” of Norman O. Dawn in Missions of California (1907), the double exposures of Mélies and Edwin S. Porter, or the model animations of Willis O'Brien, among others. However, visual effects main bibliography ignores stereoscopic compositions using transparencies from 1860, which could be looked upon as direct predecessors of modern created spectacular effects. As an object of study, we selected 6 stereoscopic photographs captured between 1880 and 1900 (identified and catalogued by the Stereo Visual Culture research project), and 4 photos Diableries (Series A) dated 1860-1870 (from a private collection). The original photographs were analysed on a Holmes Stereo Viewer, manufactured by BW Kilburn. Then they were reproduced in studio, using a DSLR camera (Canon 5D). After a minimal post-production manipulation (only to adapt the photographs to 3D TV), they will be displayed in a 3D screen, and observed with 3D polarized glasses by a small sample of students of higher education courses in Film, Photography and Animation, extremely familiarized with visual effects. Next, we will ask these students to visualize the same images, but now using the stereo viewer and the original analogue images. All the students will be interviewed. In these interviews, we will try to evaluate how these young students react to a 19th century stereo photography reproduction, showed in a displaying device they are familiar with, and using a technological apparatus (Holmes Stereo Viewer), in order to understand how do they categorize the impression that they produce, and what experience do they find more spectacular.
Aceite para apresentação- Bicacro, Joana, “«Viajar… em casa»: Virtual Travel in Early Portuguese Stereoscopy”, aceite (Abril 2014) para apresentação na 5th European Communication Conference (ECREA), 12-15 Novembro, Lisboa.
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The commodification of the virtual travel photographic experience is an important phenomenon of the 19th century visual cultures whose exhaustive archaeology is yet to be made. With great cultural relevance ever since, it transformed early popular media landscapes and helped promote the idea of travel as both a visual and a virtual experience. Frequently associated with postcard collections and the motion attractions of the early cinema shows—for instance, the French Maréorama or the American Hale's Tours of the World—virtual travel is, nonetheless, already present in other visual media of photographic nature throughout the second half of the 19th century, and with special significance in stereoscopic systems of domestic travel. These views of national or foreign landscapes and architectural subjects allowed for fairly cheap, condensed and organized forms of travel, at once local and distant; they were arguably, for a period, more vital as virtual tourism than the eventually dominant postcard. While turn-of-the-century American commercial stereoscopic images, such as the Underwood & Underwood travel system from the late 1890s, are well known and studied, European stereoscopy has remained in the shadow like somewhat forgotten visual media. «Viajar... em
casa» («Travelling... at home»), the title of a Portuguese stereoscopic series, reflects one of the most fundamental interests, uses and discourses of commercial stereoscopy in Portugal, from either national or foreign provenance, mostly European, from the 1860s until the 1910s. In this paper, a few case studies in the Portuguese stereoscopic visual travel systems are conducted. A representative selection of stereoscopic cards and glass plates from collections charted and studied by the Stereo Visual Culture Project are considered—namely from the «Archivo Panorâmico e Artístico» and «Viajar... em casa» series. The images are analyzed in connection with literature of the time on stereoscopy and travel, from specialist publications to generalist advertising. Ultimately, the Portuguese virtual travel stereoscopy is positioned in the context of European productions and others of the kind. The archaeological material and discursive treatment of these stereoscopic virtual travel systems allows one to bring light into subsequent cinematic voyage shows, as well as recent and present-day media transformations. Often thought to be typical of later visual technologies, such as today's forms of cyber- tourism, the idea of virtual travel promoted by the stereoscopic systems already places the viewer individually in an immersive, ritualized and programmatic engagement with distant, exotic and unknown places in the comfort of their home or in a local leisure environment. In conclusion, practices of virtual travel are seen here to have emerged from domestic tourism as mass media phenomena, together with (and not much later than) the massification of tourist travel and the expansion of transport, namely the train and the automobile, leading to changes and tensions between global and local. The stereoscopic virtual travel media concern particular modes of an immersive mediated sense of travel that combines 1) a form of miniaturization of the world, 2) an unsettling sense of displacement, and 3) a serialized and sequential experience of perambulation and travel.
Apresentado- Rosa, Jorge Leandro, “Stereoscopic photography: «Truth» and «reality» at the core of technique’s becoming”, aceite (Abril 2014) para apresentação na Conferência «Communicating Humanly in an Age of Technology and Spin: Jacques Ellul in the 21st Century», 13-15 Julho Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Resumo / Abstract
Following Jacques Ellul’s intellectual singularity, always capable of combining different sources of knowledge in order to understand technology, we will try to establish an ontological frame of today’s technical images. As he wrote, the human (and, obviously, the divine) speech (parole) is in the domain of «truth», while the image belongs to that domain we usually call «reality» (La Parole humiliée, p. 113). This kind of distinction, although theological and metaphysical, defies the current state of research in image theory. Reading Ellul, there’s clearly a distance from the vocabulary of contemporary thought, but, paradoxically, we approach some of the basic intuitions critical thought has formulated in the last fifty years. Denouncing the fracture between truth and reality, Ellul is not inviting us to a kind of reestablishment of world’s harmony, but he is rather opening a deeper understanding of the work of meaning inside technology itself. The technical system displaces, at the same time, «truth» and «reality», not in the mediated way a culture can do it, but within a movement without a cultural dimension. Meaning is neither operated through machines nor external to them, but it is at core of the technical system itself.
We intend to refer precise aspects of what we call “technical images”, discussing what could be an ellulian perspective about the development of their sphere of meaning, divorced from “truth”. Meaning is reduced to a “presentation of meaning”, as Nancy would say. Technical innovations, as stereoscopic photography in the XIXth century or 3D images in our days are possible relevant indicators of what Ellul calls «the image that becomes more real than reality itself» (my own translation). This, we feel, can be a valuable contribution to our discussion and knowledge of Ellul’s work. By presenting the history of stereoscopic photography in Portugal and elsewhere, some aspects of images dwelling with «reality» can be better perceived.
«Technical images» are no longer devices of representation, independent as they are from both truth and reality. A technical culture is never the context of some kind of sign. Image, here, is nothing more than the technological becoming of reality itself. Technique is the impossible choice between truth and reality. «Une exigence réciproque de l’image et de la technique, et finalement une sorte de connaturalité entre les deux» (La Parole humiliée, p. 165). Choices like the one between truth and reality are voided and useless in the technical system, but reappear as «resources» inscribed in the metaphysical history of technology. Our paper questions «truth/reality» in their relation to techniques and technical images. Today, philosophers like Giorgio Agamben or Jean-Luc Nancy write about a technical world without metaphysical choice. Ellul is still an essential author if we want to understand this shift in contemporary thought.
Apresentado- Flores, Victor, “O olhar estereoscópico na fotografia portuguesa: uma análise”, II Congresso Mundial de Comunicação Ibero-Americana — Os Desafios da Internacionalização, Braga, Universidade do Minho, Abril 2014.
Resumo / Abstract
Resumo: O recurso à câmara fotográfica estereoscópica foi muito comum na fotografia portuguesa, tal como o comprovam os milhares de imagens estereoscópicas produzidas em Portugal desde o século XIX e até hoje conservadas nas mais diversas instituições públicas nacionais. Disseminada entre práticas fotográficas de carácter mais amador ou mais profissional, a estereoscopia terá influenciado o olhar fotográfico ao demonstrar maior eficácia perante determinadas composições ou enquadramentos da imagem. Será assim possível concluir que a recorrência de alguns destes elementos formais favoráveis aos efeitos estereoscópicos denotam uma consciência e uma verdadeira apropriação do novo dispositivo? Por outras palavras, houve um olhar estereoscópico na fotografia portuguesa? Que influência teve nos seus temas e iconografias, assim como no seu plano formal? É possível reconhecer-se que o novo medium, vastamente referenciado por ter reestruturado a recepção das imagens modernas (vistas agora em pares e a partir de um visor), tenha também contribuído para formar o olhar dos primeiros fotógrafos nacionais? É possível avaliar se o novo medium propiciou imagens diferentes — pensadas e planeadas diferentemente? Propõe-se avaliar estas questões a partir da análise e do visionamento estereoscópico de fotografias de alguns fundos autorais conservados no Centro Português de Fotografia e abrangidos pelo projecto de investigação Cultura Visual Estéreo. A cultura visual da fotografia estereoscópica portuguesa.
Apresentado- Flores, Victor ‘Apagamentos na estereoscopia portuguesa: a necessidade de um estudo arqueológico’, Colóquio ‘Tecnologias Culturais e Artes dos Media’, Lisboa, Goethe Institut, Novembro 2013
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Resumo: A valorização kittleriana das estruturas materiais das tecnologias assentou no reconhecimento de que os media não são sistemas tecnológicos neutros, e que a sua especificidade comporta mudanças significativas nos registos e modos de produção de informação e, desde logo, na cultura de uma época. Tal abordagem no estudo dos media revela-se particularmente pertinente no estudo dos media ópticos se considerarmos a sua forte propensão para a transparência e para a transitividade. Neste artigo pretende-se salientar que a inobservância da especificidade da fotografia estereoscópica equivaleu à sua incompreensão e à sua fraca presença nos estudos da fotografia. A abordagem das estruturas materiais das tecnologias é, por princípio, um trabalho arqueológico que o estudo da estereoscopia portuguesa não pode dispensar. A dificuldade de recuperar a medialidade da estereoscopia advém não só da sua suspensão como prática fotográfica popular, da condição dos seus suportes (originais frágeis e, em grande parte, negativos) mas sobretudo da sua manifesta inadaptação e inconformidade com as transposições para o formato digital dos arquivos e dos seus ecrãs.
Apresentado- Flores, Victor, ‘Stereoscopy in Portuguese Social History of Photography: First Data. Contributions to an Archaeology of Paper Stereo Transparencies’, International Conference on the Image, Chicago, Outubro 2013.
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Resumo: The stereoscopic photography played a crucial role in everyday visual practices of the nineteenth century. The predominant form of consuming photographic image for more than half a century was through stereoscopic devices. Despite its popularity, most recent Histories of photography and studies on nineteenth-century photography omit or refer only briefly to stereoscopic practices. This paper aims to present some of the first results of a pioneer research project on stereoscopic photography in Portugal (funded by the Portuguese National Foundation for Science and Technology) which aims to increase the visibility of stereoscopy in the Portuguese social history of technical images. In this study we focus on the most renowned qualities of stereoscopic photography (three-dimensionality, tangibility and immersion) because they represent similar concerns to the challenges presented by new media (3D, touch-screens, tactile, or haptic, visuality) and we inquire how these qualities are promoted by the stereos of the main Portuguese collections. On the other hand, we intend to show how the most prevalent themes of Portuguese stereoscopy valued topics such as evasion (travel needs) and desires for closeness and intimacy.
Apresentado- Flores, Victor ‘Stereoscopic Photography: An Archaeological Display of the 21st Century Imagery’, International Congress of History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Science and Optical Media Simposium, Manchester, Julho 2013.
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The joint pathway followed by stereoscopy and photography in their first fifty years earned them expression and popularity, allowing their histories to be confused. One of the most common early ways of experiencing photography was through stereoscopic devices, most of them invented by the studies physiology devoted to vision between 1820 and 1840 regarding binocularity. On the other hand, what enabled the public success of the stereoscope was its association with photography. By applying plates, glasses or photographic papers to the stereoscope, a hybrid medium that combined two modern inventions was created. In spite of their distinct cultural heritages, the association of these inventions was able to satisfy some of the main visual needs that are still present, and clearly reinforced, in our current visual culture. The desire to peek, to touch and to experience immersive environments can be seen, we argue, as an archaeological fulfilment of some of the most required features of our imagery in the 21st Century.
Apresentado- Flores, Victor, “Preço a pagar por espreitar!: a fotografia estereoscópica e a condenação moral dos prazeres visuais”, Ciclo de conferências A Imagem Contextualizada — Entender a Fotografia, Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa | Fotográfico, Abril 2013.
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Resumo: As práticas estereoscópicas da fotografia no século XIX deixaram-se conotar com o entretenimento, tendo-se tornado incompatíveis com as novas necessidades públicas de fazer valer a fotografia como uma imagem objetiva e verdadei- ra. A popularidade da fotografia estereoscópica revela-nos que correspondeu a necessidades sociais bastante enraizadas na segunda metade do século XIX. Se, por um lado, a estereoscopia oferecia detalhe e precisão, por outro, vinha expandir a visualidade oferecendo imersão e ‘prazeres visuais’. A apropriação da fotografia pelos poderes públicos no final do século XIX exigiu que a fotografia não fosse confundida com ‘ilusões’ ou ‘truques visuais’. Esta comunicação visa esclarecer como as reprovações morais desses prazeres visuais, que inicialmente visaram os peep shows e outras caixas óticas, vieram também atingir a reputação e ameaçar a continuidade deste medium. Contrariamente aos fortes investimentos que as atuais indústrias da imagem fazem nas experiências imersivas e táteis das novas interfaces, o pioneirismo da fotografia estereoscópica nessas experiências foi criticado como desnecessário e promíscuo. Apesar de condenada desde o seu início, a relação entre fotografia e estereoscopia antecipou uma incursão das ima- gens pelos outros sentidos que hoje muito estimamos.
Apresentado- Flores, Teresa Mendes, “The King is naked: political correctness in stereoscopic visual culture”, II Simpósio Internacional do Observatório de Comunicação, Liberdade de Expressão e Censura, Escola de Comunicação e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo, Brasil, Março 2014.
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This presentation discussed the construction of the western women nude cannon in the elevated visual arts as a political correctness strategy of patriarcal societies in order to guarantee the fruition and circulation of such images in the margins of morality. Idealization, sublimation, elision of realistic detail and elevated contexts (historical, religious or mythological) were the main features of this cannon. Nonetheless, certain derivations of erotic daily feminine gestures were tolerated or even praised in engravings and other graphic (lower) arts for mass consumption, as a torrent of erotic literature emerged in the french revolution context. Such themes, like the moment of the bath, or the daily “toillete” at the mirror, or even the rescue moments of saving an endangered woman (escaping from a mouse, for instance!), were all very popular stories coming mostly from french comedies. With examples taken from Fernando Santana Cardoso (Torre do Tombo Archive) and MiMo’s (Museu da Imagem em Movimento - Leiria)collections of stereograms, we showed how this tradition was taken by erotic stereoscopy during the nineteenth and early twenty centuries. However, “artistic nudes” stereographs could never be accepted as “really” artistic. One of the reasons, besides mass reproduction, was the excessive detail and realism, on one hand, and the immersive, “almost real” tactile effect of stereoscopy, on the other. The act of looking itself became censored, specially among women spectators. This occurred because the medium notoriety became connoted with these erotic images that could barely be “ideal” or “unrealistic” at the time, as the cannon determined. However, this reaction seemed not to have stopped the circulation and popularity of these images as we encounter many preserved copies and comments on it. They certainly played a major part in the constitution of the contemporary naturalization of nudity as being feminine.
-Apresentado- Flores, Teresa Mendes, ‘The visual appropriation of landscape through stereoscopic photography: the «landscapes with spectators» of Alberto Marçal Brandão and the problem of immersive contemplation’, II Congresso Mundial de Comunicação Ibero-Americana: Os desafios da internacionalização. Confibercom, Abril 2014, Universidade do Minho, Braga.
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This presentation addressed the relation between photography and landscape through the particular case of a set of stereoscopic photographies - or “views” - made by the Oporto’s amateur photographer Alberto Marçal Brandão (1848 - 1919), whose collection is at the Centro Português de Fotografia. In these views he represented rural landscapes being viewed by a male spectator, seen most frequently backwards and positioned in the foreground. Dating back, at least from the renaissance, the presence of these figures was, not by chance, introduced in maps and engravings of cityscapes during the seventeen century, and came to be a theme praised by romantic artists as they imbedded aesthetic emotions in forms of visual contemplation, as well as immersion, into landscape. Alberto Marçal Brandão’s work was than discussed in relation with this tradition and with the specific effects delivered by the new medium of stereoscopy: both immersive and contemplative; detailed and eye-embracing; much in accordance with the model of the “subjective view” debated by Jonathan Crary, but not at all dispensing a (represented) distance between subject and object (the camera obscura model), challenging Crary’s conceptualization. We also addressed the ideological meanings of these practices as they empowered the (male) subject in a symbolic possession of nature, revealing Landscape not much as only a pictorial genre but as an ideological practice of imperial western societies.
-Apresentado- Joana Bicacro, ’Vistas atípicas: A estereografia de viagem de Artur Benaruf' II Congresso Mundial de Comunicação Ibero-Americana — Os Desafios da Internacionalização, Braga, Universidade do Minho, Abril 2014.
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Abstract: The circulation of technical images was accompanied, from its inception, by discourses on travel and tourism as eminently visual experiences. Between mid-nineteenth century and early twentieth century, there is an expansion of a set of new media with a vocation for virtual travel and armchair tourism, and among them we find stereoscopic travel collections. Parallel to international tourist flows and personal travel photo albums, stereo travel collections emerged as opportunities of immersion in remote and exotic locations and other places of interest. Following current research on visual media archaeology and stereoscopy, this study inspects Artur Benaruf’s travel stereoscopic photographs, a collection belonging to Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa—Núcleo Fotográfico archives. This Portuguese amateur stereo-photographer travelled and photographed heavily in the first decades of the twentieth century and also collected commercial travel stereoscopy. In view of the analysis of what could be called stereoscopic effects (of depth, tangibility, volume, etc.) and other visual aspects, we compare Benaruf’s travel production with both the stereoscopic images owned by the photographer and other contemporaneous commercial collections. It is found that effects of tangibility and depth were privileged in most of the images, enhancing a sense of being in a tridimensional space. A set of photographic decisions is isolated. These decisions and practices are related, at once, to the typification of a stereoscopic gesture and touristic regard, in homogenous stereoscopic views of travel.
-Apresentado- Reis, Vítor dos, «Ascensão, Voo e Sucessão: Francisco Afonso Chaves e Jacques Henri Lartigue no Campeonato Gordon-Bennett em Paris (1906)», Colóquio Movimento e Mobilização Técnica. Coordenação: José Bragança de Miranda, Lisboa, Institut Français du Portugal / CECL / FCSH-UNL, Março 2013.
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Resumo.
A 30 de Setembro de 1906, iniciou-se em Paris, com partida do Jardim das Tulherias, a primeira edição do campeonato aeronáutico Gordon Bennett. Nesta competição internacional participaram dezasseis grandes balões, as primeiras máquinas voadoras da história. A observar e a fotografar o acontecimento estava, entre a numerosa assistência, o açoriano Francisco Afonso Chaves (1857-1926), um dos mais eminentes naturalistas portugueses do final do século XIX e início do XX.
Debruçando-se sobre diferentes áreas, como a biologia, a geologia e a geofísica, em especial a sismologia, a vulcanologia e a meteorologia, o Coronel Afonso Chaves, incansável viajante, correspondeu-se com alguns dos mais importantes cientistas da sua época e, de forma precursora, foi um dos principais defensores da criação de um serviço meteorológico internacional. Dedicou-se também ao estudo da flora e da fauna dos Açores e teve ainda um papel importante na criação daquele que é hoje o Museu Carlos Machado, em Ponta Delgada. Quase totalmente ignorada é, no entanto, a sua actividade de fotógrafo, que exerceu de forma constante e paralela às suas actividades científicas. O seu nome não é referido em nenhuma história ou síntese da fotografia portuguesa. No entanto, a extensa obra por si legada, cujo estudo foi por nós iniciado, apresenta uma qualidade ímpar, tanto em termos nacionais como internacionais. Com uma particularidade notável: ser quase exclusivamente constituída por imagens estereoscópicas, destinadas a ser observadas através de óculos Vérascope e, desse modo, a produzir no observador uma verosímil percepção visual tridimensional.
A 30 de Setembro de 1906, no Jardim das Tulherias, Francisco Afonso Chaves realizou pelo menos 23 fotografias estereoscópicas. Três delas, do balão de Alberto Santos Dumont (1873-1932), são muito semelhantes às fotografias feitas – no mesmo local, à mesma hora e, tanto quanto é possível avaliar, de um ponto de vista muito próximo – por Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986). O objectivo da comunicação aqui proposta é analisar esta coincidência entre as fotografias de Afonso Chaves, então com 49 anos de idade, e de Lartigue, apenas com 12, dois fotógrafos que partilharam não só o gosto pela fotografia estereoscópica, como pela representação do dinamismo mecânico. Nesse sentido, procurar-se-á também demonstrar a importância que a representação visual do movimento, em especial de máquinas voadoras, e do tempo, através do recurso a séries fotográficas (como a do campeonato Gordon-Bennett), tem na obra estereoscópica de Afonso Chaves. Nesse sentido, esta constitui um dos mais importantes e até agora desconhecidos contributos para a história da modernidade visual portuguesa e para a emergência da sequencialidade temporal, da transformação dinâmica e da velocidade na fotografia em Portugal.
Apresentado- Reis, Vítor dos, «O sujeito vidente e a experiência visionária: o estatuto do observador na cultura visual», Conferência no âmbito das Conferências Públicas / Curso de Doutoramento 2011-12, Lisboa, Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa, Março 2012.
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Tendo em conta a centralidade dos conceitos de ilusão, ficção e imersão e a valorização da subjectividade na cultura artística pós-renascentista na conferência procura-se analisar e compreender as transformações operadas no conceito de visão e no estatuto do observador quando este passa de sujeito visual a sujeito vidente: aquele que vê mais, que vê para além do visível e, nesse acto, é capaz de ver o que de outro modo seria invisível. Para tanto, recorrer-se-á à apresentação e discussão da obra fotográfica estereoscópica de Francisco Afonso Chaves (1857-1926).
Aceite–Peixoto, Rodrigo, ”How the Artistic momentum of the late 19th century traditional photography has expelled stereo photography.", submetido (Fevereiro de 2014) para apresentação no ECREA, Lisboa, Novembro de 2014.
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Resumo
In this text, we will try to understand in what ways was the artistic meaning structured in traditional photography practice, and how did these ideas influence the refusal of stereo photography by late 19th century photographers who claimed an artistic expression for photography.
By analyzing the ideas of the photographers that founded the “Brotherhood of the linked ring” in England (1893), and the ones expressed by Portuguese photographers in “Arte Photographica” (an illustrated magazine published in the years 1884 and 1885), we will try to formulate a traditional photography model of communication, as an artistic expression, at the end of the 19th century. Then, we will compare these observations with all the information gathered by the research project Stereo Visual Culture (PTDC/IVC- COM/5223/2012), trying to understand the reasons for the refusal of stereo photography by the photographers that were pursuing an artistic expression in the 19th century photography.
At the end of the 19th century, image displaying devices and all the exhibition and communication structure of a pictorial artistic object were inextricably connected to two dimensional and monocular image types. The need to establish a visual common ground to the spectator, located in the object being exhibited, found no place in the fruition of stereo photography. For not only a stereoscopy could not be appreciated in the same way as art had always been showed, but above all, the technological imposition of a physical apparatus, which was an obvious characteristic of stereo photography, established a new and unique paradigm for vision.
The disruption between perception and object introduced by stereo photography causes a fracture in the idea of art as it was understood at the time, and it seemed to disempower the object, by removing from it the visual qualities that made it art. In stereo photography, perception has been detached from the object, although it is triggered by it. The visual object (the card or piece of glass in which the stereo pair has been printed) exists as a code that has to be deciphered through the imposition of a vision/sensation catalyst device (stereo viewer) to the human body, where it becomes visible. While traditional photography, in its artistic momentum, was enduring in a path towards the past, searching for pictorial forms that could bring it closer to neoclassical and renascence masters, stereo photography, on the other hand, was imposing its technological singularity to the images it produced, in an obvious way.
In the late 19th century, when painting was escaping from the representation of the real, and traditional photography was forgetting its most cutting edge qualities by pursuing a pictorial rendering of the photographic image, stereo photography could not allow for pictorial whims. In it, the real imposed itself beyond its physical appearance; the vision of reality was a property of the subject, parted from the physical world.
Aceite para apresentação- Flores, Teresa M., ‘The Visual Culture of Stereoscopy in Portugal: Haptic Images and The Human Body’, aceite (Fevereiro 2014) para apresentação na 6th International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science, 04-06 Setembro, Lisboa.
- Apresentado –Flores, Victor, ” The Opportunity to a Portuguese Stereo Archaeology: The Contribution of The Historical Discourses.", submetido (Junho de 2014) para apresentação no Archaeologies of Media and Film, Bradford, Setembro de 2014.
Resumo / Abstract
The current interest in 3D immersive environments assures us that history is recursive and that the sensory challenges brought by stereoscopy during the 19th Century were again offered to the general public. This is one reason that allows us to distinguish stereoscopic photography as a relevant subject for media archaeology. The Portuguese research project 'Stereo Visual Culture' aims to contribute to the archaeology of Portuguese stereoscopic photography (public collections, authors, publishers, themes and techniques, distribution systems, critique and published discourses). The late emergence of photography archives (both local and national) and the recent creation of a few museums specialized in technical images enabled a sudden growth of the public collections of Portuguese stereoscopic photography. This new scenario that has enriched the archives by the end of the 20th Century is particularly revealing because it denounced the significant omission of stereoscopy in the historical studies of photography and in many institutional discourses and publications.
Besides this recent and favorable conjuncture of the Portuguese public museums and archives — which has allowed the 'Stereo Visual Culture’ to identify over 28,000 stereo pairs in 41 public collections—, the archaeology of Portuguese stereoscopy can also benefit from the analysis of significant historical discourses that enthousiastically welcomed stereoscopy in several specialized journals on photography. Although these publications have been avaiable for longer decades in the National Libraries, they’ve remained almost unoticed and unremarked in the Portuguese studies of photography.
This paper aims to characterize the reception of stereoscopy in Portugal through the discourses published in several specialized journals on photography. These publications help us to recognize what were the announced qualities and advantages of stereoscopy, and are quite resourceful to identify the beliefs adressed to this 'new technique’ regarding its invention and, later, its suspension. It will be presented an analysis of the specialized journals on photography published in Portugal between 1869 and 1945 (respectively, the date of the first publication and approximate date of the last stereo photographs), in order to demonstrate how this new technology was received and announced to society and, in particular, to the early practitioners of photography. A special note will be made to the advertising that filled many pages of such publications: these were ads from the 'world of photography' (studios, cameras and technical material) that revealed the important role that topoi and rhetoric played as cultural discourses in the mediation of this new technical system.
