Journal Articles by Michelle Henning
Digital Culture and Society, 2022
This paper considers emotion recognition and sentiment analysis in
relation to social media photo... more This paper considers emotion recognition and sentiment analysis in
relation to social media photographs. It addresses this as part of a
larger regime of surveillance and control, in which photographs are
treated as symptoms for a diagnosis, and are quantified as data. Automated
emotion recognition approaches are capable in principle of
analysing the visual qualities of social photos insofar as these can be
measured and represented numerically. In reducing the photograph
to data, they select out features of the image, as a means to explain or
describe a mental state that lies behind or beyond the image. To treat
photographs as emotionally expressive goes against the historical idea
of the photograph as objective recording. Originally, the idea that photographs
could move their viewers was linked to the sense of photography
as detached documentation. Today, more and more people take
and share photographs as part of a larger shift in emotional culture,
which places a therapeutic sense of self at the heart of economy and
governance. Yet while people use mobile phone photos as a means of
expressive documentation and self-representation, emotion recognition
relies on a behaviourist and positivist model that is indifferent
to their intentions and to culture, and which is premised on a myth of
total knowledge.
Visual Culture in Britain, 2020
During the 1930s, new photographic technologies and practices addressed the difficulties of deali... more During the 1930s, new photographic technologies and practices addressed the difficulties of dealing with different kinds of climate, in Britain and her colonies. This article draws on archival material associated with two brands of photographic film manufactured in England by Ilford Limited: Selochrome and Dufaycolor. It describes these films as involved in a process of 'worlding', and as part of a 'photography complex' which produces the tropics and the British seaside as testing grounds for photography. Worlding involves the harnessing of light and air, the recalibration of bodies, the redistribution of sensory experiences and the production of new materialities.
photographies, 2018
This essay is about the phenomenon of mass, mobile photographic images in a digital, networked co... more This essay is about the phenomenon of mass, mobile photographic images in a digital, networked context. In response to recent writings that challenge the relevance of the close reading of singular images, it proposes rethinking the opposition between singular images and images en masse through philosophical ideas of multiplicity and, in particular, via the concept of image flow. It examines four connected contexts in which concepts of flow have been used: in discourses surrounding the internet and digital media, where it is used to naturalise these media; in psychology, where ideas of flow underpin descriptions of consciousness and human/animal perception; in robotics and artificial intelligence, where ideas of flow from psychology joined with a move away from dependence on representation to facilitate increasingly autonomous mobile machines; and finally in studies of television, where the on-tap transmission of images has been understood in terms of a flow that articulates or choreographs bodies and attention, connecting the rhythms and temporality of private and public space, cities and suburbs. This model of flow, in particular, allows for analysis that operates across different scales, and undoes oppositions of scale and surface/ depth that pervade recent photography theory. If you don't have access to photographies via your institution download this and click on the link.
Holes: Colonialism and Negative Space in Modernist Photography
This paper takes as its starting point ideas about documentary which have emerged in contemporary... more This paper takes as its starting point ideas about documentary which have emerged in contemporary art photography, as one context for reconsidering an earlier moment in photography. In particular I am concerned with the idea of «holes» as a strategy in documentary and in fashion photography. I look at early travel photographs taken by American fashion photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe in the 1920s in the context of her Modernist interest in negative space. This interest had a very particular effect on the representation of colonial space and colonial subjects, and needs to be understood in relation to a modern, Western and feminine experience of travel.
Photographies 10:2, 2017, pages 157-178
(If you don't have access to this journal via your univer... more Photographies 10:2, 2017, pages 157-178
(If you don't have access to this journal via your university please message me and I may be able to give you a link which will give you one free eprint from the publishers.)
A number of writers have noted the influence of Ernst Benkard’s 1927 book of death masks, Das Ewige Antlitz, on Modernist artists and writers of the inter-war period. This article links it specifically to the emergence in the late 1920s of a very particular way of photographing people, termed here “the floating face”, which is epitomised in publicity portraits of Greta Garbo. It is suggested that this photographic convention is linked to changing attitudes associated with war, to the techniques of cinema, and to surrealism, but also to the influence of Benkard’s book. The resemblance between the death mask image and movie star portrait is significant for an understanding of the origins and affective impact of a certain photographic style. This essay also suggests that the death mask as a figure in film and photography theory emerges out of this particular style of photography, and this specific social and cultural context, but then becomes applied to “the photograph” in general. It is argued that the idea of photographs as like death masks is overdetermined by the social and cultural context of 1920s Europe.
Victorian Literature and Culture, 2007
Radical Philosophy 145, Sep 2007
Book Chapters by Michelle Henning
5 Feeling Photos: Photography, Picture Language and Mood Capture
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Jan 26, 2021
BRILL eBooks, Mar 1, 2023
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
What can media archaeology offer to the study of museums or, alternatively, what can museums cont... more What can media archaeology offer to the study of museums or, alternatively, what can museums contribute to an understanding of media archaeology? Even while museums are not, strictly, media, I propose that media archaeology can help us think about how museums construct the material objects that they contain, and that conversely, thinking about how museums construct their objects can facilitate a different kind of engagement
with media archaeology. In particular, I am interested here in the museum’s transformation of objects into documents. As I will argue, the transformation of the
object into document occurs through an act of detachment or “cutting”, through techniques of display and through a kind of training of the senses and the body of the visitor. While some media archaeologists use the term “archaeology” loosely to allude to an excavation of lost, discarded and defunct media, the tradition that links media archaeology to Michel Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge is the focus here.
The International Handbooks of Museum Studies, Jul 5, 2015
This chapter explores ideas and arguments about the proliferation and circulation of photographic... more This chapter explores ideas and arguments about the proliferation and circulation of photographic and digital reproductions of art. The existence of widely circulated reproductions before photography, and the early mingling of photography with painting and print-making, demonstrates that the distinction between photographic reproduction and hand-made original was always blurred. Even so, this distinction has informed thinking about art, reproduction, and museums. In the early twentieth century, artists, curators, and art theorists thought that photography and photomechanical reproduction threatened the original work of art. The concepts of “originality,” “aura,” “facture,” and “style” became key, to distinguish photomechanical prints from valuable artworks, photography from painting. A new way of seeing seemed to be emerging – which treated reproduction as transparent, placed high value on originality and facture, and found new stylistic connections between images in the “museum without walls.” Modern forms of attention seemed to challenge the individualistic model of aesthetic contemplation enshrined in museums. Building on these early ideas, and situating them in relation to more recent discussion of digital and electronic media, this chapter argues that new practices of personal photography and image sharing require us to re-imagine the museum with and without walls: as potentially more “delirious,” playful, anarchic, and plural.
Museums and Media Archaeology: An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst
The International Handbooks of Museum Studies, 2013
The Art of The Text, 2012
In 1920s Vienna, as part of the larger socialist experiment that earned the city the nickname 'Re... more In 1920s Vienna, as part of the larger socialist experiment that earned the city the nickname 'Red Vienna', the picture language of Isotype was born. It was the invention of the Vienna Circle philosopher and sociologist Otto Neurath, working with a team of artists and researchers at his Gesellschafts-undWirtschaftsmuseum (museum of society and economy, hereafter GWM). Isotype began as the Vienna method of pictorial statistics, a means of making statistical information and comparison legible to non-expert and even semi-literate audiences through the use of pictures. Later, it became Isotype, an acronym for International System of Typographic Picture Education. Individual symbols or pictograms were made as ink drawings, then lino-cuts (later metal letter-press blocks). These were printed, cut out and pasted onto charts for display in exhibitions or for publication. A key innovation of Isotype was in the way it represented quantities as repeated pictograms of identical size, not as differences in size or volume. In this way Isotype made visual statistics measurable, because the number of pictograms could be counted and compared to the given numerical figures, but it was also far less dependent on written labels and contextual information than previous methods. Isotype was among the first standardized systems for representing social facts in pictures, and the elegance of its visual solutions arguably remains unsurpassed. 1 [fig1]
The Afterlife of Animals, 2011
The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, 1995
Nanoq: Flat-out and Bluesome, 2006
This chapter was published in 2006 in In Bryndis Snaebjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson, Nanoq: Flat-ou... more This chapter was published in 2006 in In Bryndis Snaebjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson, Nanoq: Flat-out and Bluesome, Blackdog Press, pp. 25-46 ISBN 1-904772-39-0
It centres on a comparison between realist taxidermy (pioneered by Carl Akeley among others) and photography. Snaebjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson's contemporary art project, Nanoq: Flat-out and Bluesome, brings together these two means of representation. In doing so, it makes vivid their common characteristics. Both photography and taxidermy are technologies of preservation and deal in the frozen moment. Both are, in semiotic terms, indexes; signs which have a direct connection to the things they stand for. The living lug the dead with them, sex suspends lover, outside the passing of time, and a stillness in motion characterises the photograph's odd relationship to its referent. This is the tragedy taxidermy shares with photography, since it is made from the corpse of that which it depicts. The 'truth-claim' of a taxidermied animal is stubborn even if its appearance is sometimes unconvincing. Its truthfulness rests not on the mediation of machines, or of physics and chemistry but on the fact that it is, residually but fundamentally, part-formed from the animal itself. If taking a photograph was a sublimated murder according to Sontag, taxidermy owes its very existence to an act of violence or a death: its realism is deadly.
The subject as object: photography and the human body.
New media.
A Companion to Museum Studies, 2007
New lamps for old: photography, obsolescence and social change.
Residual Media, 2007
Uploads
Journal Articles by Michelle Henning
relation to social media photographs. It addresses this as part of a
larger regime of surveillance and control, in which photographs are
treated as symptoms for a diagnosis, and are quantified as data. Automated
emotion recognition approaches are capable in principle of
analysing the visual qualities of social photos insofar as these can be
measured and represented numerically. In reducing the photograph
to data, they select out features of the image, as a means to explain or
describe a mental state that lies behind or beyond the image. To treat
photographs as emotionally expressive goes against the historical idea
of the photograph as objective recording. Originally, the idea that photographs
could move their viewers was linked to the sense of photography
as detached documentation. Today, more and more people take
and share photographs as part of a larger shift in emotional culture,
which places a therapeutic sense of self at the heart of economy and
governance. Yet while people use mobile phone photos as a means of
expressive documentation and self-representation, emotion recognition
relies on a behaviourist and positivist model that is indifferent
to their intentions and to culture, and which is premised on a myth of
total knowledge.
(If you don't have access to this journal via your university please message me and I may be able to give you a link which will give you one free eprint from the publishers.)
A number of writers have noted the influence of Ernst Benkard’s 1927 book of death masks, Das Ewige Antlitz, on Modernist artists and writers of the inter-war period. This article links it specifically to the emergence in the late 1920s of a very particular way of photographing people, termed here “the floating face”, which is epitomised in publicity portraits of Greta Garbo. It is suggested that this photographic convention is linked to changing attitudes associated with war, to the techniques of cinema, and to surrealism, but also to the influence of Benkard’s book. The resemblance between the death mask image and movie star portrait is significant for an understanding of the origins and affective impact of a certain photographic style. This essay also suggests that the death mask as a figure in film and photography theory emerges out of this particular style of photography, and this specific social and cultural context, but then becomes applied to “the photograph” in general. It is argued that the idea of photographs as like death masks is overdetermined by the social and cultural context of 1920s Europe.
Book Chapters by Michelle Henning
with media archaeology. In particular, I am interested here in the museum’s transformation of objects into documents. As I will argue, the transformation of the
object into document occurs through an act of detachment or “cutting”, through techniques of display and through a kind of training of the senses and the body of the visitor. While some media archaeologists use the term “archaeology” loosely to allude to an excavation of lost, discarded and defunct media, the tradition that links media archaeology to Michel Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge is the focus here.
It centres on a comparison between realist taxidermy (pioneered by Carl Akeley among others) and photography. Snaebjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson's contemporary art project, Nanoq: Flat-out and Bluesome, brings together these two means of representation. In doing so, it makes vivid their common characteristics. Both photography and taxidermy are technologies of preservation and deal in the frozen moment. Both are, in semiotic terms, indexes; signs which have a direct connection to the things they stand for. The living lug the dead with them, sex suspends lover, outside the passing of time, and a stillness in motion characterises the photograph's odd relationship to its referent. This is the tragedy taxidermy shares with photography, since it is made from the corpse of that which it depicts. The 'truth-claim' of a taxidermied animal is stubborn even if its appearance is sometimes unconvincing. Its truthfulness rests not on the mediation of machines, or of physics and chemistry but on the fact that it is, residually but fundamentally, part-formed from the animal itself. If taking a photograph was a sublimated murder according to Sontag, taxidermy owes its very existence to an act of violence or a death: its realism is deadly.