An underwater photomosaic technique using Adobe Photoshop™

A simple technique for taking systematic runs of vertical underwater photographs is described. Computer-based procedures for rectifying, matching, and assembling the photographs into mosaics using Adobe Photoshop™ software are then explained.     

X射线摄影技术在漆下彩画识别中的应用

针对遭到油漆涂抹的传统彩画作品,为了实现对图案的无损提取,本研究使用X射线摄影技术,又称X光成像(照相)技术,利用X射线对不同物质的穿透能力有别,在底片上成像的灰度与物体材质、密度、厚度等密切相关的特点,最终得到分界清晰的黑白图像。此类病类常见于建筑彩画中,建筑彩画意蕴深厚、技法繁缛,极具研究价值,但其中很多关键信息却已失传。经X射线摄影技术辅助,封存在油漆层下的彩画图案得以重见天日,此法与其他修复方法之间形成互补,为漆下彩画的完美修复提供了可能。     

‘My Journey to School …’: Foregrounding the Meaning of School Journeys and Children's Engagements and Interactions in their Everyday Localities

This paper gives prominence to children's own accounts of school journeys. The characteristics of school journeys in Fife, Scotland are outlined, and the nature of children's school journey experiences discussed. The focus is on children in the latter years of primary school, concentrating mainly on the experiences of those who walk without adult accompaniment on their school journeys. By drawing attention to the meaning of these journeys to children this paper brings to the fore children's active and imaginative engagements in and with their environments. This situates school journeys as an integral part of children's geographies indicative of the regulation of the child's realm and the active part which children play in redefining this.     

Characterization of ancient building lime mortars of Anhui province,China: A multi-analytical approach

The characterization of lime mortars has become of primary importance in order to obtain information about the raw ingredients and building technology of ancient masonry structures. Five different samples from Anhui province, China, representing two types of lime mortar-based materials: joint mortars between the bricks of the city wall and lime mortar sealing a tomb coffin, were collected for analysis. Archaeological information about the samples was reported and studies into the microtextural features and mineralogical compositions of those mortars were performed via a multi-analytical approach. The joint lime mortars between the bricks of city walls, including Mingzhongdu city wall, Mingzhongdu Xihua gate foundation, Zhengyangguan city wall and She county city wall, were found to be aerial lime mortars. The lime mortar from Nanling Tieguai Song dynasty tomb was analysed and found to be a pozzolanic mortar consisting of lime, clay, sand and cocciopesto-like materials. The analytical results serve as a critical reference for the maintenance and restoration of ancient city walls in Anhui province, and as a starting point for searching for ancient Chinese pozzolanic mortars and technology for making those mortars.     

Painting and Photography in Foreigners' Construction of an Image of Qing Dynasty Law

In recent years,with the spread of the internet and the booming auction markets,combined with our new age of so-called "picture-reading," paintings and photographs concerning Qingjustice have overwhelmed our view.Scholars and nonscholars are attracted by them,and believe them to be showing real historical scenes.Pictures seemingly facilitate our grasp of the world more than mere facts do,but they actually demand readers' careful discrimination.The author of the present article has discovered that the initial British construction of a discourse about the cruelty of China's criminal punishments was related to this topic having been exposed by Chinese themselves.The seemingly real images or pictures have an unknown back story,and even contain a serious distortion of the truth.Such imagistic constructions by foreigners in fact directly or indirectly served the establishment and maintenance of foreign extraterritoriality in China.The living images recorded by foreigners' cameras not only constructed Western impressions of China and Chinese people as distant,thus strengthening contemporary Westerners' mental images of Chinese culture,but still urge us Chinese today to interpret the past in the light of such images.An icon of a blood-thirsty Qing legal system constructed through painting and photographic procedures became an objective fact,a collective consciousness that penetrated people's hearts and eventually led to modifications of those Qing laws.The mental construction of an icon influenced actual institutional movement.     

Photography and Latin American Ruins

Ever since the nineteenth century photographers have regularly turned to Latin American ruins to express a diverse range of scientific, colonial, aesthetic and spiritual desires. This article looks at photographs of Latin American ruins from the nineteenth century through several archaeological expeditions in Central and South America over the course of the twentieth century. Focusing in particular on photographs of ruins that include human subjects, I argue that the human-material interactions evident in these images undermine the traditional view of a split between the archaeological subject and the material object, serving as a reminder of the political actuality of ‘classical’ ruins, sites that have sometimes been left out of the West’s contemporary fascination with the dark underbelly of modernity. Acknowledging that such politics is by no means always innocent, sometimes reflecting as it does the embedded power relations of neo-colonial desires, I argue nonetheless that ancient ruins in Latin America continue to be spaces around which social relations can be formed, not least through humour and pleasure.     

Indigenous Modernities: Missionary Photography and Photographic Gaps in Nauru

This essay examines a set of photographs created by Philip Delaporte, a German-American missionary working for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions on the island of Nauru in the early 20th century. At the time Nauru was a German colony, but the phosphate industry had brought a varied group of settlers and influences that added to a pre-existing series of inter-Pacific connections. The photographs were produced just prior to the full realization of the mining industry and the widespread ecological destruction it brought to the island. In many ways, Delaporte’s photographs are typical, recording the mission’s various projects and successes. However, Delaporte’s unique position as an ambiguous colonial figure on the eve of World War I, and Nauru’s own complex relationship with modernity, invite alternate readings of these images. Outside of Delaporte’s original intention, the photographs record other experiences: the workings of Indigenous modernity in the midst of a place increasingly subject to the inflows of global, colonial capital.     

南唐二陵壁画历史保护修复材料的分析

为了确定南唐二陵壁画已有保护修复材料的种类,使用多光谱摄影技术分别对钦陵和顺陵壁画保护修复材料的分布区域进行探查,在紫外荧光图像中确定了保护修复材料的位置,通过红外光谱和热裂解-气质联用技术对材料进行了成分分析。结果表明二陵壁画所使用的保护修复材料主要为苯乙烯-甲基丙烯酸甲酯共聚物和聚醋酸乙烯酯,还发现少量多糖类物质,为调和地仗石灰层所使用的糯米汁。该研究表明通过多光谱摄影技术提供线索,使用红外光谱、热裂解-气质联用确定成分是一种可靠的墓葬壁画保护修复材料分析方法体系,为墓葬壁画保护修复材料的鉴别提供借鉴,也为保护修复材料在墓葬壁画中的应用效果评价和劣化机理研究提供参考。     

PHOTOGRAPHS, SYMBOLIC IMAGES, AND THE HOLOCAUST: ON THE (IM)POSSIBILITY OF DEPICTING HISTORICAL TRUTH

Photography has often been scrutinized regarding its relationship to reality or historical truth. This includes not only the indexicality of photography, but also the question of how structures and processes that comprise history and historical events can be depicted. In this context, the Holocaust provides a particular challenge to photography. As has been discussed in numerous publications, this historic event marks the "limits of representation." Nevertheless there are many photographs "showing" the Holocaust that have been produced in different contexts that bespeak the photographers' gaze and the circumstances of the photographs' production. Some of the pictures have become very well known due to their frequent reproduction, even though they often do not show the annihilation itself, but situations different from that; their interpretation as Holocaust pictures results rather from a metonymic deferral. When these pictures are frequently reproduced they are transformed into symbolic images, that is, images that can be removed from their specific context, and in this way they come to signify abstract concepts such as "evil." Despite being removed from their specific context these images can, as this essay argues, refer to historical truth. First, I explore the arguments of some key theorists of photography (Benjamin, Kracauer, Sontag, Barthes) to investigate the relationship between photography and reality in general, looking at their different concepts of reality, history, and historical truth, as well as the question of the meaning of images. Second, I describe the individual circumstances in which some famous Holocaust pictures were taken in order to analyze, by means of three examples, the question what makes these specific pictures so particularly suitable to becoming symbolic images and why they may—despite their abstract meaning—be able to depict historical truth.     

One image,multiple nationalisms: Face to Face and the Siege at Kanehsatà:ke

Iconic news photographs, particularly those taken during wars and national crises, provide visual synopses of important historical events – events about which stories of triumph and tragedy are superimposed. In this paper, we systematically trace the appearances and discussions of a single, iconic image, given the moniker Face to Face, over time. In the twenty plus years since its initial publication, media discourses around the image referenced Kanien'kehaka /Mohawk, Indigenous, Quebecois and Canadian nationalisms. We conclude that discourses surrounding war and conflict imagery can be read as reflecting plural nationalisms and that while a dominant meaning can be projected onto such imagery, this is neither singular nor fixed.