Selected abstracts
1) Nele Van den Cruyce (Vrije Universiteit Brussel): Reflections of a child
Throughout the last century, childhood has undergone some significant changes. Children evolved from miniature adults working in factories to specific actors with rights of their own. This transformation contained an alteration in the way that society perceived childhood and in the way people thought that children should be handled or cared for. The process has been documented on a macro level, cf. industrialization. The transformation of children themselves is somewhat overshadowed by larger study domains, but nevertheless equally interesting. After all, social scientists are increasingly treating children and childhood as specific research topics.
This paper focuses on the transformation of children in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium in two time periods, namely the second half of the 1940’s and the 1960’s. This because of the fact that these two time periods can be seen as opposites regarding their socio-economical and cultural climate. The main research goal is to find out how society perceived the average, healthy child and how much society was concerned with the health of children. How are children portrayed and what can this illustrate about the dominant discourse regarding the health of children.
To answer these questions a methodological instrument based on visual content analysis and more specifically rhetorical analysis was created to analyze advertisements in Libelle. A magazine chosen because it is the earliest women’s magazine publishing in Belgium. With attention to the global historical context the transformation in the imaging of the average, healthy child is marked out.
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The purpose of this presentation is to examine how exhibitions can help historians to study interpretations and constructions of the past. I focus on historical exhibitions held in national museums in Ireland (National Museum of Ireland (NMI) in Dublin) and Northern Ireland (Ulster Museum (UM) in Belfast) and dealing with the 1798 Rebellion. The two case studies examined below are “Fellowship of Freedom : The United Irishmen and the Rebellion of 1798” and “Up in Arms: The 1798 Rebellion in Ireland, a bicentenary exhibition” held at the NMI and UM respectively. The 1998 displays were particularly remarkable since they were answers to previous interpretations of the conflict (notably to previous exhibitions) and aimed at producing new official narratives about the past. In order to analyze the reconstruction of the past, one meaningful approach is to focus on the relationships between images and narratives, in other words, how images were interpreted and organized to produce narratives of the past. Images may be analyzed as historical sources for the topic they deal with, for the context of production, but also for the context of display since the interpretation contributes to the constant construction of cultural heritage. Visual sources such as catalogues, programmes, guides, sketches, photographs and, to some extent, CDs produced or published for the exhibitions can then be utilized. Attention is to be particularly paid to images of violence. Firstly, I compare how the 1798 Rebellion was defined through images, especially the covers of published materials, and to what extent violence took part in the visual representations of 1798. Secondly, I intend to make clear how the different interpretations and arrangements of images were revealing of larger constructions of the past.
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In Latvia outdoor sculpture functions as a medium of political communication. Transformations of political regime engendered the alteration of representation politics aimed at attesting the new power relations. Not always the authorities can topple down a monument and erect a new one to propagate an unambiguous political message. More subtle methods are exploited to depreciate the unwanted sculptures and to break in the public sphere with new political messages. This paper conceptualises the peculiarities of this kind of political communication in semiotic terms. Among the most popular practices are renaming of monuments, change or addition of inscriptions, circulation of new explanations, permitting of natural decay and banal vandalism, modification of environment around the sculpture, and its inclusion in rituals.
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The emergence of a post-productivist countryside has thoroughly affected contemporary rural historiography. Against the backdrop of a hegemonic struggle in which several societal actors contest the countryside’s amenities, historians have turned to the analysis of the circulating social representations of the rural. The mass media – especially television – are often singled out by scholars as the primary source of unrealistic, distorted and idealized images of the countryside. Then again, most scholars agree that TV nevertheless provides ‘testimonies’ about contemporary issues. In this paper, I argue that representations of the countryside provided by TV fiction, if approached correctly, may yet be of great significance for research on contemporary rural history.
This paper focuses on De Kat, a Flemish children’s television series (1973) in which a masked environmental vigilante fights an evil industrialist and property developer. Although clearly meant to be set in contemporary Flanders, much of the episodes were filmed against the backdrop of the wild and unspoiled landscapes of the French Provence. But this ‘unrealistic’ imagery shrouds a narrative that is overflowing with references to the ongoing hegemonic struggle and historical evolutions within the Flemish countryside, such as industrial pollution, planning difficulties and the parcelling of historical estates. By relying on the well-known imagery of the rural idyll, the producers merely wish to express their admiration for healthy rural environments and simultaneously provide a deliberately overstated representation of a countryside endangered by waste dumping, invasive tourism and urban sprawl. As such, De Kat presents a fictionalized cross-section of the environmental movement in Flanders during the 1970s.
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During the 19th and early 20th century, the leading Belgian bathing resorts identified themselves as exotic playgrounds for the wealthy. The oriental idiom, extremely popular at the time, combined stylistic extractions of the Islamic world with contemporary political and socio-cultural points of view on the East. Permeated by escapism and by the idea of political supremacy of the European Superpowers, the aim was to rebuild an idealised version of the Orient. And thus, several visual media (model books, illustrated periodicals, posters, postcards, etc.) were brought into action for -on the one hand- the spread of the style, and -on the other hand- for branding the seaside resorts as utopian microcosms where hedonism ruled.
Along the Belgian coastline, few references to the pre-war tourist exploitation survived. The hostilities of both World Wars and the suffocating pressure of the real estate business did not only erase the existing infrastructure, but also ended a total experience in which exotic tendencies such as orientalism were omnipresent. All indications to the orientalist fashion have vanished in the physical world. Moreover, written sources are few and far between.
Visual media have showed that the gap in our perception of the past can be filled in. Literally ten thousands of images depict the architectural and cultural design of the late 19th and early 20th century seaside resorts. That enormous amount of pictures, which formed initially promotional material for the respective sea resorts, is nowadays a unique source for visualising the past. A past which would hardly exist without the historical iconographic material.
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This paper examines the representation of clothing in the photography of Henry Peach Robinson, paying particular attention to such well-known composite images as Bringing Home the May (1862) and later works such as When the Day?fs Work is Done (1885).
While there is a tendency to use visual images as ?eillustration?f for the elucidation of historical knowledge, the author, whose approach is that of a historian of dress / social historian, shows how complex are the issues surrounding the interpretation of such images. This paper will make reference to Robinson?fs photographs in the light of his own philosophical perspectives as articulated in his textual work Picture Making by Photography (1884) and The Elements of a Pictorial Photograph (1896). It will also draw comparisons with other photographers/artists working in the 1880s such as Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936), Helen Allingham (1848-1926) and George Clausen (1852-1944) who chose comparable subject matter ?| working-class people of humble economic means resident in the countryside.
The paper then examines the garments themselves, arguing that it is the context in which such clothes are represented as well as a knowledge of the clothing itself that furthers an understanding of the complex ?| yet important - role played by dress in the articulation of a society in transition, from an essentially rural, to an urban, culture in the late nineteenth century. The discussion ends by exploring the significance of dress for the development of the particular rural idyll that characterised English culture from the late nineteenth century.
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The Renault automobile firm has produced a wide range of images (cinema, photographs, and industrial drawings) that renew the technological, social and cultural history of the company’s strain to organize and rationalize the production of cars. These visual documents are the bases of the “Virtual Factories” ANR research program (2008-2012), which has started with the 3D reconstruction of the C5 workshop in which the Renault Automobile Company introduced the manual chassis assembly line in 1917 and made it evolve until the late 1920's. This study is both a historical enquiry on industrial work, and an archaeological project aiming at the virtual reconstruction of patrimonial vestiges.
My main point concerns the way images are used to apprehend the reality of the work they represent, not as visual evidence or simply illustrations for the historian, but as a first hand source. It is an archivist approach of non-conventional historic documents. In this perspective, I develop a methodological analysis of the images, evaluating the advantages and limits of those visual sources to apprehend such a complex technological instrument as an assembly line.
Beyond this study of the Renault's case, the idea is to overpass the classical opposition between the formal prescriptions and the real practices – to understand the way the bureaus and the workshops participated together in the productive process. It is an illustration of the way multimedia and computer techniques can produce a new type of constructed historical documents that can be adapted to other historical investigations.
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This three-part paper analyses how the Bolsheviks categorised, conceptualised, and stylized their enemies in political posters throughout the course of the October Revolution and the Civil War. Therefore, the primary source used in this dissertation is the Bolshevik poster. By analysing posters in the context of the Civil War three primary questions are posed and answered: How was the enemy labelled? What was the mental prism in which this system of labelling functioned in? What style was used in depicting the enemy? This paper argues that categorizing the enemy was much a difficult process for the Bolsheviks. Firstly, once the Civil War began the Bolsheviks quickly learned they could not label other groups in typical Marxist class divisions and therefore, they had to modify, and in some cases discard, the Marxist labels to adapt to the complexities of Russian society. Secondly, analysis of posters demonstrates that the labelling and depiction of the enemy worked within two systems that overlapped and clashed at the same time. The Bolsheviks were forced to conceptualise the enemy within the language of a post-February public that still contained elements of Tsarist patriotic culture which was incompatible with the Bolsheviks internationalist outlook. Thirdly, the style and format in which the Bolsheviks poster depicted the enemy varied widely between three different institutions that all encompassed everything from the ancient Russian lubok to the most cutting-edge European satire. Finally, what this paper argues that even as early as Civil War the Bolsheviks were already diluting their Marxist ideology with Russian tradition.
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The beginning of the XXth century looks like a golden age for editorial cartoonists in Europe. Cartoons could be very provocative. We would like to analyze why a single picture, released in an illustrated magazine at the time, could have had such an impact that it could both affect immediately public opinion and diplomatists as well and change people?fs representations and mentalities on the long term. The paper deals with the history of one of the many cartoons about Britain made in Europe and the United States during the Boer War, a specific cartoon called Perfidious Albion, a quite negative vision of Britain, which progressively became a piece of a common history between France and Britain.
First, the cartoon caused gathering in the streets, around the kiosk, and had to be published in the Netherlands to avoid censorship, as the violent cartoon was made to raise sales rather than to please political elites. Thus, it contributed to forge popular culture by feeding and renewing existing stereotypes. The issue had serious diplomatic consequences, causing major difficulties in the relations between both countries. After this critical moment, the picture was never really forgotten, and kept a more lasting impact. Nevertheless, both countries having overcoming the crisis, considered it eventually as a part of their common heritage, making a sharp contrast between a negative past and a more peaceful present time. Surprisingly, the cartoon became even again a matter of laughing.
The presentation focus on this example to illustrate how the historical signification of a drawing can change completely, and its violence can be transformed into history.
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World’s Fairs can be considered as parallel realities, as enclosed enclaves representing selected parts of the world outside of their fenced sites. This representation consists of images and texts, produced by the organizers and the participants of the fair and by their design teams. Representation at world’s fairs also explicitly aims for the public at large and is, in most cases, based on carefully fabricated images. These fabrications are used as mass media and are loaded with political, economic, social and commercial significance. The images function in their most complex way during the fair, but also have a lasting informative value in the afterlife of the exhibition. This paper focuses on the visual representation of the USSR and USA pavilions at Expo 58, the first post-war international and universal exhibition. The images – produced by architects, interior decorators, photographers and graphic artists – not only demonstrate the late fifties imagery with which these superpowers represented themselves, but also, in a more layered way, illustrate the popular and specialist visual language of oppositions in the Cold War of that era. The core image of this paper is a technical drawing, presumably by the American architect Edward D. Stone, made on the building site of the USA pavilion. The sketch shows the difference in height between the adjacent terrains of the USSR and USA pavilions, with scale figurines that represent both nations in a tellingly caricatural manner. Although the drawing was not part of the visual promotion of both nations at the exhibition, it reveals the sensibilities at the basis of the official image campaigns of the superpowers. This paper traces and analyses the broad variety in scale, scope and origin of the architectural images which constituted the Cold War propaganda of the USA and the USSR at Expo 58.
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March 27, 2009