Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime

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Photography

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Hugo Bernatzik

Hugo Bernatzik (1904–1953) was an Austrian ethnographer and photographer, renowned for his work documenting indigenous cultures in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Bernatzik studied anthropology and developed a keen interest in the lifestyles, rituals, and traditions of remote and often isolated communities. He is best known for his photographic work, which captured the everyday lives of indigenous peoples with an emphasis on their cultural practices, costumes, and environments. In the 1930s and 1940s, Bernatzik conducted extensive fieldwork in regions such as Papua New Guinea, New Guinea, and Borneo, where he collaborated with local communities and produced a substantial collection of photographs. His images provided valuable insights into the diversity and richness of these cultures, contributing to the academic understanding of anthropology and ethnography at the time.

Horace Roye

Horace Roye was a British photographer. Roye's photograph Tomorrow's Crucifixion, depicting a nude model wearing a gas mask while pinned to a crucifix caused controversy when published in the North London Recorder in August 1938, but later became a noted photograph of its time. In 1954 with a fellow photographer called Vala, Roye came up with the Roye-Vala 3-D Process. Not to miss an opportunity his company The Camera Studies Club published the Stereo Glamour Series of 3-D books of nude studies and pin-ups. As a photographer of nudes, he successfully contested the obscenity laws of his day. An account of which he published in 1960 in the booklet Unique Verdict – the Story of an Unsuccessful Prosecution. Roye retired to Portugal. During the 1974 revolution, he was besieged in his house, holding out with a shotgun. Forced to sell up he returned to England.[2] In 1980, he made his final move to Rabat, the capital of Morocco. He became Morocco's oldest British expatriate, and he was also the longest-serving member of the British Institute of Professional Photographers. He took up parasailing at the age of 75 and water-skied on the river Bouregeg until he was 78 years old. In 2002 at the age of 96, Roye was stabbed to death by an intruder at his home in the kasbah of Rabat.

John Deakin

John Deakin was an English photographer, best known for his work centered around members of Francis Bacon's Soho inner circle. Deakin had wanted to be a painter, and doubting the validity and status of photography as an art form, he did not hold his photographic work in high esteem; many of his photographs have been lost, destroyed or damaged. A chronic alcoholic, Deakin died in obscurity and poverty, but since the 1980s his reputation has grown through monographs, exhibitions and catalogues.

The Pencil of Nature

The Pencil of Nature, published in six instalments between 1844 and 1846, was the first photographically illustrated book to be commercially published. Written by William Henry Fox Talbot,  the book detailed Talbot's development of the calotype process and included 24 calotype prints, each one pasted in by hand, illustrating some of the possible applications of the new technology. Since photography was still very much a novelty and many people remained unfamiliar with the concept, Talbot felt compelled to insert the following notice into his book: "The plates of the present work are impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatever from the artist's pencil. They are the sun-pictures themselves, and not, as some persons have imagined, engravings in imitation."