Scenes of labor and technologies of calculation converge in the prefatory calendar cycle of a luxury psalter made in northern Germany during the second half of the twelfth century. Setting the manuscript in the context of eastward expansion along the Baltic rim, I argue that its program of images, text, and mise-en-page yields a previously undescribed set of formal procedures that underwrote the colonial work of high-medieval art. The distinctive practice of conferring form on the unformed (informis) was transposed from the registers of art and philosophy into the realm of the landscape, providing both a discursive framework and an ideological justification for colonial settlement.
This article engages the architectural imagery that French emissaries produced in Senegambia and New Orleans in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. I reveal how French colonizers represented themselves and their country as skillfully able to exploit non-European landscapes. In Senegambia, colonizers depicted their purportedly efficient usage of African house types. In New Orleans, images showcased how French functionaries could employ native woods to craft necessary buildings. This paper explores the origins of modern imperialism. Imagery registered how colonial travelers competently spawned a multicultural France that came to define the nation's global identity long before the French Revolution.
Art historians rarely study the backdrops, props, and costumes used in studio photography or the artisans who made them. Here I examine such "stagecraft" captured by May's Photo Studio, San Francisco, uncovering the collaborations and rivalries among its diverse makers and performers. I show how they assembled optical illusions that bridge seemingly disparate chronotopes, fabricated surfaces that convey material and emotional cravings, and layered words and images to channel virtuosity, prestige, and political relevance across cultures. Their creations, I argue, embody the self-reinventing prowess of the diaspora and constitute a vernacular modernism, characterized by transmedial promiscuity and collective imagining.
