‘passages: New Social Spaces and the Work of Migrant Central European Photographers in New Zealand in the mid Twentieth

Keith Beattie, Faculty of Arts, Deakin University, Visiting Research Fellow in Film and Visual culture, ANU A PENETRATING EYE: THE MICROPHOTOGRAPHY OF JEAN PAINLEVÉ According to Gaston Bachelard, ‘[t]he destiny of every image is magnification.’ Béla Belász reinforced the importance of magnification when he argued that via the camera and image enlargement ‘hitherto unknown objects and events [are revealed]: the adventures of beetles in a wilderness of blades of grass...the erotic battles of flowers and the poetry of miniature landscapes.’ If, then, as Bachelard claims, magnification is the fate of the image, ‘only [magnified] images of nature’, as Belász insists, ‘bear the convincing stamp of unquestionable authentic reality.’ The connections between image magnification and such a documentary reality are integral to the microphotography of Jean Painlevé (1902-1989). Painlevé’s combination of the familiar and the exotic within magnified images of various species, particularly marine organisms, contributes to an expansion of the realm of the visible through representations of the normally unseen. This paper situates the ‘penetrating eye’ of Painlevé’s microphotography in relation to the long history of ‘theatrical’ and entertaining uses of microscopy and microphotography, and the rigorous and measured applications of microscopy in science. More specifically, Painlevé’s microphotography is situated within and against the contexts of documentary photography and early twentieth century French Surrealism; particularly the version promulgated by Georges Bataille in his short-lived journal Documents. The resultant ‘Surrealist documentary’ effect of Painlevé’s images is summarised in Raymond Durgnant’s assessment that ‘attitudes usually kept stiffly apart – Surrealism + science, modernism + ultramodernism’ are aligned and reconciled by Painlevé. This paper explores these intersections and examines the ways in which Painlevé’s microphotography can be used to rethink Surrealist and documentary photography, and the representation of nature. Leonard Bell, Department of Art History, The University of Auckland ‘PASSAGES: NEW SOCIAL SPACES AND THE WORK OF MIGRANT CENTRAL EUROPEAN PHOTOGRAPHERS IN NEW ZEALAND IN THE MID TWENTIETH CENTURY’ This paper has several intertwined concerns: photography and cross-cultural interactions; the ways photographic practices can travel, and the value in the writing photographic histories of detailed investigations and close ‘readings’ of photographs in their particular socio-cultural contexts of production and use. Peter Osborne claimed that ‘all of exile’s manifestations involve a crisis in the experience and representation of space and its meanings’ (Traveling Light, 2000). That proposition will be explored in the work of two photographers, who came to New Zealand as refugees from Nazism: Frank Hofmann from Czechoslovakia and Irene Koppel from Germany. One photograph by each will be focused on in terms of the complexities and problematics of spatialities – that is, not just of physical