Making Photography Speak: John Max’s Open Passport (1973) and Photographic Narration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this dissertation, I present a detailed case study of the photographic book Open Passport (1973), by Canadian photographer John Max (1936–2011), on the basis of primary and secondary sources, including newly discovered materials. The photographic book has recently emerged as an axis to organize photographic history. Max’s book, an iconic object in Canadian photography history, nevertheless raises significant challenges to disciplinary consensus. Open Passport is an exemplary work of variant performance that demonstrates the interdependence of different modes of photographic dissemination. It offers a major test case for notions of photographic meaning, artwork, medium, and history. Performing a series of analyses—semiotic, philosophical, and historical—on Open Passport, I show how books are important sites of photographic meaning, with qualifications. Including a constellation of variants and related works—such as photo-stories, exhibitions, motion pictures, and slide shows—the relevant art historical context of Open Passport upsets the modernist historiography of an autonomous medium favoured by recent studies of the photobook. I also draw attention to the historicity of knowledge and propose an application of philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of fusion of horizons for understanding Open Passport in context as a belonging. The major contributions to knowledge of this dissertation are a renewed and extensive understanding of the work of John Max as a major artist, a more deeply reasoned study of the place of the photographic book within photographic history, as well as methodological innovations in the study of the photographic sequence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".