'Her Eyes of Fern': The Photographic Portrait in Nadja
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Shortly after the publication of my book City Gorged with Dreams, David Bate of the University of Westminster published a book on Surrealist photography, which took a very different approach. Our work was complementary rather than antagonistic, and made us aware that the field was far from closed.\n\nWhen we were invited to co-edit a special issue of the international journal History of Photography on ‘Surrealism and Photography’, we took the opportunity to invite a wide range of contributions on different aspects of the subject. The seven essays which were published demonstrated the range of imagery that still rewarded close attention and made a significant contribution to the literature in the area. \n\nThe essays in the journal were: 1. Ian Walker (University of Wales, Newport): "Her Eyes of Fern: the Photographic Portrait in Nadja"; 2. Caroline Blinder (Goldsmith’s College): "Looking for Love in all the Wrong Places: Brassaï in André Breton’s Mad Love"; 3. Kirsten A. Hoving (Middlebury College, Vermont): "Man Ray’s Disarming Venuses: Deconstructing the Classical Torso in Surrealist Photography"; 4. Lou Bailey and Lizzie Thynne (University of Sussex): "Beyond Representation: Claude Cahun’s Monstrous Mischief-Making"; 5. Neil Matheson (University of Westminster): "The Phantom of Surrealism: Photography, Cultural Identity and the Reception of Surrealism in England 1936-39”; 6. Krzysztof Fijalkowski (Norwich School of Art): "Objective Poetry: Post-war Czech Surrealist Photography and the Everyday"; 7. David Evans (Art Institute of Bournemouth): "The Situationist Family Album". \n\nMy essay ‘Her Eyes of Fern’ was a study of the place of the portrait in André Breton’s seminal book Nadja and had its beginnings in a chapter of my unpublished PhD dissertation. In 2004, a version was delivered at the conference Literature and the Photograph at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada, and this was expanded for the History of Photography essay.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".