PhotographyThe quintessential ‘modern’ medium

1839 -

Photography was not a bastard left by science on the doorstep of art, but a legitimate child of the Western pictorial tradition.

Peter Galassi

BEFORE PHOTOGRAPHY

Masaccio, Trinity (and right, scheme of perspective) 1425-28, fresco, Santa Maria Novella, Florence: considered first use of scientific perspective Masters of Illusion

Camera obscura - Light travels in a straight line and when some of the rays reflected from a bright subject pass through a small hole in thin material they do not scatter but cross and reform as an upside down image on a flat surface held parallel to the hole.

Alexandre Saverien, Camera Obscuras, 1753, engraving.

A reflex camera obscura.

Before Photography: Western art’s quest for “Realism” leads to the invention of photography

Photography relies on two scientific principles :

1) A principle of optics on which the Camera Obscura is based

2) Principle of chemistry, that certain combinations of elements, especially silver halides, turn dark when exposed to light (rather than

heat or exposure to air) was demonstrated in 1717 by Johann Heinrich Schulze, professor of anatomy at the University of Altdorf

Announcing the invention of photography (the daguerreotype) at The Joint Meeting of the Academies of Science and Fine Arts in the Institute of France, Paris, August 19, 1839, unsigned engraving

Maurisset, Fantasies: Daguerreotypomania, 1839, lithograph.

Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, Still Life, 1839, daguerreotype.

Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, Boulevard du Temple, ca. 1839, daguerreotype

Daguerre, Boulevard du Temple, detail, ca. 1839, daguerreotype

Anonymous, New England Town Scene, ca. 1847, half-plate daguerreotype.

John Adams Whipple, The Moon, 6 August 1851,

quarter-plate daguerreotype.

“It is a theorem almost demonstrated, that the consequences of any new scientific invention will, at the present day exceed, by very much, the wildest expectations of the most imaginative. Among the obvious advantages derivable from the Daguerreotype, we may mention that by its aid, the height of inaccessible elevations may in many cases be immediately ascertained, since it will afford an absolute perspective of objects in such situations, and that the drawing of a correct lunar chart will be at once accomplished, since the rays of this luminary are found to be appreciated by the plate.”

• - Edgar Allen Poe, 1840

A. LeBlondel, Post Mortem Picture, 1850, daguerreotype.

Anonymous, Nude, 1852, stereoscopic daguerreotype.

Anonymous, A Domestic Servant, ca. 1850, daguerreotype.

John H. Fitzgibbon, Kno-Shr, Kansas Chief, 1853, daguerreotype.

Anna Atkins (English), Cystoseira granulata, one of 200 images from Photographs of British Algae, 1843-44, Cyanotype (a photogram process) 11 x 9”, Detroit Art Institute.

Photographs of British Algae is a landmark in the histories both of photography and of publishing: the first photographic work by a woman, and the first book produced entirely by photographic means.

W.H. Fox Talbot, Cloisters, Lacock Abbey, 1843, calotype negative

W.H. Fox Talbot, Cloisters, Lacock Abbey, 1843,

salt print

William Henry Fox Talbot, The Open Door, 1844-46, salt print from calotype negative (using paper coated with silver iodide), a process Talbot invented in 1841.

An artistic composition: Talbot wrote of it: “We have a sufficient authority in the Dutch school of art for taking as subjects of representation scenes of daily and familiar occurrence. A painter’s eye will often be arrested when ordinary people see nothing remarkable.”

William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, cover, 1844.

Maxime Du Camp (French, 1822–1894), Abu Simbel, 1850Salted paper print from paper negative

Oscar Gustave Rejlander (Swedish-English, 1813-75) The Two Ways of Life, 1857composite albumen print, precursor to photomontage

Victorian high-art photography

Thomas Couture, Romans of the Decadence, 1847, French Academic history painting

Rejlander (1813-75) The Two Ways of Life, 1857

Compare photography andacademic paintingin compositionand content

Honoré Daumier, Nadar Elevating Photography to the Heights of Art, 1862, lithograph commemorating a court decision acknowledging photography as an art

form protected by copyright law.

Nadar, (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, French), Sarah Bernhardt, albumen print, 1864

NADAR (French), Portrait of Jules Verne, n.d., pioneer science fiction novelist. Journey To The Center Of The Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873)

NADAR, Portrait of Georges Sand, 1877

JULIA MARGARET CAMERON (English, 1815-1879), Ophelia, Study no. 2, 1867. Albumen print, 1' 11" x 10 2/3“, albumen print, wet-plate technology

Julia Margaret CAMERON, Annie, My First Success, 1864, albumen print. (right) Collodion (wet-plate) camera. Process invented in 1851:

http://youtu.be/Gyf8fQOdvDs

J. M. CAMERON, The Echo, 1868, Pre-Raphaelite influence

JULIA MARGARET CAMERON, Portrait of Charles Darwin, 1868

Mathew Brady (American, 1823-1896)Mathew Brady’s Picture Gallery, New York

“Brady of Broadway”

In 1839 Brady met, and became a student to Samuel Morse. That same year he met Louis Daguerre in Paris and went back to the United States to

capitalize upon the invention of the Daguerreotype, establishing a highly successful gallery.

Brady’s “Outfit for War”1862: Brady's team used the collodion process. The limitations of equipment and materials prevented any action shots, but the photographers brought back some seven thousand pictures portraying the

realities of war.

Alexander Gardner (studio of Mathew Brady), Dead at Antietam Church, 1862

TIMOTHY O’SULLIVAN (U.S., 1840-1882), A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 1863, collodion process. O’Sullivan belonged to Matthew Brady’s

team.

Compare representations of war:(top) Emmanuel Leutze, George Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851

(bottom) Timothy O’Sullivan, Dead Soldier, 1863

Albert Bierstadt (German-born American Hudson River School Painter, 1830-1902) Emigrants Crossing the Plains, 1867

Will Soule (U.S., 1836-1908)Indian Gallery, 1870-75

Manifest Destiny

Eadweard Muybridge (b. Edward Muggeridge, English, 1830-1904) Horse Galloping, 1878. Muybridge is known primarily for his early use of multiple cameras to capture motion, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting

motion pictures that pre-dated the celluloid film strip. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Muybridge_race_horse_animated.gif

Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxiscope (“wheel of life”), 1879. First machine patented in the U.S. to show moving pictures.