Introduction to the History of Photography

The Haystack (1844) by Fox Talbot

2012-01-23T16:04:00.000+04:00

William Henry Fox Talbot

The Haystack April 1844

salted paper print

Printed by Nicolaas Henneman

19 x 22.9 cm; image: 16.4 x 21 cm

Purchased 1975

National Gallery of Canada (no. 33487.31)

source: National Gallery of Canada

plate from THE PENCIL OF NATURE, London, 1844 by Fox Talbot

read it here: Project Gutenberg

download it here

Bayard, the "forgotten pioneer"

2012-01-22T14:25:00.008+04:00

[Windmills, Montmartre], 1839
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801–1887)
Direct positive print

3 3/8 x 3 15/16 in. (8.5 x 10 cm)
Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005 (2005.100.32)

source: Metmuseum

Hippolyte Bayard
French, 1847
Salt print
6 1/2 x 4 13/16 in.
source: Getty

Hippolyte Bayard: Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man, 1840
(Direct Positive Print) 1840

Hippolyte Bayard’s (20 January 1807 – 14 May 1887) role as a pioneer of photography, both as a photographer and as inventor, was overshadowed by Daguerre’ s support by the scientific establishment of his time and by the French government’s monetary rewards for his public disclosure of the Daguerreotype process. Bayard’s commentary of “protest” on his situation as a “forgotten” photographer and pioneer of photography is expressed in one of his most famous and intriguing images the Self-portrait as a drowned man - drowned by indifference and neglect, as he writes to explain the photograph:

“The corpse which you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process that has just been shown to you. As far as I know this indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about three years with his discovery. The Government, which has been only too generous to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself. Oh the vagaries of human life....! ... He has been at the morgue for several days, and no-one has recognized or claimed him. Ladies and gentlemen, you'd better pass along for fear of offending your sense of smell, for as you can observe, the face and hands of the gentleman are beginning to decay.”

The visible world and the act of seeing are the focus of pioneer photographers such as Talbot and Bayard, as Ian Jeffrey observes (1). And yet, a self-conscious grasp of the structures of vision and, therefore, a representation that emphasizes the organization of the visible field: masses, forms, contrasts, the materiality of surfaces and forms as well as their transformations by and into lights and shadows, differentiates the work of the Frenchman from the British inventor.

At least in the sense that Bayard’s photographs present, in a way, a more coherent approach or perhaps we should say, a more deliberate or persistent pursuit of effects or types of vision that Talbot is also able to create and recreate in some of his best works. However, in the multiplicity of interests and subjects (as well as the various functions ascribed to photography) of the British photographer, something of the “random” or tentative experiences, doings and frame of mind proper to the inventor comes to the fore in ways that at times divert the concentration of the photographer (and the viewer) from the particular qualities and themes or concepts of photography as such. Of course, such a consideration can in a sense be understood as purely “retrospective”, for Talbot as Bayard are explorers of a new visibility without prior standards.

And yet, if both, as Ian Jeffrey states, “exult in appearance”, and therefore "celebrate (pure) presence” they do so with somewhat different degrees of conviction, with different assertive strategies, goals and results. As Talbot in the "Open door" (1844) explicitly refers (or "justifies" it in connection ) to Dutch painting and Baroque art , the deliberate vision of Bayard anticipates, in Ian Jeffrey' s somewhat over-emphatic characterization, the self -conscious, analytical explorations of vision and of the visible by the Cubists (2).

Marcelo Guimarães Lima

1) Jeffrey, Ian: Photography – a concise history, London, 1981

2) Jeffrey, 1981, p. 25

Walker Evans (1903-1975)

2010-11-21T19:04:00.003+04:00

"Leaving aside the mysteries and the inequities of human talent, brains, taste, and reputations, the matter of art in photography may come down to this: it is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is the defining of observation full and felt."

Walker Evans

Walker Evans began to photograph in the late 1920s, making snapshots during a European trip. Upon his return to New York, he published his first images in 1930. During the Great Depression, Evans began to photograph for the Resettlement Administration, later known as the Farm Security Administration (FSA), documenting workers and architecture in the Southeastern states. In 1936 he traveled with the writer James Agee to illustrate an article on tenant farm families for Fortune magazine; the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men came out of this collaboration.

Throughout his career Evans contributed photographs to numerous publications, including three devoted solely to his work. In 1965 he left Fortune, where he had been a staff photographer for twenty years, to become a professor of photography and graphic design at Yale University. He remained in the position until 1974, a year before his death.

source: Getty Museum
http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artMakerDetails?maker=1634&page=2

Walker Evans
New York City, 1929
Gelatin silver print
7 1/4 x 5 in.

Walker Evans
Brooklyn Bridge, 1928-29
Gelatin silver print

Walker Evans
Girl in Fulton Street
New York, 1929

Walker Evans
New York City, 1929
Gelatin silver print

Walker Evans
6th Avenue and 42nd Street, 1929
Gelatin silver print

Walker Evans
Subway portrait
1938 - 1941
Gelatin silver print
6 1/2 x 9 1/2 in.

Walker Evans
Five Men Playing Basketball: For the Series "Dress"
New York City, April 9, 1963
Gelatin silver print
8 5/16 x 11 3/4 in.

Walker Evans
Graffiti: Dead End
about 1973-74
Polaroid SX-70 print
3 1/8 x 3 1/16 in

Walker Evans
Saint Martin, West Indies, 1974
Dye diffusion print
4 1/4 x 3 1/2 in.

© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Paul Strand (1890 – 1976)

2010-11-21T14:17:00.002+04:00

"Paul Strand's debut in photography coincided with the first stirrings of modernism in the visual arts in America. Born in New York in 1890, he attended both the class and club in photography taught by Hine at the Ethical Culture School in 1908. A visit to Stieglitz's 291 gallery arranged by Hine inspired Strand to explore the expressive possibilities of the medium, which until then he had considered a hobby.

Although he was active for a brief period at the Camera Club of New York, whose darkrooms he continued to use for about 20 years, his ideas derived first from the circle around Stieglitz and then from the group that evolved around the Modern Gallery in 1915, including Sheeler and Schamberg. Strand's work, which was exhibited at 291, the Modem Gallery, and the Camera Club, gained prizes at the Wanamaker Photography exhibitions and was featured in the last two issues of Camera Work.

From about 1915 on, he explored the visual problems that were to become fundamental to the modernist aesthetic as it evolved in both Europe and the United States. During the 1920s he mainly photographed urban sites, continued with the machine forms begun earlier, and turned his attention to nature, using 5 x 7 and 8 x 10 inch view cameras and making contact prints on platinum paper. In these works, acknowledged as seminal in the evolution of the New Objectivity, form and feeling are indivisible and intense. In addition, Strand's writings, beginning in 1917 with "Photography and the New God," set forth the necessity for the photographer to evolve an aesthetic based on the objective nature of reality and on the intrinsic capabilities of the large-format camera with sharp lens."

source: A World History of Photography by Naomi Rosenblum

http://www.masters-of-photography.com/S/strand/strand_articles2.html

Paul Strand.

Porch Shadows, 1916.

Alfred Stieglitz Collection.

©Aperture Foundation Inc.,

Paul Strand Archive.

http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/exhibition/shadows

Paul Strand (1890 – 1976)

Blind woman, New York, 1917

Paul Strand

Double Akeley, New York 1922

Peter Henry Emerson and Naturalistic Photography

2010-10-31T22:02:00.000+04:00

Peter Henry Emerson
b. 1856 Sagua la Grande, Cuba, d. 1936 Great Britain  

Born in Cuba and raised there and in the United States before moving to England as a teenager, physician and scientist Peter Henry Emerson took up photography at age twenty-six. Often described as a difficult zealot, he vocally championed a naturalistic approach to imagemaking. He favored rural subjects presented in a simple, direct manner. Emerson's influential 1889 book Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art outlined his thesis that photography's ability to record nature truthfully was its most expressive one. He argued that the photograph should imitate nature rather than alter it.   Emerson was a passionate lecturer and writer about photography, never mincing words and thus earning as many foes as supporters. He was an early and tireless champion of photography as a fine art, and he became the unofficial godfather of the Photo-Secessionist movement, founded by Alfred Stieglitz in 1902.

source: GETTY

P.H. Emerson
The Haunt of the Pike

or
Wroxham Broad
ca. 1885
platinum print
21.1 x 29.6 cm.

source: GEH

P. H. Emerson: Confessions from
‘Pictures From Life In Field And Fen’, 1887

P. H. Emerson "Ricking the reed",
from Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, 1886

source: Wikipedia

Alexander Gardner (1821-1882)

2010-10-20T08:57:00.007+04:00

Alexander Gardner
The home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg (1863)

Alexander Gardner

Dead Confederate sharpshooter at the foot of Round Top.

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 1863.

Alexander Gardner.
Richmond, Virginia. "Ruins of Gallego Mills." April 1865

The Lincoln Conspirators, 1865

Alexander Gardner, Lincoln 1865

Mathew Brady (1822-1896)

2010-10-19T13:54:00.005+04:00

Mathew Brady upon his return from the First Battle of Bull Run,
wearing a saber given to him for defense by New York Fire Zouaves.
Date 22 July 1861
unknown author in Mathew Brady's studio

source: Wikipedia

American Civil War Photographs

source: http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/brady-photos/

Abraham Lincoln

link: Mathew Brady Portraits

Mathew Brady : Photographs of the Civil War

source: YouTube Smithsonian Magazine

Documentary Photography - 19th Century: Charles Marville (1816 - 1879)

2010-10-18T16:42:00.006+04:00

" Originally trained as a painter, engraver, and illustrator, Charles Marville ( b. 1816 Paris, d. 1879) became known as a landscape and architecture photographer. He traveled to Italy, Germany, and Algeria and used both paper and glass plate negatives. In the late 1850s the city of Paris commissioned Marville to document the ancient quarters of the city before encroaching urban modernization changed them forever. He photographed renovations and new construction, including the new Paris Opéra. Marville was also commissioned by the Musée du Louvre to make reproductions of artworks in their collection. He was named official photographer of Paris in 1862. "

source: GETTY Edu

Charles Marville
rue de Constantine, Paris, 1865

Charles Marville
Paris 13e Arrondisment
c. 1865

Charles Marville
rue de la Ferronnerie, Paris
c. 1865

Charles Marville
Hotel de Ville 1871 after the

combats of the Commune of Paris

Charles Marville

Ingres in his deathbed, 1867

Documentary Photography - 19th Century: Philip Henry Delamotte (1820–1889)

2010-10-18T16:22:00.010+04:00

Progress of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, 1854

Philip Henry Delamotte (British, 1820–1889); Henry Negretti (British, born Italy, 1818–1879)
Albumen silver prints
Source: Philip Henry Delamotte: Progress of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham (52.639) | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Roger Fenton (1819-1869)

2010-10-18T10:32:00.006+04:00

" The photographic career of Roger Fenton (1819-1869) lasted only eleven years, but during that time he became the most famous photographer in Britain. Part of the second generation of photographers who came to maturity in the 1850s—only a decade after the process was invented—Fenton strove to elevate the new medium to the status of a fine art and to establish it as a respected profession. He was the first official photographer to the British Museum and one of the founders of the Photographic Society, later named the Royal Photographic Society, an organization he hoped would help establish the medium's importance in modern life."

source: http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2004/fenton/index.shtm

Roger Fenton
Self-Portrait, February 1852Albumen silver print from glass negative
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

source: http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/fenton/exhibition.shtm

Roger Fenton, Seated Odalisque, 1858

Roger Fenton, Discobolos, 1857
source: British Museum

The Crimean War Photographs

Marcus Sparling, full-length portrait,
seated on Roger Fenton's photographic van.salted paper; 17.5 × 16.5 cm., 1855

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roger_Fenton%27s_waggon.jpg

The valley of the shadow of death
Fenton, Roger, 1819-1869, photographer, 1855,
salted paper ; 28 x 36 cm.
Dirt road in ravine scattered with cannonballs.
Part of Roger Fenton Crimean War photograph collection,
Library of Congress

Mortar batteries in front of Picquet house Light Division
Fenton, Roger, 1819-1869, photographer, 1855
salted paper ; 24 x 35.5 cm.
Photo shows five men and three mortars at a mortar battery with bomb-proof shelter.
Part of: Fenton, Roger, 1819-1869. Roger Fenton Crimean War photograph collection,
Library of Congress Collection

Mission Héliographique, 1851

2010-10-17T17:38:00.000+04:00

Roman Arch at Orange], 1851
Édouard Baldus (French, born Prussia, 1813–1889)
Salted paper print from paper negative
35.3 x 26.2 cm

"In 1851, the Commission des Monuments Historiques, an agency of the French government, selected five photographers to make photographic surveys of the nation's architectural patrimony. These Missions Héliographiques, as they were called, were intended to aid the Paris-based commission in determining the nature and urgency of the preservation and restoration of work required at historic sites throughout France. The French rail network was still in its infancy and many of the commissioners had never visited the monuments in their care; photography promised a record of such sites that would be produced more quickly and accurately than the architectural drawings on which they had previously relied."

Malcolm Daniel
Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Source: Mission Héliographique, 1851 | Thematic Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Jean-Baptiste Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884)

2010-10-17T16:37:00.014+04:00

Gustave Le Gray Self portrait, c. 1852

"Though he was trained as a painter, Gustave Le Gray made his mark in the emerging medium of photography. An experimenter and technical innovator, Le Gray pioneered the use of the paper negative in France and developed a waxed-paper negative that produced sharper-focus prints. In 1851 he began to use collodion on glass negatives, which further increased the clarity of his images. He became one of the first five photographers, along with Édouard-Denis Baldus and Hippolyte Bayard, to work for the missions héliographiques, a government-sponsored commission to document the state of repair of important French monuments and buildings.

Le Gray is credited with teaching photography to many important French photographers in the 1850s. In 1851 he became a founding member of the Société Héliographique, the first photographic organization in the world, and later joined the Société Française de Photographie. In 1860 Le Gray started to tour the Mediterranean with the writer Alexandre Dumas, but they soon parted company. Le Gray went on to Lebanon and then to Egypt, where he became a professor of drawing and died in 1884."

source: GETTY Edu

The Great Wave, Sète, 1856–59
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820–1884)
Albumen silver print from two glass negatives

13 1/4 x 16 5/16 in. (33.7 x 41.4 cm)

Source: Gustave Le Gray: The Great Wave, Sete (1976.646) |
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Mediterranean with Mount Agde, 1857
Gustave Le Gray
Albumen silver print from two glass negatives

Grand Mediterranean wave
Gustave Le Gray, 1857
Albumen print from two glass negatives
323 x 412 mm

Brick [called Brick au clair de lune]
Gustave Le Gray, summer 1856 and1857 (?)
Albumen print from collodion glass negative
320 x 420 mm

source: BNF

Gustave Le Gray
Fontainebleau, 1849
Salt print, from a waxed calotype negative

source: GETTY Edu

Gnarled Oak Tree near the l'Épine Crossroads
Gustave Le Gray
1849 - 1852

Albumen print

source: GETTY Edu

Portrait of Victor Cousin
Gustave Le Gray,
1854-1859
Albumen print

source: GETTY Edu

link: Gustave Le Gray Seascapes at The Victoria and Albert Museum

The Daguerreotype: landscape and architecture

2010-10-17T13:53:00.006+04:00

Engraving of the first photograph of the Pathenon.
Taken by Gaspard-Pierre-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière in 1839.
Published in Excursions daguériennes by Noël Paymal Lerebours in 1841

source: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Parthenon_1839.jpg

Niagara. Chute Du Fer a Cheval
from Excursions daguerriennes:
vues et monuments les plus remarquables du globe,
published by Lerebours, Nöel-Marie-Paymal
1840
engraving from daguerreotype
26.0 x 73.5 cm.

source: Daguerreotypomania GEH

"The Excursions Daguerriennes, représentant les vues et les monuments les plus remarquables du globe, [Daguerreian Travels, representing the most remarkable views and monuments in the world] was published in Paris by Noël-Marie Paymal Lerebours between 1841 and 1864. The volumes were sold by subscription and in the end contained more than one hundred views of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East shot between 1839 and 1844. Pattinson's view of the falls was the only view of North America to appear in the publication.

The only way in which a daguerreotype could be printed was by making an engraving from the plate. The daguerreotype process produced a laterally reversed image, there being no negative. The engraving is traced from the daguerreotype and then turned over to give the "correct" orientation of the subject. Extra details were often added to engravings to add more "interest."

source: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/library/specialcollections/collections/daguerreotypes/excursions.php

Babbitt, Platt D.
American (-1879)
Niagara Falls
ca. 1855
daguerreotype
13.2 x 18.3 cm., full plate

source: Daguerreotypomania GEH

Southworth & Hawes

American (active ca 1845-1861)

The Niagara Suspension Bridge

March 8, 1855
daguerreotype
21.5 X 16.5 cm., full plate

source: http://www.geh.org/taschen/htmlsrc15/m197401930180_ful.html

Southworth & Hawes
American (active ca 1845-1861)
Niagara Falls
ca. 1850
daguerreotype
21.5 X 16.5 cm., full plate

source: http://www.geh.org/fm/mismis/htmlsrc26/m197401930262A_ful.html#topofimage

Southworth & Hawes
American (active ca 1845-1861)
Niagara River above the falls
ca. 1850
daguerreotype

source: Daguerreotypomania GEH

The Daguerreotype Panorama

2010-10-16T13:21:00.009+04:00

Cincinnati Waterfront Panorama Daguerreotype, taken by Charles Fontayne and William S. Porter in 1848

click on the image to enlarge

sources:

http://codex99.com/photography/5.html

http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~rmessing/cincinnatti/

A zoom illustrating the extraordinary level of detail in a daguerreotype

This is plate 4 of the Cincinnati Waterfront Panorama Daguerreotype consisting of 8 plates, taken by Charles Fontayne and William S. Porter in 1848. The plate, property of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton Counties, was imaged in tiles using a stereomicroscope (Zeiss StereoDiscovery.V12) at George Eastman House International Museum of Photography & Film, Kay Whitmore Conservation Center, in Rochester, NY

source: YouTube

links: http://www.cincinnatilibrary.org/main/rb.asp#daguerreotype
http://www.tedxcincy.com/2010/09/30/fontayne-porter-panorama-part-2-by-patricia-van-skaik/

Porter, William Southgate
American (1822-1889)
Fairmount waterworks
1848
daguerreotype
36.7 x 99.8 cm.,
(8 whole plates assembled in original mount)

source: http://www.geh.org/taschen/htmlsrc1/m197705030001_ful.html#topofimage

Landscape photography: documentary and the modern sublime

2010-10-04T15:33:00.019+04:00

The first photograph was a view from a window; among the early daguerreotypes by the inventor of the process, we see depicted in one, a view of a Parisian boulevard, in another, a still life with artistic or art related objects. We can therefore state that Nature, and Art and Architecture, were congenial subjects in early photography. Immobile and under sunlight, landscape and architectural subjects were indeed suitable to the initial technical conditions of the medium.

Romanticism, with its pantheistic view of nature, provided the initial context of ideas and forms of feeling in which the new technological image could at first express, for a century facing the experience of the acceleration of time, the hopes and fears of history itself: landscape photography both developed and transformed the Romantic sublime.

As product and process, as, at the same time, instrument and result, photography registered and expressed, as much as it helped to shape, the great structural and cultural transformations brought about in Europe by the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. In the late 18th century and early 19th century, Romanticism articulated a reaction, an elaboration and response, in the realm of aesthetic ideas to the radically changed conditions of life, to the experience of the historical upheaval that was the birth of modernity.

A time of technological developments and accelerated transformations in ways of life, with the growth of the cities and the new urban cultures, with the control and mechanization of life, expressed, in the images of nature, of geography and human geography and time, a kind of “recollection of things to come” that is, of things to pass. Landscape photography could re-state the Romantic nostalgia for past conditions, for "lost nature", at the same time in which the cold precision of the mechanical vision of the camera measured the absolute distance between past and present in modern experience.

In landscape photography and in the photography of nature, the modern sublime was actualized as both the collision and the fusion of the symbolic and the documentary: able at the same time to display a subliminal nostalgia for an “original condition” beyond time, and to constitute the very index and evidence of the irretrievability of the desired or imagined past (that place or condition which is out of the reach of the destructive works of history).

But the 19th century was not just the century of Romanticism; it was also the century of Realism in the arts. We can observe that the desire for reality is not just a desire for the same, the identical; it is also a desire for the other. Realism implied not just the contemplation of reality, the valuation of the here and now as objects of artistic worth or documentary significance, but a pragmatics of seeing and of representation as the appropriation of reality itself. The real, as process and result, is also what becomes in time. Realism implied the awareness of transformations, and the awareness of the uses of the real that was stated, in different ways, by the photographers of daily life, by documentary photography, and the portrait as belonging at the same time to the private circle of daily life and to the public persona. Beyond the established dichotomies of Romanticism and Realism, we can observe that the experience of the modern sublime could as well be expressed in the forms of daily life and documentary photography.

Marcelo Guimaraes Lima

Alexandre Clausel (French, 1802–1884)
Landscape near Troyes, ca. 1855
Daguerreotype; 10.5 x 14.6 cm (4 1/8 x 5 3/4 in.)
George Eastman House, Rochester

source: metmuseum.org

Victor Regnault (1810-78), View of the Seine at Sèvres,
circa 1852, salt print, 31.4 by 42.8 cm

source: Sothebys

Louis-Auguste Bisson (1814-1876) and Auguste-Rosalie Bisson (1826-1900).

Mont Blanc, vu du jardin", 1858.

Album Haute-Savoie. Le mont Blanc et ses glaciers.
Souvenir du voyage de LL. MM. l'empereur et l'impératrice,
par MM. Bisson frères photographes de Sa Majesté l'empereur.

source: Wikimedia

Francis Frith
Crocodile on River bank, Egypt
Albumen print from wet plate negative, 1857

source: Vintage Works

Eadweard Muybridge, Ruins of a Church, Antigua, Guatemala, 1875

Carleton Watkins, Cathedral Rock, Yosemite, c. 1866
Albumen print

Gioacchino Altobelli,
Roman Forum -Night View, c.1870
Albumen print

Afong Lai, Entrance to the Bankers' Glen,
view looking down Yuen-foo River, China 1870.

Marc Ferrez,
Entrance of Guanabara Bay,
Rio de Janeiro 1885

Marc Ferrez

Rio de Janeiro, 1906

Albumen print

The complete collodion process by Quinn Jacobson

2010-10-03T13:57:00.000+04:00

more at: http://www.youtube.com/user/quinnjacobson

Wet Collodion demonstration by Jill Enfield

2010-10-02T17:34:00.003+04:00

link: Jill Enfield

The Daguerreotype portrait: the aesthetics of the real

2010-09-28T17:17:00.013+04:00

The notion of what we may call an “artless art” was applied at different times, and with different intentions, to photography and the Daguerreotype. The image produced “directly” by nature, bypassing the intervention of the hand of the artist, was the object of amazement at first, and praised for its astounding fidelity of detail: an “art form” therefore that “no painter could ever match”.

The popularization of the daguerreotype as the 19th century progressed, brought about by technical improvements allowing for the mass production of images and specially, for the first time, the mass production of portraits, produced also as a counter-current, a kind of “over familiarity” with the daguerreotype portrait. And with it, a relative weariness about the repetitious, the unstudied, the narrowly documentary and "vulgar" or commonplace qualities (issues only partially explained by inherent limitations of the Daguerreotype technique for portraiture, such as exposure time requirements, etc) of the vast majority of rapidly created images by a growing industry of photographic studios catering to the needs and the taste of the majority.

And yet, from these vast collections of portraits, both in Europe and in the US, works emerged in which something as a new sensibility and a "new aesthetics" related to the formal and expressive possibilities proper to the photographic medium was adumbrated, expressed or anticipated. These are portraits by known or anonymous artists and craftsmen of photography in which, at different levels, the photographer's empathy with the subject and his handling of the new medium sparks a new kind of vision and a new type of record of character, mood and circumstance able to transcend the limited circle and functions of the everyday image.

Marcelo Guimaraes Lima

Gustav Oehme, Three Young Girls, Daguerreotype, c.1845

Unknown photographer, Portrait of Frederick Douglas, Daguerreotype, 1847

source:metmuseum.org

A Camera Obscura in Venice

2010-09-24T23:28:00.001+04:00

A Camera Obscura experiment in Venice from

from BBC's 'Genius of Photography

source: YouTube

Genius of Photography website

Modern daguerrotypes

2010-09-24T23:23:00.000+04:00

The following are examples of the art of the Daguerreotype as practiced today by specialized studios and labs.
From the site: TheDagLab.com. Here their Gallery of Portraits. And here an explanation of the process

Malcolm Daniels on the Daguerreotype

2010-09-24T23:02:00.000+04:00

Malcolm Daniels, Curator of the Dept of Photographs
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, talks about the Daguerreotype process

source: YouTube

Antoine-Jean-François Claudet: the daguerreotype and the art of portraiture

2010-09-21T22:13:00.005+04:00

The Geography Lesson, 1851. Stereoscopic daguerreotype

Portrait of Fox Talbot by Claudet, c.1844

image source: British Library - Points of View

Born in Lyon, France, in 1797, Antoine-Jean-Francois Claudet settled in London in 1827. After a period as a successful glass merchant, he learned the daguerreotype process from Daguerre himself. Claudet purchased the first Daguerreotype licence in England and established his own photographic studio on the roof of the Adelaide Gallery, behind St. Martin's church, London, from 1841 to 1851, later moved to 107 Regent Street. He brought several technical improvements to the Daguerreotype process, including new sensitizing materials, exposure times and focal improvements, and is credit with the discovery that it was possible to develop prints under a red light, as well as the use of painted backdrops. He was appointed photographer to Queen Victoria in 1853.

MGL

Self-portrait with his son, 1853, stereograph daguerreotype

source: Getty.edu

The portrait machine before photography: the physionotrace

2010-09-21T16:18:00.005+04:00

Le Comte de Yoldi
collection Veerle Van Goethem

source: http://users.telenet.be/thomasweynants/precursors.html

Invented by Gilles-Louis Chrétien in 1784, the Physionotrace allowed the rapid production of a profile portrait by an artist. The result was engraved on copper and the portrait multiplied by printing. The physionotrace was a mechanical apparatus that worked as a large pantograph. It represented one step in the process of democratization of portraiture: from the miniature, the silhouette and the camera lucida drawing to photography. By facilitating the reproduction of a likeness in a relatively short time, and therefore reducing the artist's effort, and, as a consequence, the price of portraits, it can be considered as a precursor of the photographic portrait as a mass phenomenon. Indeed, portraiture in the 19th century, starting with the Daguerreotype and the Calotype, was one of the main elements in the diffusion and popularization of photography, both as a new artistic and documentary form, and also as a commercial enterprise.

MGL

Martin Chambi (1891-1973) indigenous photographer

2010-05-06T13:41:00.004+04:00

Martin Chambi, self portrait with motorcycle, 1934

At 14, Martin Chambi worked in the gold mines exploited by the British in his native Peru. He learned the rudiments of photography from the same foreign bosses. He became a professional photographer working on commissions, specially portraits, and on his own, photographing the land and his people. As Alfredo Srur observed in a recent note (Radar Libros - here), the commissioned works served to fund his passion for registering his time and culture.

In the works of Chambi, photography will be both the medium and the index, tool and testimony of the modern developments affecting the Peruvian nation and its peoples in the early decades of the 20th century.

Chambi' s works capture and re-display moments of coexistence between the past and a present in transition, that is, a time internally divided between what it was and will soon no longer be, and what will come. Split between being and becoming, the present is no longer identic to itself: a time of non-identity. And yet, life goes on as an homogeneous duration. The paradox of lived time, like photographic time itself, is that in many ways it is a time that does not pass. The place of photography is located between the already gone and the always (t)here. (read more)

Marcelo Guimaraes Lima

read the complete article in the PANOPTIKON

Martin Chambi (1891-1973)

2010-05-06T00:48:00.004+04:00

photograph by Martin Chambi, 1929

"Martín Chambi Jiménez or Martín Chambi de Coaza, Puno, Peru November 5, 1891 – Cuzco, September 13, 1973) was a photographer, originally from southern Peru. He was one of the first major indigenous Latin American photographers.

Recognized for the profound historic and ethnic documentary value of his photographs, he was a prolific portrait photographer in the towns and countryside of the Peruvian Andes. As well as being the leading portrait photographer in Cuzco, Chambi made many landscape photographs, which he sold mainly in the form of postcards, a format he pioneered of in Peru.

In 1979, New York's MOMA held a Chambi retrospective, which later traveled to various locations and inspired other international expositions of his work."

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martín_Chambi

link: http://www.martinchambi.com/index.htm

Surrealism an Photography: subversive and subverted images

2010-01-20T06:54:00.006+04:00

LA SUBVERSION DES IMAGES

Centre Pompidou,
September 23 2009 - January 11 2010

« Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves » a painting by Miro dated 1925, opens the exhibition "La Subversion des Images" (The subversion of images) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The word Photo is painted on the upper left side of the work; a spot, a blob of blue paint occupies the lower right under which we read the inscription: "This is the color of my dreams" (see it here). It is indeed fitting that an exhibition focusing on the relations of Surrealism to photography and film, starts with a painting: the work of Miro recalls the common surrealist strategy of contrasts and conflation of language and image, exemplified in Magritte's celebrated "This is not a pipe". And it discloses the profound surrealist intuition of the inner identity of all forms of human expression in the common fund, the common ground and common denominator of the imagetic mind. (more)

Read my complete review of the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in the PANOPTIKON (here)

Man Ray : « Lee Miller's Neck ? », Paris 1929
© Man Ray Estate.
All rights reserved.
Lee Miller Archives, England 2009 /
Man Ray Trust / Adagp, Paris 2009

Lewis Hine (1874-1940)

2009-03-17T00:26:00.007+04:00

Child Factory Worker

Addie Card, 12 years. Spinner in North Pormal
[i.e., Pownal] Cotton Mill. Vt

Child laborers in glassworks. Indiana, 1908

Baseball team composed mostly of child laborers from a glassmaking factory.
Indiana, August 1908.

Power house mechanic working on steam pump, 1920

Lunch time and Smoke
1930-1931
negative, gelatin on diacetate film
4x5 in

Small group of immigrants landing at Ellis Island
1926
gelatin silver print
11.9 x 17.1 cm.

Ellis Island - 1926
gelatin silver print
11.9 x 17.0 cm.

Dorothea Lange

2009-03-15T15:09:00.007+04:00

Dorothea Lange "Migrant Mother" 1936.
The woman in the photo is Florence Owens Thompson.

In 1960, Lange spoke about her experience taking the photograph:

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.

source: Wikipedia

Billboards on Highway 99, 1937

Children at the Weill public school in San Francisco pledge allegiance to the American flag in April 1942, prior to the internment of Japanese Americans.

A Japanese American unfurled this banner the day after the Pearl Harbor attack; Lange photographed it in March 1942, just prior to the man's internment.

Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946): photography and modernity

2009-02-18T17:09:00.004+04:00

The Steerage, 1907

"There were men and women and children on the lower deck of the steerage.... I longed to escape from my surroundings and join them.... A round straw hat, the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right.... round shapes of iron machinery... I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that, the feeling I had about life..."

source: http://www.rleggat.com/photohistory/history/stieglit.htm

Portrait of Georgia O' Keefe, 1918

The Photography of Everyday Life: Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894 – 1986)

2009-02-16T16:13:00.004+04:00

'Grand Prix de Circuit de la Seine', June 26th 1912

The Photography of Everyday Life: Giuseppe Primoli (1851-1927)

2009-02-15T02:06:00.006+04:00

Street vendors in Rome

Reception at the Quirinal Palace (Palazzo Quirinale), Rome, 1893

Hunting scene

Photos of Degas in Paris, 1889

Link:
Fondazione Primoli

The Photography of Everyday Life: Paul Martin (1864-1942)

2009-02-14T20:35:00.008+04:00

Blind beggar at the cattle market, c.1890
Paul Martin
British, 1864 - 1942
Platinum print
18 x 22.8cm

Dancing to the organ, Lambeth, 1893
Platinum print
10 x 7.5cm

The Old Empire
Platinum print
17.5 x 23.5cm

Southend Beach, 1905

Yarmouth sands, 1892

Link:

Victoria and Albert Museum: Exploring Photography

Étienne-Jules Marey (1830 – 1904) - The Study of Movement

2009-02-14T19:56:00.013+04:00

Marey - Studies on human motion

Marey - Studies on animal motion, 1880s

Marey's photographic gun

source: Wikipedia

Marey and colleagues, a flip book experiment

Links:

Movements of Air Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) Photographer of Fluids

Works about and by Marey

Marey's Flip Book by Philipp Felsch

Marey- online exhibition

Ernst Mach: physicist and photographer

2009-02-14T19:08:00.005+04:00

source: http://www.bath.ac.uk/ncuacs/FP_Fuessl.htm

Ernst Mach (1838 – 1916) was influential as a physicist and philosopher of science in the late part of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century. He was one of the first to systematically investigate super-sonic motion using photographic techniques that he created in the early 1890s. The photographs of bullets in motion reveal (as shadows) the waves produced as the bullet approaches and surpasses the speed of sound.

Links:
Deutsches Museum E. March archive
Scientific photographs of Ernst Mach online by Wilhelm Fuessl

Degas photographer

2009-02-13T19:55:00.007+04:00

Edgar Degas
DANCER (ARMS OUTSTRETCHED)
1895 or 1896
Gelatin dry-plate negative

source: http://classes.asn.csus.edu/vail/art101/degas.htm

After the Bath, Woman Drying Her Back
Edgar Germain Hilaire Degas
French, 1896
Gelatin silver print
6 1/2 x 4 11/16 in.

source: http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=47047&handle=li

Edgar Degas

After the Bath, Woman Drying Her Back
pastel, 1896

Louise Halévy Reclining
Edgar Germain Hilaire Degas
French, 1895
Gelatin silver print
3 3/4 x 3 1/16 in.

source: http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=61459&handle=li

Links:

Degas' funereal photography By Christopher Benfey

Degas' Photos of Dancers by Morgan Alonso

Art and Photography: new images of art

2009-02-09T23:30:00.013+04:00

In the mid 1800s, the documentary powers of photography were applied in systematic ways to works of art and architecture by photographers such as James Anderson, Adolphe Braun, the Alinari brothers, Roger Fenton and others.

Soon, large photography enterprises developed for the publication of art reproductions. The photographer took over, not without protest initially, the market of reproductions that belonged to printmakers and painters.

James Anderson (British, 1813 - 1877)
Colossal bust of Antinous from the Villa Adriana, near Tivoli.

James Anderson
Rome, Colosseum and Arch of Costantin landscape
c. 1860, Albumen print
42.2 x 21.5 cm

James Anderson L'Arco di Tito [Rome] c. 1853
Wet-collodion-glass-negative 25.5 x 18.6 cm (10 x 7.5 )

James Anderson - Roman Forum

James Anderson - Arch of Constantine, Rome, c. 1858

James Anderson - Venetian Palace, c. 1870s

Comte Frédéric Flachéron
Rome, The Ara Coeli and the Dioscuri of the Capitol
1851
Salt print from calotype
35.5 x 25.0 cm

Adolphe Braun
Saint John the Baptist by Rodin 1877
albumen print
30 x 24 cm

images:
http://www.clemusart.com/Explore/artist.asp?artistLetter=A&recNo=66&woRecNo=0
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:James_Anderson
http://www.luminous-lint.com/app/photographer/James__Anderson/C/
http://www.luminous-lint.com/app/vexhibit/_COLLECTING_Roman_Photographic_School_01/5/0/0/
http://www.musee-rodin.fr/sjeun-e.htm

Art and Photography: mimesis and aura.

2009-02-09T22:18:00.013+04:00

Walter Benjamin, c. 1938
photo by Gisèle Freund

The mimetic relationship that photography establishes with painting, drawing and printmaking , the attempt to "elevate" photography to the dignity and the cultural status of the established art forms of tradition, correspond to the initial phase of emergence of both a new technology of the image and a new visual practice.

Photography relationship with the established system of the arts was indeed from the beginning a source of cultural anxiety and insecurity. Anxiety that we can understand as the manifestation of an obscure intuition that the invention of photography brought about radical changes not just in image production and in our uses of images, but also changes in our understanding of images, and consequently, in our understanding of ourselves.

The total impact of this new form of vision in the system of the visual arts and in the larger field and forms of the visual culture of the modern world would be fully recognized later. Seminal to the understanding of how photography affected deeply some our most fundamental aesthetic concepts and the very foundations of our historically constructed relationship with the work of art is the celebrated essay of Walter Benjamin "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction" (1936).

When the work of art becomes an object of photography, rather than simply its "paradigm", the art image is transformed into a new kind of image, that is, altered in its very nature and in its "artistic essence". The change in the artistic image alters the art object , whose "objectivity" will be understood from now on as its capacity to be reproduced. The mechanical reproduction, in contrast to the manual copy of works of art in the past, has the power to change the original , that is, to extract and to extricate it from from the historically given contexts of reception (and production) and project it into new historical grounds. Our relationship with the work of art is radically altered by the new type of work created by photography and the new image of art that it generates, which can no longer be made to conform to old categories and defunct forms.

Below is a quote from Benjamin´s essay on the impact of the mechanical reproduction of art.

Marcelo G. Lima

Walter Benjamin
at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, 1932
photo by Gisèle Freund

"The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura. Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual – first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty. The secular cult of beauty, developed during the Renaissance and prevailing for three centuries, clearly showed that ritualistic basis in its decline and the first deep crisis which befell it. With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later. At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of “pure” art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter. (In poetry, Mallarme was the first to take this position.)

An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics."

Walter Benjamin - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)

Pictorialism

2009-02-08T15:50:00.005+04:00

Robert Demachy, Speed 1904, gum-bichromate print

Robert Demachy, Severity 1904, gum-bichromate print

Robert Demachy, Behind the scenes, c. 1897, gum-bichromate print

A Documentary Art

2009-02-08T11:58:00.005+04:00

Still Life with Fruit], 1860
Roger Fenton (British, 1819–1869)
Albumen silver print from glass negative; 13 7/8 x 16 15/16 in. (35.2 x 43.1 cm)
source: http://www.metmuseum.org/TOAH/HD/rfen/ho_2005.100.15.htm

Stillleben mit Hortensien, Holler, Forellengeranien (1854) by Adolphe Braun

Study of Leaves on a Background of Floral Lace, 1864
Charles-Hippolyte Aubry (French, 1811–1877)
Albumen silver print from glass negative; 18 3/8 x 14 1/2 in. (46.7 x 36.7 cm)
source: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/infp/ho_2004.106.htm

Photography and/as Fiction

2009-02-08T11:51:00.004+04:00

L.M. Melender and brother, The Haunted Lane, c.1880.

albumen stereograph, Library of Congress, Washington DC

Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901)

2009-02-05T01:33:00.009+04:00

Fading Away, 1858

Henry Peach Robinson, Carolling, 1890. Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington.

When the Day's Work is Done, 1877

The Lady of Shalott by Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901). 1861.
Albumen print from two negatives, 12 x 10 in. (30.4 x 50.8 cm.). Unsigned. The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas (ace. no.964:057:068) Helmut Gernscheim Collection.

Ophellia by Sir John Everett Millais, 1852

Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1813 Sweden - 1875 London )

2009-02-04T17:25:00.008+04:00

The Artist introduces the Volunteer, c.1853

Infant Photography Gives the Painter an Additional Brush
London, about 1856
Albumen print
2 3/8 x 2 13/16 in.

source: Getty

The Two Ways of Life, 1857

Thomas Couture (1815-1879)Romans during the Decadence1847
Oil on canvasH. 472; W. 772 cm Paris, Musée d'Orsay

Hard Times (two versions), 1860

source: GEH

Combination printing

2009-02-03T13:48:00.004+04:00

According to B. Newhall (1), the technique known as combination printing evolved as a response to the problem of overexposure of the sky in landscape photography due to the sensitivity to the blue rays of the spectrum in the silver iodide emulsions used in the mid 19th century. The solution was the use of two different negatives with different exposure times of the same landscape to be combined in one print.

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820–1884)
The Great Wave, Sète, 1857
Albumen silver print from glass negative; 33.7 x 41.4 cm (13 1/4 x 16 5/16 in.)

source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gustave_Le_Gray-The_Great_Wave.jpg

(1) B. Newhall - History of Photography, 1997 (5th revised edition) p. 73-74

Darwin and photography

2009-02-03T13:06:00.007+04:00

Darwin by Julia Cameron

Darwin - The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872
with photographic illustrations by Oscar Gustave Rejlander

source: http://darwin-online.org.uk/

Maxime Du Camp (1822–1894): oriental visions

2009-01-26T23:43:00.006+04:00

"Porte D'Oree, Jerusalem"
1850, calotype, ca. 1850s

"Rive Oriental du Nil, Nubie"
1849-50, calotype

Nubie, Ibsamboul, Colosse Orientale du Spéos, 1850,
salt print, paper negative, ca. 1850

source: http://www.leegallery.com/ducamp.html

Abu Simbel, 1850

Salted paper print (Blanquart-Evrard Process) from paper negative

source: http://www.metmuseum.org/TOAH/hd/treg/ho_1981.1229.2.htm

Portraiture and Photography

2009-01-25T10:54:00.020+04:00

Antecedents: miniature painting and silhouette

François I of France
Jean Clouet (c.1535, oil on panel)
(Louvre)

Miniature portrait painting evolved in the Renaissance from the art of illuminating books.

Beethoven as a boy,
18th century silhouette portrait

Machine for drawing silhouettes.
From the 1792 English edition of
Johann Kasper Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy

Daguerreotype portraits

Daguerreotype of a young man
by T.H. Newcomer, Philadelphia.
Split leather case with the photographer's imprint on velvet mat.

source: http://www.antiquephotographics.com/Format%20Types/dags&ambros.htm

With rapid developments in the daguerreotype's materials, equipment and technique, portraiture, formerly a privilege of the powerful and the very wealthy, gained popularity and soon developed into a large industry providing a new commodity for mass consumption.

Prestige, utility, the human passion for the mimetic, narcissistic investment and the human desire for the kind of immortality conferred by memory come together in portraiture and in photographic portraiture. Photography can be understood as both an instrument of emotional attachment and the very index of human finitude. Thanks to photography, Zeno’ s paradox of time and distance turns into a description of the existential structures of individuality, a description of the temporal condition of the human subject.

Unknown photographer. Jabez Hogg making a portrait in Richard Beard' s Studio, 1843, daguerreotype

A daguerreotype describing the relationship between photographer and sitter, both immobilized, suspended in the extended instant, during the time of the exposure. The daguerreotype camera is seen in its role of mediator at the center of the composition. The photographic act can only be represented by momentary, real in-action.

Marcelo G. Lima

Latent Image

2009-01-20T22:12:00.012+04:00

The concept of the photographic latent image is characterized by B. Newhall as: " a relatively week light signal is amplified enormously by development" (1)

The action of light in the sensitized plate, paper or film is just the initial stage towards the formation of the photographic image, a process that must be complemented by development. The concept, according to Newhall, was announced by Talbot in 1841. Previously, Talbot allowed the action of light to be prolonged until the image appeared. The new procedure greatly reduced the necessary exposure time.

The idea that a feeble image can be "increased, brought out, and strengthened" after the completion of the exposure process, was part of the daguerreotype process, as Talbot himself noted in an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, after Daguerre´s disclosure of his invention. (2) It was in fact the pioneer discovery of Niépce in the 1820s. (3)

The pictures from the Salomon Andree expedition to the North Pole in 1897 are examples of the stability of the latent image. The expedition ended with the death of the explorers. Their remains were only found in 1930. And among the materials recovered, there were photographic plates which were successfully developed 33 years after being exposed.

(1) History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present
by Beaumont Newhal, New York, 1997 (5th edition) , p. 43.

(2) History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present
by Beaumont Newhal, p.25.

(3) Photography by Eric de Maré, London, 1980, p. 20.

The Örnen (Eagle) shortly after its descent onto pack ice.
Photographs by Nils Strindberg, member of the
S. A. Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:%22Eagle%22.crashed2.jpg

Tina Modotti (1896-1942)

2008-03-30T13:45:00.005+04:00

Rose, 1924

Campesinos, 1938

Workers, c 1926-1930

portrait of Edward Weston, 1923

Pablo Neruda's epitaph for Tina Modotti:

Pure your gentle name, pure your fragile life,
bees, shadows, fire, snow, silence and foam,
combined with steel and wire and
pollen to make up your firm
and delicate being.

source: Wikipedia

Edward Weston (1886-1958)

2008-03-30T13:27:00.012+04:00

Nude, 1927, silver print

Imogen Cunningham, 1922

Artichoke, 1930

Carmel, 1938

Nautilus, 1927

Tina Modotti, 1923

Tina Modotti, 1924

Excusado, 1925

Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976)

2008-03-30T12:15:00.007+04:00

Triangle plus one, 1928

Magnolia, c.1930

Flowering Cactus, 1930

Frida Kahlo, 1931

Ansel Adams, 1975

Manifesto of the Group f/64 (1932)

2008-03-30T12:09:00.002+04:00

The name of this Group is derived from a diaphragm number of the photographic lens. It signifies to a large extent the qualities of clearness and definition of the photographic image which is an important element in the work of members of this Group.

The chief object of the Group is to present in frequent shows what it considers the best contemporary photography of the West; in addition to the showing of the work of its members, it will include prints from other photographers who evidence tendencies in their work similar to that of the Group.

Group f/64 is not pretending to cover the entire spectrum of photography or to indicate through its selection of members any deprecating opinion of the photographers who are not included in its shows. There are great number of serious workers in photography whose style and technique does not relate to the metier of the Group.

Group f/64 limits its members and invitational names to those workers who are striving to define photography as an art form by simple and direct presentation through purely photographic methods. The Group will show no work at any time that does not conform to its standards of pure photography. Pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form. The production of the "Pictorialist," on the other hand, indicates a devotion to principles of art which are directly related to painting and the graphic arts.

The members of Group f/64 believe that photography, as an art form, must develop along lines defined by the actualities and limitations of the photographic medium, and must always remain independent of ideological conventions of art and aesthetics that are reminiscent of a period and culture antedating the growth of the medium itself.

The Group will appreciate information regarding any serious work in photography that has escaped its attention, and is favorable towards establishing itself as a Forum of Modern Photography.

source: Wikipedia

photographers of the Group f/64:

* Ansel Adams
* Imogen Cunningham
* Willard Van Dyke (founder and director)
* John Paul Edwards
* Consuelo Kanaga
* Alma Lavenson
* Preston Holder (founder)
* Sonia Noskowiak
* Henry Swift
* Edward Weston

Henri Cartier-Bresson

2008-03-25T13:53:00.004+04:00

Gare Saint Lazare, 1932

Andre Kertesz

2008-03-25T13:39:00.005+04:00

Meudon, 1928

Distortion series, c.1933

Under the Eiffel Tower, 1929

The studio of Mondrian, 1926

Brassai

2008-03-25T12:30:00.011+04:00

portrait of Picasso, 1932

Involuntary sculptures, c.1933

Paris by night, 1934

Bijou de Montparnasse, c. 1933

Belle de Nuit, c.1933

Place d' Italie. 1932

Hans Bellmer

2008-03-25T12:26:00.003+04:00

Bellmer, Untitled, 1960

______

The Doll, 1935

________

Hans Bellmer

___________

Eugene Atget (1857-1927)

2008-03-25T12:07:00.011+04:00

Atget came to Paris in the 1890s. Born near Bordeaux, as a young man he embarked as a sailor and cabin boy. Later he became an itinerant actor. Abandoning the stage, he aspired to become a painter, but settled for photography due to his lack of artistic education. He photographed the city of Paris on commission from public and private patrons, but also on his own. He lived an obscure life and died unnoticed. His work was discovered later by the surrealists who considered his achievements as a kind of premonition of Surrealism itself.

The photographs of Parisian streets, walls, facades, windows, storefronts, are indeed marked by a kind of quite expectation. Both intense and distracted in its concentration, in anticipation of things to come, a future drama that is at the same time the disclosure of a time already passed, as an event or a play in its final stages of completion, after the conclusion of the main action.

Through Atget´s works, Paris stages itself, presents itself as the place of a drama about to begin or already concluded. We, spectators have come perhaps too early, or most probably a little too late, and we are able to see the fragmented elements of a plot we are unable to fully grasp the final meaning.

In the majority of his images, Paris is a deserted place. When it appears in Atget´s photographs , the human figure is mostly secondary to the urban space that envelops and defines its inhabitants. The city however displays a sort of disciplined or restrained energy of its own. The city is not the background of a drama written in images by the old actor, but indeed its main character. Van Lier relates Atget images of Paris decayed walls, narrow streets, dormant facades to the concept and process of negentropy, the dissipation of energy (entropy) in physical systems and the counter attempts towards equilibrium.

As an actor, Atget knew the value of the dramatic pause and silence: a kind of music of silence is one important element in his images of deserted streets and buildings and in the mirrors of shop windows reflecting an autonomous world of commodities, liberated from the human intermediaries of commodity circulation: the dream, or nightmare of pure capitalism.

Marcelo Guimarães Lima

revised 14, February, 2009

Avenue des Gobelins (1927)

Notre-Dame, seen from Quai de la Tournelle, 1923

Paris shop front, 121 Rue Monmartre, c. 1900
Albumen print from gelatin dry plate

Organ Grinder (1898)

Cuviér Fountain at the corner of rue Linné, 1899

Paris, 62 Rue de l'Hotel de Ville, c.1900
Albumen print from gelatin dry plate
21.6 x 17 cm

Rue Gozlin, 1905

Mercury statue, Jardin des Tuileries, 1906

Jardin des Tuileries, 1907

The Moulin Rouge, 86 Boulevard de Clichi, 1910

source: http://www.gingkopress.com/_cata/ima1/atget-i1.htm

Le Cirque

Rue de Seine, 1924

Corsets, Boulevard de Strasbourge, 1912

http://www.hit.ac.il/staff/ShlomoA/Photography/archive.htm

Atget, Eugene (1857-1927) Rue St. Rustique
“20 Photographs by Eugene Atget”, New York, 1956

March 1922 / printed 1956 by Berenice Abbott from Atget’s negative
toned gelatin silver print
21.7 x 17.5 cm.

source: George Eastman House Online Collection

http://www.geh.org/fm/atget/htmlsrc/

Link:

The Paris of Atget - Then and Now

Photography and Surrealism: Man Ray

2008-03-10T20:11:00.003+04:00

Tristan Tzara: Inside-out photography

2008-03-10T20:05:00.002+04:00

inside-out photography

man ray

It is no longer the object which, with the trajectories from its extreme points intersecting in the iris, projects a badly reversed image on the surface. The photographer has invented a new method; he presents to space an image that goes beyond it; and the air, with its clenched hands, and its head advantages, captures it and keeps it in its breast.

An eclipse revolves round a partridge: is it a cigarette case? The photographer makes the spit of thoughts revolve to the creaking of a badly-greased moon.

The light varies according to the giddiness of the pupil on the cold paper according to its weight and to the shock it produces. A wisp of a delicate tree enables us to anticipate metalliferous strata, mighty chandeliers. It illuminates the vestibule of the heart with a torch of snowflakes. And what interests us has neither reason nor cause, like a cloud that spits out its abundant voice.

But let us talk art. Yes, art. I know a man who does excellent portraits. The man is a camera. But, you say, the colour and the quivering of the brush are missing. That vague shiver that was first a weakness and later, in order to justify itself, called itself sensitivity. Human imperfection, it would appear, possesses more serious virtues than the exactitude of machines. And what about still lifes? We'd be glad to know whether hors-d'oeuvres, desserts and game hampers don't excite our appetite more. I listen to the humming of a tube in an oil field, a torpedo twists its mouth, the crockery breaks with the sound of domestic quarrels. Why not make the portrait of all that? Because this applies to a particular disturbance through a channel that leads to those sorts of emotion but which consumes neither eyes nor colours.

Painters have seen this, they've got together, talked for a long time, and discovered the laws of decomposition. And the laws of construction. And of circumvolution. And the laws of intelligence and of comprehension, of sales, of reproductions, of dignity and of museum-keeping. Other people arrived later with enlightened cries to say that what the first ones had produced was nothing but bird-droppings. They offered their merchandise instead, an impressionist blueprint reduced to a vulgar but attractive symbol. For a moment I believed in their idiots' cries, washed by the melting snow, but I soon discovered that it was only sterile jealousy that was tormenting them. They all ended up producing English postcards. After having known Nietzsche and sworn by their mistresses, after having pulled all the enamel paint off the corpses of their friends, they declared that beautiful children were just as admirable as good oil painting, and that the painting that sold for the most money was the best. Noble painting, with curly hair, in gilt frames. That's their marble; that's our piss.

When everything that people call art had got the rheumatics all over, the photographer lit the thousands of candles in his lamp, and the sensitive paper gradually absorbed the darkness between the shapes of certain everyday objects. He had invented the force of a fresh and tender flash of lightning which was more important than all the constellations destined for our visual pleasures. Precise, unique and correct mechanical deformation if fixed, smooth and filtered like a head of hair through a comb of light.

Is it a spiral of water, or the tragic gleam of a revolver, an egg, a glittering arc or a sluice gate of reason, a subtle ear with a mineral whistle or a turbine of algebraical formulae? As the mirror effortlessly throws back the image, and the echo the voice, without asking us why, the beauty of matter belongs to no one, for henceforth it is a physico-chemical product.

After the great inventions and storms, all the little swindles of the sensibility, of knowledge, and of the intelligence have been swept up into the pockets of the magical wind. The negotiator of luminous values takes up the bet laid by the stable-boys. The ration of oats they give morning and evening to the horses of modern art won't be able to disturb the passionate progress of his chess and sun game.

source: Seven Dada Manifestos

http://brainwashed.com/h3o/chanson_dada/Seven_Dada_Manifestos.html (no indication of translator or edition)

Radical Dada: John Heartfield

2008-03-02T13:53:00.007+04:00

Adolf the Superman: Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk
source: http://www.towson.edu/heartfield/artarchive.html

Paradada or Dada in New York

2008-03-02T12:53:00.006+04:00

NEW YORK DADA , 1921

(Stieglitz, Duchamp, Ray)

source: Dada New York

Rose Selavy (Marcel Duchamp photographed by Man Ray, c. 1921)
source: Dada New York

Bauhaus and photography

2008-02-26T12:14:00.004+04:00

Herbert Bayer: Small Harbor, Marseille 1928.
In Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/nvis/ho_1987.1100.8.htm

From Dada to Bauhaus: Moholy-Nagy

2008-02-26T11:58:00.004+04:00

Moholy-Nagy, Untitled, photogram, c.1925
http://www.moholy-nagy.org/

Moholy-Nagy, Untitled, photogram, c.1922
http://www.moholy-nagy.org/

Dadagraphy: the photomontage - Raoul Hausmann

2008-02-26T10:44:00.006+04:00

Hausmann, Tatlin at Home, 1920
source:http://www.madsci.org

Hausmann, Raoul

Dada Siegt, 1920
Watercolor and collage on wove paper, mounted on board
Overall 23 5/8 x 17 3/4 in.
Private collection

Hausmann, Raoul
The Art Critic
1919-1920
Photomontage and collage
12 3/8 x 9 7/8 in.
Tate Gallery, London
source: ArtArchive

Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann
at the First International Dada-Messe, Berlin 1920
[Photograph, 16,5 x 12 cm.]
source: Essential Dada

Dadagraphy: the photomontage - Hannah Hoch

2008-02-26T10:29:00.005+04:00

Hannah Höch,
Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife
through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany,
1919, collage of pasted papers, 90 x 144 cm,
Staatliche Museum, Berlin.
source: Hannah Hoch- Wikipedia

Hannah Hoch,
Monument 1: from an Ethnographic Museum, 1924
source: The Photomontages of Hannah Hoch

link: Cut and Paste

Dadagraphy: the photogram

2008-02-26T10:26:00.001+04:00

Christian Schad (German, 1894-1982).
Untitled (Schadograph no. 4), 1919.
source: http://arthistory.about.com/od/dada/ig/DadaatMoMAZurich/dada_zurich_05.htm

link: http://www.photograms.org/chapter03.html

Dadagraphy (Dada and photography)

2008-02-26T10:12:00.005+04:00

Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919, "rectified readymade,"
pencil on a reproduction — a chromolithograph,
7 3/4 x 4 7/8 inches, private collection, Paris.
source: http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/r/readymade.html

Photography and the Russian Avantgarde

2008-02-26T08:55:00.014+04:00

Rodchenko

Poster for the publishing house Gosizdat,1924
(portrait of Lilya Brik shouting out the word “books”)

Portrait of Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1924
source: http://www.schicklerart.com/exh/mayakovsky/HTML/list.html

Pro eto. Ei i Mne. (About This. To Her and to Me.)
(A. Rodchenko) V. Mayakovsky,Moscow, 1923

Alexander Rodchenko
Photomontage for front and back cover of
Mayakovsky's A Conversation with a Tax-collector about Poetry, 1926.

El Lissitsky

El Lissitsky self-portrait: The Constructor, 1924

Photography and the mass media

2008-02-26T08:41:00.004+04:00

Anon.
Münchner Illustrierte Zeitung - Cover,
1918, 2 March
source: http://www.luminous-lint.com/

Tom Howard
Ruth Snyder's Death Pictured, 1928
gelatin silver, 10 x 8 inches
source: http://www.stevenkasher.com

Photography and Art

2008-02-21T12:18:00.008+04:00

Alinari Brothers, Duomo Florence, c. 1890

Alinari, Landscape study by Leonardo da Vinci, collotype

Alinari Brothers, Palazzo Vecchio Florence c.1900

source: http://www.alinari.com/

Adolphe Braun - Saint John Baptist by Rodin

Thomas Eakins Shad fishing, oil on canvas, 1881

Thomas Eakins Fisherman at Gloucester, 1881

Thomas Eakins and photography

2008-02-15T11:51:00.006+04:00

Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) - Swimmers, c.1883

Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) - Study in human motion, c.1880

source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Eakins

Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) - Nude 1883

source: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/eaph/hd_eaph.htm

Chuck Close: contemporary daguerreotype

2008-02-08T16:05:00.001+04:00

Cindy Sherman by Chuck Close
from A Couple of Ways of Doing Something (Aperture 2006)

Chuck Close:
A Couple of Ways of Doing Something
Photographs by Chuck Close
Poems by Bob Holman
Interview with Chuck Close and Bob Holman by Lyle Rexer
Clothbound, 22 tritone images
56 Pages, 11.375" X 14.875"
Aperture 2006

Excerpt from an interview by Lyle Rexer in the book:

Rexer: "And daguerreotypes are unforgiving. In the nineteenth century there were reams written about the fact that if you decided to have a daguerreotype made, you took your self-image in your hands, because nothing would be left out."

Close: "It was more warts-and-all than any other process. Because it’s so red-sensitive, any marks, any flaws are heightened. You have to be pretty comfortable in your skin, and vanity goes out the window. And it’s also physically painful. A normal daguerreotype is a more than two-minute exposure. We’ve made it instant photography by having a billion foot-candles of light go off all at once, and that’s very painful. The flashes are so intense your eyes slam shut. It’s like having an ice pick shoved in your eyeball. You can smell hair burning… Each one of these people who lent me their image with no control over how it’s going to come out, in this act of incredible generosity, had to put away whatever self-image they had of how they looked and accept this other image as being them. That goes beyond generosity."

source: http://www.lensculture.com/close.html

Photography into Art

2008-02-07T15:07:00.000+04:00

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875)
La jeune fille et la Mort, 1854

cliché-verre 201 x 168 mm
Genève, Cabinet des estampes
source: http://www.ville-ge.ch/mah/index.php?content=1.2.1.3.1.4.&langue=frs

Towards Photojournalism: Alexander Gardner and the Lincoln Conspirators

2008-01-29T13:47:00.000+04:00

Alexander Gardner (1821 – 1882)
Execution of conspirators to Lincoln's assassination (July 7, 1865)
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Gardner_(photographer)

Documentary Photography

2008-01-29T13:35:00.000+04:00

Albert Fernique1841-1898
Album de la construction de la Statue de la Liberté. (published 1883, Paris)

source: New York Public Library Digital Collection

Lewis Carrol

2008-01-28T22:56:00.004+04:00

Ambrotype photograph by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) from July 21, 1865 depicting Effie Gray Millais, John Everett Millais, and their daughters Effie and Mary at 7 Cromwell Place, signed by Effie Millais.

"Alexandra 'Xie' Rhoda Kitchin (September 29, 1864-April 6, 1925) was the favourite photographic subject of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), who photographed her around fifty times, from age four until just before her sixteenth birthday. She was also a notable 'child-friend' of Dodgson. The works they made together, often in tableau form, are commonly known to collectors, curators, and the contemporary artists who are inspired by them as the 'Xie' (pronounced 'Ecksy' - a diminutive form of Alexandra) pictures."

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Kitchin

Alice Liddell and her sisters, c.1859

Photo of Alice Liddell by Lewis Carroll. (1858)

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll#The_Photographer

André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri and the business of photography

2008-01-28T19:20:00.000+04:00

André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri (French, 1819–1889)
Prince Lobkowitz, 1858
Albumen silver print from glass negative; 7 7/8 x 9 1/8 in. (20 x 23.2 cm)
image source: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/infp/ho_1995.170.1.htm

André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri
The Organ Grinder
c. 1853 , salt print 5 7/8 x 4 3/4 in.

image source: http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=69940&handle=li

Multiple-shot camera invented by Desderi
image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Appareil_disderi.gif

link:
Carte-de-visite photography by Robert Leggat

Pierre-Louis Pierson

2008-01-28T19:03:00.001+04:00

Pierre-Louis Pierson, Countess of Castiglione, c.1860

link:
"La Divine Comtesse": Photographs of the Countess de Castiglione, Metropolitan Museum, NY

Early Photography: Between Historical Documentation and Fictional Narrative

2008-01-28T18:04:00.000+04:00

Re-enactment of the October 16, 1846 ether operation; daguerrotype by Southworth & Hawes.

image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Southworth_%26_Hawes_-_First_etherized_operation_%28re-enactment%29.jpg

Étienne Carjat

2008-01-23T18:06:00.000+04:00

Étienne Carjat (French, 1828–1906)
Charles Baudelaire, ca. 1863
Woodburytype
image source: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/infp/ho_64.677.4.htm

David Octavius Hill

2008-01-22T14:04:00.003+04:00

Newhaven fishwives
by Hill & Adamson

David Octavius Hill standing at the gate to his studio
calotype by Hill & Adamson.

source: http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/pp_d/pp_hill_calotypes_of_do_hill.htm

David Octavius Hill (1802–1870) and Robert Adamson (1821–1848)

Redding the Line (Portrait of James Linton), c. 1846
Scotish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

image source: http://www.kiberpipa.org/gallery/album82/David_Octavius_Hill_and_Robert_Adamson_Baiting_the_Line_1845.jpg

David Octavius Hill (1802–1870) and Robert Adamson (1821–1848)
"Photograph from the frontispiece of an album dated 1848,
showing D O Hill sketching in Greyfriars Kirkyard, watched by the Misses Morris.
Other tableaux in the same setting included The Artist and The Gravedigger"
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Octavius_Hill

"Many of Hill's portraits were made in the Edinburgh Greyfriars cemetery - nothing is more characteristic of this early period than the way his subjects were at home there. And indeed the cemetery itself, in one of Hill's picture, looks like an interior, a separated closed-off space where the gravestones propped against gable walls rise up from the grass, hollowed out like chimney pieces, with inscriptions inside instead of flames. But this setting could never have been so effective if it had not been chosen on technical grounds. The low light-sensitivity of early plates made prolonged exposure outdoors a necessity. This in turn made it desirable to take the subject to some out-of-the-way spot where there was no obstacle to quiet concentration."
Walter Benjamin - A Small History of Photography

The Disruption Painting

The Disruption painting shows the signing of the Act of Separation and Deed of Demission by members of the Church of Scotland and the creation of the Free Church of Scotland. Around 1,500 people attended the signing of the Act of Separation. Hill entered into partnership with Robert Adamson in 1843 to produce calotypes of individual ministers, to be used for this painting. There are 457 figures in the painting , including a few who were not present at the ceremony. Robert Adamson is included in the picture with his camera.

source: http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/pp_d/pp_hill_paintings_in_oil_disruption.htm

link: David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson Metropolitan Museum