Introduction to the History of Photography

‘Autumn’, combination albumen print by Henry Peach Robinson,1863.  According to Ian Jeffrey, Peach Robinson's works confront the dilemma of photography between activity and passivity, that is, between imagination , the artist's unique faculty of giving form to what is primarily an "inner" vision clothed by the figures of the visible world,  by the  forms of external reality, and the recording of appearances that is, something like a "self-presentation of nature" mediate by the photographic apparatus and process - a double challenge taking away the artist's control and his self-representation as a kind of "demiurge" of the visible world .     In the works of Robinson, Rejlander and others, photography assumes the "challenge" of art as a sort of competition for "aesthetic recognition" on the grounds of the established system of the arts, its recognized values and attributed functions. The very values and functions that t...

  Oscar Rejlander - The Two Ways of Life, combination print made of thirty-two images in about six weeks.  First exhibited at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857. The composition is said to be based on Raphael's The Disputation of the Sacrament (Italian: La disputa del sacramento ), or Disputa (below), painted between 1509 and 1510.

  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 Med...

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

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