Introduction to the History of Photography

The advent of the portable camera allowed for changes in the practice of photography, in the methods and goals of photographers.  Photography leaves the comforts of the studio, its tempo or rhythms, its formal ideas and established procedures and searches for novelty in the cadences, the pulses and figures of everyday life. Photographers such as Giuseppe Primoli and Paul Martin stand in between the amateur art of their predecessors and the developing discipline of photojournalism, as observed by I. Jeffrey (1).    Roma - Via Ostiense 1890 self-portrait of Giuseppe Primoli photographing the flooded street The informal, the improvised, the ephemeral are made into new plastic values translating the energies of urban life, the heterogeneous world of modern civilization unified in the commodity form of its material products and social exchanges, and similarly equalized in the “democratic” vision of the camera, a vision more and more unconcerned with ...

Alfred Stieglitz: The Eloquent Eye (1999) A PBS documentary link:     Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) and American Photography

  Young ladies by a pond, Japan (1907)   from the book In Lotus Land (1910) In lotus-land Japan (1910) http://www.archive.org/details/inlotuslandjapan00pontrich Herbert Ponting Mount Fuji This photograph is the opening image of Ponting’s ‘Japanese Studies’ collotyped by K. Ogawa F.R.P.S. in Tokyo in 1906. It is accompanied by a quote from a Wordsworth poem: ‘A distant mountain’s head, Strewn with snow smooth as the sky can shed, Shines like another sun.’   http://images.rgs.org/search.aspx?keyword=S0010741        http://www.baxleystamps.com/litho/ogawa/ogawa_ponting.shtml FUJI SAN photographed by Herbert G. Pontingpublished by K. Ogawa, 1905   The Great wall of China (1907) Ponting expanded his photographs of Japan into a 1910 book, In Lotus-land Japan. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (FRGS). His flair for journalism and ability to shape his photographic illustrations i...

E. S. Curtis (1904): Canon de Chelly – Navajo. Seven riders on horseback and dog trek against background of canyon cliffs. A smoky day at the Sugar Bowl-- Hupa , c. 1923. Hupa man with spear, standing on rock midstream   Hopi mother, 1922.   Crow's Heart, Mandan The Pool- Apache Self-Portrait of Edward S. Curtis 1868-1952.   The North American Indian at Project Gutenberg at Archive.org at Northwestern University In 1906 J.P. Morgan offered Curtis $3,000 to produce a series on the North American Indian. It was to be in 20 volumes with 1,500 photographs. Morgan was to receive 25 sets and 500 original prints as his method of repayment. 222 complete sets were eventually published. Curtis' goal was not just to photograph, but to document, as much American Indian (Native American) traditional life as possible before that way of life disappeared. He wrote in the introduction to his first volume in 1907: "The information that is to ...

  Whitby Harbour, from the series of photographs of Whitby and surrounding areas taken between 1875 and 1910. Francis Meadow Sutcliffe (6 October 1853 – 31 May 1941) was an English pioneering photographic artist whose work presented an enduring record of life in the seaside town of Whitby, England, and surrounding areas, in the late Victorian era and early 20th century. He was born in Headingley, Leeds, to the painter Thomas Sutcliffe and Sarah Lorentia Button. He made a living as a portrait photographer, working first in Tunbridge Wells, Kent then for the rest of his life in Sleights, Yorkshire. His father had brought him into contact with prominent figures in the world of art such as John Ruskin, and he resented having to prostitute his art taking photographs of holiday-makers. His business in Skinner Street rooted him to Whitby and the Eskdale valley but, by photographing the ordinary people that he knew well, he built up a most complete and revealing picture o...

'Gathering Water Lilies', 1886. Platinum print, plate IX from 'Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads' by Peter Henry Emerson The Old Order and The New', 1886. Platinum print. Photograph by Peter Henry Emerson. An illustration from 'Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads'.   http://www.archive.org/details/marshleaves00emeriala P. H. Emerson’s writings and photographs focused on photography and nature, the aesthetics of photography and the recording of nature. As an early  “conservationist”, the pristine landscape of East Anglia and its traditional ways of life (peasants, fishermen) in the process of being transformed and displaced by the combined threats of industrial and commercial progress and tourism, were his main subjects and preoccupation.  A quasi-pantheistic, romantic sensibility is expressed in his images, combined with a naturalistic purpose that searches for “truth” as the common denominator of both art, that is,...

John Thomson (1837-1921) 'Street Life in London England, 1877-8 Carbon print (woodburytype) Victoria and Albert Museum The Photographs In the late 1870s Thomson embarked on his most well known project, photographing the lives the people living on the streets of London. 'Street Life in London' was published in twelve instalments throughout 1877 and the beginning of 1878. Three of Thomson's photographs appeared in each edition with three stories mainly written by the journalist Adolphe Smith, who held reformist views and worked as the official interpreter for the TUC from 1886 to 1905. With social problems gaining increased attention in the 1870s through the work of such men as Charles Dickens and the founder of homes for destitute children, Dr Barnado, these vignettes of survival among the poor proved popular with the public. The hopes and aspirations, values and needs of those portrayed were recognisable to the readers of other classes. The photogr...