Introduction to the History of Photography

 The Photographic Salon exhibition of 1902 (source: Leggat pdf) The Salon was created in 1893 by members of the Linked Ring. "Many artists regard the hanging of their work at the Royal Academy almost as an accolade. So too with photographers. In the 1880s, the exhibitions mounted by the Photographic Society were regarded as the premier event. However, several of its members were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the Society's emphasis on scientific as opposed to aesthetic matters. As time went on differences between the photographic scientists and photographic artists became greater and more acrimonious, and Henry Peach Robinson was becoming increasingly frustrated by the failure of the Photographic Society to recognize that there was an artistic dimension as well as a scientific one to photography. The Photographic News for 19 August 1892 pinpointed the problem: "If photography is ever to take up its proper position as an art it must detach itself from s...

‘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...

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