Introduction to the History of Photography

  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...

Carleton Watkins, The Vernal Fall, from the Yosemite Book, 1868 Carleton Watkins. Yosemite Falls and the Merced River. Yosemite National Park. View from the Sentinel Dome, Yosemite, by Carleton Watkins As Ian Jeffrey observed (1),  19th century American landscape photography recorded "virgin" nature in two complementary "modes": in the first, contemplating the novelty, and the magnitude of its subject, the photographer documents vast vistas from the distance, not simply physical distance per se  but a properly visual distance appropriated to handle the unique, novel forms of the subject. In the second, photographic vision "tames" nature and organizes the natural panorama by way of an aesthetic code akin to that of the contemporary landscape painters.  Survey photography by Weed, Watkins or by Muybridge, O' Sullivan, and others, can be seen as a kind of "second" conquest o...

  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 | Heilb...

  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...

  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 t...

  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 S...

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 ...

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