Introduction to the History of Photography

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...

William Henry Jackson "Chief Garfield Velarde",  1898     William Henry Jackson,  "Running Antelope - Hunc papa Dakotas", 1877   William Henry Jackson, Wastawana or Indian Tom in Native Dress Near Brick Wall, 1872

   Flower studies, 1855 , by Adolphe Braun Still Life of a Hunting Scene  Adolphe Braun negative about 1867, print about 1880 Carbon print, 30 7/16 x 22 1/8 in. Adolphe Braun  b. 1811 Besançon, France, d. 1877 photographer French “Trained as a fabric designer, Adolphe Braun began his photography career in 1853. His photographs of flowers, for a catalog titled Fleurs photographiées, were to be transferred onto printing blocks for wallpaper and fabric designs. It was an extremely successful project for Braun; one album of the photographs was presented to Empress Eugénie of France, and it earned him a medal at the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle. By the early 1860s, Braun's focus had shifted to the making of topographical views of scenes throughout Europe and, beginning in 1866, to reproductions of works of art. The reproduction of paintings, drawings, lithographs, engravings, and sculpture was an important endeavor in France, and photo...

‘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.

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

[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 p...