The european response: Laurie Haynes
October 15, 2007
Photography as Contemporary Art
The European response.
(contrasting the emergent Art Photography movement in Europe with that of The United States)
In many respects the title of this essay is a misnomer, as there was not an actual intellectual response to the American school of Art Photography, but rather a continuation of a pre-war mindset that located photography firmly in the camp of the social documentary. The war in Europe had essentially deconstructed social order. The fundamental need to survive, rebuild, and re-discover the threads of social connection taking precedence,over the language of Art. But Art is indestructible, or rather the need to create Art. So from the ruins of Europe a damaged, but reborn child emerged. The image of American society portrayed in the post war years was, when compared to life in the major cities of Europe, the stuff of fantasy, a lifestyle, a society economically so advanced, that it was almost unrecognisable to the European audience. But the indomitable human spirit shone through, and in so doing provided a liet motif for the camera.
Robert Doisneau, a young photographer, before the war, returned to the streets of Paris with an objective lens and Eye. Specialising in an almost photo-journalistic style that celebrated the humour that enabled the people of France to battle through. Historically Doisneau’s work was seemingly etched with an heroic optimism that simply recorded those intimate moments that show a triumph of hope over adversity. Franks ability to record the frank and often humorous depictions of Parisian street life has secured him a prominent place in photographies hall of fame, and whilst his images sit uneasily amongst the ‘Art’ of the American period, his work is in many modern Art collections. During the 1970’s many of franks images were re-presented to the public as works of Art by the art poster company ‘Athena’ Among his most recognizable work is Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville(“Kiss by the Hotel de Ville”), a photo of a couple kissing in the busy streets of Paris. Who the couple were was a mystery until in 1993, when Denise and Jean-Louis Lavergne took him to court for taking the picture without their knowledge. This action forced Doisneau to admit that he actually ‘posed’ the shot in 1950 using actor/models Françoise Bornet and her then boyfriend Jacques Carteaud. Françoise was given an original print as part of her payment. In April 2005 she sold the print for 155,000 € at an auction.
Doisneau’s work gives unusual prominence and dignity to the culture of the streets, in particular the activities of children; returning again and again to the theme of children at play in the city, unfettered by parents. His work treats their play with seriousness and respect. In terms of his artistic heritage Frank was very much the Art apprentice gathering the skill of Lithographer and sculptor on his journey to becoming a photographer. It is interesting to note the Frank served as a soldier in the army of ‘La resistance’ during the war as photographer and printer. His first hand knowledge of the horror of both war and occupation perhaps leading him to celebrate the french spirit in later years. 1912 Born in Gentilly, Val-de-Marne 1929 Graduated from lithography school l’Ecole Estienne in Chantilly 1930 Camera assistant to sculptor André Vigneau 1932 First photo story in Excelsior (French magazine) 1934-39 Publicity photographer for Renault; fired for truancy 1939 Drafted into the French army (“la Résistance“) during World War II, where he acted as a soldier, photographer and printer 1946 Joined the Rapho photo agency 1949-52 Photographer for French Vogue 1992 Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford 1994 Died in Montrouge Another photographer who rose to prominence during the post war period is willi Ronis. Born in Paris, Ronis’ father was a Jewish refugee from Odessa who opened a photography studio in Montmartre and his mother was a refugee from Lithuania who gave piano lessons. Ronis’ early interest was music and he hoped to become a composer. Returning from compulsory military service in 1932, his violin studies were put on hold because his father’s cancerrequired Ronis to take over the family portrait business. The work of photographers, Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel Adamsinspired Ronis to begin exploring photography. After his father’s death, in 1949, Ronis closed the studio and joined the photo agency, Rapho, with Ergy Landau, Brassaï, and Robert Doisneau.Ronis became the first French photographer to work for LIFE Magazine. In 1953, Edward Steichenincluded Ronis, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Izis, and Brassaï in an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art entitled Five French Photographers. In 1955, Ronis was included in the The Family of Man exhibit. The Venice Biennale awarded Ronis the Gold Medal in 1957. Ronis began teaching in the 1950s, and taught at the School of Fine Arts in Avignon, Aix-en-Provenceand Saint Charles, Marseilles. In 1979 he was awarded the Grand Prix des Arts et Lettres for Photography by the Minister for Culture. Ronis won the Prix Nadarin 1981 for his photobook, Le fil du hasard.Ronis’ wife, Anne Marie was the subject of his well-known, [1949] photo, Provencal Nude. The photo, showing Anne Marie washing at a basin with a water pitcher on the floor and an open window through which the viewer can see a garden, is noted for its ability to convey an easy feeling of provencal life. Late in her life, Ronis photographed Anne Marie suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, sitting alone in a hospital yard. Anne Marie died in 1991.Ronis continues to live and work in Paris, although he stopped photography in 2001, since he required a cane to walk and could not move around with his camera, and now works on books for the Taschen publishing company.
On the other side of the channel another photographer with a unique vision was coming to the fore. Contrary to legend, Bill Brandt was born not in London, but in Hamburg, Germany, on May 3, 1904. The asthmatic son of a banking family, he came to his own country for the first time in 1931, having lived in a sanatorium in Davos and in Vienna and Paris, where he was Man Ray’s assistant.
His ambition was to become an independent professional photographer. His first book, The English at Home, appeared in 1936. Based on the portrayal of types and stereotypes, this was a kind of manifesto of British society, through which Brandt undertook to show the British their real faces. The complete opposite of the ideal motherland of his dreams, he discovered a divided people, a stratified society with a well-defined caste system, in the grip of economic crisis. Two years later he published A Night in London; in the same way as his friend Brassaï, Brandt enjoyed the uncertain, magical lighting effects of the night. Prowling around almost invisibly, he recorded London, revealing social inequality. He did not hesitate to ask his close friends to pose for him for certain situations.
In 1937 Bill Brandt travelled north, where he undertook at his own expense a photo reportage on the economic and social situation in the great cities of the Midlands and Tyneside. There he took his most memorable instantaneous photographs, such as the one of the emblematic figure of a scavenger for coal returning home, a modern myth of Sisyphus.
During the war Brandt was employed by the Home Office to show how well Londoners taking refuge in air-raid shelters were coping with air raids. He was also commissioned to produce a major photographic inventory of the capital’s important buildings. The work was carried out during the black-out, without flash, rather in the style of Atget. This reportage, notable for its use of light and shade, was published in Picture Post and emphasized Brandt’s interest in social documentation.
During the second half of his career Bill Brandt devoted himself to portraiture, landscapes, and nude photography. It was his revolutionary treatment of the last category which brought him notoriety. His first nudes were photographed with an old wooden plate camera which the police had formerly used, lacking a shutter and equipped with a wide-angle lens. These photos seemed inspired by Balthus, Hitchcock, and Orson Wells. Their dramatic atmosphere is enhanced by the unusual viewpoints of the architectural backgrounds, imbuing them with a menacing atmosphere of murder or suffocation, perhaps connected with the asthma from which Brandt suffered all his life. These unnatural perspectives, which shocked people at the time, based on the enlargement of volumes and close-up treatment of details, may be compared with the experiments of Picasso, the forms of Henry Moore, and, of course, the distorted work of Andre Kertész. Increasingly turning to abstract photography, from 1951 to 1960, when he gave up nude work, Brandt undertook exterior views (on the beaches of East Sussex, Normandy, and the south of France), in which he brought together the eternal themes of women and the sea, birthplace and symbol of creation.
At the same time, Brandt was taking portraits for Lilliput, Picture Post, and Harper’s Bazaar of the artists, intellectuals, and writers whom he admired. He detested naturalism. Rather he sought to decipher enigmas, and in his work portraiture is combined with a quasi-judicial chronicle of events. Going beyond external appearances, he tried to decode the mysteries concealed behind a face, as in his intriguing portrait of Francis Bacon (1963), far from a straightforward rendering of the subject.
His passion for literature led him to illustrate Literary Britain(1951), which unfurls naturally with romantic, tortured scenes evoking Wuthering Heights. At Stonehenge, or on Skye, Brandt demonstrated his fascination for untamed sites, those providing a sense of majesty, the sublime, the infinite. The cult of nature fostered the attraction that open spaces had for him, allowing him to bring out the emotional appeal of the landscape. This aspect of his work reached its high point when he chose 200 twentieth-century photographs for “The Land”, a project completed shortly before his death in London on December 20, 1983.
In the context of the art of his time, whose aesthetic experiments are reflected in his work, Bill Brandt was one of the first photographers to have created an individual style. While allowing the vocabulary of his art to evolve, he consciously worked at creating a personal photographic language. Based on the alliance between form and content, the fruit of experiment, exploration of the imaginary and an ever deeper investigation of the same themes, his work is notable for its splendid use of strong contrasts and densely printed images.
As legitimate subject for the European Photo-Artist the almost sub-cultural hinterland of the inner cities and its attendant nefarious night-life has been a source of inspiration and fascination. In continental Europe and the United states of America there were artists at work who seemed most comfortable when working at night. E.J Bellocq reverently photographed the prostitutes of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, in an almost magical parallel with the paintings of Henri Toulouse Latrec. Both drawn to the darkness because their miss-shapen appearance was essentially masked, both men found both comfort and inspiration from the ladies of the night. When viewed side by side there is a familiarity and sense of belonging that was in part due to the acceptance by the models of their particular difference. Another photographer who seemed at home on the streets was Gyula Brassai. born Transylvania, 1899-1984
Brassai took his name from the town of his birth, Brasso, in Transylvania, then part of Hungary, later of Roumania, and famous as the home of Count Dracula. He studied Art at the academies of Budapest and Berlin before coming to Paris in the mid-twenties. He was completely disinterested in photography, if not scornful of it, until he saw the work being done by his acquaintance André Kertész, which inspired him to take up the medium himself. In the early thirties he set about photographing the night life of Paris, especially at its more colourful and more disreputable levels. The result of this project – a fascinatingly tawdry collection of prostitutes, pimps, madams, transvestites, apaches, and assorted cold-eyed pleasure-seekers – was published in 1933 as Paris de Nuit, one of the most remarkable of all photographic books.
Making photographs in the dark bistros and darker streetspresented a difficult technical problem. Brassai’s solution was direct, primitive, and perfect. He focused his small plate camera on a tripod, opened the shutter when ready, and fired a flashbulb. If the quality of his light did not match that of the places where he worked, it was, for Brassai, better: straighter, more merciless, more descriptive of fact, and more in keeping with Brassai’s own vision, which was as straightforward as a hammer.
When Paris de Nuit was published, the great photographer and theorist Dr. Peter Henry Emerson, then approaching eighty, wrote Brassai in care of his publisher, asking Brassai to please send his proper address, so that Emerson could send him the medal that had been awarded to him for his splendid book. It is an interesting comment on the chaotic incoherence of photographic history that Brassai had never even heard of Emerson, but Emerson act of kindness and respect acknowledges Brassai as a ‘matre’.
If one had to classify the fundamental skill or objective of the European photographers, it would be the ability to suggest or imply that there is a nobility in almost every strata of society.
The collective genre, shows that cohesive strand that humanity that is fundamental to the function of society. At its core is a rhythm, first of all, the rhythm of the organism, ruled by the heartbeat and circulation of blood. As we live in a pulsating, vibrating world, we respond to it and in turn are bound to its rhythm. Without giving much thought to our dependence on the systoles and diastoles of flowing time we move through sunrises and sunsets, through the sequences of four seasons. Repetition enables us to form habits and to accept the world as familiar. Perhaps the need of a routine is deeply rooted in the very structure of our bodies.
In a city or a village which we have known well since our childhood we move in a tamed space, our occupations finding everywhere expected landmarks that favour routine. Transplanted into alien surroundings we are oppressed by the anxiety of indefiniteness, by insecurity There are too many new shapes and they remain fluid, because the principle of their order through routine cannot be discovered. What I am saying is perhaps just a generalization of my own experience but I hope to be understood as that experience has been shared by many especially in this century.
Among the misfortunes of exile, anxiety of the unfamiliar holds a prominent place. Whoever has found himself as an immigrant in a big foreign city had to cope with a kind of envy at the sight of its inhabitants engaged in purposeful occupations, confidently going to definite, known to them, shops or offices, in a world weaving together a huge fabric of everyday bustle. It is possible that such an observer from the outside would have recourse to special strategies in order to diminish his feeling of alienation.
I offer this direct quotation from Brassai, that explains ‘reason d’etr’ for the Photographer Artist
‘Living in Paris, I was for a long time drawing a line around a few streets in the Latin Quarter, so that I could call a certain area mine.” A restaurant at the corner, a small bookstore, a laundry, a cafe succeeded each other when I was taking a walk and would give me some assurance through their presence at the points expected in advance.
To be lost in a foreign city. Perhaps something more is involved here than a mere inability to find one’s way. It once happened to me, also in Paris, a city of my many joyous moments and many misfortunes, when I stepped out of the Métro in a part of the town with which I was acquainted, but not too well. I started to walk and suddenly I noticed that there was not even one spot to serve me as a guide mark and I was seized by a sort of fear of height. The houses seemed to turn around and threaten to fall. I lost orientation. And I was quite aware that my indecision of which street to take reflected my loss of orientation in a deeper sense. Exile deprives one of the points of reference that helped us to make projects, choose our goals, to organize our activities. In our native countries we maintained a peculiar relationship with our predecessors, with writers if we were writers, with painters if we were painters, etc., and that was a relationship of both respect and opposition; our driving force was to better them in one or another manner and to add our name to the roster of names remembered by our village, our city, or country Here, abroad, nothing of that is left, we have been catapulted out of history, which is always the history of a specific area on the map, and we have to cope with, to use an expression of an exile writer, “the unbearable lightness of being.”
The recovery is slow and never complete. There is a period when we refuse to recognize that our displacement is irrevocable and no political or economic changes in the country of our origin can bring about our return. Then slowly we come to the realization that exile is not just a physical phenomenon of crossing state borders, for it grows on us, transforms us from within, and becomes our fate. The undifferentiated mass of human types, streets, monuments, fashions, trends acquires some distinct features and gradually the strange transforms itself into the familiar At the same time, however, the memory preserves a topography of our past, and this dual observance keeps us apart from our fellow citizens’. As a cultural signpost the photograph is without parallel, presenting the viewer with an infinite opportunity to appraise, and re-appraise the scene set before.
The work of the photographers mentioned here share a heritage and a legacy. The ability to mark that moment in time and place.
defining social documentary
October 8, 2007
The primary goal of this session is to get you, the students thinking about traditional notions of documentary and then to create a list of features, characteristics, or traits that would act as a signpost for further examination both in terms of History, but also in terms of ‘Truth to Appearence’. This could serve as a foundation for signifying the fluid nature of documentary and hopefully get you to confront your own attitudes and expectations on the subject.
Questions to Consider
- What is a documentary?
- What are its characteristics?
- What do we expect it to do and why?
Scholars interested in culture and social life have had difficulties for some time over drawing the line between social research and documentary studies, Documentary photography and film making in particular. Some social scientists clearly embrace documentary studies as a vital complement to their own work, but others dismiss them for a lack of vigour or depth; or for neglecting social theory in favour of anecdotes, evocations and the pictorial. As image makers is it important that the social documentary photographer has a knowledge of social science? or is it enough that he/she turns the lens on a subject and leaves the debate/rhetoric to others?
Some will argue that it is imperative that the photographer has a least some rudimentary grasp of the social sciences as a valid foundation for documentary, while others will still find ( even when that foundation exists) the subsequent images overly abstracted, impersonal, insensitive to a fault, pedantic, or perhaps beside the point. Central to this debate would be the topic of Visual Anthropology, from the point of inception photography was being used as a tool of science, serving to add validity to the empirical classification,of types-things. As we have already discussed all photography is essentially an abstraction, context removed-semiotically impotent. But if that is the case how does one explain the overwhelming power of the rhetoric surrounding the image in the context of social documentary? Yet again when come to that fine line that defines our actual experience, contrasted against that we perceive to be actual experience. The photograph has the ability to ’suspend or perhaps abduct our disbelief’ to the point that we accept a notion of photographic ‘truth’ .I think that there is covert elements of humanist philosophy working quietly behind the scenes. If it were true that there was no such concept as photographic truth, what would be the point of picking up the camera and turning it on our fellow human beings? If however you accept that there are people who have genuine concerns over the plight of the human race, and that these people record events to expose injustice, inequality, suffering, and/or perhaps juxtapose these topics against others that show more positive aspects of humankind, then perhaps you can buy into the illusory world of photographic truth. Perhaps it is this balancing of good and evil that gives social documentary its power. I would be interested in hearing the opinion of others
Ist Year history of photography
September 19, 2007
Hello everyone,
If you have been directed to this blog by me, then you are one of my students and already know what this is about. If you have stumbled across it by accident, and have an interest in photography then you may find lots of information that may be of interest.
In the first instance the content is about ‘The history of photography’ – ‘how to write an academic essay’- and an exploration of ‘Photography as contemporary art’, but will be expanded to include a veritable feast of photographic ephemera, Images-critical commentary-and academic essays. I welcome your comments, and would like you to view this blog as your own, and help me to develop the site as something all students of photography can use. Laurie Haynes
A chronological history of the major events in photographic history
11thC Ð 16thCThe Camera obscura was developed allowing artists to
trace the images it projected by hand
1558 Giovanni Battista Della Porta illustrated camera
principles in his book “Natural Magic” Which
theoretically proposed the use of light in ‘automatic
drawing’
1568 Daniello Barbarofitted the camera obscura with
a lens and a changeable opening to sharpen the image. 1666 Issac Newton Demonstrated that light is the source of colour. He used a prism to split sunlight into its constituent colours and another to recombine them to make white light.
1725 Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered that the change in colour of a mixture of silver nitrate and chalk, in sunlight, was caused by light, not heat.
1758 Dolland Developed the Achromatic telescope lens. This improved the camera obscura image.
1801 Thomas Young suggested that the retina at the back of the eye contains three types of colour sensitive receptor, one sensitive to blue light, one to green and one to red. The brain interprets various combinations of these colours to form any other colour in the visible spectrum.
1802 Thomas Wedgewood is the first person to attempt to record the camera image by means of the action of light (he is successful in recording the image in organic substances such as the darkening silver nitrate on white leather or paper when exposed however he is unable to find a way to make these images permanent or stop the darkening permanently)
1816 Joseph Nicephore Niepce made a crude photographic camera from a jewel box and a simple lens and succeeded in making a negative image(from written records, no image survives)
1817 (approx) Niepce is the first to successfully fix the camera’s image (based on evidence in letters written by him at that time) interested in improving the process used for lithography (to replace the heavy, cumbersome stones used with metal plates). He was weak at drawing his own pictures he hoped inventing a process to fix camera obscura images would alleviate this need and free him to create images to use for his lithographic device invention work. He designed his cameras hoping to create an ‘artificial eye’.
1819 Sir John F Herschel, an astronomer and scientist noticed that the hyposulphite of soda dissolved in silver salts (at this time as a mere observation of the properties of these substances, and although he had not formulated any ideas on how this discovery could be used, he new it was significant)
1827 Date creation the only example of Niepce’s photographic work, ‘heliography’ as he called it still in existence today (an eight hour exposure of a view of a building and the landscape surrounding it).Niepce visited the painter Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre who was also trying to figure out how to capture the camera image ‘by the spontaneous action of light’. (As a scenic painter, he was already very familiar with the camera obscura)
1829 Niepce and Daguerre sign a ten-year agreement to work in partnership developing their new recording medium
1833 Niepce dies and Daguerre continues his work alone (although Niepce’s heirs are still legally connected to Daguerre as partners they contribute nothing to Daguerre’s research and development) William Henry Fox Talbot almost accidentally discovers a photographic system working independently in England (he too was frustrated by his inability to draw well and used the camera obscura. As he imagined how nice it would be if the camera obscura’s images could be ‘imprinted durably and remain fixed on the paper’. He experiments and creates a negative image using sodium chloride and silver nitrate).
1835 Talbot describes in his notebook how a positive image might be made from a negative if the ‘paper’ the negative was recorded on was transparent and as fixed (so it was rendered insensitive to the further action of light)
1837 First Daguerreotypeshared with the world (still exists today, signed and dated in the collection of the Societe Francaise de Photographie in Paris). These pictures were described as ‘images that paint themselves’ and ‘beautiful drawings’ with a high range of highlights, shadows, and half tones. ‘A dead spider, taken through the solar microscope, has such fine detail in the drawing that you could study its anatomy with or without a magnifying glass, as in nature Travellers, you will son be able, perhaps at the cost of some hundreds of francs, to acquire the apparatus invented by M. Daguerre and be able to bring back to France the most beautiful monuments and scenes of the whole world…’ (Gazette de France January 6 1839). The Daguerreotype process is kept secret. Talbot is astonished to hear about the Daguerreotype process created for the same purpose as his during approximately the same time period.
1839 Talbot shared samples of his work with the Royal Institute in London (pushed to do so at this time because of the Daguerreotypes), and he too keeps his process secret.
1840 First lens designed specifically for photographic purposes by Petzval
January Herschel (while trying to figure out what Talbot and Daguerre’s secret processes might be, knowing they required sensitive paper, a perfect camera, and a ‘means of arresting the further action’ successfully fixes sensitised paper using his 1819 discovery of hyposulphite of soda dissolved in silver salts. (This chemical is still used today called sodium thiosulfate or ‘hypo’)
February Herschel shares this technique with Talbot. Once published, Daguerre began using it too, and almost all subsequent photographic processes rely on this discovery. Herschel coins the term ‘photography’ (replacing Talbot’s ‘photogenic drawing) and ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ (replacing Talbot’s ‘reversed copy’ and ‘re-reversed copy’).
April Ackerman & Co., (the leading print seller and purveyor of ‘Colours and Requisites for Drawing’ advertised a ‘Photogenic Drawing Box’ (was not called a camera) complete with chemicals for sensitising paper and an instruction booklet for making prints. Magazine of Science published copies of 3 ‘photogenic drawings made on wood blocks using Talbot’s process and then carved out by hand (this technique that eliminated the need for a skilled draftsman to draw on the blocks did not go into wide use until the 1860Õs).
May Mungo Ponton(Scottish) demonstrated how he used potassium bichromate to sensitise his papers (instead of silver salt which was more expensive) and the ability to control the sensitivity of the paper according to how much of the chemical was mixed with water before being spread on the paper.
August A bill was passed in France to make the technical details of Daguerre’s process public in France. Official, genuine ‘Daguerreotype apparatuses’ went on sale internationally (but Daguerre applied for and got a patent for his process in England. Other claimants (from countries around the world) scrambled to prove they too had made independent photographic discoveries, saying theirs pre-dated Daguerre’s and Talbot’s:
Hercules Florence (a Frenchman living in Brazil) claimed he had made photographics with a camera and by contact printing as early as 1832 and provided notebooks from 1833 to 1837, which clearly documented his technique and had independently used the word ‘photographie’ to describe what he had done.
Hans Thoger Winther (a Norwegian lawyer, proprietor of a lithographic printing shop, and book publisher) claimed he had the idea of fixing camera images as early as 1826 and had succeeded in making direct positives before the disclosure of Daguerre’s process
Hippolyte Bayard exhibited 30 photos in Paris on July 14 1839 (using silver chloride paper, light, potassium iodide, and camera exposure) but his exhibition was completely overlooked as everyone was only paying attention to the work of Daguerre, and Bayard received no government support or fame as Daguerre had. The length of exposure was too long for natural portraits, and the eyes of the subject had to be kept closed in order for them to be still enough for ten to twenty minutes in bright sunlight (the time and amount of light needed for exposure. Or bright sunlight was reflected into the faces of the subjects for eight minutes, blinding them and causing tears to trickle down their cheeks ‘heroics were demanded’ of the subject of portraits. By the end of 1840 a lens 22x faster than the original was created (f 3.6 instead of f 16), the light sensitivity of the plates was increased dramatically (4 minute exposures became 25 second exposures), the tones of of the daguerreotype were enriched by gilding the plate. Portrait studios opened everywhere following these developments. Almost anyone could learn how to take daguerreotypes and set up a business within two weeks of technical training and practice. In America, many of the tedious preparation rituals were mechanized using machines to speed up and make the process more convenient
1841 Talbot announced an improvement in his photogenic drawing process: the Calotype (beautiful picture), which developed a latent image (instead of waiting for the image to appear on the sensitised surface during exposure). It created negatives which were then used to make positives. He patented this on Feb 8 1841 The first stereographs (stereo vision photographs) were exhibited at the Royal Academy of Science in Brussels
1843 Talbot set up a photo-finishing lab for Calotype negatives in Reading, England
David Octavious Hill used the Calotype to aid in his portrait painting
1840-1844 114 Travel views were issued in Paris. Daguerreotypes taken across Europe, the Middle East, and America were traced and transferred to copper plates for printing (with figures of people drawn in as the process took needed so much time for exposure that people did not appear in street scenes and this distressed the public looking at the pictures).
1850 Levi L. Hill publicly announced his success in fixing the colours of nature on daguerreotype plates, however he would not release his secret to the public, not even for $100,000. Later, it was discovered he had not properly figured out how to achieve colour, and from time to time, other daguerreotypists would find they had accidentally somehow recorded colour images as well, but most faded.
1851 Frederick Scott Archer invented a new process (unpatented thus making it free for anyone to take photographs) allowed negatives to be made using glass coated with silver salts and collodion. These plates could be prepared up to months ahead of shooting (unlike earlier processes which had to be prepared on the spot and used immediately), however they were not very ‘fast’ (light sensitive) and required 3 hour exposures in bright light at f 72 until Felice Beato reduced the time to four seconds using gallic acid on the plates.
1852 Talbot relaxed his controlling grip on the Calotype (re: both amateur and professional photographers having to pay him £100- £150 a year license fee to use his process). From then on, he only retained control over professionals taking photos for profit Talbot filed a lawsuit re: the collodion process being an infringement of his process (the same development chemical was used) against a professional photographer who had not paid him a license fee. He lost the lawsuit although he was awarded the status as the first and true inventor of the Calotype process
1853 The Photographic Society of London (later the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain) was founded for amateur and professional photographers who were interested in shooting fine art images. Most of these images were meant to be allegories, and photographers found inspiration in paintings (while some painters used photographs of models for their paintings). Large format prints were made when the image was printed from many negatives carefully masked together. Landscapes were very hard to do because the latitude of the film was so limited and the film itself was only sensitive to the blue part of the spectrum (orthochromatic).
1854 ‘Ambrotype’ prints (name coined), ‘tin type’ wet plate processes gain popularity (paralleling the daguerreotypes), Carte-de-visite technique (3rdgeneration) collodion photo deals death blow to daguerreotype images, leads to the birth of the family photo album (these prints were quite small, full figure, and not much attention was paid to aesthetics, lighting, posing, etc.). The more serious photographers worked in large format photography while the amateurs used very small formats
1855 People of almost all social classes could afford to have their daguerreotype portraits recorded ‘ not just the rich. State of Massachusetts’s statistic: 403,626 daguerreotypes had been taken in that year (June 1 1854 – June 1 1855). Daguerreotypes were much more popular overall in the U.S. than Europe and declined in use later.
New York Gallery (studio) boasted a daily production of 300-1000 daguerreotype portraits (assembly line type factories were set up where the photographers never left the cameras, and a steady stream of people would sit down, be recorded, and then collect their photo 15 minutes later) In America, as competition increased with more and more daguerreotype ‘galleries’ or studios opening up, the price of having one’s daguerreotype taken dropped dramatically in a very short time e.g. from $2.50 for a small one to as low as $0.12 each or converted to 2005 values, from approx $60.00 for a 1/8 size print to $2.50) although most of these were cheap and unsatisfactory in quality and customers were frequently disappointed Photography was the ‘mirror with a memory’ by Oliver Wendell Holmes (American Physician, man of letters and amateur daguerreotype photographer) Family photos were especially in demand due to the very high mortality rate of children, and many photos were taken of people just after they died to immortalize them. ‘Secure the shadow ere the substance fade/Let Nature imitate what Nature made’ was the couplet used extensively to advertise this service The controversy over image retouching begins when Franz Hanfstaengle (leading portrait photographer of Germany) showed a re-touched negative with a print made from it before re-touching. Roger Fenton shot the Crimean war, the world’s first ever war photographs
1856 The decline of the Daguerreotype: 606 images were displayed in the annual Photographic Society of London exhibition, but only 3 were Daguerreotypes. (They were too expensive, fragile, could not be readily duplicated)
Adolphe Louis Poitevin won Honore d’Albert, Duc de Luyes contests re: processes to create a permanent photographic print that wouldn’t fade (carbon print) and a way to print photographs using printer’s ink (collotype print)
Nadar (a leading large format portraitist who previously a second rate painter who was one of the first to use electric light to illuminate his portraits and became one of the most important photographers of his day) wrote: ‘Photography is’ as science that attracted the greatest intellects, an art that excites the most astute minds and one that can be practiced by an imbecile’’ photographic theory can be taught in an hour, the basic technique in a day. But what cannot be taught is the feeling for light nor can one be taught how to grasp the personality of the sitter (re: producing an intimate likeness as opposed to a banal portrait).The top portrait photographs were produced by teams (who worked under the umbrella name of the studio), not individuals. The name of the studio became the trademark of the photo. The photographer was more like a film director or modern art director of commercial photos leading the team with his vision while a cameraman operated the camera (strictly as a technician?), and others were responsible for painting the backdrops, dressing the set, processing the negative, making the prints, re-touching them, etc.
1857 600 photographic prints displayed at the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester, affirming photography’s growing importance in the art world
1858 Fading Away by Henry Peach Robinson a very controversial fine art photo, an acted out scene depicting a girl who was made to look ‘near death’ surrounded by her family was deemed to be in poor taste. The scene was felt to be in poor taste because it was a photograph and thus assumed to be literally depicting reality (it would not have been read this way as a painting)
First Aerial photograph recorded by Nadar from a balloon
1859 The French Society of Photography finally succeeded in convincing the Ministry of Fine Arts to allow them to have an exhibition at the Palace of the Champs Elysees at the time of the annual painting Salon. It was still seen by art critics however as the ‘servant’ of the sciences and arts like printing or short-hand. The First photographs in which natural action (e.g. strollers on a street) was captured with regular assurance (meaning easily on a regular basis instead of rarely to never)
1861 Brady began shooting his famous Civil War photos (at much personal risk), which inspired many others to start shooting this war (and subsequent wars) J
ames Clerk Maxwell reproduced a colored ribbon by the three colour additive process.
1863 Previous theories of man’s stride and positioning while walking used in drawing and painting and science turned upside down by photographic evidence of how things really were when Oliver Wendell Holmes examined streetscapes with frozen figures mid-stride (all in various stages of walking) in them
1864 The profession ‘daguerreotypist’ no longer appeared in the San Francisco business directories. The best photographers in America were former daguerreotypists.
Technology advanced to allow for shooting of dry plates. They also no longer needed to be shot immediately on the spot. This allowed them to be manufactured (photographers no longer needed to make their own plates) and sold.Ready-sensitised printing papers released almost simultaneously with manufactured dry plates. 1866 Hugo Adolph Steinheil (Munich) and John Henry Dallmeyer (London) independently and simultaneously developed almost identical lenses with corrected spherical aberration (a problem all previous lenses had throwing the corners out focus, loss of definition), and less astigmatism. Dallmeyer’s ‘Rapid Rectilinear’ lens became a generic name for all lenses of this type until the anastigmatic replaced it in 1893
Antony Samuel Adam-Salomon (sculpture turned top portrait photographer) who’s work inspires Alphonese de Lamartine (who once called photography ‘a plagiarism of nature’) confessed: After admiring the portraits caught in a burst of sunlight by Adam Salomon, the sensitive sculptor who has given up painting, we no longer claim that photography is a trade, it is an art, it is more than an art, it is a solar phenomenon, where the artist collaborates with the sun.Retouching becomes more and more common as sitters in portraits want blemishes hidden, features softened, wrinkles smoothed away etc. Specialists in publicity portraits of actors emerged as the demand for this type of image increased, and actors posed ‘in character’ and ‘on set’ for these images. Exposures were previously done by removing a lens cap from in front of the camera. Shorter exposures meant the need for very precise shutters that could expose for fractions of a second.
1871 Paris police begin using photographs as a way to record evidence at crime scenes Eadweard Muybridge’s famous photographs showing how a horse really galloped further proves the inadequacy of the human vision when it comes to analysing moving things
1876 Vero Charles Driffield and Ferdinand Hurter work to do away with ‘rules of thumb’ re: plate sensitivity for light and exposure times, and develop a means scientifically rating the density of the plate (how much sensitive emulsion was on it) and in-turn what the ideal exposures would be (previously one had to guess and hope for the best).
1854 ‘Ambrotype’ prints (name coined), ‘tin type’ wet plate processes gain popularity (paralleling the daguerreotypes), Carte-de-visite technique (3rdgeneration) collodion photo deals deathblow to daguerreotype images, leads to the birth of the family photo album (these prints were quite small, full figure, and not much attention was paid to aesthetics, lighting, posing, etc.). The more serious photographers worked in large format photography while the amateurs used very small formats
1869 Charles Piazzi Smyth exhibited prints (enlargements from negatives) taken over the past decade to the Edinburgh Photographic Society: 8X10 prints using ‘poor man’s negatives. His prints retained an amazing clarity and amount of detail. They also enabled cropping both to recompose the subject and to not be restricted to the standard sizes and shapes of negatives etc. Beginners could also easily improve the composition of their prints (previously it was unthinkable to mask off any part of the image)
1878 Animated photos start to be viewed in the zoetrope and similar devices (animations using successive images or drawings based on or inspired by Muybridge’s work) Photographs (animals and especially the human figure in motion doing various things) taken for artists (painters etc.) to use as reference. Many of these photos shocked the world (artists in particular).
1879 Gelatin emulsions went into widespread use -no smell, plates did not have to be made by the photographers- no longer a need for a portable darkroom in the field- plates held their light sensitivity for months and no longer had to be developed immediately. Paper sensitive enough to be exposed successfully using an electric light bulb were created which in-turn allowed for enlargement of negatives and bulk printing of negatives in quantities never before realized
1880’s Hand cameras (that did not require a tripod) became widely available. They were mass- produced and there was a bewildering variety to choose from. They dramatically increased the potential output of images of photographers. The halftone plate was invented and made possible and revolutionized the pictorial magazines. Photographs could be reproduced very economically Dry plates and flexible film sensitive to all colours of the spectrum (panchromatic instead of must orthochromatic) were becoming available. Photography was ‘fast’, speedy compared to the illustrative techniques of the past. The old techniques are surpassed as much by todays as the stagecoach by the railroad.
1888 The most famous early hand camera, the ‘Kodak’ is invented and manufactured by George Eastman (a box camera that used roll film long enough for 100 circular exposures. Initially paper coated in light sensitive gelatin, the paper stripped from the base after processing) ‘You click the button we do the rest’. (The cameras were sold for $25 including processing and printing of all good photos) Casual use of cameras by untrained photographers became widespread. Photography was brought into the reach of all human beings, and its power to share one’s travels even years after the fact and experiences was incomparable to anything that had previously existed. The term ‘Snapshots’ was born (from an expression used by hunters to describe shooting a firearm from the hip without taking careful aim)
Jacob A. Riis’s photos of the Lower East Side published in the New York Sun exposed the poverty and misery there. He was one of the first photographers to use a ‘flash’ technology to illuminate his subjects.
First issue of National Geographic published and sent to 200 charter members of the society
1889 Documentary photography (as a conscious photographic pursuit) can be said to have been born when The British Journal of Photography urged the formation of a vast archive of photographs ‘containing a record as complete as could be made’. Of the present state of the world
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1890’s Alfred Stieglitz’s pictorial photography started up the American pictorial movement and his influence as the vice president of the newly formed Camera Club of New York (working to push photography in America to artistic heights etc. like in Europe)
1890 Illustrated Americanthe first picture magazine deliberately planned to use photographs goes to press in February. This is possible because of the perfection of the halftone printing process in the latter 1880Õs
1891 Transparent film on a clear base of nitrocellulose was introduced (eliminated the need for paper negatives, and eventually, glass negatives) Gabriel Lippmann discovers a way to make direct positive colour photographs, however the process was not very practical and is now obsolete.
1892 Julies Carpentier (who built the Cinematographe for the Lumieres) designed the Photo-Jumelle twin lens reflex camera. It was a precision camera with fixed focus lenses, built to exacting specs. It had a tolerance of 1/100mm (a degree of precision unheard of in the camera industry of the day). This camera was widely imitated and became a classic camera type. This was the first hand camera made for artists who wanted more creative control over their pictures (the consumer box camera allowed almost none). Photographers were now free to take ‘action shots’ previously impossible with view cameras. Parallax issues prompted the invention of the single lens reflex camera in the latter part of the decade. Halftone printing processes evolved enabling photojournalism to be born (previously, photos printed via handmade wood engravings of their content; the actual photos could not be reproduced)
1895 Lumiere Brothers successfully project the first motion picture film as a ‘magic lantern’ type presentation (followed by Edison in America and the explosion of the motion picture film medium)
1896 The first X-Ray photo is taken when Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen noticed that a bit of barium platinocyanide emitted a fluorescent glow. He then laid a photographic plate behind his wife’s hand. Previously, physicians were unable to look inside a person’s body without making an incision. Roentgen was the recipient of the first Nobel Prize for Physics in 1901
1900’s Painters were freed from the need to produce representational pictures (thus cubism and abstract art were born), and now ‘straight photography’ was being born (photographs meant to look like photographs and not emulate paintings or drawings, that are not re-touched etc. going back to the early daguerreotype days). Acceptance of ‘straight’ photography as an art form was a huge step. Stieglitz moved on to create ‘straight photographs’
Lewis W. Hine begins working on his remarkable series of photographs of immigrants arriving in New York’s Elllis Island and into the tenements and sweatshops where they lived and worked. As a sociologist, the camera was a powerful tool for his research and communication with others. He essentially followed in Riis’s footsteps, and realized the power of the subjectivity of his photographs. He photographed children working in factories showing their size relative to the machines. These images were the first to be labelled a photo story where the photographs were not secondary to or illustrative of the writer’s text; they were of equal importance.
1900 The Browning (Brownie) is the first mass marketed camera
1903 The American Graflex SLR camera (followed by the British Soho Reflex in 1906) became the standard hand camera of pictorial photographers for the first two decades of the century.
1907 Stieglitz’s The Steerage (famous photo) created not by waiting endlessly for the right moment, but by recognizing a moment and grabbing it (the beginnings of what later became ‘decisive moment’ photography). The subjects were able to show themselves in their own substance or personality as revealed by the play of light and shade around them (i.e. not presented in a contrived ‘interpretation’ on the part of the photographer)
1910’s Scientific photography influences painting e.g. Duchamp’s famous Nude Descending a Staircasewas inspired by the multiple exposure high speed photographs taken by Etienne Jules Marey for his physiological studies. Futurists were also very influenced by this type of photography.
1910 August Sander (a German professional portrait photographer) began photographing people of all social classes and professions (a beginning of documentary portraiture) with the aim of creating a ‘social atlas’.
1911 Edward Steichen began taking fashion photographs for Art et Decoration
1913 Stieglitz waxed his prints for a ‘glossy surface’, something that was earlier considered to be ‘unartistic’.
Alvin Langdon Coburn starts shooting abstract photos (strange perspectives used e.g. bird’s eye views looking straight down from many feet up), and then created an optical devise based on the kaleidoscope to create his images
Vogue magazine began publishing fashion photographs by Baron Andolphe de Meyer. He founded a style in which the elegance of fashions is displayed with photographic feeling for textures.
1915 Andrew Kertesz was one of the first photographers to start taking sensitive, un-posed photographs of people in their surroundings
1916 Pictorial Photographers of America founded
1918 Christian Schad’s Dadaist abstractions made photographically without a camera
1920Õs Stieglitz’s ‘equivalent’s are the first photographic abstraction photos (mostly of the sky and clouds, also a meadow glistening with raindrops, a woman’s hands pressed palm to palm between her knees). The camera is able to ‘seize’ upon the familiar’ and endow it with new meanings, with special significance, with the imprint of a personality. Photographers began to experiment with ‘canted angles’ and playing with perspective looking up and down at buildings or using strange angles in general to record scenes (ones we would normally never view the world from)Double exposures also experimented with (e.g. Alexander Rodchenko’s Portrait of Alexander 1924) Experimentation with the negative image (printed using ‘solarization’ to create an ‘edge reversal’ effect. The unreality of the negative throws emphasis upon shapes and contours not usually seen. Texture is created in the normally transparent gelatin emulsion of the film but subjecting it to rapid temperature changes causing reticulation, a net like structure, or the gelatin is melted so the image droops and sags. Photographs are pasted together to form striking collages (coined from the French verb coller meaning ‘to glue’.). During the Third Reich, Heartfield used collage (photomontage) to make biting political statements. Photographs and text started being used together extensively in magazines (especially initially in Germany). In this decade and the 1930Õs, the way photographs and text were integrated with each other came to be called photojournalism. The miniature cameras with high-speed lenses were designed to create images that brought the viewer into the scene.
1921 Man Ray (an American Painter in Paris) and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (a Hungarian painter working in Berlin) begin to create their rayographs and photograms
1923 Edward Steichen joined the staff of Conde Naste. He shot fashion photographs and portraits of celebrities that were published regularly in Vogue and Vanity Fair.
1924 The Ernox(the Ermanox) camera with an incredibly fast lens of f.2 came onto the market allowing widespread ‘existing light’ photography. Lens speeds soon increased to f 1.5 and shutter speeds on these cameras were as fast as 1/1000 of a second First Leica put on the market with a 50mm f3.5 lens. Shortly afterward a model that allowed the lens to be easily changed while shooting
1925 The flashbulbis patented by Paul Vierkotter to replace flash powder (noisy and smoky stuff)
1926 National Geographic staff photographer Charles Martin and scientist W.H. Longley make first natural-colour underwater pictures.
1928 Erich Salomon (of Berlin) is the first to capitalize on this ‘miraculous’ camera (the Leica) by using it to capture natural, un-posed candid photographs (the term coined by an English editor) of important dignitaries and statesmen without the distraction and inconvenience of a blinding flash and acrid smoke. Previously, all portraits of this type had been posed.
1929 Rollieflex introduced. It used larger film than the Leica with 12 2.25Ó square exposures on each roll. It was a smaller and more compact revival of the twin lens reflex camera of the 1890Õs
The flashbulb is perfected by J. Ostermeier. It is almost immediately adopted by photojournalists
1930’s Ansel Adams (arguably the greatest ‘straight photographer’ of all time, or at least its greatest pioneer) begins to devote all his time to photography. His prints were made to be reproduced using the halftone process Adams invents the ‘zone system’ for calculating exposures, and to master the photographic medium through the interrelation of the sensitivity of the negative material, the amount of exposure, the brightness of the subject, and development variables chosen. This (combined with the use of a light meter) eliminates guesswork on the part of the photographer re: exposures.
Weegee (New York news photographer) used flash photography to create images that reach into the field of social caricature.
Bernice Abbot begins setting out to capture portraits of New York City (its spirit, its essence). The ‘darkness’ of the Depression greatly influenced the work of artists. ‘Documentary’ motion picture filmmaking became common: contrasting entertainment productions, these films were rooted in real problems and real situations with real participants. It was vehemently defended as ‘not art’ because art was thought to be something beautiful. Documentary was ‘anti-aesthetic’ Photographers started using their still cameras to record the world in a similar way.
Stefan Lorant pioneered the photo essay in European picture magazines, and later in America ‘A sign photographed as an object carries more impact than the literal transcription of the words it bears‘. Ð Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography on the topic of Documentary photography.
The portrait studio (in a fixed location) becomes obsolete and photographers (including Yosef Karsh) travel with their lights and large format cameras to shoot portraits on location in the homes and offices etc. of their subjects.
1930 Melville Bell Grosvenor makes first published natural-colour aerial photographs for National Geographic
1931 Hine photographed the construction of the Empire State Building risking his own life, documenting the workers risking their lives.
1932 Zeiss Ikon released the Contaxcamera to compete with the Leica. It was a rangefinder with through the viewfinder focusing.
Photojournalists were the first to widely use these cameras. They freed the photographer even further re: recording strange angles and segments of the flow of life The first photoelectric cell light meter is introduced Henri Cartier-Bressonbuys his first Leica
1933 Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work was first shown in the Julien Levy Gallery in NYC. It was initially called ‘antigraphic photography’. They were so spontaneous they seemed accidental. He showed the ‘unreality of reality’. He was able to capture the split second when the subject revealed itself most fleetingly but deeply The great early period of European photojournalism collapsed under Hitler.
1934 Fuji Photo Film founded.
1935 The U.S. government turned to documentary photographers for help fighting the Depression. The Farm Security Administration enlisted photographers to document their activities and the lives and situations of the dust bowl farmers.
Walker Evans is one of the first photographers to be hired for this purpose.
Dorothea Lange followed, moved by the poverty and breadlines she saw outside her San Francisco studio. These images alerted the FSA to her skills and landed her an invitation to join the project.
1936 The first issue of Life Magazine appears on newsstands (a publication designed to ‘harness the optical consciousness of our time’). This magazine differed from past photography magazines in how the photos were carefully chosen and sequenced by the editors it was about the ‘mind guided camera’. Issues are published weekly The most dramatic and telling photographs of World War II were made by magazine photographers or under their influence.
Life ran a school for army photographers and sent its own photographers to the front.
Kodachrome, the first multi-layered colour film is developed by Kodak
1937 Margaret Bourek-White of time magazine is one of the first photographers to make use of the multiple sync flash technique. Photographers had true and complete control over the lighting in their shots for the first time (to sculpt their subjects or only illuminate certain things or generate enough light for comfortable, posed photographs).
The first major disaster was captured by photography as it happened: The Hindenberg Zeppelin was photographed as it burst into flames, photos that are still very moving and memorable today.
Chester Carlson invents “electron photography,” which later comes to be known as xerography, or simply photocopying.
1938 Electronic flash technology is born (replacing flashbulbs that can only be used once) when Harold E. Edgerton of MIT invented the gas filled tube. Images recorded with these ‘strobes’ forever fixed image forms never detected by unaided human eye (e.g. Edgerton’s A Drum Majorette at the Belmont, Massachusetts, High School Twirling a Baton 1948) Fuji is manufacturing cameras and lenses (in addition to film)
1941 Kodacolor negative film introduced
1945 Nikon FSLR introduced followed by the Contax S SLR First photo of an atomic mushroom cloud released to the public by the US Air Force. Nothing like it had ever been seen before. It was shocking because of the broader perspective of the damage inflicted by the war.
1946 Zoomar introduces the zoom lens, the invention of American Frank Back.
1947 Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and David Seymour start the photographer-owned Magnum picture agency
1948 Hasselblad offers the first medium format SLR camera Pentax in Japan introduces the automatic diaphragm (Post WWII)
1949 East German Zeiss develops the Contax S, first SLR with an unreversed image in a pentaprism viewfinder
1950’s Richard Avedon shoots his trademark portraits of people with stark white backgrounds
Television changes the way information is transmitted. Documentary (films & photography) begins to lose its impetus in an organizational sense and becomes muddled and merged with photojournalism, especially the factual reports broadcast by television. ‘Realistic’, ‘historical’ and ‘factual’ are terms used to substitute for documentary, but doc is about a deeply subjective & respectful interpretation.
1951 David Douglas Duncan’s book this is War! Containing images of the Korean War was published.
1953 (December) First issue of Playboymagazine published (undated because Heffner never believed he’d be allowed to publish another). Never before had nude pictures been successfully sent through the mail as a mainstream commercial venture. The Marilyn Monroe photos, which appeared in playboy’s first issue, had existed long before Heffner got his hands on them, but nobody had dared challenge the powerful U.S. post office and its anti-obscenity regulations.
1954 Eastman introduces the first high speed Tri-X film First issue of Sports Illustrated appears on news-stands in August
1955 Robert Frank travels the US on a Guggenheim scholarship to photograph post-war America and Americans. With a 35mm camera he documents outings, parades, automobiles, filling stations, billboards, roadside bars, the lonely desert highway. The images are bleak, showing very little to celebrate. They are loose and contrast with the balanced and elegant images of Cartier-Bresson. Frank wanted to create images that reflected stark realism however unpleasant or uncommon.
1957 Lennart Nilsson begins using an endoscope to photograph the inside of the human body. His most provocative image was the first ever photograph of a human foetus in the womb. At first, no one was able to believe this image was a real photograph. Once proven and published in life magazine it becomes the image of choice for ‘pro-lifers’ in the abortion debate.
1959 Nikon F introduced- Colour photographs begin to regularly appear on the cover of National Geographic
© Laurence Haynes 2007- This work may be reproduced for research or other academic purposes on the proviso that the author is refererenced/ credited. All other usage is restricted under the terms of the 1987 copywrite act
Level Two
Photography as contemporary art
Laurie Haynes
From the point of inception the key debate surrounding photography is its position in the lexicon of Art practice.
The writer/ philosopher Baudelaire conceded photography only one legitimate function: recording what might otherwise be lost to the human eye due to the ephemeral moment of viewing. Photography’s ability to hold that moment in detail that could be revisited after the event, serves the sciences and not Art. The direct quote is: if only you will lie down and behave dear photography. ‘If you will act as handmaiden to the arts and science, you will deserve our thanks and applause’.
Of course photography could not be restrained in this way, instead of ‘keeping its place’ photography has gone forward to literally reshape and reinvent, if not the world in which we live , at least our perception of it.
Our exposure to photography either as subject or maker has conditioned us to the point that at virtually any point in time or place we turn our rehearsed faces to the lens; the apparent objectification giving validity to our existence. This validity, this rendering, is of course under critical scrutiny, as much an abstraction as a cubist portrait. Context removed, little more than a brief moment of ‘performance’, (what the erotic photographer Bob Carlos Clark termed ‘a smug little trick’)
yet the fact that that moment is located in a real time and place serves to imbed some notion of truth to the photograph.
Now Photographic truth is a subject that is constantly debated, and will be examined in this lecture series. On some level of either conscious or sub-conscious thought each one of us has the echo of ‘the camera never lies’ resonating within us; which in turn can serve to transform the banal sometimes into the significant. Here lies the unshakable strength of the photographic image.
The photograph shares a birth right with the realist school of painting. The nineteenth century was also the century in which the realist painters Carot And Courbet strived to capture the exact reproduction of what the eye recollected.
Their preoccupation-to focus on the exact instant or sight-was abducted forever by the instantaneous contingencies captured so easily by the camera. Fox Talbot, coined the term ‘Photogenic drawing’ and his first published volume of images was title ‘ The pencil of nature’ and was derived almost entirely (in subject matter and style) on established painterly conventions, but in terms of contingent realism that no painter could ever replicate.
Art photography was born.
I have to move forward quickly now stopping on my way to note significant changes in practice. 1857 saw the birth of the pictorialist school and this statement by Henry peach Robinson serves to illustrate the narrowing of the division between artist and photographer.
‘Any dodge, trick, any configuration of any kind is open to the photographers use… It is the photographers duty to avoid the mean, the bare, and the ugly, and aim to…. Correct the unpicturesque…. A great deal can be done and very beautiful pictures made, by a mixture of the real and the artificial’ Pictorial effect in Photography- Henry peach Robinson.
The construction of images, unreal, but playing on the real, an artist positioning of the ‘vision’ of the maker, replicating the skill of painter.. Robinson worked in a time when the prevailing style of the arts was essentially romantic. A Polish critic announced
‘Photographers do not copy nature now, they interpret it’
collectively they positioned themselves on higher ground’ than the realist painters, becoming more refined; their interpretation becoming more academic than Delacrois or Ingres. The first real breakthrough came at the hand and eye of an English eccentric. Julia Margaret Cameron. Obsessed with portraying the ‘inner man’ she ignored the techniques that where currently ‘a la mode’ and returned to long exposures (20 Minutes) that where agonising for the sitter; but served to strip away the artifice of performance. Techniques used sixty years later by Both Penn and Avedon to ‘get inside’ the subject.
From these beginnings Art Photography was born. Art by its very nature is contextualised by the economic-social-political climate of making, photography shares this heritage, but perhaps is more overtly effected by the ever shifting social climate.
The fundamental mechanism for viewing a photograph is ‘truth to appearance’. The viewer, that is you and I, bring to the photograph a pre-history of actual and a priori experience that conditions our response to the image. It is this factor above all else that enables the ‘Art photograph’ to play with visual and emotional perception.
Alfred Stieglitz, who I consider to be the Father of ‘Modern Art photography’ came to Europe From America to study engineering, and whilst there bought a hand held camera, and set about capturing the ‘Life’ on the streets. On his return to the States
(1917) he embarked on a deliberate series of un-pictorial studies of a city in the midst of, snowstorms. Driving rain, bad light and shadows. He tracked the marks of man, and took these ‘impressions’ to a public unused to images of this type.
He founded a magazine, and Gallery, the legendary ‘219’( its address on fifth avenue) and set photography on the map as Fine, high Art, the brother of both cubism and surrealism.
(expand) For thirty years Stieglitz led a growing brotherhood of Art Photographers. The American school fundamentally different from its European counterpart( explain why), but also indelibly linked by a strand of enquiry that first and foremost examined the human condition. By the outbreak of the second world war Photography occupied an unassailable position as a medium of artistic expression, But the almost exponentional change of social status between 1836 and 1936, was nothing compared with what was to come over the next ten years.
The global nature of WW2 changed forever the strict delineation of class and status as two generation of men went to war, leaving a vacuum in the home nations that had to be filled. Women left the home and rose to the challenge forever undoing a social status quo. Life became focussed on mortality, and in so doing served to loosen moral ties and boundaries. In the midst of war and death people became aware of a new freedom, a resilience, a joy d’Vivre, that caused them to celebrate life. Photography went through a process of division, a tool of propaganda, that served to inform and misinform in the same breath. But above all render the horrific details of modern warfare forever indelible for the surviving generations.
This breaking of the final taboo, the pictorial rendition of the arena of death and destruction starting a process of de-sensitisation that continues unabated to this day. Gloves off, photography, became the key mode of representation. In the post war era virtually every aspect of life in western society became the focus for the lens. Advertising was born, and the pre-war fascination with the moving image, scaled new heights.
Now in ascendance as the dominant mode of representation, The lens strategically ate away at the spoken and written word; film and photography were central as the visual signposts of a new prosperous society, where everything and anything was achievable.
European and American photography and film making developed in tandem, like fraternal twins, sharing the same linage, but being markedly different in appearance. Europe the first born, being on the surface the quieter of the two, intellectual, reasoned, self-questioning, somehow reflecting the trauma of the war years, containing imbedded within the myth of peace.
America the second born, brash, confident, but essentially a society isolated from the reality of both the horror of war and the agony of rebuilding a shattered society. Adopting the role of hedonist. From this re-birth this new beginning, the language of representation became in some ways almost diametrically opposed. The more commercially advanced America, already embracing a burgeoning commercial use of the ‘Image’ began to explore the yet as unnamed mechanisms of ‘Popular culture’.
The booming economy of post-war America is still haunted with the wraith like twin spectres of the depression years and the War which remain on some level indelibly fixed in the consciousness of the nation, that said images show apeople diving headlong into the waters of hedonism. The pursuit of ‘leisure time’ becoming almost a national obsession (in the states above the Mason–Dixon line). The camera in turn was focussed on these events, on a society freed from economic shackles, celebrating life. One man does not shair this view, Robert Frank, His essays show an America of desolate highways, and broken lives, as if echoing the work of his European counterparts. Europe by contrast was still reeling from the impact of war…The economy in tatters, struggling with massive rebuilding and subsequent debt. A collective society still in mourning with a misdirected society of traumatised and displaced individuals forced to look inward. Yes there were celebrations at the end of hostilities, yes people danced in the streets, hugging strangers. But this euphoria was soon replaced with the stark reality of loss-poverty-the daily grind. As a post war baby I cannot comment on the reality of the situation, but life in black & white, with the colour stripped away by adverse circumstance, was mirrored in the imagery of the moment. The gritty ‘realist’ images of nations coming to terms with the loss of a generation. The contrast with post war America could not be more stark. But in that dark hour the camera turned unwaveringly toward recording the human condition. Apparently free of the strings of political motive it moved unfettered amongst the people of Europe and did find small flames of hope, love, and charity.
The post war photography of Robert Doisneau perhaps best captures the almost hidden beauty of these times.
© Laurence Haynes 2007- This work may be reproduced for research or other academic purposes on the proviso that the author is refererenced/ credited. Al other usage is restricted under the terms of the 1987 copywrite act
More To Come…
