Defining the Erotic: Laurie Haynes

Defining  the Erotic. 

As we have discussed, representation is dependent on a continual referencing of the object, in this case the image. This referencing draws upon a culturally dependent reading that will attempt to rationalise that which is ‘seen’, and in the case of the photographic, it is not the ‘photograph’ as object, rather the image within the boundaries of the frame, that are the ‘seen’.

The act of looking is mediated by both a conscious and subconscious recognition of the cultural act of viewing, which results in signification. This signification has many different identities, and serves to classify the image in a way that creates ‘recognition’ of the cultural codes and convention of that image.

For instance when we view photographic images of ‘The Family’, the classification/recognition is entirely personal and the images serve as triggers or memento mori, that fix the representation of actual events (The Photographs are not the event, but are signs that an event has taken place) Such images are made available to only intimate social group members, and carry imbedded a codex for viewing which is mediated by both the social and cultural frame of reference of the viewer. In lay persons terms, it means that to be shown such pictures positions you as part of that social/cultural group and you will respond in an appropriate manner that reflects and acknowledges the intimacy of presentation/viewing.

Now you may be thinking where is all this going? In this instance I am preparing the ground to investigate a mechanism of both viewing and object classification which essentially stands outside the contemporary social/cultural framework.

 The Erotic can be considered as a sub-cultural frame of reference that is dependent on an individual positioning of personal objectification. The Oxford English Dictionary classifies the word Erotic as an adjective, therefore descriptive: of, or causing sexual love; tending to arouse sexual desire/excitement. Now I consider this description to be overly simplistic, and not really striking any intellectual or emotional chord with my own concept of the erotic. What that is, is hard to define in terms of visual iconography, as I consider the Erotic to be dependent on a complex positioning of both intellectual and emotional trigger’s, that have long strand points (a chain of associated textual and visual signposts) of socio-cultural reference that are very hard to encapsulate in a simple statement. In short I know what I consider erotic, but it is mediated by a whole panoply of social interaction which can be object dependent, but is often a mental construct. There are however objects that are symbolic of the erotic, and wherever you have symbolic objects, you will get symbolic objectification.

 The erotic is gender/sexuality specific. There is  a chasm of difference between the female definition of the Erotic and the male. In terms of ‘Photographic history’ if we consider that early photographers used the visual devices and iconography of High Art, then the nude body is a prominent subject. The erotic has a lineage that predates photography by two thousand year or more. Erotic drawing and painting exist that depict the symbolic sexual objectification of both sexes. In Japan, for example, shunga appeared in the 13th century and continued to grow in popularity until the late 19th century when photography was invented. At the point of inception of the photograph, Japanese illustrators where still producing ‘Pillow books’ which essentially where used to introduce women to the concept of sexual love in graphic detail. In Japanese culture theses books were intimate tokens of love and esteem, and were accepted as part of the culture. European photographers, transformed or perhaps abducted these images and culturally positioned the erotic photograph as ‘outside’ the social mores of society. The resulting images which in some case copied faithfully the ‘poses’ of the pillow book, where secretly traded in the higher echelons of society, where their risqué charms became the subject for private collection and viewings amongst gentleman. But Erotic Art as a specific context was not a new thing. In Europe, starting with the Renaissance, there was a tradition of producing erotica for the amusement of the aristocracy. In the early 16th century, the text I Modi was an woodcut album created by the designer Giulio Romano, the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi and the poet Pietro Aretino. In 1601 Caravaggiopainted the “Love Triumphant,” for the collection of the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani. The latter is reputed to have kept it hidden behind a curtain to show only to his friends, as it was seen as a blatant celebration of sodomy. The tradition is continued by other, more modern painters, such as Fragonard, Courbet, Millet, Balthus, Picasso, Edgar Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec,and of course Egon Schiele, who served time in jail and had several works destroyed by the authorities for offending turn-of-the-century Austrian mores with his depiction of nude young girls. Erotic Art of this type was common in the Early 20th century. Artist E. J. Bellocq is best remembered for his down-to-earth photographs of French prostitutes in domestic settings in the red light district of New Orleans. In contrast to the usual pictures of women awkwardly posed amid drapery, veils, flowers, fruit, classical columns and oriental braziers, Bellocq’s sitters appear relaxed and comfortable. What is unuseual about Bellocqs studies is that they were to all intents and purposes largly unknown, A respected photographer on one hand, Bellocq had a darker side to his art which was realised in the images of La femme d’nuit. The critic David Steinberg speculates that the prostitutes may have felt at ease with Bellocq because he was “so much of a fellow outcast”, very similar in many respects to toulouse Lautrec.One of Mandel’s early outdoor photos.Julian Mandelbecame known in the 1920s and 1930s for his exceptional photographs of the female form. Participating in the German “new age outdoor movement,” Mandel took numerous pictures in natural settings, publishing them through the Paris-based studios of A. Noyer and PC Paris^. It is interesting to note that this work was not deamed erotic, but rather a romantic ideal that typified a whole philosophy that was adopted by the orchestrator’s of the Third Riecht, as the model of arian perfection. Deviant Art which included erotic images by Schiele and others being confiscated and destroyed. Another noteworthy nude photographer of the first two decades of the 20th century was Arundel Holmes Nicholls. His work, featured in the archives of the Kinsey Institute, is artistically composed, often giving an iridescent glow to his figures Following in Mandel’s footsteps, Nicholls favored outdoor shots.Many photographs from this era are damaged; Bellocq, for instance, frequently scratched out the faces of his sitters to obscure their identities. Some of his other sitters were photographed wearing masks. Peter Marshall writes, “Even in the relatively bohemian atmosphere of Carmel, California in the 1920s and 30s, Edward Weston had to photograph many of his models without showing their faces, and some 75 years on, many communities are less open about such things today than Carmel was then”    

Socially the early images are very significant. In 19^th century Japan women were the property of men, and ‘models’ from all classes were ‘procured’  without protest. European society, having gone through a social revolution that recognised the rights of the individual was a different matter. No ‘decent’ Women would be party to erotic photography, even when dressed in the academic finery of ‘Boudoir photography’

The models, both male and female came from the streets.

The economically repressed underclass of petty thieves and prostitutes. Erotic/pornographic images exist from France, Germany, England, and  Italy, and they all have the same common denominator. Class, and economic dependence. If you examine the images closely, you will see that in almost all the subjects and scenes, no matter how carefully crafted and dressed, the models show clear evidence of having spent a considerable time bare foot.

So early erotic photography was produced to sexually titillate the visual palettes of the ruling classes. The images were made by men, for men.

You are all familiar with term the male gaze, and it is true that the vast majority of Erotic images are made for exactly this, but there are images that make emotional and intellectual connections that completely negate the objectification of breasts, buttocks, and the pudenda. Now I am not making any distinction about the moral objections to the erotic, it exists in many forms, and the positioning is entirely subjective. But I feel that the erotic is an appropriate subject for visual investigation, in that we are by nature under the yoke of the visual; and use the language of the image to navigate an emotional and social connection with the world in which we live.

If you consider the hierarchy of desire, then sexual needs figure very prominently, and it is therefore easy to understand the proliferation of erotic photography. But there exists a world where such imagery is not connected with sexual objectification but social connection.

Social connection could be defined simply as ‘belonging’.

 If you are outside society, a loner, then you will feel disconnected and seek out a society that represents your inner vision of who you are. You become part of a sub-culture. Many sub-cultures co-exist within the mainstream, making points of connection that symbiotically cement the structure of society together.

 But there is a need for recognition of the individual and collective social group. Symbolic objectification is one of the devices that position such recognition; and it is displayed all around us. This display is often culturally removed from the place of origin, and owes its transmigration directly to the photographic image. For example consider skin art and  body piercing. Originally a specific ritual which would be used to delineate either the tribal nature of a collective society or to mark a right of passage. The motifs are now used to identify sub-cultural groups or alternate lifestyle. These images are in turn also often fetish-ised or eroticised to further delineate the social division. Clothing is also often used for exactly the same purposes, and rightly or perhaps wrongly is infected by the genetic catch-all title, The erotic.

The erotic image could then perhaps be typified as an in image which provokes an emotional, intellectual and physical response which are all interdependent, whereas pornography is primarily limited to the physical. So therefore if the individual sets out to create an erotic image it is doomed to failure, because the erotic cannot be staged, it just is; the ultimate movable feast.

(c) laurie Haynes. This document may be used for academic or research purposes on the condition that the author is credited. all other uses restricted.

  

Art Photography

This is a pice I started and did not finish, but it kick started my first lecture on ‘Photography as contemporary art’

Fine art photography. 

In this module we will explore both the concept of photography as art, as well as examine the work of key protagonists and specific ‘Art’ movements. The remit of this particular course of study asks that we confine ourselves to work from the 1960’s to date, but I feel that it is impossible to engage fully with the subject unless we examine the following questions –

 

·    What is Art?

·    Is photography a valid art medium

 

( sample student views)

 

If we accept that photography is valid medium for artistic expression, at what point did the maker/photographer become artist.

 

The birth of pictorialism. 1851

 

. The aim of such techniques was to achieve what the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica termed, in discussing Pictorialism, “personal artistic expression”

Pictorialism largely subscribed to the idea that art photography needed to emulate the painting and etching of the time. Most of these pictures made were black & white or sepia-toned. Among the methods used were soft focus, special filters and lens coatings, heavy manipulation in the darkroom, and exotic printing processes. From 1898 rough-surface printing papers were added to the repertoire, to further break up a picture’s sharpness. Some artists “etched” the surface of their prints using fine needlesSuccessful attempts to make self-consciously “art” photography can be traced to Victorian era practitioners such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, and Oscar Gustave Rejlander among others.Despite the aim of artistic expression, the best of such photographs paralleled the impressionist style then current in painting. Looking back from the present day, we can also see close parallel between the composition and picturesque subject of genre paintings and the bulk of pictorialist photography.As a distinct movement pictorial photography is essentially of British origin, although in its later phases there was a strong influence on American photography. The Linked Ring and The New American School were notable organised U.S. tendencies in Pictorialism around 1900. An American circle of photographers later renounced pictorialism altogether and went on to found Group f/64, which espoused the ideal of unmanipulated, or straight photography.The contemporary American portraitist Sally Mann revisited the pictorialist style in her 2003 book What Remains.One of the most important publications that promoted Pictorialism was Alfred Stieglitz’s “Camera Work” 1903 – 1917. Each publication had up to 12 plates that were reproduced in Photogravure,Halftone or Collotype. This plates are now collected and very sought after in the art world. Most of the photographers that made up the issues were “Photo – Succession” members, a group that promoted photography as art.Alfred Stieglitz is also know as the the grandfather of “Pictorialism”Stieglitz also brought Picasso, Matisse, Rodan and other important painters at the time to the forefront of the American art scene. Pictorialism was a popular movement in the early years of the twentieth century, that strove to make the photography as a much like a painting as possible. It produced little that is now deemed of lasting value in the art world, and its styles and approaches are now seen as outmoded.During the twentieth century, art photography became accepted by the English-speaking art world and the gallery system. In the USA, a small handful of curators spent their lives struggling to put it there; Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and John Szarkowski, and Hugh Edwards.Since the 1970s, many galleries have accepted that the best of documentary photography and photojournalism is worthy of being shown in the gallery situation alongside art photography. From around 1975 many new galleries were opened to show only photography. These too, generally, were happy to show both fine-art and documentary pictures.Traditionally, until the late 1970s genre styles predominated; nudes, portraits, natural landscapes (exemplified by Ansel Adams). Breakthrough ’star’ artists in the 1970s and 80s, such as Sally Mann and Robert Mapplethorpe, still leant heavily on such genres, although seeing them with fresh eyes. Others investigated a snapshot aesthetic approach.Throughout the twentieth century, there was a noticeable increase in the size of prints. Small delicate prints in thin frames are now a rarity, and hi-gloss wall-sized prints are common. There is now a tendency to dispense with a frame and glass altogether and instead to print onto blocked canvas.Color photography is now preferred over black & white, and its validation was strongly aided by curator John Szarkowski. Historians generally point to the Szarkowski-curated William Eggleston show at MoMA in 1976 as the “breakthrough of color”. In England, the early work of Gilbert & George is cited as validating color in art photography.American organizations, such as the Aperture Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art, have done much to keep photography at the forefront of the fine arts.

Current trends

There is now a trend toward a careful staging and lighting of the picture, rather than hoping to “discover” it ready-made. Photographers such as Cindy Sherman and Gregory Crewdson, among others, are noted for the quality of their staged pictures.Medium-format and large-format cameras have been preferred by art photographers over 35mm but, with the rapid improvements in the high-end of digital photography, this is now changing.Since the 1990s there have been some internal art-world tensions between fine art photographers and what might be termed “artists with cameras”.With the advent of digital photography and Photoshop, montage art photography has once again become popular; it is notably seen in the work of artists such as John Goto and Anyes Galleani. Purely computer-generated digital art (fractals, etc) is usually clearly distinguished from fine-art photography.No concerted attempt has been made to popularize fine art photography, beyond the limited market for book reproductions. It is generally considered that one has to have an ‘educated eye’ to really appreciate fine art photography. Since art photography is simply not on the agenda of schools and educationalists, the chance of developing a popular mass market remains limited. Numerous online “web magazines” have appeared since 1995, offering a new form of outlet for viewing fine art photography, but even this remain a niche and sales figures remain poor. Attempts by online art retailers to sell photography alongside prints of paintings have had mixed results, with strong sales coming only from the traditional “big names” of photography such as Ansel Adams.According to Art Market Trends 2004 (PDF link) 7,000 photographs were sold in auction rooms in 2004, and photographs averaged a 7.6 percent annual price rise from 1994 and 2004. Around 80 percent were sold in the USA. Of course, auction sales only record a fraction of total private sales.As printing technologies have improved since around 1980, a photographer’s art prints reproduced in a finely-printed limited-edition book have now become an area of strong interest to collectors. This is because books usually have high production values, a short print run, and their limited market means they are almost never reprinted. The collector’s market in photography books by individual photographers is developing rapidly.The prestige of the label ‘art photography’ has led many to try to apply the label to a host of inferior products – such as calendars and cheap posters.   

Ist Year history of photography

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  

11^thC Ð 16^thCThe 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 (3^rdgeneration) 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 (3^rdgeneration) 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…