Thursday, February 21

The focus of today’s class was on the role of photography in the 19th century. One of the first photographers that we looked at was William Henry Fox Talbot. Talbot, who photographed in the early 19th century, was important for developing photography as an artistic medium. His photographs, of items as simple as lace, show the power of a photographer to use the camera as an art form.

Roger Fenton, a British photographer, was one of the first to capture war. Fenton photographed the Crimean War and provided ordinary citizens with the reality of war that could not before be seen.
Similarly, Timothy O’Sullivan photographed the American Civil War. O’Sullivan provided Americans with a vivid account of the realities of war. This era was the birth of war photography which changed the relationship between ordinary citizens and war as photographs allowed war to be seen in a whole new light. This is another example of the power of the camera to connect people with realms that were previously unknown.

KEY WORDS/PEOPLE
*Joseph Nicéphore Niépce- (1765 –1833) was a French inventor, most noted as the inventor of photography and a pioneer in the field. He is well-known for taking some of the earliest photographs, more than 180 years ago. He created the first permanent photograph, of the exterior of his home, around 1826. The photograph was made using a camera obscura and a sheet of pewter coated with bitumen of Judea, an asphalt that when exposed to light, hardened permanently.

*William Henry Fox Talbot- (1800 –1877)He worked in England and was the inventor of the negative/positive photographic process, the precursor to most photographic processes of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was also a noted photographer who made major contributions to the development of photography as an artistic medium. His work in the 1850s, on photo-mechanical reproduction led to the creation of the photoglyphic engraving process, the precursor to photogravure. He was interested in forms and shapes. His book, “Pencil of Nature” was the first book to be illustrated entirely with photographs.

*Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre- (1787 –1851) was a French artist and chemist, recognized for his invention of the daguerreotype process of photography. The daguerreotype is an early type of photograph in which the image is exposed directly onto a mirror-polished surface of silver bearing a coating of silver halide particles deposited by iodine vapor. In later developments bromine and chlorine vapors were also used, resulting in shorter exposure times.

*Roger Fenton- (1819-1869) was one of the 1st war photographers. He photographed the Crimean War in the 19th century. At this time, people had to be still in photos so he did not capture in action shots. His photos were influential in showing the British public a realistic account of the war.

*Henry Peach Robinson- (1830-1901) was an English Pictorialist photographer best known for his pioneering of combination printing - joining multiple negatives to form a single image, the precursor to photomontage.

*Peter Henry Emerson (1856–1936) was a Cuban-born photographer. His photographs are early examples of promoting photography as an art form. He is known for taking photographs that displayed natural settings.

*The Reverend Charles Dodgson- (1832 –1898), better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican clergyman, and photographer. He is now considered by many to be one of the very best Victorian photographers, and is certainly the one who has had the most influence on modern art photographers. His subjects also include skeletons, dolls, dogs, statues and paintings, trees, scholars, scientists, old men, and little girls. His notorious (and possibly misunderstood) studies of nude children were long presumed lost, but six have since surfaced, four of which have been published.
*Mathew B. Brady- (1822-1896), was one of the most celebrated 19th century American photographers, best known for his portraits of celebrities and the documentation of the American Civil War. He is credited with being the father of photojournalism. He also captured the American West.

*Timothy O’Sullivan- An American photographer who photographed in the 19th century. He is best known for his photographs of the American Civil War and of the American west. He captured a photo of the aftermath of Gettysburg and entitled it “Harvest of Death”. He captured the realities of war but it still had an element of art.

*Carleton Watkins- was a 19th century Californian photographer. He photographed the American West and he taps into the mythic notion of the west. His photos capture the majestic view of nature.

*Eadward Muybridge- He was a British photographer who photographed America in the late 19th century. He did a series of photographs that became linked to the formation of film and motion. He did this series of photographs to determine if a horse ever had all four feet off of the ground while running. These photos led to the development of the motion picture camera.

*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. Pictorialism is interested in sentimentalizing the real. Ex) Albin-Guillot

*The Linked Ring- In May 1892, Robinson founded the Linked Ring, a brotherhood consisting of a group of photographers based in London, pledged to enhance photography as a fine art. Famous members of this brotherhood included Frank Sutcliffe, Frederick Evans, Paul Martin, and Alfred Stieglitz. Though the formation of this group was, as their publicity indicated, "a means of bringing together those who are interested in the development of the highest form of Art of which Photography is capable", it is also very likely that serious photographers were now trying to distance themselves from the growth of photography for all, brought about by the introduction of simple cameras.

*Albumen print- was invented in 1850 by Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard, and was the first commercially exploitable method of producing a photographic print on a paper base from a negative. It used the albumen found in egg whites to bind the photographic chemicals to the paper and became the dominant form of photographic positives from 1855 to the turn of the century.

*Photogravure- is an intaglio printmaking process initially developed in the 1830s by Henry Fox Talbot in England and Nicéphore Niépce in France. Photogravure was developed to provide an archivally permanent way of reproducing a photographic image. Photogravure registers an extraordinary variety of tones.

RANDOM CLASS NOTES
-In 1830s, issues of realism came about.
-photograph was viewed as real by some. The goal was to attempt to copy nature.
-Others realized that photographs could be altered.
-Thus there was a conflict between those who felt that photography should be used for realism and those that felt it should be a sort of self-expressionism.

-beauty was important at first, but 19th century brings about the notion that photography can be more than beauty.

*Straight photography- straight on, documentary, as objective as you can be, realistic, most think of black and white as dominant accepted mode

-In Britain and the United States, the tradition of moving into expressionist photography was known as Pictorialism. For example, Robinson. It became particularly important after 1880s. Alfred Steglitz is an example. This becomes dominant tradition for a while and was in contradiction to realism.

Certain genres develop…
Landscape photography/nature
portrait
war photography
still life (objects arranged within a frame)
Journalistic
Travel
Beginnings of Street Photography