History of Photography - Marien

Southworth & Hawes

Photograph of "first" surgery with ether as anesthesia (1846-1848). Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes ran a photography studio in Boston in the 1804s-1850s. They used large (whole plate) daguerreotypes 6 ½ x8½ inches. Southworth advanced the notion of the photographer as an artist.

William Henry Jackson

William Henry Jackson worked for government sponsored survey directed by Ferdinand Vanderveer Hayden in 1871. William Henry Jackson's photographs of Yellowstone were not the first but became enduring visual symbols of the locale. His philosophy on nature was informed by Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who saw nature as representing a higher spiritual intelligence

War Photographs

With mass-produced stereographic photographs, tintypes, and cartes-de-visite, war photographs taught viewers a modern skill: how to ignore or forget images when confronted by them en masse, and excessively.

Orientalism

With the global expansion of Western political and economic interests in the mid-19th century, photographers sought to highlight cultural differences. One of the most persistent types showed women from the Middle East and Asia in sexually suggestive poses.

Mathew Brady Studio

Brady began doing photography in New York City in the early 1840s. Celebrity photography became his stock and trade. His status rose with the fame of his sitters and the sitters fame rose by being photographed by Brady. Brady is best remembered for his battlefield photographs of the Civil. Brady did not take most of the photographs himself. Abraham Lincoln 1863, Penny portrait 1864

Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond

British medical doctor who took pictures of his mentally ill patients to use in their therapy. A picture would show them their mental illness and help them better understand. "Photography's scientific objectivity would give it historical importance."

Autochrome

In addition, an elaborate process for making color photographs called the Autochrome was developed 2 brothers, Louis and Auguste Lumière, who also invented the motion picture projector in 1895.

Calotype

Invented by Talbot. Used paper negative with latent image. Papers was developed, fixed and washed. Print made from exposing negative placed over light senstive paper (salt paper) and rinsed.

Hippolyte Bayard

Invented the first direct positive process; first self-portrait. Self Portrait as a Drowned Man 1840

Louis and Auguste Lumière

Inventors of autochrome in 1904 and motion picture projector in 1895

Albumen paper

Light sensitive paper used with collodion process. Paper coated with egg white, salt and silver nitrate. Placed under negative and exposed to light.

Combination Printing

A technique that takes two or more negatives to make a final print.

Louis Agassiz and J. T. Zealy

Harvard Professor Agassiz employed photographer Zelay to photograph slaves in "so-called" ethnography study showing the superiority of whites over blacks.

Carleton E. Watkins

Carlton Watkins was not the first person to photograph the Yosemite Valley but he was the best known and most influential. Watkins saw Yosemite as an opportunity to take scenic views that were attractive to tourists.

Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre

Claims to be inventor of photography. Discovered a way to take the latent image exposed on a silver plate and found that a salt solution would stop "fix" the light sensitive material from continuing to react. Called his process the Daguerreotype.

Duchenne De Boulogne

Duchenne was a physician at the Paris hospital La Salpetriere, which treated people suffering from epilepsy, neurological problems and insanity. De Boulogne attempted to arouse through electrical stimulation the individual facial muscles that he considered to be involved in human expression.

John Herschel

Right after the 1839 announcement, John Herschel came up with the concept of making a print from an image. He called his work "photographic specimens" which evolved into the term "photography" used today. Later he created the cyanotype process.

Latent Image

The Latent image - an image has been registered on the silver surface but is not visible yet. It must be developed through a chemical process.

Collodion Process

"Wet process" that used glass instead of paper, it had greater sensitivity and shorter exposure times. Higher quality prints (free of imprint for paper's texture).

George Eastman

"You press the button, we do the rest" promised George Eastman in 1888 with this advertising slogan for his Kodak camera. George Eastman wanted to simplify photography and make it available to everyone, not just trained photographers. In 1883, Eastman announced the invention of photographic film in rolls. Kodak the company was born in 1888 when the first Kodak camera entered the market.

camera obscura

(dark room) a darkened enclosure in which images of outside objects are projected through a small aperture or lens onto a facing surface

camera lucida

(light room) an optical device consisting of prism that enables an observer to view simultaneously the image and a drawing surface for sketching it

Edward S. Curtis

Edward S. Curtis made numerous photographs of Native American life using gravure or platinum printing techniques lending the pictures a soft, faded quality. He carried Native American costumes, which his customers associated with pre-industrial Native Indian life and occasionally had his subjects dress up in what his viewers considered authentic Indian garb. In other words, he had them perform for the camera.

William Henry Fox Talbot

English inventor, produced a positive image of a paper negative in 1835. This was the first positive/negative process closest to what we do now with film. Multiple images could be made from the same negative. Invented the calotype.

Said's Definition of Orientalism

The term "Orientalism", adopted by cultural critic Edward Said in 1978, has come to mean a generalizing and patronizing Western attitude towards Middle Eastern, North African and Asian peoples as passive, rather than active, child-like rather than mature, feminine rather than masculine; and timeless - that is separate from the progress of Western history.

The Effects of the war on Photography

Andrew J. Russell was the only official photographer paid by the U.S. government. 1) Photographs of politicians like Abraham Lincoln and military leaders were popular. 2) Families wanted pictures of their men going off to war and soldiers wanted pictures of their families. 3) The portrait business boomed and the recently invented tintype was particularly popular, cheap and lightweight. The tintype was developed on thin sheets of iron. 4) More than 1400 photographers photo-ing war. Civil War photographs tended to be stiff and formal.

Photo-Secession

Broke away from NY Camera Club. Photo-Secession's statement of purpose was: 1)To advance photography as applied to pictorial expression; 2)To draw together those Americans practicing or otherwise interested in the art; 3)To hold from time to time, at varying places, exhibitions not necessarily limited to the productions of the Photo-Secession or to American work.

Dry Plate

But by 1900, the responsiveness of B&W film to the range of colors was advanced and applied to the dry plate, making it more responsive to tonal variation in monochromatic prints. Because of faster exposure times, dry plates worked well with the new, smaller and more portable cameras. In part, the short exposure time of the dry plate led to the design of camera shutters, which could open and close more quickly than the hand could remove and replace a lens cap. The dry plate allowed the photographer to record movement and permitted them greater mobility and anonymity. Also the photographer did not need a tripod because the image exposed so quickly. In 1893, exposures could take several minutes; by the end of the 19th century exposure time was reduced to a possible 1/5000 of a second.

Julia Margaret Cameron

Cameron's position among Britain's cultural elite, allowed her to produce a series of portraits, allegories, and illustrations that are among the most admired and influential of photographic images. She liked to use a loose, soft style. She took portraits of close and famous friends and had very close portrait compositions that would only show upper torso or head. She used natural light really well.

Clarence H White

Clarence H. White taught Alferat Columbia University in New York City and was influential in American photography. He was also elected into the Linked Ring association. His work centered on Pictorialist themes with delicate atmospheric effects and strong use of light.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce

Created a process called heliography (sun writing) producing the world's first permanent photograph - "View from the Window at Gras" (1826). He worked with silver chloride and the camera obscura and ran into the same problems as Wedgewood and Davy but came up with an actual negative.

Daguerre vs Talbot

Daguerre's process was used most when exact rendering were wanted - portraiture and scientific images. Talbot's process was used when softer effects and multiple copies were wanted. But there were no rules on how either was used.

1839

Date for invention of photography. On January 7, 1839 the invention of photography (Daguerreotype) was announced. Photography was presented to the world on August 19, 1839, at a joint meeting of the Academy of Science and the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris.

David Octavius Hill and Roert Adamson

David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson worked in Scotland in the 1840s and covered a broad range of subject matter. They used the calotype instead of the daguerreotype. They were more visually inventive and turned the calotype's formal qualities to their advantage. Compared to rembrandt, instead of trying to imitate the detail of a daguerreotype they used the artistic principle of light and shadow (chiaroscuro) to create large areas of shadow which suppressed fine detail.

War and the Photography of Native American People

Dozens of "wars" were fought 1850 and 1886 such as the Modoc War. The preparation, conduct and aftermath of battles and skirmishes were seldom photographed. The images made, particularly those of the conflicts between Native Americans and the US government, tended to portray indigenous people as weak or too wicked to stand in the way of civilization. Even when the indigenous people were victorious over the white man.

Pictorialism - 2

Emerson found most amateur and art photography pretentious but many practitioners ignored his insults and based their ideas of art photography on his photographs, emulating their subdued middle-gray tones that he got with the platinum printing process , soft focus and peaceful agrarian subjects. Art photographers creatively misunderstood Emerson's writings as permission to move away from faithful depiction toward more evocative and expressive photographs. They embraced his choice of subjects but discarded his allegiance to recent science. They liked to use selective focus and got rid of distracting details associated with vulgar commercial photography

Charles Darwin

European efforts to establish comprehensive and systematic classifications of human beings were enhanced by the writings of Darwin. Some commentators interpreted Darwin's writings as validation of a natural hierarchy of development, from lower to higher races, based on visible difference on the anatomy and cultural characteristics. Charles Darwin argued that the physical signs of emotional states were inherently the same for all humans, and that animals had emotions that they expressed in similar ways that people did. Darwin commissioned Rejlander and other photographers to make photographs for his book and believed that babies exhibited the purest, least acculturated signs of emotion.

Pictorialism -3

Fog and shadow were used a lot and they strove for tonal complexity which they got by using techniques like platinum printing. They liked to do hand work on both the negative and print and frequently printing on textured paper so they resembled watercolors and evoked the photographs of Hill & Adamson and J.M. Cameron who they admired. Pictorialists valued having a symbolic control over industry and a sense of superiority over snapshooters. The writings of Henry Peach Robinson became very popular with the new generation of photographers and was probably even more responsible popularizing the word "pictorial" than Emerson.

Gertrude Kasebier

Gertrude Kasebier was probably the most successful American portrait photographer in the first decade of the 20th century. Her photographs of women sometimes relied on implicit storytelling in the manner of lady Hawarden. The mother-and-child theme, prominent in Kasebier's photography, was often depicted with the mother helping the child negotiate the passage into life, rather than holding the child close.

Edward Steichen

He and Stieglitz were close friends and collaborated with him on many exhibitions and the journal Camera Work. His pictorialist work emphasized design and powerful graphic contrast. Like many Pictorialists, he experimented with color autochromes.

Peter Henry Emerson

He rejected the idea of art as a vehicle for personal and emotional expression. He maintained that the artist was a person of special character and ability but derided work of imagination as untrue. His own notion of naturalism was based on contemporary science, not art theory. Emerson insisted that, in the modern world, science was the only authentic basis for art and photography. Emerson saw the German scientist, Hermann von Helmholtz, studies of the human eye's range of focus as educational for photography. He attempted to align art with the cutting edge of science, and to make it part of the modern world. Emerson expanded on his theory of photography in his most important theoretical work, Naturalistic Photography in 1886. Instead, he argued that the artist should translate exactly how the eye sees, concluding that the photographer should focus on the main subject of a scene, allowing the periphery and the distance to become indistinct. This was called differential or selective focus. He rejected his own theory in 1890 with a pamphlet titled The Death of Naturalistic Photography .

Henry Peach Robinson

Henry Peach Robinson started photography in 1852; became the leader of a so-called High Art movement which advocated beauty and artistic effect no matter how it was obtained. Used combination printing. "Fading Away" (1858), shows girl dying in bed with two women and a man looking out window. It is a manipulated image. using more than one negative.

Naturalism

It is a view that is specifically concerned with practical methods for acquiring knowledge, irrespective of one's metaphysical or religious views.

Naysmith and Carpenter

James Nasmyth and astronomer James Carpenter to created a unique series of images of moon from plaster models. They did not consider the models as fakes. The models were conceived as an instructional tool that provided clear, close-up details not technically possible in actual moon photographs.

Pre-Raphealites

Julia Margaret Cameron, Henry Peach Robinson, Oscar Rejlander and Lady Clementina Hawarden took the Pre-Raphaelite preoccupation with the poetic and archaic and produced beautiful and affecting images.

Nadar

Nadar capitalized on the upper-class taste for images of creative people.Portrait photographer Nadar insisted that he was an artist. He conceptualized his photographs and posed his subjects but the images often were taken by staff. Using carbon arc lamp, he took pictures of Paris sewers.

Stereograph

Pair of images of a scene taken at slightly different angles to produce an image with the illusion of depth when viewed in a stereoscope.

Pictorialism -1

Pictorialism refers the idea of emulating painting and engraving and treating photography as an art form and was followed by a number of photographers into the early 20th century. Henry Peach Robinson is considered the founder of the pictorialist school of photography. He was considered both a highly regarded and a controversial figure. Robinson's manipulative approach raised hotly contended questions among critics and artists.

Roger Fenton

Roger Fenton was a pioneering British photographer, one of the first war photographers; he photographed the Crimean war. Most of his images were inoffensive and showed military leaders and soldiers doing the same social activities they might do at home. The Valley of the Shadow of Death - cannon balls moved.

Carte-deVisit

Small photo portrait mounted on cardboard about the size of a calling card.

Alexander Gardner

Some stories say that Gardner was unhappy with Brady taking photographic credit for the work Gardner was doing and the book's author claims that Gardner resigned but kept good relations with Brady.audiences at the time were willing to accept images that represented a broader sense of truth even though they didn't adhere to strict visual fact. "Death of a Rebel Sharp Shooter" -this photo was slightly manipulated for composition -photographed Civil War, Lincoln -Scottish

Alfred Stieglitz

Stieglitz knew the work of major Pictorialist photographers in Europe and America and wanted Camera Notes to be international in scope and make American photography equal to European painting in the minds of Americans. His early work includes the familiar tranquil scenes and overall blurriness of Pictorialism, but his depiction of light and textures is clearer than Pictorialist photography. He was also influenced by geometric experiments of Picasso. Stieglitz's images became more straightforward with more emphasis on form rather than atmosphere

Little Galleries 291

Stieglitz worked with his friend Edward Steichen and they opened up Little Galleries at 291, 5th Ave. in New York. Stieglitz showed a wide variety of photographs admired by Pictorialist photographers and also showed other media by artists such as Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, Picasso, Cezanne and many other artists of the early Modernist era.

Fuzzygraph

The "fuzzygraph," as Pictorial photographs were mockingly called, helped foster the photographic industry, as commercial manufacturers produced soft-focus lenses and textured photographic papers for amateur use. The gum-bichromate process, which made it possible to add pigment and texture to a print, became popular and was used and promoted by French photographer Robert Demachy.

Half Tone Process

The half-tone process allowed publications to reproduce photographic images directly, rather than through engravings. Along with the stereograph and the postcard, the half-tone supplied modern life with visual information to an unprecedented degree.

Timothy H. O'Sullivan

Timothy O'Sullivan, who left Brady's studio in 1862 and went to work for Alexander Gardner was given credit for his work in Gardner's publications. From 1867 to 1869, O'Sullivan was the official photographer on the United States Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel under Clarence King. His job was to photograph the West to attract settlers. In contrast to the Asian and Eastern landscape fronts, the subject matter he focused on was a new concept. It involved taking pictures of nature as an untamed, unindustrialized land without the use of landscape painting conventions

Oscar Rejlander

Used combination printing to make most famous High Art photo called "Two Ways of Life" after Raphael's "The School of Athens." A sage (or father) introduces two youths to life; one is the honest moral life and the other is the life of debauchery. Required numerous negatives.

The Pencil of Nature

William Henry Fox Talbot published the first book illustrated with photographs, "The Pencil of Nature" (1844-1846)