quiz 5 - mods 8+9

Eadweard Muybridge p132

*English photographer, active in the USA. *first to analyze motion successfully by using a sequence of photographs and resynthesizing them to produce moving pictures on a screen. His work has been described as the inspiration behind the invention of the motion picture. *Born Edward James Muggeridge *emigrated around 1852 to the USA, where he first worked for a firm of publishers and later became a book dealer. After a stagecoach accident in Texas in 1860, he returned to England, where he took up photography. *By 1867 he was back in California, describing himself as 'Eadweard Muybridge, artist-photographer'. During the next five years he took over 2000 photographs, selling many of them under the pseudonym Helios. *Muybridge made his name as a photographer with a successful series of views, Scenery of the Yosemite Valley, published in 1868. *In 1872 he was commissioned by a former governor of California, Leland Stanford, to photograph his horse, Occident, trotting at speed. The aim was to test Stanford's theory that at some stage in its trot the horse would have all four feet off the ground. Muybridge's first photographs were inconclusive, but further attempts in 1873 appeared to prove the point, at least to Stanford's satisfaction. *Work was interrupted by a dramatic crisis when Muybridge, tried for killing his wife's lover and acquitted, found it prudent to make a photographic expedition to Central America. *In 1877 Muybridge returned to the problem of the trotting horse and began the work which was to make him famous. He designed an improved shutter to work at the astonishing speed of one-thousandth of a second and used all his experience to sensitize his plates for the shortest possible exposure. When the resulting retouched picture of Occident in arrested motion was published in July 1877, it was so different from the traditional artist's impression that it created a minor sensation. The next year Muybridge embarked on an even more ambitious series of experiments. In order to secure a sequence of photographs of horses in various stages of trotting, he set up a battery of 12 cameras fitted with electromagnetic shutters. These were activated by strings stretched across the track. *Muybridge later repeated his experiments using 24 cameras. The subsequent photographs were widely reproduced in publications throughout America and Europe. The publicity led Muybridge to design a projecting device based on an optical toy by which drawings derived from his photographs could be projected on to a screen as moving pictures. During the early 1880s he toured Europe with this instrument, termed the zoopraxiscope, and a large collection of lantern slides. With the latter he was able to demonstrate that artists throughout the ages had depicted the horse in attitudes that were completely false. *On his return to America, Muybridge quarreled with Stanford, but in 1884 he was able to begin work at the University of Pennsylvania using elaborate banks of cameras to analyze animal and human motion by means of photographs. *He took over 100,000 photographs, 20,000 of which were reproduced in his major publication, Animal Locomotion (London, 1887.) This 11-volume work had a tremendous impact, not least on artists, who were forced to reassess completely the manner in which they depicted animal movement. *Muybridge finally returned to England in 1900. He bequeathed numerous relics of his work to Kingston-on-Thames Public Library, a great proportion of which is on loan to the Science Museum, London. Other major repositories of Muybridge's work include the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, the Stanford University Library and the Stanford University Art Gallery and Museum. —Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online.

platinum process p148-49

*a contact printing process in which the image is partially printed out with unltraviolet radiation. After exposure the image is chemically developed out to completion. --- Alfred Stieglitz's Palladium Photographs and their Treatment by Edward Steichen Douglas G. Severson The platinum process was patented and introduced to the marketplace under the name Platinotype by the Englishman William Willis in 1873. One of its earliest and most skilled practitioners was Peter Henry Emerson, who was much admired by Stieglitz for his efforts on behalf of photography as an art form and who in 1887 awarded Stieglitz the first of his many medals and prizes in photography. Emerson expressed his admiration for the platinum process in his textbook, Naturalistic Photography (Emerson 1899, 135-36): Every photographer who has the good and advancement of photography at heart, should feel indebted to Mr. Willis for placing within his power a process by which he is able to produce work comparable, on artistic ground, with any other black-and-white process. We have no hesitation in saying that the discovery and subsequent practice of the process has had an incalculable amount of influence in raising the standard of photography. Making a platinum or palladium print involves the sensitization of paper with ferric oxalate and platinum or palladium chloride. Light exposure reduces the ferric salts, and the exposed paper is then immersed in potassium oxalate, which catalyzes the reduction of the platinum or palladium salts to the final metallic image material. Unwanted iron salts remain in the paper, however, and must be eliminated by several baths in dilute hydrochloric acid and a final water wash. (For more detailed information on the chemistry of the platinum and palladium process, see Gottlieb 1993, 1995.) The resulting print is made up of finely divided metallic platinum or palladium embedded in the fibers of the paper surface. That surface is completely matte and can therefore be viewed from any angle, as there is no emulsion or subsequent gloss. A variety of papers can be used, and contrast can be varied by dilutions of the sensitizer and other manipulations (Reinhold 1991). But the primary advantage of the platinum or palladium process in comparison to the silver process, which preceded and succeeded it, is that it can reproduce a much longer tonal scale. A full-scale platinum or palladium print from a properly rendered negative has an unmatched tonal beauty. Platinum and palladium have been described here interchangeably because both are based on the light sensitivity of iron salts, and the printing and processing procedures are nearly identical. They can even be mixed together in the same sensitizer. However, there are some differences between the two metals that are of considerable significance for this investigation. While palladium appears in Willis's original patent specifications (Willis 1880), it was not widely used until 1916 when the British government forbade the use of platinum for photography because it was needed for the war effort. In June 1916 the Eastman Kodak Company also ceased production of the platinum paper it had manufactured since 1906. As photographers like Stieglitz began, of necessity, to rely more heavily on the substitute palladium papers, certain differences became apparent. Most important, palladium prints were inherently warmer in tone than platinum. Although color could be altered by reducing developer temperature or by using toners such as lead oxalate, it was extremely difficult to produce the same neutral gray tones with palladium as were naturally rendered by platinum. Palladium prints also had somewhat lower contrast, although that could be compensated for by adjustments to the sensitizer solution or the developer dilution. Moreover, unlike platinum, palladium is slightly soluble in hydrochloric acid, which is the clearing bath for the process. Therefore, a more dilute clearing solution, perhaps 1:200 rather than 1:60, was recommended for palladium. Until recently, both platinum and palladium prints have had an excellent reputation for stability and permanence, primarily because the metallic platinum or palladium that forms the image is more resistant than silver to attack from peroxides and other oxidants. However, acidity introduced by the clearing bath can threaten the paper support, and it now appears that palladium prints in particular may be more prone to staining or discoloration than was previously expected.

Frederick Evans p.155

*aesthetic rooted in the Arts and Crafts Movement -- stressed dignity of work, beauty of fine materials, and spiritual importance of preindustrial life *1895 -- began a photographic meditation on medieval cathedrals in England and France *mastered tight compositions, thru use of repeating lines, capturing a strong sense of chiascuro *1900 -- elected to the Linked Ring --- Evans was considered, in his time to be one of the greatest architectural photographers, concentrating his work on the great cathedral interiors of England and France. Evans believed in the purity of the negative and allowed his prints to communicate without any manipulation. He was a master of platinum printing. "Photography is Photography; And in it's purity and innocence is far too uniquely, valuable and beautiful to be spoilt by making it imitate something else." "The unwise, those who refuse to learn from the study of exhibited work, and who are unable to learn by practical experience, say that though photography may have its art aspects and value, yet it can never hope to attain to a very high place, as its sense of personality, its obedience to individuality, is so limited. Give half a dozen men the same camera, lenses and plates, and send them to the same place to do the same thing, and all the results will be alike, or so nearly alike as to reveal the real mechanicalness of photography. Yet, curiously enough, this is just one of the most difficult things a photographer can be set to do, to exactly repeat himself, or another. He may use the identical apparatus, know the subject perfectly, and yet be totally unable to bring away an exact replica." — Camera Work 25, 1909. --- English photographer and writer. He took up photography in the early 1880s out of his interest in the 'study of the beautiful' while a bookseller in London. In 1887 he received a medal from the Royal Photographic Society for his microscopic photographs of shells, which to his dismay were categorized as scientific photographs. In 1889 he met Aubrey Beardsley and was instrumental in getting Beardsley his first assignment illustrating Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur. Evans's portrait of Aubrey Beardsley (1894), showing the artist holding his head in his hands, is one of his finest. Around 1890 Evans began to photograph English and French cathedrals; it was on his architectural photography that his reputation was established. One hundred and twenty of his platinum prints were exhibited at the Architectural Club, Boston, in 1897. The next year, aged 45, Evans retired from his bookshop to devote his time to photography. In 1900 two achievements helped to consolidate his reputation: he had his first one-man exhibition of 150 prints at the Royal Photographic Society and was elected to the exclusive photographic brotherhood, the Linked ring. As one of its most important members, he was responsible from 1902 to 1905 for the innovative hanging of the annual Salons. In 1903 Alfred Stieglitz featured Evans's photographs in his new journal Camera Work , accompanied by an appreciation by George Bernard Shaw. Evans's a Sea of Steps (Wells Cathedral) (1903) is one of his greatest images of that period. The wave of steps to the chapter house that engulfs the viewer prompted such a rash of camera-club imitations that indentations were made in the floor for the amateur to erect his tripod in the correct spot. In 1905 Evans took on assignments from Country Life that enabled him to photograph further afield, such as his commission in 1906 to photograph English parish churches and French châteaux. This period marked a shift in his style to solid, more sculptural architectural elements that contributed to his eventual distancing from the Ring. Around 1909 Evans turned increasingly to landscape photography, in which he explored effects of light in forested areas. In 1912 he began to publish privately platinotype editions of his collections of works by William Blake, Hans Holbein the younger and Beardsley. He was a master of the platinum print, then called the platinotype, which created an image of clear grey tones whose subtlety of range allowed for exceptional realistic detail. When combined with the precision allowed by his exposure, sombre corners of medieval churches became marvels of discriminating detail. His output declined by the 1920s due to the high price of platinum, his dissatisfaction with the new silver paper and his dislike of the photographic avant-garde's interest in abstraction. Evans was described by Alfred Stieglitz as 'the greatest exponent of architectural photography'. Evans aimed to create a mood with his photography; he recommended that the amateur 'try for a record of emotion rather than a piece of topography'. He would spend weeks in a cathedral before exposing any film, exploring different camera angles for effects of light and means of emotional expression. He always tried to keep the camera as far as possible from the subject and to fill the frame with the image completely, and he used a small aperture and very long exposure for maximum definition. Equally important to the effect of his photographs were his printing methods; he rejected the fashion for painterly effects achieved by smudging, blowing or brushing over the surface of the gum paper print. His doctrine of pure photography, 'plain prints from plain negatives', prohibited retouching. Evans was a prolific writer on photography, regularly contributing essays and photographs to Camera Work until 1907 and to the weekly Amateur Photographer between 1902 and 1910, where he explained his philosophy of 'pure' photography. In 1928 he was made an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. Evans is represented in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum, the International Museum of Photography at Rochester, NY, and the Royal Photographic Society, Bath

Peter Henry Emerson p.148

*saw photography as an independent medium combining art and sciene *photographer is the one who determines the camera's own intrinsic attributes *camera images could engage the senses and emotions in a naturalistic manner *observe and record dispassionately *enduring art is made from nature; the artist's role is to imitate these effects on the eye *"In capable hands...a work of Art" *method was to photograph his subjects in their natural environment -- rely on selection of subject, lighting, framing, and selective focusing to make an artistic camera image --- In 1885 Peter Henry Emerson along with George Davison founded the Camera Club of London, which was a forum for serious amateurs in photography. Emerson's was known for his images of people engaged in labor, particularly the idealized peasant, the genre subject. He published his work in a richly illustrated volume of platinum prints titled Life and Landscape of the Norfolk Broads (Links to an external site.), (1886). Emerson had a friendship with the landscape painter Thomas Frederick Goodall (Links to an external site.) whom he met while photographing in the Norfolk Broads. Goodall's inspiration was that of the Barbizon School (Links to an external site.), which was a style known as Naturalism Pictorialism was based on Emerson's Naturalistic theories of art. In his lecture Photography, A Pictorial Art, given in March 1886 to the Camera Club, Emerson attacked the dependent relationship established between photography and painting. Emerson saw photography as an independent medium that combined science and art. In his book Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, (1889) Emerson discussed his philosophy of art and art history. Generating a great deal of controversy in the photographic community, it was referred to as 'a bombshell dropped in a tea party.' ¹ "Photography has been called an irresponsive medium. This is much the same as calling it a mechanical process. A great paradox which has been combated is the assumption that because photography is not 'hand-work,' as the public say-though we find there is very much 'hand-work,' and head work in it—therefore it is not an art language. This is a fallacy born of thoughtlessness. The painter learns his technique in order to speak, and he considers painting a mental process. So with photography, speaking artistically of it, it is a very severe mental process, and taxes all the artist's energies even after he has mastered technique. The point is, what you have to say and how to say it. The originality of a work it is expressed, whether it be in poetry, photography, or painting. That one technique is more difficult than another to learn no one will deny; but the greatest thoughts have been expressed by means of the simplest technique, writing."—Naturalistic Photography In 1891 Emerson renounced his philosophies of photography in a pamphlet titled The Death of Naturalistic Photography. In this essay Emerson explained "...the limitations of photography are so great that, though the results may and sometimes do give a certain aesthetic pleasure, the medium must always rank the lowest of all arts... for the individuality of the artist is cramped, in short it can scarcely show itself. Control of the picture is possible to a slight degree, by varied focusing, by varying the exposure (but this is working in the dark), by development, I doubt (I agree with Hurter and Driffield, ² after three-and-half months careful study of the subject), and lastly, by a certain choice in printing methods. But the all-vital powers of selection and rejection are fatally limited, bound in by fixed and narrow barriers. No differential analysis can be made, no subduing of parts, save by dodging—no emphasis—save by dodging, and that is not pure photography, impure photography is merely a confession of limitations... I thought once (Hurter and Driffield have taught me differently) that... true values could be altered at will by development. They cannot&#59 therefore, to talk of getting values in any subject whatever as you wish and of getting them true to nature, is to talk nonsense... In short, I throw my lot in with those who say that photography is a very limited art. I deeply regret that I have come to this conclusion." ³ --- English photographer. He lived in Cuba and the United States until his widowed English mother took her two sons to England in 1869. He studied medicine at King's College Hospital, London (1879), and later received a BA (1883) and a Bachelor of Medicine degree (1885) from Cambridge University. While at Cambridge he studied photography, and after a brief medical practice he left the profession in 1886 for photography and writing. After becoming a member of the Photographic Society of Great Britain in 1883, he achieved recognition writing for such journals as Amateur Photographer. In East Anglia Emerson used his nautical skills and knowledge of natural history while photographing the fen country and its people. The results were albums such as Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, which he co-authored with the English painter Thomas F. Goodall (1856-1944), Pictures of East Anglian Life (Links to an external site.) (London, 1888), Wild Life on a Tidal Water (Links to an external site.) (London, 1890), On English Lagoons (Links to an external site.) (London, 1893) and Marsh Leaves (Links to an external site.) (London, 1895). These limited edition albums, which contained either platinotype (platinum) prints or photogravures, reveal Emerson's sensitivity to pictorial values and his knowledge of country people and fishermen. The picturesque photographs, such as Gathering Water Lilies (Links to an external site.) (1886), are balanced by careful descriptions, including some accounts of mistreatment of women and problems created by absent landlords and encroaching tourists. Photographs, such as the platinotype Towing the Reed (Links to an external site.), suggest Emerson's interest in French realist artists, particularly Jean-François Millet (Links to an external site.). Emerson's claim that photography was a pictorial art, 'superior to etching, woodcutting [and] charcoal drawing' (Emerson, 1886, p. 139), rested on his idea of Naturalism. He considered his theory scientific and called for 'differential focusing', which, supposedly, would give effects similar to human vision. Through use of a long focus lens, diaphragm and camera-back swings, the main subject could be made relatively sharp while other areas were rendered softer. Achieving a faithful impression satisfied his belief that nature was the scientific first principle of art. He advanced this theory, along with diatribes on other photographic approaches, in articles and in lectures before the Royal Photographic Society and the Camera Club (London), which he helped to found in 1885, as well as in his book Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art (1889). He scorned the art-like combination print and took issue with its chief proponent Henry Peach Robinson in the photographic press. He also opposed retouching, 'dodging' and gum bichromate printing. He advocated platinum printing or photogravure and suggested new exhibition techniques. In 1890 the chemists Ferdinand Hurter and Vero Charles Driffield published experiments on the relationship of exposure and development that Emerson mistakenly interpreted as proving the mechanical limitations of photography in controlling tones. A conversation with a noted artist, possibly Whistler, led him to renounce photography as art, in a black-bordered pamphlet entitled The Death of Naturalistic Photography (1890), which he had printed privately. With the third edition of Naturalistic Photography (1899) he reiterated that photography was mechanical and not art. As the photographic contest judge for the Amateur Photographer in 1887, Emerson discovered Alfred Stieglitz and awarded him first prize for A Good Joke (1887). In later years Emerson published lists of medallists, designating silver or bronze medals to photographers whom he admired, among them Julia Margaret Cameron and Nadar. The Royal Photographic Society awarded him its prestigious Progress Medal in 1895. He remained bound to his purist aesthetic, and, although he continued to photograph in the early 20th century, he was no longer a leading force. The straight photography aesthetic, however, has prevailed in much 20th-century photographic art. — Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press

'291'

Early Exhibitions, 1908-1912 After a year of exhibiting American and European photographs at 291, Stieglitz and Steichen believed they needed an invigorating influx of new ideas. Steichen, at the time, was living in Paris and had befriended many artists. Acting as Stieglitz's European agent, he sent over exhibitions of such artists as Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Auguste Rodin, whose drawing HellView in a new window was exhibited at 291 in 1910. Many of these early exhibitions, frequently the first presentations of these artists' works in this country, included innovative ways of portraying the human form that often shocked 291's audience with frank depictions of sensuality and challenges to conventional notions of beauty. Stieglitz's aim, however, was not to sensationalize, but to instruct artists and the American public about the fundamentals of the new art and to provoke serious discussion. Responding to the Armory Show, 1913291-Nadelman-1915_sm.jpg In 1913, stimulated in part by the groundbreaking exhibitions held at 291 in the previous five years, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors hosted a large exhibition of modern European and American art at the Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory in New York, including work by some of the most innovative artists of the period, many of whom Stieglitz had exhibited earlier. Before, during, and after the Armory Show, Stieglitz organized a series of tightly focused exhibitions at 291: first, he showed watercolors by the American artist John Marin, then his own photographs, followed by the work of the French modernist Francis Picabia. Each exhibition included studies of New York City, and thus over the course of three months visitors to 291 were able to contrast how European and American artists responded to the city. In what he called a "diabolical test," Stieglitz timed the exhibition of his photographs to coincide with the Armory Show to see if his own art withstood comparison to the latest developments of modern painting. New Experiments, 1914-1917 In the wake of the Armory Show several other New York galleries began to exhibit modern European art. Unwilling to be one among many, Stieglitz altered 291's course and, aided by Steichen and the Mexican caricaturist Marius de Zayas, began to exhibit more experimental art, such as that of Constantin BrancusiView in a new window in 1914. Later that year, with the help of de Zayas, Stieglitz mounted what he claimed to be the first exhibition anywhere to present African sculpture as fine art rather than ethnography. Inspired by their spiritual and expressive qualities, Stieglitz exhibited sculpture from central and west Africa. In 1915 he installed works by Picasso and Georges Braque together with a reliquary figure from the Kota people of Gabon and a wasp's nest. In this way, he sought to stimulate debate about the relationships between art and nature, Western and African art, and intellectual and supposedly naïve art. During World War I, 291 became a haven for European artists. To express the new spirit they brought to the gallery, Stieglitz, de Zayas, and Picabia, along with Paul Haviland, a supporter of 291, and Agnes Ernst Meyer, a former critic, launched a new publication named for the gallery. Many articles in 291 applauded America as the most modern nation in the world, but writers also challenged readers to recognize and embrace the central role that the machine played in their life. In 1917 the French dada artist Marcel Duchamp carried this idea a step further when he declared that a machine-made object, a urinal he titled Fountain, was a work of art. Stieglitz concurred with Duchamp, and after Fountain was rejected from another exhibition, he showed it at 291. Younger American Artists, 1916-1917 Although modern art received greater attention after the Armory Show, few New York galleries showed American works. Deeply committed to American artists, Stieglitz made them the focus of his activities after 1915. In 1916 and 1917 he presented a series of exhibitions of the painters Marsden Hartley and Georgia O'Keeffe, and the photographer Paul Strand, that summarized the dramatic changes that had occurred in American art in the past decade. Each artist had integrated the latest developments in modern European art with their own experience and constructed a powerful new vocabulary of form and color. Despite these innovative exhibitions, Stieglitz was forced to close 291 in June 1917. For more than twelve years he had supported the gallery with his own or his first wife's personal income, yet mounting financial difficulties, caused in large part by the United States' entry into World War I, made it impossible for him to continue to do so.- National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (Links to an external site.)

Thomas Edison p141-143

look in the book

Vero Charles Driffield & Ferdinand Hurter p137

"Further, we had long felt that art in photography ceased to play any part the moment the cap was removed from the lens, and that very subsequent operation, whether exposure, development, printing or enlarging, was strictly a matter of science, and amenable to calculation. While we quite realized that the artist will always produce the best picture, we contended that the scientist will produce the best negative. The photographer, therefore, who combines scientific method with artistic skill is in the best possible position to produce good work. Hence, our aim was to raise technical photography from an empirical art to a quantitative science."—Vero Charles Driffield, November 15th, 1903 Reprinted from "The Photo-Miniature", The Photographic Research of Ferdinand Hurter & Vero C. Driffield Vol. V., No. 56, November, 1903 "The photographer who combines scientific method with artistic skill is in the best possible position to do the good work."—Vero Charles Driffield "The fluctuations of light throughout the year and again throughout the day, are so great that no photographer could adequately allow for them with any certainty of a proper exposure. The best he could do was to make a more or less well-founded guess. It was clear that such a matter must be governed by a law of nature and with the object in view, therefore, of reducing exposure to a system we made up our minds to work together at the subject."—Vero Charles Driffield, The photographic researches of Ferdinand Hurter & Vero C. Driffield, 1880. "One of the greatest difficulties the photographer, and especially the amateur has to encounter, lies in correctly estimating his exposure. Of course, by one who is in the habit of making almost daily exposures, experience is gained, which is a more or less certain guide, but by the photographer, who only occasionally exposes a plate, some better guide is required if certainty of result is to be expected. The fluctuations of the light throughout the year, and again throughout the day, are so great that we believe nobody, be he professional or amateur, can adequately allow for them unless he has some reliable data to go upon. Then, again, with the era of gelatino-bromide dry plates, a new difficulty arose in consequence of the great variety in their speeds. This is a very serious complication, and has never hitherto been scientifically dealt with, a satisfactory unit of speed never having been found."—Vero Charles Driffield, The photographic researches of Ferdinand Hurter & Vero C. Driffield, 1880. --- Sensitometry is the scientific study of light-sensitive materials, especially photographic film. The study has its origins in the work by Ferdinand Hurter. Ferdinand Hurter was a Swiss industrial chemist who settled in England. He also carried out research into photography. Vero Charles Driffield was a chemical substance engineer who also became involved in photographic research with early black-and-white emulsions. They determined how the density of silver produced varied with the amount of light received, and the method and time of development. Plots of film density (log of opacity) versus the log of exposure are called characteristic curves, Hurter-Driffield curves, HD curves, or H & D curves. The overall shape is a bit like an "S" slanted so that its base and top are horizontal. There is usually a central region of the HD curve which approximates to a straight line, called the "linear" or "straight-line" portion; the slope of this region is called the gamma. The low end is called the "toe", and at the top, the curve rounds over to form the "shoulder". Usable values of gamma are typically between 0.8 and 1.2. (But values of up to 1.5 may be useful for slides). A full set of HD curves for a film shows how these vary with developer type and time.—From AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Thomas Eakins p133

*used Muybridge's horses as a visual source in his own paintings *incorporated camera into his own teachings

Linked Ring

Brotherhood of the Linked Ring Association of photographers that flourished in Britain between 1892 and 1909. The association was founded by a group of artistic photographers (mainly Pictorialist) who were disenchanted with the attitudes and activities of the council members of the Photographic Society of Great Britain, the majority of whom were photographic scientists and technologists. The lecture and exhibition programmes were directed to their interests. Alfred Maskell and George Davison were instrumental in bringing together on 27 May 1892 the 15 British photographers who were the founders of the Linked Ring: Bernard Alfieri, Tom Bright, Arthur Burchett (1875-1913), Henry Hay Cameron (1856-1911, son of Julia Margaret Cameron), Lyonel Clark, Francis Cobb, Henry E. Davis, Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863-1906), Henry Peach Robinson and his son Ralph W. Robinson (1862-1942), Francis Seyton Scott, Henry Van der Weyde and William Willis (1841-1923). All were either distinguished photographers or closely involved in the medium. The name was chosen to symbolize the unity of the members linked together in a spiritual and aesthetic band of brothers. The association was constituted 'as a means of bringing together those who are interested in the development of the highest form of Art of which Photography is capable' and those only were eligible who admitted the artistic capabilities in photography. In order to carry out the principal aim of the Linked Ring (the promotion of the art of photography), the Links (members) added to their numbers many of the most distinguished photographers of the period at an international level, including Gertrude Käsebier, Clarence H. White, James Craig Annan, Edward J. Steichen, Heinrich Kuehn, Alvin Langdon Coburn, F. Holland Day, Hugo Henneberg and Hans Watzek. There was no differentiation between amateur and professional. Several worked in a range of media, although the dominating interest for most was photography. Those Links able to do so met once a month to discuss matters of mutual interest and make decisions on admission of new members. The major activity was the annual exhibition known as the Photographic Salon, which set new standards in photographic art. Initially it was held in the Dudley Gallery in Piccadilly, London. Other exhibitions (usually loans of members' work) were also organized. Although the Links did not publish a magazine, the Linked Ring Papers were printed privately for circulation among members only. Copies of these are rarely seen. In aesthetic matters considerable variety is to be found in the work of the Links, from what had become unfashionable realism, as in the work of Joseph Gale (c. 1835-1906), through naturalistic and impressionistic work to Pictorial photography (at which time it reached its peak of artistry and popular appeal). The latter explored mood and atmosphere, which were achieved by various means, such as contre-jour lighting, soft-focus lenses and special printing processes. The Pictorialists produced a wonderfully rich range of prints, employing such processes as platinum, carbon, gum and oil prints, and combinations such as gum platinum and bromoil. Monochromatic colours ranged from etching black to red chalk. Workers who used carbon printing sometimes produced prints in blues and greens (for appropriate subjects). When the major objective had apparently been achieved (the promotion of photography as a visual art) internal dissensions occurred within the Linked Ring, and the association was disbanded, with considerable reluctance, on 24 November 1909. — Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press

carbon process

A means of producing permanent pigment prints that was perfected by Sir Joseph Wilson Swan (1828-1914) in 1864 and based ultimately on the work of Alphonse Louis Poitevin. It is a process that depends on the hardening action of light on bichromated gelatin. Swan prepared his 'carbon tissue' by spreading a layer of gelatin impregnated with a coloured pigment (typically carbon black) on to a sheet of paper and sensitizing it with potassium bichromate. The tissue was then placed beneath a negative and exposed to light. The areas beneath the dense parts of the negative remained more or less unaffected, but areas unprotected from light were hardened. In theory the tissue could then be washed with warm water, which removed only the soft soluble gelatin thus 'developing' the image. In practice Swan found that the entire surface of the original tissue became hardened during exposure, although this was no more than a very thin coat in the areas least exposed to light. It was therefore found necessary to cement a fresh sheet of paper to the face of the exposed gelatin before the warm, water wash. The soaking action removed the original support tissue exposing the soft unchanged gelatin, which was also washed away leaving an image of hardened gelatin impregnated with pigment. This final print was laterally reversed but could be corrected by a further transfer process. Carbon prints show a very slight relief and rarely exhibit signs of aging or image deterioration. During the last quarter of the 19th century they were widely used for book illustrations and the commercial reproduction of conventionally made photographs and prints. The process was actively exploited in England by the Autotype Company, who acquired Swan's patent rights in 1868.— Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press

bromoil process p.150

Technique devised by E. J. Wall (d 1928) and C. Wellbourne Piper (1866-1919) in 1907 as a variant of the oil pigment process. A standard gelatin silver bromide print was treated with a potassium bichromate solution, which bleached the image and selectively hardened the gelatin. After washing and fixing, greasy inks were applied by brush, the ink being absorbed by the softer areas of the gelatin in proportion to the amount of silver in the original bromide print. The inked prints were sometimes transferred to a second sheet of paper by means of a printing press. — Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press

electrotachyscope

The Electrotachyscope was a large rapidly revolving disk which held photographs that were illuminated by a spark. The viewer saw the images at roughly eye level.

zoopraxiscope

The original zoopraxiscope for 16 inch discs had a set of removable shutters with different numbers of slots, for producing various motion effects. The glass discs are edged in a leather texture paper and have a central circular paper label of the same material and a central hole to enable them to be attached to the machine. The discs contain various numbers of images. Most are painted in black silhouette, some are painted with details.—from The Zoopraxiscope, The Edweard Muybridge Bequest, The Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames. In 1881 Muybridge invented the Zoopraxiscope. The following passage is from an 1882 publication called Living London... READERS of the 'Echoes ' in the Illustrated London News may remember that, some two or three years ago, I took the liberty of introducing them to Muybridge, ' who (hitherto an unknown quantity in my mind) had introduced himself by sending me from Palo Alto, in California, a number of very curious productions, being instantaneous photographs of the various attitudes of a fast-trotting horse in motion. One could scarcely help being struck, and admiringly struck, first by the ingenuity of the idea itself; next by the phenomenal celerity of the operation (the photographing of each attitude occupying, so I heard, only the five-thousandth part of a second); and, finally, by the unutterably hideous aspect of the attitudes assumed by the animal in the various stages of trotting. These attitudes, however, the operator asserts to be the true and natural ones; while, on the other hand, he as stoutly asserts that the accepted, conventional, traditional, and artistic rendering of the movements of the horse are, and have been (with a few Greek exceptions), altogether false amid unnatural these forty centuries since. So I spake Muybridge fair, and exhorted him to persevere in his experiments. He has so persevered, and has largely developed them. On Monday, 6th March, in the theatre at the Royal Institution, a select and representative audience assembled to witness a series of most interesting demonstrations of animal locomotion, given by Mr. Muybridge, who ins only very recently arrived in England. The Prince and Princess of Wales, Princesses Victoria, Louise, and Maud, and the Duke of Edinburgh, honoured the occasion by their presence; likewise did I note among the brilliant company Earl Stanhope, Sir Frederick Leighton, P.R.A., Professors Huxley, Gladstone, and Tyndali; and last, not least, Alfred Tennyson, Poet-Laureate. Mr. Muybridge exhibited a large number of photographs of the horse, walking, ambling, galloping, and leaping; and the postures were quite as hideous as those in the sun-pictures which had been sent me from California; but, by the aid of an astonishing apparatus, called a 'Zoopraxiscope,' which the lecturer described as an improvement on the old 'Zoetrope,' but which may be more briefly defined as a magic lantern run mad (with method in the madness), the ugly animals suddenly became motile and beautiful, and walked, cantered, 'ambled, galloped, and leaped over hurdles in the field of vision in a perfectly natural and lifelike manner. I am afraid that, had Muybridge exhibited his 'Zoopraxiscope' three hundred years ago, he would have been burnt for a wizard. After the horses, dogs, oxen, wild bulls, and deer were shown under analogous conditions of varied movement, and finally Man appeared (in instantaneous photography) on the scene, and walked, ran, leaped, and turned back-somersaults to admiration. On the following Thursday Mr. Muybridge repeated his demonstrations before the members of the Royal Academy at Burlington House. Mr. Muybridge is as modest as he is clever; and in his prefatory remarks he did not omit to do full justice to the labours in this particular field of research of Mr. J. H. Walsh ('Stonehenge'), the editor of the Field. That learned authority, in The Horse in the Stable and the Field (London Routledge), pp. 131-133, has accurately discriminated between the received and the correct interpretation of the gallop by painters and sculptors. Says 'Stonehenge:' 'To represent the gallop pictorially in a perfectly correct manner is almost impossible. At all events, it has never yet been accomplished, the ordinary and received interpretation being altogether erroneous. Nevertheless, if' a proper interpretation is given, the eye at once rebels; and on examination of such a figure, founded on perfectly correct principles, the mind refuses to assent to the idea of great pace, which is that which is intended to be given.'—George Augustus Sala, Living London, 1882.

Thaumatrope

In 1826, a man called Dr. John Ayrton Paris began selling the first animated toys in London. He called his toy a thaumatrope, which is Greek for 'wonder turner'. It consisted simply of a disc with two pieces of string attached to it. When the disc was spun between the strings, the images on the back and front blended together to form a single picture. Popular images included birds in cages, circus performers and the encounters between dogs and cats.—From The Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture

Fusil Photographique Photographic Gun

In the early 1880's Étienne-Jules Marey published pictures of birds in flight made with his photographic gun. A forerunner of the motion picture camera, it had a sight and a clock mechanism and made 12 exposures of 1/72th of a second each. Marey's observations concerning the changes in the shape of birds' wings in relation to air resistance was vital in understanding the phenomenon of flight.-from The Electric Library The fusil photographique or photographic gun. When the trigger was pulled the plate rotated.

John Joly p143

John Joly, a physicist from Dublin, Ireland invented in 1893, the first practical method of making a single picture, by the additive process, without using any device to view the image. --- A screen of vertical lines containing microscopic red, green, and blue strips was placed in contact with a black and white plate of the exact same size. An exposure was made through the screen side of the combination. The b&w plate was processed. A positive transparency was made and then bound permanently to the color screen. When viewed it gave the appearance of a full color image.

Phenakistiscope

Joseph Plateau invented an animation device in 1832 called the Phenakistiscope. The phenakistiscope (Greek for 'deceptive view') had a disc carrying a series of images set in a ring around the circumference, with small slits between the images. When a rod was placed through the center of the disc, and it was spun in front of a mirror, a person looking through the slits from the back of the disc would see a moving image reflected in the mirror. The images used could either be abstract patterns or performers such as jugglers or acrobats.—From The Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture

kinetoscope

Kinetoscope, 1894. The Edison Manufacturing Co. Also known as the Edison Kinetoscope and the Peep-Show Kinetoscope. It was a parlor motion picture viewer containing a continuous 50 feet of "standard" 35mm film running at about 40 frames per second with a duration of about 20 seconds. This device was designed by Thomas Edison's assistant, W.K.L. Dickson.

Étienne-Jules Marey p134

"To complete the researches which I have communicated to the Academy at recent sessions [1888] I have the honour to present today a band of sensitized paper upon which a series of impressions has been obtained, at the rate of twenty per second. The apparatus which I have constructed for this purpose winds off a band of sensitized paper with a speed which may reach 1m, 60 per second, as this speed exceeds my actual needs I have reduced it to 0m, 80. If the impressions are taken while the paper is in motion, no clearness will be obtained, and only the changes of position of the subject experimented upon, will be apparent. But if, by means of a special device, based upon the employment of an electro-magnet, the paper is arrested during the period of exposure, 1/5000 of a second, the impression will possess all the clearness that is desirable. This method enables me to obtain the successive impressions of a man or of an animal in motion, while avoiding the necessity of operating in front of a black background. It seems moreover destined to greatly facilitate the studies of the locomotion of men and animals."— Marey to the Academie des Sciences, 1889. "From the invisible atom to the celestial body lost in space, everything is movement...It is the most apparent characteristic of life; it manifests itself in all functions, it is even the essence of several of them. All movement is the product of two factors: time and space; to know the movement of a body is to know the series of positions that it has occupied in space in a series of successive moments."—Étienne-Jules Marey in the Introduction to La Methode Graphique dans les Sciences Experimentales, 1878. --- French photographer. His photographic research was primarily a tool for his work on human and animal movement. A doctor and physiologist, Marey invented, in 1888, a method of producing a series of successive images of a moving body on the same negative in order to be able to study its exact position in space at determined moments, which he called 'chronophotographie'. He took out numerous patents and made many inventions in the field of photography, all of them concerned with his interest in capturing instants of movement. In 1882 he invented the electric photographic gun using 35 mm film, the film itself being 20 m long; this photographic gun was capable of producing 12 images per second on a turning plate, at 1/720 of a second. He began to use transparent film rather than sensitized paper in 1890 and patented a camera using roll film, working also on a film projector in 1893. He also did research into stereoscopic images. Marey's chronophotographic studies of moving subjects were made against a black background for added precision and clarity. These studies cover human locomotion—walking, running and jumping (e.g. Man Beginning to RunView in a new window); the movement of animals—dogs, horses, cats, lizards, etc.; and the flight of birds—pelicans, herons, ducks etc. He also photographed the trajectories of objects—stones, sticks and balls—as well as liquid movement and the functioning of the heart. He had exhibitions in Paris in 1889, 1892 and 1894, and in Florence in 1887.—Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online.

Edward Steichen p.162-3

Edward Steichen Steichen's early work embraced the world of the Pictorialist's. He became friends with Stieglitz through an introduction by Clarence White. He studied painting in Paris and it was there that he met and befriended many of the members of the Linked Ring. He returned to the United States and became one of the founding members of the Photo Secession. He turned his photographic efforts towards advertising photography in the second decade of the 20th century. During World War II he was Director of Navy Combat Photography. He eventually became the Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. "The use of the term 'art medium' is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding. " —Edward Steichen --- Steichen emigrated to the USA in 1881 and grew up in Hancock, MI, and Milwaukee, WI. His formal schooling ended when he was 15, but he developed an interest in art and photography. He used his self-taught photographic skills in design projects undertaken as an apprentice at a Milwaukee lithography firm. The Pool-eveningView in a new window reflects his early awareness of the Impressionists, especially Claude Monet, and American Symbolist photographers such as Clarence H. White. While still in Milwaukee, his work came to the attention of White, who provided an introduction to Alfred Stieglitz; Stieglitz was impressed by Steichen's work and bought three of his photographs. Steichen studied briefly in Paris at the Académie Julian and participated in the New School of American Photography exhibition in London and Paris (1900). He was elected a member of the Linked ring society of British Pictorialist photographers. His homage to Auguste Rodin, Rodin—le penseur (1902; priv. col., see 1978 exh. cat., no. 11), a platinum and gum-bichromate print made from two negatives, is a masterpiece of ethereal form and light, which remains one of his most familiar images. Returning to New York, he became a founder, with Stieglitz, of the Photo-secession group and, in 1903, designed the cover of Stieglitz's new magazine Camera Work (1903-17). A special edition of his work, The Steichen Book (New York, 1906), was published as a supplement to Camera Work. When he moved from his small studio at 291 Fifth Avenue, he encouraged Stieglitz to use the space as a gallery for new art and photography, and in 1905 it became the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, later known as 291. Steichen was still involved in painting as well as photography and abandoned a successful photographic portrait studio to return to Paris in 1906. Through Gertrude and Michael Stein he became acquainted with the most important artists of the Ecole de Paris and arranged, with Stieglitz, for their work to be seen for the first time in the USA at 291. In 1907 he created a series of remarkably delicate colour images within a week of the introduction of the autochrome process by the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, including Houseboat on the Thames. On the eve of World War I Steichen returned to New York. Differing views on the war, the future of 291 and Steichen's expressed desire to become a photojournalist in the tradition of Mathew Brady severed the close ties that he had with Stieglitz. Steichen first joined the Signal Corps but was then transferred to the US Army Expeditionary Forces Air Service as commander of the photographic division (1917-19). The demand for sharp resolution aerial photographs prompted Steichen to pursue a new interest in photographic technology after the war. His experiments included photographing a white cup and saucer on a series of graduated grey tonal-scale backgrounds and led to compositions such as Pears and an AppleView in a new window, where the lighting techniques he had developed, plus the necessarily long exposures, optically diffused the forms, emphasizing volume and weight. In 1922 he made a final, ceremonial commitment to photography, burning all the paintings remaining in his studio in Voulangis, France. Although Steichen made several trips to New York during the post-war years, it was not until 1923, when he became Chief of Photography for Condé Nast Publications, that he returned permanently to the USA. He set a new standard for printed photography at Condé Nast. His portraits in Vanity Fair and Vogue defined the era. Gloria Swanson (1924; New York, MOMA) testifies not only to his genius as a designer, with the device of the lace veil, but also to his uncanny ability to convey the essence of the personality before his lens. During his 13 years with Condé Nast he also created advertising images for the J. Walter Thompson agency. After closing his professional studio in 1938, Steichen began to experiment with 35 mm photography but was halted by the outbreak of war. During World War II he was placed in command of all naval combat photography. In addition he organized two exhibitions for MOMA: Road to Victory (1942), a panoramic portrait of the USA on which he collaborated with his brother-in-law, the poet Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), and Power in the Pacific (1945). In 1947 Steichen abandoned his own photography and became director of the department of photography at MOMA. Although he organized many exhibitions during his 15-year tenure, he felt that The Family of Man (1955) was his most important contribution. Conceived as a collective portrait, it included 503 photographs by 273 amateur and professional men and women from 68 countries. It could be argued that The Family of Man was a social document that found its way into the annals of art through the prestige and position of its curator, yet it became, in its travels throughout the world, one of the most popular exhibitions ever held.

Levi L. Hill p142

"...mixing in proper proportions, for it happens, nearly always, that some colors are found excluded by others. By care, however, we ought to arrive at the reproduction of all the colors. There exist many difficulties, more indeed than in any of the ordinary processes of photography. We cannot always depend upon obtaining the same results with the same materials, owing principally to the difficulty of preserving the solution at a uniform strength."—Levi L. Hill in A Treatise on Heliochromy, 1856. --- 1851 - announced a secret, permanent, direct color process 1856 - published "A Treatise on Heliochromy". Did not contain any workable instructions and Hill was called a hoax *did discover a method to capture several natural colors *charlatan - added pigments by hand

Sir Charles Wheatstone

"A rapidly moving wheel, or a revolving disc on which any object is painted, seems perfectly stationary. ...Insects on the wing appear, by the same means, fixed in the air. Vibrating strings are seen at rest in their deflected positions. A rapid succession of drops of water, appearing to the eye a continuous stream, is seen to be what it really is, not what it ordinarily appears to be."—Wheatstone, C. (1834) "An account of some experiments to measure the velocity of electricity and the duration of electric light." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 124, p. 591. --- "As early as 1834, Sir Charles Wheatstone observed that an object painted on a revolving disc appeared to be stationary when illuminated by intense electric light. He also noticed that flying insects seemed to be fixed in mid-air by the same means. In 1851, Henry Fox Talbot attached a page of the London times to a swiftly revolving wheel in a darkened room, uncapped the lens of his camera, and made as exposure of about 1/100,000 of a second by means of an electric spark, sharply freezing the action of the moving paper." Robert Hirsch p. 131

Dr. Richard Leach Maddox p137

"Dr. R. L. Maddox. We think very few amateurs are acquainted with the early originators of the Gelatine Bromide Process, - a process so complete to-day as to make the practice of photography nearly universal, extending to every branch of industry. Dr. R.L. Maddox is acknowledged the world over as the first to suggest and practically demonstrate the use of gelatine as a vehicle for holding the sensitive salts and to discover that it aided in increasing their sensitiveness. While many who make important discoveries, retain their secret for personal profit, he freely gave the process to the world, and thereby enabled others to perfect it, until to-day it stands unrivaled, opening fields of work that were thought to be impossible. Vast industries have been built up, and successful manufacturers of dry plates have reaped liberal profits." — American Amateur Photographer (1891) Aid for Dr. R.L. Maddox, Vol. 3, pp 481-482 "In England the name of Dr. Maddox will be well-known to every photomicrographer, for during the past thirty years he has done more photo-micrographic work, and laboured more to bring the claims of the art before the scientific world, than any other man. As the inventor of gelatino-bromide plates, strange to say, his name is not so generally known - at least, in this country - for the great authorities on modern photography on the Continent (Dr. Eder and Dr. Vogel) have given due honour to Dr. Maddox for his invention. In England, the writer thinks, Dr. Maddox has never received sufficient recognition for an invention of such value - an invention which has revolutionized the whole science and practice of photography. The photo-micrographs of Dr. Maddox are well known: perhaps among the best are his photograph of part of the frustule of P. angulatum x 3,000, his photographs of various Coicinodisci and other diatoms. A large series of slides for the lantern was made from Dr. Maddox's negatives, and this series had a worldwide fame. Dr. Maddox still continues the practice of photomicrography, and his photographs of bacteria, illustrating papers which he has recently contributed to the Royal Microscopical Society, have been pronounced by competent authorities to be unsurpassed even by the splendid productions of Koch." — I.H. Jennings, How to Photograph Microscopic Objects, or, Lessons, in Photo-micrography for Beginners, 1885.

Chronophotography & the Wheel Camera

"In this method of photographic analysis the two elements of movement, time and space, cannot both be estimated in a perfect manner. Knowledge of positions the body occupies in space presumes that complete and distinct images are possessed; yet to have such images, a relatively long temporal interval must be had between two successive photographs. But if it isn't the notion of time one desires to bring to perfection, the only way of doing so is to greatly augment the frequency of images, and this forces each of them to be reduced to lines."—Étienne-Jules Marey, 1883 A chronophotograph is a series of multiple exposures on single glass plates or on strips of film that passed automatically through a camera. This was an invention of the French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey. He developed this device to help him understand the range of human movement so that he could then apply this knowledge to reconstructive surgery and to physical training programs. Marey's first experiments were of models dressed in black with bright metal bands attached to the body. The subjects would move across a black backdrop as he shot a sequence of images. This would create a linear graph of movement. Marcel Duchamp acknowledged that his Nude Descending a Staircase had been inspired by Marey. Marey, with the help of assistants made improvements to his wheel camera. He created chronophotographs of subjects without the black clothing and bright metal bands attached to the body. The rotating disk in the camera had up to ten slots cut into it at even intervals. The subject would move in front of a black background while the rotating shutter exposed the glass plate. This would creating a sequence of images on one plate. Marey also photographed animals and inanimate objects in motion. Marey's camera is the forunner of the motion picture camera.

A. M. Worthington Arthur Mason Worthington

"It would be an immense convenience if we could use a kinematograph and watch such a splash in broad daylight, without the troublesome necessity of providing darkness and an electric spark. But the difficulties of contriving an exposure of the whole lens short enough to prevent blurring, either from the motion of the object, or from that of the rapidly shifting sensitive film, are very great, and anyone who may be able to overcome them satisfactorily, will find a multitude of applications awaiting..." from A study of splashes, by Arthur Mason Worthington, 1908.

James Clerk Maxwell p142-43

"Let it be required to ascertain the colours of a landscape by means of impressions taken on a preparation equally sensitive to rays of every colour. Let a plate of red glass be placed before the camera and an impression taken. The positive of this will be transparent whenever the red light has been abundant in the landscape and opaque where it has been wanting. Let it now be put in a magic lantern along with the red glass and a red picture will be thrown on the screen. Let this operation be repeated with a green and a violet glass, and by means of three magic lanterns let the three images be superimposed on the screen. The colour of any point on the screen will then depend on that of the corresponding point of the landscape, and by properly adjusting the intensities of the lights, etc., a complete copy of the landscape, as far as visible landscape is concerned, will be thrown on the screen."—James Clerk Maxwell --- *1861- made first true color photograph based on the additive color theory *projected black and white positives through three lantern projectors with corresponding blue-violet, green, and red filters. All three combined to project a color image

George Eastman p138

"We were starting out to make photography an everyday affair, to make the camera as convenient as the pencil."—George Eastman "You push the button, we do the rest."—George Eastman "What we do during our working hours determines what we have: what we do during our leisure hours determines what we are."—George Eastman --- *American inventor and photographer. He took up photography in 1877 *1878, dissatisfied with the cumbersome wet collodion process, he started making the new gelatin dry plates. He decided to manufacture them commercially and invented a machine to end the need to hand-coat the glass. In January 1881 he founded the Eastman Dry Plate Company. *Eastman's desire to bring photography to more people, and to satisfy the needs of the growing number of amateur photographers, led him to develop many new products. *In 1885 his roll-holder adaptor allowed the heavy and fragile glass plates to be replaced by a roll of sensitive paper; the success of this device inspired him to design a new camera with the roll-holder built in. The result was the Kodak camera (1888), for which Eastman chose the name; it was designed for the general public, who had only to point it in the right direction and release the shutter. When the 100-exposure roll provided with the camera had been exposed, the whole apparatus was returned to Eastman's factory, where the paper roll film was developed and printed, the camera reloaded and returned to the customer; 'You press the button, we do the rest' was his slogan. *The introduction of the Kodak camera did much to democratize the practice of photography, taking it out of the hands of the experts. Eastman went on to pioneer other major advances in amateur photography, including in 1889 the first commercial celluloid roll film (which made motion picture projection possible), and he brought photography within the economic reach of millions with the introduction of the Brownie camera range in 1900. *The company he formed (from 1892 Eastman Kodak) grew to be a giant multinational organization responsible for major technical innovations in photography. After his death, his home became the International Museum of Photography.—Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online.

Royal Photographic Society (RPS) p.160

'the interchange of thought and experience among Photographers'. 1853 and the founding of the Photographic Society For any organisation to have been around for more than a century it must have met the needs of those it was designed to serve. The Royal Photographic Society is no different and its original aims of 'promoting the art and science of photography' are as relevant today as they were back when it was formed. The Society has evolved as the interests and needs of its members have changed and, particularly, as photography itself has changed - not least since the mid-1980s. As The Society enters its 160th year it is an opportunity to look back to 1853 and how the Society was formed and what it achieved during its first year. Origins The Photographic Society, as The RPS was originally known, was not the first photographic society but it was the first to be formally organised to have been in continuous existence in the same form since its foundation. It took only a few years from the announcement of photography in 1839 for the first loose gathering of amateur photographers to come together. The Edinburgh Calotype Club consisted of 'keen experimentalists' and was formed in 1843. Its dozen members met to look at calotypes, to discuss photographic art and to socialise. With such a small number of members it had no need of rules or officers to run it. In London the publisher Joseph Cundall, along with Robert Hunt, started the Calotype Society - later known as the Photographic Club - in 1847. This, again, was a gathering of around a dozen photographers or 'gentlemen amateurs' who met regularly to discuss their experiments in photography and to exchange photographs. Among its members were Frederick Scott Archer, Hugh Welch Diamond, Edward Kater and Sir William Newton who would later become founder members of the Photographic Society. In mid-1852 the United Kingdom's first properly organised photographic society was formed in Leeds by J W Ramsden, who later become a Society member. The Leeds Photographic Society operated under properly constituted rules and as early as July 1852 it circulated the work of its members. In 1878 it became a section of the Leeds Field Naturalist Club and was re-established as an independent society in 1881. Towards a London Photographic Society By the late 1840s and early 1850s photography was beginning to move on technically from the daguerreotype and Henry Talbot's calotype processes. In March 1851 Frederick Scott Archer published in The Chemist details of his collodion process which represented a significant advance on the calotype. It used collodion on glass to carry the light sensitive chemicals and although it would take further work to refine it for commercial use amateurs and commercial studios were able to use it freely as it was not protected by patent. Talbot claimed that his 1843 calotype patent applied to Archer's process but the courts eventually dismissed this in 1854. This uncertainty held back photography's progress in the meantime. The Great Exhibition was also important. Opening on 1 May 1851 it brought together 700 exhibitors and over 6 million visitors by the time it closed on 15 October 1851. Photography was exhibited as both a fine art and as a branch of science and over 700 photographs were shown as well as cameras, lenses and associated photographic apparatus. The Exhibition was important in raising awareness of photography as an art form and by late 1851, as Roger Taylor has noted, there was a campaign underway to establish a photographic society in London. An detailed prospectus held by the National Media Museum for a photographic society, possibly written by Roger Fenton, appears to date from January 1851-June 1852. The main difficulty a new society faced was to convince Talbot to release members from any restriction imposed by his calotype patent. Robert Hunt met with Talbot but despite him amending the restrictions on practicing photography no agreement was reached. In April 1852 a committee planning for a London society published a 'Proposal for the formation of a Photographical Society' in the national press directly challenging Talbot over his right to limit photography by amateurs 'for their own amusement' and to bounce Talbot into relaxing his conditions. Talbot was understandably upset but he agreed to meet a group of five consisting of Frederick Berger, Roger Fenton, Peter Wickens Fry, Peter Le Neve Foster, Thomas Goodeve, Robert Hunt and Sir William Newton. Reconciling Talbot's interpretation of the patent laws with those of the committee proved impossible and their efforts were adjourned indefinitely. Despite this setback discussions continued under the auspices of the Society of Arts with Sir Charles Eastlake, director of the National Gallery, and Lord Rosse, president of the Royal Society, taking the lead as official representatives of art and science in the UK. After two months an agreement with Talbot was reached. In a formal letter dated 30 July 1852 Talbot acknowledged the impact of the Great Exhibition as heralding a new era for photography and he presented his invention to the country. Later that year the Society of Arts held the first exhibition devoted to the art and science of photography. It opened on 22 December 1852 and was organised by Joseph Cundall and Philip Delamotte. Nearly four hundred photographs were shown and such was its success it was extended to meet the public demand. The inaugural meeting Following the agreement with Talbot the committee that had attempted to form a photographic society earlier in 1852 was resurrected. It resolved to recommend the establishment of a photographic society and placed advertisements in newspapers announcing an inaugural meeting on Thursday, 20 January 1853 in the Great Rooms of the Society of Arts in John Street, Adelphi, London. The meeting was open to 'ladies and gentlemen interested in Photography' and this was the inaugural meeting of the Photographic Society. The chair was taken Sir Charles Eastlake, after Talbot had declined the presidency of the new society, with Roger Fenton acting as honorary secretary to the provisional committee. Eastlake addressed the meeting and thanked Talbot for having 'thrown open his invention to the enterprise of men or science, of amateurs and artists'. Fenton read a report from the provisional committee which described the informal gatherings at members' houses, the impetus given by the Great Exhibition which had increased the number of photographers and the failed discussions with Talbot. The meeting then moved on to consider establishing a society to be called The Photographic Society. Le Neve Foster, Dr Playfair and Dr Booth acting on behalf of the Council of the Society of Arts proposed that rather than setting up a new society photography might be better served by establishing a photographic committee under the Society of Arts which would provide funds and rooms. Those attending the meeting disagreed and the original proposal for a separate society was passed with only a few dissenters. A Council was elected for the first year and the rules were agreed which allowed for a president, three vice presidents, a secretary, treasurer and nineteen other members forming a Council. Rule 9 stated that ladies would be eligible as members. Admission was set at one guinea (£1.05) with an annual subscription of one guinea. Life membership cost ten guineas. Meetings were to be held at the Society of Arts on the first Thursday in the month between November and June starting at 8pm. The rules also established a gallery at which members could exhibit pictures for sale from which the Society would take a 10 per cent commission. The first year Meetings The first proper meeting of the new Photographic Society was held on 3 February 1853 at which new members were elected, papers read and photographs 'chiefly of wood scenery, taken by Sir William J Newton were exhibited'. This was the basic structure of subsequent meetings. At the second, on 3 March, a letter was read from the Society of Arts asking for cooperation in forming a collection of photographs to circulate among 'the Literary and Scientific Institutions and Mechanics Institutions throughout the United Kingdom'. At the third, Mr Fry showed the first camera made in London and a 'chromatic Daguerreotype' by Mr Niépce. Sixty 'magnificent' Calotype views of Venice were not shown as time ran out. The first annual general meeting was held on 2 February 1854 and a series of resolutions from Mr Rippingham revised the original rules so that the president and vice president could stand after holding office for one year and be re-elected. Retiring members of Council became eligible for re-election. More controversially a resolution proposing that future vacancies in the Council could not be held by any person practicing photography professionally with a view to profit or dealing in photographic materials or apparatus was passed after discussion. It was later rescinded. Council In addition to the monthly members' meetings Council met weekly. It was preoccupied by a number of issues over its first year. The first meeting of Council which took place on 27 January discussed the relationship between the Society and the Society of Arts. There was a feeling that the new Photographic Society needed to distance itself from the Society of Arts and a committee was established to find new premises. Various establishments including the Chemical Society and others in upper Regent Street were inspected and by May the Society finally settled on rooms from mid-Summer at the Botanical Society for one year at a rent of £15 p.a. In 1854 new rooms were taken at 21 Regent Street and the Society applied for rooms in the proposed new building on the site of Burlington House, London. Administration The administration of the society was also considered and Council agreed that a proper manner of keeping the minutes of the Council and of its Committees and other records was a necessity. Minute, voucher and correspondences books were authorised for purchase. On 31 March Council resolved to thank Mr Vignoles 'for his very valuable laborious and persevering exertions in effecting the organization of the Society and arranging all its business details and for his liberality in permitting Council to hold their weekly meetings at his Chambers'. A clerk was employed by the Society to copy meeting reports in the Society record books and in May Mr Williams was engaged as an assistant secretary at the rate of £30 p.a. A register of members was also established and it was proposed to print a list of members and their addresses for distribution with the Journal. Membership recruitment was supported by placing advertisements in the two main London daily newspapers, The Times and the Morning Chronicle. On 10 March Council read letters from Captain Scott and Mr Dancer on the subject of appointing local representatives in different parts of the Kingdom. Fenton was ordered to consider and prepare a report on the subject. General business was also reported to the Council. On 30 March 1854 letters were read from the Deputy Inspector General of Fortifications and the Hydrographer of the Admiralty asking for advice on the application of photography to military and naval purposes. On 19 May a letter from the Secretary of the Leeds Photographic Society was read proposing a 'junction', or joining, of the two societies. Council set up a sub-committee to consider the proposal which seems to have come to nothing. The Ipswich Philosophical Society asked to receive the Journal for free which was acceded to. The Society was also the recipient of gifts. These included photographs from M Regnault, a photomicrograph of a caterpillar by Mr Pratz of Vienna, copies of the French journal La Lumière and a series of pictures taken in 1840 and 1841 by M Bayard. Journal The need to publish a journal had been defined as essential even before the Society was set up and Council appointed a publication committee at its 10 February meeting. Council resolved that 'a Journal be established for the dissemination among the members of this Society of the communications made at the Ordinary meetings and of information bearing upon the interests of the Photographic Art and that the Journal be published monthly'. The committee was authorised 'to make the best and most economical arrangements with a respectable firm for the printing and publication of the Journal of the Society'. The committee resolved on 16 February to propose to Council that 'the proceedings of the Society ought to be published under the name of "The Journal of the Photographic Society" '. It also proposed that the Journal should appear promptly after each meeting and 1000 copies be printed of the first number so that free copies could be sent to all the Clubs of London and to scientific and literary institutions, thereafter 500 copies would be printed. The following week Messrs Taylor and Francis were appointed printers and publishers of the Journal. The first number of the Journal was ready by the 3 March. Such was the demand for the Journal that a second edition of 800 copies of the first number was ordered and throughout the first year reprints and larger prints runs of the Journal were approved. By the end of 1853 it was 'ordered that the standing number of the Journal now printed be 4000 and that the back numbers as they may require printing be made up to 4000'. By May 1854 the print run was reduced to 2750 with the Journal stereotyped for future re-printing if required. Consideration was also given to publishing the Journal twice a month and this was agreed on 21 April. The same meeting also resolved that the Journal would be sent free of charge to Henry Talbot. In June Council considered complaints regarding 'the want of punctuality in the delivery of the publication' and it resolved to write to the publishers. To produce the meeting reports a short-hand writer was employed although his services were discontinued in January 1854. Arthur Henfrey FRS was requested at the 10 March Council to edit the next two numbers of the Journal in return for £5. He was appointed editor from 1 May at a salary of £60 p.a. but only stayed in post for a short time. Exhibitions Producing a Society Exhibition was also a key objective for the new Society. The Society of Arts had proposed that the Society cooperate with it in a plan for forming a collection of photography to be sent around the country for exhibition. Council agreed to support this and Mr Foster and Mr Fenton were set up as a committee to draw up an answer to the Society of Arts request. The Society was keen to mount its own exhibition of photography in London but the difficulty of securing suitable premises continually delayed it. On 17 March the subject of rooms for an exhibition came up and the rooms of the Water Color [sic] Society were looked at but proved to be unsuitable. Eventually, on 2 June Council resolved that 'in consequence of it not being possible to obtain suitable Rooms, the Council have considered it advisable to postpone the exhibition of photographs to the latter part of the year'. Even this proved to be optimistic. Council increased the amount it was prepared to spend on rent from £20 to £30 and on 1 December Fenton was able to report that he had engaged the room of the Society of British Artists in Suffolk Street, Pall Mall, for an exhibition during January and February 1854 at a rent of £25 per month. A committee was formed consisting of Fenton, Berger, Hunt, Rosling and Vignoles to manage it. Advertisements were placed in a range of papers and journals advertising the exhibition and it opened to the public on 4 January 1854. The previous day Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had been given a private tour by the President, Sir Charles Eastlake, and Fenton and they had bought several prints. In February Council agreed that the 'working classes' could be admitted in the evenings at a cost of 3d per person and that this was to be advertised in The Times until the exhibition's close at the end of February. On 9 February 1854 a letter from the secretary of the Committee of the Dundee Photographic Exhibition was read and Council agreed to deliver photographs belonging to the Society for exhibition in Dundee. Many of the photographs sent north had been included in the Society exhibition. Royal Patronage At the Society's fifth ordinary meeting on 2 June Fenton read an extract from the 12 May Council minutes which noted the Council considered 'it is of the highest importance to the interests of the Photographic Society that H.M. the Queen and H.R.H. The Prince Albert should become patrons of the Society'. The President was asked to take action to secure it. On the afternoon of the 2nd the President received a letter from Mr C B Phipps at Buckingham Palace dated 30 May stating 'I am commanded to inform you that the Queen and Prince will willingly give their Patronage to the Photographic Society'. This raised the question of whether the Society's name should be changed to reflect the Royal patronage. The Council minutes of 16 June recorded that 'the subject of the assumption of the title of "Royal Photographic Society" having been considered. Resolved that it is not expedient to take any further steps in that matter for the present'. The Society eventually became 'Royal' in 1894. To the future The Photographic Society had a busy first year. Council was preoccupied with ensuring that papers were ready for meetings and with setting up the administrative procedures of the new Society. Some of the rules regarding elections to Council were amended before its first year was over. The finances of the Society do not feature significantly in the Council minutes but the Journal report of the first annual meeting held on 2 February 1854 reported cash and assets at a healthy £406 17s. Much like today the Society was approached by other organisations as a point of contact for photographic advice. The need to publish a Journal and to produce an exhibition were the Society's two main concerns and were both successfully realised and successfully continue to the present day. The late receipt of the Journal and finding appropriate exhibition venues are problems still present. The work undertaken by Fenton and the other members of the Photographic Society's Council in that first year did much to establish the Society on a sound long-term footing. Over the following years the Society had occasional financial or political crises which it successfully weathered. The aims of The Society and how it achieved these through its administration and membership have evolved and continue to do so as imaging changes. Despite this Fenton and the members of its first Council would surely recognise The Society today as the direct descendent of their Society. Dr Michael Pritchard FRPS Most of the information for this article has come from The Society's Minutes of General Meetings 1853- and Minutes of Council 1853-1857 held on behalf of The Society by the National Media Museum, Bradford.

Hermann Wilhelm Vogel p137

*1873 - discovered that the addition of certain dyes to an emulsion made it sensitive to the spectral region that was absorbed by the dye, opening up the field of dye sensitization of emulsions *1884 - formulated the first commercial orthochromatic gelatin silver dry plate. It suffered from fog and loss of sensitivity but provided a more accurate black and white tonal translation - wider range of gray print tones *first professor of photography at the Institute of Technology in Berlin *1867 - published "Handbook of Photography" *students developed the first color photography

Art Nouveau p.152-53

*1880-1914 *rejected academic painting of historical events *advocated a withdrawal from the uniform, mechanical vulgarity of industrial age *promote the arts as an indispensable part of life *aesthetic self-improvement clubs

Gertrude Käsebier p.162

*1897 -- opened her own studio in New York *1898 -- recognized at the first Philadelphia Salon *1900 -- the first woman elected into the Linked Ring *founding member of the Photo-Secession --- Käsebier began her career in her late 30's. Studying at the Pratt Institute her original intention was to become a painter but instead, she found photography as her calling. She opened a portrait studio in New York in the late 1890's where her work came to the attention of Alfred Stieglitz. She became a member of the Photo Secession. Her work was published in the first issue of Camera Work. --- American photographer. She studied painting at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY (1889-93), and in France and Germany (1894-5). She began her professional photographic career c. 1894, as a magazine illustrator, and then c. 1898 she opened a portrait studio on Fifth Avenue in New York. Her simplified portrait style dispensed with scenic backdrops and fancy furniture and was soon widely emulated. Robert Henri, Auguste Rodin, Stanford White and the chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit were among her subjects. Beginning in 1898, her studies of mothers and children as well as her portraits were acclaimed at major photographic exhibitions such as the Philadelphia Photographic Salons. Käsebier was a founder-member of the Photo-Secession in 1902, and 'Blessed art thou among women' was among the photographs featured in the first issue of Camera Work in 1903. By 1907 she had begun to drift from the Photo-Secession, exhibiting with them for the last time in 1910. She resigned in 1912. During the second and third decades of the 20th century she was allied with the Pictorial Photographers of America. She closed her portrait studio c. 1920, and a retrospective of her photographs was held at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in 1929. Käsebier generally printed in platinum or gum bichromate emulsions and frequently altered her photographs by retouching a negative or by rephotographing an altered print. She was the leading woman pictorialist photographer of her day and, as a married woman with children who attained success and fame, she became a model for others, including Imogen Cunningham.

tonalism p.161

*American Artistic Movement in painting and photography *idealized, melancholic, mysterious, personal, romanctic interpretation that favored muted colors and mood --- Style of American painting that appeared between c. 1880 and 1920. Though not clearly defined, its main exponents were George Inness (Links to an external site.), James McNeill Whistler (Links to an external site.), Thomas Wilmer Dewing (Links to an external site.), Dwight W. Tryon (Links to an external site.), Alexander Helwig Wyant (Links to an external site.) and such artists of the Photo-Secession as Edward J. Steichen (Links to an external site.). The term was used by Isham in 1905 and by Brinton in an essay in a catalogue for an exhibition of American painters held in Berlin in 1910. Edward Steichen, Across the Salt Marshes, Huntington, c. 1905, oil on canvas.Brinton named the now virtually forgotten artists J. Francis Murphy, Bruce Crane (1857-1937), Ben Foster (1852-1926) and Henry Ward Ranger (1858-1916) as exponents of the style and as leaders of contemporary art in the USA. The style is characterized by soft, diffused light, muted tones and hazily outlined objects, all of which imbue the works with a strong sense of mood. The term was applied especially to landscape painting in which nature is presented as serene or mysterious, never disquieting or dramatic. Tonalism grew up alongside American Impressionism yet is distinguished from that (and from French Impressionism) by its restrained palette and strongly subjective aesthetic. Somewhat in the tradition of George Fuller and of the earlier Hudson River School (Links to an external site.) in America, the Tonalists approached nature in a contemplative, Romantic manner, the intention being to capture not so much the appearance of a landscape as its mood as perceived by the artist. This idealistic attitude linked Tonalism to the contemporary Symbolist (Links to an external site.) aesthetic, particularly evident in such paintings as Steichen's Across the Salt Marshes, Huntington, c. 1905. The outlines of the trees are scarcely visible in the dim, misty atmosphere, lending the scene a strong sense of mystery. Whistler's earlier Nocturnes, which date from the 1870s onwards, have similar qualities, as shown by Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice (Links to an external site.) c. 1880. Closer to Impressionism in its lighting and in the brushwork, though still characteristic of Tonalism, is Tryon's Morning in May, 1911 depicting a serene area of tree-lined landscape. Occasionally the Tonalist style was applied to figure and interior subjects, as in Dewing's The Spinet (Links to an external site.),1902, in which the prominent soft brown hues fuse the foreground with the background, blending the central figure into her surroundings. — Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press

Ottomar Anschütz p136

*German photographer *1882 - developed a folding hand camera with a focal plane shutter *1884 - pictures of birds in flight amazed photographic and scientific communities *1886 - improved Muybridge's camera to allow faster sequential human and animal locomotion studies *tachyscope *made electric spark photographs of projectiles in flight

George Davison p.150

*advocated photographic impressionism *to create a monochromatic image of nature, a pinhole substitutes for his lense *synthesizes naturalistic subject matter and impressionistic strategies with a focus on aesthetic *ideas created the Vienna Club der Amateur-Photographen --- which would later establish a model for exhibiting photographs for aesthetic qualities --- English photographer. He was born into a working-class family and became an audit clerk in the Exchequer in London. He took up photography in 1885, when he joined the newly formed Camera Club in London. He soon became club secretary, a post he carried out with great distinction. This, and his growing reputation as a Pictorial photographer, led George Eastman to appoint him assistant manager of the Eastman Photographic Materials Company set up in 1889 in London. He became Managing Director of the re-formed Company, Kodak Ltd, a post he held until 1908. Davison was intensely interested in photography as a medium of artistic expression, and became a disciple of P. H. Emerson, whose theories of 'naturalistic photography', which proposed that photography should imitate natural vision by using soft focus for peripheral detail, Davison eagerly applied. Davison extended this into the development of a style of photographic Impressionism, in which the aim of the photographer was to convey the impression of, or emotional reaction to, a subject by the suppression of detail. In order to produce soft focus images Davison used pinhole, instead of lens, cameras and printing methods such as gum bichromate. Images such as the Onion FieldView in a new window (1890) played a central role in the debates concerning photography as a fine art. His photograph An Old Farmstead (1890) won the gold medal at the Photographic Society of Great Britain exhibition of 1890. Davison broke with the latter, however, and became a founder-member of the Linked ring, a brotherhood of photographers committed to excellence in all styles of photography. Through his writings in English, French, American and other journals, Davison became a leading figure in Pictorial photography. From 1911 Davison no longer took photographs

Alice Boughton p.162

*celebrated the beauty of women and wrote about the qualities needed to produce images of people --- "...if the photographer has sufficient insight to perceive the interest and character of the sitter, the result may be a real achievement. This does not necessarily mean that the subject should be beautiful or graceful, or "know how to pose." It is the photographer's business to try and seize upon and bring out the innate quality, the individuality or charm of each." - Alice Boughton, Camera Work Number 25, January 1909

the "Kodak" The Kodak Camera a.k.a. Original Kodak Camera a.k.a. No. 1 Kodak Camera (barrel shutter) "You press the button, we do the rest" p138

*coined by George Eastman *began as a camera model and became a brand and company that dominated the amateur market *1888 - first kodak was a simple 3 3/4 x 3 1/4 x 6 1/2 weighing 25oz, including film *"Eastman's American Film" *ready for a user to point, shoot, advance film and shoot again *99 exposures to ship to the Eastman factory for processing and finishing *Eastman Kodak Company - the first nationwide photofinishing concern *contact prints were made from each negative and mounted on gilt-edged, chocolate-brown cards, then returned with the camera *$10 camera came back reloaded with film *"Eastman's Transparent Film" - allowed photographer to do the processing *1891 - daylight loading film allowed the camera to be loaded without a darkroom *conceptual breakthrough was to divorce the act of exposure (seeing) from the mechanical details and chemical steps of the process *marketed towards people who had never taken a photograph or own a camera *redrew boundaries of photographic practice by providing an industrial support system capable of producing standardized materials to maintain it *transformed a decentralized practice into a mass retail market of goods and services *contradicted the proclamations of artists and scientists that special equipment and technique were needed *brought the act of photography to everyday middle class, initiated a new dialogue between viewer and subject, continued photography's ability to level heirarchy, and created a visual democracy

Alvin Langdon Coburn p.160-1

*founding member of the Photo-Recession and elected into the Linked Ring *influenced by tonalism *series on Grand Canyon emphasized on specific aspects instead of scale --- "It is my hope that photography may fall in line with all the other arts and with her infinite possibilities, do things strange and more fascinating than the most fantastic dreams." —Alvin Langdon Coburn "I believe that most creative artists worthy of the name, of whatever school or medium be it pen or brush, marble or scale of tones, have an inner world of inspiration which interpenetrates this world of action, and into this sanctuary they may, yea must, at times retire for meditation and refreshment. Some say in sleep this state is reached, and dreams the bringing back of some vague glimmerings to the waking life; but the way is more firm than this, and happy is he who finds the central way." — Alvin Langdon Coburn. --- [Coburn] was greatly influenced by his mother, a keen amateur photographer, and began taking photographs at the age of eight. He traveled to England in 1899 with his mother and his cousin, F. Holland Day. Coburn developed substantial contacts in the photography world in New York and London, and in 1900 he took part in the New School of American Pictorial Photography exhibition (London, Royal Phot. Soc.), which Day organized. In 1902 he was elected a member of the Photo-Secession, founded by Alfred Stieglitz to raise the standards of pictorial photography. A year later he was elected a member of the Brotherhood of the Linked ring in Britain. Some of Coburn's most impressive photographs are portraits. He worked for a year in the studio of the leading New York portrait photographer Gertrude Käsebier and became friendly with George Bernard Shaw, who introduced him to a number of the most celebrated literary, artistic and political figures in Britain, many of whom, including Shaw, he photographed. Shaw also wrote the preface to the catalogue for the exhibition of Coburn's work at the Royal Photographic Society, London, in 1906, and regarded Coburn and Edward Steichen as 'the two greatest photographers in the world'. Coburn produced two books of portraits: Men of Mark (1913) and More Men of Mark (1922). As a photographer of cities and landscapes (1903-10), he concentrated on mood, striving for broad effects and atmosphere in his photographs rather than clear delineation of tones and sharp rendition of detail. He was influenced by the work of Japanese painters, which he referred to as the 'style of simplification'. He considered simple things to be the most profound.

Photogravure p148-49, 159

*photo etchings --- http://www.photogravure.com/process/process.html

Frederick Holland Day p.159-60

*the third member of the Linked Ring *influenced by the Decadent Movement -- rejected the notion that art should imitate nature and emphasize amorality, play, and relief from stress caused by industrialism *raised issues dealing with sex, religion, race, and physical perfection of youth *helped end tradition fo concealing female nude but male nudity was deemed too sexual *1898 -- condemned for portraying black male nudity as equal *1900 -- organized the New School of American Photography --- American photographer. He was an eccentric who sought to express his ideas on life and art through Pictorial photography, which he took up in 1887, frequently by interpretations of two opposites—the sacred and the profane. He regarded Classical Greece as the ideal and he pursued an intensive study of the human form, attempting to represent physical perfection in his photographs. These were in medium or large format, with mainly platinum prints. Day was a cultivated and sensitive man of independent means. As well as studying painting, he was an admirer of Keats, owning a fine collection of the poet's manuscripts, letters and early editions. He published books as a hobby (1893-9), co-founding the Boston publishing house of Copeland and Day and importing the then scandalous works of Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. He became obsessed with photography, and in January 1896 he was elected a member of the Linked ring brotherhood, which aimed to promote photography as a visual art. In 1899, with Coburn and his mother, he went to England, renting a studio and darkroom in London in an alley north of Mortimer Street, W1. During the summer of 1899 Day worked on a series of photographs devoted to sacred subjects. Some 250 negatives were made, including studies of the Crucifixion, the Descent from the Cross, the Entombment and the Resurrection and others showing incidents connected with the Stations of the Cross. He regarded 25 of these as having been fairly successful and a dozen as really successful. He himself posed as Jesus Christ, having fasted until his features and body were emaciated; he grew his hair and beard for over a year in preparation for the photographs. Several of the studies required groups of people, and Day said that the posing of them was a long and arduous task. The models were his friends and professional actors, who wore specially imported antique costumes. Exhibitions of Day's Sacred Art photographs in 1899-1900 brought interesting reactions. Some art critics were prepared to accept photography as a medium for portraying such subjects, while photographers in the main were strongly opposed to it. In 1900 Day was responsible for arranging and displaying a major exhibition: The New School of American Photography. Alfred Stieglitz, who considered Day to be a potential rival, refused to support the exhibition. Both were aiming to establish photography as a pictorial art, and this may explain why Day, although regarded as a distinguished member of the Linked Ring, never joined the Photo-secession, founded by Stieglitz in 1902. Some of Day's most imaginative photographs are in a series illustrating the legend of Orpheus, in which the exotic models included his protégé, Khalil Gibran, one of the immigrant boys he protected. His cousin, the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, said: 'To be in the company of this intellectual and artistic man was an education in itself ... In his house, on elegant Beacon Hill (Boston), Day used to exhibit his photographs in an incense-laden atmosphere to the élite of Boston society.' A disastrous fire about 1914 destroyed Day's collection of photographs, with the exception of those that he had given to friends or donated to other collections. From 1917 he maintained a self-imposed isolation from society

Robert Demachy p.153-5

*took up photography in 1880 *founding member of Photo-Club de Paris and exhibited prints made with the gum-bichromate process *1895 -- elected to the Linked Ring *prints range from portraits to nudes to urban landscapes *disdainful of clarity in detail and reality in art --- French photographer, writer and theorist. He was from a banking family and was financially secure, which enabled him to devote all his time to photography from 1880 to 1914. He was especially interested in the gum bichromate printing process, which could be easily hand tinted, and in which he achieved remarkably subtle effects. He tackled all the genres: oriental scenes, nudes, dancers, portraits, landscapes and scenes from everyday life. In subject-matter his works oscillate between naturalism, as in Académie, and symbolism as in Struggle. His works were frequently exhibited (Paris, London, Vienna, New York) and were an instant success. In 1904 Alfred Stieglitz devoted a portfolio to Demachy in his review Camera Work. Demachy was also a theorist of 'art' photography, giving numerous lectures, and writing articles for the Bulletin du Photo-Club de Paris and the Revue de Photographie, as well as aesthetic and technical works. The processes used and the treatment of the images (contrasts of light, opacity, soft focus, granulation, monograms, layout), partly inspired by Impressionism, made him the leader of French Pictorial photography. He was closely linked to the main representatives of this movement and corresponded with Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Heinrich Kuehn

bas-relief p.161

A French term meaning "low-raised work." This art, along with high relief, is known collectively as relief sculpture -- meant to be seen primarily from one direction -- as opposed to sculpture which is in the round or full round. (pr. bah'ruh-leef') ArtLex

gum-bichromate process p154

A printing process based on a patent by Alphonse Louis Poitevin of 1855. Gum printing was developed by John Pouncy (c. 1820-1894) who took out a further patent in 1858 and later exhibited several specimens. Paper coated with gum arabic was sensitized with a bichromate solution containing vegetable carbon pigment. The paper was exposed to light under a negative and then washed with water. By removing the soft gum that had not been hardened by light the water acted as a developer. The remaining hand-pigmented gum remained to give a positive picture. The washing stage gave the operator considerable scope to manipulate the results, and there was a great choice of pigment colours. The finished picture often resembled an artist's charcoal drawing more than a photograph. The process was revived and improved in the 1890s. For a few years the process enjoyed a great deal of popularity, especially in Pictorial photography, perhaps the most notable exponent being Robert Demachy.— Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press

Between-the-Lens Shutter

A shutter whose blades operate between two elements of the lens

Pictorialism p148

A style of photography and imagery based on an application of the principles of fine art, and, in particular, on ideas of beauty and nature deriving from the Picturesque. Although specifically identified in the late 19th century and the early 20th, the underlying aesthetic was a response to the ongoing debate about photography's scientific and artistic status. In this respect, the term 'pictorial' is defined in Henry Peach Robinson's Pictorial Effect in Photography (1869), which recommended adherence to the systemized aesthetic of the contemporary painting Salon --- The creation of Robinson's elaborate tableaux vivants involved technical precision, but a different approach predated his work in Hill and Adamson's calotypes of the 1840s and Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs of the 1860s and 1870s, all of which were characterized by shallow focus, chiaroscuro tonality and simple, centralized composition. Reacting against Robinson, P. H. Emerson codified these attributes in a lecture entitled 'Photography: A Pictorial Art' at the Camera Club, London, in 1886. In Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art (1889) he adopted the theory of Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-94) that the human eye focuses on only the centre of the field of vision. Emerson proposed photography's use of a limited depth of field and subordination of extraneous detail. Although Emerson repudiated his views, a new phase of photography was in evidence at the exhibition of the Photographic Society of Great Britain in Pall Mall, London, in 1890. George Davison's pinhole photograph The Onion Field (1889) was the most radical example, but the glossy sepia and purple-black albumen prints were generally superseded by the soft matt greys and browns of gelatin silver and non-silver processes that allowed more control over the final image. Platinum printing, well established by 1885, yielded a subtle range of tones on a variety of textured papers. Bichromated colloids produced permanent images through such processes as carbon printing, gum bichromate, photogravure and, in the early 1900s, bromoil and oil pigment printing. Photographs mimicked the texture of a charcoal drawing or replicated a watercolour painting in hue and tone, appropriate to the massed, flattened tones of the new aesthetic. Impressionistic effects were enhanced through soft-focus lenses and the use of screens to blur images during exposure or printing. Photography gained stature as a means of artistic expression through a conscious dissocation from its mechanistic attributes, and its equivalence to other media was fostered by the Art Nouveau emphasis on unified decorative values. Pictorialism, as the first truly international photographic movement, was promoted in the 1890s and early 1900s through numerous multinational groups and associations. In 1891 the newly organized Vienna Camera Club exhibited 600 exclusively 'artistic' photographs selected by painters and sculptors. Work by English photographers was included, and following this, Henry Peach Robinson led a group in secession from the Photographic Society of Great Britain, forming the Brotherhood of the Linked ring. Their first exhibition, The Photographic Salon (1893), included work by George Davison, Malcolm Arbuthnot (1874-1967) and Francis J. Mortimer (1874-1944). The membership of the Linked Ring embraced American and European photographers, including the Trifolium of the Vienna Camera Club: Hans Watzek, Hugo Henneberg and Heinrich Kühn. The Trifolium also joined the Photo-Club de Paris (1894), founded by Maurice Bucquet, with Robert Demachy and Constant Puyo (1857-1953). The Club broke away from the Société Française de Photographie, and the jury for its 1894 exhibition included four painters and the National Inspector for the Fine Arts. Das Praesidium, whose members included Theodor Hofmeister (1863-1943) and Oskar Hofmeister (1871-1937), was instrumental in exhibitions at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg (from 1893). The Cercle d'Art Photographique of Brussels (1900) included Léonard Misonne (1870-1943) and Pierre Dubreuil (1872-1944); its exhibitions also embraced non-photographic media. This was not unusual: in 1898 the members of the Munich Secession showed Watzek's large gum bichromates prints alongside paintings. Other notable forums for Pictorial photography included the International Exhibition at Glasgow (1901) and at Turin (1900 and 1903). In 1900, F. Holland Day (of the Linked Ring) and Alvin Langdon Coburn organized The New School of American Photography at the Royal Photographic Society in London. Many of the same photographers exhibited as the Photo-secession at the National Arts Club in New York (1902); the show was organized by Alfred Stieglitz and included works by Gertrude Käsebier, Clarence H. White, Frank Eugene, Edward Steichen and Heinrich Kühn. The work was further promoted by Charles Caffin (1894-1918) in his important book, Photography as a Fine Art (New York, 1901). The Photo-Secession found its voice in Camera Work (1903-17), the elaborate periodical edited by Stieglitz; its critical acclaim far outlasted the aesthetic that inspired it. Other journals fostered art photography, among them The Amateur Photographer (London, from 1884), edited from 1893 by Linked Ring member Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863-1908); Photographic Review (from 1891) in Lwów, Poland (now L'viv, Ukraine); Photograms of the Year (London, from 1895); Die Kunst in der Photographie (Berlin, 1897-1908), La fotografica artistica (Italy, from 1904); and Vestnik fotografii (Moscow), whose director after 1903 was Nikolay Petrov. Charles Holme edited special editions on Pictorial photography (1905 and 1908) for The Studio (London). Outside Europe and the USA, Harold Cazneaux was integral to Australian Pictorialism, while in Canada Sidney Carter (1880-1956) founded The Studio Club (Toronto, 1904), inspired by the Linked Ring. In Japan Ogawa Isshin (1860-1929/30) integrated existing aesthetics with a concern for spiritual values, an approach mirrored in the Pictorialist landscapes of the Indian Sir Pradyot Kumar Tagore (1873-1942) and embodying photography's quest for personal expression. In 1910 the Photo-Secession organized an international exhibition of 600 photographs at the Albright Art Gallery (now Albright-Knox Art Gallery), Buffalo, NY. In that year a schism with American members of the Linked Ring led to its dissolution, and although George Davison, Malcolm Arbuthnot and Alvin Langdon Coburn organized an exhibition of the London Secession in 1911, that effort had no direct sequel. Coburn joined Gertrude Käsebier, Karl Struss (1886-1980) and Clarence H. White in founding the Pictorial Photographers of America (1915). Although Camera Work ceased publication in 1917, the continuing popularity of Pictorial photography in the USA was evident in Pictorial Photography: Its Principles and Practice (1917), by Paul Anderson (1880-1956), and The Fine Art of Photography: Painting with the Camera (1919). F. J. Mortimer promoted British Pictorialism well into the 1940s as Director of the London Salon and the Camera Club, President of the Royal Photographic Society and editor of The Amateur Photographer (from 1908) and Photograms of the Year (from 1912). World War I brought increasing aesthetic, social and political fragmentation. Post-Impressionism pulled avant-garde photography away from a 19th-century Pictorialist aesthetic towards formalist abstraction, to which Pictorialism's misty romanticism and ideal of intrinsic beauty were irrelevant. Pictorialism's attributes of manipulated photographic media, subjectivity and symbolism have, however, remained guiding principles of photography as art.—Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press

Additive & Subtractive Color Theory

Additive color theory states that "all colors of light can be mixed optically by combining in different proportions the three primary colors of the visible spectrum: red, green, and blue." When combined in equal proportions the additive primary colors produce the appearance of white. The complimentary colors of the additive primaries are the subtractive primaries. The subtractive colors are cyan, magenta and yellow. When these are combined in equal proportions they subtract portions of white light; they produce neutral density or black. When combined in varying proportions, or pairs, the subtractive colors will create the additive primary of the third subtractive color. They can then be used in varying degrees of filtration to prevent (subtract ) portions of the visible spectrum from passing.

Frank Eugene p.163-4

American photographer and teacher, active also in Germany. After attending the Bayerische Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich (from 1886), he began exhibiting his photography in New York. Around 1899 he came to the attention of Alfred Stieglitz and was praised by the critic Sadakichi Hartmann for the intelligent combination of painterly and photographic effects in his work. He became a member of the influential transatlantic photographic society, the Linked Ring (1900), and was a founder-member of Stieglitz's Photo-secession. Around 1901 he moved permanently to Germany, where he became a lecturer at the Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt für Photographie und Reproduktionstechnik, Munich. When Stieglitz visited him in 1907, the two made some of the first artistic experiments in colour photography with the newly developed autochrome process. In 1913 Eugene was appointed to the chair in Pictorial photography at the Akademie für Graphische Künste, Leipzig. Two years later, he renounced his American citizenship and became a German citizen. With the exception of a few landscapes made in Egypt in 1901, Eugene's photographic oeuvre consists almost exclusively of allegorical images, as well as straightforward portraits and female nudes. His finest work, which brought him to the attention of the Stieglitz circle, was done within the decade around 1900. It included The HorseView in a new window (1895) and a series of nude studies made around 1898, particularly Adam und EvaView in a new window (1898) and Dido (c. 1898). Here, as earlier, Eugene approached photography like a printmaker, substantially altering his negatives with oils and etched cross-hatching before printing them, which resulted in lively backgrounds to his main figures.

Clarence Hudson White p.164

American photographer and teacher. A self-taught photographer, he began taking photographs in 1893 and soon developed a style that showed the influence of Whistler, Sargent and Japanese prints. He was elected to the Linked ring group of Pictorial photographers in 1900 and was a leading member of the Photo-secession from 1902. His evocative photographs of rural landscapes and of his family celebrate the joys and virtues of the simple, middle-class way of life that existed in the USA before World War I. By 1906 White was already a major figure in American photography and moved to New York, where he began a close professional and artistic relationship with Alfred Stieglitz that lasted until 1912. His work was published in Camera Work in July 1903, Jan 1905, July 1908, July 1909 and Oct 1910. In 1908 he began teaching photography, founding in 1910 his own Summer School of Photography in Seguineland, ME, with F. Holland Day, Max Weber and Gertrude Käsebier, and the highly successful and influential Clarence White School of Photography in New York in 1914. Although his own photography went into decline during the last decade of his life, his students included Laura Gilpin, Karl Struss (1886-1991), Dorothea Lange, Paul Outerbridge, Ralph Steiner (1899-1986) and Anton Brueh

orthochromatic & panchromatic

An orthochromatic emulsion is a black and white photosensitive material which responds to only the blue and green wavelengths of light and not to the red portion of the spectrum. Also referred to as 'ortho.' film. A panchromatic emulsion is a black and white photosensitive material that responds to all wavelengths of light

Anne Brigman p.162

Anne W. Brigman, a late nineteenth-century pictorialist photographer, was born in Hawaii but spent most of her life in California. She used natural images combined with the female figure to create mysteriously poetic images. The Dying CedarView in a new window can be understood as a commentary on the grandeur and universality of nature—the oneness of woman and creation. More recently, the photograph has been seen as a statement of feminist principles, expressing a yearning for some sort of unattainable freedom. Brigman used cedar trees almost exclusively in her female nude images, but the reference to Daphne (the nymph pursued by Apollo who was saved by being transformed into a laurel tree) is unmistakable. Brigman was one of the first women to photograph nudes in a wilderness landscape. Her images deliberately resemble charcoal drawings, as she sought to capture the spirit of her subject rather than a faithful reproduction

Autochrome

Autochromes were the first really practical color photographs and were made by a process patented in 1904 [by Auguste and Louis Lumière.] An autochrome was a colored, transparent image on glass, similar to a slide. The color came from a layer of translucent granules of potato starch, each dyed red, blue or green to create a colored mosaic on the glass plate. During exposure, light traveled through these granules to reach a light sensitive layer below; red granules would only allow red light to travel through, and so on. The light sensitive layer was thus selectively exposed by color. When the autochrome was held up to the light, the colored granules were viewed in combination with the black and white image behind to create a color photograph.—from the Victoria & Albert Museum Online --- 7/19/2012 by Jim DaMico The Rhode Island Historical Society The autochrome is the rarest, the most fragile and, to a great many eyes, the most beautiful of photographic processes. It represents not just the birth of color photography but color as luminous as the camera ever caught it. --- History The Autochrome, invented by Louis and Auguste Lumière and patented in 1904 is an additive color screen plate process and was the first commercially viable color photographic process. The Lumières introduced the Autochrome process to the world on June 10, 1907[e] and it became popular amongst amateur and professional photographers from 1907-1930's. The Lumières built upon years of experimentation starting with James Clerk Maxwell's 1861 additive color synthesis process. Maxwell's process involved using three separate lantern glass slides, individual red, green and blue filters to both take the image with and project through and three separate yet superimposed lantern slide projectors to produce a color image[f].The Autochrome, as we will see, simplified the process of color photography. Alfred Stieglitz, founder of the Photo-Secession, was at the Photo Club de Paris[g] introduction of the Autochrome process given by Auguste and Louis Lumiere and introduced the process to America. On November 15, 1907 the Autochrome process became available to amateur and professional photographers in America. [h] By 1913, the Lumière factory was producing 6,000 Autochrome plates a day and kept manufacturing them until 1932.[i] According to a 1916 Photo-era magazine[j], R.J. Fitzsimons was the sole American agent based in New York City for the Lumière's Autochrome process. It was the amateur photographers however that fully embraced the Autochrome. This was reflected in the numerous articles written about individuals' experiences with this new color photography in the pages of such magazines and photo journals as American photography, The Photogram, Photo-Era, Practical color photography, and The American Annual of Photography. The popularity of the Autochrome was exhibited in the pages of National Geographic beginning in 1914 and continued until the advent of Kodachrome slide film in 1935. Between 1914 and 1935 National Geographic photographers took an estimated 12,000 Autochromes.[k] In addition, French banker and philanthropist, Albert Kahn, sent a group of photographers to Autochrome the world, documenting among other things, World War 1 and the collapse of the Ottoman empires. Kahn's endeavor resulted in 72,000 Autochromes, most of which have not been published and are housed at the Albert Kahn Museum in Paris --- Costs In order to give some context to the affordability to amateur photographers using the Autochrome process I looked at the 1930 publication, Color Photography with Autochrome Plate[m]. A box of four 4 x 5 inch Autochrome plates cost $2.28., cover glass per dozen costs $.50, a Diascope viewer, $5.25 for a total of $8.03. In 2010 dollars these materials would cost $100.66. These costs do not include any chemicals or other processing supplies the photographer would need. The average yearly family income for American workers in 1930 was approximately $1,524 with expenditures of $1,512.[n] Average family income of 1930 translates to approximately $19,104.69 in 2010 dollars and in 1935 the average hourly wage in manufacturing was $.58. This translates to $9.27 per hour in 2010. In 2010 dollars, a photographer's $100 investment into basic Autochrome material would be equal to $1,253.58 today. As one can see, making Autochromes was expensive and out of the reach of most workers. --- Manufacturing Process The Autochrome manufacturing process was quite elaborate. At the factory in Lyon, France, the first step involved running transparent potato starch grains through numerous sieves in order to sort out those that had a diameter between ten and fifteen millimeters.[o] A slightly concave piece of glass was coated with a mixture of crude pine sap and beeswax and, a "...mosaic of microscopic grains of potato starch" is laid on the glass plate with the space between the grains filled in by spreading the plate with charcoal powder. Lastly a panchromatic silver halide emulsion is applied. As mentioned above the potato starch grains are dyed red, green and blue-violet and act as the color filters. To get a sense of the size of the grain, it took approximately four million grains to coat one square inch of the plate. In order to improve the quality of the final image, a roller with a pressure of 5 tons per square centimeter was used to flatten and evenly spread the grains out. --- Photographic Process After careful composition, the photographer placed a yellow-orange screen on the lens; loaded the Autochrome plate into the camera with the glass side toward the lens. By placing the plate in this manner, light is filtered through the filter screen which is comprised of all those dyed potato starches, to the panchromatic emulsion. Due to the slowness of the Autochrome emulsion, the photographer needed a tripod and was restricted to shooting out of doors on sunny days. Flash powder was also used by photographers to shorten their exposure times but this, like much of the Autochrome taking process took some experimenting. Once exposed, the photographer processed the plate as a slide. This complex, multi-step process involves first developing the plate to a negative image and then back to a positive image. Once the Autochrome is fully processed, the photographer could place the plate in a Diascope viewer which would allow transmitted light to reveal the image and to also protect the image from extended periods of time exposed to the light. Otherwise, the only other ways to view the image was by holding it up to the light or projecting it. The result of the photographer's endeavor was a luminous, dream like quality that had not been seen before in photography prior to the advent of the Autochrome.— The Rhode Island Historical Society

Camera Notes

Camera Notes was the most significant American photographic periodical of its time. Published quarterly by the Camera Club of New York and edited by Alfred Stieglitz, the fountainhead of American art photography, it represented a critical phase in the campaign to legitimize the photo image as an artistic pursuit. Throughout most of its short, six-year life the publication included thoughtful articles on photography as fine art, as well as hundreds of halftone images and, most importantly, nearly 100 stunning, high-quality photogravures. Printed largely by New York's Photochrome Engraving Company, where Stieglitz himself had previously worked, the gravures are strong in tone, unlike the delicate printing style popularized by P. H. Emerson in England. While Stieglitz drew heavily from work by members of the camera club (including himself), he also featured images by other Americans, like F. Holland Day and Clarence H. White, and Europeans such as J. Craig Annan and Robert Demachy. Many of the images in Camera Notes also appeared later in Camera Work. - Photogravure.com (Links to an external site.)

Camera Work

Camera Work 1903-1917 2003 marks the centenary of the launch of the journal Camera Work. Created by the legendary American photographer Alfred Stieglitz, its aims were to promote and support the work of the newly formed American Photo-Secession movement of art photographers. Camera Work, a quarterly publication, was initially the vehicle for advancing the cause of Pictorialism and pictorialist photographers in America. By 1910 Camera Work had moved away from an exclusive focus on photographic art to become the most important journal in America for the introduction of French Impressionist art. The last issues, which appeared in 1917, saw a return to photography but, rather than the older-style soft-focus Pictorialism, the journal at this time promoted a new form of hard-edged modernism featuring the work of Paul Strand. Across its 50 issues, Camera Work would become the most important American art journal of the first half of the 20th century. Unlike many earlier photographic journals, Camera Work was the first photographic journal to emphasise visual and intellectual content rather than just providing technical advice. It was illustrated with hand-pulled, photogravure illustrations of the very highest quality. Stieglitz himself was one of the foremost exponents of photogravure in America and considered it to be the perfect vehicle for bringing together images and text and disseminating photography to a wider audience. The gravures of Camera Work, which were printed on Japanese tissue to preserve the maximum tonal quality, are among the finest examples of this art form. The unbound plates are frequently sold as individual, original art works. Throughout its life Camera Work functioned on many levels. It began as the vehicle for the very best Pictorialist work. It provided aesthetic commentary from the foremost critics of the day in the fields of photography, painting, sculpture and literature while serving as a catalogue and review for exhibitions at Stieglitz's gallery, 291. Perhaps more importantly, as the former Curator of the Royal Photographic Society in England, Pam Roberts observed, 'Camera Work served as an autobiography of the creative life of one man, its creator, editor, financier and inspiration, Alfred Stieglitz'. A complete set of this rare and important journal was acquired in 1976. Through its combined holdings of rare photographic art in the permanent collection and books, journals and ephemera in the Gallery's Research Library, the National Gallery of Australia provides an unmatched resource in this country for the study of both the history of photography as an art and photographically illustrated publications.

Gabriel Lippman p144-45

Gabriel Lippmann received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1908 for his method of reproducing colors photographically based on the phenomenon of interference. --- In 1891 Lippmann revealed a revolutionary color-photography process, later called the Lippmann process, that utilized the natural colours of light wavelengths instead of using dyes and pigments. He placed a reflecting coat of mercury behind the emulsion of a panchromatic plate. The mercury reflected light rays back through the emulsion to interfere with the incident rays, forming a latent image that varied in depth according to each ray's colour. The development process then reproduced this image, and the result, when viewed, was brilliantly accurate. This direct method of colour photography was slow and tedious because of necessarily long exposure times, and no copies of the original could be made. It never achieved popularity, therefore, but it was an important step in the development of colour photography. Lippmann's colour photographic technique was based on interference, the combining of different light waves arriving simultaneously at the same point - the same phenomenon that causes colour to appear in colourless substances such as soap bubbles. To receive the image, Lippmann used a glass plate coated on one side with light-sensitive emulsion, a mixture of gelatin, grains of silver nitrate, and potassium bromide. In the camera, the emulsion side of the plate faced a plate holder coated with mercury, which acted as a mirror. When the camera lens was opened, light was reflected from the objects in the lens's field of view through the lens to the emulsion-coated plate and through the plate to the mirror; the various wavelengths of this light corresponded to the various colours of the objects in the field of view. The incoming light was then reflected back into the emulsion by the mirror. When the incoming light waves and the light waves reflected by the mirror met on the surface of the emulsion, they created interference patterns in the silver grains of the emulsion. These patterns were then fixed on the plate by chemical baths. When the plate dried, the interference patterns reflected light in various wavelengths corresponding to the original colours of the photographic objects. Lippmann's process was an important experimental milestone although it proved impractical in photography because exposure times were too lengthy, the image had to be viewed at a precise angle to a light source, and it could not be reproduced.—Lippmann, Gabriel. (2007), in Encyclopedia Britannica.

Heinrich Kühn p.155, 159

German photographer, writer and scientist. His first use of photography was his microphotography in medical research in histology and bacteriology at the Robert-Koch-Institut, Berlin. His asthmatic condition led him to abandon his job as a doctor and to move to Innsbruck, where he devoted himself to photography, supported by family wealth. His first influences were from the Vienna Secession and from the Linked ring, which he joined in 1896, encouraging him to take part in the international exhibition of art photography in Vienna in 1891. He was strongly affected too by his meeting with Hans Watzek at the Wiener Camera-Klub in 1894. Watzek, Hugo Henneberg and Kühn worked together from 1896 on the multiple-gum printing technique to attain the broadest possible range of tonal values. They exhibited frequently together from 1897 to 1903 as Das Kleeblatt (or Trifolium), publishing numerous articles on the techniques of artistic representation with which they made a case for photography as a fine art. Kühn's importance as an art photographer lies in his work of c. 1900, but he is most renowned for his lifelong investigation of the effect of optical and chemical influence on the reproduction of brightness values. He was also in contact with the photographers of the Photo-Secession, meeting Steichen (1901 and 1907) and Alfred Stieglitz (1904 and 1907), with whom he corresponded from 1899 until 1933. Stieglitz published Kühn's photographs in Camera Work, 13 (1906) and 33 (1911). From 1906, when he established a portrait studio in Innsbruck, Kuehn carried out experiments in color photography with autochrome plates. He closed his studio in 1919 and from 1920 concentrated on writing and editing for specialist journals such as Das Atelier des Photographen and Photographische Rundschau. His photographic practice during the 1920s was limited to the documentation of his scientific and technical experiments. Among the equipment that Kühn developed were a movable-back camera, a soft-focus lens, which was commercially sold as Imagon in 1931, and a double-exposure film

Photo-Secession

Group of mainly American Pictorialist photographers founded by Alfred Stieglitz in New York in 1902, with the aim of advancing photography as a fine art. Stieglitz, who chose the organization's name partly to reflect the Modernism of European artistic Secession movements, remained its guiding spirit. Other leading members included Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen and Clarence H. White. The Secession also exhibited and published work by Europeans, for example Robert Demachy, Frederick H. Evans, Heinrich Kühn and Baron Adolf de Meyer, who shared the Americans' attitude that photography was a valid medium of artistic expression. All participants placed great emphasis on fine photographic printing. Their gum bichromate or platinum prints often emulated paint, pastel or other media, particularly in their use of soft focus, emphasis on composition and texture, and adoption of traditional academic subject-matter; in addition graphic signatures or monograms were often used. The Secession's shifting aesthetic concerns are well documented in the elegant magazine Camera Work, which Stieglitz edited (1903-17). From 1905 exhibitions were held regularly in New York at The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, 291 Fifth Avenue, later known as 291. In order to define photography's position among the arts, it was felt appropriate to exhibit contemporary American and European non-photographic works, and from 1908 there were more exhibitions of paintings than of photographs. After the Secession's last major photographic exhibition in 1910 at the Albright Art Gallery (now Albright-Knox Gallery) in Buffalo, NY, many disaffected Pictorialist photographers left the group, and it disbanded unofficially, although 291 remained open until 1917.— Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press

Frederic Eugene Ives p143

Pho`to•chro'mo•scope noun [ Photo- + Greek ... color + -scope .] 1. A device for giving shifting effects of color to a photograph. The unmounted print, made translucent, is illuminated from behind with colored light. 2. A combination of three optical lanterns for projecting objects on a screen in the colors of nature. The images of three partial photographs taken through color screens (red, green, and blue, respectively) are superimposed. Each image is given its own primary color, and these colors blend and reproduce the colors of the object. Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary "The Kromskop is an optical instrument which accomplishes for light and color what the Phonograph accomplishes for sound and the Kinetoscope for motion... The Kromskop photograph is... although not a color photograph, a color record, just as the cylinder of the phonograph, although not a cylinder of sound, contains a record of sounds, and the kinetoscope ribbon, although not an animated photograph, contains a record of motion. The phonograph cylinder must be placed in the phonograph before it can be made to reproduce the sounds recorded; the kinetoscope ribbon must pass through the kinetoscope in order to visually reproduce the moving scene; and the Kromogram must be placed in the Kromskop in order to visually reproduce the object photographed."—Frederic Ives, Kromskop Color Photography (1898) Frederick Ives's commercially produced 'Kromograms' of 1895 were the first colour photographs available to the public, and had to be viewed through coloured filters using his 'Kromskop'. They employ the three-colour principle demonstrated by Clerk Maxwell in 1861. Three stereoscopic b/w images each 50 x 50 mm on glass making one stereoscopic colour image. Viewer for stereoscopic colour-separation transparencies. The separations are laid on the stepped part of the viewer over glass filters coloured (from the top) red, blue and green. Strongly lit from above by the hinged mirror reflector at the rear, the three images are superimposed and redirected to the viewing lenses by internal reflectors. After manual adjustment to achieve correct register, the photograph can be viewed in true colours in three dimensions. Developed during the years 1890-95 by the American inventor Frederick Eugene Ives, the photochromoscope system was the first commercially available process of colour photography, employing the additive principle demonstrated by Clerk Maxwell in 1861. Ives's invented a number of practical colour processes but his photochromoscope gave the public its first experience of real colour photography, and stimulated the quest for more easily used processes. The photochromoscope was superseded by these after about 1900. In London, the Kromscop company, the Photochromoscope Syndicate, appointed W. Watson and Sons as their agent with the London Stereoscopic Company having the franchise for the West End.

photochromoscope

Pho`to•chro'mo•scope noun [ Photo- + Greek ... color + -scope .] 1. A device for giving shifting effects of color to a photograph. The unmounted print, made translucent, is illuminated from behind with colored light. 2. A combination of three optical lanterns for projecting objects on a screen in the colors of nature. The images of three partial photographs taken through color screens (red, green, and blue, respectively) are superimposed. Each image is given its own primary color, and these colors blend and reproduce the colors of the object.—Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary "Viewer for stereoscopic color-separation transparencies. The separations are laid on the stepped part of the viewer over glass filters colored (from the top) red, blue and green. Strongly lit from above by the hinged mirror reflector at the rear, the three images are superimposed and redirected to the viewing lenses by internal reflectors. After manual adjustment to achieve correct register, the photograph can be viewed in true colors in three dimensions. Developed during the years 1890-95 by the American inventor Frederick Eugene Ives, the photochromoscope system was the first commercially available process of color photography, employing the additive principle demonstrated by Clerk Maxwell in 1861. Ives's invented a number of practical color processes but his photochromoscope gave the public its first experience of real color photography, and stimulated the quest for more easily used processes. The photochromoscope was superseded by these after about 1900."—from the Museum of the History of Science, London.

gelatin emulsion

Photographic process in which gelatin is used as the dispersing vehicle for the light-sensitive silver salts. The process, introduced in about 1880, superseded the wet collodion process, in which a wet negative was produced from a nitrocellulose (collodion) solution applied to a glass plate immediately prior to exposure. This chemical treatment necessitated the presence of a darkroom wherever a photograph was to be made. The development of a process in which a sensitized gelatin emulsion could be dried on the plate and stored, protected from light, for months before use revolutionized the world of photography. Gelatin dry plates were commercially produced and came ready to use. The photographer did not have to treat the glass; just expose it to light and develop it. The gelatin emulsion would remain sensitive to light even when dry, greatly improving the process for photographers. Because the plates were manufactured, the edges of the glass were smooth, the emulsion was even, and the sizes were more regular. The silver nitrates were evenly distributed in the gelatin emulsion and were more sensitive to light, producing a negative with sharper contrasts than the collodion wet plates.—from Britannica Online.

sensitometry

Photography is part art and part science. The science part is called sensitometry. Sensitometry is the science of measuring the sensitivity of photographic materials. ...When you take a picture with your camera, the shutter opens and lets light strike the film. The film has then been exposed to light. When the film is developed, the areas where it has been exposed by the light will turn dark. The more light that struck the film, the darker that area will be when it is developed. What is needed is a way of measuring how much light and how much development it takes to darken the film a certain amount. In other words, we need to be able to assign numerical values to the amount of light, amount of development, and degree of darkening and then determine what the relationship is between them. The name of this method is sensitometry. Sensitometry tells us how sensitive the film is to light, and how development affects the exposed film. —from Basic Photographic Sensitometry Workbook KODAK Publication No. H-740.

Alfred Stieglitz p.157-8

Stieglitz was considered the driving force of modern photography because of his quest to see the medium recognized as an art form. He began as a Pictorialist championing self expression. In his own work he did however prefer the harder look of the photographic print to the softer painterly surfaces evoked by printing methods such as the gum bichromate method. He is know for introducing and showing the work of many early 20th century artists (not just photographers) in his publications and galleries. --- "Let me here call attention to one of the most universally popular mistakes that have to do with photography - that of classing supposedly excellent work as professional, and using the term amateur to convey the idea of immature productions and to excuse atrociously poor photographs. As a matter of fact nearly all the greatest work is being, and has always been done, by those who are following photography for the love of it, and not merely for financial reasons. As the name implies, an amateur is one who works for love; and viewed in this light the incorrectness of the popular classification is readily apparent." — Alfred Stieglitz, in 1899. "The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art; but granted that it is an art, reliance should be placed unreservedly upon those possibilities, that they may be made to yield the fullest results." — Alfred Stieglitz, 1901, (about the Romantic-Impressionist school of photography.) Stieglitz&#39s ambition was to reinvent photography as a high art. To do so meant establishing value for the medium. He would (continue to) do this through the publication Camera Work which was begun as the journal of the Photo-Secessionists. The first publication of Camera Work was in 1903 and in it Stieglitz stated, "Only examples of such work as gives evidence of individuality and artistic worth, regardless of school, or contains some exceptional feature of technical merit, or such as exemplifies some treatment worthy of consideration, will find recognition in these pages." During its reign, Stieglitz showcased not only photography, but work from the other arts as well. The central object within its pages though, was the photograph. The signature of Camera Work was craftsmanship. It is that which separated its content, and of course that of the contributors, from other publications and printing of its day. The reproductions within were photogravures, tipped in by Stieglitz himself. The images were printed on tissue paper, usually toned and sandwiched between two heavier sheets of paper, one of which was used as a backing for viewing the print. Any text that accompanied the images was presented on a separate page. By continuously presenting the photographic image in this form Stieglitz placed emphases on the photographs in Camera Work as unique objects; as finely crafted photographic reproductions. This was in opposition to publications using the halftone process to reproduce work cheaply, rapidly, and in greater quantity. It stood out from the masses. Camera Work remained in publication until 1917.

stream of consciousness

Stream of consciousness is the continuous flow of sense‐perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories in the human mind; or a literary method of representing such a blending of mental processes in fictional characters, usually in an unpunctuated or disjointed form of interior monologue. The term is often used as a synonym for interior monologue, but they can also be distinguished, in two ways. In the first (psychological) sense, the stream of consciousness is the subject‐matter while interior monologue is the technique for presenting it; thus Marcel Proust's novel A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27) is about the stream of consciousness, especially the connection between sense‐impressions and memory, but it does not actually use interior monologue. In the second (literary) sense, stream of consciousness is a special style of interior monologue: while an interior monologue always presents a character's thoughts 'directly', without the apparent intervention of a summarizing and selecting narrator, it does not necessarily mingle them with impressions and perceptions, nor does it necessarily violate the norms of grammar, syntax, and logic; but the stream‐of‐consciousness technique also does one or both of these things. An important device of modernist fiction and its later imitators, the technique was pioneered by Dorothy Richardson in Pilgrimage (1915-35) and by James Joyce in Ulysses (1922), and further developed by Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway (1925) and William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury (1928).— Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

secession movement p.150-2

Term applied to a group of artists who secede from academic bodies or associations in protest at their constraints. The term comes from the Latin secessio plebis, the revolt of the plebeians against the patricians. The Secessions in German-speaking Europe in the late 19th century developed out of the political and literary movement of the 1870s, Die Jungen, which had broken away from the rigidity of historicism (typified by the Ringstrasse style in Vienna), an eclectic synthesis of styles, and sought a modern style for modern living. The three main Secessions were those of Munich, Berlin and Vienna, although others were formed in Dresden, Karlsruhe, Düsseldorf, Leipzig and Weimar. Secessions also took place in other parts of Europe, including Rome (La Secessione, 1913) and Budapest (Szecesszió, 1896-1914), and, under different names, elsewhere, for example in Prague (Mánes Union of Artists, 1895) and Kraków (Sztuka Polish Artists Society). At issue in all areas was control over exhibiting policies and the art market. An underlying problem was the tension between the élite, successful artists and the increasingly large numbers of mediocre and impoverished artists. This tension was exacerbated by experimentation in styles heralded by the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and adopted by some though by no means all of the Secessionists. — Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press

Cinématographe invented by Jules Carpentierp142

The first public presentation of the Lumière Cinématographe was given in Paris on Saturday 28 December 1895. The Lumière brothers rented a basement room at the Grande Cafe, 14 Boulevarddes Capuchines. The earliest cameras used circular perforations at the sides of each frame. The later cameras used standard 35mm film. The Cinématographe served as camera and projector.

focal plane shutter

The focal-plane shutter is a curtain cloth containing a slit placed directly in front of the film. It is called focal plane because it operates close to the focal plane of the lens which is where the film is. It is carried on a roller and winds across the film onto a second roller. When the shutter is released the opening travels across the film. Cocking the shutter brings the curtain back across to the starting position again.

persistence-of-vision

The persistence of vision theory as stated by Joseph Plateau is as follows... If several objects, progressively different in form and position, are presented to the eye for very short intervals and sufficiently close together, the impressions they make upon the retina will join together without being confused, and one will believe he is seeing a single object gradually changing form and position.—Joseph A. Plateau, as quoted in Georges Sadoul, Histoire generale du Cinema, Vol. 1, p. 25 Robert Hirsch states in Seizing the Light that "since an image impression lingers for a fraction of a second, individual images appear to be in continuous motion, as in a flip-book. Devices like this and the zoetrope, a rotating cylinder with slits, through which one or more people could see sequential, simulated action drawings of acrobats, boxers, dancers, and jugglers, permitted an immobile viewer to have a machine generated visual experience unfold over time." (p.8)

Louis Ducos du Hauron & Charles Cros

These two individually separately developed the subtractive color process in 1867. They combined dyed images instead of mixing colored lights. Their method was to expose separate black and white negatives through color filters of violet, green and orange-red. They used the secondary colors for pigments rather than the subtractive primaries from light. They then created positives from the negatives which contained carbon pigments of blue, red and yellow. The three positives were assembled in register to create the final print. Typical daylight exposures for the filtered negatives were from 1 to 2 seconds with the violet filter, 2 to 3 minutes with the green filter, and 25 to 30 minutes with the red filter.

symbolism

The symbolic use of objects to express underlying ideas and emotions came to fascinate certain artists towards the end of the 19th century. Reacting against the growing materialism of the age, and specifically the artistic dominance of Impressionism and realism, they aimed to reconcile matter and spirit through a language of signs and hidden meanings; an esoteric art where the significance of a work implied more than the sum of its apparent parts, revealing its full meanings only to initiates in the loose, unofficial 'brotherhood' of the Symbolists' self-defined dream world. Burne-Jones spoke of a beautiful land which 'no-one can define or remember, only desire'. This became one aspect of Symbolism; the other, closely allied to the general extravagances of fin de siècle culture, was a land of decadent orgies and mysterious fears. The poet Jean Moréas (1856-1910) published a Symbolist manifesto in 1886, declaring that the artist must 'clothe the idea in sensuous form', a conception leading many painters to explore the mystical and the occult. The most extreme manifestations of this quest appeared at the Rose + Croix Salons, established by the flamboyant Joséphin Péladan in 1892.— The Oxford Companion to Western Art, Oxford University Press

symbolism p148

The symbolic use of objects to express underlying ideas and emotions came to fascinate certain artists towards the end of the 19th century. Reacting against the growing materialism of the age, and specifically the artistic dominance of Impressionism and realism, they aimed to reconcile matter and spirit through a language of signs and hidden meanings; an esoteric art where the significance of a work implied more than the sum of its apparent parts, revealing its full meanings only to initiates in the loose, unofficial 'brotherhood' of the Symbolists' self-defined dream world. Burne-Jones spoke of a beautiful land which 'no-one can define or remember, only desire'. This became one aspect of Symbolism; the other, closely allied to the general extravagances of fin de siècle culture, was a land of decadent orgies and mysterious fears. The poet Jean Moréas (1856-1910) published a Symbolist manifesto in 1886, declaring that the artist must 'clothe the idea in sensuous form', a conception leading many painters to explore the mystical and the occult. The most extreme manifestations of this quest appeared at the Rose + Croix Salons, established by the flamboyant Joséphin Péladan in 1892.— The Oxford Companion to Western Art, Oxford University Press

zoetrope

The zoetrope was an open drum with slits on the side for viewing images as they spun by. When viewed through the slits the images appear like a single figure in motion. The model pictured below, from 1867 has 13 slits. Depending on which historian you read, credit is given to several different people for this invention, Antoine F. J. Claudet or William Horner.

Auguste and Louis Lumière p142

With their first Cinématographe show in the basement of the Grand Café in the boulevard des Capucines in Paris on 28 December 1895, the Lumière brothers have been regarded as the inventors of cinema - the projection of moving photographic pictures on a screen for a paying audience. However, they were probably not the first to do this: the Latham brothers in New York were screening boxing films to paying audiences from 20 May 1895, using their Eidoloscope projector. Nevertheless, the achievement of the Lumières was considerable. Their Cinématographe was the first satisfactory apparatus for taking and projecting films and its claw mechanism became the basis for most ciné cameras. --- Auguste and Louis were born in Lyon where their father, Antoine Lumière, had a photographic business. At the age of seventeen, Louis invented a highly sensitive photographic plate which the Lumières began manufacturing. It was so successful commercially that the Lumières built a factory in the Monplaisir suburb of Lyon. By 1894, they were employing three hundred people. Late that year, Antoine saw an example of Edison's peep-show Kinetoscope in Paris and encouraged his sons to devise an apparatus that would take and project moving pictures. Within a few months, they produced a successful prototype of the Cinématographe, which was not only a camera but a printer and projector as well. It was patented in France on 13 February 1895. Compared with other attempts at producing a movie camera, the Cinématographe was remarkably compact and, unlike the Edison Kinetograph, it did not rely on electrical power, which few premises had at that time. Thus the Cinématographe could be taken anywhere, either to shoot film or to use as a projector - all that was required was a magic lantern lamphouse with a gas or limelight illuminant. At the heart of the Cinématographe was the film transport mechanism, whereby two pins or 'claws' were inserted into sprocket holes at each side of the film, moved it down and were then retracted, leaving the film stationary for exposure. This intermittent movement was designed by Louis and based on the principle of the sewing machine mechanism. The handle at the rear of the Cinématographe operated the rotating shutter and the take-up magazine as well as the film transport mechanism. The Lumières' first film (in fact, they made three versions) was shot outside their factory as the workers left at the end of the day. It was shown to the Société d'Encouragement à l'Industrie Nationale in Paris on 22 March 1895: this was probably the first public screening of moving pictures. The Lathams' first public demonstration in New York took place on 21 April 1895. At the Paris meeting, Louis met the engineer Jules Charpentier who undertook to manufacture the Cinématographe for the Lumières. --- Later that year, the Lumières made a number of other films, all around a minute long, showing scenes such as Auguste and his wife feeding their baby, a train arriving at La Ciotât in the south of France and possibly the first film comedy, L'arroseur arrosé, in which a mischievous boy tricks a gardener into being soaked with water and is chased and spanked. Another public demonstration of the Cinématographe was given to the French Photographic Congress held in Lyon in June 1895, when the delegates were particularly impressed at seeing film of themselves taken the previous day. The Lumières decided to launch the Cinématographe publicly in Paris on 28 December 1895. The programme, lasting about twenty minutes, comprised ten films and cost one franc. On their first day they had just thirty-three customers. But soon, word spread and the Lumières were taking over 2,000 francs each day. They decided not only to sell Cinématographes but to send out operators to film and present shows in Britain, the USA and Russia. In the first years of the Lumière film operation, cameramen were sent all over the world to record scenes in Russia, Japan, the Holy Land. Auguste and Louis continued to work on technical developments and in 1900 devised a camera which took large-format 75mm films. By 1905, however, the Lumières withdrew from the cinema business. They worked instead on inventing the first successful photographic colour process - the Lumière Autochrome - in 1907. Louis also worked on a process of stereoscopic cinematography. The two brothers lived long enough to be feted as pioneers of the cinema - as Louis stated, 'on December 28, 1895, was really born the expression: "I have been to a movie."'

The Arts and Crafts Movement p.155, 158

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/acam/hd_acam.htm --- The Arts and Crafts movement emerged during the late Victorian period in England, the most industrialized country in the world at that time. Anxieties about industrial life fueled a positive revaluation of handcraftsmanship and precapitalist forms of culture and society. Arts and Crafts designers sought to improve standards of decorative design, believed to have been debased by mechanization, and to create environments in which beautiful and fine workmanship governed. The Arts and Crafts movement did not promote a particular style, but it did advocate reform as part of its philosophy and instigated a critique of industrial labor; as modern machines replaced workers, Arts and Crafts proponents called for an end to the division of labor and advanced the designer as craftsman.

Barbizon School p.150

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/bfpn/hd_bfpn.htm --- *softened brushwork created atmospheric effects *images relied on post-camera techniques

Japonism p156

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/jpon/hd_jpon.htm --- After Japanese ports reopened to trade with the West in 1853, a tidal wave of foreign imports flooded European shores. On the crest of that wave were woodcut prints by masters of the ukiyo-e school which transformed Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art by demonstrating that simple, transitory, everyday subjects from "the floating world" could be presented in appealingly decorative ways. ---- *major influence to Pictorialism *Western artists incorporated Japanese influences of clear, vibrant colors, forceful outline, foreshortened and aerial perspectives, and asymmetrical and cropped compositions

The Oil Pigment Process p.156

http://www.unblinkingeye.com/AAPG/OP/op.html --- by Ed Buffaloe Oil pigment printing, sometimes referred to as the Rawlins oil process, is the predecessor of bromoil. Oil pigment print by Ed BuffaloeOriginally conceived and practiced by Alphonse Louis Poitevin in the mid-1850's, using a roller to spread the ink, G.E.H. Rawlins introduced the use of a brush for selective application of ink in 1904. The oil pigment process works on the same principle as lithographic printing--oil and water don't mix. Essentially, a gelatin-sized paper is coated with a bichromate solution, dried, and exposed through a negative. The gelatine is selectively hardened where the light hits the paper. After the paper is washed and dried, it is soaked in water. The gelatine swells, except in those areas where it has become hardened. Thick oil-based printing ink is applied to the paper and sticks to the areas with hardened gelatine, but the water-swollen areas of the paper repel the ink. The paper with selectively hardened gelatine is known as a matrix. The primary difference between an oil print and a bromoil is that the oil print requires an enlarged negative, whereas the bromoil starts with an enlarged print. In the bromoil process, the enlarged print is bleached with a copper sulfate/dichromate solution and the gelatine is hardened selectively wherever the silver was present. It was Howard Farmer (of Farmer's Reducer fame) who discovered, in 1889, that dichromate will selectively harden the gelatin of a silver print when the silver is reduced. Then, in 1907, E.J. Wall wrote a brief article suggesting that this property of dichromate might be used to make oil prints from bromide prints, and later that same year C. Welborne Piper published details of the process....