quiz 4 - mods 6 + 7

Charles Baudelaire

"A mad-ness, an extraordinary fanaticism took possession of all these new sun-worshippers."—Baudelaire Charles Baudelaire, father of modern art criticism, was deeply ambivalent about modernity. Some of his concerns about the creative situation for the artist in a mechanically progressive age are displayed in this commentary on photography from the Salon review of 1859, the year most Baudelaire scholars consider his most brilliant and productive. In the twelve years between the 1846 review and this one, the poet's contempt for the values of the middle-class establishment and the charles_baudelaire02.jpgegalitarian "mob" had deepened. After a brief, disillusioning engagement at the barricades in 1848, the 1851 Bonapartist coup d'état, and the coronation of Napoleon III the next year, whatever hope he might have held for the politics of his era vanished. His alienated modernism gained further assurance in early 1852 from his discovery of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), the American poète maudit whose vision Baudelaire recognized as his own. Poe's influence can be detected in the 1857 Flowers of Evil, a collection of poems that was immediately banned by the censors of Napoleon III. After a famous trial, six of the poems were judged an offense against public morality, and Baudelaire's break with establishment culture was complete. In 1846 Baudelaire had declared his admiration for the beauty of modern dress and manners and sought the painter who would capture it. In 1860 he expanded on these views in an article published in 1863, The Painter of Modern Life. Yet this 1859 commentary on photography, despite the absolute modernity of the medium, expresses scorn for its ubiquity and overwhelming popularity. Apparently putting aside his search for the artist who will represent modern life and his close ties to realists Courbet, Manet, Daumier, and the photographer Nadar, Baudelaire here asserts that "It is useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me.... I prefer the monsters of my fantasy to what is positively trivial." Baudelaire's poem, Correspondences (c.1852-6) likewise reduces the Realist aesthetic to irrelevance. Nature becomes an immaterial "forest of symbols," a poet's dictionary of subjective associations, metaphorical forms rather than concrete phenomena. The anti-materialist perspective of Correspondences and this commentary on photography will have a formative influence on Symbolist poets and artists in the decades after Baudelaire's death. Its cultural prestige will reach far into the 20th century to give critical support to nearly every modernist movement from Fauvism and Cubism through Abstract Expressionism. As you read, note the reasons Baudelaire gives for his attitude toward photography. What does he think of its many admirers, especially the painters? Is he still addressing the bourgeois viewer as he did in the 1845-6 Salon reviews? Who is his intended audience? How do Baudelaire's observations about the social value of photography compare with the hopes W.H.F. Talbot expresses in the 1841 Pencil of Nature and Walter Benjamin's views in the 1936 "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"! -Dr. Elaine O'Brien, California State University Baudelaire's Salon of 1859 was first published in the Révue Française, Paris, June 10-July 20, 1859. This selection is from Charles Baudelaire, The Mirror of Art. Jonathan Mayne editor and translator. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1955. [...] During this lamentable period, a new industry arose which contributed not a little to confirm stupidity in its faith and to ruin whatever might remain of the divine in the French mind. The idolatrous mob demanded an ideal worthy of itself and appropriate to its nature - that is perfectly understood. In matters of painting and sculpture, the present-day Credo of the sophisticated, above all in France (and I do not think that anyone at all would dare to state the contrary), is this: "I believe in Nature, and I believe only in Nature (there are good reasons for that). I believe that Art is, and cannot be other than, the exact reproduction of Nature (a timid and dissident sect would wish to exclude the more repellent objects of nature, such as skeletons or chamber-pots.) Thus an industry that could give us a result identical to Nature would be the absolute of Art." A revengeful God has given ear to the prayers of this multitude. Daguerre was his Messiah. And now the faithful says to himself: "Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools!), then photography and Art are the same thing:' From that moment our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze at its trivial image on a scrap of metal. A madness, an extraordinary fanaticism took possession of all these new sun-worshippers. Strange abominations took form. By bringing together a group of male and female clowns, got up like butchers and laundry-maids in a carnival, and by begging these heroes to be so kind as to hold their chance grimaces for the time necessary for the performance, the operator flattered himself that he was reproducing tragic or elegant scenes from ancient history. Some democratic writer ought to have seen here a cheap method of disseminating a loathing for history and for painting among the people, thus committing a double sacrilege and insulting at one and the same time the divine art of painting and the noble art of the actor. A little later a thousand hungry eyes were bending over the peepholes of the stereoscope, as though they were the attic-windows of the infinite. The love of pornography, which is no less deep-rooted in the natural heart of man than the love of himself, was not to let slip so fine an opportunity of self-satisfaction. And do not imagine that it was only children on their way back from school who took pleasure in these follies; the world was infatuated with them. I was once present when some friends were discretely concealing some such pictures from a beautiful woman, a woman of high society, not of mine—they were taking upon themselves some feeling of delicacy in her presence; but "No," she replied. "Give them to me! Nothing is too strong for me." I swear that I heard that; but who will believe me? "You can see that they are great ladies," said Alexandre Dumas. "There are some still greater!" said Cazotte. image006_02.jpgAs the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. I do not believe, or at least I do not wish to believe, in the absolute success of such a brutish conspiracy, in which, as in all others, one finds both fools and knaves; but I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce. In vain may our modern Fatuity roar, belch forth all the rumbling wind of its rotund stomach, spew out all the undigested sophisms with which recent philosophy has stuffed it from top to bottom; it is nonetheless obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy, and that the confusion of their several functions prevents any of them from being properly fulfilled. Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place. If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally. It is time, then, for it to return to its true duty, which is to be the servant of the sciences and arts— but the very humble servant, like printing or shorthand, which have neither created nor supplemented literature. Let it hasten to enrich the tourist's album and restore to his eye the precision which his memory may lack; let it adorn the naturalist's library, and enlarge microscopic animals; let it even provide information to corroborate the astronomer's hypotheses; in short, let it be the secretary and clerk of whoever needs an absolute factual exactitude in his profession—up to that point nothing could be better. Let it rescue from oblivion those tumbling ruins, those books, prints and manuscripts which time is devouring, precious things whose form is dissolving and which demand a place in the archives of our memory—— it will be thanked and applauded. But if it be allowed to encroach upon the domain of the impalpable and the imaginary, upon anything whose value depends solely upon the addition of something of a man's soul, then it will be so much the worse for us! I know very well that some people will retort, "The disease which you have just been diagnosing is a disease of imbeciles. What man worthy of the name of artist, and what true connoisseur, has ever confused art with industry?" I know it; and yet I will ask them in my turn if they believe in the contagion of good and evil, in the action of the mass on individuals, and in the involuntary, forced obedience of the individual to the mass. It is an incontestable, an irresistible law that the artist should act upon the public, and that the public should react upon the artist; and besides, those terrible witnesses, the facts, are easy to study; the disaster is verifiable. Each day art further diminishes its self-respect by bowing down before external reality; each day the painter becomes more and more given to painting not what he dreams but what he sees. Nevertheless it is a happiness to dream, and it used to be a glory to express what one dreamt. But I ask you! does the painter still know this happiness? Could you find an honest observer to declare that the invasion of photography and the great industrial madness of our times have no part at all in this deplorable result? Are we to suppose that a people whose eyes are growing used to considering the results of a material science as though they were the products of the beautiful, will not in the course of time have singularly diminished its faculties of judging and of feeling what are among the most ethereal and immaterial aspects of creation?

Oscar Gustave Rejlander

"I am tired of photography-for-the-public, particularly composite photographs, for there can be no gain and there is no honour, only cavil and misrepresentation."—Oscar Rejlander in 1859. Swedish photographer and painter active in England. After training in painting and lithography he began photographing in 1853 using the wet collodion negative process and albumen prints. Rejlander's interest was directed toward the artistic potential of photography, and he is known as the 'father of art photography'. He believed that lessons were to be learnt from the great masters of the fine arts. However, he did not copy paintings but sought to produce photographic equivalents. His models varied according to the type of photograph he was creating. For 'high art' photographs and some figural studies, he took inspiration from Italian High Renaissance art; for genre photographs, he used sources in Dutch and Flemish genre painting, English narrative painting and also popular imagery, such as cartoons in Punch. While other photographers also borrowed from art of the past, Rejlander appears to have studied a broader range of potential sources than most of his contemporaries. Rejlander produced very few allegorical photographs and most of these were made in the late 1850s when he was beginning his photographic career. His most famous work of this type, The Two Ways of LifeView in a new window, is a large (460×770 mm) image made from 30 negatives and based compositionally on Raphael's School of AthensView in a new window (1509-11; Rome, Vatican, Stanza della Segnatura). The process that he used to produce this combination print involved masking the sensitized paper and printing each negative in turn in the correct position. Through numerous figures, it illustrates the right and wrong choices one can make in life and their consequences. He made the photograph explicitly as a competition piece to be exhibited in the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester in 1857. Before it went on public display the photograph was praised by fellow photographers for its artistry, but at the exhibition it was roundly criticized for impropriety (nude figures) and pretentiousness in attempting to rival painting; it was, however, purchased by Queen Victoria. Rejlander's genre photography was much more extensive and much more popular in his lifetime than his allegorical work. Critics admired his ability to identify the essential sentiment of a scene and to capture expressions critical to the telling of the story. He drew his genre incidents from life but always arranged the compositions in his studio. One of his best-known photographs of this type, still in use today by the Shaftesbury Society, is Night in TownView in a new window or Poor Jo (c. 1860,) which shows a pathetic, homeless street urchin sleeping huddled in a doorway. Rejlander also made portraits and a few landscapes. He preferred, however, to make studies of the figure and of human expression, although these efforts were always criticized for being incomplete. In his studies of expression he was strongly influenced by contemporary research on physiognomy. He was commissioned by Darwin to make around twenty illustrations for The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals (London, 1872). Rejlander's reputation vacillated in direct relation to the heated debate on whether photography was an art form. By his death, however, his major role in promoting photography as a fine art was generally acknowledged. His photographs and his theory of art photography had both immediate and extended influence. During his lifetime his photographs stimulated the development of two trends—genre and pictorial studies. Although he was not as interested in photographic technique as many of his peers and was frequently criticized for careless manipulation, later photographers profited from his belief in the validity of imagination in photography, the right of the photographer to alter the appearance of reality and the necessity of applying artistic principles.—Oxford Art Online, Oxford University Press.

Henry Peach Robinson

"Photography would be better if its elements were not so easily comprehended as to make it almost a frivolous pursuit, and to cause it to be included with amusements and recreations."—Henry Peach Robinson "Photography would have been settled a fine art long ago if we had not, in more ways than one, gone so much into detail. We have always been too proud of the detail of our work and the ordinary detail of our processes."—Henry Peach Robinson Henry Peach Robinson was an English photographer. As a young man he worked in a bookshop while studying art. He became interested in photography at the Great Exhibition, London (1851), and photographed landscapes and architecture in Shropshire and Warwickshire. In 1857 he opened a portrait studio in Leamington Spa and became interested in the composite photographs of O. G. Rejlander. Robinson, too, began to compose his photographs from a number of separate negatives in an attempt to elevate photography to the status of painting in the academies. The process was known as combination printing. In 1858, under Rejlander's tutelage, Robinson produced Fading AwayView in a new window, a combination print from five separate negatives representing a young girl on her deathbed accompanied by her family. Robinson's narrative photographs of allegorical or sentimental genre themes were often combination prints assembled from many negatives. He created tableaux with actors and props, sometimes incorporating a verse caption to help establish the narrative purpose of the composition, for example Bringing Home the MayPreview the documentView in a new window. His photographs paralleled Victorian paintings, in which sentimental narratives were favorite themes, and in which artists often worked from several photographic studies in order to ensure verisimilitude. Robinson's theoretical writings are also of great importance. He became one of the leading proponents of Pictorial photography, a method that he outlined repeatedly in his 11 books and numerous articles on the aesthetics and theory of photography. Borrowing from earlier manuals of art theory and practices of the Royal Academy, his body of writing on the technique and composition of photography remains the most complete in English in the 19th century. The Pictorial Effect in PhotographyPreview the documentView in a new window (1869) was republished in many English and foreign language editions. Quoting such revered academic artists as Joshua Reynolds, and setting forth the principles of composition and chiaroscuro, he laid down sound artistic advice in a discipline that at the time was practiced primarily by amateurs. Robinson's most important contribution in Pictorial Effect was his final chapter on combination printing, in which he urged the photographer to incorporate multiple negatives to enable him to reproduce different planes in perfect focus. This enabled complex compositions to be made with scrupulous attention to detail and created an image that was in Robinson's view more perfect than any single exposure. Robinson remained the chief theorist and practitioner of pictorialism until challenged in the 1880s and 1890s by P. H. Emerson, who argued that photography should emulate natural vision and should not have a uniform focus. Robinson was a founder-member of the Linked ring in 1892 but resigned from the group in 1900.—Oxford Art Online, Oxford University Press.

U.S. Geological and Geographical Surveys of the American West: The Great Surveys

Between 1860 and 1879 four major expeditions sponsored by the U.S government surveyed, mapped, and explored a large geographical region west of the Mississippi River. The maps and reports were submitted from the U.S. Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel, led by Clarence King; the U.S. Geographical Survey West of the 100th Meridian, led by Lieutenant George Montague Wheeler; the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, led by Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden; and the U.S. Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region, led by John Wesley Powell. In 1879, these were either concluded or consolidated under the newly created office of the U.S. Geological Survey. Though many other expeditions occurred before and during the period between 1860 and 1879, including, but not limited to, the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Zebulon Montgomery Pike expedition and the Josiah Whitney expedition, only these four led directly to the creation of the U.S. Geological Survey and are referred to as the "Great Surveys" of the American West. In 1867 the U.S. Congress appropriated funds to establish the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under the War Department. Chief of the Army of Engineers, General Andrew Atkinson Humphreys, appointed Clarence King, a graduate of Sheffield Scientific School of Yale, to lead the survey. The mission of the survey was to examine the geological features and natural resources across a band of land between the 105th and the 120th meridians along the 40th parallel. Additional natural scientists to the survey included three geologists, a botanist, and an ornithologist. In order to document the survey, King hired Timothy O'Sullivan, a former photographer with Mathew Brady's Civil War photography corps. The Fortieth Parallel Survey set up a base-camp in the Truckee Meadows, near present-day Reno, Nevada. Their first task was to make a 15,000 square mile map of the area between the California Sierra Nevada and the Shoshone mountain range 150 miles to the east. Though the survey did not make it to the 105th meridian, King and his men crossed the Humboldt Sink, the Carson Sink, and the Black Rock desert. They collected two thousand rock specimens, examined numerous mines, and set up 300 barometrical stations before ending the first season and returning to base camp. While wintering in Virginia City, Clarence King and two other geologists explored and gathered data on Comstock mines, while photographer Timothy O'Sullivan took photographs from deep inside the Comstock mines, using magnesium flashes for illumination. The Fortieth Parallel Survey's second season expanded the territory of the first season to cover all the Great Basin as far as Salt Lake. The U.S. Congress, pleased with the quality and amount of scientific information sent by the expedition, funded subsequent seasons until 1873, when General Andrew Atkinson Humphreys concluded the survey. Seven volumes of research were published during and after the Fortieth Parallel Survey, including The Mining Industry (1870), Microscopic Petrography (1876), Descriptive Geology (1877), and Systematic Geology (1878). In the same year as the Fortieth Parallel Survey, Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, a professor of geology and mineralogy at the University of Pennsylvania, was appointed geologist-in-charge of the United States Geographical and Geological Survey of the Western Territories. Hayden's orders were comprehensive and included, among other things, searching for deposits of oils, coals, clay marls, and other mineral substances. In addition, Hayden's survey was charged with gathering samples of geology, mineralogy and paleontology, and to note soils with regard to their adaptability to specific crops. In the twelve years that Hayden led the U.S. Geographical and Geological Survey of the Territories, numerous scientists and artists contributed their talents to its purpose. An example of this contribution is the photographic work of William Henry Jackson, a photographer who had, prior to his appointment to the survey, been documenting the building of the Union Pacific Railroad as it journeyed westward to join the Central Pacific railroad. Jackson's images of the Yellowstone region accompanied sketches by Thomas Moran and a detailed report of the survey's findings. These were presented to the U.S. Congress, and on March 1, 1872 President Grant signed a bill making the region Yellowstone National Park. Included in the vast output of the Hayden survey are Sun Pictures of the Rocky Mountain Regions (1870) with photographs by William Henry Jackson, The Yellowstone National Park (1876) illustrated by Thomas Moran, Geological and Geographical Atlas of Colorado (1877), and The Great West: Its Attractions and Resources (1880). As with the Hayden survey, reports and collections made by John Wesley Powell helped to build interest in and perpetuate the exploration of yet another area of the American West, the Grand Canyon and plateau regions of Colorado and Utah. Powell, a former Civil War veteran and a professor of geology at Wesleyan College in Illinois, proposed a geological and geographical survey by boat of the Colorado River and its tributaries. Powell's initial expedition exploring the Colorado River from May 24 to late August 1869 received favorable media coverage, in part due to Powell's entertaining lectures. Unfortunately, however, the survey yielded very little in the way of physical data. For the second expedition Powell turned to the U.S. Congress as a means to supplement funds that he was currently receiving from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. In June of 1872, Powell was granted $10,000 to lead a second expedition, the Geographical and Topographical Survey of the Colorado River of the West. Powell's primary interest was in geology and ethnology, and his investigations centered on the problem of aridity and human adaptation in the lands of the West. Powell's travels by foot and by boat brought him into contact with what he called the plateau tribes; the Paiutes, the Shivwits, the Unikarits, the Utes, and others. Inspired by these encounters and by the ancient ruins of cities he saw while on the Colorado River, Powell later became the Smithsonian Institution's first Director of the Bureau of American Ethnology, a post he held from 1872 until his death in 1902. The Powell expeditions yielded several books and reports: Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and its Tributaries (1875), Report on the Geology of the Eastern Portion of the Uinta Mountains (1876), Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages (1877), and Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States (1878). George Montague Wheeler had a similar practical interest in the exploration of western lands. A graduate of West Point Military Academy, Wheeler wanted to make maps that stressed human settlement and could be used to advance roads, railroads, dams, irrigation, agriculture, and settlement. On June 10, 1872, the U.S. Congress granted Wheeler $75,000 to map the area west of the 100th meridian on a scale of eight miles to the inch, an undertaking that Wheeler estimated would take fifteen years to complete. All four surveys were now being conducted simultaneously. In the summer of 1873, the Hayden and Wheeler surveys met at the headwaters of the Arkansas River in Colorado. Conflicts arising from the possibility that both were surveying and mapping the same territories caused the U.S. Congress to hold hearings to consider whether the surveys were conducted wastefully. At this time it was concluded there was enough work for all four surveys to continue with funding. From 1874 to 1879 the Wheeler expedition surveyed, using a base-line and trigonometric triangulation method, over a third of the country west of the 100th meridian, including Colorado, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California. Wheeler's survey produced seventy-one geographical and topographic maps and seven economic land-use maps. Wheeler supervised over twenty-five publications on geography, astronomy, paleontology, zoology, botany, and archaeology, and seven of his own volumes of notes and reports. Over the course of the survey 43,759 specimens were sent the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. At the end of the fiscal year in 1879, the U.S. Congress once again debated whether four independently funded and autonomous surveys were wasteful. A lobbying effort, headed by Powell but supported by many members of the scientific community, persuaded Congress to consolidate their research efforts into one new office, the U.S. Geological Survey. Because of the government patronage and the historical significance of the four surveys, much of the primary fieldwork has been preserved. The field notes and records of the United States Geographical Surveys West of the 100th Meridian are archived as Record Group 77, Office of the Chief of Engineers. Many of the large-plate photographs of William Henry Jackson, Jack Hillers, Timothy O'Sullivan, and E.O Beaman, which were made while accompanying the expeditions, are held in the Still Pictures Section of the National Archives in Washington, D.C. A large collection of Powell's fieldwork is housed in the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology. A publication of Nevada Humanities

The Victorian Era

http://www.victorianweb.org/art/index.html

unconscious association

unconscious association unconscious - Not having awareness or sensory perception. Occurring in the absence of conscious awareness or thought. Without conscious control; involuntary or unintended. In psychoanalytic theory, the portion of the mind which holds such things as memories and repressed desires, that are not subject to conscious perception or control but that often affect conscious thoughts and behavior. The unconscious is an important issue to artists influenced by Surrealism.- ArtLex

exceptionalism

"American exceptionalism" is a term used to describe the belief that the United States is an extraordinary nation with a special role to play in human history; a nation that is not only unique but also superior. Alexis de Tocqueville was the first to use the term "exceptional" to describe the United States and the American people in his classic work Democracy in America (1835-1840), but the idea of America as an exceptional entity can be traced back to the earliest colonial times. Jack P. Greene's analysis of a wealth of contemporary materials has established that by "the beginning of the nineteenth century the idea of America as an exceptional entity had long been an integral component in the identification of America." Many scholars of the belief in American exceptionalism argue that it forms one of the core elements of American national identity and American nationalism. Deborah Madsen, for example, contends that exceptionalism is "one of the most important concepts underlying modern theories of American cultural identity." It is a central part of the American belief system or what Benedict Anderson calls its "imagined community."— from the Gale Encyclopedia of US Foreign Policy

Lewis Carroll

"Somebody let the rabble in"—Lewis Carroll, Upon the introduction of negatives and subsequent demise of collodion plates. English mathematician, writer and photographer. Well&#45known as the author of children's books with a logical philosophical undercurrent, he was active as an amateur photographer, using wet collodion plates, from May 1856 to July 1880, according to his diary. His portraits of Victorian luminaries include Dante Gabriel RossettiView in a new window (1863), Arthur HughesView in a new window (1863), John Everett MillaisView in a new window (1865), Alfred TennysonView in a new window (1857; ) and many churchmen. His portraits of children are often elegantly composed: The Ellis Children (1865), for example, lie, sit and stand to form a white triangle of dresses on the dark landscape. Effie Millais (1863) in her white flannel night&#45gown swirls within an oval frame. His letters suggest that he made numerous nude studies of children. Four hand&#45tinted examples of these may be found in the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia. Carroll occasionally strove for an effect very similar to Julia Margaret Cameron's Pre-Raphaelitism. Florence BickerstethView in a new window (1865) shows white hands gripping a black hat, dark hair rippling over a white blouse. Carroll wrote 'Photographers are a blind race at best; ...we learn to look at even the prettiest faces as so much light and shade'. Yet the direct, controlling gaze of many of his young female models suggests the curious humility of his camera; they can appear imperious (especially Alice LiddellView in a new window) or sensuous when presented as draped nudes. On the whole they are inviting, innocent and, at the same time, wise representations of the sexuality of Victorian girlhood.—Oxford Art Online, Oxford University Press.

Eugène Durieu

"The future of Photography lies in paper."—Eugène Durieu

Julia Margaret Cameron

"When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has been almost the embodiment of a prayer."—Julia Margaret Cameron "...it is a sacred blessing which has attended my photography; it gives a pleasure to millions and a deeper happiness to very many."—Letter to Lady Tennyson, ca. 1875. "I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied. Its difficulty enhanced the value of the pursuit. I began with no knowledge of the art. I did not know where to place my dark box, how to focus my sitter, and my first picture I effaced to my consternation by rubbing my hand over the filmy side of the glass. It was a portrait of a farmer of Freshwater, who, to my fancy, resembled Bolingbroke. The peasantry of our island are very handsome. From the men, the women, the maidens and the children I have had some lovely subjects, as all the patrons of my photography know. This farmer I paid a half-a-crown an hour, and, after many half-crowns and many hours spent in experiments, I got my first picture, and this was the one I effaced with holding it triumphantly to dry. I turned my coal-house into my dark room, and a glazed fowl house I had given to my children became my glass house! The hens were liberated, I hope and believe not eaten. The profit of my boys upon new laid eggs was stopped, and all hands and hearts sympathized in my new labour, since the society of hens and chickens was soon changed for poets, prophets, painters and lovely maidens, who all in turn have immortalized the humble little farm erection. Having succeeded with one farmer, I next tried two children...and I now produced a picture which I called "My First Success."... Personal sympathy has helped me on very much. My husband from first to last has watched every picture with delight, and it is my daily habit to run to him with every glass upon which a fresh glory is newly stamped, and to listen to his enthusiastic applause. This habit of running into the dining room with my wet pictures has stained an immense quantity of table linen with nitrate of silver, indelible stains, that I should have been banished from any less indulgent household..."—from Julia Margaret Cameron, Annals of My Glass House, 1874. Julia Margaret Cameron was an English photographer and writer. Her father was an official in the East India Company. She therefore spent a number of years in Calcutta, but she was educated by her maternal grandmother in France and in England. In 1838 she married Charles Hay Cameron, a distinguished jurist. She brought up six children, who were born between 1839 and 1852. In 1848 the Cameron family settled permanently in England, living first in London and from 1860 at Freshwater, Isle of Wight. Cameron was a frequent visitor to the literary and artistic salon conducted by her sister, Sara Prinsep, at Little Holland House, Kensington, London. In 1847 she published a translation of Gottfried August Bürger's Leonora; she also wrote poetry, and apparently began a novel. Julia Margaret Cameron was given her first camera in 1864 to occupy her time while her husband and sons were on the family coffee estates in Ceylon. Photography was not a common amateur recreation in the 1860s; she described her eventual commitment to the difficult wet collodion negative and albumen print positive process in a letter to Sir John Herschel (31 December 1864) as fired by her ambition to 'ennoble Photography'. She was also inspired by the fancy dress portrait photographs taken in 1863 by the English painter David Wilkie Wynfield (1837-87). George Frederick Watts, whom Cameron had met at Little Holland House, supported her work and used her images as painting studies. She was elected a member of photographic societies in London and Scotland in 1864. Like other members of her social group, Cameron regarded recent technical developments in photography, including such forms as carte-de-visite portraiture, as threats to established values of photographic representation. She inscribed her photographs as 'From Life' and refused to retouch defects on the negative, believing such an action mitigated the authenticity of the material connection between the photographic negative and her subject. Her controversial soft-focus technique gave animation and breadth to her forms and rejected the perfection of detail prized in commercial photography (see figView in a new window); her expressive and symbolic uses of lighting were distinguished from the generalized illumination characteristic of commercial work (see figView in a new window). In her bust portraits of notable Victorian men, Cameron referred to ideal types and to compositions from Old Master paintings to communicate her idea of heroic individuals. An example of this approach is Henry Taylor: A 'Rembrandt' (c. 1866). Her narrative photographs, derived from tableaux vivants and amateur theatricals, dealt largely with women (e.g. St AgnesView in a new window and Zoe,Maid of AthensView in a new window), in particular with idealizations of the Victorian roles of wife and mother, for example Mary Mother (1867). Cameron's major work of narrative photographs was her Illustrations to Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King' and Other Poems (London, 1874-5), published in two volumes, in which she represented the female characters of Camelot, such as Guinevere in The Parting of Sir Lancelot and Queen GuinevereView in a new window. Like other members of her social group, Cameron regarded recent technical developments in photography, including such forms as carte-de-visite portraiture, as threats to established values of photographic representation. She inscribed her photographs as 'From Life' and refused to retouch defects on the negative, believing such an action mitigated the authenticity of the material connection between the photographic negative and her subject. Her controversial soft-focus technique gave animation and breadth to her forms and rejected the perfection of detail prized in commercial photography (see fig); her expressive and symbolic uses of lighting were distinguished from the generalized illumination characteristic of commercial work (see fig.). In her bust portraits of notable Victorian men, Cameron referred to ideal types and to compositions from Old Master paintings to communicate her idea of heroic individuals. An example of this approach is Henry Taylor: A 'Rembrandt' (c. 1866). Her narrative photographs, derived from tableaux vivants and amateur theatricals, dealt largely with women (e.g. St Agnes and Zoe, Maid of Athens), in particular with idealizations of the Victorian roles of wife and mother, for example Mary Mother (1867). Cameron's major work of narrative photographs was her Illustrations to Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King' and Other Poems (London, 1874-5), published in two volumes, in which she represented the female characters of Camelot, such as Guinevere in The Parting of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere . Julia Margaret Cameron: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, albumen silver print from...Cameron actively sought both to place her inspirational subjects before the public and to achieve sales and recognition for her work. She was not obliged to earn a living from her photographs but hoped purchases would aid her family's ailing finances. She registered over 500 photographs for copyright protection and sold her work through the London print-sellers Colnaghi & Company. Cameron regularly contributed to exhibitions of photographic societies in London, Edinburgh, Paris and Berlin, and to international exhibitions in London, Dublin, Paris, Vienna and Philadelphia; she also organized three one-woman shows in London. In her search for sitters and for reviewers of her work, she drew upon her extensive contacts among the Victorian intelligentsia, many of whom wrote favorable notices about her work for prominent journals. She made numerous portrait studies of close friends, including Alfred TennysonView in a new window and Sir John HerschelView in a new window. Commercial photographers resented Cameron's contempt for photographic proprieties and her easy access to famous sitters and to publicity. Their hostility to her technique abated, however, when they realized her work was not a serious threat to their market. The pictorial qualities of her photography were appreciated by her select audience but were inapplicable to the values of the mass audiences. Cameron produced few photographs after she moved to Ceylon with her family in 1875. The Arts and Crafts movement revived interest in Cameron's work in the 1890s, and Virginia Woolf, Cameron's great-niece, published a selection of her photographs (Links to an external site.).—Oxford Art Online, Oxford University Press.

Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond

"[His] proficiency has [...] enabled Dr Diamond to enrich his portfolios with curious portraits of the insane, which are not only truthful as portraits, but revive in those familiar with insane patients the memory of many others whose various forms of mental peculiarity had made their characteristic stamp; thus furnishing representations highly interesting, generally singular and striking, sometimes amusing, sometimes, it must be said, awful, but always suggestive of useful thought." (Conolly, pt. I., January 2, 1858:3) Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond was an English photographer. The son of a surgeon with the East India Company, he was educated at Norwich Grammar School, the Royal College of Surgeons and Bethlem Hospital. During the early 1850s Diamond photographed many mentally ill women patients at the Surrey County Asylum, Wandsworth, where he was superintendent. He claimed that these photographs were used both as medical records and for self-discussion in the treatment of some patients. Throughout the 1850s his portraits of the mentally ill dominated reviews of exhibitions of photographs. His paper 'On the Application of Photography to the Physiognomy and Mental Phenomena of Insanity' was read before the Royal Society on 22 May 1856. A number of his photographs, translated into engravings and accompanied by case studies, were published in the Medical Times and Gazette. Diamond was one of the earliest photographic experimenters: in April 1839 he had made photogenic drawings (photograms) of feathers and lace. He was a close friend and the doctor of Frederick Scott Archer (1813-57), the inventor of the wet collodion process which Diamond was one of the first to use in 1850. Diamond did not confine his use of photography to professional purposes. He photographed works of art and objects and places of archaeological and antiquarian interest. In his capacity as Honorary Photographer to the Society of Antiquaries he donated photographs of antiquities to the society. During the 1850s Diamond established himself as a disseminator of photographic information. He welcomed discussion of problems and improvements with both experienced and aspiring photographers. One of the latter, Henry Peach Robinson, recalled Diamond as a father figure of early photography. —Oxford Art Online, Oxford University Press.

Woodburytype

A woodbury type is a photomechanical process formed by a layer of colored gelatin pressed upon a sheet of paper in a mold. The mold is photographically made from a negative and varies in its thickness according to the light and dark areas of the negative. When the colored gelatin is pressed against the paper, it takes the shape of these variations and forms the tonal gradation of the image. The color can be arbitrarily chosen, but is usually brown like other nineteenth century photographs. This is a highly permanent process, but because of its technical complexities was soon super-ceded by other methods..— The Library of Congress

Bank of Nile at Thebes, 1854. Salted paper print from a waxed paper negative. John B. Greene

André Jammes and Eugenia Parry Janis, writing in The Art of French Calotype noted: "Greene's work is atypical, however. His monuments and especially landscapes seem distinctly distant, nor do they really seem to be of anything in the normal sense. Greene also had an exceptional attitude toward the representation of landscape space. In the manner of Chinese landscape painters on scrolls, his lens seems to scan a terrain rather than extract it as a fixed whole from a single vantage point. The effect of this is greatly heightened by the emphasis on tonal nuance and an interest in slender sketches of transparent land masses rather than the usual emphasis on a solid monument surrounded by a site. ...At age twenty-two, such insights were precocious in the extreme, and his invention regarding expanses of uncharted space takes on greater meaning in the light of the evidence that seems to place him in an American context. It had been rather difficult to imagine an insular English sensibility capable of conceiving such boundless horizons in photography." [p. 121, n. 186]

Trestle Work, Promontory point, Salt Lake Valley, ca. 1868-69. Andrew J. Russell

Andrew Russell (1829-1902) has been acclaimed as one of the nation's great photographers during the wet-plate era. A native of New Hampshire who grew up in New York, he started out as a painter. During the Civil War, however, he received an assignment to photograph the United States Military Railroad and he mastered the complex art of working with wet-plate negatives. Following the war, this "sun artist" turned his attention to that great national project of the construction of the transcontinental railroad. While A. A. Hart of Sacramento photographed the west to east segment for the Central Pacific Railroad, Russell captured the east to west portion. In recording this incredible construction project, Russell and his assistants made over two hundred 10 × 13 inch, wet-plate, collodian negatives, and approximately six hundred stereographs. Keep in mind, in an era before conventional film, field photographers like Russell worked under incredibly difficult conditions having to prepare and develop their glass negatives on the spot. Russell, according to photographic historian Robert Taft, complained of the heat and the difficulty of obtaining clear water for his negatives. In 1869, he published one of the most impressive photographic works ever produced in this country, The Great West Illustrated. Fifty magnificent 9 ¼ × 12 inch albumen photographs grace this large folio.—The California State Library Foundation Bulletin, no.86, 2007.

Ascension of Mont-Blanc, 1860. Albumen silver print. August-Rosalie Bisson

Bisson Frères—Louis-Auguste Bisson, 1814-1876; and Auguste-Rosalie Bisson, 1826-1900 Bisson Frères—consisting of brothers Louis-Auguste and Auguste-Rosalie Bisson, also known as the Bissons âiné and jeune (older and younger) — was one of the most celebrated and widely known French photographic studios and publishing houses of the 19th century. Begun by their father, a heraldic painter, the Bissons' first studio opened in Paris in 1841, shortly after the invention of the daguerreotype. Louis-Auguste, a student of architecture and chemistry, learned photography directly from Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and went on to advance the medium through a number of inventions and techniques, contributions for which the brothers received considerable praise. He retired from the business in 1865. Auguste-Rosalie, perhaps the better known of the two, was responsible for some of their more spectacular photographic successes, including the first closeup views of the peaks of Mt. Blanc (1861.) Among the Bissons' many accomplishments and honors were a set of 900 daguerreotypes of the members of the French National Assembly, which were later published in lithographic copies; their appointment as official photographers to Napoléon III and Pope Pius IX; their role as founding members of the Société Française de Photographie; and their numerous and much-admired series of landscape, architectural, and portrait photographs. After his brother's retirement, Auguste-Rosalie continued to work in photography, including a voyage to Egypt in 1869 and views of the Siege of Paris in 1871. As late as 1900, the year of his death, he patented a heliochrome process for the printing of photographs in color with ink.—text from The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio.

Manifest Destiny

By Sam W. Haynes University of Texas at Arlington The 1840's were years of extraordinary territorial growth for the united States. During a four year period, the national domain increased by 1.2 million square miles, a gain of more than sixty percent. So rapid and dramatic was the process of territorial expansion, that it came to be seen as an inexorable process, prompting many Americans to insist that their nation had a "manifest destiny" to dominate the continent. Yet, the expansionist agenda was never a clearly defined movement, or one that enjoyed broad, bipartisan support. Whig party leaders vigorously opposed territorial growth, and even expansionist Democrats argued about how much new land should be acquired, and by what means. Some supporters of Manifest Destiny favored rapid expansion and bold pursuit of American territorial claims, even at the risk of war with other nations. Others, no less committed to the long-term goal of an American empire, opposed to the use of force to achieve these ends, believing that contiguous land would voluntarily join the Union in order to obtain the benefits of republican rule. In an often-used metaphor of the day, these regions would ripen like fruit and fall into the lap of the United States. Thus the champions of Manifest Destiny were at best a motley collection of interest groups, motivated by a number of divergent objectives, and articulating a broad range of uniquely American concerns. Several factors help to explain why the United States embarked upon an aggressive program of expansion during this period. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, many Americans had dismissed as fanciful the idea of a transcontinental republic, convinced that the bonds of Union would weaken as the nation grew larger. But such vast distances were quickly being conquered by technological innovations. By the 1840s, steamboats had turned America's waterways in busy commercial thoroughfares, while a network of railroads integrated eastern markets with towns and cities on the western slope of the Appalachians. The telegraph, first used in 1844, ushered in a modern age of long distance communication. An American dominion stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific now seemed within reach. Although the United States had no shortage of unoccupied lands, expansionists argued that the republic must continue to grow in order to survive. Echoing the political philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, they viewed an abundance of land as the mainstay of a prosperous republic, and warned against the concentration of political and economic power. Troubled by creeping urbanization and a rising tide of immigrants from Germany and Ireland, expansionists viewed Manifest Destiny as a means to obtain a new, long-term lease on the Jeffersonian ideal. Far from weakening the republic, they argued, territorial growth would actually serve to strengthen it, providing unlimited economic opportunities for future generations. Expansionists were also motivated by more immediate, practical considerations. Southerners anxious to enlarge the slave empire were among the most ardent champions of the crusade for more territory. New slave states would enhance the South's political power in Washington and, equally important, serve as an outlet for its growing slave population. For American commercial interests, expansion offered greater access to lucrative foreign markets. Washington policy-makers, anxious to compete with Great Britain for the Asia trade, had long been convinced of the strategic and commercial advantages of San Francisco and other ports on the Pacific coastline of Mexican-owned California. The disastrous Panic of 1837, which had resulted in huge surpluses and depressed prices for American farm products, also focused attention on the need to develop new foreign markets. Most important of all, perhaps, was the growing sense of anxiety which Americans felt toward Great Britain. Americans had always been suspicious of British activities in the western hemisphere, but inevitably this fear had grown as the United States began to define its strategic and economic interests in terms that extended beyond its own borders. Great Britain's claim to the Pacific Northwest and its close relationship with Mexico were matters of great concern to American interests, which viewed Great Britain as the United States' only rival for control of the Pacific coastline. Fearful of being "hemmed in" by Great Britain, Democratic leaders saw Her Majesty's government poised to block American territorial ambitions at every turn. In addition, southern slaveowners were particularly apprehensive of Great Britain, which had abolished slavery in its West Indies colonial possessions in 1833. In 1843, southern statesmen alleged, on the basis of little evidence, that Great Britain was actively engaged in a plot to abolish slavery throughout North America. These rumors provoked a frenzied outcry in the South, which called for the immediate annexation of the Texas Republic in order to secure the interests of the planter class in the cotton-growing regions of North America. This fear of British designs, real and imagined, changed the face of Manifest Destiny, converting many advocates of gradual expansion into apostles of a new, more militant brand of imperialism. By the mid-1840s, with Great Britain rumored to be plotting with Mexico to block Washington's efforts to annex the Texas Republic and scheming to acquire California, U.S. expansionism took on a greater sense of urgency. Elected on a pro-expansion platform in 1844, Democrat James K. Polk moved quickly to annex Texas as the twenty-eighth state. Polk also threatened to disregard long-standing British claims to Oregon, convinced that he only way to deal with "John Bull is to look him straight in the eye." Polk's defiant brinkmanship would ultimately lead to a compromise with Her Majesty's government over the Oregon territory, while precipitating a war with Mexico, whose government, Polk incorrectly believed, was acting in concert with Great Britain to thwart U.S. territorial ambitions. Although Polk insisted that the United States was not waging a war of conquest, critics accused the president of manufacturing a war to seize California and New Mexico. In the months following the war, Polk also considered extending U.S. sovereignty over the Yucatan peninsula and Cuba, two regions which he believed were vulnerable to encroachments from the British. These initiatives received little support in Congress, however, and were abandoned shortly before Polk stepped down from office. In the 1850s, having established itself as a transcontinental empire, the United States ceased to regard British activities in the western hemisphere with alarm. Preoccupied with the increasingly bitter sectional conflict over slavery, many Americans rejected Manifest Destiny. Although southern extremists would sponsor filibuster expeditions into Latin America with the objective of gaining new lands to extend the slave empire, the expansionist movement faded from the national agenda in the years prior to the outbreak of the Civil War.

Lady Clementina Hawarden

Clementina Hawarden grew up in Scotland and England, but moved in 1857 with her husband Cornwallis Maude, 4th Viscount Hawarden, to his estate in Dundrum, Co. Tipperary, Ireland. She apparently took her first photographs, stereoscopic landscapes, in late 1857 or early 1858. In 1859 the Hawardens moved to London. In her drawing-room studio Lady Hawarden first made stereoscopic carte-de-visite-style portraits, but was soon using larger, single-image formats as well, and working in series. She posed her subjects in the windows and on the balcony of her home. From c. 1862 she concentrated on photographing her daughters in costume tableaux. She exhibited her work under the collective titles Studies from Life and Photographic Studies with the Photographic Society of London in 1863 and 1864, and was awarded the Society's silver medal in both years. Viscountess Hawarden produced c. 850 photographs, all albumen prints from wet collodion negatives. A large proportion of these are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London). Sir Francis Seymour Haden, who etched at Dundrum, based some of his etchings on her photographs.—Oxford Art Online, Oxford University Press.

combination print

Definition: n. ~ Photography · A technique of creating a photographic print with a single, unified image from several different negatives. At its simplest,combination printing may be little more than the use of two separate negatives made of the landscape and the sky that are printed together. This technique was used to compensate for orthochromatic negatives that could not properly record the sky and scenery in a single exposure. At the other extreme, combination printing is frequently associated with the Pictorialist photographers of the 19th century. O. G. Rejlander and H. P. Robinson were two well-known practitioners. One of the best known examples is Rejlander's The Two Ways of Life. A print made using this technique may be described as a combination print or a composite print. The use of combination printing to create The Two Ways of Life, Rejlander would have needed a huge studio and many models to take this picture with a single negative. Instead, he enlisted the services of a troupe of strolling players and photographed them in groups at scales appropriate to the distance at which they were to appear from the spectator. On other negatives he photographed models of the stage. He made thirty negatives in all, which he masked so they would fit together like a picture puzzle. Then, painstakingly masking a sheet of sensitized paper to match each negative in turn, he printed them one after the other in the appropriate positions.1— from A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology, the Society of American Archivists, 2005

Lady Elizabeth Eastlake

Elizabeth Eastlake was principally an essayist, and her writings encompass a wide range of topics, among them an article on the 'Art of Dress' (1847), in which she surveyed the history of dress, especially as revealed through paintings. In 1856 she published a penetrating critique of the first three volumes of Ruskin's Modern Painters (1843-60). She disagreed with Ruskin's literary characterization of paintings as primarily vehicles for ideas, instead believing painting to be an autonomous art form with its own language. In 1857 she wrote an article on photography that defined limitations of the new medium. After surveying its scientific development she described how photography fails to record nature faithfully because of, for example, its varying sensitivity to different colors. She concluded, 'Photography is intended to supersede much that art has hitherto done, but only that which it was both a misappropriation and a deterioration of Art to do.' In the late 1870s and early 1880s she published five essays on Leonardo, Michelangelo, Titian, Dürer and Raphael. These were organized around issues of interpretation, taking account of the latest art historical methods, and all five were reprinted in Five Great Painters (1883). She turned more specifically to these new analytical methods in discussions of the research of J. A. Crowe, Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle and Giovanni Morelli. In her article of 1872 on Crowe and Cavalcaselle she expressed her regret at the lapse of humane writing that the new art history seemed to initiate. She herself enriched that earlier tradition while still applying rigorously critical standards of judgment. More generally, her writings contributed to the late 19th-century view of art as a domain subject to its own laws

Gustave Courbet

French painter and writer. Courbet's glory is based essentially on his works of the late 1840s and early 1850s depicting peasants and labourers, which were motivated by strong political views and formed a paradigm of Realism. From the mid-1850s into the 1860s he applied the same style and spirit to less overtly political subjects, concentrating on landscapes and hunting and still-life subjects. Social commitment, including a violent anticlericalism, re-emerged in various works of the 1860s and continued until his brief imprisonment after the Commune of 1871. From 1873 he lived in exile in Switzerland where he employed mediocre artists, but also realized a couple of outstanding pictures with an extremely fresh and free handling. The image Courbet presented of himself in his paintings and writings has persisted, making him an artist who is assessed as much by his personality as by his work. This feature and also his hostility to the academic system, state patronage and the notion of aesthetic ideals have made him highly influential in the development of modernism.—Oxford Art Online

Eugène Delacroix

French painter, draughtsman and lithographer. He was one of the greatest painters of the first half of the 19th century, the last history painter in Europe and the embodiment of Romanticism in the visual arts. At the heart of Delacroix's career is the paradox between the revolutionary and the conventional: as the arch-enemy of jean-auguste-dominique Ingres and as the leading figure of the French Romantic movement, he was celebrated for undermining the tradition of painting established by jacques-louis David, yet he nevertheless enjoyed official patronage from the beginning of the Restoration (1814-30) until the Second Empire (1852-70). Delacroix disliked the 19th century, hated progress, was conservative in his tastes and manners, but—for Baudelaire, at least—was the most modern of artists, resembling the great painters of the First Republic (1792-1804) and the First Empire (1804-14) in his wish to rival the written word. His subjects, like those of David, were serious and historical, but he replaced the Stoic ideal with one equally grand and dramatic, yet lacking any kind of moral or political certainty. Nevertheless, he was the last representative of the Grand Manner. He lived long past the years of the Romantic movement, although a Romantic interest in suffering, insanity, death and violence is always present in his art, which is essentially literary and personal.—Oxford Art Online

realism

Movement in mid- to late 19th-century art, in which an attempt was made to create objective representations of the external world based on the impartial observation of contemporary life. Realism was consciously democratic, including in its subject-matter and audience activities and social classes previously considered unworthy of representation in high art. The most coherent development of Realism was in French painting, where it centred on the work of Gustave Courbet (Links to an external site.), who used the word réalisme as the title for a manifesto that accompanied an exhibition of his works in 1855. Though its influence extended into the 20th century its later manifestations are usually labelled as Social realism. — Oxford Art Online, Oxford University Press.

positivism

Positivism was founded by Auguste Comte. It is a doctrine that states that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge, and that such knowledge can only come from positive affirmation of theories through strict scientific method, refusing every form of metaphysics.

ethnic photography

Term for the use of photographs in the recording of cultures. In the 19th century, parallel to the Industrial Revolution and the development of technological processes such as photography, European and American travellers systematically explored the colonial territories of the world. Among these were anthropologists untrained in photography, who were usually affiliated to scientific societies and museums and who pursued the natural sciences, including the study of technologically less advanced cultures. Soon after the invention of the first practical photographic process in 1839, travel photography became a popular photographic genre. In the 1860s scientists began to take photographs of other cultures and developed forms of photographic representation closely linked to their interests in documenting the ways of life of foreign peoples and classifying the races of mankind. By 1870 ethnographic photography had grown into a well-delineated photographic genre. Two forms of ethnographic photography were most widely practised in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The first was photography of a human subject referred to as the 'type'. This provided racial evidence on human physical evolution, then a major field of study that had grown out of 19th-century positivism. These anthropometric photographs attempted to follow rigid guidelines, requiring frontal, half-profile or profile poses of the human subjects, often nude, so that measurements could be taken from the photograph. Such depersonalized, generic 'type' images were most often made of people (prisoners, for example) that were completely dominated and intimidated by the photographer's culture. The second form was photography that showed the scientists' interest in material aspects of 'exotic' cultures. Such visual inventories allowed the study of architecture, art, craft production and rituals. Inventory-type photography was particularly common in the German-speaking part of Europe, where anthropologists such as Adolf Bastian (1826-1905) and Theodor Koch-Grünberg (1872-1924) worked in museum and university settings emphasizing the study of material culture. In North America the photographs of Native Americans by Franz Boas, George Dorsey (1868-1931), James Mooney (1861-1921) and others documented dances, ball-games, house construction and crafts. Native American photographers such as Louis Shotridge, a Tlingit, also documented material culture, especially as it related to artefacts that museums were considering purchasing. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the majority of photographers had adopted ethnographic conventions in cross-cultural photography. Professional photographers would produce sets of ethnographic images, for example when they were hired to accompany expeditions. Amateur photographers, among them missionaries, military men and merchants, also worked in the ethnographic style. Besides the scholarly purpose that most photographers wanted to fulfil when recording ethnographic subjects, many shared a passion for exotic themes. They often composed their photographs to enhance stereotypical aspects of their subject that the purchaser of the image, the viewer, demanded. Many missionary photographers and colonial administrators also used photography in their efforts to justify and demonstrate the civilizing and converting effect of their presence. Various regions of the world—the Himalaya in India, Ceylon [now Sri Lanka], the Southwest and the Plains of North America, the ancient kingdoms in Africa—attracted the image-makers more than others because they were the focus of fantasies of the exotic and the unknown. Because photography was felt to be a direct reflection of nature and reality, the photographers attempted to make the unknown known by securing the image. In India a photographic record of castes and tribes was produced in the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th by European photographers such as William Louis Henry Skeen and Samuel Bourne and by indigenous photographers such as Deen Dayal & Sons and C. Mull & Co. In North America a prolific body of work was produced by Edward S. Curtis, William Henry Jackson, John K. Hillers (1843-1925), Richard Maynard (1832-1907) and Hannah Maynard (1834-1918), David F. Barry (1854-1934), Benedicte Wrensted (1859-1949) and many others. Numerous Europeans photographed in Africa, the so-called 'dark' continent partitioned into colonies during the age of imperialism. Photographic studios existed in many of the big coastal towns, and the photographers ventured along the coast and into the hinterlands. One such professional, the Portuguese J. A. da Cunha Moraes, served the family photographic firm in Luanda (Angola) from about 1863 to 1889. His images were widely distributed in Europe. Among the German anthropologist photographers were Bernhard Ankermann (1859-1943) in Cameroon and Gustav Fritsch (1838-1927) in South Africa. The Austrian merchant Rudolf Oldenburg photographed in Guinea and Cameroon between 1900 and 1913, while the French traveller Marcel Monnier worked in the Ivory Coast in 1890-91. J. W. Lindt: Family Group, Ulmarra Tribe, Clarence River, NSW,...South America had its share of ethnographic photographers, among them the English botanist and anthropologist Sir Everard im Thurn (1863-1932) in Guyana. In Brazil Marc Ferrez (1843-1923) captured the life of Brazilian blacks, as well as photographing cities and landscapes and members of the Brazilian élite. In Peru Martín Chambi (1891-1973) photographed the Europeanized élite as well as the descendants of the Inca. In Australia and New Guinea the studio photographer John William Lindt (1845-1926), who worked from about 1860 to 1890, specialized in views of the aborigines. The English administrator Edward Horace Man (1836-1929) captured the Andaman Islanders on commission from the Royal Anthropological Institute in London. A substantial photographic record was left by Henry B. T. Somerville (1863-1932), who served on a British Navy expedition to the Solomon Islands. In the late 19th century Richard Parkinson (1844-1909), a German national, spent 30 years in the South Seas, documenting his stay there with photographs. Hugo Adolf Bernatzik (1897-1953), a Viennese anthropologist and journalist, travelled and photographed extensively in many parts of the world. In the mid- to late 20th century the photographic study of the Balinese (1942) by the American photographers Gregory Bateson (1904-80) and Margaret Mead (1901-78), and the Japanese photographers Tadao Kano and Kokichi Segawa's illustrated ethnography of the Formosan Yami (1956), opened an active disciplinary debate on the role of photography in anthropological research. Other photographers, such as Eliot Elisofon (1911-73), who worked mainly in Africa, Helga Teiwes (b 1930), who photographed Southwest American Indians, and Carol Beckwith (b 1945), who photographed the Maasai and Fulbe of Africa, continued to produce ethnographic images of great value in anthropological inquiry. Both 19th- and 20th-century ethnographic photographs were used by visual anthropologists of the 1980s and 1990s, who carefully contemplated the implications of the photographic encounter and the meaning of the images as multi-layered sources. Ethnographic photographs can be found in many older publications, including the series on the peoples of India (1868-75) by James Forbes Watson (1827-92) and Sir John William Kaye (1814-76), Dammann's work on the races of man (1873-6) and Blackmore's North American Indian delegation views (1857-8).

The Other

The Other is an individual who is perceived by the group as not belonging, as being different in some fundamental way. Any stranger becomes the Other. The group sees itself as the norm and judges those who do not meet that norm (that is, who are different in any way) as the Other. Perceived as lacking essential characteristics possessed by the group, the Other is almost always seen as a lesser or inferior being and is treated accordingly. The Other in a society may have few or no legal rights, may be characterized as less intelligent or as immoral, and may even be regarded as sub-human. Otherness takes many forms. The Other may be someone who is of... a different race (White vs. non-White), a different nationality (Anglo Saxon vs. Italian), a different religion (Protestant vs. Catholic or Christian vs. Jew), a different social class (aristocrat vs. serf), a different political ideology (capitalism vs. communism), a different sexual orientation (heterosexual vs. homosexual), a different origin (native born vs. immigrant). The Other is not necessarily a numerical minority. In a country defeated by an imperial power, the far more numerous natives become the Other, for example, the British rule in India where Indians outnumbered the British 4,000 to 1. Similarly, women are defined and judged by men, the dominant group, in relationship to themselves, so that they become the Other. Hence Aristotle says: "The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities; we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness." The group which is defining the Other may be an entire society, a social class or a community within a society, a family, or even a high school clique or a neighborhood gang. — From Brooklyn College, CUNY, Brooklyn, NY.

large format camera

The large format camera, the view camera has taken many forms through the history of photography. There are a variety of sizes for the view camera but typically, today when we think of the view camera we are referring to the 4 X 5 inch negative size. This is the size of the film that the camera can accommodate. The 4X5 is the 'small' format of large format cameras. The 8X10 inch camera is the next common size. There are, in-use today cameras up to 20 X24 but these are the exception. The form of the camera is a lens on one end and a ground glass for viewing the subject on the other with an expandable bellows in-between. The camera typically has a series of movements on the front and back end of the camera called shift, tilt, rise and fall, and swing. These enable the photographer to 'square' the subject with the way we typically perceive it. An example would be when you take a photograph with your DSLR of a tall building the building would look like it is ending in a point. The view camera through its series of adjustments allows for perspective correction, making the sides of the tall building parallel. View cameras in the 21st century are primarily used in architectural photography and some commercial applications. In the 19th century the travelling photographer worked in a variety of formats from around our modern 4X5 size to the 20X24 format.

symbolic, narrative allegory Allegory

The representation of an abstract quality or idea through a series of symbols or persons given symbolic meaning. Allegories were particularly popular in Renaissance and Baroque art. For example, Rubens's famous Allegory of War and PeaceView in a new window (National Gallery, London) of 1629-30, the political sub-text of which was the desired peace between England and Spain, is enacted by Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom, driving away Mars, God of War, in order to protect the fulsome figure of Pax (Peace). — The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, Oxford University Press

uniformitarianism

Until well into the 19th century archaeology was hampered by the belief, based on the Bible, that the world had been created in 4004 BC, a restriction that required all discoveries to be artificially constricted into an extremely limited timescale. It was not until the middle of the 19th century that the modern discipline of archaeology evolved, when advances in geological thought and, in particular, acceptance of the theory of evolution, freed it from the shackles imposed by the biblical calendar. The Scottish geologist James Hutton (1726-97), in his Theory of the Earth (1785), had established the principle of 'uniformitarianism', a concept confirmed by Charles Lyell (1797-1875) in his Principles of Geology (1833). They showed that the stratification of rock, that is, its arrangement in superimposed layers or strata, was due to processes identical to (or 'uniform' with) those continuing to produce layers in rivers, streams and lakes. This concept, applied to the history of Man, has become one of archaeology's most fundamental principles

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

With Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, Rossetti formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in September 1848. The group derived its name from a desire to revert to a tradition of simplicity and realism that was found in early Italian art; they aimed to achieve a high degree of fidelity in reproducing nature and detail. Rossetti devised the Brotherhood's magazine, The Germ, chiefly devoted to the nature of art; launched in 1850, it lingered for four issues and then lapsed. The movement also suffered such an eclipse, for, although later artists were termed Pre-Raphaelite, the original Brotherhood ceased to exist by 1852. Two of Rossetti's best-known canvases from his Pre-Raphaelite period, the Girlhood of Mary VirginView in a new window (1849) and Ecce ancilla Domini!View in a new window (1850; both London, Tate), were intended to be historically accurate, but their symbolism also made reference to the contemporary revival of ritual in the High Anglican church. The first of these, shown at the Free Exhibition, carried the initials 'PRB' (Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood), and by the time the latter was exhibited a year later at the National Institution their meaning had been revealed, and for this Rossetti was blamed by the Brotherhood. He was ridiculed by critics and condemned for his lack of training and other insufficiencies; angrily he decided never to exhibit again publicly in London. Ruskin was a keen patron of Rossetti's early drawings and watercolours; for example, he owned Arthur's TombView in a new window (1855; London, BM). He encouraged the artist, bought and commissioned works and commended them to others; he also vigorously reprimanded incompetent work. By his persuasion Rossetti began to teach at the Working Men's College, London, in January 1855.— Oxford University Press

abozzo

abbozzo - In painting, blocking in — the first sketching done on the canvas, and also the first underpainting. In sculpture, a mass of material that has been carved or manipulated into a rough form of the ultimate work. Italian for "sketch." - ArtLex

abstraction

abstraction and abstract art - Imagery which departs from representational accuracy, to a variable range of possible degrees, for some reason other than verisimilitude. Abstract artists select and then exaggerate or simplify the forms suggested by the world around them. - ArtLex

The Pre-Raphaelites

http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/prb/1.html

tableaux Tableau Photography

tableau (tã-blô′) n., pl. tab•leaux 1. A group of people attractively arranged (as if in a painting) [syn: tableau vivant] 2. Any dramatic scene 3. An interlude during a scene when all the performers on stage freeze in position and then resume action as before. 4. A tableau vivant. [Fr. > OFr. tablel, dim. of tabel, surface prepared for painting.] A tableau image is one whose meaning is dependent on our investing the photograph with our own train of narrative and psychological thought. It is the use of storytelling in a single image. It is a stand-alone picture. Tableau images can make references to many different subject areas... historically, tableau (tableau vivant) paintings have referenced subjects and scenes from everyday life, ordinary folk, and common activities as well as depicting famous events which were intended to glorify or to idealize, excessively, some event, person, or thing. The scene is created and presented by actors who remain silent and motionless on a 'stage'. The staged photograph; the tableau image.

transcendentalism

transcendentalism - A philosophy holding that one can transcend experience in order to attain a higher plane of knowledge. May also refer to a literary and philosophical movement that flourished in New England in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson (American, 1803-1882) and Henry David Thoreau (American, 1817-1862), who were influenced by such German philosophers as Immanuel Kant (1724-1802). - ArtLex