History of Photography: Ch.2 The Second Invention of Photography

Henri Le Secq

(1818-1882) another of the Historic monuments comissions Heliographiques. also a painter and antiquarian. often produced finely detailed registers of architecture and sculpture like in Tour de Rois (Tower of Kings) In his other work, Le Secq orchestrated images in which deep shadows mute detail and create such sharp contrasts that the photographs even approach abstraction ; he also made ingenious still-life photographs

Gustave Le Gray

(1820-1882) skilled photographic technician and chemist that worked with historic monuments commission advanced the idea that profuse photographic detail did not have artistic merit. With critics such as Francis Wey and photographers such as Hill and Adamson, Le Gray advocated a theory of sacrifices-that is, of giving up particulars, and composing the picture surface either with sharply defined tonal areas, or through softness where some critics considered that photography would lower public appreciation for art, he argued that it would advance taste by allowing the public to study the fullness of nature. SALT PRINT- forest of fontainibleu 1851 ALBUMEN PRINT- The Great Wave, Sete, 1857

William Newton

1785-1869 proposed rendering a subject a little out of focus. Le Gray support of the new medium and his excitement about its possibilities are expressed in his treatises;

Hugh Weld Diamond

1809-1866, a British medical doctor who made photographs of mental patients professed that mentally ill patients could look at photographs of themselves and understand their afflictions better photograph as transparent medium that allowed the therapist and the patient to interpret the language of nature accurately. one of the first doctors to experiment with the Collodion process (wet plate process) a new negative-positive process used glass not paper, to support light-sensitive material. boasted greater sensitivity and shorter exposure time than previous processes including the albumen glass plate negatives made by Claude Felix Abel Niepce de Saint Victor

ambrotype

1854 james ambrose cutting

What was the Historical Monuments Commission, and what did they have to do with photography?

A grand series of architectural photographs was undertaken by them the commission was charged with listing, surveying. and making recommendations for the historically correct restoration of French medieval and Gothic architecture. expected to use French daguerrotype over British calotype but they rejected the daguerreotype's cold metallic tinge in favor of the softer forms produced by the calotlpe a member said people of taste had not yet accepted the daguerrotype because its DETAIL WAS MORE DISTRACTING THAN ARTISTIC calotype= less sharp and more eloquent for medieval nostalgia. also larger and could produce negatives for many copies

William Henry Fox Talbot

Calotype Photogenic Drawing

What is the difference between a calotype and a daguerreotype? ->which one is easier to make? ->which one is easier to store (for archival purposes? ->consider that one is paper and one is metal

Daguerreotype used for exact renderings (portrait science), very DETAILED Calotype used for SOFTER effects and to make negatives for multiple copies both too slow to record rapid action

Hippolyte Bayard

Early self-portraits, Self Portrait of the as a Drowned Man explored how photos can be misleading "what the eye sees and what the photograph records, may not be trustworthy"

Noel Marie Paymanl Lerebours

French publisher (1807-1873) relied on daguerreotypes when he assembled a multivolume work titled "Excursions Daguerreians, showing the world's most remarkable views and monuments"- included a view of Propylaea of gateway to the Athenina Acropolis by Lotbiniere calculated that prospective buyers would not appreciate a straightforward transcription of daguerreotype views, so he adjusted shadows and other elements to make his scenes more appealing to contemporary taste. credits him as publisher for printing the photos by many anonymous photographers who contributed to daguerreotypes. in early photography, conceptualization was routinely prized over the actual taking of a photograph. ie. in portrait studio, photographer might pose a client and arrange lighting while the assistant actually took and developed the image. for a long time, Scottish photographer David Octavius Hill was bestowed more distinction for the art direction of his pictures than his partner Robert Adamson, was given for the execution of them.

pre social media

No prior medium fully presaged the common photograph's ability to externalize remebrnace or to produce images conceived of as genuinely akin to actual experience. the sense of a personal encounter, of being connected w/ individual experience with national and scietific events. what 20th century french philospher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) called "compulsive visibilty" began to play a much larger part in human affairs. Societal, scientific and even personal progress started to be understood as dependent on increased visibility of data in all fields of government and in intellectual inquiry

Jean Francois Antoine Claudet

portrait work His 185 1 daguerreotlp e The Geography Lessor shows a man standing before a globe, and children with books, the central one of which shows a print of a Classical building. The image is a daguerreotype using the stereography technique

The commercial firm of Southworth and Hawes

The Boston photographic establishment run by Albert Sands Southworth (181 1-1894) and Josiah Johnson Hawes (1808- 1901) exhibited large daguerreotypes of political and cultural celebrities and Boston economic prosperity and historical heritage. they specialized in large (whole plate) daguerreotypes (usually 6.5 wide in by 8.5 in high) which cost about $15 common daguerreotypes sold for $2 and some for only 25 cents. notion of the daguerreotypist as an artist was forcefully advanced by Albert Sands Southworth, in his self-portrait and in his writing. he said, ""the artist, even in photography, must go beyond discovery and the knowledge of facts. He must create and invent truths, and produce new developments of factsl' Playing on the mid-nineteenth-century interest in character study, Southworth described the role of the photographer as catching "the whole character of the sitter . . . at first sight' He affirmed that "Nature is not all to be represented as it is, but as it ought to be, and might possibly have been."

Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre

The Daguerrotype

At what point did people start to use direct photographic prints in publishing instead of lithographic or etching reproductions of photographs?

The Pencil of Nature published in 6 sections between 1844 and 1846

What is stereography?

produced by two cameras spaced to imitate human binocular vision. In a special viewer, the two stereographic images appeared to be a single three dimensional scene. Stereoscopic daguerreotypes, such as The Geography Lesson, added the illusion of three-dimensionality

Egypt and the Holyland

as early as 1839, Francis Arago had urged the use of new medium in copying hieroglyphics Daguerrean photo of Egypt did not fulfill Arago's wishes. Instead, they were picturesque: "like a picture" literally. broad aesthetic category in 19th century thought. meant natural scene was composed in a way that stirred fine feelings or thoughts in the viewer just as painting or a sketch might do by selecting topics and designing scenes reminiscent of paintings, photographers validated their efforts and won public acceptance

Nathaniel Hawthorne

best-known story about photography's double life as a recorder of reality and a mysterious generator of insights into character is Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables published in 1851 story's central character, Mr. Holgrave, is a daguerreotypist. His portraits have special powers, extending human sight into insight, and revealing what ordinary vision cannot bring into focus: the moral character of individuals.

photographic series

creating and arranging images in meaningful sequences was increasingly adopted in historical, archeological, travel, scientific, medical and even art photography during this medium's earliest years, compilation of dissimilar and unrelated images, such as those found in Lerebour's "Excursions Daguerriennes" and Talbot's "The Pencil of Nature: were prevalent arrangements of related images were published more frequently

Technical innovations allowed photography to become increasingly detailed (today's digital advancements mirror this same rapid growth). At what point does the detail become more important than the subject? Is technical advancement, more detail, etc. more important than the subject and narrative, or are there artists who think that something else was more important (more artful, more meaningful?)

detail more distracting than artistic= use calotype over daguerrotype

How did early photojournalists address the issue of "truth" in their photography? (think about photomanipulation like Photoshop)

edited entirely manually ie. Baldus made 10 negatives and subtly connected them. hand painted negative affixed to the rest photographers juggled either... aligning themselves with the idea of the inherently unique value of the unretouched negative and print OR maintaining that camerawork is and should be multifold, embracing pure print and manipulation of the images

rapid action photogrpahy

neither calotype nor daguerreotype could do it staged incidents or pictured before / after images like in wars

The Pencil of Nature

one of the first books illustrated with actual photographs rather than engraved version contained 24 calotype images Talbot's commercial experiment with photography he founded a studio is Reading, just outside of London where he produced the Pencil of Nature. part of the mid-century industrialization of photography

photography's transition from invention to an active agent in the social world had to do with...

patenting of the Calotype (Talbot, 1841) and Daguerreotype (Daguerre, 1839)