History of Photography Ch.3: Popular Photography and the Aims of Art

Anthony's Photographic Journal

Anthony's Photographic Journal, published by E. and H. T. Anthony & Co. from 1870.

behind the eagerness for stereographs was the ideal of democratic access to information

"What an educational revolution is here, my countrymen]'wrote a critic in an 1858 issue of the British journal the Athenaeum. "Why our Tommys and Harrys will know the world's surface as lvell as a circumnavigator. ... What a stock of knowledge our Tommys and Harrys will begin life with! Perhaps in ten years or so the question will be seriously discussed ... whether it will be any use to travel now that you can send out your artist to bring home Eglpt in his carpetbag to amuse the drawing room withl'e Stereography thus concocted a pleasing combination of education and entertainment that presaged what the late twentieth century would call "infotainment."

What is a carte-de-viste?

"card photography" in US carte-de-ylsife was a small portrait photograph originallv intended to be pasted to the back of a regular visiting card (4 by 2 inches) standard carte-de-visite camera had more than one lens up to eight different images of the sitter could be exposed on one photographic plate cheapness ofthe carte-de-visite portrait, resulting from its eflrcient means of production, partly explains its rapid acceptance. Many cartes-de-visite were full-length portraits, or bust-length shots, rather than close-up studies ofthe face. The distance from the camera, especially in the full-length portraits, eliminated the need for and expense of careful lighting and time-consuming retouching. The success of the carte-de-visite also derived from the liberal use of fancy furniture and painted backdrops calculated to make the sitter appear rich. encouraged sitters to construct an image of self satisfaction and financial prosperity.

Jean-Francois Millet

"the Sower" 1862 Cliche verre

William Lake Price

1810-1896 a British painter who adopted photography, made portraits of famous people, scenes from everyday life, still-life studies, and tableaux vivants from literature. His image of Don Quixote, hero of the romance of the same name by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), drew upon the tradition of inspirational or uplifting painting

Oscar Rejlander

1813-187 worked with Charles Darwin constructed the most famous High Art photograph began as a painter While studying art in Rome, he made a living by copying Old Master paintings. There he became acquainted with Raphael's famous fresco The School of Athens, whose composition and theme of opposing points of view became the basis for a large photographic work, The Two Ways of Life, exhibited in 1857 In the center ofthe Raphael fresco, Plato points toward the heavens, the realm of the ideal, and Aristotle seems to point to the earth, source of material knowledge. In Rejlander's The Two Ways of Life, a sage introduces two youths to life: the one on the right embraces the moral life of honest industry; on the left, a callow rake is about to venture into a life of dissipation and debauchery. The women who posed were from Madame Wartont (sometimes Wharton) Troupe, a popular theatrical group who performed tableaux vivants derived from paintings and, especially, Classical sculpture

C. Jabez Hughes

1819-1884 British photographer. when debate over how to make room for imaginative camerawork while maintaining respect for utilitarian uses came about, he suggested that photography ought to be divided into 3 classes. 1. mechanical- literal or exact depiction 2. art- the maker, not content with things as they appear "determines to infuse his mind into them by arranging, modifying, or otherwise disposing them, so they may appear in a more appropriate or beautiful manner" 3. included "certain pictures which aim at higher purposes that the majority of art-photographs, and whose aim is not merely to amuse, but to instruct, purify, and ennoble." tension between depiction and imagination high art is "to insrtuct, purify and ennoble"

Journal of the Photographic Society (later became Photographic Journal)

Also in Britain, the Photographic Society of London, founded in 1853, was quickly followed by city-based photographic societies. The status of the Photographic Society was enhanced when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert became patrons. The society published the journal of the Photographic Society, which later became the Photographic Journal.

The Pre-Raphaelite painters

Cameron appreciated the languidly beautiful women in medieval costume who appeared in paintings by artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and made several images similar to work of Rosetti

Eugene Delacroix

French painter. insisted on a crucial differentiation between the insights that follow on the interaction of eye and mind and what occurs in the process of photography. Although Delacroix commissioned photographic studies of models to be used in his paintings, he insisted that the camera was a machine that yielded pictures untrue to the complexities of human perception PHOTOGRAOHY DOES NOT REPLICATE REAL LIFE For him the central activity of art-soul speaking to soul-was foreclosed by photography. socialized with photographers

Etienne Carjat

French photographer 1828-1906. was typical of the emergent artist-photographer who led a bohemian life. Trained as a painter and working as a caricaturist and writer, Carjat moved in the world of Paris culture, where he met writers, musicians, artists, and their patrons. work comparable to Naadar journeymen photographer not high art

Charles Baudelaire

French poet and critic (1821-1867) accepted photography as a means of record-keeping, yet lamented what he saw as its broad social consequences. He contended that photography supporters were unwittingly constricting the range of human imagination. Baudelaire wrote that "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 seesl'2l He thought that those who considered that "Photography and Art are the same thing"22 thinly rationalized soul-deadening matter-of-fact pictures PHOTOGRAPHY AS A FORM OF ART socialized with photographers

What is High Art?

High Art photography was brought into being by photographers and critics concerned to link the new medium to the betterment of individuals. thought photographers would degrade society. put photography in the service of public morality by trying to make the medium ennoble and instruct its viewers in proper conduct. The perceived divide between popular and art photography, begun in the middle of the nineteenth century, lasted almost one hundred years.

Adolphe Braun

In 1866, Alsatian photographer Adolphe Braun (1812-1877) began an art reproduction business that quickly became international both in the scope of its reproductions and in its sales. Fratelli Alinari Fotografi Editori, a company that still sells art reproductions, was founded in Florence, Italy, in 1852. Photographic Art Treasures (1856), a collection of picturesque vielvs, art reproductions

The Gwyneed Ladies Art Society

In 1901, Lady Augusta established the Mostlyn Art Gallery to show the work of the Gwyneed Ladies Art Society, thereby creating the first gallery built specifically to show women's artwork. The photographic work of upper-class women in the nineteenth century is not widely known because outside of the exchange clubs their photographs were not exhibited, and many remain in private family collections

Gaspard Felix Tournachon Nadar

Nadar drew political cartoons and caricatures of prominent figures, and conceived his Panth6on Nadar as a lithograph that would show a thousand portraits of contemporary celebrities work comparable to Carjat journeymen photographer not high art also a fervent advocate of balloon transportation and aerial reconnaissance. He produced the first photographs of Paris from the basket of his balloon Le Geant (The Giant). administered airmail service during the seige of Pairs

Adrien Tournachon

Nadars brother. would go on to aid Duchenne de Boulogne (see p. 150). In a short-lived partnership, the brothers produced a series of photographs of the mime artist |ean-Charles Deburau, posed as Pierrot

The British Photographic Exchange Club

Some groups, such as the Photographic Exchange Club in Britain, modeled themselves on organizations in the graphic arts, and traded images

La Lumiere

The French Soci6t6 Heliographique, which began in 1851, published the influential journal La Lumiere. The group was succeeded by the French Photographic Society in 1855. The Photographic Society in Vienna, Austria, founded in 1861, was the first in the Germanspeaking world. Photographic clubs and publications sprang up throughout Europe, North and South America, and in colonial India and Asia

D.E. and H.T. Anthony & Co.

private publishers set up such journals as the Photographic Art Journal, which was founded by Henry Hunt Snelling in 1851, and Anthony's Photographic Journal, published by E. and H. T. Anthony & Co. from 1870.

lantern slides

Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, publishers in Italy, Germany, and France produced carte-de-visite that illustrated art objects. Lantern slides, sometimes called "magic lantern slides," were made of art objects and architecture. The magic lantern was a device for projecting images on to a screen; early lanterns used oil lamps. In the 1870s

Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper

Two American weekly papers with readerships that promptly soared into the miliions were Frank Leslie's lllustrated Newspaper, started in 1855, and Harper's Weekly, begun two years later. Each was dedicated to bringing the pubiic visual accounts ofcurrent events.a

Harper's Weekly

begun in 1857 newspapers began to use photographically derived engravings which opened new markets dedicated to bringing the public visual accounts of current events

What is a cliché verre?

partially photographic technique invented in 1839 by British engravers with French image makers A Cuvelier and L Granguillaume. It employed a glass plate covered with a dark coating, Iike opaque black varnish, something akin to Talbots earliest experiments (see p. 19). The artist scratched an image into the coating with a sharp stylus, making what amounted to a hand-drawn negative. The plate was placed on sensitized paper, and exposed to light; many prints could be made from one plate (Fig. 3.5). Because the cliche verre seemed neither sufficiently handmade nor wholly photographic, however, it found only limited success

Lewis Carroll

pen name for Charles L. Dodgson (1832-1898) photographs of children. wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. photographed "Alice" daughter of his friend and made her look very poor. come people claim it is a sexually charged image.

Andre Adolphe Eugene Disderi

photograph "Prince Lobkowitz" 1858 Metropolitan Museum of Art carte-de-viste

Julia Margaret Cameron

produced images in order "to ennoble photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art combining the real and ideal and sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty" appreciated the languidly beautiful women in medieval costume who appeared in paintings by artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and made several images similar to the work of Rossetti characteristic style= slightly blurred focus; a detailed picture of the Virgin Mary would look too much like someone acting out the role, but a cloudy version appears like an imagined vision or a remembered dream. ophelia study- albumen print

Rembrandt Peale

said "we do not see with the eyes only, but with the soul" which summed up the complaint that phtography was not a medium open to imagination

Oliver Wendell Holmes

well known Boston area physician, photographer, and writer on photography wrote the 1859 essay "The Stereoscope and the Stereograph" said that when looking into image in stereograph, "the mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture". "The shutting out of surrounding objects, and the concentration of the whole attention ... produce a dreamlike exaltation of the faculties, a kind of clairvoyance, in which we seem to leave the body behind us and sail away into one strange scene after another, like disembodied spirits" thought the stereograph surpassed painting in its intense illusionism and in its potential to broadcast knowledge to a wide audience. It would become "the card of introduction to make all mankind acquaintances' and it would simulate the feeling of being present at natural wonders such as the Alps and human marvels such as the pyramids. For Holmes, the stereograph was a watershed moment in the progress of human history