Lectures 13-22
Jacques Henri Lartigue
"I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost - that is important. If they are art objects at the same time, that's fine with me. In fact, it is what I write in my diary that excites me most; I write with love and try to express things the best way I can."
Dr. Harlod Edgerton
100 exposures per second. Edgerton had developed a camera where the film was fed through it at high speeds without stopping like in Marey's devices.
Roger Fenton
1855 commissioned to photograph the Crimean War by art dealer Thomas Agnew. He was to make a series of pictures that were to support the official view of the war and to describe the position of the allies for the people at home. Fenton had to show the positive side of the war. He shot over 300 images. They were carefully posed and arranged due to the long exposure times. He was also hired to document artworks and other objects for various museums.
Roger Fenton
1856 Fenton was appointed chief photographer to the Photogalvanographic Company. In 1862 Fenton abandons photography and returns to being a lawyer. We can only speculate why he quit after 11 years. Perhaps he was not making enough money or his health was not up to the demands of traveling with all the equipment. In 1862 he sells his equipment and negatives.
August Sander
AUGUST SANDER 1876 - 1964 Born in Herdorf, a small village east of Cologne, Germany, on November 17, 1876. His father was a carpenter in the local mines. His mother took care of their eight children. August attended a local public school. In 1892 he became interested in photography and bought his first camera with the help of his uncle and he set up a darkroom. From 1897-1900 he served in the military in Trier. In his off hours he worked in various photo studios in a number of cities including Berlin, Leipzig, and Dresden.
Jacques Henri Lartigue
After World War I he began to paint. By the 1930s his photographs were widely exhibited throughout France. It wasn't until the 60s that his turn of the century photographs were exhibited in Paris and in New York. His work became very famous for documenting a lifestyle that most people would only dream about.
The Origins of Color Photography
After exposure, the print was placed in water, and the part of the gum that had remained soluble slowly dissolved and floated away. The photographer could alter this process by brushing the surface or focusing a stream of water toward it to dissolve greater or lesser amounts of the pigmented gum Arabic, thus changing the degrees of contrast. The print was complete when dried. It could be recoated with a similar or different color. These gum prints were beautiful in color but do not have much sharpness in detail. They resembled crayon, charcoal or watercolor drawings. Since they do not have silver in the final print, they were relatively permanent.
Eugene Atget
Among the painters who bought his photos: Henri Matisse Georges Braque Maurice Utrillo Andre Derain Maurice de Vlaminck Man Ray bought 40 of his prints, and numerous paintings survive that have been based on his photographs. In 1899 he sold 100 photos to the Bibliotheque of Paris, where he discovered a market for his documentary pictures of Old Paris.
August Sander
Artists practicing the New Objectivity wanted to record the exact appearance of objects while proposing that photography was meant to classify and archive the world around them. These photographers saw each subject, whether person or an object, as representative of a generalized "type." Many later photographers would be inspired by the New Objectivity.
Eugene Atget
Atget tried to make each and every photo stand-alone and be a work of art. He loved everything old and avoided photographing the new Louvre and new constructions of the wide boulevards. Although we do not see humans in a lot of his pictures, their presence are definitely felt. During World War I, he was accused of being a spy with his camera, which had to be humiliating. Plagued by a stomach ulcer he lived on a diet of milk, bread and sugar. After the war, he retreated to the quiet of Paris' parks, where you sense his loneliness. In 1920, he sold 2,600 negatives to the Ministry of Fine Arts for 10,000 francs, which gave him some financial security.
Eugene Atget
Atget: Bar de Cabaret, Paris. He was hired to document the historical parts of the city in 1907. He had, from 1910, systemically categorized his works into albums containing about 60 photos each, interiors, coaches (but not cars), bistros, tradesmen, etc.
Karl Blossfeldt
Blossfeldt is considered one of the leaders of New Objectivity in German photography. He was not an artist, but a modeler of plants and a sculptor. His first international success came with the publication of Art Forms in Nature, 1929.
Karl Blossfeldt
Blossfeldt would take a scalpel and remove unwanted parts of the plant to get the look he wanted. Other New Vision photographers believed in unmanipulated or straight images. Not Blossfeldt, he did not believe in that because he was coming from a totally different perspective - he wanted the end result to be used for training artists to get inspiration from nature, not some photographic manifesto dictating his or others visual concerns.
Karl Blossfeldt
Blossfeldt: Inflorescene of Garlic, c.1900s. Meurer's study was backed by the Prussian Ministry of Trade in an effort to restore Germany's applied arts program to a higher status after losing badly in several world's fairs in Paris and London.
Karl Blossfeldt
Blossfeldt: Maiden Hair Fern, c. 1900s. A local gallery owner, Karl Nierendorf, a champion of the New Objectivity, perhaps saw Blossfeldt's images in the halls of the museum school and exhibited his works in 1926. It was Nierendorf's help that got his first book published through a friend. Nierendorf wrote the introduction.
Roger Fenton
Born at Crimble Hall in Heywood, near Rochdale, Lancashire, England in 1819. He studied at the University College in London in 1838. While pursuing studies in law, he also studied painting in 1839 with a member of the Royal Academy, Charles Lucy. He then went to Paris for more advanced studies from 1841-44 at Paul Delaroche's studio. His studies of painting prepared him for later years as a photographer. Le Gray and Fenton exchanged information and ideas relating to both technical and aesthetic matters.
Edward Muybridge
By 1883 Stanford did not extend his financing of Muybridge's experiments and he moved to the University of Pennsylvania. He now used 24-30 cameras 6 inches apart and used dry plates instead of wet plates, and an electromagnetic device to trip the shutters in sequence. In 1 1/2 years he shot over 100,000 images.
August Sander
By 1909 his son came down with polio and a doctor suggested he move his family. He sold his studio and went to Cologne, eventually opening another studio there in 1910. He would go into the farming community of Westerwald in search of new customers when business was slow. His clientele didn't like arty photographs so he started shooting what he called "exact photography." When World War I started, he was sent to Belgium and France. His wife, Anna ran the studio in his absence.
August Sander
By 1944, his son died in prison of "unknown" causes. His Cologne home was destroyed. He took 10,000 of his 40,000 negatives to Kuchhausen, where he moved his family as well. This ended his studio life. With the war over, a fire in 1946 destroyed his remaining 30,000 negatives. He concentrated on reorganizing what was left of his project for his remaining years, exhibiting prints and winning many awards. In 1951 he had his first exhibition at Photokina and the city of Cologne bought a series of photos he made of the city.
Etienne-Jules Marey
By Feb. 1882, Marey had succeeded in making a camera that recorded graphic multiple images on one plate. Leonardo da Vinci had done this with drawings. This was a small rifle that took twelve pictures on a round or octagonal disk seven and a half centimeters in diameter, at intervals of 1/720 second. The plate stopped long enough to be exposed. The slotted shutter let light through and then blocked it.
Edward Muybridge
By the time of his death in 1904, Muybridge had also published popular editions of his studies. Taken at speeds up to 1/6000th of a second, these historic stop-motion sequences captured even the subtlest of movements. No more complete study of the human body in motion has ever been attempted. Muybridge made one image on one plate, then multiply viewpoints with multiple cameras, but still one image per plate. To learn more about Muybridge watch this YouTube video: Muybridge.
Etienne-Jules Marey
By the time of his death in 1904, Muybridge had also published popular editions of his studies. Taken at speeds up to 1/6000th of a second, these historic stop-motion sequences captured even the subtlest of movements. No more complete study of the human body in motion has ever been attempted. Muybridge made one image on one plate, then multiply viewpoints with multiple cameras, but still one image per plate. To learn more about Muybridge watch this YouTube video: Muybridge.
Dr. Harlod Edgerton
DR. HAROLD EDGERTON (1903 - 1990) Inventor of the MODERN FLASH and fast stroboscopic light. He carried on Muybridge's and Marey's experiments. He was first and foremost an engineer. His interests in ultra high speed photography and synchronized lights have led to applications for testing automobile engines, synchronized landing lights at airfields, warning lights on top of tall buildings, and ultimately, capturing the invisible. In the 1930s his strobe lights caught anything and everything in stop action.
August Sander
During the 20s he befriended a group of painters, the Cologne Progressives and he developed plans for a large-scale documentary photography project called Citizens of the Twentieth Century. It would be like a group portrait of an entire country and would have 540 portraits divided into 7 groups with 45 portfolios of 12 images each. He completed the first portfolio on the farmer. In 1927, he exhibited 100 prints in Cologne as a preview of his grand project. A popular idea during this period was that you could tell a lot about a person by how they looked, or through their physiognomy.
Capturing Motion
Eadweard Muybridge 1830-1904 Etienne-Jules Marey 1830-1904
Eadweard Muybridge
Eadweard Muybridge was born in England in 1830 (he died in 1904) and moved to the United States around 1852. He began his career in photography in the 1860s in California, quickly gaining fame as a landscape and panoramic photographer. He was competition for Carleton Watkins, having made trips to Yosemite in 1868 and 1872. He would print clouds in the sky when it was white on the original print.
Dr. Harlod Edgerton
Edgerton has had numerous exhibits and his pictures are known the world over for their ingenious demonstrations of making the invisible visible and adding greatly to scientific knowledge.
Dr. Harlod Edgerton
Edgerton: Antique gun firing, 1936. The gun took its own picture as the explosion of the bullet being fired triggered the microphone, visible in the foreground, that released the flash. The bullet is barely out of the muzzle, still hidden in the smoke escaping from the gun.
Dr. Harlod Edgerton
Edgerton: Atomic Bomb Explosion before 1952. He continued his investigation using shutter speeds of 1/10,000,000 of a second recording air waves, sound waves, and other explosions ending in 1951 with atomic bomb blasts at 1/100,000,000 of a second.
August Sander
Edward Steichen in preparing for his "Family of Man" exhibit, purchased 80 of Sander's photographs for the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. He died in 1964 in Cologne at the age of 88.
Eugene Atget
Eugene Atget (1857-1927) Born in Libourne near Bordeaux in 1857, the son of a carriage maker. He was orphaned at an early age and went to live with his uncle, a high official in the French National Railroad. They moved to Paris. He studied for the priesthood, traveled to Uruguay as a cabin boy. From 1879-1881 he studied acting at the Conservatory of the French National Theater in Paris. For the next 17 years he and his lifelong companion, Valentine Compagnon, traveled with various acting troupes, eventually giving up acting.
Edward Muybridge (Etienne-Jules Marey mentioned)
Eventually Muybridge was able to develop the equipment, chemicals and technique he needed with the help of Stanford's engineers. He rigged up twelve cameras tripped by thin black threads with shutters at 1/1000th of a second. He had succeeded in recording what the human eye could not see. Among his innovations was the zoopraxiscope, which allowed images to be projected in rapid succession, thus simulating motion, on Stanford's suggestion to investigate this method first shown to his family in 1879. Sir John Herschel had envisioned this in 1867, and Marey had thought of it also in 1873.
The Origins of Color Photography
Eventually, many of the portrait painters shifted to photography since it was a cheaper way for someone to have their portrait done. If they did choose to do this and didn't become photographers, then they often were hired as colorists to touch up the images on the plates. On daguerreotypes they usually put gold on watch chains, and then they might paint the skin in flesh tones and add blush to cheeks. Painting on a dag was difficult and tricky. However, customers of the photographers liked the added color, that is why it was done.
Eugene Atget
He had been living on a street in Paris, rue des Beaux-Arts, next to the art academy. He knew lots of students and tried painting. He gave that up, although he always talked about himself as an artist and painter. He began to photograph about 1898 when he was 41. He expected to be able to sell his photos to his artist friends. He sold many prints this way and always made a living at his photography. In his address book, he noted the names of those who bought his prints, the best times to visit them, the nearest Metro stations, and other details.
Jacques Henri Lartigue
He kept a journal and diary his entire life writing about his family and friends, their antics, parties, and the simplest things in life. Lartigue had the zest for enjoying life. His photographs told the story of his life through his snapshots. He was a privileged child and he made the best of it. His photographs were not discovered until 50 years after he started making them. In fact, he had no other knowledge of what other photographers were doing until he became 50.
Eugene Atget
He liked to go out early in the morning when the least amount of people were around. He shot over 8-10,000 photos of Paris, particularly of the dying life styles, doorways, alleys, buildings, you name it, and he photographed it. He photographed everything but upper class life or new building projects. He loved the stage-like setting of shop windows and empty cafes with chairs.
Jacques Henri Lartigue
He started to photograph the fashionable women along Paris' famed boulevards when he was 11 years old.
Eugene Atget
He used dry plates that were 7 x 9 1/2 inches. He carried his massive tripod, wooden camera and plates all over Paris, even when lighter cameras were available. He would leave early in the morning when the streets were empty. Photos of street scenes could be bought by architects, tourists as souvenirs, authorities for their archives, and artists for source material for their paintings. He sold large numbers of prints to libraries and museums. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London bought over 400 prints. He was commissioned to do a series on the street vendors of Paris. He shot over 80 scenes, probably for a postcard publisher.
Roger Fenton
He was among the first to document war and to photograph the Royal Family. Fenton goes to Russia and uses Le Gray's dry waxed paper process and makes calotypes. Upon his return he used the wet collodion glass negative process for the rest of his life.
Etienne-Jules Marey (Wright Brothers)
His studies of birds in flight helped the Wright brothers invent the airplane. His photos of human locomotion were used in the physical training of soldiers and athletes, later to increase efficiency in labor forces. In the field of art, painters and sculptors looked to his and Muybridge's images as the authority for the representation of humans and animals in motion.
Charles Jones
His tradition comes from people like Julia Cameron and William Henry Fox Talbot who were independent thinkers and artists working alone. Unlike Blossfeldt's white or gray backdrops, we find many of Jones' images darker and moodier, using the soft overcast light of England to create beautiful diffused highlights on his vegetables.
Roger Fenton
In 1847, he qualified as a solicitor and had several paintings selected for exhibition in London over the next few years at the Royal Academy. He helped form the Photographic Club (Calotype Club). In 1852, Society of Art's Photographic Exhibition held the world's first photographic exhibition. Fenton helped to arrange for the exhibit and was elected to escort Queen Victoria and Prince Consort to the exhibit. Fenton was a key player in England in elevating photography as an art form, just as Le Gray did in France. He had a keen sense of composition and his boldness was often criticized.
Roger Fenton
In 1853, Fenton instrumental in forming The Photographic Society. It was Fenton who persuaded Talbot to give up his restrictive use of his patents. In 1864 he is commissioned By Queen Victoria to photograph the Royal Family. He is also commissioned to record the art treasures of the British Museum.
Eadweard Muybridge
In 1872, Leland (Lee-land) Stanford, the railroad magnate (Central Pacific Railroad) and former governor of California, sparked Muybridge's interest in locomotion when he asked the photographer to help him substantiate the theory that a fast-trotting horse will, as some point, have all four feet off of the ground. Stanford had bet a friend $25,000 that the traditional view was wrong. Stanford wanted him to use his horse, Occident. Muybridge rose to the challenge and was able to produce a murky picture but was it was inconclusive for Stanford.
Edward Muybridge (Etienne-Jules Marey mentioned)
In 1874, Muybridge's work for Stanford was interrupted: after a domestic quarrel, Muybridge murdered his wife's lover. He was acquitted on grounds of "justifiable homicide" on Feb. 5, 1875. He left the country for awhile.Stanford had received a copy of Marey's book Animal Mechanism, where Marey described a moment where the horse's gallop showed all four feet off of the ground. In 1876, Stanford rehired Muybridge and instructed him to make the series that would be used on the zoetrope.
Karl Blossfeldt
In 1890, in conjunction with Meurer's commission, six scholarships were awarded by the Prussian government to future teachers, two to modelers (Karl Blossfeldt being one of them) and two to artists. As assistants to Meurer, they collected botanical material, working around southern Europe using Rome as their base. Since Meurer was working from photographic samples which he took himself, it is conceivable that Blossfeldt also began systemically photographing plants at this time. His basic method was to place the plants on a white or gray background, and on occasion altering the plants by removing or improving the look of stems and buds.
August Sander
In 1901 he took his first commercial assignment for Greif Photographic Studio in Linz, Austria. He taught himself Pictorialism and became an art photographer. The next year he bought the studio with Franz Stuckenberg, and renamed it Sander and Stuckenberg. Later, he won a bronze medal in a regional exhibit in 1903. By 1904 he was the sole owner of the studio and won several first and grand prizes in exhibitions, and experimented with color photography. Had his first solo exhibition of 100 prints in 1906 in Linz.
Karl Blossfeldt
In 1930, when he was in his 60s, his works were shown alongside younger avant-garde photographers at the famous Stuttgart exhibition Film and Foto. The simple forms of plants in his images against plain neutral backgrounds made his images look very modern as opposed to the prevailing attitude of painterly Pictorialism.
Charles Jones
In 1981, at an antique market in London, photographic collector Sean Sexton stumbled upon a trunk for sale. It contained hundreds of photographs which all appeared to be primarily of the same subject - plants. He saw the originality and uniqueness to the work and bought them. They were gold-toned gelatin silver prints from glass negatives. Most had notes about the plant name and the initials C. J. and a few written with Charles Jones.
The Origins of Color Photography
In the gum print process any different color or colors could be added to the process. Each individual print is unique, making it like a fine art print.
Etienne-Jules Marey
It had distinct advantages of Muybridge's system: a single point of view, equal and verifiable intervals of time, continuous registration on a single plate instead of instantaneous images on multiple plates. Marey made multiple images on one plate.
Jacques Henri Lartigue
Jacques Henri Lartigue 1894-1988 Born in France to a wealthy Parisian family. His father was a banker who enjoyed all the new adventures and inventions of the day. His family were gifted inventors and scientists. His grandfather invented the monorail. His joy for life was carried on by his son and evidenced in his photographs. His parents gave him a camera when he was 7 years old. Then he said, "Photography is a magic thing!"
Karl Blossfeldt
Karl Blossfeldt 1865-1932. In 1881 he began an apprenticeship as a modeler in the art foundry of an ironworks company. By 1884 he started a drawing course at the college attached to the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Berlin. In 1886 he completed his course of study as an art caster. In 1889, the drawing instructor, Professor Meurer is commissioned by the Prussian Board of Trade to set up a well-organized plan of study for drawing classes using nature as a model. This was to be the foundation for the study of arts and crafts.
Le Gray and Fenton
Le Gray's forest images and Fenton's landscapes exhibit the same darkness in the trees and lightness in the skies when exposed at the same time. Le Gray put two prints together to overcome this problem whenever possible. Robert Fentons subject matter, marine scenes, major architectural monuments, landscapes, military displays, Royal portraits, and war scenes was almost identical to Le Gray's. Fenton did still lifes later in his career, which Le Gray left no evidence that he did the same.
Dr. Harlod Edgerton
Like a photogram which uses the sun, the point source of the strobe gives a very sharp shadow. It can reveal the refraction or bending of light caused by heat and pressure in an atmosphere. If it is of very short duration, it can reveal the changes in density of the air or other gases caused by shock waves, heat, explosions, and movement. It can reveal much more than a normal photograph. This was taken at 1/1,000,000 of a second. Notice the shock waves in front of the bullet. The black particles are pieces of the plexiglass.
Eugene Atget
Man Ray had an assistant, Berenice Abbott. She fell in love with Atget's photos and bought several of them in 1925. She asked to photograph him in 1927. When she went to his apartment to show him the prints, he had died on August 3, 1927. She arranged to buy his estate, issued albums of his work in 1930 that gave him an international reputation. She eventually sold the entire collection to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1968. Many have been influenced by Atget's artistic interpretations of finding beauty in the everyday and commonplace. Among his admirers were Abbott, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand. Many street photographers name Atget as their main source of inspiration.
Etienne-Jules Marey (MOTION PICTURE CAMERA)
Marey showed how animals and humans moved. He eventually invented the motion picture camera 7 years before commercial motion pictures. By the end of his life, his study of motion had led him to make visible the most ephemeral movements of all, those of air and water.
Etienne-Jules Marey
Marey used a black hangar with the figures wearing black suits with painted white stripes to get a graph of the movements. We can trace Marey's influence in Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912, in which the artist attempts to illustrate the interaction of time and space on canvas.
Dr. Harlod Edgerton
Milk-drop Coronet, 1957. About 1/2" in diameter, took 25 years to perfect. Falling from a small tube, the first drop of milk creates a disk-shaped layer into which a second drop splashes, catapulting the milk into a crown-like shape about one-half inch in diameter. Taken in 1957, this image is the culmination of 25 years of a search for perfection. Edgerton had been trying to get uniform tips for all this time.
The Origins of Color Photography
Most of the major turn of the century photographers used this process: Alvin Coburn, Steiglitz, Clarence White, Heinrich Kuhn, Edward Steichen, and many others. Since the process was easy to use, its caught on quickly. Agfa came out with their own agfacolor plates in Germany.
August Sander
On January 30, 1933, President Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor and his National Socialists assumed power in Germany. Sander had published five portfolios. His son, Erich, a member of the Communist Party was arrested by Hitler's Gestapo and put in prison for ten years. By 1936, the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts destroyed all the publishers' plates of Sander's book, Face of the Time, and confiscated any copies of the book because his photos did not support Nazi theories of an Aryan race.
Edward Muybridge
On May 14, 1880 at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, Muybridge used a projector with two glass disks: one carrying twelve images revolving in one direction, and a second, slotted disk that revolved in the opposite direction and served as a shutter. The effect of a running horse was so realistic, that a reporter wrote, "The only thing missing was the clatter of the hoofs." This device credited him with the invention of the motion picture. Because of his work, he gained an international reputation and lectured all over the world.
The Origins of Color Photography
Over the years there were several other pigment and color processes which photographers used. They were the bromoil, carbon, carbo, along with bichromate called pigment processes. Several mechanical printing processes involved selecting color areas and reproducing them by using a printing press process over actual photographic prints. These attempts were basically playing with the print by adding colors on top of the print or pigments to the image when formed on the paper so it was integrated like a salt print in feeling - the pigments soaking into the paper.
The Origins of Color Photography
Photographers since the beginning of the inventions of the various photographic techniques wished for color in their images. Many portrait artists took up photography as a way to speed up the drawing process or use the images as source material for lithographs or posters. Nadar and his Pantheon of 1854, David Hill and his Signing of the Deed of Demission 1866, and Brady's A Gallery of Illustrious Americans, 1841. All of these men eventually became full-fledged photographers.
The Origins of Color Photography
Plates were manufactured in large quantities between 1907 and about 1940 by the Lumiere brothers' company. The plates were exposed in the camera, glass side forward, so that light entering the lens would pass through the color mosaic filter before reaching the emulsion. The plates were then developed and washed. The resulting negatives were then placed in a chemical bath in order to bleach out the negative impression. After exposure to white light the plates were redeveloped, bringing forward a positive colored impression that was fixed, washed a final time, and varnished.
Charles Jones
Relatives speak about his private life with little to say other than by the 1950s he and his wife were still living in the countryside with no electricity or running water. He could not reconcile himself to the realities of living in the modern age. His children were shocked to find out he did not claim his retirement pension from the British government. He considered it charity. He died in 1959.
Jacques Henri Lartigue
Richard Avedon called Lartigue: "The most deceptively simple and penetrating photographer in the history of photography." He knew and photographed the leading personalities of his time. Unlike Atget who only photographed old things, Lartigue photographed what was new, joyously.
August Sander
Sander retreated into landscape and plant photography and his project was never completed. When World War II broke out in 1939, he put his 40,000 negatives in the basement of his home. He moved his studio to Kuchhausen, a small village in Westerwald.
August Sander
Sander: Bicyclists, Westerwald, 1922. Similar to the Young Farmers in that Sander would often venture out to the country by bicycle and take pictures. He was well-known for his portraits throughout the area. The grouping, like in the Young Farmers, is an excellent composition where the subjects work well together while maintaining their individuality.
August Sander
Sander: Dwarfs, 1912. According to Sander's system and beliefs, the farmer was at the top of his class structure with peasants. As a society evolved, other classes descended ending with the bottom, "The Last People" of beggars, the mentally ill, vagrants and unemployed. Their physical condition would have made them outcasts.
August Sander
Sander: Landowner, Cologne, 1924. Some of Sander's portraits were commissioned, while others he shot for himself. He advertised himself as "an at-home photographer," which meant he would travel to you, even though he had a studio.
August Sander
Sander: Peasant Bride, Westerwald, 1914. Although he knew the names of his subjects, he left them out of the titles so the portraits would be more universal in meaning, usually listing their occupation.
August Sander
Sander: Shepherd, 1913. In his work, "Citizens of the 20th Century" he wanted to have a portfolio of archetypes. This shepherd Sander called "The Sage." In a 1951 radio lecture, Sander said, "every person's story is written plainly on his face, though not everyone can read it. These are the runes of a new, but also ancient language."
August Sander
Sander: Victim of an Explosion,1930. One of Sander's photographic strengths was establishing eye contact with just about all of his subjects. This underscored the dialogue with him and ultimately the viewer. The outcasts typically do not look into the camera, either deliberately or due to embarrassment.
Charles Jones
Sexton tried to gather information about the photographer. He even found an ad in a paper where Jones wanted to take pictures of gardens for a half crown a piece. His grandchildren remembered seeing glass plates being used as cloches or little houses to protect young plants out in his garden. None of the photographs are dated. In one family album there is a date of 1904. We can only assume they were shot around 1895-1910 by the materials he used. Most likely he considered his photographic work a private creative practice, perhaps purely to document his beloved plants. They are remarkable.
Roger Fenton
Some of his negatives were bought by Francis Frith, who continued to print and sell them long after Fenton died in 1869 in London. Frith became the most successful of early publishers of photography with a stock of negatives by many different photographers. The detail in Fenton's photographs and atmosphere in his landscapes, showed he was a master of the medium.
Eadweard Muybridge
Stanford had Muybridge photograph his mare, Sallie Gardner. The press were invited to the actual event staged at Stanford's racetrack on his 9,000 acre ranch. This created quite a sensation, because it was not the normal way artists' depicted a horse running (both front and rear legs outwards), this showed them both inwards.
Karl Blossfeldt
Students bought plant books for their studies. Industrial firms used plant reliefs as decorative designs around buildings. There was a big demand for artists to do this. In 1896, Meurer returns to Germany and Blossfeldt remained another year in Italy. In 1898 Blossfeldt became a drawing instructor at the college he attended. Blossfeldt becomes a permanent instructor, where he teaches Modeling From Plants for 31 years starting in 1899. He worked from natural specimens or slides of his plant photographs.
Etienne-Jules Marey
The Italian Futurists borrowed Marey's imagery to epitomize the sensation of time. During this end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, the idea of a "now" and time being universal and uniform was being expressed everywhere. Marey's photographs are viewed now as beautiful works of art, were intended to be scientific first with knowledge being the intent, not beauty. The telephone, telegraph, phonograph were all inventions that brought the world closer and what was called the "thickened present" - a continuous flux, a succession of states which announced that which follows and contained that which preceded it.
The Origins of Color Photography
The Origins of Color Photography: 1. Painting on daguerreotypes 2. Painting on prints 3. Pictorialists: manipulating prints and negatives. Altering finished print color through gum printing processes. 4. Lumiere Brothers: Autochrome process.
The Origins of Color Photography
The autochrome process consisted of coating a glass plate with a sticky varnish, then with a thin pressed layer of tiny grains of translucent potato starch. The grains had been separated into three equal lots and each lot separately dyed red-orange, blue-violet, or green. Mixed together in random distribution, they formed a dense mosaic color filter on the plate. Over this layer of grains was added another coating of varnish and finally, a gelatin-bromide emulsion that was sensitive to the entire spectrum of light .
The Origins of Color Photography
The autochrome process provided a direct capture of colors, fragile and luminous. It was a colored transparent image on glass, similar to a slide, ranging in size from less than 2 inches square to 15 x 18 inches. It was meant to be viewed by being held up to a light or projected onto a surface like slides we look at today. Each was a unique object and was a color negative, then made into a positive. It was invented and patented in 1904 by Louis Lumiere (1864-1948), the younger of two brothers who figured so prominently in the invention of the motion picture.
The Origins of Color Photography
The autochrome process was the first commercially available color process that provided a direct capture of colors in negative format.
The Origins of Color Photography
The complement of blue is orange, yellow is violet, red is green. A given color will absorb the rays of its complement, but the rays of the color will pass through it. A red filter will absorb green but all other colors pass through it. On every square inch of the plates were four million screens of red-orange, green and violet. A 5"x7" plate had over 140 million points of color.
Edward Muybridge
The culmination of Muybridge's work was the publication in 1887 of Animal Locomotion: an electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movements, which was published in eleven volumes by the University of Pennsylvania. The project was under the direction of a group of advisors composed of artists and scientists, including the renowned painter Thomas Eakins. Muybridge began the work in 1884, using both humans and animal subjects.
The Origins of Color Photography
The developed autochrome plate then would be a negative of the complementary colors, and the apple would appear green. The image would be reversed and a second development would then turn the negative into a positive, and the apple would appear red.
Karl Blossfeldt
The origins of plant photography goes back to .... ......Talbot and Atkins. Before this, in the late Middle Ages on up to the 18th century, their were books based on drawings of plant specimens for medicinal and herb purposes.Blossfeldt used glass plates. He then made positives as slides, to project to his classes. He made thousands of images.
The Origins of Color Photography
The pictorialists (we'll get into their style in a week or so) used the gum bichromate process to add color to their pictures. Introduced in 1894, and popular into the 1920s, and occasionally today, the gum bichromate process for making prints from negatives was valued for the high degree of control it gave the photographer over the appearance of the final print.
Roger Fenton
The picture The Valley of the Shadow of Death was probably the first to bring home the horrors of war with cannonballs littering the targeted road. He had to make this photograph with his assistant in the middle of a raging war. Just prior to this he came up with a photographic van (probably the first outfitting of such a portable darkroom). After the war, he returned to Britain, traveling in a new van around the country making stereoscopic views and views in a variety of formats from 8x10 inches to 14x17 inches.
The Origins of Color Photography
The print is made by brushing onto a sheet of paper a smooth coating of gum Arabic (a transparent plant secretion) dissolved in water and mixed with a pigment and a solution of potassium (or ammonium) bichromate. The coated paper was dried and exposed in sunlight or ultraviolet light under a same-sized negative (contact printed). The bichromate caused the gum Arabic to harden in proportion to the amount of light received. For example, the highlights in the final print on the negative are dark. As a result, over the corresponding section of the print the gum did not harden and could be washed away, leaving the highlight area light in tone.
The Origins of Color Photography
The starch grain mosaic served to filter the light so that the underlying bromide emulsion was selectively expose to color. The Lumieres' technique was based on the fundamentals of color theory. All colors are modifications of the colors of the spectrum. The three primary colors - blue, yellow, and red, when mixed will produce all the other colors. Each color has its opposite as a corresponding complement, which when placed beside it makes it more brilliant and vibrate optically. This had been demonstrated by the Impressionists and Seurat.
The Origins of Color Photography
The world was taken with color and its excitement sent photographers all over the world to capture the world in color. Albert Kahn wanted to create an encyclopedia of the world in color, a project that resulted in over 72,000 autochromes. And National Geographic sent its photographers to exotic shores and has over 14,000 autochromes in its archives and used many of these shots in its publication. Look in current issues and you will probably see some historic autochrome photographs. For more on autochromes see an excellent site on the Webliography.
Edward Muybridge
Three batteries of cameras allowed simultaneous photography from three different positions. A grid in the background was intended to serve as a guide for artists. Subscriptions were purchased my many luminaries in the fields of art and science, among them John Ruskin, Thomas Edison, Louis Tiffany, August Rodin, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Louis Pasteur.
August Sander
Two books were published in 1928, Karl Blossfeldt's Art Forms in Nature and Albert Renger-Patzsch's The World is Beautiful. These photographers, along with Sander, were photographing in a straight-forward style while cataloging people, plants and objects. This form of photography became known as The New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit). ______________________________________ They treated their subjects to what appeared to be objective and detached observations, giving their images a documentary quality.
The Origins of Color Photography
Unlike the Pointillists dots of color on paintings which was visible to the eye, these were not. Some would clump together so you get a strange daub of one color here and there on an autochrome. The starch grains acted like tiny little filters, absorbing their complements and letting the other colors pass through. The red rays of an apple would be absorbed by the green complementary grains and the red rays would not strike the plate; however, the violet and orange grains would allow rays to pass through, and the film underneath them would be acted upon. In development the silver bromide under the orange and violet would be reduced, and the green grains would appear because the silver under them was still intact.
Jacques Henri Lartigue
Up until that time, his only knowledge of photography came from Vogue and Harper's Bazaar magazines. He was and is considered an amateur because he did not pursue making money with his images. However, he had exceptional talent. He explained how he would teach photography, "First, one must learn how to look, how to love. It's the same with painting and writing."
Charles Jones
We know that Jones was born in England in 1866, the son of a master butcher. He was trained as a gardener and was employed on a number of private estates before retiring. We shall never know exactly how and why he become so obsessed with photographing plants. He left no notes, diaries, or writings to explain his body of work. He had been written about his work on one estate in The Gardeners' Chronicle.
August Sander
While Wall Street crashed in 1929, Sander published Face of the Time, a collection of 60 photos. The book was considered a "treasure-trove for lovers of physiognomy and an outstanding opportunity for the study of human types as stamped by profession and social class," said Thomas Mann, winner of the Nobel prize in literature. ____________________________________ In 1931, Sander gave five radio lectures on the "Nature and Development of Photography" in Cologne. He was at the height of his career.
Dr. Harlod Edgerton
With these high speed images, the shock wave often breaks the surface before the bullet enters and before it exits. A microphone picks up the sound and triggers the exposure and flash. Talbot in 1851 produced the first flash pictures by using a spark. Modern flash tubes use xenon gas, which was Edgerton's invention. All those flashes on small cameras are a direct result of Edgerton's work. All of Edgerton's images are recorded in a lab under total darkness.
