Art Styles in the Industrial 19th Century


 

Art, Technology, & Industry


 

(Neoclassicism, Romanticism and Art Styles in 19th century  Art Map)




Etienne-Tules Marey
 

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Pioneers of Photography

The first experiments with the chemical effect produced by light on certain substances were undertaken by Johann Heinrich Schulze and Carl Wilhelm Scheele in the 18th century. Not long after, in 1802, Thomas Wedgwood, son of porcelain manufacturer Josiah, began to experiment with producing images by a photographic process. He managed to obtain silhouette images of leaves and other objects on paper and leather that had been impregnated with silver nitrate and silver chloride. However, it was primarily through the pioneering work of three men - Joseph Nicephore Niepce (1765- 1833) and Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre (1789-1851) in France and William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) in England - that photography was born.
The world's earliest surviving photograph - now in the Gernsheim Collection, Texas - was produced by the French inventor Niepce. In 1826, he succeeded in making a negative photographic image of the view from his workroom on a sheet of pewter covered with bitumen of Judea.
At the same time, the French artist and inventor Daguerre was earning out experiments in the reproduction of images by a photochemical process. In 1829. he formed a partnership with Niepce, and continued their research after Niepce's death in 1833. In 1839. he sold the rights for the daguerreotype and the heliograph (the name given to Niepce's process) to the French government: his work was first presented at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences in Paris in the same year. Described in detail in a booklet published in 1839. the process involved a silver-plated sheet of copper made sensitive to light by exposure to iodine vapour, which produced a light-sensitive layer of silver iodide on the surface of the plate. After being placed in the camera for exposure, the plate was then exposed to mercury vapour to produce an image. At first, the image was fixed in a salt solution, but the method was later improved by the use of hyposulphate (hypo), the discovery of astronomer Sir John Herschel (1792-1871). Unaware of the experiments being carried out by the French inventors, the British scientist Talbot was also working on a technique to record accurate images. On his honeymoon in 1833, he made use of a camera lucida - a sketching aid that enabled the user to produce an accurate drawing of a scene on paper. His frustration at the poor results led to his experimentation with photography, and he discovered a process of exposing sensitized paper in the camera and then developing it to form a negative image. This could then be contact-printed onto another sheet of sensitized paper to produce a positive print. The process, called "calotype", differed from the daguerreotype in that the resultant negative image could be used to make multiple positive prints, whereas each daguerreotype was a unique image. Talbot published details of his photographic process early in 1839, six months before the French government released details of the daguerreotype.

 

Joseph Nicephore Niepce (1765- 1833)
1826

French inventor. Niépce and his brother Claude (1763–1828) were little-known scientists who developed a functioning internal combustion engine and a sugar extraction process, both of which were commercial failures. Their fortune became depleted by a lifetime of experimenting. Harmant (1980) has suggested that their photographic experiments originated in the late 18th century; certainly Nicéphore had used nitric acid to fix the images of the camera obscura on silver chloride paper by 1816. Although no known examples survive, this was an advance on the methods of Thomas Wedgwood, who was unable to preserve his images.


 

William Henry Fox Talbot and some colleagues outside his photographic printing establishment,
Reading, c 1845.

 Talbot set up this photographic printing works to mass-produce photographs for the publication of
The Pencil of Nature.

 

Alessandro Guardassoni
Self-portrait with Camera
c 1860
 Instituto Guaiandi, Bologna

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THE ALINARI BROTHERS

Tlie Alinari brothers' company, founded in 1852 in Florence by Leopoldo, Romualdo, and Giuseppe Alinari, was one of the first to devote itself to photography and publishing. The brothers specialized in photographing works of art and architecture, as well as portraiture and landscape photography. The company built up an amazing collection from their numerous photographic assignments, charting the events that took place in the second half of the 19th century. Their illustrated catalogues, published from 1865 onwards, contained a wide selection of pictures from an archive comprising thousands of plates and photographs.
 

The photographic studio of the Alinari brothers.
Archivio Alinari, Florence.
 

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NADAR

Gaspard-Felix Tournachon (1820-1910), better known as Nadar - the pseudonym affectionately given to him by his friends after his nickname tourne adard (bitter sting) — is recognized as a photographic pioneer. His eccentric personality was first revealed in the caricatures that he drew for reviews and periodicals from the 1850s onwards; each conveyed his highly individual standpoint - ironic, keenly observant, and hyper-critical. Nadar was particularly drawn to social events and the literary and artistic climate of 19th-century Paris. He first became involved in photography when planning a series of lithographic caricature portraits of 270 famous people of the time. In order to complete this project, evocatively called the Pantheon, he recruited various collaborators, completed many drawings, and took numerous photographs. The operation was repeated for his second edition of the Pantheon, in which a few changes were made. Nadar's main interest, however, seems to have been in investigating the possibilities of photography as a medium, and he persuaded Gustave Le Gray, the doyen of photography of his day, to give lessons to him and his brother, who was a painter. In 1854, Nadar opened his own studio at 113 Rue Saint Lazare in Paris, where he mastered the wet collodion process and specialized in portraits. Until the advent of electric light, he exploited the limited daylight in his studio and achieved original results; his subjects were lit from one side, leaving parts of their faces and body in shadow. This technique sculpted the expressions of the faces in tones that ranged from white to black, while the absence of a painted backdrop accentuated their faces. Nadar's many portraits of the famous personalities who came to his studio, including Balzac, Delacroix, and Rossini, are documented by the notes and letters that passed between the photographer and his subjects. In I860, when he had already gained a high reputation in his field, Nadar moved to the Rue des Capucines, to a building that had been used as a photographic studio by Le Gray and the Bisson Brothers. On the front of the building was a huge illuminated facsimile of Nadar's signature. Helped occasionally by his son Paul, he undertook novel projects, such as aerial photography from balloons flying over Paris. He even went so far as to build a prototype steam-powered helicopter (1863). During the same period, he experimented with photographs taken by artificial light; this led to his shooting of the catacombs and the network of sewers under Paris using electric light.

 

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The World Through the Camera

Portraiture was one of the earliest beneficiaries of Daguerre's photographic technique. At first, the exposure times required were too long, but various improvements were soon introduced that were to reduce drastically exposure times, although the subjects still had to strike lengthy poses. The contrast and strength of the image greatly improved, and people were intrigued and fascinated by the immediacy and vitality of these daguerreotypes. During the 1840s, photographers like Claudet, Vaillant, and Derussy took thousands of portrait photographs. These included the 400 taken by Scottish landscape painter David Octavius Hill for a project in 1843; lie invited fellow Scotsman Robert Adamson to help him complete the task. Photography also proved to be an ideal method of recording historical sites and views of faraway countries, despite the unwieldly equipment, which was difficult to set up outside a studio, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey and Jules Itier took about 1,000 photographs during the 1840s while travelling in China and Egypt, and in 1845, Frederick Langenheim captured pictures of Niagara Falls on five plates.
In the same decade, Talbot used his calotype process to take pictures for the illustration of printed matter, publishing in 1844 the first of six parts that were to form The Pencil of Nature - 24 plates with text and photographs by Talbot himself.
Early photographic processes could now provide the various branches of science - from the natural sciences to the observation of the universe - with an effective investigative tool, even though the technical potential of the photographic medium had not yet been fully explored. It was not until later in the 19th century, for example, that photo-mechanical methods of reproducing photographs made the mass distribution of copies feasible. In 1850, Louis Blanquart-Evrard invented the albumen process for printing photographs on paper; this proved very popular, and he opened a photographic printing works in 1851. In the same year, Frederick Scott Archer published his discovery of a process in which collodion acted as a binding agent to keep light-sensitive chemicals on the surface of a glass plate and produce glass negatives. Subsequently, improved collodion and, later, gelatine emulsions were developed and produced on an industrial scale. In 1854, the Societe Francaise de Photographie was founded to promote the work of artists and photographers, following the demise of the Societe Heliographique. Portrait and reportage photographs were joined by the novelty cartes de visite -photographs pasted onto small rectangles of cardboard. Several poses were recorded on each negative, using special cameras to capture the multiple exposures. Soon, these cartes de visite were produced in their millions by virtually every photographic studio in the world. Photography was soon being used for an increasingly diverse range of enterprises. It reached the world of industry via the great international exhibitions, and so much interest was shown in the documentation of exhibits in lavishly illustrated catalogues that people began to appreciate its potential importance in the sphere of advertising. Meanwhile, in the US, photography was used to promote national unity, with Charles Weed, Carlton E. Watkins, and Eadweard Muybridge all undertaking separate expeditions to record the scenery of the Yosemite Valley in California. Exploration of Central America was recorded in 47 views of important Mexican historical monuments by Desire Chanay, Cites et Ruines Americaines, and in 1856 Moulin's photographs provided an original photographic record of little-known episodes in the colonization of Africa. However, photography's greatest potential was not fully realized until cameras were mass-produced in a form that could be used by anyone. In 1888, George Eastman introduced the first Kodak camera and launched the first commercially available celluloid roll film the following year. However, the cost of film and equipment remained expensive, and it was not until he developed the Brownie box camera in the early 1900s that photography could be enjoyed equally by professional and amateur.

 

Maxime du Camp, the colossus of Ramesses II at the Temple of Abu Simbel, 1849-51, calotype.
Gernsheim Collection, Austin, Texas.

From the 1840s, photography was increasingly used for the documentation of archaeological sites.

Lamberto Loria
Three Young Women of Matu
1891-98
Museo Preistonco ed Etnografico Luigi Pigorini, Rome

In the field of scientific photography photographing different races
was considered important for anthropological study.


 

Carlton E. Watkins, view of Yosemite Valley, California, 1861.

Yosemite National Park Museum, California. Photography was an important tool for the study of geographical features.


 

Two photographs of family groups in a portfolio, 1850.
Family portraits were now substitutes for miniatures.
Photographs could be incorporated easily into jewellery such as necklaces, bracelets, or brooches.


 

Robert Macpherson, Rome, a Fountain, and the Temple of Vesta,
albumen print, c 1858.
 Gernsheim Collection, Austin, Texas.


 

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Auguste Bertsch
photomicrograph of a louse
1853
Societe Francaise de Photographie, Paris

SCIENTIFIC PHOTOGRAPHY

The different forms of scientific-photography were to have a considerable influence on 20th-century art. The naturalistic-abstraction of Paul Klee, for example, refers explicitly to the world revealed by the microscope, while the dynamic quality of the images captured by chronophotography were to lead to many of the Futurist and Cubist experiments at the start of the 20th century. In 1853, Auguste Bertsch and Towler Kingsley took photomicrographs of insects and crystals with a solar microscope. Photomicrography involves taking photographs of very-small objects by attaching a camera to the eyepiece of the microscope. (The reverse method - making small photographs of objects by optical reduction - is known as microphotography; Dagron, 1870.)
In the field of astronomy, telescopes and other traditional optical equipment used for observations were equipped with cameras that made it possible to carry out detailed studies of the Moon's surface (Warren de La Rue, 1852, and Lewis Rutherford, 1865) and the recording of events of particular scientific interest, such as solar eclipses (Porro and Quinet, March 14 1858). In 1856, photographs were first taken during gas and hot-air balloon flights for geophysical surveys of territory and mapping, as well as photo-reconnaissance for military purposes. Two years later, Nadar and the Tissandier brothers took the first aerial photographs of Paris. In 1861, Aime Laussedat experimented with a photogram-metric technique of recording and measuring, which was used by E. Deville to survey the entire surface of the Rocky Mountains. In astronomical photography, definition and precision were achieved by using special plates and improved chemical processing, as demonstrated in a photograph of a comet taken by Pierre-Jules-Cesar Janssen in 1881, and in the Atlas Photographique de la Lune (1896-1909) by M. Loewy and P. Puiseux. Photography also proved invaluable in medicine. Etienne-Tules Marey (1830-1903) first carried out studies on the physiology of movement, based on the analysis of a sequence of photographs. These were taken using a "photographic gun." which could achieve exposure speeds of one 720th of a second, lie also invented chronophotography, used to visualize the structure of movement on a single image. It was Marey's work that inspired Marcel Duchamp to produce his Nude Descending a Staircase studies in 1911-12.
   
 

Etienne-Jules Marey
Long and High Jump
1886
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris
 

Etienne-Jules Marey


 

Etienne-Jules Marey

see collections:


History of Photography