History of Photography



Introduction  
History of Photography

A World History of Photography

The Story Behind the Pictures 1827-1991

Photographers' Dictionary









 

Chapter 3

 

To represent. . . the beautiful and the sublime in nature... demands qualities alike of head and of heart, in rapt accordance with the Infinite Creative Spirit. Marcus Aurelius Root, 1864   There is only one Coliseum or Pantheon; but how many millions of potential negatives have they shed,—representatives of billions of pictures,—since they were erected! Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable. . . . Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1859

EASY OF ACCESS, generally immobile, and of acknowledged artistic appeal, landscape, nature, and architecture provided congenial subjects for the first photographers. The desire for accurate graphic transcription of scenery of all kinds— natural and constructed—had led to the perfection of the camera obscura in the first place, and it was precisely because exactness was so difficult even with the aid of this device that Talbot and others felt the need to experiment with the chemical fixation of reflected images. Beginning with the daguerreotype and the calotype, 19th-century scenic views evolved along several directions. They provided souvenirs for the new middle-class traveler, and brought the world into the homes of those unable to make such voyages. Photographs of natural phenomena provided botanists, explorers, geologists, and naturalists with the opportunity to study previously undocumented specimens and locations. And as scientific knowledge increased, as changing conditions of life in urban centers promoted new concepts of how to understand and represent the material world, the camera image itself became part of the shifting relationship between traditional and modern perceptions of nature and the built environment.

From the Renaissance up until the middle of the 18th century, painted landscape, with few exceptions, had been considered important mainly as a background for historical and religious events; landscape as such occupied a low position in the hierarchy of artistic subjects. With the relaxation of academic art strictures and the introduction during the Romantic era of a more sensuous depiction of nature, artists turned to a wider range of motifs from the material world. These extended from pastoral landscapes, seen from afar, to depictions of singular formations—water, skies, trees, rocks, and fruits of the field. As heirs to these evolving attitudes toward nature, photographers, armed with a device they believed would faithfully record actuality, approached the landscape with the conviction that the camera might perform a dual function—that photographs might reveal form and structure accurately and at the same time present the information in an artistically appealing fashion.

Landscape Daguerreotypes

Truthful representation of the real world without sentimentality presented itself as an important objective to many 19th-century scientists and intellectuals, including French novelist Gustave Flaubert, who held that the artist should be "omnipotent and invisible." This position reflected one aspect of the positivist ideas of social philosopher Auguste Comte and others who were convinced that a scientific understanding of material reality was the key to economic and social progress. The camera image was regarded as a fitting visual means for just such an impersonal representation of nature. Nevertheless, it is difficult to determine the full extent of daguerrcotyping activities with reference to views of nature, architecture, and monuments. Many plates have been lost or destroyed; others, hidden away in archives or in historical and private collections, have been surfacing in recent years, but no overall catalogs of such images exist. From the works most often seen, it seems apparent that the finely detailed daguerreotype was supremely suited to recording architectural features while somewhat less useful for pure nature. The influential British art critic John Ruskin, who in 1845 began to make his own daguerreotypes as well as to use those of others in preparing the drawings for his books on architecture, praised the verisimilitude of the daguerreotype image as "very nearly the same thing as carrying off the palace itself."

Daguerreotype scenic views made on both sides of the Atlantic reveal attitudes about nature and art of which neither the photographer nor the viewer may have been aware at the time. The stark mountains and graceless buildings in an 1840 image by Samuel Bemis of a farm scene in New Hampshire (pi. no. 97) seem to suggest the solitary and obdurate quality of the New England country-side. Admittedly, this Boston dentist, who acquired his photographic equipment from Daguerre's agent Gouraud, was working at the very dawn of photography, when materials and processes were in a state of flux. In contrast, the harmonious landscape (pi. no. 98) by Alexandre Clausel, probably made near Troves, France, in 1855, attests to not only a firmer grasp of technique but also to a greater sensitivity to the manner in which the traditional canons of landscape composition were handled.

Landscape photography evolved as a commercial enterprise with the taking of views of well-known or extraordinary natural formations for the benefit of travelers. A favorite site in the United States, Niagara Falls was daguerreotyped by Southworth and Hawes in 1845, ambrotyped as well as daguerreotyped by George Platt Babbitt in 1848, and photographed on stereographic glass plates by the Langenheim brothers in 1855. Albumen prints from collodion negatives of the Falls were made by English commercial photographers John Werge and William England in 1853 and 1859 respectively, and from dry plates by George Barker. In the Midwest, daguerreotypes of similar scenic wonders were made by Alexander Hesler and others in larger numbers than is generally appreciated today.

97. Samuel Bemis. New Hampshire Landscape, 1840.
Daguerreotype. Collection Ken Heyman, New York.

98, Alexandre Clausel. Landscape, Probably Near Troyes, France, c. 1855.
Daguerreotype. International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y.

The urban scene also was considered appropriate for the daguerreotypist. Bridge and Boats on the Thames (pi. no. 9) of 1851 by Baron Jean Baptiste Louis Gros typifies the incredible amount of detail made visible by this process, and indicates the way bodies of water might be used to unify sky and foreground, a solution that virtually became a formula for many landscape photographers. The drama of dark silhouette against a lighter sky, seen in Wilhelm Halffter's image of Berlin (pi. no. 10) demonstrates another method of treating the problem of visually unrelated rectangles of light and dark areas that the actual land- or cityscape frequently presented; this, too, became a commonplace of view photography Most landscape imagery was designed for a broad market—the buyers of engraved and lithographed scenes—so the problem of the nonduplicatable metal plate was solved by employing artists to translate the daguerreotype into engravings, aquatints, and lithographs. One of the first publishers of an extensive work based on daguerreotypes, Noel Marie Paymal Lerebours (an optical-instrument maker who had been associated with Daguerre's endeavors), made use of daguerreotyped scenes from Europe, the Near East, and the United States; these were either commissioned or purchased outright as material for engravings, with figures and fillips often added by artists. Among the daguerreotypists whose work appeared in Lerebours's Excursions daguerriennes: Vues et monuments les plus remarquables duglobe (Dagnerrinn Excursions: The World's Most Remarkable Scenes and Monuments), issued between 1840 and 1843, were Frederic GoupilFesquct, Hector Horcau (pi. no. 99), Joly de Lotebiniere, and Horace Vernet, all of whom supplied views of Egypt. Daguerreotyping, it seems, had become indispensable both for travelers who could not draw and artists who did not have the time to make drawings.

Interest in unusual scenery and structures was so strong that even though daguerreotyping in the field was not easy, a number of other similar projects were initiated in the early 1840s, generally by affluent individuals who hired guides and followed safe routes. Dr. Alexander John Ellis, a noted English philologist, was inspired by Excursions daguerriennes to conceive of Italy Daguerreotyped, comprising views of architecture engraved from full-plate daguerreotypes that he had supervised or made himself in 1840-41; the project was abandoned, although the plates still exist. The British physician Dr. George Skene Keith and a well-to-do French amateur, Joseph Philibert Girault de Prangey, took daguerreotypes, hoping to publish works on Near Eastern architecture that might show details and structure in close-ups and suggest connections between architecture and biblical history. In Switzerland, Johann Baptist Isenring, a painter and engraver turned daguerreotypist, and Franziska Mollinger, one of the early women daguerreotypists, each traveled by caravan throughout the country taking views of scenery to be engraved and published.

99. HECTOR HOREAU. Abu Simbel, 1840.
Aquatint. Collection Gerard-Levy, Paris.

Panoramic Views

Before giving way to the more practicable negative-positive process, the daguerreotype achieved a measure of additional popularity' with respect to panoramic views— images that are much wider than they are high. It will be recalled that panoramas (and in Paris, The Diorama) with minutely rendered landscape detail were among the most popular entertainments of the early 1800s in Europe and the United States.' Soon after the announcement of the daguerreotype, photographers attempted to capitalize on the appetite for this kind of encompassing yet accurate visual experience. At first, series of individual daguerreotypes arranged in contiguous order to depict a wider prospect were popular, especially in the United States. There the urge to document urban development occupied photographers in virtually all major cities, as exemplified by Fairmount Watenvorks, a series by William Southgate Porter consisting of eight plates made in Philadelphia in 1848. Photographers throughout the nation made panoramic views of the cities in an attempt to encompass the urban growth taking place before their eyes; a 360-degree panorama of Chicago made by Alexander Hesler in 1858 was possibly the first such effort. Wilderness landscape was treated similarly by the San Francisco daguerreotypist Robert Vance and by John Wesley Jones, early American daguerreotypists of western scenery. Jones took 1,500 views in the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada (none of which has survived) on which to base a painted panorama entitled The Great Pantoscope. Panoramic views also were made on single plates of extended width, achieved either by using a wide-angle lens, or by racking the camera to turn slowly in an arc while the plate moved laterally in the opposite direction. In 1845, Fredrich von Martens, a German printmaker living in Paris, was the first to work out the optical and mechanical adjustments necessary to make single panoramic daguerreotypes of his adopted city, then he turned to a similar format in collodion for Alpine landscapes. Indeed with the advent of the wet plate, the panorama came into its own, even though panoramas on paper had been made by the calotypc process. While exposure time for the glass negative often remained long, the resulting sharply detailed segments of a scene, printed and glued together to form an encompassing view, were taken as embracing reality even though the human eye could not possibly have seen the landscape in that fashion. However, these panoramas were more realistic than the lithographed bird's-eye views that were so popular. By using panoramic cameras that rotated in an arc of approximately 120 degrees, photographers might avoid the exacting calculations needed to assure that the panels of the panorama would join properly without overlaps or missing segments, but these devices could not encompass as wide an angle as the segmented panoramas and consequently seemed less dramatic. Panoramas were produced by photographers everywhere, by the Bisson brothers, Adolphe Braun, Samuel Bourne, and many now-unknown figures in Europe, Asia, and India, and by American photographers of both urban development and western wilderness. George Robinson Fardon, William Henry Jackson, Carleton E. Watkins, and especially Eadweard Muybridgc, who devoted himself to making panoramic views of San Francisco on three different occasions, were among the more successful panoramists in the United States during the collodion/albumen era (pi. no. 165).

Landscape Calotypes

Despite unparalleled clarity of detail in landscape daguerreotypes, the difficulties in making and processing exposures in the field and the problems of viewing an image subject to reflections and of replicating the image for publication made it an inefficient technology with respect to views. From the start, the duplicatable calotype was accepted by many as a more congenial means of capturing scenery, and it achieved greater sensitivity and flexibility for this purpose after improvements had been made by Louis Desire Blanquart-Evrard and Gustave Le Gray. Be-tween 1841 and about 1855, when collodion on glass sup-planted paper negatives entirely, calotypists documented cityscape, historic and exotic monuments, rural scenery, and the wilder, less-accessible terrains that were beginning to appeal to Europeans who had wearied of the more familiar settings. Because of their broad delineation, calotype views more nearly resembled graphic works such as aquatints, and this tended to increase their appeal to both artists and elitists in the intellectual community who preferred aesthetic objects to informational documents. Nevertheless, the calotype still had enough detail to recommend it as a basis for copying, as the British publication The Art Union pointed out in 1846 when it noted that painters, not being as enterprising as photographers, could depend on "sun-pictures" (calotypes) of places such as "the ruins of Babylon or the wilds of Australia" for accurate views from which they could make topographical paintings.

Somewhat easier to deal with than daguerreotyping in the field, the chemistry of the early calotype still was complicated enough to make its use in travel a problem. Nevertheless, a number of British amateurs (often aided by servants and local help) transported paper, chemicals, and cameras to the Continent and the Near East soon after Talbot's announcement. Three members of his circle— Calvert Jones, George W. Bridges, and Christopher Rice Mansel Talbot—were the first hardy souls to journey from Great Britain to Italy, Greece, and North Africa with calotype equipment. Through its high vantage point and pattern of light and shade, a view of the Porta della Ripetta in Rome (pi. no. 101) suggests that Jones (who photographed in Italy and Malta) was interested in atmospheric and artistic qualities as much as in description. Bridges, who traveled in the region for seven years, made some 1,700 pictures, which he found were subject to serious fading; a small group was published in 1858 and 1859 in an album entitled Palestine as It Is: In a Series of Photographic Views... Illustrating the Bible. Another group of calotypes of the area by Dr. Claudius Galen Wheelhouse was gathered together in an album entitled Photographic Sketches from the Shores of the Mediterranean. Ernest De Caranza in Anatolia, Maxime Du Camp in Egypt, and Pierre Tremaux in the Sudan were others among the irly figures who attempted, with varying degrees of success, to use the calotype process to photograph in North Africa and the Near East. These works were forerunners of the numerous views on paper whose appeal to die Victorian public may have been in part because they afforded a contrast between the progress visible at home and the undeveloped landscape of the region and in part because they recalled to viewers their biblical and classical heritage.

In spite of these efforts and even though Talbot placed no restrictions on the noncommercial use of calotypes, view-making did not exactly flourish in England during the first ten years of the process's existence. Instead, images of landscape and architecture achieved a pinnacle of excellence in France during the 1850s, as a result of interest by a small group of painter-photographers in an improved paper process that had evolved from experiments by Blanquart-Evrard and Le Gray. By waxing the paper negative before exposure, Le Gray achieved a transparency akin to glass, making the paper more receptive to fine detail. The spread of this improved technique in France during the early 1850s gave the calotype a new life and resulted in images of extraordinary quality. This flowering coincided with the concern among Barbizon landscape painters for capturing the quality of light and revealing the value of unspoiled nature in human experience.

The improved calotype also made conceivable the photographic campaign—government or privately sponsored commissions to produce specific images. One of the earliest was financed in 1850 by the Belgian treasury, but the most renowned, the Missions heliqgraphiques, was organized in 1851 by the Commission des Monuments his-tofiques (Commission on Historical Monuments) to pro-vide a pictorial census of France's architectural patrimony. Undertaken initially during the Second Republic, in accord with continuing efforts by Napoleon III to preserve and modernize France, it involved the documentation of aged and crumbling churches, fortresses, bridges, and castles that were slated for restoration under the guidance of the architect Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc.

The five photographers engaged in this innovative documentation were Edouard Denis Baldus, Hippolyte Bayard, Le Gray, Henri Le Secq, and O. Mestral. Photographers received itineraries and instructions, quite exact at rimes, detailing the localities to be photographed. Among the most accomplished of the group were Le Gray and Le Secq, both of whom had been trained as painters in the studio of Paul Delaroche (along with the British photographer Roger Fenton). Le Secq's Strasbourg Cathedral (pi. no. 102), one of a series of architectural monuments, is an exhilarating organization of masses of sculptural detail. Le Gray (see Profile), in whose studio many calotypists first learned the process, was a demanding technician who also was involved in making collodion negatives; his images will be discussed shordy in the context of developments in that material. Little is known of Mestral, a former daguerreotypist and an associate of Le Gray, other than that he photographed in Brittany and Normandy on his own and from the Dordogne southward in company with Le Gray. The image of the bridge Pont Valentre (pi. no. 103) in Cahors, included because of impending plans to restore what was then considered the finest example of medieval military architecture in France, suggests a distinctive feeling for volume and silhouette.

101. REV. CALVERT JONES. Porta della Ripetta, Rome, 1846.
Calotype. Science Museum, London.

102. HENRI LE SECQ. Strasbourg Cathedral, 1851. Calotype.
International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y.

IO3. O. MESTRAL. Cahors: Pont Valentre, c. 1851. Calotype.
Caisse NationaJc des Monuments Historiques et des Sites, Paris.
 

Unhappily, the Missions project never reached full fruition. Negatives—some 300—and prints were filed away without being reproduced or published, either because the project's sole aim was to establish an archive or because the photographers depicted these ancient structures in too favorable a light for the images to serve as propaganda for restoration efforts. Individually, they were used by architects and masons working under Viollet-le-Duc's guidance in matching and fabricating decorative elements that had been destroyed. (More than a century later, these early photographs still proved to be useful guides in the restoration of ancient monuments.) Nevertheless, the government of France under Napoleon III continued to regard photography—whether calotype or collodion/ albumen—as a tool integral to its expansive domestic and foreign programs, commissioning documentation of the countryside, the railroad lines, and of natural disasters as evidence of its concern for national programs and problems. Baldus produced about 30 large-format negatives of the flooding of the Rhone River in 1856 (pi. no. 104). It is apparent from the amplitude of his vision and the sense of structure in the example seen here that no dichotomy existed in the photographer's mind between landscape art and documentation.

Not all French landscape calotypists were trained artists, nor was their work invariably commissioned. Indeed, one of the intriguing aspects of the epoch is that scientists as well as painters found the paper negative a congenial process for representing nature. Victor Regnault, director of the Sevres porcelain factory (after 1852) and president of both the French Academy of Sciences and the Societe Franfaise de Photographic, had first become curious about paper photography when Talbot disclosed the process, but only pursued this interest in 1851 after improvements had been made by Blanquart- Evrard. Using the waxed-paper process, he experimented with exposure and produced a number of idyllic, mist-shrouded views of the countryside around the factory, among them The Banks of the Seine at Sevres (pi. no. 105), in which he included the everyday objects of rural existence such as casks and barrow. Louis Robert, chief of the painters and gilders at the porcelain factory, worked both at Sevres and Versailles, using the calotype process before turning to albumen on glass; a number of his calotypcs were included in Blanquart-Evrard's 1853 publication Souvenirs de Versailles (pi. no. 106). These images display a sensibility that is similar to that of Barbizon painters in their lyrical approach to the homely and simple aspects and objects of nature and rural life.

British amateur photographers welcomed the improved calotype for its greater sensitivity and definition. As heirs to picturesque and topographical traditions in landscape imagery, they sought to maintain a delicate balance between affective expression and the descriptive clarity that the improved process made possible. At times, English camera images of buildings and their surroundings seem to reflect the notion put forth by contemporary writers that architectural structures have expressive physiognomies much like those of humans. For example, Guy's Cliffe, Warwickshire (pi. no. 107) by the English amateur Robert Henry Cheney brings to mind a melancholy spirit, a phrase used by Ruskin to describe the character of certain kinds of buildings. The most celebrated English photographer of this period, Roger Fenton (to be discussed shortly), was extravagantly praised in the British press for the marked "character" of his architectural images.

Benjamin Brecknell Turner, an English businessman who made pure landscape calotypes (pi. no. 108) as well as portraits and architectural views, found the paper negative so sympathetic to his vision of untrammeled nature that he continued to work with the material until 1862, long after most photographers had switched to glass plates. On the other hand, Thomas Keith, a Scottish physician, practiced the calotype for only a very few years, and then only on occasions when the quality of light enabled him to make negatives of great tonal range. Keith's interest in the expressive nature of light, inspired perhaps by his acquaintance with Hill and Adamson, is apparent in images made in 1856 on the island of Iona, among them Doorway, St. Oran's Chapel (pi. no. 109), where the factual record of ancient church architecture is given unusual force by strongly accentuated illumination.

104. EDOUARD DENIS BALDUS. The Flooding of the Rhone at Avignon, 1856.
Calotype. Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques et des Sites, Paris.

105. VICTOR REGNAULT. The Banks of the Seine at Sevres, 1851-52.
Calotype. Collection Andre Jammes, Paris. Art Institute of Chicago.

106. LOUIS ROBERT. Versailles, Neptune Basin, c. 1853.
Calotype. Collection Andre Jammes, Paris. Art Institute of Chicago

107. ROBERT HENRY CHENEY. Guy's Cliffe, Warwickshire, 1850s.
 Albumen print. Collection Centre Canadien d'Architecture/Canadian
Centre for Architecture, Montreal.

108. BENJAMIN BRECKNELL TURNER. Old Willows, c. 1856.
Waxed paper negative. Collection Andre Jammes, Paris. Art Institute of Chicago.

109. THOMAS KEITH. Doorway, St. Gran's Chapel, Iona, 1856.
Calotype. Thomas Keith Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.
 

Calotyping also appealed to Englishmen who made their homes outside the British Isles, among them Maxwell Lyte and John Stewart, who lived in Pau in the Pyrenees in the 1850s. Stewart's views of the rugged terrain of this region (pi. no. 110), published by Blanquart-Evrard and exhibited in England, were praised by his father-in-law Sir John Herschcl for the artistic effects of their "superb combination of rock, mountain, forest and water." Both Lyte and Stewart were members of the Societe Frangaise de Photographic Along with Thomas Sutton, the first in Britain to use Blanquart-Evrard's process in a publishing venture, they kept open the channels of communication between the French and British regarding the latest in photochemical technology.

French and British imperial interest in the countries of the Near East, Egypt in particular, continued to lure photographers using paper (and later glass) negatives into these regions. In 1849, the wealthy French journalist Maxime Du Camp, accompanied by the young Flaubert, was sent on an official photographic mission to Egypt. Trained by Le Gray and equipped with calotyping appa-ratus "for die purpose of securing, along the way, and with the aid of this marvelous means of reproduction, views of monuments and copies of inscriptions," Du Camp also was expected to make facsimile casts of hieroglyphic inscriptions. The calotypes, printed in 1852 by Blanquart-Evrard for his first publication, Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie, 11 display a concern for establishing accurate scale, as seen in the human yardstick provided by a native assistant in The Colossus of Abu Simbel (pi. no. 111), but they also demonstrate the definition and clarity that the improved calotype made possible.

Five years later, the amateur French archaeologist Augustc Salzmann briefly used the calotype with similar authority to make documents of architectural ruins in Jerusalem in order to "render a service to science" and to help solve a controversy about the antiquity of the monuments. Working with an assistant, Salzmann was able to produce about 150 paper negatives under difficult circum-stances; these, too, were printed at the Blanquart-Evrard establishment at Lille. In addition to an avowed scientific aim, images such as Jerusalem, Islamic Fountain (pi. no. 112) indicate the photographer's mastery of composition and sensitivity to the effects of light. The work of both Du Camp and Salzmann indicates that in the hands of imaginative individuals the camera image might develop a unique aesthetic, an ability to handle volume and light in an evocative manner while also documenting actuality.

110. JOHN STEWART. Passage in the Pyrenees, n.d.
Calotype. Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh

111. MAXIME DU CAMP. The Colossus of Abu Simbel, c. 1850.
Calotype. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

112. AUGUSTE SALZMANN. Jerusalem, Islamic Fountain, 1854.
Calotype. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Landscapes in Colbdion/Albumen

The new collodion technology, discovered and publicized by Archer in 1850 and 1851, forced landscape photographers and documentarians operating in the field to transport an entire darkroom—tent, trays, scales, chemicals, and even distilled water—besides cameras and glass plates (pi. nos. 113 and 114). It may seem astonishing today that, under such circumstances, this technique should have been considered an improvement over the calotypc, which also was somewhat more sensitive to natural tonalities and had greater range. But paper negatives required time-consuming skills for complete realization. With the promise of sharper and more predictable results in less time, the glass negative with its coating of collodion and silver-iodide preempted all other processes for the next 30 years. Together with the albumen print, which retained the sharpness of the image because the printing paper was also coated with an emulsion, collodion made the mechanization of the landscape view possible, turning the scenic landscape into an item of consumption, and landscape photography into photo-business.

Limitations in the sensitivity of the collodion material itself were responsible for evoking contradictory aesthetic attitudes about images made from glass plates. Because of the limited responsiveness of silver-iodide to the colors of spectral light other than blue (and ultraviolet radiation), landscape images that displayed blank white skies and dark, relatively undifferentiated foregrounds were not un-common. While commercial publishers seem not to have been unduly disturbed, this characteristic was decried by Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, one of the first serious English critics of photography. Writing in the Quarterly Review in 1857, she observed, "If the sky be given, therefore, the landscape remains black and underdone; if the landscape be rendered, the impatient action of light has burnt out all cloud form in one blaze of white.'" She added that the collodion landscape photograph was unable to represent the tonal gradations that the eye accepts as denoting spatial recession, and that by its combined lack of atmosphere and too great precision, the image showed both too little and too much. Among others who objected to the lack of realism in the extreme contrast between dark and light areas in landscape photographs was Hermann Wilhelm Yogel, an influential German photographer, critic, and photo-chemical researcher, whose opinions appeared frequently in American periodicals during the 1860s and '70s, and who was successful in his efforts to improve the sensitivity of the silver halides to the various colors of light.

Photographers concerned with artistic landscapes avoided these problems with what was called "artifice." This involved using masks and combining two negatives on the same print—one for the sky and one for the ground—-or employing hand-manipulations to remove un-attractive mottled and gray areas. Valley of the Huisne (pi. no. 115) by Camille Silvy, praised as a "gem" when exhibited in 1858, exemplifies the possibilities of this technique for creating scenes that a contemporary critic characterized as "rich in exquisite and varied detail, with broad shadows stealing over the whole." Le Gray, whose role in paper photography has been noted, used double printing in a number of collodion seascapes made at Sete (Cettc) (pi. no. 116) around 1856—works similar in theme and style to seascapes painted by French artists Eugene Delacroix and Gustave Courbet at about the same time. Less traditionally picturesque than Silvy's scene, Le Gray transformed clouds, sea, and rocks into an evocative arrangement of volume and light, into an "abstraction called art," in today's language. That composite landscapes of this period could be and often were unconvincingly pieced together is apparent from contemporary criticism that complained of pictures with clouds that were not reflected in the water or of foregrounds taken in early morning joined to skies taken at noon.

113-114. UNKNOWN. European-style Portable Darkroom Tent, 1877.
Wood engravings from A History and Handbook of Photography, edited by J. Thompson, 1877.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; gift of Spencer Bickerton, 1938.

115. CAMILLE SILVY. Valley of the Huisne, France, 1858.
Albumen print. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

116. GUSTAVE LE GRAY. Brig Upon the Water, 1856.
Albumen. Albumen print. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

see also: Gustave Le Gray (collection)
 

The government of Napoleon III, which had promoted the calotype as a means of documenting both scientific progress and royal patronage, continued to regard collodion images in the same light. What at first glance may seem to be landscape pure and simple, such as views taken in the Alps by the Bisson brothers, was motivated by the Imperial desire to celebrate territorial acquisition—in this case the ceding to France of Nice and Savoy by the Kingdom of Sardinia. During the collodion era, the Bissons had rapidly extended their range of subjects to embrace art reproductions, architecture, and landscapes, often in very large format. Passage des Ecbelles (pi. no. 117), one of the six views made by Auguste-Rosalie as a participant in the second scaling of Mont Blanc in 1862, integrates the description of distinctive geological formations with a classical approach to composition, achieving in its balance of forms and tonalities a work of unusually expressive power. A similar evocation of solitary nature unaltered by human effort can be seen in Gorge of the Tamine (pi. no. 118) by Charles Soulier, a professional view-maker who is better known for his urbane Paris scenes than for Alpine landscapes. In view of steadily encroaching urbanization, these images suggest a public nostalgia for virgin nature that will be encountered again, more forcefully, in camera images of the American wilderness during the 1860s and '70s. Scenic views found an avid entrepreneur as well as photographer in Adolphe Braun. With studios in both Paris and Alsace, he was not only a prolific view-maker, but a large-scale publisher who supplied prints in a variety of formats—stereoscope to panoramic—to subscribers in England, France, Germany, and the United States. Responding to the imperial desire to make Alsatians aware of their French heritage, Braun first photographed the landscape and monuments of this province and then went on to make more than 4,000 images of Alpine, Black Forest, and Vosges mountain scenery, eventually printing in carbon instead of albumen in order to insure print stability. Braun's views, of which Lake Steamers at Winter Mooring, Switzerland (pi. no. 119) is an outstanding example, display a skillful blend of information and artistry but also present the landscape as accessible by the inclusion of human figures or structures.

117. AUGUSTE -ROSALIE BISSON. Passage des Echeles (Ascent of Mi. Blanc), 1862.
Albumen print. Bibliothequc Nationale, Paris.
 

Auguste-Rosalie Bisson (see collection)

(1826 - 1900) was a French photographer, active from 1841 to the year of his death, 1900.
He was born and died in Paris and was the son of the heraldic painter, Louis-François Bisson.
He is known as the first person that took pictures from the summit of Mont Blanc in summer 1861.

see also: Auguste Rosalie Bisson. The Ascent of Mont Blanc, 1862

118. CHARLES SOULIER. Gorge of the Tamine, c. 1865.
Albumen print. Collection Gerard-Levy, Paris.

119. ADOLPHE BRAUN. Lake Steamers at Winter Mooring, Switzerland, c. 1865.
Carbon print. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

England, too, had landscapists with an authentic respect for what the collodion process could accomplish, but government patronage was limited to royal acclaim and, at times, purchase of individual images by members of the royal family, with documentations of the countryside and historical monuments initiated by photographers themselves or by private publishers rather than by the state. Fenton, the commanding figure in English photography before his retirement in 1862, had made calotypes of architectural monuments in Russia in 1852. He changed to collodion in 1853, and after his return from the Crimean War (see Chapter 4), he had another traveling darkroom constructed to facilitate making views of rugged rocks, mountain gorges, waterfalls, and ruins—romantic themes to which thee British turned as industrialization advanced. Contemporary critics on both sides of the Channel considered his landscapes to have reached the heights to which camera images could aspire, especially with respect to capturing atmosphere and a sense of aerial perspective. However, because Fenton refused to combine negatives or do handwork, images with strong geometric pattern, such as The Terrace and Park, Harewood House (pi. no. 120), were criticized as offensive. A number of Fenton's landscapes were published as stereographs in The Stereoscopic Maagazine, as photoengravings in Photographic Art Treasures and as albumen prints in albums and books devoted to native landscape—these being the forms in which scenic images found an audience in the 1850s and 60s.

Albumen prints became popular as book illustration between 1855 and 1885 when, it is believed, more than a thousand albums and books, sponsored by private organizations and public personalities, were published, mainly in England, Scotland, France, India, and the United States. Original photographs provided artistic, biographical, historical, and scientific illustration as well as topographical images to supplement and enhance texts on a wide variety of subjects. Even the small, relativety undetailed stereograph view was considered appropriate to illustrate scientific and travel books; one of the first to use the double image in this manner was C. Piazzi Smyth's Teneriffe, which appeared in 1858 with 18 stereograph views of the barren island landscape where Smyth and his party conducted astronomical experiments. It was soon followed by The Stereoscopic Magazine, a monthly publication that lasted five years and included still lifts and land- and cityscape stereographs. The success of illustration with photographic prints of any kind may be ascribed to their fidelity and cheapness and to the relative rapidity with which paper prints could be glued into the publication, while the decline of this practice was the result of even more efficient photomechanical methods that made possible the printing of text and image at the same time.

Wales and Scodand provided other English photographers besides Fenton with localities for wilderness images, among them Francis Bedford who made GlasPwil Cascade (pi. no. 122) in 1865. In common with many landscapists of the period, Bedford issued stereographs as well as larger-format views because they were inexpensive and in popular demand. However, it was the Scottish photographer Wilson, probably the most successful of the view publishers, who is believed to have had the world's largest stock of scenic images in the 1880s (pi. no. 121). Interested also in instantaneous pictures (see Chapter 6), Wilson noted that "considerable watching and waiting is necessary before the effect turns up which is both capable and worthy of being taken." Using a tent darkroom in the field to prepare the exposures, this meticulous former portrait painter employed over 30 assistants in his Aberdeen printing establishment to carefully wash and gold-tone the prints in order to remove all chemical residue. As a con-sequence, Wilson albumen prints are of greater richness and stability than was usual for the era. Other British landscapists of the collodion era included Frith, William England, and James Valentine whose successful enterprise in Dundee, Scotland, turned out views similar to those by Wilson. While competently composed and well-produced, the absence of atmosphere and feeling in commercial views were contributing factors in the endeavors that began in the 1870s to fashion a new aesthetic for landscape photography.

120. ROGER FENTON. The Terrace and Park, Harewood House, 1861.
Albumen print. Royal Photographic Society Bath, England.

121. GEORGE WASHINGTON WILSON. The Silver Strand, Loch Katrine, c. 1875-80.
Albumen print. George Washington Wilson Collection, Aberdeen University Library.

122. FRANCIS BEDFORD. Glas Pwll Cascade (Lifnant Valley), 1865.
Albumen print. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Similar ideas about landscape motivated German view-makers of the 1850s and '60s. Outstanding calotype views had been made in the early 1850s by Franz Hanfstaengl and Hermann Krone, before these individuals changed to collodion. Krone, the more versatile of the two, who advertised his Photogmphisches Institut in Dresden as a source for scenic views and stereographs as well as portraits, was commissioned by the crown to produce views of the countryside and cityscape throughout Saxony, which resulted in the appearance in 1872 of his Komigs-Album der Stadte Saehsens (King's Album of Saxon Cities) to celebrate the golden wedding anniversary of the rulers of Saxony. Though less idealized than some, these views of Dresden and its natural environs, exemplified by Waterfall in Saxon Switzerland (pi. no. 123), still reflect the romantic attitude of the view painters of the early 19th century. Romanticism also suffuses Bridge Near King's Monument (pi. no. 124), an 1866 image by Vogel, but the focus of this work is light and not locality. In a still different vein, studies of forest foliage and trees (pi. no. 125) made in the mid- to Iate-186os and typified by the work of Gerd Volkerling suggest the influence of the Barbizon style of naturalism.

Landscape photography developed in the Scandinavian countries in the 1860s and '70s in response to the tourism that brought affluent British and German travelers to the rocky coasts of this region in search of untamed nature. Photographers Marcus Selmer of Denmark, Axel Lindahl and Per Adolf Thoren of Sweden, and the Norwegians Hans Abel, Knud Knudsen, and Martin Skoien, all supplied good souvenir images to voyagers who, there as elsewhere, wished to individualize their recollections with picturesque travel images. The most dramatic of these views—the mist-shrouded mountains and tormented ice and rock formations (pi. no. 126) captured by Knudsen during his 35 or so years as an outstanding scenic photographer—reflect the prominent influence of the German Romantic style of landscape painting in that they not only serve as remembrances of places visited but encapsulate a sense of the sublime.

123. HERMANN KRONE. Waterfall in Saxon Switzerland, 1857.
Albumen print. Deutsches Museum, Munich.

124. HERMANN VOGEL. Bridge near King's Monument, 1866.
Albumen print. Agfa-Gevaert Foto-Historama, Cologne, Germany.

125. GERD VOLKERLING. Oak Trees in Dessau, 1867.
Albumen print. Agfa-Gevaert Foto-Historama, Cologne, Germany.

126. KNUD KNUDSEN. Torghatten, Nordland, c. 1885.
Albumen print. Picture Collection, Bergen University Library, Bergen, Norway.

Landscape photographs of Italy were made almost exclusively as tourist souvenirs. A continuing stream of travelers from northern Europe and the United States ensured an income for a group of excellent foreign and Italian photographers. Here, especially, the romantic taste for ruins was easily indulged, with most images including at least a piece of ancient sculpture, building, or garden. As photography historian Robert Sobicszek has pointed out, because Italy was seen as the home of civilization, early photographers were able to infuse their views with a sense of the romantic past at almost every turn. In Grotto of Neptune, Tivoli (pi. no. 127), taken in the early 1860s, Robert MacPherson, a Scottish physician who set himself up as an art dealer in Rome, captured the strong shadows that suggest unfathomable and ancient mysteries while fashioning an almost abstract pattern of tonalities and textures. Interest in romantic effects is apparent also in Night View of the Roman Forum (pi. no. 128) by Gioacchino Altobelli, a native Roman who at times collaborated with his countryman Pompeo Molins on scenic views. Altobelli, later employed by the Italian Railroad Company, was considered by contemporaries to be especially adept at combining negatives to recreate the sense of moonlight on the ruins—a popular image because of the touristic tradition of visiting Roman ruins by night.

The best known by far of the Italian view-makers were the Brogi family and the Alinari brothers; the latter established a studio in Florence that is still in existence. Like Braun in France, the Alinari ran a mass-production photo-graphic publishing business specializing in art reproductions, but their stock also included images of fruit and flowers and views of famous monuments and structures in Rome and Florence. In the south, Giorgio Sommer, of German origin, began a similar but smaller operation in Naples in 1857, providing genre scenes as well as landscapes. In Venice, tourist views were supplied by Carlo Ponti, an optical-instrument maker of fine artistic sensitivity that is apparent in San Giorgio Maggiore Seen from the Ducal Palace (pi. no. 129), made in the early 1870s. Given the long tradition in Italy of vedute—small-scale topographical scenes—it is not surprising that camera views of such subject matter should so easily have become accomplished and accepted.

Other European nations on the Mediterranean such as Spain and Greece, while renowned for scenic beauty and ruins, were not documented with nearly the same enterprise as Italy, probably because they were outside the itineraries of many 19th-century travelers. The best-known photographs of Spain were made by Charles Clifford, an expatriate Englishman living in Madrid, who was court photographer to Queen Isabella II. Working also in other cities than the capital, Clifford photographed art treasures as well as landscapes and architectural subjects; his view The Court of the Albambra in Granada (pi. no. 130) suggests a sense of sunlit quietude while still capturing the extraordinary richness of the interior carving. As one might anticipate, views of Greece, particularly the Acropolis, were somewhat more common than of Spain and also more commonplace. Photographed by native and foreign photographers, the most evocative are by James Robertson, Jean Walther, and William Stillman, an American associated with the British Pre-Raphaelites who had turned to photography as a result of disappointment with his painting. Stillman's images, published in 1870 as The Acropolis of Athens Illustrated Picturesquely and Architecturally (pi. no. 131), were printed by the carbon process, which in England was called Autotype.

127. ROBERT MACPHERSON. Grotto of Neptune, Tivoli, 1861.
Albumen print. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

128. GIOACCHINO ALTOBELLI. Night View of the Roman Forum, 1865-75.
Albumen print, nrernational Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y.

129. CARLO PONTI. San Giorgio Maggiore Seen from the Ducal Palace, 1870s.
Albumen print. Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Mass.

130. CHARLES CLIFFORD. The Court of the Alhambra in Granada. c. 1856.
Albumen print. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

131. WILLIAM STILLMAN. Interior of the Parthenon front the Western Gate, 1869.
Carbon print. Photograph Collection, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.