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History of Photography
Introduction
History of Photography
A World History of Photography
The Story Behind the Pictures 1827-1991
Photographers' Dictionary


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Chapter 5
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PHOTOGRAPHY AND ART:
THE FIRST PHASE
1839-1890
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....of all the
delusions that possess the human breast, few are so intractable as
those about art.
Lady Elizabeth
Eastlake, 1857
When
photography was invented artists thought that it would bring ruin
to art but it is shown that photography has been an ally of art,
an educator of taste more powerful than a hundred academies of
Design would have been... .
"Photography
and Chromo-lithography," 1868
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"Is PHOTOGRAPHY ART?" may seem a
pointless question today. Surrounded as we arc by thousands of photographs
of even' description, most of us take for granted that in addition to
supplying information and seducing customers, camera images also serve as
decoration, afford spiritual enrichment, and provide significant insights
into the passing scene. But in the decades following the discovery of
photography, this question reflected the search for ways to fit the
mechanical medium into the traditional schemes of artistic expression.
Responses by photographers, which included the selection of appropriate
themes and the creation of synthetic works, established directions that
continue to animate photography today. And while some photographers used
the camera to emulate the subjects and styles of "high" art, graphic
artists turned to photographs for information and ideas. The intriguing
interplay that ensued also has remained a significant issue in the visual
arts. Photographs that reproduce art objects also have had a profound
effect on the democratization of public taste and knowledge, changing
public perceptions of visual culture and making possible the establishment
of art history as a serious discipline.
The much-publicized pronouncement
by painter Paul Delaroche that the daguerreotype signaled the end of
painting is perplexing because this clever artist also forecast the
usefulness of the medium for graphic artists in a letter to Francpis Arago
in 1839. Nevertheless, it is symptomatic of the swing between the outright
rejection and qualified acceptance of the medium that was fairly typical
of the artistic establishment. It was satirized in a group of cartoons by
Nadar (pi. nos. 240-241) depicting an artistic community that denied
photography's claims while using the medium to improve its own product.
Discussion of the role of photography in art was especially spirited in
France, where the internal policies of the Second Empire had created a
large pool of artists, but it also was taken up by important voices in
England. In both countries, public interest in this topic was a reflection
of the belief that national stature and achievement in the arts were
related. In central and southern Europe and the United States, where the
arts played a lesser role, these matters were less frequently addressed.
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240-241. NADAR (GASPARD
Felix TOURNACHON). TWO cartoons. "Photography asking for just a
little place in the exhibition of fine arts."
Engraving from Petit journal pour rire, 1855. "The ingratitude of
painting refusing the smallest place in its exhibition to
photography
to whom it owes so much." Engravings from Le journal amusant,
1857. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.
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From the maze of conflicting
statements and heated articles on the subject, three main positions about
the potential of camera art emerged. The simplest, entertained by many
painters and a section of the public, was that photographs should not be
considered "art" because they were made with a mechanical device and by
physical and chemical phenomena instead of by human hand and spirit; to
some, camera images seemed to have more in common with fabric produced by
machinery in a mill than with handmade creations fired by inspiration. The
second widely held view, shared by painters, some photographers, and some
critics, was that photographs would be useful to art but should not be
considered equal in creativeness to drawing and painting. Lastly, by
assuming that the process was comparable to other replicatable techniques
such as etching and lithography, a fair number of individuals realized
that camera images were or could be as significant as handmade works of
art and that they might have a beneficial influence on the arts and on
culture in general.
Artists reacted to photography in
various ways. Many portrait painters—miniaturists in particular—who
realized that photography represented the "handwriting on the wall" became
involved with daguerreotyping or paper photography; some incorporated it
with painting, as in the case of Queen Victoria's painter Henry Collen,
while others renounced painting altogether. Still other painters, the most
prominent among them Ingres, began almost immediately to use photography
to make a record of their own output and also to provide themselves with
source material for poses and backgrounds, vigorously denying at the same
time its influence on their vision or its claims as art. While there is no
direct evidence to indicate that Ingres painted from daguerreotypes, it
has been pointed out that in pose, cropping, and tonal range, the
portraits made by the painter after Daguerre's invention virtually can be
characterized as "enlarged daguerreotypes." Yet, this politically and
artistically conservative artist was outspoken in contesting photography's
claims as art as well as the rights of photographers to legal protection
when their images were used without permission. The irony of the situation
was not lost on French journalist Ernest Lacan, who observed that
"photography is like a mistress whom one cherishes and hides, about whom
one speaks with joy but does not want others to mention."
The view that photographs might be
worthwhile to artists—acceptable for collecting facts, eliminating the
drudgery of study from the live model, and expanding the possibilities of
verisimilitude—was enunciated in considerable detail by Lacan and Francis
Wey. The latter, a philologist as well as an art and literary critic, who
eventually recognized that camera images could be inspired as well as
informative, suggested that they would lead to greater naturalness in the
graphic depiction of anatomy, clothing, likeness, expression, and
landscape configuration. By studying photographs, true artists, he
claimed, would be relieved of menial tasks and become free to devote
themselves to the more important spiritual aspects of their work, while
inept hacks would be driven from the field of graphic art. Wey left
unstated what the incompetent artist might do as an alternative, but
according to the influential French critic and poet Baudelaire, writing in
response to an exhibition of photography at the Salon of 1859, lazy and "unendowed"
painters would become photographers. Fired by a belief in art as an
imaginative embodiment of cultivated ideas and dreams, Baudelaire regarded
photography as "a very humble servant of art and science, like printing
and stenography"—a medium largely unable to transcend "external reality."
For this critic as well as for other idealists, symbolists, and aesthetes,
photography was linked with "the great industrial madness" of the time,
which in their eyes exercised disastrous consequences on the spiritual
qualities of life and art. Somewhat later, the noted art critic Charles
Blanc made the same point when he observed that because "photography
copies everything and explains nothing, it is blind to the realm of the
spirit."
Eugene Delacroix was the most
prominent of the French artists who welcomed photography as helpmate but
recognized its limitations. Regretting that "such a wonderful invention"
had arrived so late in his lifetime, he still took lessons in
daguerrcotyping, made cliche verve prints, joined the recently established
Societe beliographique, and both commissioned and collected photographs.
These included studies of the nude made by the amateur Eugene Durieu (pi.
no. 242), with whom the artist collaborated on arranging the poses.
Delacroix's enthusiasm for the medium can be sensed in a journal entry
noting that if photographs were used as they should be, an artist might
"raise himself to heights that we do not yet know."
The question of whether the
photograph was document or art aroused interest in England also. A Popular
Treatise on the Art of Photography, an 1841 work by Robert Hunt,
emphasized processes rather than aesthetic matters, but noted that "an
improvement of public taste," which had devolved from the fact that
"nature in her rudest forms is more beautiful than any human production,"
already was discernible because of photography. The most important
statement on this matter was the previously mentioned unsigned article by
Lady Eastlakc (pi. no. 243), "Photography." Concerned with the
relationship of "truth" and "reality" to "beauty," she contended that
while depictions of the first two qualities were acceptable functions of
the camera image, art expression was expected to be beautiful also. And
beauty was a result of refinement, taste, spirituality, genius, or
intellect—qualities not found in minutely detailed super-realistic visual
descriptions made by machine. This formulation was addressed to collodion-albumen
technology and enabled her to exempt the "Rembrandt-like" calotypes of
Hill and Adamson from her condemnation. In addition to the broadly handled
treatment seen in her own portrait or in The Misses Binny and Miss Monro
(pi. no. 52), for example, Hill's and Adamson's images expressed the
refinement of sentiment that Lady Eastlake considered an artistic
necessity. She concluded that while photography had a role to play, it
should not be "constrained" into "competition" with art; a more stringent
viewpoint led critic Philip Gilbert Hamerton to dismiss camera images as
"narrow in range, emphatic in assertion, telling one truth for ten
falsehoods."
These writers reflected the
opposition of a section of the cultural elite in England and France to the
"cheapening of art," which the growing acceptance and purchase of camera
pictures by the middle class represented. Collodion technology made
photographic images a common sight in the shop windows of Regent Street
and Piccadilly in London and the commercial boulevards of Paris. In
London, for example, there were at the time some 130 commercial
establishments (besides well-known individual photographers like Fenton
and Rejlander) where portraits, landscapes, genre scenes, and photographic
reproductions of works of art could be bought in regular and stereograph
formats. This appeal to the middle class convinced the elite that
photographs would foster a taste for verisimilitude instead of ideality,
even though some critics recognized that the work of individual
photographers might display an uplifting style and substance that was
consonant with art.
John Ruskin, the most eminent
figure in both English and American art at mid-century, first welcomed
photography as the only 19th-century mechanical invention of value, and
then reversed himself completely and denounced it as trivial. He made and
collected daguerreotypes as well as paper prints of architectural and
landscape subjects, and counseled their use to students and readers of his
Elements of Drawing. Both academic and Pre-Raphaelite painters, among them
William Frith, John Millais, Ford Madox Brown, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and
the American Pre-Raphaelite William Stillman, employed photographs of
costumes, interiors, models, and landscapes taken from various vantage
points as study materials. While they insisted that their canvases were
painted strictly from nature. some of their productions seem close enough
in vision to extant photographs to suggest "that the camera has insinuated
itself into the work. English painters may have been even more reticent
than the French about acknowledging their use of photographs because of
the frequent insistence in the British press that art must be made by hand
to display a high order of feeling and inspiration.
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242. EUGENE DURIEU. Figure Study
No. 6, c. 1853.
Albumen print. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.
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Jean Louis
Marie Eugene Durieu (see
collection)
(From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia)
Jean Louis Marie
Eugène Durieu (1800; Nîmes, France – 1874; Paris, France) was an early
French photographer of nudes, known for making studies for Eugène
Delacroix. Some of Durieu's nudes were used by Delacroix to creating his
own paintings and drawings.
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EUGENE DURIEU.
Draped female nude
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EUGENE DURIEU.
Draped female nude
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see also:
The Story Behind the Pictures 1827-1991
Eugene Durieu/Eugene Delacroix.
Nude from Behind
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The 20 years following the
introduction of collodion in 1851 was a period of increased activity by
the photographic community to advance the medium's claims as art.
Societies and publications were founded in England, France, Germany,
Italy, and the United States, with the Photographic Society of London (now
the Royal Photographic Society) and the Societe Frangaise de Photographic,
established in 1853 and 1854 respectively, still in existence.
Professional publications, including La Lumiere in Paris, the Photographic
Journal in London, and others in Italy, Germany, and the United States,
were in the vanguard of discussions about photographic art, devoting space
to reviews of exhibitions of painting as well as photography.
Between 1851 and 1862, individual
photographers, among them Antoine Claudet, Andre Adolphc Disderi, and
numbers of the now-forgotten, joined artistic photographers Rejlander,
Henry Peach Robinson, and William Lake Price in publishing articles and
letters to the professional journals that attempted to analyze the
aesthetic similarities and differences between graphic works and
photographs and to decide if photography was or was not Art.
Notwithstanding their long-winded, often repetitious contentions, the
photographers and their allies evolved a point of view about the medium
that still forms the basis of photographic aesthetics today. Summed up in
a piece by an unknown author that appeared in the Photographic Journal at
the beginning of 1862, ostensibly it addressed the immediate question of
whether photography should be hung in the Fine Arts or Industrial Section
of the forth-coming International Exposition. The author observed that
"the question is not whether photography is fine art per se—neither
painting nor sculpture can make that claim— but whether it is capable of
artistic expression; whether in the hands of a true artist its productions
become works of art." A similar idea, more succinctly stated, had
illuminated the introduction by the French naturalist Louis Figuier to the
Catalogue of the 1859 Salon of Photography (the exhibition that apparently
inspired Baudelaire's diatribe). Figuier was one of a number of scientists
of the era who were convinced that artistic expression and mass taste
would be improved by photography, just as the general quality of human
life would benefit from applied science. He observed that "Until now, the
artist has had the brush, the pencil and the burin; now, in addition, he
has the photographic lens. The lens is an instrument like the pencil and
die brush, and photography is a process like engraving and drawing, for
what makes an artist is not the process but the feeling."
The leading French painters of
landscapes and humble peasant scenes—known as the Barbizon group—as well
as the Realists and Impressionists who concerned themselves with the
depiction of mundane reality, accepted photographs more generously than
Ingres and the Salon painters, in part because of their scientific
interest in light and in the accurate depiction of tonal values. A number
of them, including Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, and Jean Francois
Millet, collected calotypes and albumen prints, apparently agreeing with
Antoine Claudet that when a painter desires to imitate nature, there could
be nothing better than to consult the "exacting mirror" of a photo graph.
These artists considered the camera a "wonderfully obedient slave," and
while not all of them painted from photographs directly, such camera
"notes" had an important effect on their handling of light and tonality.
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243. DAVID OCTAVIUS HILL and
ROBERT ADAMSON. Portrait of Elizabeth Rigby, Later Lady Eastlake,
c. 1845. Calotype. National Portrait Gallery, London.
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see also:
David Octavius Hill
and
Robert Adamson (collection)
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Frequenting the forests around
Arras and Fontainebleau, the haunt also of a number of photographers,
Barbizon painters became acquainted with cliche verre a drawing on a
collodion glass plate that is a hybrid form—part drawing, part
photographic print. Known since the early days of photography and included
in both Hunt's treatise and a French work on graphic art processes, it was
taught to many artists visiting the region by Adalbert and Eugene Cuvelier.
It could be used as a sketching technique, as in a set of Five Landscapes
(pi. no. 244) by Corot, or to yield a more finely detailed print,
exemplified by Woman Emptying a Bucket (pi. no. 245), an 1862 work by
Millet. Cliche verre seems to have been exceptionally congenial to
painters working in and around Barbizon, but an American artist, John W.
Ehninger, supervised an album of poetry illustrated by this technique.
Entitled Autograph Etchings by American Artists, it included the work of
Asher B. Durand (pi. no. 246), one of the nation's most prominent
mid-century landscapists. In England, its primary use was as a method of
reproduction (called electrography) rather than as an expressive medium.
The effect of photography on the
handmade arts be-came irreversible with the spread of collodion
technology. Besides using camera images as studies of models and draperies
and for portraits that were to be enlarged and printed on canvas, painters
began to incorporate in their work documentary information and
unconventional points of view gleaned from familiarity with all sorts of
photographs. The high horizons, blurred figures, and asymmetrical
croppings visible in many Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings,
which seem to establish a relationship between these works and camera
vision have been discussed by Scharf, Van Deren Coke, and others. To cite
only one of numerous examples of the complex fashion in which painters
incorporated camera vision into their work, an 1870 collaborative painting
by the Americans Frederic E. Church, G. P. A. Healy, and Jenis McEntee,
entitled The Arch of Titus (pi. no. 247) makes use of a studio portrait of
the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his daughter Edith (pi.
no. 248) as a focal point. But in addition to this obvious usage, the
extreme contrast between monochromatic sky and the dark under portion of
the arch, the transparency of the shadow areas, and the pronounced
perspective of the view through the arch all suggest the close study of
photographs. Artists using photographs in this way usually did not obtain
permission or give credit to photographers, and it is not surprising that
a number of court cases occurred involving better-known photographers who
contested the right of painters to use their images without permission, a
situation that has continued to bedevil photographers up to the present.
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244. JEAN BAPTISTE CAMILLE
COROT.
Five Landscapes, 1856.
Cliche verre.
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245. JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET.
Woman Emptying A Bucket, 1862.
Founders Society, Detroit Institute of the Arts.
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246. ASHER B. DURAXD. Trie
Pool, No.1, 1859. Cliche verre albumen print from Autograph Etchings
by American Anists, supervised by John W. Ehninger, 1859. Stuart
Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, New York Public
Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
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247. G.P.A. HEALY, FREDERIC
E. CHURCH, AND JERVIS MCENTEE.
The Arch of Titus, 1871.
Oil on canvas. Newark Museum, Newark, N.J.;
Bequest of J. Ackerman Coles.
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248. UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER.
Longfellow and Daughter in the Healy Studio in Rome. 1868-69.
Albumen print. Marie de Mare Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, D.C
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While painters were using
photographs and critics were arguing the merits of this practice, how did
the photographers themselves feel about the medium's status as art? Coming
from a spectrum of occupations and class positions, and approaching the
medium with differing expectations, they displayed a range of attitudes.
Several, among them Sir William Newton, a painter-photographer who helped
found the Photographic Society of London, and the fashionable society
portraitist Camillc Silvy, were out-spoken in claiming that the medium was
valuable only for its documentary veracity. Others, including Fcnton,
Edouard Denis Baldus, and Charles Negre, endeavored to infuse photographic
documentation with aesthetic character in the belief that camera images
were capable of expression, while still others, notably Rejlander and
Robinson, not only emulated the conventional subject matter of paintings
but manipulated their photographs to produce "picturesque" images.
Starting in the early 1850s,
photographic prints were shown in exhibition rooms and galleries and
selected for inclusion in expositions where problems of classification
sometimes resulted. For instance, nine Le Gray calotypes, submitted to the
1859 Salon, were first displayed among the lithographs and then, when
their technique became known, were removed to the science section. For the
remainder of the century, photographers attempted to have camera images
included in the fine arts sections of the expositions, but indecision on
the part of selection committees continued. On the other hand, exhibitions
organized by the photographic societies in the 1850s at times included
many hundreds of images that were displayed according to the conventions
of the academic painting salons, eliciting criticism in the press and
eventual repudiation in the late 1880s. "How is it possible," wrote an
English reviewer in 1856 "for photographs, whose merit consists in their
accuracy and minuteness of detail, to be seen to advantage when piled,
tier upon tier, on the crowded walls of an exhibition room?" As if in
answer to this criticism, photographers turned to the album as a format
for viewing original photographs.
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Photography and the Nude
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That camera studies of both nudes
and costumed figures would be useful to artists had been recognized by
dagucrreotypists since the 1840s; Hermann Krone's Nude Study (pi. no. 249)
is typical of the conventional Academy poses produced for this trade. A
calotype of a woman with a pitcher, by former French painter Julien Vallou
de Villeneuve (pi. no. 251), exemplifies the numerous studies on paper of
models costumed as domestic servants—designed to serve the same
clientele—that probably were inspired by the work of French painters like
Francois Bonvin; these simply posed and dramatically lighted figure
studies continued a tradition of painted genre imagery with which
photography—on the occasions when it was judged to be art—was invariably
associated. Even well-known photographers provided studies of all aspects
of the human figure for artists, as can be seen in Rejlander's Study of
Hands (pi. no. 252).
Predictably, photographs of nudes
appealed to others besides graphic artists. Indeed, soon after the
invention of the medium, daguerreotypes (followed by ambrotypes. albumen
prints, and stereographs, often hand-colored to increase the appearance of
naturalness) were made expressly for salacious purposes (pi. no. 250).
Photographic journals inveighed against this abuse of the camera, and some
studios were raided as a result of court findings in Britain and the
United States that photographs of nudes were obscene, but erotic and
pornographic images continued to find an interested market. More to the
point is the fact that to many Victorians no clear distinctions existed
between studies of the nude made for artists, those done for personal
expression, and those intended as titillating commercial images. In a
milieu where people were scandalized by realistic paintings of unclothed
figures except in mythological or historical contexts, where Ruskin was
allowed to destroy J. M. W. Turner's erotic works, it would have been too
much to expect that the even more naturalistic camera depiction of nudity
would be accepted, no matter what purpose the images were designed to
serve.
This was true even when such
images were conceived with high artistic principles in mind, as with
Rejlander's Two Ways of Life (pi. no. 253), to be discussed shortly. The
same Victorian moral code no doubt accounts for Lewis Carroll's decision
to destroy the negatives of his own artistically conceived images of nude
young girls which he realized "so utterly defied convention," and to have
the photographs of the daughters of his friends, including Beatrice Hatch
(pi. no. 334), painted in by a colorist who supplied the fanciful outdoor
decor. In this context, a comparison between the painted and photographed
nudes by the American painter Thomas Eakins, who made some 200 such camera
studies, is instructive. Photographs of a group of swimmers (pi. no.
254)—made by Eakins or a student—for the painting The Swimming Hole (pi.
no. 255) capture movement and anatomical details with lively accuracy.
Nevertheless, the painter, apparently concerned with avoiding anything
that his Philadelphia patrons and critics might find offensive, discreetly
(but unavailingly) rearranged the poses of the nude boys in the final
work.
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249. HERMANN KRONE. Nude Study, c.
1850.
Daguerreotype. Deutschcs Museum. Munich.
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250. UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER. Nude,
1870s.
Albumen print. Private Collection
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251. JULIEN VALLOU DE VILLENEUVE.
Woman with Pitcher, c. 1855.
Calotype. Bibliotheque Nationalc, Paris.
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JULIEN VALLOU DE VILLENEUVE
(see collection)
(1795-1866)
French lithographer, photographer and painter. From his debut at the
Salon of 1814 as a painter he regularly exhibited lithographed images of
daily life, fashion, regional costumes and erotica, many done after the
work of English and Dutch artists. He also published his own lithographed
compositions, mostly 'female types'. With Achille Deveria and others he
contributed to the compendium of romantic erotica called Imagerie galante
(Paris, 1830), which provocatively updated an erotic mode found in
18th-century engravings. The subjects were pictorial versions of stock
characters from popular novels and plays.
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JULIEN VALLOU DE VILLENEUVE.
Female nude, standing
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JULIEN VALLOU DE
VILLENEUVE. Female nude, reclining, ca. 1853
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252. OSCAR GUSTAV REJLANDER. Study
of Hands, c. 1854.
Albumen print. Gernsheim Collection, Humanities Research Center,
University of Texas, Austin.
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OSCAR GUSTAV REJLANDER
(see collection)
(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
Oscar Gustave Rejlander
(Sweden 1813 – Clapham, London on 18 January 1875) was a pioneering
Victorian art photographer.
His exact date of birth is uncertain, but was probably 1813. He was the
son of Carl Gustaf Rejlander, a stonemason and Swedish Army Officer. He
studied art in Rome where he saw photographs of the sights, and then
initially settled in Lincoln, England. He abandoned his original
profession as a painter and portrait miniaturist, apparently after seeing
how well a photograph captured the fold of a sleeve. Other accounts say he
was inspired by one of Fox Talbot's assistants.
He set up as a portraitist in the industrial Midlands town of
Wolverhampton, probably around 1846. Around 1850 he learned the wet-collodion
and waxed-paper processes at great speed with Nicholas Henneman in London,
and then changed his business to that of a photography studio. He
undertook genre work and portraiture. He also created erotic work, using
as models the circus girls of Mme Wharton, street children and child
prostitutes - his Charlotte Baker series remains notorious.
Rejlander undertook many experiments to perfect his photography, including
combination printing from around 1853, which it is possible he may have
invented. He was a friend of photographer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better
know by the nom de plume Lewis Carroll), who collected Rejlander's early
child work and corresponded with him on technical matters. Rejlander later
created one of the best known & most revealing portraits of Dodgson.
His early work only slightly sullied his later reputation, and he
participated in the Paris Exhibition of 1855. In 1857 he made his
best-known allegorical work, The Two Ways of Life. This was a seamlessly
montaged combination print made of thirty-two images (akin to the use of
Photoshop today, but then far more difficult to achieve) in about six
weeks. First exhibited at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857,
the work shows two youths being offered guidance by a patriarch. Each
youth looks toward a section of a stage-like tableaux vivant - one youth
is shown the virtuous pleasures and the other the sinful pleasures. The
image's partial nudity was deemed 'indecent' by some - and those familiar
with Rejlander's more commercial work might also suspect that prostitutes
had been used as cheap models. But the 'indecency' faded when Queen
Victoria ordered a 10-guinea copy to give to Prince Albert.
Despite this royal patronage, controversy about The Two Ways of Life in
strait-laced Scotland in 1858 led to a secession of a large group from the
Photographic Society of Scotland, the secessionists founding the Edinburgh
Photographic Society in 1861. They objected to the picture being shown
with one half of it concealed by drapes. The picture was later shown at
the Birmingham Photographic Society with no such furore or censorship.
However the Photographic Society of Scotland later made amends and invited
Rejlander to a grand dinner in his honour in 1866, held to open an
exhibition that included many of his pictures.
The success of The Two Ways of Life, and membership of the Royal
Photographic Society of London, gave him an entree into London
respectability. He moved his studio to Malden Road, London around 1862 and
further experimented with double exposure, photomontage, photographic
manipulation and retouching. He became a leading expert in photographic
techniques, lecturing and publishing widely, and sold portfolios of work
through bookshops and art dealers. He also found subject-matter in London,
photographing homeless London street children to produce popular
'social-protest' pictures such as "Poor Joe" and "Homeless".
He married Mary Bull in 1862, who was twenty-four years his junior. Mary
had been his photographic model in Wolverhampton since she was aged 14.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson visited Rejlander's Malden Road studio in 1863
and was inspired to set up his own studio. Around 1863 Rejlander visited
the Isle of Wight and collaborated with Julia Margaret Cameron.
Some of Rejlander's images were purchased as drawing-aids to Victorian
painters of repute, such as Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema. In 1872 his
photography illustrated Darwin's classic treatise on The Expression of the
Emotions in Man and Animals.
He became seriously ill from about 1874. Rejlander died in 1875 with
several claims on his estate, and costly funeral expenses. The Edinburgh
Photographic Society raised money for his widow on Rejlander's death, and
helped set up the Rejlander Memorial Fund.
Rejlander's ideas and techniques were taken up by other photographers and
this, to some extent, justifies labelling him as the father of art
photography.
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253. OSCAR GUSTAV REJLANDER. Two
Ways of Life, 1857.
Albumen print. International Museum of Photography at George Eastman
House, Rochester, N.Y.
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OSCAR GUSTAV REJLANDER. Two
Ways of Life, 1857.
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Thomas Eakins
(see collection)
(b Philadelphia, PA, 25 July 1844; d
Philadelphia, 25 June 1916).
American painter, sculptor
and photographer. He was a portrait painter who chose
most of his sitters and represented them in powerful but
often
unflattering physical and psychological terms.
Although unsuccessful throughout much of his career,
since the 1930s he has been regarded as one
of the
greatest American painters of his era.
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254. THOMAS EAKINS OR STUDENT.
Eakins's Students at the Site of "Tbe Swimming Hole," 1883.
Gelatin silver print. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, D.C.
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255. THOMAS EAKINS. The Swimming
Hole, 1883.
Oil on canvas. Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.
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Thomas Eakins Carrying a Woman,
1885. Photograph, circle of Eakins
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THOMAS EAKINS. Untitled.
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THOMAS EAKINS. Boys Boxing in atelier
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Thomas Eakins and J. Laurie Wallace at the Shore,
ca. 1883
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THOMAS EAKINS. Boy in Artelier
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Vintage
photo nude woman
(see collection)
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