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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 6
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NEW TECHNOLOGY,
NEW VISION,
NEW USERS
1875-1925
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...photography, from being
merely another way of procuring or making images of things already
seen by our eyes, has become a means of ocular awareness of things
that our eyes can never see directly... it has effected a
very complete revolution in the ways we use our eyes and... in the
kinds of things our minds permit our eyes to tell us.
William M. Ivins, Jr., 1953
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IN THE FIFTY YEARS that followed the announcement that pictures could
be made with sunlight, processes and ideas were continuously tried and
discarded as people involved with the medium sought answers to the
technical problems created by the expanding aesthetic, commercial, and
scientific demands upon photography. As these needs un-folded it became
apparent that professional photographers were looking for more sensitive
film and for stable, standardized products to document an ever-widening
range of subjects; that the scientific community required refined and
specialized equipment; that artistic photographers were seeking materials
of long tonal range and permanence. Still another constituency was added
to those who made and used camera images when at the end of the 1880s
simplified apparatus and processing methods—"push button"
photography—turned potentially everyone into a photographer. During the
same period, the persistent struggle to produce images in color in the
camera was won, even though the solution turned out to be one of limited
application. This explosion of products, techniques, and processes
(detailed in A Short Technical History, Part II) produced significant
changes in the kinds of images made and how they were used, and as a
consequence established new audiences for photographic images. In turn,
the increasing numbers of images provided information that altered public
attitudes and perceptions of reality.
By 1890, photographic technology had taken wing. Wet collodion, in use
for some 25 years before going the way of the daguerreotype, was
supplanted by the dry plate—a silver-bromide gelatin emulsion available
first on glass plates and later on lightweight, flexible celluloid film.
This material was not only easier to use; it was more sensitive to light,
thus shortening exposure time, and eventually it became
orthochromatic—corrected for all colors of the spectrum except red (and
blue, to which it was oversensitive). Camera design also flourished;
during the final decades of the 19th century, photographers could choose
from among a variety of instruments designed for different purposes. For
professional work in the field there were view cameras in several sizes
with extension bellows, swings, and tilts; for the serious amateur,
hand-held reflex cameras. Stercographic and panoramic apparatus was
available, as were tiny detective cameras—so named because they might be
concealed in clothing or in other artifacts to make picture-taking
unobtrusive. Concurrently, manufacturers began to produce faster lenses,
shutters, exposure meters, flash equipment—all of which gave the
photographer greater control over capturing on the negative what was
occurring in actuality. At the same time, printing papers that satisfied
both artistic and commercial purposes appeared on the market.
Standardization—the rational production of photo-graphic materials and
processes—accelerated toward the end of the 19th century for a number of
reasons. Basic among them was the continuing trend in Western capitalist
countries toward the regularization of all manufactured goods and many
services, with photography considered an intrinsic part of industrial
capacity. Another stimulus was the growth of the chemical and dye
industries, especially in Germany after its unification in 1871, which led
to competition (in other countries, too) in the manufacture of new
sensitizing materials and more refined apparatus. Possibly the most
important stimulus was the realization that photography had shown itself
to be more than a craft that reproduced what the eye could see, that its
potential as a tool for revealing scientific, sociological, and physical
phenomena never actually seen had transformed it into the most significant
pictorial means in modern industrial society. And as printing technology
progressed to make possible the direct transcription of photographic
illustration in news and informational media (see Chapter 10), the
pressure for more accurate equipment and flexible materials increased.
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Photography from the Air
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The expanded roles that the medium would presently assume had been
hinted at soon after mid-century as photographers attempted to depict the
physical universe from unusual vantage points or under abnormal conditions
using the unwieldy collodion wet plate. For example, in connection with
the growing interest in "flying machines," efforts were begun in the late
1850s to photograph from the sky, to reaffirm scientifically the vision of
artists who from the Renaissance on had imagined a "bird's-eye view" of
the earth. In 1858, Nadar became the first to succeed- producing a
somewhat murky image of Paris while stripped to the skin (for lightness)
and concealed behind a dark curtain the basket of a captive balloon manned
by the famous Goddard brothers. He spent the next two years promoting his
own lighter-than-air creation (see Profile), but his greatest success in
aerial photography stemmed from the views of the Arc de Triomphe (pi. no.
287) taken in 1868 with a multilens camera from the basket of another
balloon, the Hippodrome.
Aside from the romance associated with the balloon-called the "ultimate
engine of democracy" by the French— the practical nature of balloon
transport was demonstrated when it turned out to be one of the two ways
that mail could be delivered to and from the besieged city of Paris during
the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). The other way, by carrier pigeon,
involved photography in that the written messages were reduced
microphotographically and later enlarged for reading in a projection
enlarger, foreshadowing the V-mail of the second World War.
At about the same time as Nadar's experiments— 1860—the Boston
photographer James Wallace Black, a partner in the astrophotographic
research conducted at Harvard by John Adams Whipple (see Chapter 1),
ascended 1,200 feet in a balloon tethered over the Boston Common. Black
used a Voigtlander camera and a shutter of his own contrivance to make the
first aerial photographs in America, six of which are extant. Although the
extraordinary feat of viewing the city "as the eagle and the wild goose
saw it" (pi. no. 288) was praised by Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the
photographer himself suggested that reconnaissance photography by balloon
be tried during the Civil War, no action was taken. Despite attempts by
several other photographers to make topographical views from the air, at
times with balloon and kite cameras, the airborne camera seems not to have
evoked further interest until the 20th century.
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287. NADAR (GASPARD FELIX TOURNACHON). The Arc de Triomphe and the
Grand Boulevards, Paris, from a Balloon, 1868.
Modem gelatin silver print from the original negative. Caisse Nationale
des Monuments Historiques et des Sites, Paris.
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NADAR (see collection)
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288. JAMES WALLACE BLACK. Boston from the Air, 1860.
Albumen print. Boston Public Library, Boston.
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Photography by Artificial Light
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Another group of experiments undertaken to extend the scope of the
medium soon after its invention involved artificial illumination. Electric
batteries made it possible for Talbot in 1851 to produce a legible image
of a swiftly revolving piece of newsprint (see below) and also provided
artificial light for Nadar's experiments in this realm. Using Bunsen
batteries and reflectors, Nadar first made portraits and then, in 1861,
took the complicated apparatus below the streets to photograph in the
sewers and catacombs (ancient burial grounds) of Paris. Some of the
exposures took as long as 18 minutes, necessitating the substitution of
manikins for humans (pi. no. 289), but despite having to cart lights,
reflectors, rolls of wire, and camera and collodion equipment through
narrow and humid corridors, Nadar produced about 100 underground scenes.
Views of the pipes and drains, the walls of bones, and the tomb markers
that constitute the nether regions of the city demonstrated the medium's
potential to disclose visual in-formation about a wide range of physical
facts.
Commercial portraiture by electric light using Bunsen cells was
attempted by Adolphe Ost in Vienna in 1864, but it was not until the end
of the following decade that the quality of portraits made by electric
light became almost indistinguishable from those made with natural
lighting. Because electric batteries initially were both weak and costly,
photographers experimented with other chemical agents, including
oxyhydrogen flame directed against lime (limelight) and magnesium wire.
The latter substance was first put to the test in attempts to picture mine
interiors in England in 1864; soon afterward it made possible images taken
inside the Great Pyramid, and in 1866 the American Charles Waldack
employed it for a series inside Mammoth Cave in Kentucky (pi. no. 290).
This substance was also used for indoor portraiture; a group portrait, one
of a series of early experiments with magnesium light made by John C.
Browne in 1865, includes the editor of the Philadelphia Photographer, the
journal most eager to promote new photographic technologies in the United
States. In its most common form—flash-powder (used from the 1880s on)—
magnesium emitted a cloud of acrid white smoke when ignited, and its
intense light created harsh tonal contrasts, but until the flash bulb was
invented in Germany in 1925 there was no practical alternative portable
lighting agent.
Urban nighttime views presented another intriguing problem for
photographers, but during most of the 19th century the gaslight used in
street lamps was so weak in its illuminating power that exposures of from
three to four hours were required to represent the tonalities of the night
scene. In an early experiment by Whipple in 1863, photographs of the
Boston Common, where the illumination had been boosted with the aid of
electric light, still required exposures about 180 times as long as those
taken in sun-light. Following the gradual electrification of cities from
the 1880s on, there were more frequent attempts to capture people,
carriages, and especially the street lighting itself at night. Works by
Paul Martin in London and Alfred Stieglitz in New York in the 1890s are
among the numbers of images testifying to the fact that both documentary
and pictorialist photographers were fascinated by night scenery,
especially the reflections of electric lights on glistening pavements and
the tonal contrasts between virgin snow and velvety night sky.
The keen interest shown by Talbot and other photographers in objects
and phenomena not ordinarily visible to the human eye (see Chapter 1), in
conjunction with the increasing need on the part of the scientific
community for precise information about microorganisms, prompted
improvements in the design of equipment and methods that enabled
scientists to study such matter as the structure of crystals and the forms
of cells. At the same time, astrophotography gained ground with the
capability of photographing, besides sun and moon, planetary bodies; by
1877 it was possible to contemplate a complete photographic mapping of the
fixed star firmament. In the following decade.
Austrian and German photographers succeeded in making clear images of
the phases of lightning in the night sky. Toward the end of the century,
X-rays—spectral rays that penetrate opaque structures—were discovered by
Conrad Wilhclm Roentgen (recipient of a Nobel prize in 1901) at the
University of Wurzberg, stimulating their immediate use in camera images
for medical diagnoses; within a year more than a thousand publications
about X-rays appeared.
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289. NADAR (GASPARD FELIX TOURNACHON). Workmen in the Pans Catacombs,
1861.
Albumen print. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.
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290. CHARLES WALDACK. Beyond the "Bridge of Sighs" from Mammoth Cave
Views, 1866.
Albumen print. New-York Historical Society; George T. Bagoe Collection,
gift of Mrs. Elihu Spicer.
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The Photography of Movement
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The most dramatic developments in terms of popular acclaim occurred in
the realm of motion study as the camera began to provide artists,
scientists, and the lay person with visual evidence about ordinary matters
that the unaided eye could not see, such as walking and running. Talbot's
success in stopping action with the aid of an electric flash (mentioned
earlier) was acclaimed because it pointed the way to photographing "with
all the animation of full life . . . the most agile dancer during her
rapid movements ... the bird of swiftest flight during its pas-sage,"' but
these experiments were not followed up until the 1880s, when Austrian
scientist Ernst Mach, working in Prague, made exposures of flying
projectiles, sound waves, and air streams using electric flash as a
lighting source. Incidentally, although concerned with providing
scientific information, Mach also wished these images to be visually
pleasing, arguing that aesthetic quality in no way detracts from
usefulness. Simultaneously, experimentation in stop action photography
also took off in other directions— based on the capacity of the
short-focal-length lens used on stereograph cameras to freeze motion in
street photography and the other on the ability of successive exposures to
record the discrete stages of a movement.
Throughout the 19th century, the need to institute proper training
programs for horses and the desire by painters of history pictures for
greater accuracy in the depiction of battle scenes had led to efforts by
scientists to graphically analyze motion; after its invention, photography
became the favored instrument for this endeavor. Beginning in 1872, the
analysis of motion by the camera was carried on for some 20 years by
Eadweard Muybridge and Thomas Eakins in the United States, by Ericnne
Jules Marey in France, and by Ottomar Anschutz in Germany.
Muybridge's prominent role in this adventure was the result of what he
called an "exceptionally felicitous alliance" with Leland Stanford,
ex-governor of California, president of the Central Pacific Railroad, and
owner of the Great Palo Alto Breeding Ranch (who nevertheless eventually
disavowed the collaboration). Curiosity among racing enthusiasts about the
positions of the legs of a horse running at full gallop prompted Stanford
to call upon Muybridge—by 1872 the most renowned cameraman in the American
West—to photograph his trotter Occident in motion. Though not remarkably
clear, the first images from Muybridge's camera established to Stanford's
saris-faction that at one point all four of the animal's hooves left the
ground (pi. no. 292)—although not, it should be added, in the position
usually shown in painted representations."
This experiment initiated a collaboration, beginning in 1877, between
Stanford and Muybridge with the goal of providing visual information about
animal movement useful in the training of horses and human athletes (pi.
no. 291). This time, the animals were photographed as they moved in front
of a calibrated backdrop, tripping specially designed, electrically
operated shutters of 12 cameras equipped with Dallmeycr stereographic
lenses at one-thousandth of a second. News of the sensational photographs
that resulted— photographs that documented what the human eye had never
registered—appeared in the California press in 1877, in the prestigious
Scientific American the following year, and in journals in London, Paris,
Berlin, and Vienna soon afterward. Having become an international
celebrity, Muybridge lectured in the United States and Europe, where his
work was acknowledged by the French physiologist Marey.
Late in 1883, as a result of the withdrawal of Stanford's patronage,
Muybridge accepted an invitation to continue his work at the University of
Pennsylvania where he boldly extended the cast of characters and the range
of movements. His human subjects were drawn from the teaching staff at the
university, from professional models for the female nudes (about whose
lack of grace he complained!), and from friends in the arts, among them
Eakins, whose hand he photographed in various positions (pi. no. 293). In
an elaboration of the California experiments, the move-ments generally
were performed in front of a backdrop marked with a grid of vertical and
horizontal lines and before a batten' of 24 cameras about six inches apart
in a line parallel with the grid, while smaller groups of cameras were
maneuvered into position to capture frontal, rear, and foreshortened
views, as in Woman Emptying a Bucket on a Seated Companion (pi. no. 294).
By the time the Pennsylvania project began in 1884, advances in technology
enabled Muybridge to use more sensitive dry plates instead of collodion,
and to afix a roller shutter in front of each camera lens. These were
operated by an electromagnetic system (designed by the photographer) that
tripped the shutters in succession and at the same time operated a
chronograph or timing device. In a year-and-a-half of work, Muybridge
produced some 100,000 images analyzing the movements involved in walking,
running, playing ball, pirouetting, curtseying, and laying bricks, among
other activities. The university selected 781 plates for Animal
Locomotion, an expensive publication, after which Muybridge issued smaller
editions entitled Animals in Motion and The Human Figure in Motion.
Eakins, the American painter whose long-standing interest in the
accurate graphic representation of movement had prompted him to correspond
with Muybridge and to purchase a set of studies of the horse in motion,
applied the knowledge he gained to the depiction of the horse's legs in
his first Philadelphia commission—the oil painting, The Fairman Rogers'
Four in Hand (pi. no. 295), in which ironically the carriage wheels arc
blurred as if moving while the horses' hooves are frozen in one phase of
their movement. In his own studies of motion, Eakins, who started to make
photographs as soon as dry plates became available (pi. no. 297),
preferred to work with apparatus that registered the successive phases of
action on one plate, as can be seen in History of a Jump (pi no. 298), a
frequently reproduced work.
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291. EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE. Studies of Foreshortening; Mahomet Running,
1879.
Modern print from a wet-plate glass collodion negative. Stanford
University Art Museum, Stanford, Cal.
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EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE
(see collection)
(b
Kingston-on-Thames, 9 April 1830; d Kingston-on-Thames, 8 May
1904).
English photographer, active in the USA. He was the first to analyse
motion successfully by using a sequence of photographs and
resynthesizing them to produce moving pictures on a screen. His work has
been described as the inspiration behind the invention of the motion
picture.
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292. UNKNOWN. Cover of "Scientific American" with Muybridge's Series of
Horses, October 19, 1878.
Engraving. New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
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293. EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE. Eakins's Hand, from Animal Locomotion, 1887.
Collotype. Museum of the Philadelphia Civic Center.
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294. EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE. Plate 408 from
Animal Locomotion,
Woman pouring a bucket of water over another woman,
1887.
Collotype. Photograph Collection, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox,
and Tildcn Foundations.
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294. EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE. Plate 408 from Animal Locomotion, 1887.
Collotype. Photograph Collection, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox,
and Tildcn Foundations.
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294. EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE. Plate 408 from Animal Locomotion, 1887.
Collotype. Photograph Collection, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox,
and Tildcn Foundations.
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294. EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE. Plate 408 from Animal Locomotion, 1887.
Collotype. Photograph Collection, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox,
and Tildcn Foundations.
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295. THOMAS EAKINS. A May Morning in the Park , 1879.
Oil on canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art
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296. EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE. Zodpraxiscope, c. 1870.
Eadweard Muybridge Collection, Kingston Upon
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297. THOMAS EAKINS. Amelia Van Buren with a Cat, c. 1891.
Platinum
print. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
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298. THOMAS EAKINS. History of a Jump, 1884-85.
Gelatin silver print. Philadelphia Museum of Art; gift of George Bregler.
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Thomas Eakins
(see collection)
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Marey's contribution to the photographic documentation of movement was
made in conjunction with his primary vocation of physiology, for which he
initially had devised graphic methods of recording skeletal and muscle
movements. After reading about Muybridge's experiments in La Nature in
1878 (and later through personal contact with him), Marey turned to the
camera as a more accurate tool for such documentation. Because he was more
interested in schematic diagrams of muscle movements than in random, if
timed, depictions of moving figures, he adapted for his own use the fusil
photographique (photographic gun)—a camera inspired by the rotating bullet
cylinder of a revolver—which Eakins also used. Originally, Marey produced
a series of separate images with this apparatus but soon realized that
more precise information could be gained if the sequential movements
appeared on the same plate. For these timed images—called
chronophotographs (pi. no. 299)—Marey employed a rotating slit shutter and
experimented with a variety of black and white garments on models who
moved against similarly colored backdrops; eventually he settled on a
figure clothed entirely in black with bright metal bands attached to the
sides of the arms and legs, photographed against a black background. This
yielded a "working geometric drawing"—a linear graph of 60 skeletal
movements per second. As was true of other kinds of instantaneous studies,
these images were to have a telling effect on concepts and styles in art
as well as on the scientific understanding of movement.
Similar experiments in arresting motion were made by Anschiitz, who had
studied photography in Berlin, in Munich with Franz Hanfstaengl, and in
Vienna before returning to his native Prussia. Building on a series of
stills of horses in morion that he had made with a shutter mounted in
front of the plate, Anschiitz embarked on a project to produce
instantaneous photographs of animals in the Breslau Zoo. Widely
publicized, the most famous among these images are 120 exposures of the
activities of a family of storks (pi. no. 300). By 1886 Anschiitz had
adapted Muybridge's system of using multiple cameras to the very small
instruments with which he worked, and with the aid of the Prussian
ministries of war and education he continued to photograph both animal
movements and army maneuvers, using a specially designed "Anschiitz" lens
manufactured by the Goerz Company.
Three of the photographers involved in stop-motion experimentation
envisaged the next logical step—the re-constitution of the appearance of
movement by viewing the separate analytical images in rapid sequence. For
this purpose Marey and Muybridge turned to a range of so-called
philosophical toys, among them the Phenakistoscope (or zoetrope) and the
Praxinoscope, both of which involved rotating cylinders or disks with a
sequence of images on one moving element viewed through either
counter-rotating or stationary slots on the other. This reconstitution of
motion, suggested first by Sir John Herschel in 1867 and later by Marey in
1873, struck Stanford as a means to test the correctness of the
photographic evidence seen in the stills; therefore Muybridge worked out
the Zoopraxiscope (pi. no. 206), a device consisting of a glass disk on
which images were arranged equidistantly in consecutive order, with a
slotted counter-rotating viewer; its function, as stated by its designer,
was "for synthetically demonstrating movements analytically photographed
from life." These first "motion pictures" were seen by the Stanford family
in Palo Alto in 1879, and two years later during Muybridge's trip abroad
they were projected for audiences of influential European artists and
intellectuals. Anschutz's endeavor in 1887 to reconstruct movement
employing an Electro-Tachyscope, a device in which enlarged diapositives
(slides), illuminated by a spark, revolved in sequence on a disk, was
limited in effect because the small-format images were not projected but
had to be viewed directly.
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299. ETIENNE JULES MAREY. Falling Cat Sequence, c. 1880s. Gelatin
silver prints.
National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington,
D.C.
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ETIENNE JULES MAREY. Untitled.
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Flying pelican captured by Marey around 1882. He found a way to record
several phases of movements in one photo.
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ETIENNE JULES MAREY. Chronophtographie.
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300. OTTOMAR ANSCHUTZ. Series of Storks in Flight, 1884.
Gelatin silver
prints. Agfa-Gevaert Foto-Historama, Cologne, Germany.
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302. MARCEL DUCHAMP. Nude Descending a Staircase #2, 1912.
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Science and art became more profoundly intertwined when the camera
began to supply evidence of animal movement beyond what even the most
naturalistically inclined artist was capable of seeing. Stop-motion
photography and the various publications attracted a wide spectrum of
artists working in a variety of styles, among them the salon painters
Adolphe William Bouguereau and Franz von Lenbach, the realist Edgar Degas,
the Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais, the expressionist Auguste Rodin,
and the symbolist James Abbott McNeill Whistler. As in the past, many
painters used the newly revealed informatio correct inaccurate
representation and to make their work appear more naturalistic, as was
true of Jean-Lo sonier, a French painter of prestigious historical scenes,
some of which he altered to conform to the new knowledge. Other artists
became engrossed with the idea of movement and time, integrating various
views of the same object seen in several positions as the theme of their
paintings and creating images suggestive of the fluidity of situations and
events. For example, Degas, an enthusiast who was himself a sensitive
photographer, conveyed lively animation by painting on a single canvas the
same seated dancer in a variety of positions (pi. no. 301).

301. EDGAR DEGAS. Frieze of Dancers, c. 1883. Oil on canvas.
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Time, movement, and change exerted an even greater fascination on the
early-20th-century European painters who sought a new language to express
the shifting realities of their own era. Photography may have been blamed
by a small group of these avant-garde artists for a "disgraceful
alteration" in seeing, but, as Aaron Scharf has pointed out. "stop-motion
camera imagery, in particular the geometric diagrams of Marey, with their
emphasis on pattern and movement, offered Cubist, Vorticist, and Futurist
painters a fresh vocabulary." In the most famous of a number of such
examples, Nude Descending a Staircase (pi. no. 302), French artist Marcel
Duchamp adapted Marey's schema to transform the posed female
nude—conventionally an expression of immobility—into a supremely energetic
statement that proclaims its modernism while maintaining a tie to hallowed
tradition. Of all those seeking to embody the vitality of their time in
the painted image, Duchamp most clearly recognized that photography in all
its ramifications had subverted the long-standing relationship between the
artists and the conventions of painting. Interest in the graphic depiction
of movement based on Marey's studies reached a climax among European
artists of the Cubist and Futurist movements between 1911 and 1914. but
other kinds of stop-motion photographs have continued to artists
everywhere up to the present.
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