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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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THE STORY BEHIND THE PICTURES 1827-1991
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1 Nicephore Niepce. View from the Study Window, 1827
2 Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre. Boulevard du Temple, 1838
3 Eugene Durieu/Eugene Delacroix. Nude from Behind, ca. 1853
4 Duchenne de Boulogne. Contractions musculaires, 1856
5 Auguste Rosalie Bisson. The Ascent of Mont Blanc, 1862
6 Nadar. Sarah Bernhardt, ca. 1864
7 Francois Aubert. Emperor Maximilian's Shirt, 1867
8 Andre Adolphe Eugene Disderi. Dead Communards, 1871
9 Maurice Guibert. Toulouse-Lautrec in His Studio, ca. 1894
10 Max Priester/Willy Wilcke. Bismarck on his Deathbed, 1898
11 Heinrich Zille. The Wood Gatherers, 1898
12 Alfred Stieglitz. The Steerage, 1907
13 Lewis Hine. Girl Worker in a Carolina Cotton Mill, 1908
14 August Sander. Young Farmers, 1914
15 Paul Strand. Blind Woman, 1916
16 Man Ray. Noire et blanche, 1926
17 Andre Kertesz. Meudon, 1928
18 Robert Capa. Spanish Loyalist, 1936
19 Dorothea Lange. Migrant Mother,
Nipomo, California, 1936
20 Horst P. Horst. Mainbocher Corset, 1939
21 Henri Cartier-Bresson. Germany, 1945
22 Richard Petersen. View from the Dresden City Hall Tower, 1945
23 Robert Doisneau. The Kiss in Front of City Hall, 1950
24 Dennis Stock. James Dean on Times Square, 1955
25 Bert Stern. Marilyn's Last Sitting, 1962
26 Gerard Malanga. Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground, 1966
27 Helmut Newton. They're Coming!,
1981
28 Sandy Skoglund. Revenge of the Goldfish, 1981
29 Robert Mapplethorpe. Lisa Lyon, 1982
30 Joel-Peter Witkin. Un Santo Oscuro, 1987
31 Sebastiao Salgado. Kuwait, 1991
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see also:
DAGUERRE Louis JACQUES MANDE
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Chapter 2
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1838
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Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre
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Boulevard du Temple
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Around 1835, Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre succeeded
for the first time in fixing permanent photographic images through the
process that later became known by his name. His most famous
daguerreotype, almost taken in the spring of 1838, was long thought to be
the first image of a human figure.
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The image was anything but perfect - its creator realized this full
well. The painter, inventor, and diorama owner Louis-Jacques-Mande
Daguerre belongs - together with Niepce and Talbot - to the great
triumvirate of photographic history. Of the three, however, Daguerre was
surely the most skilled tactician, possessing what we would today call a
highly developed sense of PR. Ever since the 1820s, Daguerre had been
looking for a process to enable the technical production of pictures based
on the images produced by the camera obscura. Finally, in 1835 he achieved
success, and now the issue became how best to exploit the potential of the
new medium. Daguerre's view othe Boulevard du Temple was intended to be a
link in a visual chain of argumentation for his new process. Admittedly,
as remarkable as his picture was for the conditions of his time (or
rather, for the limitations of his process), his 5 x 6 1/2-inch format
image remained nonetheless modest in comparison with what painting,
drawing, or graphics could offer. In short, from the very beginning,
photography had to compete with the 'fine arts'. And in this contest, the
new medium labored under numerous disadvantages: Daguerre's photograph,
for example, reproduced the reality it sought to capture in very small
format - and 'merely' in black-and-white (as the early critics noted with
disappointment as early as 1839). Furthermore, the photograph, which
consisted of a single direct plate, was necessarily a reverse image, and
on top of this, the reflecting surfaces othe plate itself interfered with
viewing the image: according to how one held the daguerreotype, the
picture flipped from a positive to a negative image. But perhaps worst of
all was that nothing was to be seen of the pulsating life ofthe Boulevard
with its trade and activity and traffic, in the form of carts and
horse-drawn wagons. These were left to be imagined. The deadening effect
of the daguerreotype is evident in an encyclopedia entry for "Paris"
written in 1866, which describes precisely this length of the Boulevard as
the former "main square for the true life of the people of Paris, ...
[where] quacks, somnambulists, rope-dancers, etc., compete with lots of
larger and smaller theaters, whose audiences as a rule found entertainment
in such blood-curdling pieces that the street was called the boulevard du
crime." Our picture, however, conveys none of this. In the left foreground
is merely a gentleman in a frock coat, a tiny figure, apparently having
his shoes polished - and even contemporaries suspected that Daguerre had
hired two people to play the parts by maintaining a pose for the still
lengthy exposure time of several minutes. As Jean-Pierre Montier once put
it, their shadows were "impregnated" onto the plate. Whatever the case,
this picture remains the first photographic image of a human being, or
rather, two of them - if one omits the recently discovered portrait of a
certain "M. Huet", dated 1837, also attributed to Daguerre.
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Triptych with three daguerreotypes for King Ludwig I of Bavaria
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Curious onlookers are unwelcome
A view out the window. A view from above down into a world that now
existed to be photographically explored, investigated, exploited, and
recorded. Niepce had already gazed out of the window of his estate in Le
Gras. Talbot, the inventor of the negative-positive process and Daguerre's
true competitor in the struggle for the copyright to photography, had
already bequeathed us even more than a view from a window: perhaps the
most famous of his works is his calotype of the Boulevard des Capucines.
As so often in the early stages of photography, the photographers here,
too, consciously turned to a theme that had already been formulated by
traditional panel and canvas painting. In the early days of photography,
when a photographer aimed a camera out a window - whether from his house (Niepce),
his room (Daguerre), or even a hotel (Talbot) -he had a completely
pragmatic reason, beyond that of iconographic reverence for the traditions
of painting. These early researchers feared too much publicity and sought
to exclude a curious audience from taking note of their endeavors. This
was one reason they searched out a photographic 'hiding place'.
Furthermore, their work was easier if they could conduct it close to the
home laboratory; more precisely, the lab was what made early photography
possible in the first place. The French science minister Arago estimated
that the preparatory work for a single daguerreotype amounted to 30-45
minutes - and Daguerre wanted always to make three exposures in a row for
the sake of underlining the usefulness of his process, so to speak: one
taken in the morning, one at noontime, and one in the afternoon.
We find ourselves at 5 rue des Marais. We can be fairly certain that it
was from the window of his private apartment that Daguerre made his three
exposures, ofwhich only two have survived, albeit in heavily damaged
condition. Anyone looking for the house today is on a fool's errand, for
the rue des Marais, like so many tranquil - or, phrased negatively, dim
-corners of old Paris fell victim to the colossal urban renovations of
Baron Haussmann. But we can imagine the house to be approximately where
the Boulevard de Magenta runs into the Place de la Republique, that is, in
the 10th Arrondissement, In Daguerre's day, Paris housed around 800,000
inhabitants. The city limits in the west were defined by the Field of
Mars, in the east by the Pere Lachaise, in the south by the Montparnasse
Cemetery, and in the north by today's Pigalle. This is the Paris of Balzac
and Hugo, Ingres, Delacroix, and the young Dumas - the Paris in which
Rodin would be born in 1840, Sarah Bernhardt in 1844. All this makes the
city sound like the world art capital - which the city certainly was in
the nineteenth century. But Paris was something else as well, namely
narrow, dark, close, dirty, and in this age before sewers, filled with
what was then called a miasma. As the writer Maxime Ducamp pertin¬ently
remarked, "Paris as it existed on the eve of the Revolution of 1848 had
become unlivable."
A pictorial diversion for the broad masses
In the spring of 1838, Daguerre tuned the lens of his camera obscura,
which had been built by the Paris opticians Charles and Vincent Chevalier,
down onto the Boulevard du Temple. He was not at all interested in a
nostalgic look at 'Old Paris' threatened with (possible) extinction; that
is a theme that such photographers as Atget would explore decades later.
Instead, Daguerre, wholly in the role of a technician and inventor, sought
within the panorama of his city a picture that would be at once as rich in
detail, as sharp and effective, and as large as possible (in spite of the
very small aperture) - and that at the same time that could function as a
metaphor of the cradle of the invention. And in fact it was the many tiny
objects in the picture that captivated the first viewers of the
photograph. Among these was no less a figure than the American painter and
inventor Samuel F. B. Morse, who looked up Daguerre in Paris in March 1839
"to see these admirable results." Morse expressed himself charmed "by the
exquisite minuteness of the delineation" but noted at the same time:
"Objects moving are not impressed. The Boulevard, so constantly filled
with a moving throng of pedestrians and carriages was perfectly solitary,
except an individual who was having his boots brushed." The Parisian
inventor, born Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre in 1787, already had several
careers behind him as a scenic artistic, stage and costume designer, and
the creator and director of a diorama, before he developed an interest in
the possibility of permanently capturing the fleeting images produced by
the camera obscura. Daguerre was what we might today call a media person -
someone who recognized the need of his times for pictures and sought to
commercialize this need in as many ways as possible. Whereas the diorama
offered an almost archaic form of the cinema - a pictorial diversion for
the broad public, a spectacle produced by means of illusionistic painting
united with skilled lighting effects -the new medium of photography, which
still remained to be invented, sought a process of picture-making that
would correspond to the positivist age: a process at once fast and exact,
economical and objective. Daguerre, who had worked together with Nicephore
Niepce, had realized the light sensitivity of silver iodide already in
1831, a discovery which in turn led him to an improvement in the process
that bears his name. A pop-ular anecdote claims that in 1835 it was merely
by chance that Daguerre discovered the so-called latent image, which meant
that the exposure time could be reduced to a sensational 20 to 30 minutes
- thus raising Daguerre's hopes for the genre of picture that was of
greatest interest to him, namely the portrait.
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Louis JACQUES MANDE DAGUERRE.
Boulevard du
Temple, Paris, c. 1838. Daguerreotype. Bayerisches NationaJmuscum, Munich.
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The delicacy of the contours, the purity of the forms
The daguerreotype, however fascinating, has always been termed a dead
end of photography - an accusation that refers primarily to the production
of a single, irreproducible plate, in contradiction to the real aim of an
economical mass medium. The daguerreotype has in fact neither predecessors
nor successors. All of this may be true, but nevertheless overlooks the
importance of daguerreotypy as the first truly practical photographic
process, which in some countries - such as the USA - remained viable until
into the 1860s. From the technical point of view, the daguerreotype is a
direct positive image in a (then) maximum full-plate format of 8 1/2 x 6
1/2 inches. To produce a picture, a silvered copper plate was sensitized
with iodine vapor, exposed in the camera obscura, developed in mercury
steam, and finally fixed in a solution of salt or sodium thiosulfate. The
result was a reflective and one-of-a-kind image, whose finely chiseled
lines, even down to tiny details and shadings of tone, produced a picture
of the world that addressed the scientific interests of the time.
Daguerre's discovery placed him on the horns of a dilemma. His process was
still far from mature, especially because portraits, which at this point
continued to require an exposure time of ten minutes in sunlight, remained
more or less out of the question. On the other hand, the inventor was
involved in an international race, and he felt intense pressure to go
public with his process. Therefore, in the autumn of 1838, Daguerre
appealed to leading scientists for help in interesting the government in
his invention. He found his chief supporter in Francois Arago, the
secretary of the Academy of Sciences. It would also be Arago who convinced
the French Parlement to buy the rights of the process and to make it
internationally available. On 19 August 1839, the two official bodies held
their memorable meeting in which the technical details of daguerreotypy
were presented. The age of photography had begun. The initial reports
concerning the announced discovery appeared early in 1839, and the
photographs of the Boulevard du Temple became the focus of amazement among
contemporary scholars and journalists. The Pfennig Magazin, for example,
announced in 1839 that in one of the pictures, a man could be seen "having
his boots polished," and continued, "He must have held himself extremely
still, for he can be very clearly seen, in contrast to the shoeshine man,
whose ceaseless movement causes him to appear completely blurred and
imprecise." What intrigued John Robin-son, the secretary of the Royal
Society of Arts, were the differences be-tween the three plates caused by
the changes in light. In addition, "delicacy of the outlines, the purity
of the forms, and the precision and harmony of the tones, the aerial
perspective, the thoroughness of even the smallest details" also earned
praise (Eduard Ko 11 off, 1839). Daguerre's invention was clearly greeted
as a sensation. Soon 'daguerreotypomania' spread throughout France and the
rest of Europe.
Excitement among artists and art-lovers
We do not know precisely what moved Daguerre late in 1839 to send a
sample of his 'artworks' to the ruling houses of Russia, Prussia, and Aus-tria.
Gernsheim (1983) speculates about an initiative of the French foreign
minister; in any case, the list of selected monarchs included the Bavarian
King Ludwig I, who received - along with a dedication by Daguerre -what
were even then already the world's most famous photographs, namely two of
the three views of the Boulevard du Temple and, in the middle of the
framed triptych, a still life which has not survived, along with an
inscription by Daguerre. "Noon" wrote the photographer in his own hand
under the picture on the left. "Huit heures du matin" (eight o'clock in
the morning) is legible below the photograph with the shoeshine man -
information that later formed the basis of the attempt to determine the
exact date of the picture. Using contemporary maps and diagrams, and
taking into account the length of the shadows and the camera position of
51 1/2 feet above the street, Peter von Waldhausen has been able to date
the view of the boulevard to the period between 24 April and 4 May 1838.
The identity of the shoeshine man and his customer, however, remain
matters for speculation.
In October 1839, the three daguerreotypes arrived in Munich, where they
were on display at the Arts Association after 20 October. They immediately
caused excitement, particularly among "artists and art-lovers." According
to commentary in the Ailgemeine Zeitung, the pictures were absolutely free
of error and "by demonstrating all the advantages and wonder of the [new]
invention, they teach us also about its relation to art." After the
exhibit closed, the daguerreotypes returned to the private royal
household, and after the regent's death, became part of the collection at
the National Museum of Bavaria. The pictures, however, received no special
attention, at times being included in the permanent exhibit. As a part of
this collection, they were evacuated for storage during the Second World
War, and were heavily damaged. In any case, by the time the plates were
turned over by the National Museum to the Munich Photography Museum as a
permanent loan, they were suffering so severely from oxidation that the
still life in the center - a picture contradictorily described by
contemporaries - was totally beyond recognition. An in expert attempt at
cleaning Daguerre's two remaining plates in the "1970s succeeded only in
erasing their content. Thus, one hundred forty years after their creation,
nothing more of the Boulevard du Temple was to be seen. The photohistorian
Beaumont Newhall, however, had earlier made reproductions of the plates
for an exhibit at the New York Museum of Modern Art entitled "Photography
1839-1937." Based on these plates, Peter Dost of Nuremberg and Bernd
Renard of Kiel were able to produce facsimiles. Our Boulevard du Temple as
seen on these pages is thus no more than a technical (i.e., screened)
translation of the original daguer-reotype based on one of the modern
reproductions of the original plate. As cynical as it may sound as far as
the cultural loss is concerned, photography as a technical pictorial
medium nonetheless won the day.
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Louis JACQUES MAND£ DAGUERRE.
Still Life, 1837. Daguerreotype. Societe Franc.aise de Photographic, Paris.
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