History of Photography
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Method of recording the image of an object by the action of light, or
related radiation, on a sensitive material. The word, derived from the
Greek photos (“light”) and graphein (“to draw”), wasfirst used by the
scientist Sir John F.W. Herschel in 1839.
The term photography usually refersto the formation of optical images
projected by a lens in a camera onto a film or other material carrying a
layer of light-sensitive silver salts and the duplication and
reproduction of such images by light action (printing); in an extended
sense it also includes the formation of images by certain invisible
radiations (ultraviolet and infrared rays) and images recorded in other
sensitive materials not containing silver by means of chemical or
physical processes or both. Related processes include the recording of
images by X rays, electron beams, and nuclear radiations (radiography)
and the recording and transmission of light images in the form of
electromagnetic signals (television and videotape).
This article treats the historical and aesthetic aspects of still
photography. For a similar treatment of motion-picture photography, or
cinematography, see motion picture.
As a means of visual communication and expression, photography has
marked aesthetic capabilities. In order to understand them, the
characteristics of the process itself must first be understood. Of these
the first is immediacy. Usually, but not necessarily, the image that is
recorded is formed by a lens in a camera. Upon exposure to the light
forming the image, the sensitive material undergoes changes in its
structure; a latent image is formed, which becomes visible by
development and permanent by fixing. With modern materials, the
processing may take place immediately or may be delayed for weeks or
months. But, either way, the elements of the final image are determined
at the time of exposure. This characteristic is unique to photography
and sets it apart from other ways of picture making. Although the
photographer can control the characterof the original image he captured
upon film by the way he develops the negative and prints it, he cannot
alter it except by manual interference.
A second characteristic of the photograph is that it can contain more
than the photographer intended it to. The first daguerreotypes, shown to
an astounded public in Paris in thewinter of 1838–39 by the inventor
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, were praised because of the amount of
detail recorded by them; looking at one with a magnifying glass, it was
said, was like looking at nature with a telescope. The rival inventor of
photography, William Henry Fox Talbot, after noting this characteristic,
commented:
It frequently happens, moreover—and
this is one of the charms of photography—that the operator himself
discovers on examination, perhaps long afterwards, that he has depicted
many things he had no notion of at the time. Sometimes inscriptions and
dates are found upon the buildings, or printed placards most irrelevant,
are discovered upon their walls: sometimes a distant dial-plate is seen,
and upon it—unconsciously recorded—the hour of the day at which the view
was taken.
As technological advances have improved
photographic equipment, materials, and techniques, the scope of
photography has expanded enormously. High-speed photography has made
visible certain aspects of motion never before seen; with material
sensitive to invisible radiation, hidden aspects of nature can be
revealed; and, by a combination of photographic, electronic, and space
technology, even the planets can be observed in new ways. Photography
pervades every sphere of activity in modern civilization. Its
thousandfold applications have made it indispensable in daily life.
Photography disseminates information about humanity and nature, records
the visible world, and extends human knowledge into areas the eye cannot
penetrate. Next to the printed word the image drawn by light is the most
important means of communication, and for this reason photography has
been aptly called the mostimportant invention since the printing press.
The seemingly automatic recording of an image by photography has given
the process a sense of authenticityshared by no other picture-making
technique. The fact that the photograph can show more than the eye can
see and thatthe image is not filtered through the brain of a man and put
down by the skill of his hand has given it value as evidence. The
photograph has become, in the popular mind, so much a substitute for
reality and of such apparent accuracy that the adage “The camera does
not lie” has become a cliché.
This intrinsic characteristic is of such strength that it has dominated
the evaluation of photography's role in the arts.In the past photography
was sometimes belittled as a mechanical art because of its dependence on
technology. It has also been used over and over again as a foil by art
criticsto denounce paintings that rely heavily upon exact representation
of subject matter. Indeed, after reviewing the daguerreotype process,
the painter and art expert Paul Delaroche, who served on the committee
that advised the French government to purchase the rights to the new
process, declared: “From today painting is dead.”
In truth, photography is not the automatic process that is implied by
the use of a camera. A fully automatic camera canproduce a correctly
exposed and sharp negative, but it cannot distinguish between a banal
snapshot and a well-composed picture. The ability to make such a
distinction rests solely with the person behind the camera. The creative
photographer perceives the essential qualities of the subject and
interprets it according to his judgment, taste, and involvement. The
mechanical photographer merely reproduces what he sees.
Although the camera does limit the photographer to depicting existing
objects rather than imaginary or interpretive views, the skilled
photographer has at his command a wide variety of controls that can be
used to overcome the constraints of literalness and to introduce
creativity into the mechanical reproduction process. The image can be
modified by different lenses and filters. The type of sensitive material
used to record the image is a further control, and the contrast between
highlight and shadow can be changed by variations in development. In
printing the negative, the photographer has a wide choice in the
physical surface of the paper, the tonal contrast, and the image colour.
The most important control is, of course, the photographer's vision. He
chooses the vantage point and the exact moment of exposure. Through
experience he knows how the camera will record what he sees. He learns
to pre-visualize the final print. If he has visual imagination and
perception, he can make more than a passive record. He can express
universal qualities. He can extend the vision of the viewer.
So facile a medium is photography that it is difficult to grasp its
aesthetic capabilities and accomplishments. Of thebillions of
photographs that are taken every year, only a relatively small number
can be considered art. Few camera users are deliberately concerned with
the production of photographs to be judged as art. A far greater number
look upon photography as a means of communication. While the aim of the
commercial photographer, the photojournalist,and the scientist may not
primarily be aesthetic, it is significant and remarkably characteristic
of the medium thatoften in their work can be found memorable pictures
that reach beyond the particular to the universal. Recognition plays an
overwhelming role in photography: recognition by the creative
photographer of the picture possibilities presented to him and
recognition by the viewer of aesthetic qualities in photographs that he
sees.
The pioneers
The forerunner of the camera was the camera obscura, a darkchamber or
room with a hole (later a lens) in one wall throughwhich images of
objects outside the room were projected on the opposite wall. The
principle was probably known to Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago. The
Italian scientist andwriter Giambattista della Porta, late in the 16th
century, demonstrated and described in detail the use of a camera
obscura with a lens. By the 18th century artists commonly used various
types of camera obscura to trace accurate images from nature. These
devices still depended on the artist's drawing skills, however, and the
search for a method to reproduce images completely mechanically
continued.
In 1727 the German professor of anatomy Johann Heinrich Schulze proved
that the darkening of silver salts, known since the 16th century, and
possibly earlier, was caused by light and not heat. He demonstrated the
fact by using sunlight to record words on the salts, but he made no
attempt to preserve the images permanently. His discovery, in
combination with the camera obscura, provided the basic technology
necessary for photography. It was not until the early 19th century,
however, that photography actually came into being, largely through the
artistic aspirations of two Frenchmen, Nicéphore Niepce and
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, and two Englishmen, Thomas Wedgwood and
William Henry Fox Talbot.
Contributions of Niepce and Daguerre
Niepce, an amateur inventor living near Chalon-sur-Saône, a city 189
miles southeast of Paris, came to photography through his interest in
lithography. In this process drawings were copied by hand onto the
lithographic stone. To make the drawings Niepce relied upon his son's
artistic skill, but, when his son entered military service, he was left
without a draftsman. Not artistically trained, he devised a method by
which light drew the pictures he needed. He oiled an engraving to make
it transparent, then placed it on a plate coated with a light-sensitive
solution and exposed the setup to sunlight. After a few hours the
solution under the light areas of the engraving hardened, while that
under the dark areas remained soft and could be washed away, leaving a
permanent, accurate copy of the engraving. Using a type of asphalt,
bitumen of Judea, which changes its solubility in oil of lavender
according to its exposure to light, he succeeded from 1822 onward in
copying oiled engravings onto lithographic stone, glass, and zinc and
from 1826 onto pewter plates. In 1826/27, using a camera obscura fitted
witha pewter plate, Niepce produced the first successful photograph from
nature, a view of the courtyard of his country estate, Gras, from an
upper window of the house. Theexposure time was about eight hours,
during which the sun moved from east to west so that it appears to shine
on both sides of the building. The photograph was rediscovered in 1952
by the historian Helmut Gernsheim and is now preserved in the Gernsheim
Collection at the University of Texas.
Niepce produced his most successful copy of an engraving, aportrait of
Cardinal d'Amboise, in 1826. It was correctly exposed in about three
hours, and in February 1827 he had the pewter plate etched to form a
printing plate and had two prints pulled. The plate and prints are the
oldest photomechanical reproductions still in existence. (The plate and
one print are in the Science Museum, London; the other print is in the
Gernsheim Collection.) Paper prints were the final aim of Niepce's
heliographic (i.e., sun-drawn) process, yet all his other attempts,
whether made using a camera or engravings, were underexposed and too
weak to be etched. Nevertheless, Niepce's discoveries showed the path
that Daguerre and others were to follow with more success.
Daguerre was a professional scene painter. Between 1822 and 1839 he was
co-proprietor of the Diorama in Paris, an auditorium in which he and his
partner Charles-Marie Bouton displayed immense paintings, 451/2 by 711/2
feet (14 by 22 metres) in size, of famous places and historical events.
The partners painted the scenes on translucent paper or muslin and by
the careful use of changing lighting effects were able to present
vividly realistic tableaux. The views provided grand entertainment in
the illusionistic style, and the amazing trompe l'oeil effect was
purposely heightened by the accompaniment of appropriate music and the
positioningof real objects, animals, or people in front of the painted
scenery.
Like many other artists, Daguerre made his preliminary sketches by
tracing the images produced by a camera obscura. About 1826 he began
unsuccessful experiments inrecording the camera image “by the
spontaneous action of light.” Learning of Niepce's work, he wrote to
him, and on Dec. 14, 1829, the two men formed a partnership for the
express purpose of improving Niepce's invention of heliography. From
then on Daguerre worked using the improved materialsNiepce had
adopted—silvered copper plates and iodine—without achieving any improved
results until 1835, two years after the death of his partner. By
accident Daguerre discovered that a latent image forms on a plate of
iodized silver and that it can be “developed” and made visible by
exposure to mercury vapour, which settles on the exposed parts of the
image. Exposure times could thus be reduced from eight hours to 30
minutes. The results were notpermanent, however; when the developed
picture was exposed to light, the unexposed areas of silver darkened
until the image was no longer visible. By 1837, though, Daguerre was
able to fix the image permanently by using a solution of table salt to
dissolve the unexposed silver iodide.That year he produced a photograph
of his studio on a silvered copper plate, a photograph that was
remarkable for its fidelity and detail. Contrary to his contract with
Niepce, Daguerre now called the improved process after himself:
daguerreotype.
In 1839 Daguerre and Niepce's son sold full rights to the daguerreotype
and the heliograph to the French government,in return for annuities for
life. On August 19 full working details were published. Daguerre wrote a
booklet describing the process, An Historical and Descriptive Account of
the Various Processes of the Daguerreotype and the Diorama, which at
once became a best-seller: 29 editions and translations appeared before
the end of 1839.
Contributions of Wedgwood and Talbot
In 1802 Thomas Wedgwood, son of the famous potter Josiah Wedgwood,
reported his experiments in recording images onpaper or leather
sensitized with silver nitrate. Although he could record silhouettes of
objects placed on the paper, he was not able to make them permanent and,
to his disappointment, he failed to record a camera image. Nonetheless,
the paper published by Sir Humphry Davy in the Journal of the Royal
Institution, London, in June 1802, on the experiments of his friend
Wedgwood, is the first account of an attempt to produce photographs.
Unaware of the work of Wedgwood and the French pioneers, Talbot, trained
as a scientist at Cambridge University, was led to invent a photographic
process because of his inability to draw landscapes. On a holiday trip
to Italy in 1833, the idea came to him of recording by chemical means
the images he observed in his camera obscura. By 1835 he had aworkable
technique: he made paper light-sensitive by soaking it alternately in
solutions of common salt (sodium chloride) and silver nitrate. Silver
chloride was thus produced in the fibres of the paper. On exposure to
light the silver chloride became finely divided silver, dark in tone.
Theoretically, the resulting negative could be used to make any number
of positives simply by putting fresh sensitized paper in contact with
the negative and exposing it to light. Talbot's method of fixing the
print by washing it in a strong solution of sodium chloride was
inadequate, however, and the process was not successful until February
1839, when Herschel suggested fixing the negatives with sodium
hyposulphite (now called sodium thiosulfate) and waxing them before
printing, which reduced the grain of the paper.
When news of Daguerre's process reached England in January 1839, Talbot
rushed publication of his “photogenic drawing” process and subsequently
explained his technique in complete detail to the members of the Royal
Society—six months before the French government divulged working
directions for the daguerreotype. There were many others who had similar
techniques and who were to claim priority, but to Talbot and Daguerre
are owed the two basic processesthat were to establish photography as
the most facile and convincing way to produce pictures.
First criticism
The two pioneer processes were different in several ways. Daguerreotypes
were on metal; photogenic drawings were on paper. Each daguerreotype was
unique; photogenic drawings could be duplicated. The aesthetic as well
as physical character differed markedly. The daguerreotype rendered
detail to a degree that was remarkable; the photogenic drawing, because
of the fibrous structure of the paper supporting the silver image, gave
a broader, somewhat diffused effect.
The first criticism of photography was necessarily based on a comparison
with painting or drawing, since no other standards of picture making
existed. Photography's remarkable ability to record a seemingly
inexhaustible amount of detail was marveled at again and again. The
critics regretted that, because of the great length of exposure, moving
objects were not recorded or were rendered blurry and indistinct. The
inability of the first processes to record colours was disappointing,
but since the critics were already conditioned to black-and-white prints
and drawings, this was not as serious a drawback as the harshness of the
tonal scale. The technique of photography was at once recognized as a
shortcut to art. No longer was it necessary to spend years in art school
drawing from sculpture and from life, mastering the laws of linear
perspective and chiaroscuro. As Daguerre boasted in abroadsheet in 1838,
“with this technique, without any knowledge of chemistry or physics, one
will be able to make in a few minutes the most detailed views.”
Pre-World War I history
Daguerre's process rapidly spread throughout the world. Before the end
of 1839, travelers were bringing back to Paris daguerreotypes of famous
monuments in Egypt, Israel, Greece, and Spain; from them engravings were
made that were published in two volumes as Excursions daguerriennes
between 1841 and 1843. Although his process was published“free to the
world” by the French government, Daguerre tookout a patent for it in
England; the first licensee was Antoine-François-Jean Claudet. The first
daguerreotypes in America were made on Sept. 16, 1839, just four weeks
after the announcement of the process. Exposures were at first of
excessive length—a daguerreotype of King's Chapel, Boston,in the
International Museum of Photography, Rochester, N.Y., bears a label
stating that it was made between 4:40 and 5:30 PM on April 19, 1840. At
such exposures moving objects could not be recorded, and portraiture was
impractical. Even in blazing sunlight and with the face whitened by
flour, a person had to sit immobile for several minutes.
Experiments were started in Europe and the United States to improve the
optical, chemical, and practical aspects of the daguerreotype process to
make it more feasible for portraiture, the most desired application.
Using a camera with a mirror substituted for the lens, Alexander Wolcott
opened in New York in March 1840, a “Daguerrean Parlor” for tiny
portraits. This was the earliest known photography studio anywhere; the
first studio in Europe was opened by Richard Beard in a glasshouse on
the roof of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London on March 23,
1841. Unlike the many daguerreotypists who were originally scientists or
miniature painters, Beard had been a coal merchant and patent
speculator. Having acquired the exclusive British license for the
American mirror camera (he later also purchased the exclusive rights to
Daguerre's invention in England, Wales, and the colonies), Beard
employed the chemist John Frederick Goddard to try to improve and
accelerate the exposure process. Among the techniques Goddard studied
were two that Wolcott had tried: increasing the light sensitivity of the
silver iodide with bromine vapoursand filtering the blindingly bright
daylight necessary for exposure through blue glass to ease the portrait
sitter's eye strain. By December 1840 Goddard had succeeded well enough
to produce tiny portraits ranging in size from one centimetre in
diameter to 1.5 by 2.5 inches (four by six centimetres). By the time
Beard opened his studio exposure times were said to vary between one and
three minutes according to weather and time of day. Daguerreotype
portraits were immensely popular, and the studio made considerable
profits the first few years, but competition soonappeared and Beard lost
his fortune in several lawsuits against infringers of his licenses.
The finest daguerreotypes in Britain were produced by Claudet, who
opened a studio on the roof of the Royal Adelaide Gallery in June 1841.
He was responsible for numerous improvements in photography, for the
discoverythat red light did not affect sensitive plates and could
therefore be used safely in the darkroom, and for the practical
introduction of stereoscopic daguerreotypes in 1851.
The most important advances in photographic lens and camera design came
from József Petzval and Friedrich Voigtländer, both of Vienna. Petzval
produced an achromaticportrait lens that was about 20 times faster than
the simple meniscus lens the Parisian opticians Charles Chevalier and
N.M.P. Lerebours had made for Daguerre's cameras. Voigtländer reduced
Daguerre's clumsy wooden box to easily transportable proportions for the
traveler. These valuable improvements were introduced by Voigtländer in
January 1841. That same month another Viennese, Franz Kratochwila,
freely published a chemical acceleration process in which the combined
vapours of chlorine and bromine increased the sensitivity of the plate
five times.
The improvements that had been made in lenses and sensitizing techniques
reduced exposure times to approximately 20 to 40 seconds.
Daguerreotyping became a flourishing industry, especially in the United
States, which, it was generally conceded, led the world in the
production of daguerreotypes. In the late 1840s every city had its
“daguerrean artist,” and villages and towns were served by traveling
photographers who had fitted up wagons as studios. In New York City
alone there were 77 galleries in 1850. Of these, the most celebrated was
that of Mathew B. Brady, who began in 1844 to form a “Gallery of
Illustrious Americans,” and to that end collected portraits of notables
taken by his own and other cameramen. Twelve of the portraits were
published by lithography in a folio volume. In Boston a studio operated
by Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes that was advertised
as “The Artists' Daguerreotype Rooms” produced the finest portraits ever
made by the daguerreotype process. The partners avoided the stereotyped
lighting and posing formulas of the average daguerreotypist and did not
hesitate to portray their sitters unprettified and “as they were.”
Lemuel Shaw, a judge of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, stands with
crumpled coat and unruly locks of hair under a glare of sunshine; Lola
Montez, adventuress, dancer, actress, lolls over the back of achair, a
cigarette between her gloved fingers. Cities and towns, as well as their
inhabitants, were photographed by American daguerreotypists: the rapid
growth of San Francisco was documented month by month, and the first
history of the city, published in 1855, was illustrated by engravings
made from daguerreotypes.
Development and use of the calotype process
The popularity of the daguerreotype surpassed that of the photogenic
drawing, but Talbot continued work to improve his process. On Sept.
21–23, 1840, while experimenting with gallic acid, a chemical he was
informed would increase the sensitivity of his prepared paper, Talbot
discovered that the acid could be used to develop a latent image. This
procedurerevolutionized photography on paper as it had photography on
metal in 1835. Whereas previously Talbot had needed a camera exposure of
one hour to produce a 6.5- by 8.5-inch negative, he now found that one
minute was sufficient. Developing the latent image had put photography
on paper on a par with the daguerreotype. Talbot named his improved
negative process the calotype, from the Greek meaning “beautiful
picture,” and protected his rights by patent.
The first and most aesthetically satisfying use made of this improved
process was in the work of David Octavius Hill, a Scottish landscape
painter, and his partner, Robert Adamson,an Edinburgh photographer. In
1843 Hill decided to paint a group portrait of the ministers who in that
year formed the Free Church of Scotland. There were more than 400
figures tobe painted. Sir David Brewster, who knew of Talbot's process
from the inventor himself, suggested to Hill that he make use of this
new technique. Hill then enlisted the aid of Adamson, and together they
made hundreds of photographs,not only of the members of the church
meeting but also of people from all walks of life. Although their
sitters were posed outdoors in glaring sunlight and had to endure
exposures of upward of a minute, Hill and Adamson managed to retain
spontaneity. Hill's vision was dominated by the painting style of the
period in lighting and posing, particularly in the placement of the
hands. Many of the calotypes are strikingly reminiscent of canvases by
Sir Henry Raeburn and other contemporary artists. Indeed, William Etty,
a Royal Academician, copied in oils the calotype Hill and Adamson made
of him in 1844 and exhibited it as a self-portrait. In addition to their
formal portraiture, the partners made a series of photographs of
fishermen and their wives at Newhaven, in Edinburgh, and architectural
studies.
The potential of the calotype for recording great monuments of
architecture was shown by a number of Frenchmen, many of whom were
trained as painters. In the 1850s they began tophotograph historical
buildings for the government. Working with cameras making photographs as
large as 20 by 29 inches, Henri Le Secq, Charles Marville, and Charles
Nègre produced remarkable calotypes of the cathedrals of Notre-Dame in
Paris, Chartres, and Amiens, as well as other structures that were being
restored after centuries of neglect. An establishment was set up in
Lille, Fr., by Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Evrard for bulk printing these
paper negatives. Among the products of this firm was a superb volume of
photographs by the Parisian writer Maxime Du Camp taken during his
travels with the writer Gustave Flaubert in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria,
from 1849 to 1851.
Pre-World War I history
Development and use of the collodion process
Photography was revolutionized in 1851 by the introduction of the
collodion process for making glass negatives. This new technique,
invented by the English sculptor Frederick Scott Archer, was 20 times
faster than all previous methods and was, moreover, free from patent
restrictions. The glass plate negatives recorded detail in a way that
rivaled the daguerreotype, and from them paper prints could be made. The
process had one serious drawback: the photographer had to sensitize his
plate almostimmediately before exposure and expose it and process it
while the coating was moist. Collodion is a solution of nitrocellulose
(guncotton) in alcohol and ether; when the solvents evaporate, a clear
plasticlike film is formed. Since itis then impervious to water, the
chemicals used for developing the exposed silver halides and removing
the unexposed salts cannot penetrate to them. Despite the drawback that
the photographer had to have a complete darkroom outfit with him always,
the collodion process was almost at once universally adopted. It reigned
supreme for more than 30 years and greatly increased the popularity of
photography. Some of the most remarkable photographs of all time were
produced by this wet-plate process.
At first the positive prints made from the glass plate negatives were
produced by Talbot's salt paper method, but from the mid-1850s on they
were made on albumen paper, a slow printing-out paper (i.e., paper that
produces a visible image on direct exposure, without chemical
development) that had been coated with egg white before being
sensitized.The egg white gave the paper a glossy surface that
improvedthe picture. Albumen paper was introduced in 1850 by
Blanquart-Evrard and remained in general use until World War I.
The new collodion process was also used to produce imitation
daguerreotypes called positives on glass or ambrotypes. They were simply
underexposed or bleached negatives that appeared positive with a dark
coating or backing. In posing and lighting, these popular portraits were
identical to daguerreotypes; they were of the same standardsizes, and
they were enclosed in the same type of case. Theydid not approach the
brilliancy of the daguerreotype, however. Tintypes, first known as
ferrotypes or melainotypes, were cheap variations of the ambrotype.
Instead of glass the collodion emulsion was coated on thin iron sheets
enameled black. At first they were presented in cases, surrounded by
narrow gilt frames, but by the 1860s this elaborate presentation had
been abandoned, and the metal sheets were simply inserted in paper
envelopes, each with a cutout window the size of the image. Easy to
make, inexpensive to purchase, tintypes remained a kind of folk art
through the 19th century. Poses were often informal, if not humorous.
Portraiture
A new style of portrait, introduced in Paris by André-Adolphe-Eugène
Disdéri in 1854, was universally popular from 1859 onward. It came to be
called the carte de visite because the size of the mounted photograph
(four by 21/2 inches) corresponded to that of a calling card. Disdéri
used a four-lens camera to produce eight negatives on a single glass
plate. Each picture could be separately posed, orseveral exposures could
be made at once. The principal advantage of the system was its economy:
to make eight portraits the photographer needed to sensitize only a
single sheet of glass and make one print, which he then cut up into
separate pictures. At first cartes de visite almost invariably showed
the subjects standing. Backgrounds, which had usually been plain in the
days of the daguerreotype, becameornate: furniture and such
architectural fragments as papier-mâché columns and arches were
introduced, and heavy-fringed velvet drapes were hung within range of
the camera. With the advent of the cabinet-size (61/2 by four inches)
picture in 1866, the baroque tendencies of the photographer became yet
more audacious, so that in 1871 a photographer wrote: “One good, plain
background, disrobed of castles, piazzas, columns, curtains and what
not, well worked, will suit every condition of life.” It was at this
period that retouching, the use of handwork on the negative, was
introduced, as was the practice of painting over the photograph in oil
colours.
In contrast to the excessive reliance on accessories and retouching
shown by the popular portrait photographers of Europe and America, the
work of two Frenchmen and one Englishwoman stands apart. In their
portraiture they reacheda level unsurpassed since the daguerreotypes of
Southworthand Hawes and the calotypes of Hill and Adamson. These
photographers were Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, a Parisian writer, editor,
and caricaturist who used the pseudonym of Nadar; Étienne Carjat,
likewise a Parisian caricaturist; and Julia Margaret Cameron, wife of an
eminent British jurist.
Nadar took up photography in 1853 as a means of making studies of the
features of prominent Frenchmen for inclusion in a large caricature
lithograph, the “Panthéon Nadar.” He posed his sitters against plain
backgrounds and bathed themwith diffused daylight, which brought out
every detail of faceand dress. He knew most of them, and the powers of
observation he had developed as a caricaturist led him to recognize
their salient features, which he recorded directly, without the
exaggeration that he put in his drawings. When Nadar's photographs were
first exhibited, they won great praise in the Gazette des Beaux Arts,
then the leading art magazine in France. Nadar was a colourful man who
had a passion for balloons. He combined his interests by taking a series
of aerial photographs, which inspired the French artist Honoré Daumier
to produce a cartoon bearing the mocking title “Nadar Élevant la
Photographie à la Hauteur de l'Art” (“Nadar Raising Photography to the
Height of Art”).
Carjat's portraits, more intense perhaps than Nadar's, have the dignity
and distinction of those of his contemporary and rival.
Cameron took up photography as a pastime in 1864. Awkward as it was, she
used the wet-plate process and began to take portraits of such
celebrated Victorians of her acquaintance as Alfred Tennyson, George
Frederick Watts, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, and Sir John F.W.
Herschel. Anumber of her portraits were shown at the Paris
InternationalExhibition of 1867. Cameron used a lens of the extreme
focallength of 30 inches to obtain large close-ups. This lens required
such long exposures that the subjects frequently moved. The lack of
optical definition plus this accidental blurring was universally
criticized, yet the very power of her work won her international praise.
This can only be explained by the intensity of her vision. “When I have
had these men before my camera,” she wrote about her portraits of great
men,
my whole soul has endeavoured to do its duty toward them in recording
faithfully the greatness of the inner man as well as the features of the
outer man. The photograph thus obtained has almost been the embodiment
of a prayer.
Besides these memorable portraits, Cameron produced a large number of
allegorical studies, of children and young women in costume, acting out
biblical scenes or themes based on the poetry of her hero, Tennyson. In
making these pictures—which today seem weak and sentimental—she wasmuch
influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite painters and the photographic work of
Oscar G. Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson (see below), leaders in the
production of photographs that emulated paintings.
Influence of painting
Consideration of photography as an aesthetic medium was given impetus by
the formation of photographic societies, made up of both professionals
and amateurs, who had been attracted to the camera by the popularity of
the collodion process. In 1853 the Photographic Society, parent of the
present Royal Photographic Society, was formed in London, and in the
following year the Société Française de Photographie was founded in
Paris.
At the first meeting of the Photographic Society the president, Sir
Charles Eastlake (who was then also president of the Royal Academy),
invited the miniature painter Sir William Newton to read a paper “Upon
Photography in an Artistic View” (Journal of the Photographic Society, i,
1853). His argument was that photographs could be useful to the painter
so long as they were taken “in accordance [as far as it is possible]
with the acknowledged principles of Fine Art.” One way by which the
photographer could make his results more like works of art, Newton
suggested, was to throw the subject slightly out of focus. He also
recommended liberal retouching.
An outcome of the urge to create photographs that would fit a priori
concepts of what “art” should be was the practice of combining several
negatives to make one print in order to achieve painterly compositions
of subjects too complicated to be photographed in a straightforward
manner. A famous example was by Oscar G. Rejlander, a Swede who had
studied art in Rome and was practicing photography in England. He used
30 negatives to produce a 31- by 16-inch print titled “The Two Ways of
Life,” showing, in allegory as obvious as it was sentimental, that the
way of the blessed led through good works and the way of the damned
through vice. Rejlander, who described the technique in detail in
photographic journals, stated that his purpose was to prove to artists
the aesthetic possibilities of photography, which they had generally
denied. The photograph was shown in the Manchester Art Treasures
Exhibition of 1857 and was purchased by Queen Victoria for Prince
Albert.
Rejlander's technique stimulated Henry Peach Robinson, a professional
photographer who had been trained as an artist,to produce similar
combination prints. He achieved fame with a five-negative print, “Fading
Away,” produced in 1858. The subject, a dying girl, was considered by
critics as too painful a subject to be represented by photography.
Perhaps the implied authenticity of the camera bothered them, for
painters had long presented subjects of a far more painful nature.
Robinson became a most articulate member of the Photographic Society,
and his teaching was even more influential than his photography. In 1869
appeared the first of many editions and translations of his book,
Pictorial Effect in Photography . From an outmoded handbook on painting,
Robinson borrowed compositional formulas the useof which, he claimed,
would bring artistic success. The importance of balance was stressed,
and the opposition of light against dark was made clear. The fault of
the book lay not only in the assumption that rules set up for one art
form could be applied to another but also in its intellectual and
academic approach to art.
Robinson's work is weak and artificial by present standards of taste.
Not only did he practice combination printing when it was not
technically necessary, but he preferred to work in the studio, against
painted backdrops and with props of natural objects, even foliage,
mounted on casters. When he did photograph the real world, he took
models with him, dressing them up to play the part of country girls.
So long as photographers maintained that the way to art wasby the
emulation of painting, critics were reluctant to admit the new medium to
an independent aesthetic position. Portraits, when done as sensitively
and as directly as those produced by Hill and Adamson, Nadar, and
Cameron, won thepraise of art critics. But sentimental genre scenes,
posed andarranged for the camera, lacked the sharp objective truth that
is a characteristic of photography. Other photographers, not concerned
about producing art for exhibition, were making photographs of the world
and man's activities with such extraordinary perception and
understanding of the medium that often their work surpassed more
consciously artistic works. These men took their cameras to battlefields
and to faraway places, often at the risk of their lives.
Combat photography
In 1855 Roger Fenton sailed from London to the Crimea to photograph the
war. He was sent to provide visual evidence countering the caustic
written reports dispatched by William Russell, war correspondent for The
Times of London, criticizing military mismanagement and the inadequate,
unsanitary living conditions of the soldiers. Fenton had to develop his
wet plates in a horse-drawn van that had been converted into a darkroom.
It was visible for miles in the barelandscape and a few times attracted
enemy fire. Despite the difficulty, during his four-month stay Fenton
produced 360 photographs, the first large-scale camera documentation of
a war.
When the Civil War broke out in the United States, Mathew Brady, the New
York daguerreotypist and portraitist, who had been among the first to
adopt the wet-plate process, conceived the bold plan of making a
photographic record of the hostilities. When President Lincoln told him
the government could not financesuch an undertaking, he invested his own
savings in the project, expecting to recover his outlay by selling
thousands of prints. Brady and his photographers—notably Alexander
Gardner and Timothy H. O'Sullivan, who left his employ in the midst of
hostilities—produced an amazing record of the battlefield. At his New
York gallery, Brady showed pictures of the dead at Antietam. The New
YorkTimes reported on Oct. 20, 1862:
Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality
and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them on
our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.
. . . It seems somewhat singular that the same sun that looked down on
the faces of the slain blistering them, blotting out from the bodies all
semblance to humanity, and hastening corruption, should have thus caught
their features upon canvas, and given them perpetuity for ever. But it
is so.
Long prized for their value as historical documents, the Civil War
photographs are now valued for their aesthetic qualitiesas well.
Unfortunately for Brady, immediately after the war they were seen as
unnecessary reminders of hardship and conflict. Unable to sell the
prints as he had planned, Brady died embittered in a charity hospital in
New York City. Fenton's Crimean War photographs had similarly lost their
audience as soon as the peace treaty was signed. Nevertheless,
entrepreneurs hoping to sell prints or commemorative albums continued to
finance the photographic documentation of the more important conflictsof
the late 19th century. The South African (Boer) War and the
Russo-Japanese War were also covered by photographers engaged by
newspapers and by three American mass producers of stereographs.
Landscape photography
During the collodion period scores of photographers journeyed to the far
corners of the world, producing memorable travel views despite the
trying conditions of the wet-plate process. Among the most successful
was the Englishman Francis Frith. The most active of several European
photographers working in the Middle East in the late 1850s, he took
hundreds of fine pictures of monuments along the Nile from Cairo to Abu
Simbel, as well as in Syria and Palestine. Samuel Bourne, Felice Beato,
John Thomson, and other British amateurs traveled to Asia, bringing back
to England lively images of the nature, people, and customs of India,
China, and Japan. Other British photographers concentrated on Europe:
Charles Clifford recorded the landscape and architecture of Spain,
Robert MacPherson thatof Rome, and Thomas Annan of Glasgow and George
Washington Wilson of Aberdeen the wildness, castles, and abbeys of
Scotland. The Bisson brothers (Louis-Auguste and Auguste-Rosalie),
Gustave Le Gray, and Edouard-Denis Baldus depicted the landscape and
architecture of France. In the United States Carleton E. Watkins and the
English-born Eadweard Muybridge both won recognition for their scenic
views of Yosemite, the Columbia River, Alaska, and other wilderness
regions of North America.
Landscape photography was usually intended for publication in books or
as portfolios of prints to be sold to collectors, but in the United
States photographers were oftenimportant members of government surveys
and were also commissioned by railroad companies to make publicity
pictures of track laying, bridge building, and spectacular scenery
through which the new lines ran. Of the photographers of the American
frontier, two stand out: Timothy H. O'Sullivan, of Civil War fame, and
William Henry Jackson. O'Sullivan's photographs of the Southwest are of
great beauty, particularly his views of Indian cliff dwellings in the
Canyon de Chelly in Arizona, made in 1873. Jackson, self-trained as a
painter in Vermont, crossed the plains as a wagon driver. In 1868 he
opened a photographic gallery in Omaha, Neb. The Union Pacific Railroad
was under construction, and he received an order to produce 10,000
stereographs. The excellence of his work led F.V. Hayden, a geologist,
to hire him to photograph the Yellowstone as part of Hayden's
government-financed expedition there in 1871. The photographs Jackson
took were influential in the decision by Congress to create Yellowstone
National Park. Later, in 1875, he recorded the immensity of the western
landscape, using large glass plates.
Stereoscopic photography
Many of the landscape photographers also took stereographs. These double
pictures, taken after 1856 with twin-lens cameras, produce a remarkable
effect of three dimensions when viewed through a stereoscope.
Stereography, first described in 1832 by the English physicist Charles
Wheatstone, is uniquely photographic, since no artist could draw two
scenes in exact perspective from viewpoints separated only 21/2
inches—the normal distance between human eyes. Wheatstone's mirror
stereoscope, however, was not practical for use with photographs, and
the invention languished until the Scottish scientist Sir David Brewster
designed a simplified viewing instrument, which was exhibited at the
1851 Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace, London. Queen Victoria was
entranced by the stereo daguerreotypes she saw there, and with the
introduction of the collodion process, which simplified exposure and
printing techniques, three-dimensional photography became a popular
craze.
In 1854 the London Stereoscopic Company was formed. Theirchief
photographer was William England, whose lively street scenes of New York
City in rainy weather and views of Niagara Falls taken in 1859 were the
wonders of the day. The instantaneous street scenes, which showed
pedestrians and vehicles stopped in their tracks, were made possible
because the small size of the stereo-camera reduced exposure times to
less than half a second. To minimize movement street views were usually
taken from a first-floor window with the camera focused directly down
the street. (Such views later inspired several Impressionists to paint
similar street scenes.) Between 1860 and about 1920 a stereo viewer was
as ubiquitous in British and American homes (where a simplified and
cheap hand viewer was introduced by Oliver Wendell Holmes [the American
physician was a great lover of photography]) as the television set is
today. Millions of stereographs were circulated in the years before
newspaper reproduction of photographs, and their impact was enormous.
Development of the dry plate
In the 1870s many attempts were made to find a dry substitute for wet
collodion so that plates could be prepared well in advance and developed
long after exposure. The suggestion casually made in 1871 by Richard
Leach Maddox,an English physician, to suspend silver bromide in a
gelatin emulsion led, in 1878, to the introduction of factory-produced
dry plates coated with gelatin containing silver salts, an event that
marked the beginning of the modern era of photography.
Gelatin plates were about 60 times more sensitive than collodion plates.
The increased speed freed the camera from the tripod, and a great
variety of small hand cameras that allowed photographers to take
instantaneous snapshots became available at relatively low cost. Of
these, the most popular was the Kodak camera, introduced by George
Eastman in 1888. Its simplicity greatly speeded the growth of amateur
photography. In place of glass plates, it contained a roll of negative
material sufficient for taking 100circular pictures, each roughly 21/2
inches in diameter. After exposing the last negative, the entire camera
was sent to one of the Eastman factories (Rochester, N.Y., or Harrow,
Middlesex), where the roll was processed and printed. “You Press the
Button, We Do the Rest” was Eastman's description of the Kodak system.
At first Eastman's so-called “American film” was used in the camera.
This film was paperbased, and the gelatin layer containing the image was
stripped away after development and fixing and transferred to a
transparent support. In 1889 it was replaced by film on a transparent
plastic base of nitrocellulose that had been developed by the Reverend
Hannibal Goodwin of Newark, N.J., in 1887.
Photography of movement
A few years before the introduction of the dry plate, the world was
amazed at the photographs of horses taken by Eadweard Muybridge in
California. Using a series of 12 to 24 cameras ranged side by side
opposite a reflecting screen, with their shutters released by the
breaking of threads as thehorse dashed by, Muybridge secured sets of
sequence photographs of successive phases of the walk, the trot, and the
gallop. When the pictures were published internationally in the popular
and scientific press, they were so different from the traditional
hand-drawn representation of a horse's steps that it was difficult to
believe that they were accurate. To prove that his photographs were
correct, Muybridge threwthem upon a screen one after the other with a
lantern-slide projector he had built for the purpose; the result was the
world's first motion-picture presentation. This memorable event took
place at the San Francisco Art Association in 1880.
Muybridge's early studies were taken with wet plates. With the new
gelatin plates, he was able to improve his technique greatly, and in
1884–85, at the invitation of the University of Pennsylvania, he
produced 781 sequence photographs of many kinds of animals as well as
men and women engaged in a wide variety of activities.
Muybridge's photographic analysis of movement led the French
physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey to develop chronophotography. Whereas
Muybridge had employed a battery of cameras to record detailed, separate
images of successive stages of movement, Marey used only one, recording
an entire sequence of movement on a single plate. With Marey's method,
the images of various phases of motion sometimes overlapped, but it was
easier to see and understand the flow of movement. Marey was also able
to record higher speeds at shorter intervals than Muybridge. Both his
and Muybridge's work greatly contributed to the field of motion study
and to the development of the motion picture.
Naturalistic photography
Contributions of Emerson
In the late 19th century the growing number of amateur photographers
used the camera to capture daily occurrencesand important moments in
their lives, but the members of the societies and clubs concerned with
photography as an art became more and more divorced from matters of
ordinary life. Subjects in the so-called art photographs were
artificially composed in the studio in imitation of 17th-century Dutch
paintings. Photographers strove to master complicated printing methods
allowing manual interference. Photographing everyday life was considered
mere record-making or documentation. Landscape pictures, the strength of
British photographers in past decades, found little favour. When similar
beliefs prevailed in French academic painting 35 years previously, the
French realist painter Gustave Courbet was prompted to call for a
“return to nature.” So now Peter Henry Emerson, physician by profession
and an ardent amateur photographer, attacked the artificiality of the
photographs generally accepted as outstanding examples of the artistic
use of the camera. Emerson's passionate plea for the return to natural
subjects was indeed salutary, but of greater importance was his advice
that photographers should respect the photographic process and limit
their controls to those that were inherent.
In his book Naturalistic Photography (1889) Emerson further developed
his theories (some of which he later disclaimed). Although his writings
were influential, his photographs of the life of simple country folk
presented a farmore convincing argument for his beliefs. Emerson's
photographs were far removed from the usual artificial genre studies and
close to the graphic work of the French painter J.-F. Millet, which
Emerson greatly admired. They were published in limited editions in
handsome folio volumes and motivated other amateurs to seek inspiration
innature.
The photographs in Emerson's first and finest album, Life andLandscape
on the Norfolk Broads (1886), were printed on the newly invented
platinotype paper. In this printing paper, salts of iron and platinum
replaced those of silver as the light-sensitive material. Platinotypes
had a long and delicatetonal scale, and they did not fade, unlike the
more common silver prints. Emerson helped to popularize the paper, which
remained in use until about 1920, when the rising price of platinum made
it impractical.
The Linked Ring and the Photo-Secession
The recognition of photography as an art rather than a mechanical
process and its evaluation on its own terms rather than according to the
traditional rules governing painting were further advanced by the
formation in London in 1892 of the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring. The
group, which was founded by the prominent pictorial photographer H.P.
Robinson, George Davison, a leader of the Art Nouveau movement, and
others dissatisfied with the scientific bias of the London Photographic
Society, held annual exhibitions, which they called salons. By 1901 it
was their proud boast that “through the Salon the Linked Ring has
clearly demonstrated that pictorial photography is able to stand alone
and that it has a future entirely apart from that which is purely
mechanical.”
Similar groups formed in other countries. One of the most influential
was the Photo-Secession, founded in the United States in 1902 by Alfred
Stieglitz. Stieglitz, who had previously organized the Camera Club of
New York City and served as editor of the club journal, Camera Notes,
was a strong proponent of “straight” photography. He did not believe in
retouching or manipulating in any way his negatives or prints. He had,
as early as 1892–93, demonstrated the pictorial possibilities of the
hand camera with his photographs of New York under all weather
conditions.
A few of the Photo-Secession members, including Clarence H. White and
Harry C. Rubincam, favoured naturalistic photography like Stieglitz.
Many, however, notably EdwardSteichen and Alvin Langdon Coburn, were
adherents of the impressionistic soft-focus school and of the newly
introduced gum print process. This technique gave the photographer the
utmost manual control. He coated paper with watercolour pigment of any
desired tint mixed with gum arabic and potassium bichromate. On exposure
to light beneath a negative, the pigment became insoluble according to
the amount of light received. The print was “developed” simply by
bathing it in water. If desired, areas could be eliminated by brushing
them with hot water or by drawing on them.
Despite their stylistic differences, the members of the Photo-Secession
were united in their disdain for the lack of standards and the general
conduct of photographic exhibitions in the United States. They chose the
name “secession” to dramatize their rebellion against the status quo,
just as avant-garde German and Austrian painters had used the same word
to make manifest their independence ofofficialdom. The record of the
Photo-Secession is contained in 50 issues of the much praised Camera
Work , published by Stieglitz between 1903 and 1917; this quarterly
publication contained superb reproductions of photographs but was of
uneven quality, partly because of the members' stylistic differences.
The photographs were occasionally overly sentimental, artificial, or
banal, and indeed, far better work was being produced in New York City
at this time by documentary photographers such as Jacob Riis and Lewis
W. Hine, whose photographs were not then considered art.
In addition to Camera Work, the Photo-Secession had a gallery, which
came to be known as 291 from the street number on Fifth Avenue, New York
City, where it was located. There Stieglitz showed not only pictorial
photographs but also, from 1906 on, avant-garde modern art, selected at
first by Steichen in Paris. At 291 Americans saw, long before the Armory
Show of 1913 made them popular, paintings and sculpture by Rodin, Marin,
Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso, Brancusi, and Matisse.
Stieglitz also organized there the first exhibitions in the world of
drawings by children (1912) and of African art (1914).
Other important photographers of the period were Paul Strand and Coburn.
The last two issues of Camera Work contained photographs by Strand only.
They showed an entirely new approach. There were views looking down from
unusual angles; there were bowls in quasi-abstract arrangements; there
was a group of powerful open-air portraits taken in the streets of the
lower East Side of New York City. These portraits had been taken with a
45° prism fitted over the lens, so that the subjects were unaware that
they were being photographed. Coburn, one of the first of thePhoto-Secessionists,
made a series of photographs in 1912 looking down from tall buildings,
which he exhibited as “New York from Its Pinnacles”; they were
remarkable for the way inwhich emphasis was placed on form. He pushed
this interest in abstraction to the total elimination of recognizable
subject matter in his “Vortographs,” some of which were published in
Photograms of the Year in 1917.
During the 1920s and '30s, a new, more realistic style of photography
gained prominence, a reflection, perhaps, of post-World War I
disillusionment. At the close of the war, Steichen, who had been in
command of aerial photographyfor the American Expeditionary Forces,
abandoned the broad, impressionistic style he had earlier practiced for
sharply focused portraits of celebrities, taken for Vanity Fair and
Vogue magazines. The painter Charles Sheeler used the camera to record
the stark beauty of Pennsylvania barns andthe forms of industrial
structures.
In California, Edward Weston, who had been working as a photographer for
more than 15 years, turned in 1923 to a more direct and realistic use of
the camera, with a certain emphasis upon abstract form that he never
allowed to detract from the recognition of subject matter. “The camera
should be used for a recording of life,” he wrote in 1924, “for
rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself,
whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.” He formulated a
working method based on the use of the classic view camera for eight- by
10-inch negatives, a high-quality lens, well stopped down to ensure
great depth of field, and the complete avoidance of artificial lighting.
He printed the negatives by contact on glossy bromide paper to secure
maximum detail. Enlarging and retouching of any kind was inadmissable.
To Stieglitz this revaluation of photographic aesthetics was in fact a
strengthening of the beliefs he had held since his student days. He
produced some of his most powerful work in the 1920s—especially his
photographs of cloud forms thathe called “Equivalents” because they were
equivalent to his thoughts and emotions. Ill health forced him to
abandon the camera in 1936, but he continued to maintain an art gallery
until his death in 1946.
Paul Strand, whose striking close-ups and semiabstract photographs
Stieglitz had first exhibited, developed a style equally rigorous and
self-disciplined during the same period.He produced powerful landscapes,
direct portraits, and minute details of driftwood and plant life. In
1940 a portfolio of superb photographs Strand had taken in Mexico was
issued. After Strand settled in France in 1950, he traveled extensively,
producing similar publications on France, Italy, the Hebrides, Egypt,
and Ghana, each providing insight into the life in small communities.
Asked to define his sphere of interest, Strand once replied that he
considered himself a photographer of people.
Viewing the negatives of Strand led Ansel Adams in 1930 to make
photography his career. He was then studying the piano and photographing
for his own satisfaction. Long interested in nature—his first
photographs were of the SierraNevada Range and Yosemite National Park—he
refined and sharpened his technique. In 1932, with Willard Van Dyke,
Edward and Brett Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Sonya Noskowiak, Adams
founded an informal society, Group f.64, so named for the smallest
setting of the aperture of the lens that coupled maximum depth of field
with maximum sharpness. Adams' great contribution was in what he called
“the interpretation of the natural scene.” His photographs “Mount
Williamson—Clearing Storm” (1944) and “Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine”
(1944) are classics.
A major representative of the postwar realistic style, known as the Neue
Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”) in Germany, was Albert Renger-Patzsch,
a professional photographer whospent most of his life in Essen.
Beginning in 1922, he introduced a completely new approach to
photography in Germany. He abhorred the vagueness and falsification of
photography of the art nouveau period (1890–1914). A firmbeliever in
straight photography, he was fascinated by the beauty of everyday
things. Like Strand before him, Renger-Patzsch considered a purely
objective photography to be the true, if unattainable, goal. His
photographs are characterized by strong design, factual documentation,
and stark realism stressing materials. Like Weston he insisted that the
final image should exist, in all itscompleteness, before the exposure
was made and that the print should directly record this image in full
detail.
Renger-Patzsch's work was first exhibited in 1925, and three years later
his most famous book appeared, Die Welt ist schön (“The World Is
Beautiful”). The very title set the work apart in a period when artists
were more concerned with creating abstractions than interpreting the
environment. Renger-Patzsch looked hard at the world. The art historian
Heinrich Schwarz wrote in 1929: “If today the photographs
ofRenger-Patzsch create more pure pleasure than many paintings, it is
not an accident, but evidence that the time has found in the
photographer a more sensitive instrument for the expression of its
artistic needs than in the painter.” Renger-Patzsch's subsequent books
were largely concerned with regional landscapes and architecture, but
his last two publications, Im Wald (1958; “Trees”) and Gestein (1966;
“Stones”), have an abstract beauty inspired by their themes.
Neue Sachlichkeit gathered momentum when Karl Blossfeldt's breathtaking,
detailed magnifications of plants, which he had taken around 1900 to
assist him in modeling plants, were published in Original Forms of Art
(1928), followed by the Magic Garden of Nature (1932). About that time,
August Sander, sick of the sweet-looking, posed studio portraits by
which he had made his living for nearly 30 years,vowed “From now on I
only want the honest truth about our time and people.” In Portrait of an
Epoch (1929) Sander presented such an unflattering portrait of the
German middle class that in 1934 the Nazis impounded all unsold copies.
Sander's idea of photographing tradespeople in his studio in Cologne
inspired the American fashion photographer Irving Penn to shoot a
similar series 30 years later. In both cases the portraits are
unconvincing because the workers are divorced from their usual
surroundings. The finest portraits of the German intelligentsia of the
1920s were taken by Hugo Erfurth of Dresden. They are imbued with strong
artistic conception and a sympathetic understanding of the sitter.
Post-World War I history
Influence of abstract art
In 1919 Christian Schad, a member of the Dada group of modern artists in
Geneva, amused himself by arranging small, flat objects directly on
photographic paper. Upon exposure to light, the paper darkened more or
less or not at all, according to the opacity or transparency of the
objects. These “schadographs,” as they came to be called, were minor
contributions to the Dada movement and would be forgotten except that
they inspired the American Surrealist painter Man Ray and the Hungarian
constructivist painter László Moholy-Nagy to produce similar, though
larger, abstract photographs.
Man Ray had settled in Paris in 1921 and was supporting himself by
taking portraits and fashion photographs. One day he accidentally set a
glass funnel, a graduate, and a thermometer on a piece of photographic
paper, thus producing “rayographs.”
I turned on the light; before my eyes an image began toform, not
quite a simple silhouette of the objects as in astraight photograph, but
distorted and refracted by the glass more or less in contact with the
paper.
About the same time, in Berlin, Moholy-Nagy (or perhaps his wife, Lucia,
a trained photographer) began to use three-dimensional objects to make
similar cameraless photographs, which he called “photograms.” Although
identical in technique, the work of each was quite different. Man Ray
emphasized the distorted but recognizable object; Moholy-Nagy the play
of light, no matter how abstract. The former brought to photography the
vision of the Surrealists; the latter, that of the Constructivists.
As a teacher in the influential Bauhaus art school, Moholy-Nagy explored
the potential of the unconventional use of the camera as a means of
discovering form. He delighted in the worm's-eye and the bird's-eye
view. He considered the negative an end as well as a means. Amazed at
the power of the medium to make visible the invisible, he collected X
rays, photomicrographs, and astronomical and ultrahigh-speed
photographs. When in 1925 he put together a book of these pictures
titled Painting, Photography, Film, the eyes of the world were opened to
the scope and breadth of photography as a tool for vision.
Photomontage
The art of combining photographs with watercolour paintingswas a popular
pastime in the 1870s. In the first decades of the 20th century the idea
of freely combining mediums was revived when Cubist painters began to
glue on their abstract canvases words clipped from newspapers, labels
from bottles, and even actual objects. The extension of this collage
technique (from the French coller, meaning “to glue”) to photography was
logical. The German artist John Heartfield, the greatest master of
photomontage, claimed that the origin of the technique lay in postcards
that he and his friend the German artist George Grosz sent to friends at
the front during World War I. These were
a mischmasch of advertisements for hernia belts, student song books
and dog food, labels from schnaps and wine bottles, and photographs from
picture papers,cut up at will in such a way as to say, in pictures, what
would have been banned by the censors if we had said it in words.
Heartfield's photomontages, which were published weekly, first in Berlin
and later in Prague, between 1929 and 1938, have a savage quality.
Violent contrasts of the scale and perspective of the image elements,
the ruthless cropping of heads and bodies, the substitution of machine
parts for vital organs, and other seeming illogical juxtapositions, were
carefully calculated to have a shock effect. Heartfield's anti-Fascist
montages were among the strongest protests made by any visual artist.
Excellent montages were also produced in the 1920s by the German artists
Hannah Höch, Herbert Bayer, Otto Umbehr, and the Surrealist painter Max
Ernst. Most of these combinedphotographs cut from newspapers with other
ephemera to express a specific idea. The montages of the Constructivists
are more architectural: space is created with the purely photographic
self-portrait of the Russian artist El Lissitzky (1924) and a fantasy
world is built by Moholy-Nagy in his “Leda and the Swan.” The power of
montage lies in the tensions set up by the juxtaposition of disparate
visual elements.
Documentary photography
At this same period, the documentary photographs of Eugène Atget first
became known to the public. Beginning around 1898, this French
photographer produced approximately 10,000 photographs of Paris and its
environs that were direct, straightforward, and poetic in their
sympathetic rendering of the very fabric of the city. He photographed
shop fronts, buildings, wheeled vehicles of all kinds, decorative
details, and the people who earned their living in the streets. Unknown
to the photographic world, Atget worked alone, supporting himself by
selling prints to architects, painters, and, above all, museums. The
beauty of his photographs attracted the attention of Man Ray, who
published a few of them in the periodical La Revolution Surréaliste in
1926. Upon Atget's death in 1927 his entire collection of prints and
negatives was saved for posterity by the U.S. photographer Berenice
Abbott (with the help of the New York art dealer Julien Levy); they are
now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
Although Atget was one of the most prominent photographers in the
documentary field, he was by no meansthe first. The value of the
photograph as a record of the worldand man's conditions and achievements
has been evident since the inception of the medium in 1839.
Early documentary photographs were used to relay information about
important events (e.g., the Brady staff's record of the Civil War) as
well as the scenery and people of distant or unexplored lands. They were
also used to record the successive stages of significant or complex
projects. TheEnglish artist Philip Henry Delamotte, for example, was
hiredto document in weekly photographs the progress of the construction
of the Crystal Palace in London, from the laying of its foundation in
1852 to its opening by Queen Victoria two years later. Shortly
afterward, by order of the French government, Édouard-Denis Baldus
photographed to scale the sculpture, capitals, scrollwork, and other
architectural details of the new wing of the Louvre Museum. Valuable
workof a similar timely nature was undertaken by the English
photographers Alfred and John Bool and Henry Dixon. Between 1875 and
1886 they worked for the Society for Photographing Old London, recording
the historic buildings and relics that were gradually disappearing as a
result of modernization.
The recognition of the power of photography to persuade as well as to
inform came somewhat later. The classic sociological study London Labour
and the London Poor , by Henry Mayhew (1851–62), was illustrated with
drawings partly copied from daguerreotypes taken by Richard Beard; a
sequel, patterned upon it, appeared in 1877—Street Life in London, by
Adolphe Smith and John Thomson. The photographs, taken by Thomson, were
moving, straightforward pictures of chimney sweeps, flower sellers,
bargemen, and other tradesmen. They were reproduced by the woodburytype
process, which gave exact, permanent facsimiles of the original prints.
The intent of the publication was to show—as Charles Dickens had shown
in his novels—the hardships and problems faced by the ever-growing
working-class population of London. Each of the photographs was
accompanied by a detailed explicative text by Smith. Oscar G. Rejlander
photographed orphan children in the streets of London performing such
humble tasks as cleaning boots and sweeping streets.
To Jacob A. Riis, a police reporter in New York City in the 1880s, the
camera became the ally of his pen in the personal crusade he was waging
to better the lot of the immigrants who then lived and worked in
wretched conditions in tenements in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Himself
an immigrant—he arrived in New York from Denmark in 1870—he knew at
first hand the conditions he was seeking toeradicate. To supplement his
written descriptions, he turned to photography. When the cameraman he
employed proved unsatisfactory, he learned the process himself and was
one of the first to use flash powder, a German invention recently
introduced to the United States. His photographs, published in crude
facsimile in newspapers and in his now-famous books, How the Other Half
Lives (1890) and Children of the Poor (1892), were instrumental in
stimulating legislative reform.
Beginning in 1905, Lewis W. Hine, a teacher at the Ethical Culture
School in New York and a trained sociologist, began to make a pictorial
record of immigrants passing through Ellis Island. He followed them in
New York City, photographing them in their living quarters, at work, and
in the streets. Later Hine traveled to textile mills, mines, and other
places where young children were employed; largely through the evidence
of his photographs, legislation was eventually passed against child-labour
abuses.
In England Sir Benjamin Stone, a member of Parliament for Birmingham,
was obsessed by the wish to document old English customs and pageants
that he rightly feared would gradually disappear. He was the most active
member of the National Photographic Record Association, which he had
founded for this purpose in 1895, leaving to the city of Birmingham a
collection of 22,000 photographs.
The body of photographs produced for the Farm Security Administration
during the Great Depression in the United States has been preserved for
future generations by the Library of Congress. The pictures cover the
period from 1935until the outbreak of World War II and were taken by a
group of dedicated photographers, under the direction of Roy E. Stryker.
Stryker, a professor of economics at Columbia University, was invited by
the Secretary of Agriculture to form a historical section in the
department to document the plight of farmers driven from their land in
the dust bowl and who were migrating to the West. This at once took the
form of a photographic project. The first photographer to be hired was
Arthur Rothstein, a student of Stryker's. From California came Dorothea
Lange, who had photographed migratory workers there. Her photographs are
notable for their compassionate attitude toward people. In her
“Migratory PeaPicker,” a destitute young mother, surrounded by her
children, peers at the camera with determination and courage. Walker
Evans, with a direct uncompromising sense of environment and the beauty
of everyday architecture, contributed a notable series. With the writer
James Agee he documented the lives of sharecroppers in the book Let Us
Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Others were documenting America at this
time: Berenice Abbott produced a notable series of photographs of New
York City, and Margaret Bourke-White with her husband, Erskine Caldwell,
did a passionate survey of the South, which appeared in book formas You
Have Seen Their Faces (1937).
Photojournalism
From the outset, photography has served the press. Within weeks after
the French government's announcement of the process in 1839, magazines
were publishing woodcuts or lithographs with the byline “from a
daguerreotype.” In fact, the two earliest illustrated weeklies—The
Illustrated London News , which started in May 1842, and L'Illustration,
based in Paris from its first issue in March 1843—owe their origin to
the invention of photography. Early reproductions were generally crude,
however, and carried little of the conviction of the original
photograph. Regular use of photographs in magazines began with the
perfection of the halftone processfor facsimile reproduction in the
1890s. By 1915 newspapers had also turned to photography for reporting
topical events, and the profession of newspaper illustrator
graduallybecame obsolete. Although technical advances improved
reproduction quality, the subjects and styles of early journalistic
photography were generally unimaginative and dull.
It was not until the appearance of the Ermanox in 1924 and the Leica in
1925 that a new approach to pictorial journalism began to emerge. These
two German-made miniature cameras, fitted with wide-aperture lenses,
required extremely short exposure times for outdoor work and were even
able to photograph indoor scenes by available light. This capability led
to photographs whose informality of poseand sense of presence were
remarkable. In 1928–29 two of the largest picture magazines in Europe,
the Münchner Illustrierte Presse and the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung,
began to print the new style of photographs. Erich Salomon captured
revealing candid portraits of politicians and other personalities by
sneaking his camera into places and meetings officially closed to
photographers. Felix H. Man was encouraged by Stefan Lorant, editor of
the Münchner Illustrierte, to take sequences of photographs at
interviews and cultural and social events. Lorant then laid out the
photographs in imaginative picture essays.
The example of the German picture magazines was followedin other parts
of Europe and in the United States. One was the short-lived Vu,
established in Paris in 1928. An issue of Vu devoted entirely to the
Spanish Civil War contained memorable photographs by Robert Capa. In
1936 both Life and Look were conceived in America, and a formula was
evolved in which the picture editor, photographer, researcher, and
writer constituted a team. The result was the creation of a definite
photographic style.
Life's first photographers were Margaret Bourke-White, already famous
for her industrial photographs made largely for the magazine Fortune;
Alfred Eisenstaedt, an experienced photo reporter for the Keystone
Picture Agency in Germany; Peter Stackpole, whose photographs of the
Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco attracted much attention; and Thomas
D. McAvoy, a news photographer who had pioneered in photographing
interior scenes by available light. The concept of Life from the start,
according to its founder, Henry Luce, was to replace haphazard picture
taking and editing with the “mind-guided camera.” Photographers were
briefed for their assignments and encouraged to take great quantities of
photographs, in order that the editors might have a large selection. The
visual organization of the picture story was carefully planned for
maximum reader impact. The opening photograph of the picture essay
established the situation, and like written narration there was a visual
climax and a definite conclusion.Usually the photographs were chosen and
arranged on the pages before the accompanying text was written. Unlike
the illustrated article, the picture essay quite logically is based upon
the photographs, and the text is devoted to informationthat cannot be
expressed visually: names, dates, places.
Life and Look preferred to use pictures of great sharpness and depth.
Thus, instead of unobtrusive miniature cameras, American photographers
used large-format cameras requiring slow lenses, large plates, and
additional flash light.At first, the photographers made great use of
so-called synchroflash; i.e., flash that was synchronized with the
camera shutter. The next step was the multiple flash, which made
possible more sophisticated and pleasing lighting effects. By
duplicating the existing illumination with the flash lighting,
photographers could await the moment when people were at their most
natural and then make the exposure without the need for posing.
This way of photographing was soon challenged. Lorant, whohad left the
Münchner Illustrierte Presse, moved in 1934 fromGermany to London.
There, he established the magazines Weekly Illustrated (1934) and
Picture Post (1938). Staff photographers on both magazines included old
colleagues from Germany, such as Man and Kurt Hutton. They, as well
asother contributors, were encouraged to develop the technique and
pictorial style of available-light photographs so brilliantly begun in
the 1920s. Their pictures had a remarkable naturalness that brought
great reader appeal—so much so that Life began to publish similar
photographs and in 1945 hired a former Picture Post photographer,
Leonard McCombe, with an extraordinary clause in his contract: he was
forbidden to use flash.
Memorable groups of photographs have been taken for the picture
magazines. Examples are Man's “A Day with Mussolini,” first published in
the Münchner Illustrierte Presse(1931), and then, with a brilliant new
layout, in Picture Post; W. Eugene Smith's “Spanish Village” (1951) and
“Nurse Midwife” (1951) in Life; and Eisenstaedt's informal, penetrating
portraits of famous Britons, also in Life.
The photojournalist's ability to train himself to perceive the
significant in the fraction of a second and to use the camera with such
speed and precision that the instantaneous perception is preserved
forever is a great creative gift. The gift is evident in the work of the
Hungarian André Kertész as early as 1915 and in his later work in Paris
during the 1920s. The Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson began around 1930
to develop the style that he later called the search for the “decisive
moment.” To him the camera was an “extension ofthe eye.” With
extraordinary precision he perceived a fully composed picture of the
most fleeting scenes. Unlike many other photographers, he did not crop
or recompose his pictures after they had been taken: every detail of a
Cartier-Bresson photograph is present in the negative. He preferred the
miniature 35-mm-film camera. When he found a picture possibility he
stalked his prey unobtrusively, working with his camera to a visual
climax.
Colour photography
Photography's transmutation of nature's colours into various shades of
black and white had been considered a drawback of the process from its
inception. Hence, at the request of a client, many portrait
photographers collaborated with artists who hand-tinted daguerreotypes
and calotypes or painted over albumen prints in oils. Some artists also
copied the photograph onto canvas; others, such as Franz von Lenbach in
Munich, had the image projected onto canvas that had been made
light-sensitive, whereupon they painted freely over it. In Japan, where
hand-coloured woodcuts had a great tradition and labour was cheap, some
firms from the 1870s on sold photographs of scenic views and daily life
that had been delicately hand-tinted. In the 1880s photochromes, colour
prints made from hand-coloured photographs, became fashionable and
remained popular until they were gradually replaced in the first decades
of the 20th century by Autochrome plates.
The Autochrome process, the first practical colour photography process,
was introduced in France in 1907 by Auguste and Louis Lumière. It used a
colour screen (a glass plate covered with grains of starch dyed to act
as primary-colour filters and black dust that blocked all unfiltered
light) coated with a thin film of panchromatic (i.e., sensitive to all
colours) emulsion and resulted in a positive colour transparency. The
Lumières' success was due in part to the introduction of panchromatic
emulsion the previous year by a London firm of photographic plate
manufacturers. All previous experimenters trying to solve the problem of
colour photography had been seriously impeded by the comparative
insensitivity of the earlier negative material to all colours except
blue and violet.
Researchers continued to look for improvements and alternative colour
processes, and in 1935 Leopold Godowsky, Jr., and Leopold Mannes, two
American musicians working with the Kodak Research Laboratories,
initiated the modern era of colour photography with their invention of
Kodachrome film. With this reversal (slide) film, colour transparencies
could be obtained that were suitable both for projection and for
reproduction. A year later the Agfa Company of Germany developed the
Agfacolor negative–positive process, but due to World War II the film
did not become available until 1949. Meanwhile, Kodak had introduced in
1942 the Kodacolor negative–positive film that, 20 years later—after
many improvements in quality and speed and a great reduction in
price—became the most popular film used for amateur photography. Today
about 80 percent of all photographs are shot in colour.
Later trends
Throughout its history, there have been two complementary yet distinct
aesthetic approaches to photography. On the one hand, there has been the
recognition of the basic qualities of photography and the desire to make
use of them in a functional way. On the other hand, there have beenthose
who believe that the most aesthetic use of photography is to relate it
to other mediums. Since 1950 both these trends have been pursued with
vigour, and to them has been added a third approach, the expressive,
emotional use of photography pioneered by Stieglitz with his
“equivalents” series.
In the United States, Minor White, through his long career, hiswriting,
his teaching, and his founding and editing of the influential magazine
Aperture, developed the Stieglitz approach to a highly sophisticated
level. For him, the photograph must be transformed in such a manner that
the viewer can read an inner message, which is not visible upon the
surface, but which is carried by it. White's book Mirrors, Messages,
Manifestations (1970) is a collection of superb photographs that present
his spiritual biography.
To Aaron Siskind, who worked with wall scrawls, weathered wood and
plaster, torn billboards, and what he called “the detritus of our
world,” the photograph must communicate more than the subject itself.
The photographs of Harry Callahan express his highly developed sense of
linear form, often by means of sharp contrasts of black and white and
multiple images.
One of the finest photographers working after World War II was former
Life photographer Andreas Feininger. His dramatic close-ups of
architecture and nature reveal a thorough understanding of design,
composition, and structure, which can perhaps be attributed to his early
training as an architect.
Colour photography has become increasingly popular within the ranks of
the amateur. Although many professionals have explored the artistic
possibilities of colour, which can add intensity and realism to the
picture and increase interest in the subject, some prefer
black-and-white to colour film for aesthetic reasons. Among professional
colour photographers, Eliot F. Porter and Marie Cosindas (one of the
first to work with Polaroid instant films) were the leaders in America:
both preferred a somewhat realistic approach.
A considerable impediment to a more widespread use of colour in
monographs and other publications studying the artof photography is the
often prohibitive price of colour reproduction.
The urban social scene viewed objectively without sentiment or
moralization—often called the “social landscape”—has been a subject of
much interest to photographers in both the United States and Europe. The
work of such photographers as Robert Frank, Bruce Davidson, and William
Klein takes the form of penetrating sociological observations, somewhat
reminiscent of the documentary photography of the 1930s. The approach
differs in that, rather than presenting problems faced by a certain
level of society, emphasis is placed on the effects of the urban
environment upon people.
In England and Europe, trends closely parallel those in the United
States. Bill Brandt, whose classic social reportage began with the book
The English at Home (1936) and continued during World War II with
trenchant photographs of life in the bomb shelters of London, changed
his style during the 1950s. Using an extremely wide-angle lens he
created startling abstract studies of nudes, some of which are
reminiscent of Henry Moore sculptures. Cecil Beaton, fashion
photographer for British Vogue, created pictures withexquisite taste.
His moving photographs of London during the bombing of World War II and
of other scenes of the war stress the human aspect rather than the
military. The “social landscape” school is well represented in the work
of Tony Ray-Jones and Raymond Moore. The strongest contribution probably
lies in the field of photojournalism. George Rodger, one of the founders
of the Magnum agency and a former Life photographer, and Bert Hardy, a
former Picture Post photographer, provided a solid tradition for the
work of Don McCullin, who—like Robert Capa before him—traveled from war
to war, photographing with deep compassion the conflicts that appeared
in his book The Destruction Business(1971).
The most imaginative photographs in Europe are mostly made for
publication, rather than for exhibition or hanging in galleries and
homes. Europeans, in general, do not consider the photographic print as
an end in itself, but as a step toward reproduction in periodicals and
books. Brassaï (the pseudonym of Gyulas Halász) made his name in
photography with the publication of Paris de nuit (1933), intimate and
sympathetic photographs of night life in the more humble quarters of
Paris. In the 1950s, like Aaron Siskind, he became fascinated with wall
scrawls and graffiti. Robert Doisneau was a master of humour and satire,
catching moments of absurdity in everyday life. Lucien Clergue turned to
the natural scene and to the nude in surf. The tradition of cameraless
abstraction was enriched by the Belgian Pierre Cordier with the
introduction in 1958 of his “chimigrammes”—colour images made, not by
light, but chemical action on photographic paper.
In Germany the greatest influence was the teaching of Otto Steinert at
Saarbrücken and, since 1959, at the Folkwangschule in Essen. Almost
single-handedly he brought back to Germany that spirit of
experimentation and boldness of concept that had been suppressed during
the Third Reich. An excellent photographer, Steinert was the founder in
1951, together with the art historian J.A. Schmoll gennant Eisenweth, of
a movement they named “Subjective Photography.” He led the group “Fotoform,”
which first exhibited its work in 1950, to explore the creative
potential of any possible expressive technique. Peter Keetman is one of
the strongest representatives of Fotoform's dedication to creating
innovative, expressive graphic designs and abstract patterns. Robert
Häusser, a student of Steinert, was strongly influenced by Fotoform in
his early work. Later he introduced mystifying elements into his
landscapes, willfullydistorting reality until it bordered on abstract
expressionism.Chargesheimer, like Robert Frank in the United States,
laid great stress on the unpleasant side of his themes in hard, almost
brutal photographs of German cities. Floris M. Neusüss, who teaches at
the University of Kassel, in Germany, is a great exponent of conceptual
photography, which uses concepts as material and in which the
preconceived idea is more important than the object. Erwin Fieger stands
out with such books as 13 Photo-Essays (1969), Japan, Sunrise Island
(1971), and Mexico (1973) as one of the finest in the field of colour
reportage. Horst Baumann specialized in illustration, particularly in
colour.
The Austrian Ernst Haas was a master of colour photography, turning
toward the abstract in his remarkablephotographs of blurred action and
bold compositions. A member of the Magnum group, a cooperative formed by
Cartier-Bresson and others in 1947, Haas produced work thatis
international in scope.
Outstanding among Swiss photographers working after World War II was
Werner Bischof, who, until his death in 1954,movingly photographed
refugees in Europe, the famine in India, Japan, and the Incas of Peru.
Superb colour work was produced by Emil Schulthess for his books Africa
(1959), The Amazon (1962), China (1966), and others. Georg Gerster
revealed in his aerial views, primarily taken in colour, a beauty of
design that frequently comes close to modern art.
The Czech Josef Sudek (1896–1976) is best known abroad for his still
lifes, Vilem Heckel for his photographs of industry and mountains, Karel
Plicka for his views of Prague, and JosefKoudelka for his impressive
work on Gypsies. In Sweden each member of the group of photographers
known as TIO (“Ten”) has produced outstanding work. Each works in a
different field, but all are united by their modern style. The most
gifted Russian photographer, Alexander M. Rodchenko, was too modern for
Stalin's taste, and his work was banished until the dictator's death.
During World War II Dimitri Baltermans produced fine reportage work on
the front.
In Italy Franco Fontana, shooting in colour with telelenses, created
amazing abstractions of landscapes, fields, and buildings; Mario de
Biasi made a fine record of the uprising in Budapest in 1956; and Fulvio
Roiter produced a series of travel books, the most sensitive and
romantic of which focused on his hometown, Venice. The chief concern of
most photographers in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, however, is centred
upon the recording of the social scene: Mario Giacomelli's series of
photographs of nuns and village life is typical and outstanding.
In Japan the extraordinary documentary and landscape photographs by
Hiroshi Hamaya parallel the straight photographic approach. Superb
photographs were also produced by Takayuki Ogawa, the social realist,
and by the imaginative Eikoh Hosoe.
A lively interest in expanding the medium of photography beyond the
straight approach was characteristic of much work in the late 20th
century. The experimentation took many forms, including the revival of
long-obsolete printing techniques such as the gum bichromate process and
the platinotype. Perhaps the most startling change to come about after
1960 was an interchange of mediums between photographers and painters.
Many photographers made liberal use of manual techniques, such as
negative and print retouching and the addition of colour.
Simultaneously, painters, who had long utilized photographs as tools for
observation, boldly imitated the very quality of photographic vision and
sometimes introduced unaltered photographs by collage techniques or
silkscreen reproduction directly into their canvases.
Another late 20th-century trend was the photographer's increasing
reliance on books for the presentation of his work.Several factors
contributed to this practice, among them the demise of many of the major
picture magazines, technical developments that provided better printing
quality at lower costs, and the complete acceptance of photography as an
art worthy of study and preservation.
Beaumont Newhall
Helmut Erich Robert Gernsheim