3.1 Capturing Images: The Dev of Phography in the 19th C Flashcards
camera obscura
A Latin term for “dark chamber”. A dark room or box with an aperture/lens through which light shines onto an opposit wall, creating an upside-down image of the scene passing through the lens, which can then be traced.
daguerreotype
An early type of photograph created through a process invented by Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre in 1839, in which a metal plate coated with light-sensitive materials is exposed to light, then treated with mercury vapors, in order to reveal an image. The image was then fixed in a salt solution.
The resulting picture was a negative image, but appeared positive upon a polished silver plate. It was fragile, and not easily duplicated, but produced a precise, high quality image.
Daguerre’s The Artist’s Studio has a composition and overal aesthetic consistent with the conventions of still-life painting of the time.
Pictorialist Photography
A style of photography that reflects the conventions of painted portraiture, featuring the half-length portrait, positioning of hands, and dramatic lighting. Nadar’s self portrait (1855) is an example of this genre.
Name several ways in which photography was used in the 19th C. What subject matter was used? What styles?
Among other uses, early photography was used to document architecture and landscape, to document the world around us, to record scientific data of the natural world, and for portraiture.
William Henry Fox Talbot, inventor of the calotype (a process using a paper negative), found the process, which created a rather hazy image, to be well suited to making images of rural scenery and still lifes. Following his passion for nature, Talbot and his assistant, Anna Atkins, also catalogued the natural world in a book titled The Pencil of Nature, illustrated with salt-paper prints of botanical specimens. Because his process could not compete with the precision of the daguerreotype, Talbot approached photography as an artistic medium.
Wet glass plate colloidal photography was used by Matthew Brady to document the battlefields of the Civil War, making it possible for the first time for people who had not been at war to see what they perceived as a factual depiction of its horrors. Brady’s documentary photos, such as The Battle of Antietam (1862) profoundly affected the American public.
The availability of photography awakened a mass hunger for portraiture. Before the photograph, portraits were available to the relative few who had the time and money to have a portrait painted. In early photographic portraits, this connection to painted portraits - or the pictorialist tradition - comes through. They were frequently half-length, with dramatic lighting, and featuring the hands. Nadar’s portraits of Sarah Bernhardt (1864) are illustrative, as is Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait of Mrs. Herbert Duckworth (1867). Cameron’s portraits also featured allegorical references, and she deliberately made them slightly unfocused in order to created a moody, dreamlike quality.
Francis Frith photographed the wonders of the world in his travels, making images such as the Pyramid at Giza (1858) known worldwide. Carleton Watkins participation in expeditions to map land west of the Rockies produced aesthetically driven landscape images that formed national perceptions of the West, and ultimately informed the establishment of National Parks.
Louis Daguerre, Artist’s Studio (1837)
composition and overal aesthetic consistent with the conventions of still-life painting of the time.
Matthew Brady, Dead Soldier, Civil War (1863)
Julia Margaret Cameron, Mrs. Herbert Duckworth as Julia Jackson (1866-75)
Cameron manipulates focus and dodges/burns to play with light, create hazy, mooody, evocative, intimate atmosphere
Romanticism
A counterpoint to Enlgihtenment idealism. Romanticism critiques the notion that the world is knowable and ruled by reason alone. Its central premise was that exploration of emotions, the imagination, and intuition would lead to a more nuanced understanding of the world.
