Photography: From Daguerre to Digital

The Very Beginnings

Cameras before Photography Photography means Light Writing; popular artistic media today that utilizes a camera to capture images. The science behind the camera was discovered in 5th Century BCE China, but cameras did not appear until the 11th century in modern day Iraq. How do Cameras work? Light bounces off the object and travels in a straight line. Light reflected from an object can project an image of that object onto a surface under controlled circumstances. How does that image look to us? Image of the Castle in Prague being projected onto a wall using a camera obscura.

Camera Obscura Artists inside the chamber would trace the reflected view onto paper, creating the forerunner to the photograph. These dark rooms helped artists perfect perspective and chiaroscuro. Illustration showing artist inside a camera obscura. In the 17th century artists discovered they did not need to be in the chamber.

Vermeer…Painter and Photographer? Art historians studying Baroque master Vermeer debate if his works were made with a camera obscura. There is little drawing under his works; the lines there are simple contours. The mirror in the Music Lesson also shows a mysterious rectangular object being reflected….

Vermeer…Painter and Photographer? Phillip Steadman created a model of the room and set the camera obsura up in the location determined from the mirror image. The image in the camera matched the painting…even the shadows were in the correct place! Is Vermeer a Great Artist? OR Great Fraud?

The Modern Camera A light-tight box with an opening to admit light, a lens to focus the light, and a light-sensitive surface to receive and chemically CAPTURE the image created by the light. The first captured image created by a camera used by Joseph N. Niepcs ca 1826.

Louis Jacques Mande Daugerre First inventor to capture a clear photographic image. Captured the images on a copper-plate coated with silver iodide. The plate is the photograph, thus a positive image. Called the daguerreotype. 10-20 minute exposure time made it commercially viable. Le Boulevard du Temple, 1839.

Daguerre, Le Boulevard du Temple and Monet’s Boulevard des Caupines in Paris, ca.1873

William Fox Talbot Created photographs by capturing the image in reverse on a plate called a negative. The negative could be used to create multiple copies on positive images on photographic paper. Called the calotype. This system beat out the Daguerreotype, which was no longer used after 1865. Early calotype taken by Talbot showing photographers at work, 1853.

Photojournalism Bearing Witness and Documenting the Everyday

Photojournalism Once photographs could be reproduced in newspaper, the field of photojournalism born. Due to the mechanical nature of creating a photograph, some mistakenly believe that a photograph is highly objective, without opinion or point of view. The image must be framed and captured; reality is manipulated to suit the photographer’s aims. Not mere illustrations; oftentimes these photographs become iconic, shaping our collective memory of an event. Images taken after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gult Coast in 2005.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936. US government realized power of images early; the Farm Securities Administration of the Dept of Agriculture subsidized photographers to document the crisis of the Dust Bowl and Depression. Lange took several images of this mother. The migrant mother’s grandson has a website with their story at http://www.migrantgrandson.com/

“The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects. So that no one would say, ’how did you do it, where did you find it, ‘ but they would say that such things could be.” – Dorothea Lange

Ansel Adams Known for his photographs of the American West. Believed the best photographs needed to contain a variety of values from white to black. Photographer as artist and technician. Avid member of the Sierra Club; his art used to create new National Parks. Ansel Adams, The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 1942.

Photography IS Art

Photography and Art Freed artists from creating mimetic images. Early photos taken as artistic images imitated the subjects and poses seen in paintings. Soft focus used to give an artistic touch. However, since these early images are imitating painting rather than exploring photography some are pretty bad! Henry Peach Robinson, Fading Away, 1858.

Julia Margaret Cameron Considered herself an amateur. However Cameron was one of the first to use close-ups and carefully controlled lighting. Favored long exposures and profile views. Created thousands of images, portraits and posed scenes, sometimes with her famous friends such as Charles Darwin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Virginia Woolfe. Julia Jackson photographed in 1886.

Certainly the work of Cameron was influential on the British artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Alfred Stieglitz Early major proponent of photography as an art form. Opened a photography art gallery in NYC in 1905, and published first photo journal Camera Work from 1903 to 1917. Known for shooting “straight”. Flatiron Building from Camera Work, 1903.

Henri Cartier-Bresson French photographer that also found visual poetry in the world around him. Felt good photography was the result of the photographer and not a mechanical process. “This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography; composition should be a constant of preoccupation, being a simultaneous coalition – an organic coordination of visual elements.”

Man Ray Famous photographer and painter. Influential with both the Dada and Surrealist movements. Supported his art by taking fashion photos for Vogue. Credited with inventing the “Rayogram”, a technique in which objects are placed on photographic paper in the dark room to create images. (There is no camera). Champs delicieux, second Rayogram, 1922.

Cindy Sherman Interest in self-portraits began from an assignment at art school. Rather than true self-portraits, she creates stereotypical characters recognizable by the American/western audience. Works in both black and white, and color. Cindy Sherman, Film Still #21

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #355, 2000

The Digital Revolution Today’s cameras do not use film. Lens focuses information on sensors that translate the hue and intensity of light into digital files. Files are very easy to manipulate today with computer software like Photoshop and Instagram. Further blurs the line between reality and created image. Woman sitting in front of Gursky’s Stateville, Illinois, 2002.