PHOTOGRAPHY

Photography was presented as a new visual medium simultaneously in England and France in 1839. This invention had been preceded by a decade of experimentation. The aim was to fix a fragment of reality projected via a lens onto the ground glass of a camera obscura on a support sensitized to light with silver nitrate. The Frenchman Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1789–1851), a theatrical designer for the Paris Opéra, partly in collaboration with Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833), developed a process whereby a single print could be recorded on a silvered copper plate. His invention, termed daguerreotype, was immediately acquired by the French government and used on a small scale in Europe and America throughout the 1840s primarily for portraits and the occasional city view and landscape. No prints could be made from daguerreotypes: they were unique objects. Around the same time in England, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) developed a negative-positive process, which he called the calotype. Using this process, multiple positive prints could be made from a paper negative. Talbot's invention of paper photography remained experimental into the 1840s, in part because Talbot obtained patents and then defended them vigorously. New inventions, in fact, improvements on Talbot's principle, surpassed the negative-positive method making possible modest printed editions. The most common method used, well into the nineteenth century, was the wet collodion process (developed by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851), by which prints on albumen paper were made from glass negatives.

A speech the physicist François Arago gave at the Académie des Sciences in Paris in 1839 revealing

the infinite possibilities of photography is famous: he claimed it could be applied in the arts, archaeology, and the sciences. In his now classic photo book The Pencil of Nature (1844–1846), Talbot also outlined the many objectives of photography: from the reproduction of art to the capturing of still lifes, landscapes, portraits, and architecture. In the early days the new art relied heavily on existing visual traditions, and photographers borrowed all manner of motifs and compositions from painting, drawing, and the graphic arts. The first photographers practiced this new branch of art as amateurs, often in and around their own homes. They purchased their camera and equipment in major cities such as London, Paris, and Berlin and were generally affluent. These enthusiasts were interested in experiments with chemistry and physics and eagerly studied the manuals that came onto the market. Artists, scientists, lithographers, and printers also tested the two methods, the daguerreotype and paper photography.

spread of photography

The early photographers rapidly organized themselves in the form of associations and clubs, and went public with their photographic series at various important international exhibitions (London, 1851; London, 1852; Paris, 1855; Amsterdam, 1855; and Brussels, 1856). These same years witnessed the realization of several prestigious projects, some commissioned by governments or associations, the first one being the photographing of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, an idea launched by the British prince consort, Albert. He was also excited about the mission of Roger Fenton (1819–1869) to photograph the Crimean War in 1855. French photographers, including Gustave Le Gray (1820–1884), Henri Le Secq (1818–1882), and Édouard Baldus (1813–1882) were commissioned in 1851 to record the monuments in their country. The French photographers in particular raised the art to great heights. In the second half of the 1850s Baldus photographed the construction of the new Louvre and numerous railway projects; Le Gray made wonderful sea views; and Nadar (1820–1910) received writers, statesmen, and artists in his atelier on the Boulevard des Capucines. Handsome results were also achieved fairly early on farther afield: in Egypt and the Holy Land, as well as in the colonies in Asia. As an army photographer, Linnaeus Tripe (1822–1902) recorded monuments in India (1858), and Isidore van Kinsbergen (1821–1905) did the same in the Dutch East Indies a few years later for the Dutch government.

Europe experienced sweeping political, economic, and social changes in the middle of the nineteenth century. The eruption of the European revolutions of 1848 marked a turning point: it helped form new, larger nation-states, new consitutitions, and more democracy. Large-scale industrialization, which had emerged in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, continued to gain momentum across Europe in this period. This development is aptly phrased in the motto "Mechanization takes command," which also pertained to the visual production in which mechanization (photography) gradually took over handwork (drawing and printmaking). After having been the province of princes, the elite, and the highest classes until the mid-1850s, photography became the new visual medium of the affluent bourgeoisie. The ascendancy of the bourgeoisie was directly linked to the rise and applications of photography as a visual medium for a broad, and increasingly affluent, public. The Paris photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri (1819–1889) developed the carte-de-visite portrait in 1854. The first "mass media," this novelty along with stereophotography (developed by Sir David Brewster in 1849), boomed around 1860. People not only wanted to be eternalized in photographs, but they also wanted to own them for their own pleasure and for their travel albums. From that moment the occupation of photographer took on greater substance, and photographic studios were established in virtually every city. Thus, at this time the invention of photography was part and parcel of a technological development that seemed unstoppable, and it blossomed in a period of prosperity when the European public was eager to give evidence of its new status.

Book and print sellers also began dealing in photography, thereby effecting a widespread and international dissemination, as had been the case in the preceding centuries with prints. Photographs were affixed to preprinted sheets, a few of which were then combined in a cover (creating a fascicule) and sold directly or mailed. When the series was complete, the fascicules were bound together with the accompanying text. Photography rapidly became popular as a form of book illustration: initially entire editions were provided with manually inserted photographs: novels, poetry, scientific publications, catalogs, and series. Many now famous photographs were first part of a book, for instance Maxime Du Camp's photographs of Egypt (1849–1851), John Thomson's photographs of China (1873–1874), and Thomas Annan's images of the slums of Glasgow (1868–1877).

Photography was closely linked to the world of art, architecture, and culture. It led to a far greater accessibility of "realistic" imagery that formed a source of inspiration for painters, sculptors, and architects alike. Photography particularly suited such characteristics as atmosphere, naturalism, and plein air in nineteenth-century art. Photographic nudes, studies of architectural detail, landscape, and even street scenes were used by artists. Moreover, in the realm of science, photography was used for diagnostic purposes or as a means for astronomers to record their observations. In the 1870s and 1880s, photography and the study of motion came together in the experiments of Eadweard Muy-bridge (1830–1904) and Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904), culminating in the development of film at the beginning of the twentieth century.

the turn of the century

The new medium was first seen in retrospective in 1889, when photography celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Historical surveys were organized for which the earliest photographs were brought together and exhibited at the World's Fair in Paris in that year. This moment coincided with the rise of the first international movement within photography, pictorialism, which was actually a reaction to the standardization in the studios of the professional photographers. Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), the American photographer born to German parents, was an important advocate of this direction, which propagated photography as art. European and American photographers interacted

in Stieglitz's gallery in New York and in his influential magazine Camera Work (1903–1917). The year 1889 was significant for other reasons as well. It marked the introduction in Europe of an American invention, namely the small, portable Kodak camera with a roll of film. Initially these cameras were used primarily by well-to-do amateur photographers, and in the following decades they gave an enormous boost to nonprofessional photography. Avid amateur photographers included artists such as the Frenchmen Pierre Bonnard and Edgar Degas, the Dutch painter George Hendrik Breitner, and Pablo Picasso. Their handling of the medium photography was quite fresh and unconventional. It was the prelude to the new vision fully explored by avant-garde photographers in the twentieth century.

The 1890s brought still more important changes. The printing business was increasingly employing photomechanical printing techniques to produce high-quality illustrations for art and architecture books. This allowed photographs in photolithography, photogravure, and collotype to be printed in ink. Around 1900 these techniques were used in book printing in all manner of variations. The invention of autotype with halftone printing of the image, moreover, made it possible to print both the photograph and the text during the same printing. Newspapers and magazines illustrated ever more photographs starting in the second half of the 1890s. The press in particular developed rapidly in the first decade of the twentieth century. Photographs increasingly came to determine the face of weekly magazines such as the Illustrated London News, L'Illustration, and the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, and the drawn illustrations in wood engraving faded into the background. The out-break of World War I in 1914, not surprisingly, only

whetted the appetite for images, and the war years were formative for photojournalism. A vital technical development was the autochrome color process, presented in 1907 by the Lumière brothers (also responsible for introducing cinema photography in 1895). Primarily amateur photographers (with a talent for chemistry), but pictorialists too, now recorded the world in color for the first time.

The most striking feature of the invention of photography—with its technological development and long series of applications until the first decade of the twentieth century—is the remarkable swiftness with which this new visual medium penetrated all sectors of society. In little more than half a century, photography replaced both drawing and printmaking. Because of its realism, the photograph proved to be an appealing object both in the private realm and in numerous areas of the public domain.

See alsoAtget, Eugène; Avant-Garde; Nadar, Félix; Paris.

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Mattie Boom