Photography

I

Introduction

Photography, production of permanent images by means of the action of light on sensitized surfaces, giving rise to a new form of visual art, historical document, and scientific tool. The history of photographic image-making is the story of the diverse applications of a new and constantly evolving technology. It is a history that includes images at every point on the scale between utilitarian scientific and historical documents and pictures conceived with the highest artistic ambitions. Parallel to it is the history of photographic techniques, in which constant expansion of the technical resources available to photographers led to an ever-increasing range of aesthetic possibilities. Photographic techniques current today are described in the article of that title.

II

Early Aesthetic Ambitions

From its invention in 1827 and effective introduction in 1839 through the first decades of its application, photography was the subject of debate as to its place among the arts—a fact witnessed by the contemporary literature of photographic criticism. The French painter Paul Delaroche, on first seeing a daguerreotype, made the dramatic claim that “from today painting is dead”. The reality was not so simple. In fact it took many decades for the full impact of photography to be felt on the discipline of painting. Photography eventually liberated painting from the need to be representational, as the camera was able to take on the illustrative role which had previously been that of the artist, freeing painting on its path towards abstraction.

Photography, meanwhile, had yet to fully define its own unique visual language and complex aesthetic potential. At first, photographers leaned heavily on the conventions of picture-making learned from traditional media. William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the earliest pioneers, had explored photographic chemistry in search of a support for his own shortcomings as a draughtsman. He sought an alternative to his pencil to adequately fix on paper the images projected from nature by his drawing aid, the camera lucida. When he published his thoughts on the potential applications of his discoveries, he entitled the work, the first part of which was issued in June 1844, The Pencil of Nature. It included a study, “Fruit Piece”, which acknowledged an evident source in the conventions of still life painting. The Pencil of Nature also proposed practical applications for the new medium, such as the reproduction of typesetting, which anticipate later exploitations whose basis is technological rather than aesthetic. At this early stage Talbot was confronting the duality of a picture-making medium which achieved perfect facsimile from life.

It is perhaps no coincidence, nor entirely ascribable to the necessarily long exposures, that among the earliest experiments in picture-making by Talbot's contemporary inventor, Louis Jacques Daguerre, are a fine series of painterly still-life studies of artefacts on a window ledge or shelves, and this pursuit of painterly notions of the picturesque dominated the early years of photographic picture-making. The careers of Roger Fenton in England and Gustave Le Gray in France served as exemplary case studies of the dichotomy which photographers endeavoured to resolve between the inherent drama of fact as recorded in the light-sensitive chemicals and their own ambitions to give formal and expressive values to their subject-matter.

III

Portrait Photography

Portraiture constitutes a substantial proportion of all photographic images created in the 19th century. They satisfied a curiosity to record the features of immediate family and friends as keepsakes and tokens of affection. Photography, meanwhile, allowed for the widespread publication of portraits of important or celebrated subjects, including political figures, royalty, and members of the aristocracy, and celebrities in the worlds of science, literature, and the fine and performing arts.

In the 1840s, the daguerreotype became the favoured process for portrait photographers whose businesses achieved rapid and widespread popularity throughout the United States, Great Britain, France, and elsewhere in Europe. The presentation of the unique daguerreotype plates with gilt mats in velvet-lined leather or embossed paper cases or small frames identified them as precious objects, in the tradition of the precisely painted and exquisitely packaged portrait miniature. Fine hand-colouring reinforced the link with the conventions of miniature painting.

The first extensive portrait project using negatives and prints on paper was that undertaken in 1843 by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. Hill, an artist, had determined to paint a historic group portrait of the First General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland. The many photographic portraits made in preparation for this and the studies of Scottish types and distinguished figures which were the fruit of a collaboration that lasted until Adamson's death in 1848 constitute one of the finest legacies from the first decade of photography. Hill and Adamson's calotypes (made with Talbot's process) exploited the limitations of the paper negative, using broad chiaroscuro to considerable aesthetic effect. The daguerreotype, in comparison, though capable of greater clarity and finer detail, gave a more factual, less painterly result. In the hands of such distinguished practitioners as Southworth and Hawes, the portrait daguerreotype was capable of considerable strength by virtue of the very specific power of this clarity, the authority of fact and detail.

Three portrait photographers of the 1850s and 1860s demand attention for their considerable and contrasting achievements. Nadar, in the 1850s, produced a distinguished series of character studies of the great men and women of French Second Empire society. His portraits combine intimacy and a sense of truth, with stark and forceful representations of both the features and personalities of his sitters. In the following decade Julia Margaret Cameron undertook a series of portraits of eminent British subjects and studies of people whose features served her complex purposes. Her portraits, often soft-focused and tight-cropped on the face, are penetrating studies enriched by mystical undercurrents. She extended the scope of portraiture to embrace symbolist and allegorical references. The American Mathew Brady came to prominence during the Civil War and achieved his reputation through the scale and documentary value of his endeavour. He built an historical photographic archive, a dead-pan record of the people shaping the destiny of the nation. By choosing subjects who were famous and influential personages, these and other photographers created images that function simultaneously as portraits and, for later ages, as invaluable historical documents.

Photographic portraits were gathered into albums, in many cases specifically designed to hold images made to the standard carte-de-visite or cabinet formats. Such albums would contain personal collections of family and friends or would become galleries of celebrities, with published portraits contributing to the beginning of the cult of famous personalities that became so ubiquitous in the 20th century.

IV

Landscape and Topographical Photography

The camera was used to bring to a curious public a visual account of the face of the world. This record embraced the natural landscape and the human impact on that landscape on every scale from agricultural exploitation to the development of cities. Such photographic records inevitably ranged from straightforward factual documents to lyrical interpretations of the subject-matter before the lens. These subjects included picturesque views for the nascent tourist market; records of imperial expansion under the British and French; and, particularly in the United States, documents of the natural wonders of a new continent as it was being explored.

Photographers recorded the route and the sights of the Grand Tour, the leisurely but educational progress through Europe that was a central feature of a privileged upbringing for young British and French aristocrats. Artists and writers too would seek inspiration in Italy, Egypt, and the eastern Mediterranean, which exerted a strong fascination on the mid-19th century European imagination as the cradle of ancient civilizations and religions. In the 1840s pioneers such as Welsh calotypist Calvert Richard Jones and the French daguerreotypists Jules Itier and Baron Gros made their Grand Tours with a camera, and in the 1850s a few ambitious and courageous travellers took up the challenge of making a comprehensive photographic record of their journeys and returned home to publish portfolios recording what they had seen. The finest of these succeed in evoking the character of the landscapes and the splendour of the ruins that contain the spirit of ancient civilizations. Of particular merit were the photographs of the ruins of ancient Egypt, Nubia, Palestine, and Syria by Maxime du Camp (1852), of Egypt by Félix Teynard (1853), of the Holy Lands by Auguste Salzmann (1854-1856), and of Egypt by Francis Frith (1857).

A group of calotypists working in Rome around 1850, including Giacomo Caneva, Eugène Constant, Frédéric Flachéron, and the expatriate Englishman Thomas Sutton, made a fine and evocative record of the ancient monuments of the city, to be followed over the next decades by talented but increasingly commercial practitioners catering to the growing demand from travellers for records of their sightseeing. These notably included the Scotsman Robert MacPherson, and James Anderson. The Alinari brothers in Florence and Carlo Ponti in Venice also catered to this burgeoning market.

The British were the most successful empire-builders and British photographers were among the most prominent in recording distant corners of the world. India was first documented effectively in the 1850s by photographers associated with the British military forces, notably Captain Linnaeus Tripe and the military doctor John Murray. In the 1860s, Samuel Bourne produced a substantial body of images including the record of his travels in the Himalaya. John Thomson made the most extensive early record of China while Felice Beato, who had partnered James Robertson in recording the Crimean War, went on to establish himself as the leading photographer of Japan and the Japanese.

In the United States, photographers of the landscape tended to work in a large format, commensurate with the vast horizons which they were endeavouring to define. Their work, exemplified at its best in the achievements of William Jackson and Timothy O'Sullivan, conveys a sense of awe at the epic scale of the land which they were discovering and depicting.

In Britain and France the land provided a different kind of inspiration. It fuelled a yearning for romantic images in which photographers, like painters and authors before them, imposed on the landscape their own ideas of the picturesque. They added a lyrical dimension to the image-making process, incorporating transcendental qualities in images which satisfied spiritual rather than merely factual curiosity. Roger Fenton and Henry White in Britain, and Olympe Aguado, Gustave Le Gray, and Victor Régnault in France, were among the most distinguished to explore the rich potential of this vein. Topographical subject-matter meanwhile became the basis of an industry, as exemplified in the transition of Francis Frith from adventurer and traveller to entrepreneur and industrialist, founding a large-scale photographic publishing enterprise.