the life time photography

Still Lifes

2011-09-27T10:12:00.000-07:00

The first showpieces of photography were still-life compositions that-except for their lack of color-were often all but indistinguishable from paintinqs. With great care their creators laid out arrays of household objects, flowers, fruit and game in eleqant. balanced arrangements, carefully lighted them and then recorded the image. Given the cumbersome equipment and processes then in use, such compositions were a natural starting point for photography. A still-life subject, unlike living creatures, did not twitch restlessly during a long exposure. It could also provide a controlled variety of interesting shapes and textures for the photographer to explore at his leisure.

Among the abler professionals who experimented with still-life themes was Henri LeSecq, the official photographer for France's Historical Monuments Commission. Le Secq was a master technician whose architectural photographs were so sharp in detail that an admirer remarked they were easier to study than the real thing, Yet when Le Secq turned to still life, he immediately went beyond mere record making. He had a real painter's eye for masses and a broad range of tones; he even used rough paper for his calotype prints to soften the details. The rich, glowing mixture of whites, grays and blacks thus produced was an early promise' that the camera could both record and transfigure what it saw.

Painting with Light

2011-09-27T09:59:00.000-07:00

The Invention of photography sent shock waves through the 19th Century art world. Painters were soon vacillating between writing obituaries for their own craft and announcing that the camera was a toy that took neither brains nor skill to operate. It was such a revolutionary way to produce pictures, in fact, that no one was quite sure how to use it to best advantage.

But produce pictures it plainly did, and it naturally was turned first to imitation of painting; many of the early photographers simply adapted the conventions-and the cliches-· of the older art form to their work. Instead of taking interpretive pictures of the real world around them, as 'photographers would later learn to do, they made pictures very much as painters made paintinqs, elaborate still lifes, carefully posed portraits, moody landscapes, formal figure studies, allegorical scenes-- and they judged these photographs by what they had grown accustomed to seeing in paintings. At the French Photographic Society's exhlbltion in 1885, the judges rejected several photographs-including one of a man cutting his corns-because their subject matter was not deemed sufficiently dignified to qualify as art.

In some respects-particularly in matters of composition, lighting and tonal values-photography learned much from its apprenticeship to painting., When Dr. Hugh Diamond, an English physician and amateur photographer, assembled the photographic still life shown at far right, he was drawing upon such venerable motIfs as the 18th Century version in oils at right above. Happily he had a good eye and was also a good technician. His photograph contained a wealth of rich tones, textures and details that any painter might envy. But this sort of slavish following of painting more often led photography into blind alleyways. Too many photographers, trying to produce grand works in classical or romantic style, dressed up their models In rented armor or baggy togas and posed them against painted ruins. In the long run such pseudopaintings proved only that the cold eye of the camera could devastatingly expose artificiality for what it Was. Most such pictures look silly today. As photography came of age, however, its practitioners began to realize that they could do more than merely duplicate paintings. Some started to use the camera to document social conditions and record informal scenes of everyday life; still others sought artistic expression in compositions of light and form. Henry Peach Robinson, one of England's foremost photographers, began asking himself some probing questions. "Why," he wondered, "should we try to make our pictures look like the result of other arts? The limitations of photography as an art have not been definitely fixed."

PHOTOGRAPHY versus PAINTING (The Victorian Pioneers)

2011-09-12T22:25:00.000-07:00

Photography! It burst upon the sedate, self-satisfied world of Victorian Europe with the force of an exploding comet. Within months of the announcement in 1839 of Daguerre's technique, a new profession, a new technology, a new art form and a new craze had come into being. In Paris and London, optical supply houses-where lenses could be purchased-and apothecaries -where chemicals were available-were suddenly besieged by photography enthusiasts eager to acquire their own cameras and prepare their own plates. City balconies blossomed with oddly-shaped boxes pointed toward the streets; hoverinq nearby, anxious neophyte photographers, watches in hand, countsdon the minutes necessary to inscribe the image of a tree, a lamppost or a building upon the sensitized plate. If the end result, as often as not, was a mere blur, no matter; the imagination 'Of the enthusiast sketched in the sharply defined images of which the daguerreotype was capable when it was placed in the hands of an expert.

While amateurs all ever Europe were happily taking pictures, posing for pictures and collecting pictures, a few men were asking themselves what the true role of photography might be. Seme of the answers soon became obvious. In the field of astronomy, for example, Francols Arago, whointroduced the daguerreotype precess to a joint meeting of the French Academles of Sciences and Fine Arts in 1839, immediately saw its application to his own discipline; it was not leng before some of his colleagues were attempting photographs of the moon and other celestial bodies. And as a means of spreading knowledge of faraway peoples and places, photography quickly proved that it had no peer. Photographers were soon touring the Holy Land, North Africa, the Middle East and some of the more remote reaches of Europe. On the sands of Egypt, along the Way of the Crossin Jerusalem, in the shadow of the ParthenonIn Athens, they hauled their bulky equipment, prepared their plates and fought off swarms of flies and mosquitoes to bring back photographic views of the ancient world's majestic ruins. Their efforts seem all the more remarkable because there was as yet no way to reproduce their work directly in books 'Or periodicals; either lndividual prints of the photographs had to be made and laboriously pasted in by hand, or, as was more usual, the photoqraphs were hand copied by engravers.

In one fleld, however, the role of photography was far from clear. Almost from the moment of the newrnedlum's birth, a number of photographers began staking out claims in areas that had long been the preserves of painters. Portraits, landscapes, still lites, nudes and even allegorIes came to be grist for the photographer's mill. Paintlnq, which for many centuries had been pa.instakIngly perfecting the techniques of perspective and realistic detail, suddenly found its supremacy as an art form challenged by a mechanical device that could record even the most complex scene instantaneously.

Confronted with this revolutionary invention, some painters reacted with foreboding. "Painting is dead from this day on!" the French painter Paul Delaroche was reported to have exclaimed in 1838. In one sense he was right, for painting simply as representation of reality had indeed suffered a mertal wound. Although a photograph could not then convey colors,its unique ability to reproduce the surface of things made it a better mirror of nature than even the most detailed painting. But in a broader sense, Delaroche could not have been more mistaken. By usurping painting's role as the portrayer of the objecti.veworld, photography would prove a powerful stimulus to artists, setting them off on a quest for new means of expression.

It is hardly surprising that in the early days of photography many painters, even talented ones, fought back against the mechanical monster that threatened their self-esteemand livelihood. Although the French painter ingres admitted that photography captured "the exactitude I would like to achieve," for public consumption he appended his siqnature, as did a number of other painters, to a formal protest issued in 1862, that damned photography as a soulless, mechanical process,"never resulting in works which could ever be compared with those works which are the fruits of intelligence and the study of art.”

Photographers, in turn, resented such pretensions on the part of painters. Some of them had themselves been trained in the art academies of Europe, and they found in photography a new art form. But because of their backgrounds they continued to think of this new form in old and conventional ways. They regarded photography as another kind of painting. The oldest known daguerreotype, taken by Daguerre himself in 1837, reveals this clearly. It is' a still life self-consciously composed in the style of neoclassical painting.

Paul Delaroche, who shortly before had prophesied the death of painting, apparently had second thoughts. Soon he could barely contain his snthusiasm over the artistic possibilities of photography. "Daguerre's process," he wrote in 1839, "completely satisfies all the demands of art, carrying certain essential principles of art to such perfection that it must become a subject of observation and study even to the most accomplished painters." A French newspaper critic was even more lyrical: "What fineness in the strokes! What knowledge of chiaroscuro! What delicacy! What exquisite finish! How admirably are the foreshortenings given: this is Nature itself!"

The daguerreotype had one quality that actually intensified the tendency to confuse photography with painting; it was a one of a kind process. Each picture was a unique thing in itself and could not be copied. Like a painting, it could be carefully composed by its creator and treasured by Its owner, who could rest secure in the knowledge that he had a work of art that could not be duplicated. It was not until widespread use of a process that relied on transparent paper negatives from which any number of prints could be made that this sense of paintinglike uniqueness could be threatened. Nevertheless Fox Talbot, the inventor of this process, and others continued, in essence, to imitate painting at first. In the 1840s Talbot published The Pencil of Nature, the world's first book of photographs. The edition was a small one of approximately 150 copies, and each photographic print was pasted onto its page by hand. For his negatives and his prints Talbot used fine writing paper that he had treated with chemicals. The texture of this paper gave his pictures softer outlines and tones than those possible with the mirrorlike surface of the daguerreotype" which utillzed sensitized copper plates. Talbot's subjects were architectural views and stililifes taken around hls ancestral home of Lacock Abbey. These softly rendered views gave the little volume the look of an artist's sketchbook.

However, it was not in architectural, still life or landscape photography that the camera made Its first and most successful assault upon a. preserve of palntlnq, but in the field of portraiture. The invention of photography coincided with the rIse to attluence of a large European middle class who clamored for the services of painters able to immortalize them on canvas. By the early 19th Century, the portrait of the paterfamilias, his wife and his chlldren had become a mark of a respectable and prosperous household. But if the demand for portraits knew no bounds, neither dld the fees of the most talented artists. What was needed was a quick, effIcient means of producing likenesses that on the one hand would satisfy the patron's desire for self admiration without pauperizing hIm and on the other would permit the "artist to turn a fast profit. To meet this demand for cheap portraits, painters devised all manner of short cuts, including sketching a likeness from the ground glass of the camera obscura, tracing the subject's profile as it appeared through a translucent screen (an extremely popular type of portrait called a silhouette) .and painting miniatures so small that the subjects' heads were frequently less than an inch high. During the early part of the 19th Century the art academies of' the Continent, Britain and America turned out, each year, scores of practitioners whose meager talents would never be tested beyond the simple demands of the miniature or the silhouette.

One can imagine the dismay with which these artisans greeted the arrival of photography. Here was cornpetltlon that was practically unbeatable. For a fraction of the cost of even a cheap oil painting, the sitter could have his image preserved on plate or paper. Despite efforts to denigrate the photog.raph as "soulless," portrait painters found themselves fighting a losi.ng battle. In a remarkably short time the silhouette became little more than a historical curiosity and the practice of miniature portraiture all but disappeared. In 1830, for example, of the 1,278 paintings exhibited at Britain's Royal Academy of Arts, about 300 were miniatures; three decades later, fewer than 70 portraits of this type were displayed. During the interval, of course, photography had been invented and many portrait painters were driven either into penury or into the practice of the despised new medium itself.

Much of the new photographic portraiture was hardly of a higher order than what it replaced. The comparative simplicity of photography lured hundreds of untrained and unimaginative people, looking for a way to get rich quick, to set up shop and churn out their wares by the score each day. Advances in equipment and techniques reduced exposure times for portraits from 15 or 20 minutes to less than a minute, adding to the comfort of the sitters and the profits of studio owners. In 1849, a mere decade after the announcement of photography's birth, some 100,000 daguerreotype portraits were taken in the city of Paris alone. In London, the boom in portrait photography was even more astounding. Between 1851 and 1857 the number of portrait studios in that city jumped from about a dozen to more than 150. Not untypical was the studio of one Mr. Lorenzo Henry Russell, who styled himself, among other things, a professor of music, a mesmerist and a taxidermist as well as a photographer. For Mr. Russell, the ideal patron presumably was one who could be lulled by soft music, hypnotized by a piercing stare, stuffed torthe mantelpiece and then photographed for posterity-all at a modest time payment rate of one shilling a week.

Portrait studios of Russell's day varied from outlandishly ornate salons to sparsely furnished photo factories. Many studios had on hand scores of painted backdrops and pasteboard props, enabling the customer to choose the setting that best expressed his character, his ambitions or his dreams. Portrait photographers, following the lead of portrait painters, tailored these props to their sitters' achievements: an actress might be shown standing before Greek masks for comedy and tragedy; a musician might hold a lute. As often as not the props spoke of the sitter's fantasies rather than his accomplishments; a timid man could pose as an intrepid hunter stalking his prey, a merchant as a scholar surrounded by books and scientific instruments.

American portrait photographers were particularly adept at luring customers with lavish displays. One journalist compared their establishments with "the enchanted habitations which the Orientals erect for their fabulous heroes. Marble, carved in columns ... [adorns] the walls .... Here are gilded cages with birds from every clime, warbling amidst exotic plants whose flowers perfume the air .... Surrounded thus, how is it possible to hesitate at the cost of a portrait?" In such portrait palaces the cost might come high-as much as $15 or $20. For those who could not afford the fee there was always a quick-picture emporium around the corner. Here the customer stood in line to buy a ticket representing a prepaid exposure. Then he waited his turn to sit before the camera. As each new sitter entered the curtained cubicle, the cameraman reached into a hole in the wall where a technician handed him a freshly coated plate. After the operator had made the exposure, he passed the plate through a hole in another wall, beyond which a technician completed the work as the cameraman went on to another customer. Art may have been the last thing the owners of such studios worried about, but their 25-cent prints were often as good as-and frequently more straightforward than-the fancier products of the more expensive salons.

By the time portrait studios were in full swing in the 1850s, several important technological advances had eased the lot of both the photographer and his patrons. Most important was the fact that retouching had become a standard practice, enabling photographers to satisfy the vanity of the most self-admiring patrons. The Photographic News of London put the case for retouching quite baldly in 1859: "The [retoucher] may correct with his brush defects which, if allowed to remain, spoil any picture. For instance, where a head is so irregular in form as to become unsightly, soften those features which are the most strikingly deformed, and reduce the head to a greater semblance of beauty. Try to discover what good points there are-for all heads have some good points-and give these their full value." The mass of photographers followed such instructions with enthusiasm. What resulted were cosmetic images that revealed little of the character of the sitter.

There were some portrait photographers who refused to retouch and others who limited retouching to backgrounds; among them were some of the most talented men of their time. The earliest of the master portraitists were the Scottish photographers David O. Hill and Robert Adamson. Hill, a painter of some talent, helped to found the Royal Scottish Academy. In 1843 he joined forces with Adamson, a young chemist who had taken up photography. It was Hill's intention to make photographic portrait studies in preparation for a huge group painting he was planning to immortalize some 470 Scottish clergymen and laymen. The two men worked in the calotype process, which Hill characterized as superior to the daguerreotype precisely because of its imperfections. "The rough surface, and unequal texture throughout of the paper," wrote Hill, "is the main cause of the calotype failing in details, before the process of Daguerreotype-and this is the very life of it. [Calotypes] look like the imperfect work of a man-and not the much diminished perfect work of God."

In their photographs Hill and Adamson showed a deep sensitivity to their subjects' characters that is all the more remarkable because of the difficulties they had to overcome. They worked with bulky equipment, slow lenses and light-sensitized papers that required exposures in full sunlight of one or two minutes. Nevertheless, the two photographers managed to pose and direct their subjects in such a way as to produce portraits that have life and spontaneity. In their study of Hugh Miller, for example, they captured the flinty nature of the Scottish character and the strength and determination of the Scottish will in a way that few photographers could match even today.

When Hill completed his camera studies, he returned to brush and palette.

After 23 years of labor, most of it in his spare time, he finished the group portrait-a work that can only be ranked as a giant mediocrity. It is ironic that Hill, who always believed that photography was merely a tool for the painter, found lasting fame for his practIce of the "lesser art," while as a painter his name is all but forgotten.

Another artist who made his mark as a master portrait photographer was the Frenchman Gaspard Felix Tournachon, known to hls contemporaries -and to history-by his adopted name of Nadar. Born in Paris in 1820, Nadar studied medicine and then abandoned it in favor of a career as a protesslonal cari.caturist. As a young man his ambItion was to publish caricatures of every prominent Parisian, and like Hill he turned to photography to record the faces he wished to draw. By 1853, however, Nadar had become so enthusiastic about the artistic possibilities of photography that he all but gave up the pen In favor of the camera and opened his own photographic studio. To this studio flocked the great and near-great, among them the writ ... ers Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas and musicians like Rossini, Berlioz, Wagner and Liszt. Some came to Nadar because of hls reputation for excellence in portrait work, others merely because it was the stylish thing to do. In any case,few who had their portraits taken by the great man himself -rather than by one of his assistants, to whom the lesser celebrities were guided-ever had reason to be disappointed .. Unlike many portrait photographers of the period, Nadar avoided complicated props like pasteboard columns and pretentious lighting. effects in which the subject's head might be haloed by sun streaming into the studio. By the standards of Victorian Europe, Nader's style was simplicity itself, and because as a celebrity in his own right he knew most of the people who came before his camera, he was able to draw from them expressions and poses that are at once relaxed and compelling.

Through the work of Nadar, hlstorlans have gained penetrating insights into the haute monde of the Second Empire and Third RepubUc.In 1859 a French journalist summed up his contribution: "All the artistic, dramatic, political galaxy-in a word the intelUgentsia-of Paris has passed through his studio. The series of portraits that he exhibits is the Pantheon of our generation. Dau.mier meditates. Guizot stands, his hand in his Waistcoat,as severe and cold as if he were waiting for silence in the court before launching into a thundering rebuttal-Co rot smiles as someone asks him why doesn't he finish his landscapes .... The photographer has the right to be called an artist."

At about the same time Nadar was at work in Paris, two amateurs were establishing themselves as talented portraitists in England. One was Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland; the other, a true master of the art, was a gentlewoman named Julia Margaret Cameron. Not surprisingly, Carroll excelled in the portraiture of children. His natural sympathy for them and their problems and his delight in telling them stories undoubtedly helped him put his subjects at ease during the long exposures his large-plate camera required. Like most Victorian photographers, Carroll sought prettiness of detail and soulful expressions. He was, however, no mere imitator of established conventions, and time and time again he ignored the "artistic" modes of his era to produce photographs that are at once romantic and authentic. Alice P. Liddell, the prototype for the Alice of Alice in Wonderland, is revealed deep in thought, her head resting in profile against the back of her chair. It is superb characterization, and one can easily imagine how this little girl with the pensive look could inspire Carroll to flights of literary fancy

Although Carroll was an amateur in the sense that photography was only one of his interests, Julia Margaret Cameron was such only in her lack of interest in selling her pictures. Once she discovered photography, it became the passion of her life. Generally speaking, her works fall into two categories: straight portraiture of superb quality, in which she used the camera to reveal the essential character of her subjects; and illustrative photography, in which the subjects are dressed in the garb of literary or historical figures. The illustrative photographs were very much in tune with Victorian taste. It is her portraits that have brilliantly survived the test of time.

Julia Cameron, the daughter of one British colonial official and the wife of another, was born in India in 1815. After her marriage in 1838 to a man 20 years her senior, she spent another 10 years in India before her husband retired from government service, eventually settling at Freshwater, on the Isle of Wight. Her romance with photography did not begin until she was 48 years old, and then almost accidentally. One of her grown children gave her a camera, thinking this harmless diversion might ease the boredom apt to weigh down a lady of leisure and advancing years. If she had been bored, Julia Cameron never was again. A woman of immense determination, comfortable means and good social connections, she brought to photography,all the enthusiasm and zeal of a religious convert. She even spoke of her work in devotional terms. Referring to her portraits of Britain's literary and artistic elite,she once wrote: "When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has almost the embodiment of a prayer."

While the good lady regarded her photography with reverence" she treated the distinguished visitors at her home more like slaves. No man was too famous, no woman too, frail to be spared Mrs. Cameron's bul.lying until he or she agreed to sit for a portrait. Among those who resisted successfully was the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi,who, while visiting Mrs. Cameron's neighbor and friend Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was accosted by the lady in Tennyson's garden. Not knowing who this interloper was, he simply told her to be gone.

If resisting Mrs. Cameron's plans was painful, sitting for her could be torture. A perfectionist, she would take exposure atter exposure, all the while snapping orders at her subjects. Crown Prince Fredertck of Prussia, whose word was law within his own domains, apparently made the mistake of lowering his glance while sitting for a portrait. As if addressing a careless child, Julia Cameron commanded, "Big eyes! Big eyes!"

Matters were not eased by Mrs. Cameron's technique. Her beli·ef in subdued light and large photographic plates, and her use of long lenses for close-ups (a technique in which she specialized), necessitated exposures that often lasted for several minutes. After each exposure she would disappear into her darkroom to prepare another plate, leaving ·her sitter with firm orders not to move a muscle while she was gone. Even chance acquaintances, if their faces intrigued Julia Cameron, stood little hope of escape. One young lady, asked to pose in the manner of ancient royalty, remembered the occasion years later in an article for a British photographic journal. "The studio ... was very untidy," she reminisced, "and very uncomfortable. Mrs. Cameron put a crown on my head and posed me as the heroic queen. This was somewhat tedious, but not half so bad as the exposure. Mrs. Cameron warned me before it commenced that it would take a long time, adding, with a sort of half groan, that it was the sale difficulty she had to contend with in working with large plates. · . · The exposure began. A minute went over and

I felt as if I must scream; another minute, and the sensation was as if my eyes were coming out of my head; a third, and the back of my neck appeared to be afflicted with palsy; a fourth, and the crown, which was too large, began to slip down my forehead; a fifth-but here I utterly broke down, for Mr. Cameron, who was very aged, and had unconquerable fits of hilarity which always came in the wrong places, began to laugh audibly, and this was too much for my self-possession, and I was obliged to join the dear old gentleman. When Mrs. Cameron. · · bore off the gigantic dark slide with there whose purpose was to endow the musings of the imagination with the mantle of reality. His colleagues and the general public alike eagerly awaited each new photographic offering from the master's studio, and devoured the' truth that came from the master's pen. In his Pictorial Effect in Photography Robinson told his admirers quite straightforwardly: "Any dodge, trick and conjuration of any kind is open to the photographer's use .... It is his imperative duty to avoid the mean, the bare and the ugly, and to aim to elevate his subject, to avoid awkward forms and to correct the unpicturesque .... " Such advice, coming from so famous a photographer, encouraged others to look more than ever to painting for their inspiration rather than to the unique ability of photography to represent the real world.

One who needed no encouragement from Robinson or anyone else was Oscar G. Rejlander, a Swede who moved to England in the 18405 in hopes of establishing his reputation as a portrait painter. As a means toward this end, he took up photography. A resourceful and innovative man-some of his pictures bring to mind Surrealist photographs of the 1920s-Rejlander firmly bel'ieved that photography could beat painting at its own game. Around 1856 he produced some pictorial studies inspired by Raphael's Sistine Madonna, in one of which he had little children fill the role of cherubs. Encouraged by generally favorable criticism, he then conceived of what must be one of the greatest oddities in the history of photography-an exceptionally large composition, measuring 16 by 31 inches, entitled The Two Ways of Life. The allegorical picture, which bears some resemblance to storytelling canvases of the Italian Renaissance, was intended by Rejlander to be a sta.rtling demonstration of the photograph's worth as a full-scale study model on which painters could base their own works .. However, when it was exhibited at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 it was viewed as a work of art in Its own right. The picture shows two youths in Roman garb being introduced to the adult world by their bearded teacher. One youth turns his eyes toward modestly draped figures representing such virtues as Religion, Good Works, Industry and Knowledge, while the other clearly cannot wait to fling himself into the arms of seminude temptresses who symbolize Licentiousness, Wine, Gambling and other vlces. It was a very crowded "canvas," and to produce it Rejlander hired a band of itinerant actors and posed them in small groups for separate photographs. Then, after setting up and photographing an elaborate pseudo-Roman backdrop, he carefully pieced together the 30 negatives to produce the final print.

Although the picture is almost ludicrous in its heavy-handed message, it greatly appealed to the Victorians' sense of morality, and the fact that it was a photograph rather than a painting appealed even more to their newfound love of technology. Many objected to the nudity in the picture, but The Two Ways of Life nevertheless received the ultimate seal of approval: Queen Victoria herself, despite her well-known parsimony, considered 10 guineas a fair enough price to pay for so morally elevating a picture and bought it as a present for her consort, Prince Albert.

In the more fanciful works of Rejlander and Robinson, photography that was derivative of Victorian painting began to burn itself out. Other photographers continued to rake around in the coals, attempting to rekindle their craft in the fire. By the 1880s, however, a new movement was coming to the fore, led by an ex-medical student, Peter Henry Emerson, an Anglo-American whose work would influence photographers in both England and the United States. Emerson was the first to campaign against the stand that "art" photographers had taken. He realized that imitation paintings did not make great photographs, and saw that true photographic art was to be created only by exploitation of the camera's inherent potential: its unique ability to capture in a direct way the essence of the real world. Scorning the stili-popular pictorial school, in article after article he thundered against such practices as composite printing, costumed models, painted backdrops and sentimentalized views of daily life. A man of strong opinions, with language to match, Emerson characterized Robinson's Pictorial Effect in Photography as "the quintessence of literary fallacies and art anachronisms."

Having thus disposed of prevailing tastes, Emerson laid down his own strictures for camera work: simplicity of equipment; no "faking" by lighting, posing, costumes or props; free composition, unfettered by classical formulae ("each picture requires a special composition and every artist treats each picture originally"); complete avoidance of retouching ("the process by which a good, bad or indifferent photograph is converted into a bad drawing or painting"). Emerson maintained that the ingredients for deeply moving, esthetically satisfying pictures were to be found in the lives and the work of common people, in photographs taken not in the studio among theatrical props, but in the farms and fields of Britain. Inhis book Naturalistic Photography, published in 1889, Emerson called for a photographic renaissance in which the contrived and artificial would be replaced by the true and real. Several books of his photographs-containing pictures taken in the Norfolk Broads, a swampy area of England where the author had a houseboat-amply proved his point. Pictures like the one of Norfolk cottages , which examined the world of English country folk, remain to this day classics of their kind.

While Emerson strongly recommended spontaneity in terms of subject matter he was anything but casual on the subject of photographic technique. In the matter of focusing, in particular, he attempted to apply hard-and-fast scientific principles so that the photograph would reproduce a scene as he believed the human eye saw it: sharp at the point of focus, fuzzy at the periphery. Emerson's concentration on technique, it turned out, led him astray. He came to think that every aspect of picture making could be reduced to a set of technical principles and controls-san idea that also appealed to some painters of his time. But when he found there were certain aspects that he could not control to his satisfaction, he entered a period of frustration. Frustration led to despair and despair finally led to denunciation-not just of the principles, but of photography itself. Where but a few years before he was predicting that the challenge of photography would cause the ultimate demise of painting, in 1891 he denounced his own medium as "the lowest of all arts." There was undoubtedly an element of pique in Emerson's renunciation. A volatile and vain man, he could not abide the thought that others, working in the new school of natural realism, were now leading the way toward a new esthetic of photography. Yet he could not destroy what he had already accomplished. Through his earlier writings and photographs, Emerson had greatly influenced a new generation of photographers. He had proclaimed photography as an art in its own right, independent of painting; an art with its own needs, its own laws and its own triumphs. This was to be the art of truth, not the stylized and "ennobling" truth of the pictorialists, but the truth of man and nature, imperfect but real.

The Firts Candid Camera

2011-09-12T21:14:00.000-07:00

Not until the 1920s did photographers get a camera that realized the promise of Talbot's mousetraps a handy, unobtrusive instrument able to take pictures easiIy in dim Iight. The first of these candid cameras to be followed soon by the Leica was the Ermanox, marketed under the slogan, "What you see, you can photograph"

In the hands of an expert like Erich Salomon, this claim was no exaggeration. Salomon often dressed in formal clothes to crash diplomatic gatherings, where his camera enabled him to record Europe's powerful at work. In tribute to him, the French statesman Briand once remarked "There are just three things necessary for a .. · conference: a few Foreign Secretaries, a table and Salomon.”

Ermanox first revealed the potential of candid photography. It used 2 x 3-inch glass plates that had to be loaded one at a time. But its small size made practical a lens so fast-f/2-that indoor shots could be snapped without special lighting, enabling Erich Salomon to catch such intimate views as the scene be/ow of e summit meeting on Franco-German problems.

The Newspaperman's Standby

2011-09-12T05:25:00.000-07:00

Jacques-Henri Lartigue : A Delage Racer at the Grand Prix, 1912

Early In the 20th Century, the public was introduced to a new dimension in journalism: action news pictures made with the high-speed, single-lens reflex camera. The first real "press" camera, it was portable, its fast lens and focalplane shutter could freeze even a speedinq car, it tocusedeasily through the taking lens, and its large picture size allowed the high-quality prints needed for engraving. For nearly half a century many of the most memorable news photographs were taken with the German lCA or its neartwin, the American Graflex.

The versatility of the big reflex made it equally popular with photographers who were not journalists. It capitalized on odd distortions in the pictures caused by the focal-plane shutter. In the photograph at rig,ht by J.H. Lartigue, the impression of speed is conveyed by the apparent forward lean of the car's wheel and the backward lean of the spectators. Both effects are due to the shutter, a fast-moving slit that moves vertically across the film, exposing different parts of it at different instants in time. Thus, in taking a picture of a fast-moving car, the bottom of the wheel will be photographed at one point, but when the slit in the shutter reaches the top of the wheel, the whole car will have moved to the right, so that the wheel comes out looking eggshaped. In taking this picture lartigue had to move his camera to keep pace with the car's movement This,in turn, gave the spectators their odd appearance, for when the shutter's slit passed across their legs the camera was in one position, but by the time it exposed their heads the camera and film had moved to the right.

While looking down into the tall, light-shielding hood of an lCA like this one, the French photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue took the picture shown at right in 1912. The certiere worked much like modern 35mm single-lens reflexes but used 4 x 5 inch glass plates and was fitted with an f /4.5 lens, very fast for its day. Its distorted freezing of motion, so obvious in the racing car oicture, ties over t.he decades become an ittustretors' convention; today an artist drawing a movinq object may deliberately make it lean forward to convey an impression of speed.

Bird's-Eye Views from a Rocket

2011-09-07T22:27:00.000-07:00

As early as the 1860’s photographers had. gone up In balloons to make detailed records of cities, landscapes and battlefronts; small cameras had also been attached with sorne success to high-flying kites and even to the breasts of trained pigeons.

By 1903 a still more startling form of aerial photography was in the offing. In that year a German engineer, Alfred Maul,patented a rocket camera that caught the interest of the Kaiser's generals for its potential usefulness in military reconnaissance. After nine years of work and many experimental models Maul successfully launched the device shown at right. The camera,shot skyward by a rocket and returned to earth by parachute, made a single exposure automatically as it reached the apex of' its flight. To test its durability in warfare, soldiers were ordered to fire at the descendinq camera to see if they could effectively knock it out. Although Maul's invention survived the test and produced good pictures, it was never used in combat: Airplanes and dirigibles, both invented in the early 1900’s, provided superior camera platforms. Not until after World War II did rocketborne cameras come into their own as superb instruments for space studies.

At a rifle range near Dresden, German soldiers prepare a rocket camera and its launching tower for a test-firing in 1912.

With the rocket in place, all is ready for the launch, and the camera blasts off in a billow of smoke.

When the rocket burned out at 2,600 feet the camera made a single exposure, like the one shown above, and floated back to earth.

Propellant Chamber

Camera Compartment

Nose Cone

A Gun to Shoot Action

2011-09-05T23:09:00.000-07:00

In the late 1870s, a French professor of physioloqy and 'natural history, Etienne Jules, Marey, made the first step, toward capturinq all of an action instead of Just treezinq part of it. Long interested 'in analyzinq the ways in which animals move, he turned to' photoqraphy In the hope that he could break down their motions into sequences,each step of which could be studied individually. By 1882 Marey had designed a gun camera whose trigger set in motion a clockwork mechanism, the clockwork turned a sensitized plate on which 12 postage-stamp-size pictures were made in a second. The exposure for each was very brief 1 /720 second. In 1887, Marey invented a "chronophotographic" camera "that took sequence pictures on a roll of sensitized paper; three years later he" replaced the paper, with transparent celluloid film on which he was able to record as many as 60 individual exposures per second. This instrument foreshadowed the modern motion picture camera.

Marey's gun camera took the 12 tiny pictures at lett ot a bird in flight. The camera hada lens in its barrel and a shutter at the front of its breech. A.d.tum-shape,dmagazine, shown detached above the gun, held a load of 25 circular plates, each with a dozen picture-taking areas around its rim. To load the camera, the drum was placed on tooot the breech and a slot was openedso that the first plate tell into a chamber oirecttv behind the shutter. The user closed the slot, removed the drum magazine, then sighted on his subject end squeezed the trigger to get his 12 rapid-fires ho ts.The drum was then remounted and the gun turned upside down so thet the plate dropped into a storage compartment for later developing.

Marey's roll-film sequence camera (shown in a top view) took photographs in a horizontal strip like the one above. The film, driven by a hand crank, moved from a storage spool to the focal plane in the middle of the compartment, where it stopped for exposure, and then was wound on a take-up spool. The shutter, also operated by the crank,made individual exposures of 1/100 second, fast enough to avoid blur in pictures of a flying duck.

You Press the Button, We Do the Rest

2011-09-02T06:07:00.000-07:00

Holding the Camera that was to make his fortune, George Eastman is pictured in a Kodak snapshot while abroad ship in 1890. With advertisement below, Eastman launched highly succesful campaigns for his Kodak no.1 and subsequent models. Other manufacturers, climbing on the bandwagon, used the Kodak as a standard of comparison-as in the Hawk-Eye ad at below-toclaim that their models were better.

No single event did more to popularize photography than George Eastman's introduction of the simple box camera in 1888, accompanied by the famous slogan above. Eastman foresaw that, given the proper, easy-to-use equipment, millions of ordinary people would "desire personal pictures or memoranda of their everyday life, objects, places or people that interest them .... "

Eastman's original model, the Kodak No. 1 (shown opened for reloading at below), was a box less than seven inches long and four inches wide. Its onespeed shutter was set at 1/25 second -fast enough that subjects did not have to strain to hold still-and its fixed-focus lens assured that everything more than eight feet distant would be reasonably sharp. The pictures were circular, not masked to a rectangular shape, in order to take advantage of the entire image projected by the lens. But what won over ordinary people was simplicity. There was no fumbling around with plates, for the Kodak was the first camera designed to use roll film and it came loaded with enough film to make 100 exposures. Nor did the amateur have to worry about developing and printing. He paid $25 for the loaded camera, including a shoulder strap and leather case. The price also covered the cost of processing the first roll of film; when he had made his 100 exposures he mailed the unopened camera to Eastman's Rochester, New York, plant, where the negatives and prints were made. To receive his camera back fully reloaded and ready for use again, the customer mailed along with it an additional $10, a fee that also prepaid the processing costs for the new roll of film.

Two jolly gentlemen, one with Kodak in hand, pose for a snapshot in 1889. Barely a year after its invention the little box camera had become part of American life.

A Swiveling Lens for Panoramic Views

2011-08-25T19:51:00.000-07:00

Landscapes and cityscapes were handy subjects for early photographers. But they were at a disadvantage compared with painters: The standard cameras could take in only part of a scene, since few lenses had' a viewing angle exceeding 40 degrees. When a photographer wanted a view of a city or mountain range he had to take overlapping views and paste them together.

In 1844, however, Friedrich von Martens, an engraver-photographer living in Paris, built a camera that could take scenes like the one shown below, embracing an arc of 150 degrees. The secret was a swiveling lens, which swept around a scene, "wiping" a continuous image across a daguerreotype plate five inches high and 17,5 inches long.

In later years similar panoramic cameras were used for pictures of large groups of people like the student body of a school. Some of the results contained a bizarre element, for a fleetfooted prankster could get his likeness into the same picture twice by outracing the camera's panning mechanism. After being photographed at one end of the group he ran around to be snapped again at the other end.

The von Martens camera was the first to use a swiveling lens and a curved plate, devices used in the later panoramic camera pictured at far left. In the von Martens instrument, a hand crank (a) turned a gear (b) that swiveled the lens (c) in its flexible leather mount; in the later camera the lens was moved by turning the viewfinder on top. The lens had a mask with a slit (d) to restrict the image projected onto the plate (e) to a narrow strip; as the lens turned, the strip image moved across the plate, building up the picture in much the same way that a focal-plane shutter does. Like most daguerreotype pictures, it was a mirror image, reversed left for right.

FRIEDRICH VON MARTENS = Panorama of Paris, 1846

Adding the Third Dimension

2011-08-23T20:08:00.000-07:00

Two girls appear in a stereo photograph taken in 1853. When seen through a stereoscope like the one at right, which used a pair of lenses to magnify the two images, the slightly different views merged and the girls stood out in relief. This viewer is an ornate affair on a stand most were inexpensive hand-heId models.

By the early 1860s a new photographic fad was sweeping Europe and America: stereoscopic photographs. These were pictures in pairs, viewed through a twin-lens device called a stereoscope, which made each pair merge into a single view that seemed startlingly three dimensional, like a perfectly detailed model of the actual scene. Almost every middle-class household boasted dozens, sometimes hundreds, of these pictures. Family and friends gathered in the parlor to gape at each new set the pyramids of Egypt, Parisian street scenes, the wonders of Peking, views of the Holy Land-all of them seeming to spring to life in vivid perspective before the eyes of the viewer.

Stereo photography was based on a long-k-nown phenomenon of vision: that the eyes receive two slightly different views of a scene, which the brain translates into a single image having three dimensions. Thus a pair of pictures supplying slightly different views to each eye created the illusion of depth when seen through the stereoscope. Among the first to make a camera specifically designed for the job was an English optical intrument maker named John B. Dancer, who in 1856 patented a device that took two pictures simultaneously through lenses set slightly apart.

A box on a box, Dancer's device combines a stereo camera atop a platestoring magazine. The camera has two lenses mounted 2,5 inches apart, about the distance between the pupils of a person's eyes. In front of each lens is a revolving disk with holes of different diameters, one of which was selected to provide the aperture size needed for the correct exposure. In front of the disks is a doubleended paddle used as a shutter; turned by hand, it uncovered the lenses for focusing and taking picture .

With Dancer's magazine-loading system the photographer could prepare the camera in advance for a series of stereo pictures by stacking 'plates in the arewer of the box below the camera. Once he·had tocusedhls subject on a ground-glass screen at the back of the camera, the ohotoqrephet replaced the screen with a plate-cflanging back (a). He then turned a knob (b) to operate a gear that moved the plate- carrying drawer iorwerd. As" a plate came into position, its number appeared in the window (c) on the camera's side. He lowered a rod (d), screwed it into a threaded hole (e) on the top of the plate and pulled the plate up into picturetaking position. After exposure was made the plate was lowered, the rod unscrewed and raised, and the drawer moved forward to bring a fresh plate into position for the next picture.

Portraits Cheaper by the Dozen

2011-08-23T09:03:00.000-07:00

Photographic portraits found instant popularity because they were much cheaper than painted ones, but even so they cost more than most people could afford. In 1854, however, a French photographer named Andre Adolphe Eugene Disderi brought portraits within reach of practically everyone by inventing a new type of camera. Equipped with several lenses, it cut costs by taking as many as a dozen pictures on one 6,5 x 8,5 inch plate.

Disderi's innovation went largely unnoticed until 1859, when the Emperor Napoleon III, about to embark for Italy, halted his troops in front of the photographer's studio and went inside to have his portrait made by the new method. After word of this got around, Disderi suddenly found himself besieged by Parisians wanting their own portraits made. Within months, the rage for these tiny likenesses-called carles-de-visite because they were often left by visitors in place of printed calling cards -spread across France, England and the United States. To serve the seemingly insatiable demand, hundreds of studios throughout Europe and America were established, and photographers competed to cut prices even more. The size of the individual portraits got even smaller as photographers devised ways to squeeze as many as 12 images on a single plate.

An early carte-de-visite camera had a focusing knob on each lens. Some cameras had lenses of different focal lengths so that views of different sizes, ranging from full-length to close-up, could be taken simultaneously.

In a carte-de-visite print, shown before being cut into separate pictures, a young lady tries out six coy poses. They were taken with an improved camera that allowed the photographer to mask sections of the plate so that he could expose one view at a time. Thus the customer could strike several different poses for the price of one.

The inventor of such tiny multiple portraits, Disderi-cenown above in one of his carte-de-visite photographs-became the Emperor's court photographer, made a fortune, spent it and died a pauper.

"The Mammoth"

2011-08-21T03:50:00.000-07:00

During photography's early decades, enlargements were difficult and expensive to make and often turned out hopelessly blurred. If you wanted big pictures you used a big camera. Many photographers had cameras that took 11 x 14-inch plates and larger and larger ones were built as the demand for big pictures grew. Among the first true giants was the one designed in 1858 by C. Thurston Thompson, an English photographer who specialized in reproducing works of art; his camera, a full 12 feet long, took photographs three feet square.

The largest camera of them all was built in the United States around 1900. Named the Mammoth, it was designed for officials of the Chicago and Alton Railroad Company, who wished to have a single, perfectly detailed portrait of their newest luxury train. Having accomplished this feat, the Mammoth, like its prehistoric namesake, vanished, a victim of its own size and clumsiness.

The Mammoth

Butterfield Camera 1929

Weighing a full 1,400 pounds when loaded with its 500-pound glass plate, the Mammoth was operated by a team of sometimes as many as 15 men. Built in Chicago, it was moved about on a specially designed railroad car; the developing and printing of one of its 4,5 x 8-foot photographs required 10 gallons of chemical solutions. The picture it was designed to take, of a luxury express train, so overwhelmed the judges at the 1900 Paris Exposition by its sheer size that it won the "Grand Prize of the World."

Smaller Box, Brighter Image

2011-08-21T00:17:00.000-07:00

One of photography's pioneers, an English country squire turned scientist named William Henry Fox Talbot, took a different route from that of Petzval to speed up picture taking. At first Talbot, like his contemporary Daguerre, had used a large camera obscura. But he found that an exposure of even one full hour in full sunlight often failed to get a picture. Then Talbot realized that tiny cameras, using lenses of short focal lengths, would be much faster. The light gathered would be concentrated on a small area rather than dispersed over a large one; the brighter image thus cast would be recorded faster by the weak photographic materials he was forced to use.

Talbot fitted microscope lenses-the most carefully made lenses produced up to that time-to the little cameras, which his wife dubbed "mousetraps." The cameras were very small indeed, as the photograph above indicates,

some of them measuring only 2,5 inches on a side. With one of these cameras, Talbot made his first successful photograph, a picture of a window in his manor house. The exposure time had been cut to a half hour, but the picture was so small-one inch square-that he dismissed it as looking like the work "of some Lilliputian artist." Lacking any means of enlarging his pictures, Talbot abandoned his mousetraps and concentrated his efforts on developing photographic materials sensitive enough to work in larger, conventional cameras.

But the mousetraps he discarded were to become, nearly a century later and in a much more sophisticated form, the cameras most people used. For Talbot had the right idea: The key to speed in picture taking was a small camera whose short-focal-Iength lens made the most of dim light by concentrating it on a small piece of film.

In this early photograph, taken in two parts and pieced together, Talbot and his assistants put on a busy show. Talbot himself prepares a camera to take a portrait of a waiting customer (the ring behind the sitter will serve to keep his head steady during the exposure). At left, an assistant copies a painting; at right, another photographs a statue. In the background a technician puts negatives on racks in the sun to make positive prints. At far right, the kneeling man holds a target for the taker of this photograph to focus on.

A Faster Lens to Freeze Motion

2011-08-20T23:41:00.000-07:00

A cutaway diagram of Voigtlander's camera shows the Petzval lens (a) with its two groups of lens elements, each having. a convex and concave part. The photographer looked through a peephole (b) and focused by means of a ground-glass screen (c). Then he unscrewed the rear section of the camera and substituted a round sensitized plate (d) for the screen.

The first cameras made do with the crude lenses inherited from the camera obscura-lenses that were adequate for the sensitive human eye but too limited in light-gathering power to make photographs easily. Before photographers could take clear pictures of everyday scenes, they needed a lens mathematically designed for use in a camera. In January 1841 a maker of telescopes and other optical equipment, Voigtlander and Son, unveiled a camera-no modified camera obscura but a true photographic instrument -that was fitted with a lens designed by Josef Max Petzval, a 33-year-old professor of mathematics at the University of Vienna. The camera, which understandably turned out looking like a small telescope, used circular plates to record the full image projected by the lens. But it was the lens that mattered. It gathered 16 times more light than other types and made possible the recording of poorly lighted scenes and moving crowds capturing these difficult shots with remarkable clarity but with strange tints that were due not to the lens but to the crude chemicals then in use.

The camera, a finely made instrument, was sold disassembled in an elegant wooden case.

Viennese instrument maker Peter von Voigtlander, alert to photographers' demands for a fast lens and efficient camera, snapped up the new lens design brought to him by a mathematics professor, Josef Max Petzval. Voigtlander's technicians built the lens from Petzval's calculations and planned a camera especially for it.

Cameras That Made History (The Trailblazers)

2011-08-20T02:46:00.000-07:00

One of America's first daguerreotypists, Jacob Byerly ,peers into the viewing screen of his camera, a plain box with a lens hardly changed from the centuries-old camera obscura. The group portrait at right, taken with a camera much like Byerly's, shows the lifelike detail characteristic of daguerreotypes. The smallest child, unable to hold still, appears blurred; the other figures are sharp, although no one appears to be enjoying the ordeal.

Portraits of Mrs. Kiah Sewall and Family, 1840

The daguerreotypes that introduced photography to the world in 1839 were amazingly sharp and detailed pictures despite the fact that they had been made in a crude camera. Daguerre had simply modified a portable camera obscura, the device artists had long used as a sketching aid, so that it would accept a light-sensitive plate.

While Daguerre's invention was acclaimed as miraculous, its limitations soon became obvious. The combination of poor lenses and slow-acting chemicals required exposures of up to 20 minutes in bright sunlight before an image could be recorded in the camera. Scoffers predicted that photography would never get beyond the novelty stage. But in scarcely more than a year they were being proved wrong. Thanks to improvements in light-sensitive compounds and a few optical innovations, exposures could be made in less than two minutes. Customers were soon flocking to newly established daguerreotype studios-on the continent, in Britain and, before long, in the United States-where, with the aid of headrests and arm supports, they tried to hold still for the camera.

The Wolcott camera (top), proudly emblazoned with the name of its inventor, American optical designer Alexander S. Wolcott, cut exposure time to about 90 seconds in sunlight by gathering light with a large concave mirror, which produced a brighter image than any available lens. Light entered the camera through a large hole (a) and struck the highly polished mirror (b), which concentrated the rays and reflected them onto a viewing screen (c) held in a frame by a clip (d): To focus, the photographer looked through a door (e) and moved the frame's support (f) to sharpen the image. He then substituted a plate for the screen.

A front view of Alexander S. Wolcott's mirror camera (top), patented in 1840, shows the circular light-admitting hole, the rectangular plate holder and the curved reflecting mirror behind it. Typical of the tiny pictures this type of camera took is the one above, now badly deteriorated, of Henry Fitz, a telescope maker who helped Wolcott build a larger camera of similar design. Although Wolcott's mirror instruments made serviceable pictures, they soon became obsolete as lens design improved.

From Camera Obscura to Instamatic

2011-08-19T23:23:00.000-07:00

Camera Obscura

Many artists of the 17th and 18th Centuries used a camera obscura for precise preliminary sketches for paintings of landscapes, buildings and even portraits. The portable model shown above worked exactly like the modern reflex camera. Light entering through the lens was reflected by an angled mirror inside the box; the mirror projected a riqnt-side-uo image on the ground-glass screen at the top, which was shielded from surrounding light by a folding hood. The artist placed a thin piece of paper on the glass and traced the image, achieving perfect perspective with a minimum of effort.

Instamatic Camera

The camera, oddly enough, was invented many centuries before photography. In the form of the camera obscura, it projected a view of an outdoor scene into a darkened room, directing light rays from the scene through a small hole in one wall to form an image on the opposite wall. During the 11th Century a number of Arabian scientist-philosophers were amusing themselves with camera obscuras made out of tents. In the late 15th Century Leonardo da Vinci described the "dark chamber" in knowledgable detail.

When one of Leonardo's countrymen, a Neapolitan scientist and writer named Giovanni Battista della Porta, became interested in camera obscuras toward the end of the 16th Century, he reacted as millions of amateurs have ever since: he got a camera of his own. He experimented with a lens to sharpen the image and then invited some of his friends in for a show. Seating them in the room facing away from the aperture, he uncapped the lens. On the wall could be seen a group of actors hired to play a little drama outside. Della Porta's guests, unhappily, were not amused by his motion picture show; the sight of tiny human forms cavorting upside down on a dark wall sent them into panic. Not long after, their host was brought before a Papal court on a charge of sorcery; he somehow wriggled out of the trouble, but found it prudent to leave the country for a while.

By the end of the 17th Century camera obscuras were serving practical ends. They were made in the form of movable chambers and sedan chairs so that artists could carry them around, get inside, and trace landscapes and cathedrals in accurate perspective, using translucent paper placed over a ground-glass viewing screen. One of the first fully portable models was designed by Johann Zahn, a German monk. Zahn's camera, a wooden box nine inches high and two feet long, had not only a lens that could be moved in and out in a tube to focus the image, but an adjustable aperture to control the amount of light entering the box and a mirror that cast the image, right side up, onto a translucent screen on top so that it could be viewed from outside the box. Zahn's device was identical in principle with the modern single-lens reflex camera and had he had some kind of light-sensitive plate to put into it he would have invented photography.

However, virtually nothing was known about photographic chemicals at the time and it was not until 1826 that a French lithographer-inventor, Joseph Nicephore Nlepce, applied recent discoveries about light-sensitive compounds and finally supplied the missing element. Niepcs coated a sheet of pewter with an asphalt solution, inserted it in an artist's camera obscura much like Zahn's and placed it on his windowsill. After an exposure of eight hours he succeeded in making the world's first photograph: a dim, fuzzy image of his farmyard in central France.

After some years of effort, Niepce joined forces with a Parisian scenery designer and impresario, Louis Jacques Mande Oaguerre. Like Niepce, Oaguerre did little to improve the camera, but he did find more sensitive chemicals. In 1839, after Niepce's death, he announced the first practical photographic process to the world. His daguerreotypes, which took exposures of about half an hour to produce, were surprisingly sharp. But he could photograph only still lifes, buildings and landscapes; people simply could not hold still long enough for their images to be recorded.

At the announcement of Oaguerre's breakthrough, one of the men present, an Austrian professor named Andreas von Ettingshausen, immediately recognized the problem: the crude lens Oaguerre was using was far too inefficient in gathering light (by modern standards, it had a speed of about f/17). On his return home, von Ettingshausen reported this news to his friend and colleague Josef Max Petzval, a professor of mathematics at the University of Vienna; he also introduced Petzval to Peter von Voigtlander, head of. a prestigious family optical firm. It took nearly a year for Petzval to compute the design of a new lens and have it properly made, but the result was worth the effort. Built into a special camera made for it by voigtlander, it admitted nearly 16 times as much light as Oaguerre's (its speed was about f/3.6) and reduced exposures to less than a minute.

Petzval's lens was to be the photographer's standard for 60 years thereafter. Known everywhere as "the German lens," it turned photography from a novelty into a practical craft. Thousands were produced by Voigtlander for use in his own and other cameras; and other entrepreneurs in Europe and America made many more thousands of copies. Voiqtlander soon built a second factory in Germany to handle the demand, helping to lay the cornerstone of the German photographic industry. By then, however, Petzval had quarreled with his partner, contending that he had not been properly rewarded for his achievement, and the two men split up. Although Petzval was honored later as one of the founders of photography,he died a lonely and embittered man.

The camera in which Petzval's lens was most often used was the large and heavy view camera employed by nearly all professionals and amateurs through most of the 19th Century, but now seldom seen outside the studio. It was a tripod-mounted wooden box, with another box sliding inside it like a tight-fitting drawer (later replaced by a flexible leather bellows) to move the lens back and forth for focusing. The photographer adjusted focus while looking at the image on a ground-glass screen in the back; the screen was removed and replaced with a plate holder for picture taking.

With the introduction of faster plates in the late 1870s, the camera needed a new element: a mechanical shutter that could dependably produce exposures in fractions of a second. The first shutters were not built inside the camera, but were accessories that the photographer fitted over the front of his lens. One, the "guillotine," or drop shutter, was the essence of simplicity: a sliding board with a rectangular hole in it. When the photographer released the shutter, the board dropped, letting light pass through to the lens during the instant the rectangle moved past. Rigged with rubber bands, this type of shutter permitted photographers like Eadweard Muybridge to stop a horse in mid-gallop with speeds of close to 1/S00 second. The first focal-plane shutter, which operated like the guillotine but had an opening of adjustable size, was used by a British photographer named William England as early as 1861. The other main type, the leaf shutter, was first introduced by Edward Bausch in 1887.

By the 1880s a variety of ingenious special-purpose cameras also appeared: giant cameras to produce giant prints (enlarging was still impractical); multi-lens cameras that could record many small, inexpensive portraits on a single plate; stereo cameras that created an illusion of three dimensions; panoramic cameras that took in broad views. But all of these devices were still too unwieldy and expensive for most amateurs. Also, with few exceptions they still involved the loading, unloading and developing of one plate at a time. Then, in 1888, a single event launched photography on its way to becoming a hobby for everyone: George Eastman, a former bookkeeper in a Rochester, New York bank, announced his Kodak No.1, the first true hand-held camera designed to use roll film.

The Kodaks were aimed at the snapshot market; the dream of a small yet versatile camera for serious photography was still unfulfilled. In the spring of 1925, however, a handy little camera was displayed at the Leipzig Fair. Made by the German optical works of E. Leitz, it was called the Leica (from "LEitz CAmera"); it used a roll of 3Smm film to provide 36 exposures; it had a fast focal-plane shutter and a high-quality f/3.S lens.

The Leica had started as a gleam in the eye of Oskar Barnack, head of Leitz's experimental department, some 20 years before. Barnack, whose health was poor, was nevertheless an avid hiker and amateur photographer and liked to pursue his pastimes O,n Sundays in the Thuringian Forest. After panting up and down hills with his S x 7 view camera and a suitcase full of equipment, he began to dream of a camera he could simply put in his pocket or sling from his shoulder. Barnack’s idea –“kleines Neqativ, grosses Bild" ("small negative, large picture") started to take shape. At first he tried cutting his 5 x 7 plates into small pieces and usinq them in an experimental camera, but the tiny negatives were too coarse to produce decent enlargements. Later, when he started working for Leitz on a motion-picture camera, he thought of using that camera's film, which was specially prepared to record fine detail in a small negative.

The film made the difference and the Leica in its later form set the standard for the modern hand camera that could take almost any kind of picture under almost any conditions. One lever advanced the film and wound up the mechanism of the focal-plane shutter, which could give any of a range of exposures from one second to 1/1000 second. The extremely fast lens (now f/1.9) permitted picture taking indoors without special lighting and a rangefinder mechanically connected to the lens provided accurate focusing. Most important, the camera was so small and simple to use that it could be taken anywhere and operated without fuss.

Barnack's Leica revolutionized photography. Along with similar precision cameras like the Ermanox (page 164) it became the new tool of photojournalists as well as an increasing number of amateurs, who prized its ability to catch unposed, natural pictures. And in turn such photographers began to support an ever-growing market for other types of small, versatile cameras, each with its own distinctive advantages. The twin-lens reflex, which enabled the photographer to focus through a separate lens coupled to the taking lens, was made popular by the introduction of the Rolleiflex in 1927; and in 1937 the Exacta provided a versatile small camera that could be easily focused through the taking lens, the 35mm single-lens reflex.

These and subsequent developments in fine cameras have been spectacular enough, but the real camera explosion has come since World War II with. the astonishing success of two families of cameras for the amateur: the Kodak Instamatics and similar "do-everything-for-you" cameras of other manufacturers, and the Polaroid Land Cameras, named for Edwin H. Land, inventor of the first successful in-the-camera developing process. (Land was inspired to create the picture-in-a-minute camera by his small daughter:

When he was taking snapshots of her one day, she impatiently asked how soon she could see them and was heartbroken when he explained about the delay involved in developing and printing.) Both these families of modern cameras give the photographer the simplicity that won amateurs to George Eastman's first Kodak. Film magazines snap into place so that there is no threadihg. Light-sensitive devices gauge illumination and automatically set shutter or aperture for exposure. Fine focusing must still be done by the human eye-but the inventors are working on that problem too.

Petzval's Lens (Voigtlander)

Voigtlander Modern

A View from beyond Our World

2011-08-18T22:51:00.000-07:00

FRANK BORMAN for NASA = Earth Rise as Seen from Apollo 1968

Just before Christmas 1968, the world watched enthralled as the spacecraft Apollo 8 sped toward its rendezvous with the moon. On board the craft, in turn, astronauts Frank Borman, William Anders and James Lovell watched the earth, photographing it as it shrank into the distance. It was the first time that men had moved far enough out in space to see their own planet as a celestial body-a marbled sphere of clouds, land and sea.

The photograph at the right, taken by Borman with a Hasselblad fitted with a 250mm telephoto lens, shows the earth as it appeared from a distance of a quarter of a million miles, rising above the surface of the moon. Later the picture would be carried on television, reproduced in thousands of newspapers and magazines, even made into a United States postage stamp. Viewing it, earth-bound men shared with the astronauts a measure of their awe and a sense of man's insignificance in the vastness of space

The Body's Wonders

2011-08-17T21:11:00.000-07:00

Photographers, using special equipment and techniques, have been able to make visible many marvels of the human body. Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson is one; he worked closely with doctors over a period of years to make an extraordinary series ot photographs that trace the development of the human embryo. The photograph at right shows an 11-week-old fetus only moments after its mother miscarried. The blood-rich placental mass, here partially cut away to reveal the two-and-one-half-inch long fetus curled within, was suspended by Nilsson in a clear fluid so that he could photograph it in as close an approximation of the natural state as possible. Whereas a similar fetus preserved as a specimen in a laboratory bottle would repel most beholders, Nilsson's painstaking technique has lent an awesome beauty to this view of life at its beginning.

In the picture opposite, research scientist Don Ross used a process called multispectral analysis to make a remarkable contour map of the human skull showing contrasts of bone and tissue that the eye would otherwise miss. He converted shades of gray into shades of color, turning an ordinary X-ray of a human skull into a stunning pattern of many hues that simplified interpretation of the X-ray.

photo by LENNART NILSSON

Crystallized Motion, Visible Time

2011-08-16T21:02:00.000-07:00

GJON MILI = Nora Kaye

H.E. EDGERTON = Splash of a Milk Drop

A drop of milk falls into a saucer; a delicate coronet of liquid erupts and is gone. It happens too quickly for the eye to catch-but not too quickly for a camera equipped with an electronic flash. Harold E. Edgerton, who took this picture, pioneered ultra-high-speed photography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1930s. He developed an electronic flash of such high intensity and brief duration that it could make pictures at a speed of one millionth of a second-fast enough to stop a bullet in flight. Multiple exposures made with a rapid succession of these flashes produced an image of motion in progress across the film. Edgerton's "strobe light" provided scientists with a valuable tool with which to study everything from the movement of high-speed machinery to the strike of a rattlesnake. And in the hands of an artist like Gjon Mili it can capture the beauty of motion in the graceful sweep of a ballet dancer

An Extension of Vision

2011-08-16T02:19:00.000-07:00

The human eye is a superb instrument, able at a glance to differentiate between subtle shades of color, to function in murky darkness or seashore glare, to focus on fine print or on distant mountains, to judge size, to register movement, to measure depth. But the eye has its limits. It can perceive only the form of electromagnetic energy that we call visible light; to other almost identical forms, such as heat and X-rays, it is blind. The eye is quick enough to follow the beat of a swan's wing, but not that of a hummingbird's. At 20 feet it can distinguish an object as small as 7/100 inch across, but nothing smaller. Most limiting of all is the eye's attachment to man himself; it goes where man goes-and nowhere else.

The camera frees man from such limitations on his ability to see. No single photographic process can do all the things the eye can and yet many can do things the eye cannot. There is almost nothing that one form or another of the mechanical eye and sensitized film fails to see. To record the effects of a nuclear explosion, for instance, the Atomic Energy Commission has snapped 'pictures showing what happens in 1/200,000,000 second. Photographic plates are used to register the movements of the smallest things known-the minuscule particles produced by an atom smasher-and of the largest things known-stars that glimmer so distantly they too are invisible to the human eye.

Astronomers were among the first to put photography to work seeing the unseen. By the end of the last century they had already used the camera extensively to explore space. The photograph at the right, made by two French astronomers in 1894, shows the moon as it appeared through the large telescope at the Observatory of Paris. It is one of a series of plates comprising the first systematic photographic survey of the moon and in its time it was a revelation. Today our concept of the moon is far more detailed and comprehensive, primarily because of photographs-some taken by space robots in lunar orbit and others taken by men standing on the surface of the moon itself. And from the cameras held by those same men, we have gained a whole new perspective of our own planet, shrunk to the size of a plastic beach ball, its swirled blue, brown and white surface hanging in the black void of space.

The camera peers inward, too, revealing the infinitely fine warp and woof of matter. With the aid of X-rays it peels back the very tissues of life, laying bare the structure and ills of the human body; teamed with the microscope, it has recorded the moment of conception when an egg and spermatozoon meet.

By going where the eye cannot go and sensing what the eye cannot see, the camera has become an indispensable tool for investigating the natural world. At the same time it has provided an unexpected bonus. It is remarkable how many photographs taken purely for scientific purposes are truly beautiful simply as pictures to look at. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," the poet John Keats once wrote. The camera, whether focused on the atom or the stars, on a dancer's movements or a city's patterns, reveals much truth -and as the pictures on the following pages show, much beauty too.

LOEWY AND PUISEUX = The Moon , 1894

The Manipulated Print

2011-08-16T02:02:00.000-07:00

Discovery in photography can also take place after the shutter is snapped. The picture above was done largely with scissors and paste pot-and a keen eye for design. Beginning with 3Smm frames of a nude, Ray Metzker cut prints into small rectangular chips and assembled them into a vibrant, flickering pattern.

To create the photomontage at right, Jerry Uelsmann took three shots; he placed each negative in a separate enlarger, blended images by moving a single piece of printing paper from one to the other, then reversed some of the images and produced halo effects. Uelsmann has called the darkroom "in the truest sense, a visual research lab .... [One can] revisualize the final image at any point. ... It has been and will always be alchemy."

Ray Metzker

JERRY UELSMANN = Small Woods Where I Met Myself, 1967

Konrad Wyrebek

The Photographer's Found Abstractions

2011-08-14T23:10:00.000-07:00

"The possibility of discovery is everywhere," says Paul Caponigro, who made the photograph of fractured rock surfaces at the right. The same words could have been said by Harry Callahan, whose picture of a Wisconsin church window appears above. Both men have learned to see in the world around them distinctive patterns and textures, and, by isolating and framing them in the camera's crisp rectangular field, transform them into works of abstract art. Most photographers would have stood farther back, so as to include in their composition the whole church, steeple and all, or the entire rock formation and its surroundings -producing, perhaps, nice pictures but hardly as compelling ones as these. "I'm interested in revealing the subject in a new way, to intensify it," says Callahan of his approach. "A photograph is able to capture a moment people can't always see with their eyes."

Harry Callahan = the bombilla

Personality in Portraits

2011-08-14T22:51:00.000-07:00

A photographer making a portrait is driven by two powerful forces: His own creative approach and the personality of his subject. The results, as seen here, often vary widely but ultimately depend on bold selection and framing of what he sees. "A great presence, deeply aware of his own image," observed Irving Penn of Pablo Picasso, who had dressed up for this picture in bullfighter's cloak and stiffbrimmed Cordoban hat. Penn, on assignment from Vogue magazine, let the great painter pose himself, while he focused on the essence of the man, his "eye-round, quick, intensely black."

Arnold Newman, working for Harper's Bazaar, seated pianist and composer Igor Stravinsky beside a grand piano, its open top suggesting a giant black musical note. The extraordinary placement of the musician in one corner of the picture clinches the composition's powerful effect, echoing the discordant and yet lovely quality Newman so admired in Stravinsky's music.

A Search for Beauty

2011-08-14T00:55:00.000-07:00

From the moment it was invented, photography was accepted by most people for what it is an unparalleled recording medium. But some photographers soon realized that if it were to win a place among the arts, its images had to go beyond mere record keeping-that photographs had to be beautiful and expressive in themselves.

In the beginning there were no rules for this new art form, no established body of artists or traditions to say what it should do. Inevitably many photographers relied heavily on what was going on in painting or sculpture at the time. This often led to amusing-even disastrous-results. In a few cases it produced remarkably good pictures. One example, from the' socalled "pictorial" school of photography popular around the turn of the century, is the lovely study of a girl shown opposite, made by the American photographer Gertrude Kasebler in 1903. Its romantic pose, soft focus and moody lighting are remarkably similar to many paintings then in vogue.

But even such graceful attempts to parallel painting slighted the special power of the camera. Photographers began to recognize their medium as a virtually limitless means of showing others the world the way they saw it. Photography, they found, could evoke the serenity of lakes and clouds or the rushing, hemmed-in quality of the city. It could celebrate sensuous natu ral forms in the female figure or even in a common vegetable; it could express people's personalities more convincingly by framing them in bold compositions of line and tone; it could isolate details in subjects as commonplace as a church or a rock and turn them into a~stract works of art. And finally, they discovered, photographs could be used to fracture the world of reality and reassemble it, employing all the tricks of the darkroom to create a reality that exists only In the artist's mind.

GERTRUDGE KASEBIER : Evelyn Nesbit, 1903

The Shocking Instant

2011-08-14T00:17:00.000-07:00

Some photographs are so highly charged with emotion that they become unforgettable events in themselves. United States Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima was one such photograph; the living skeletons of the Nazi concentration camps were others. One of the most shockingly memorable pictures of recent years is the one at right, which, like that of the Iwo flag-raising, won a Pulitzer Prize. Edward Adams, an Associated Press photographer, snapped it at the very instant when Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnam's national pollee chief, put a pistol bullet through the head of a suspected Viet Cong terrorist, whose hands were tied behind his back. In a country already numb with killings, one more death might hardly have been expected to stir a ripple. But recorded as it was by the camera and reproduced in newspapers and magazines around the world, Adams' photograph was immediately seen and felt for what it was: a terrifying summation of war, death and man's timeless brutality to man.

EDWARD T ADAMS : Execution of a Suspected Viet Cong Terrorist, 1968