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Celebrating 150 Years of Photography
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15210 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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8 / 1989 |
2,162 Words |
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Jason Edward Kaufman
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While the history of photography can be viewed as the history of its technological development, it is also very much the story of its practitioners' struggle to gain for their medium the prestige accorded fine art. Photography was born of science and art, and its identity is linked to both disciplines.
When the daguerreotype was brought before the French legislature in 1839, its advocates envisioned artists able to "surpass the most accomplished painters in fidelity of detail and true reproduction of the local atmosphere." However, once the initial wonderment subsided, the newest child of the Industrial Revolution was swiftly put to utilitarian and commercial use, accomplishing mechanically what was formerly done manually, providing a rapid and inexpensive means of recording the appearances of persons, topographical views, archaeological sites, botanical specimens, man-made structures, and hand-made prints.
Akin to Painting
Notwithstanding, photography seemed predestined to be closely associated with painting. Its inventors were not only scientists, but artists intent on compensating for their inability to draw well. Their lenses were ground according to the demands of picture-making. The Englishman William Henry Fox-Talbot, who pioneered a paper negative process ("calotype") at virtually the same time the Frenchmen Nicphore Nipce and Louis Jacques Mand Daguerre announced their polished-silver technique ("daguerreotype"), called once of his procedures "photogenic drawing," and titled his album of 1844-46 The Pencil of Nature.
Delacroix based a number of his figures on photographs and himself experimented in several modes of photography, regretting that "such a wonderful invention" had not been made earlier in his career. Courbet and Millet collected photographs for reference in painting light and shading, and Gerald Needham has convincingly proposed that as great a landmark as Manet's Olympia (1865), derived from a pornographic photograph that circulated at the time. Degas copied locomotion studies by Edweard Muybridge in order to depict the actual position of a horse's legs in full gallop. Thomas Eakins is known to have taken hundreds of photographs, many of which supplied him with motifs for his paintings. And the Pre-Raphaelites, adhering to Ruskinian principles, attended to nature's details with the assistance of the camera. The instances are legion.
Despite its advantages for the artist, photographs were never exhibited in mid-nineteenth-century fine art exhibitions. Photography was considered a mechanical procedure and thus relegated to the industrial sections of expositions.
Theory sanctioned the espousal of painterly aspects by photographers. In 1853, the painter William J. Newton, vice president of the Photographic Society of London, noted that the chemical property of photography enabled it to produce extremely detailed views but pointed out that art requires "a broad and general effect" and urged photographic artists to render "the whole subject a little out of focus." In his Pictorial Effect in Photography (1869), Henry Peach Robinson urged photographers to study the great works of past art and to apply their lessons to the arrangement of their photographs.
Others were more intentional in their
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