William Henry Fox Talbot,
British, 1800–1877,
A Scene in York:
York Minster from Lop Lane,
1845,
salted paper print,
Edward J. Lenkin Fund, Melvin and Thelma Lenkin Fund,
and Stephen G. Stein Fund, 2022.57.1
A British polymath as adept in astronomy, chemical science, Egyptology,
physics, and philosophy, Talbot spent years inventing a photographic
process that created newspaper negatives, which were and then used to brand
positive prints—the conceptual footing of nearly all photography until the
digital age. Calotypes, as he came to call them, are softer in effect than
daguerreotypes, the other process announced in 1839. Though steeped
in the sciences, Talbot understood the ability of his invention to make
striking works of art. Here the partially obstructed view of the cathedral
rising from the confines of the city gives a sense of discovery, of having
simply turned the corner and encountered this scene.
David Octavius Hill
and
Robert Adamson, Scottish, 1802–1870, and Scottish, 1821–1848,
David Octavius Hill at the
Gate of Rock House, Edinburgh,
1843–1847,
salted newspaper print,
Paul Mellon Fund, 2007.29.27
In the mid-1840s, the Scottish team of Hill, a painter, and Adamson,
a photographer who had opened the first photography studio in Edinburgh,
produced some of the finest pictures made with the newly invented
medium. Theirs was a truthful partnership of technical skills and inventiveness.
In the four cursory years of their alliance before Adamson’s untimely
death, they created some three grand portraits and pictures of local
life. This flick of Hill, made at the entrance to his studio, is characteristic
of the partners’ deft harnessing of lite and shadow to model the
subject’s face, suggesting a psychological intensity.
Albert Sands Southworth
and
Josiah Johnson Hawes,
American, 1811–1894, and American, 1808–1901,
The Letter, c. 1850, daguerreotype, Patrons’ Permanent Fund, 1999.94.i
Working together in Boston, the portrait photographers Southworth and Hawes aimed to capture the character of their subjects using the daguerreotype process. Invented in France and one of the two photographic processes introduced to the public in early 1839, the daguerreotype is made past exposing a silvery-coated copper plate to light and and so treating information technology with chemicals to bring out the paradigm. The heyday of the technique was the 1840s and 1850s, when it was used primarily for making portraits. The daguerreotype’s long exposure time commonly resulted in frontal, frozen postures and stern facial expressions; this moving-picture show’southward pyramidal composition and strong sentiments of friendship and companionship are characteristic of Southworth and Hawes’s innovative approach.
Roger Fenton, British, 1819–1869,
Moscow, Domes of Churches
in the Kremlin,
1852, salted paper print, Paul Mellon Fund, 2005.52.1
Trained as a lawyer and painter, Fenton photographed for just
eleven years, still he was one of United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland’south near influential and skilled
practitioners. The start official photographer to the British Museum,
he was besides one of the founders of the Photographic Society, an
arrangement he hoped would establish photography’s importance
in modern life. He constantly tested the limits of his exercise,
even hauling his cumbersome equipment abroad to places such every bit
Russia, where he made this photograph as function of a remarkable
series of architectural views of the Kremlin.
Roger Fenton,
British, 1819–1869,
Fruit and Flowers, 1860,
albumen impress,
Paul Mellon Fund, 2005.52.4
Gustave Le Gray,
French, 1820–1884,
The Pont du Carrousel, Paris:
View to the W from the Pont des Arts,
1856–1858,
albumen print,
Patrons’ Permanent Fund, 1995.36.94
(Slides 6–9)
In the second half of the nineteenth century, some photographers in France, hired by governmental agencies to make photographic inventories or simply catering to the growing need for pictures of Paris, drew on the medium’south documentary abilities to tape the nation’south architectural patrimony and the modernization of Paris. Others explored the camera’s artistic potential by capturing the ephemeral moods of nature in the French countryside. Though photographers faced difficulties in carting around heavy equipment and operating in the field, they learned how to master the elements that directly affected their pictures, from securing the right vantage bespeak to dealing with move, light, and changing atmospheric weather during long exposure times.
Charles Marville,
French, 1813–1879,
Hôtel de la Marine,
1864–1870, albumen print,
Diana and Mallory Walker Fund, 2006.23.1
Édouard-Denis Baldus,
French, 1813–1889,
Toulon, Train Station,
c. 1861,
albumen print,
Patrons’ Permanent Fund, 1995.36.10
Eugène Cuvelier, French, 1837–1900,
Belle-Croix, 1860s, albumen print, Gail and Benjamin Jacobs for the Millennium Fund, 2007.115.i
Julia Margaret Cameron,
British, 1815–1879,
The Mount Nymph, Sweet Freedom,
June 1866, albumen print, New Century Fund, 1997.97.ane
Ensconced in the intellectual and artistic circles of midcentury England, Cameron manipulated focus and calorie-free to create poetic pictures rich in references to literature, mythology, and history. Her monumental views of life-sized heads were unprecedented, and with them she hoped to define a new mode of photography that would rival the expressive power of painting and sculpture. The title of this work alludes to John Milton’s mid-seventeenth-century verse form “50’Allegro.” Describing the happy life of 1 who finds pleasure and beauty in the countryside, the poem includes the lines:
Come up, and trip information technology as ye become
On the lite fantastic toe;
And in thy right mitt lead with thee,
The mountain nymph, sweetness Liberty.
Maria Harriet Elizabeth Cator, British, 1831–1881,
Cator Family Album
(detail), 1866–1877, collage of watercolor and albumen prints in bound volume, Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund, 2022.174.1
In mid-nineteenth-century Uk, upper-grade women frequently created collages out of minor, commercial portrait photographs of family and friends, cutting out heads and figures and pasting them onto paper that they then embellished with drawings and watercolor. Made decades before the twentieth-century advanced discovered the provocative attraction of photocollage, these inventive, witty, and whimsical pictures undermined the standards of respectability seen in much studio portrait photography of the time.
Carleton E. Watkins,
American, 1829–1916,
Piwac, Vernal Falls, 300 feet, Yosemite,
1861,
albumen impress,
Gift of Mary and David Robinson, 1995.35.23
The westward expansion of America opened up new opportunities
for photographers such every bit Watkins and William Bong (see the following slide). Joining
government survey expeditions, hired by railroad companies, or
catering to tourists and the growing need for chiliad views
of nature, they created photographic landscapes that reached a
wide audience of scientists, businessmen, and engineers, as well
as curious members of the centre form. Watkins’southward photographs
of the sublime Yosemite Valley, which oft recall landscape
paintings of similar majestic subjects, helped convince Congress
to pass a bill in 1864 protecting the area from development and
commercial exploitation.
William H. Bell, American, built-in England, 1830–1910,
Grand Cañon, Colorado River, Near Paria Creek, Looking West, 1872, in
Geographical and Geological Explorations and Surveys W of the 100th Top, Seasons of 1871, 1872, and 1873
(1873), albumen print in bound volume, Corcoran Collection (Gift of William Wilson Corcoran, 1886)
Guillaume-Benjamin-Amant Duchenne (de Boulogne),
French, 1806–1875,
Plate 63,
Fright,
from
Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine
(The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression) (1862),
1854–1855,
albumen print,
Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
A neurologist, physiologist, and lensman, Duchenne de
Boulogne conducted a series of experiments in the mid-1850s in
which he applied electrical currents to various facial muscles to
study how they produce expressions of emotion. Convinced that
these electrically-induced expressions accurately rendered internal
feelings, he and so photographed his subjects to constitute a precise
visual lexicon of homo emotions, such equally hurting, surprise, fear,
and sadness. In 1862 he included this photograph representing
fearfulness in a treatise on physiognomy (a pseudoscience that assumes
a relationship between external advent and internal character),
which enjoyed wide popularity among artists and scientists.
Eadweard Muybridge,
American, born England, 1830–1904,
Plate 365,
Head-spring, a flying dove interfering,
from
Brute Locomotion, 1887,
collotype,
Corcoran Collection (Museum purchase, 1887)
Muybridge’s experiments in the 1880s revolutionized the understanding
of movement and inspired scientists and artists alike.
Using banks of cameras equipped with precisely triggered shutters,
he captured sequences of pictures of people and animals
moving and performing uncomplicated actions, such as climbing stairs or,
as here, performing a head-leap. Showing modest increments of
movements, his work made visible what in one case was imperceptible to
the human heart and laid the foundation for motion pictures.
Source: https://www.nga.gov/features/in-light-of-the-past/the-19th-century-the-invention-of-photography.html
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