Photography as an Art Form

110 flashcards by MentisLibrary

Photography's history from the daguerreotype onward: the processes, the photographers and movements, the genres and their conventions, the vocabulary of criticism, and how prints and photobooks are made.

What did the camera obscura give artists long before photography existed?
A darkened room or box with a small hole that throws an inverted image of the scene outside onto the opposite wall. It solved projection but not fixing: the image could be traced, never kept.
Which is the oldest surviving photograph made in a camera?
View from the Window at Le Gras, made on a pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea, which hardened where light struck it and was washed away where it did not. The exposure ran for hours.
Daguerreotype
A unique positive image on a silvered copper plate, developed over mercury vapor and fixed with salt. It has a mirror surface, astonishing detail, no negative, and cannot be copied.
Daguerreotype vs calotype
The daguerreotype is a one-off positive on metal, sharp and unrepeatable. The calotype is a paper negative from which any number of positives can be printed, softer because the paper fibers diffuse the image.
What was The Pencil of Nature?
Talbot's book of mounted calotypes, issued in six parts, the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs. Its captions argue that the camera draws by itself, without the artist's hand.
Who produced the first book illustrated with photographs?
Anna Atkins, a botanist, who reproduced seaweed specimens as cyanotypes in Photographs of British Algae and issued it to subscribers in parts. It was a scientific reference, not an art object.
Cyanotype
A contact printing process using iron salts rather than silver, printed by sunlight and developed in plain water, that yields a Prussian blue image. Cheap, simple and very stable.
Which words did John Herschel give photography?
Negative and positive. He also invented the cyanotype and showed that hyposulfite of soda would dissolve unexposed silver salts and so fix an image permanently.
What is the wet collodion process?
Glass plates coated with collodion and silver salts that had to be exposed and developed while still wet, within about ten minutes. It gave a sharp glass negative and exposures of seconds instead of minutes.
Tintype
A collodion positive on a thin sheet of blackened iron, cheap, unbreakable and finished in minutes while the sitter waited. Fairground and traveling photographers used it into the twentieth century.
What was a carte de visite?
A small albumen print pasted to a card the size of a calling card, made eight at a time on a single negative with a multi-lens camera. Collecting and exchanging them became a craze in the 1860s.
Albumen print
A print on thin paper coated with egg white and salt, sensitized with silver nitrate and printed out by sunlight under the negative rather than developed. Its warm purple-brown tone and slight sheen define nineteenth-century photography.
What changed when gelatin dry plates arrived?
Plates could be bought ready made, exposed weeks later and developed whenever convenient, and they were fast enough to stop motion. The photographer no longer needed chemistry at the scene.
What did Eadweard Muybridge settle in 1878?
That a galloping horse does lift all four hooves clear of the ground, and that it happens when the legs are gathered under the body, not extended front and back as painters had drawn it. He used a row of cameras tripped by the horse itself.
Who was Etienne-Jules Marey?
A French physiologist who recorded the successive phases of a movement as overlapping exposures on one plate, using a camera built like a rifle. His images fed directly into Futurist and Cubist painting.
What did the first Kodak camera change?
It arrived loaded with roll film for a hundred exposures; the owner shot them, posted the whole camera back, and received prints and a reloaded camera. Developing and printing left the photographer's hands.
Brownie
A cardboard box camera Kodak sold for one dollar from 1900 and marketed to children. It put a camera in most households and made the family snapshot an ordinary object.
What was the first practical color process?
The autochrome: a glass plate screened by dyed potato starch grains acting as microscopic color filters. The result is a single transparency with a soft, pointillist grain and muted tones.
Kodachrome
A color transparency film with three emulsion layers whose dyes were formed during a development so complex that only the manufacturer could do it. Famous for stable, saturated color.
How did the Leica change what photographers could do?
It used 35mm cine film in a small, quiet camera that could be carried all day and shot in a run of frames. Photographers began working in sequences and reacting to events instead of setting up.
Photogram
A camera-less image made by laying objects on light-sensitive paper and exposing it, so they print as pale silhouettes with soft haloes where light crept around the edges.
Solarization
Partial reversal of tones caused by re-exposing the material to light part way through development, leaving a dark Mackie line along edges. Properly it is the Sabattier effect.
What did Oscar Rejlander's The Two Ways of Life prove was possible?
That a photograph could be constructed like an academic painting: he combination-printed about thirty separate negatives into one moralizing allegory. Queen Victoria bought a print.
Who was Julia Margaret Cameron?
A British portraitist who took up photography at 48 and worked deliberately soft, with long exposures and smears and scratches left in the negative. She photographed Tennyson and Herschel and staged literary allegories.
Who made the first aerial photographs, and of what?
Nadar, over Paris from a tethered balloon in 1858. He also made the first photographs by artificial light, in the catacombs and sewers, using battery-powered lamps.
Why does Roger Fenton's Crimean work show no fighting?
Wet collodion needed a wagon-borne darkroom and exposures of seconds, so he could photograph camps, officers and empty ground and nothing else. The Valley of the Shadow of Death is a road strewn with cannonballs.
What did Alexander Gardner's Civil War book do that was new?
Photographic Sketch Book of the War gave each of its hundred albumen prints a written caption and credited the photographer who made the negative. It also includes a picture for which a body had been dragged into position.
Who were the survey photographers of the American West?
Timothy O'Sullivan, Carleton Watkins and William Henry Jackson, who hauled mammoth plate cameras on government and railroad expeditions and produced the images by which the East imagined the West.
What did Jacob Riis use photography for?
To force New York tenement conditions in front of readers who had never seen them, in How the Other Half Lives. Magnesium flash powder let him photograph unlit rooms, cellars and alleys at night.
What made Lewis Hine's child labor photographs effective?
He recorded each child's name, age, job and working hours alongside the picture, and measured children against the buttons on his own coat to prove their height. Portrait, evidence and caption worked together.