Week 6 - Fixing The Shadows [BBC The Genius of Photography: Notes]

BBC's The Genius of Photography - Episode 1:
Fixing The Shadows

Here are the notes I made whilst watching the first episode:

Meudon by Andre Kertesz 1928

Photography always transforms what it describes. The art of photography is to control that transformation. 

This photo captures the lucid genius of photography. 

Photography is about the frame you put around the image in. It's about what comes in and what is cut off. Yet, the story doesn't end there. The story is told beyond the frame through the reader's intuition.

Photography is the secret world of appearance. That is its true genius. 

Camera Obscura and the DaguerreotypeThe 'Camera Obscura' is an optical phenomenon which is easy to create and hard to believe (see post on pinhole cameras for more information)

It had been known for centuries what a camera obscura could do. The breakthrough came with the observation of certain chemicals were light sensitive. As early as 1802, certain scientists had experiments with these light sensitive salt crystals and temporarily would experience photography. However they had no way of harnessing the image, and to stop it from over exposing. 

With Henry Fox Talbot's first shoebox sized camera, he experimented with paper coated with silver salts. These were nicknamed mousetraps. Soon they began catching mirror images. A negative image where the tones are reversed.

Rival to Henry Fox Talbot was French artist Louis Daguerre who had his own methods of fixing the shadows.- Instead of using a paper-based process, Daguerre fixed his images on a mirrored metal plate.- Unlike Talbot's negative to positive process, Daguerre produced one-off images like a Polaroid.

- It has been named the mirror with a memory, a Daguerreotype. 

Daguerreotype of Kate Moss by Chuck Close, 2003

With a daguerreotype, the silver grains of the image "sit up" in a way that you wouldn't see in a photograph. What you see in a daguerreotype is light reflected back through an image which has a very different look to a paper based photograph. The mirror-based plate gives off a really beautiful contrasting image, they are far more intimate photographs. 

One big weakness of the Daguerreotype is that you could have multiple reproductions of the same image and paper based photography was more dominant. 

In its early decades, all photography, whether on paper, metal, glass or tin was a matter or wonder and even disbelief. 

However, the camera doesn't purely describe the world the way you would expect it to. Anything you've taken a picture of you've put a frame around it and since it's now cropped off and narrowed point of view it now becomes important, a spectacle of importance. The camera revealed a world teaming in detail. 

Muybridge's "A Series of a 8 Phases of a Stride" 1879

Muybridge and Stanford: Shutter SpeedEadweard Muybridge's motion studies and the wealth of Leland Stanford resulted in "A Series of a 8 Phases of a Stride" 1879. - Muybridge was born in Kingston upon Thames. His restless ambitions brought him to San Francisco, which was at the time, a thoroughly modern city. - Stanford came to Muybridge after Muybridge's work of the 360 view photographs he took of San Francisco. He had a rich man's problem, as a race-horse breeder he wanted to prove the horse lifts all four feet off the when it trotted. Something that evaded human perception for millennia. - At Stanford's old private race track, on a white'd out section of track he placed 24 cameras with electric shutters in a row which would trigger in sequence, 4 every second as the horse passed by. - By this, Muybridge did more than just freeze the moment, he slowed down time itself. Now the camera could now see faster than the human's eyes and dissect motion. 

Commercialisation of PhotographyOnce photography was invented, by 1850 most photographs were made for commercial reasons. 
- All aspects of photography you could make money from, it became a global phenomenon. 

Charles Baudelaire, Nadar 1854

- The heart of photography's empire was the studio. 
Nadar became a famous portraiture photographer. He photographed celebrities with signature poses. 

It's the force of personality alone that conveys the character. You had to project yourself into the medium as the studio you were in was empty. 

Tripods and easels switched positions with photographers being inspired by paintings and art. Cameras had a new way of seeing and was also making impressions on artists too.
Once photography had become commercialized and an industry, photography wasn't really considered an art form. 

George Eastman and Kodak

George Eastman revolutionized photography with his invention of the roll film. He became interested in photography as he wanted to document a holiday he was going on. - Eastman invents and markets the camera known as The Kodak.

"You press the button, we do the rest."

Nell, Marks, Carie, Abe, Lake Conesus by Anonymous, 1893

- To reduce the price of cameras and actually promote it, Eastman came up with The Brownie Camera. It was cheap to make and develop and buy film for. 

- Kodak didn't just change what was happening behind the camera, but also what was in front of it. 
With snapshots in abundance, people would now look into the camera and say cheese!

- The Kodak camera was all about having fun, the adventure of taking a photograph, enjoying yourself and capturing a happy moment. - The art of photography is created without theories, but by amateurs. Discovering as they go along and understanding how cameras behaved the more they used them. 

Vernacular PhotographyThere are no accidental masterpieces in painting, but there is in photography. - The amateur snapshot is a small sub-category of vernacular photography. 
Vernacular photography were photos of the everyday, photos that had no artistic value. It contained some of the world most naturally occurring images. 

When people started photographing crime scenes, they were shot with wide, almost fisheye lens to capture an entire scene (a tomb of the Pharaohs) The police officers of the NYC who were photographers created their own aesthetic style from this. 

"My cousin Bichonnade" by Jacques Henri Lartigue

Jaques Henri-Lartigue- The ultimate amateur photographer - He came from a wealthy family hence why he was able to experiment with photographic mediums from a young age. - His photographs are a testament to the rich culture of amateurism. 
- He had all the advantages a photographer could have which is why people believe he could such striking photography. - Lartigue toyed with the idea of motion, taking popular imagery of the time to new levels with stop-motion photography 
PictorialismTo take away from the vernacular explosion of photography, elite artists wanted to draw it back into a fine art form. 
- However, it was an artistic dead end as they were looking into the past while the vernacular were already looking into the future.