daguerreotype

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Jul

Review: ‘Colony: Australia 1770-1861’ at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne Part 2, featuring photographs from exhibition

Categories: Australian artist, Australian photography, beauty, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, landscape, light, Melbourne, memory, National Gallery of Victoria, painting, photographic series, photography, portrait, reality, space and time
Tags: Aboriginal people, ambrotype, art, Australia colony, Australian ambrotype, Australian art, Australian artist, Australian colonial life, Australian daguerreotype, Australian photography, Bathurst, Boonwurrung, Brothers William Paul and Benjamin Featherstone, Caroline and Thomas James Lawson, colonial society, Colony: Australia 1770-1861, daguerreotype, daguerreotype portraitist, daguerreotype portraits, double portraits of children, Douglas Kilburn, Douglas T. Kilburn, Douglas T. Kilburn Group of Koori men, Douglas T. Kilburn South-east Australian Aboriginal man and two younger companions, Douglas T. Kilburn Two Koori women, early Australian photography, Eliza Lawson, Emily Spencer Wills, ethnographic studies, First Nations, First Nations people, first professional photography studio in Australia, Freeman Brothers Studio, Freeman Brothers Studio Jemima Jane Davis, Freeman Brothers Studio Mother and children, Freeman Brothers Studio Walter Davis, George Coppin, George Goodman, George Goodman Caroline and Thomas James Lawson, George Goodman Eliza Lawson, George Goodman Maria Emily Lawson, George Goodman Sarah Ann Lawson, George Goodman Sophia Rebecca Lawson, George Goodman Susannah Caroline Lawson, George Taylor his wife Ann, George Taylor his wife Ann (nee Collis Pratt), Group of Koori men, Group of people in front of a crushing plant on a goldfield, Henry Kay, Henry King, Henry King Henry Kay, Indigenous Australian, Indigenous Australian tribes, James Freeman, Jemima Jane Davis, Kulin, Kulin nation, Marcus Bunyan terror incognita, Margaret Robertson, Maria Emily Lawson, Meade Brothers Studio, Melbourne, Mother and children, National Gallery of Victoria, New Norfolk Cup, Ngurai-illam-wurrung, NGV Australia at Federation Square, Pair of portraits: George Taylor his wife Ann, photography, Port Phillip, Port Phillip District, Portrait of a gentleman with check pant, Portrait of a nun, Portrait of two boys, Professor John Smith, Professor Robert Hall, Professor Robert Hall Portrait of a gentleman with check pant, Reverend Francis Russell Nixon, Reverend Jabez Bunting Waterhouse, Robert Lyall, Robert Lyall with the New Norfolk Cup, Sarah Ann Lawson, Sophia Rebecca Lawson, South-east Australian Aboriginal man and two younger companions, Susannah Caroline Lawson, Tasmanian photographers, Taungurong, terra incognita, terra nullius, terror incognita, The Cornwall Chronicle, The Lashmar family, Thomas Bock Margaret Robertson, Thomas Bock Portrait of two boys, Thomas Bock William Robertson Jnr., Thomas Glaister, Thomas Glaister George Coppin, Thomas Glaister Professor John Smith, Thomas Glaister Reverend Jabez Bunting Waterhouse, Thomas Glaister Seated woman, Two Koori women, Walter Davis, Wathaurung, William Freeman, William Lawson II, William Millington Nixon, William Millington Nixon The Lashmar family, William Robertson Jnr., Woiwurrung

Exhibition dates: 15th March – 15th July 2018

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Colony: Frontier Wars (15 March – 2 September 2018) which presents a powerful response to colonisation through a range of historical and contemporary works by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists dating from pre-contact times to present day.

Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this posting contains images and names of people who may have since passed away.

Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne showing how some of the photographs were displayed in the case at rear.
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

” …what the generality of the white population of the Colony consist of, which is of the most debased and vilest dregs of Great Britain and Ireland… they never look on the Blacks in the light of human beings, but, would just as soon shoot them as they would a crow, or hunt them as they would a kangaroo. Indeed in some districts the dogs used to be thought good for nothing unless they could kill a Black as well as a kangaroo, and they used to teach them to do so, by giving them some of the poor Black’s blood.”

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James Graham. ‘Overland Letter’ part of the Graham Bros collection at The University of Melbourne archives quoted in Dr Katherine Ellinghaus. “Criss-Cross History Hidden in a Letter,” on the Pursuit website 12 June 2018 [Online] Cited 16/02/2022

“The bad deeds of some leading frontier politicians, administrators and military men have been almost overlooked; many history books – even more modern online popular resources such as the Australian Dictionary of Biography – diminish, attempt to justify or overlook completely their proven excesses against this continent’s Indigenes. …

“On any occasion of seeing or falling in with the Natives, either in Bodies or Singly, they are to be called upon, by your friendly Native Guides, to surrender themselves to you as Prisoners of War. If they refuse to do so, make the least show of resistance, or attempt to run away from you, you will fire upon and compel them to surrender, breaking and destroying the Spears, Clubs and Waddies of all those you take Prisoners. Such natives as happen to be killed on such occasions, if grown up men, are to be hanged up on Trees in Conspicuous Situations, to Strike the Survivors with the greater terror.”

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Lachlan Macquarie, fifth governor of New South Wales quoted in Paul Daley, “Heroes, Monuments and History,” in Meanjin, Autumn 2018

Terror incognita

Firstly, let me state that I am no expert in Australian colonial history, culture or photography. These are very specialised fields. But what I can do is use my eyes, my knowledge and my feelings to provide comment on this exhibition.

This magnificent exhibition at NGV Australia at Federation Square is a fascinating interrogation of the early history of the Australian nation, yet at the same time I found it very disturbing and sad. The exhibition more resembles a natural history exhibition than an art exhibition, a cabinet of curiosities, a Wunderkammer, were encyclopaedic collections of objects whose categorical boundaries are yet to be defined are mixed with the first European art made on this continent. The exhibition is a microcosm or theatre of the world, and a memory theatre, for all that has passed since before invasion of this land up until the year 1861. The installation mixes together colonial and Indigenous artefacts from within the allotted time period. There is so much to see that I have visited three times and not got to the bottom of this exhibition it is so dense. Paintings, drawings, sculpture, colonial furniture, clothing, pottery, jewellery, photography, maps, artefacts, etc… are displayed in a melange of techniques, offering a huge range of artists and media. Please see Part 1 of the posting for the installation images of the exhibition.

Some observations can be made. Generally, the paintings and drawings are of a very classical form, very tightly controlled and painted. They set out to document the landscape, firstly the Australian landscape as seen in the European tradition, and then in a more realistic yet romanticised form in later paintings. Early colour aquatints of Aboriginal people depict them climbing trees in an almost reptilian manner while later representations picture “a romantic vision of a vast, silent and forbidding land. Two generic Aboriginal people figures are included in the foreground in the guise of the noble savage.” Of a vanishing race. Other collages (a fictionalised representational technique), such as James Wallis’ View of Awabakal Aboriginal people, with beach and river inlet, and distant Aboriginal group in background (c. 1818), propose “a harmonious relationship between the Awabakal, colonisers and the military. Such a suggestion is at odds with earlier events of April 1816 when Wallis, under the direction of Governor Macquarie, led an armed regiment against Dharawal and Gandangara people south of Sydney, in what is now acknowledged as the first officially sanctioned massacre of Indigenous people in Australia.” (Exhibition text) Further, the romanticised vistas of colonial interloper John Glover (1767-1849) evoke, “an idyll where the natives were at one with nature, even as the slaughter was upon them…” (Damian Smith, 2018). This connection to nature can be seen in Glover’s painting The River Nile, Van Diemen’s Land, from Mr Glover’s farm (1837). But, as the exhibition text notes, “Glover had not experienced the conflict or witnessed the violence between Tasmanian Aboriginal resistance fighters and white settlers during the 1820s. By the time of his arrival in 1831, the Tasmanian Aboriginal survivors had been forced to leave Country and relocate to Flinders Island.” These representations of Aboriginal life are pure fiction constructed in the imagination of the artists and colonisers.

By way of contrast, the portraits of landed gentry, such as Thomas Bock’s four paintings of Captain William Robertson and his family (1830s-1850s), are elegant and flattering. They are portraits executed in the grand Georgian manner fashionable in England and were greatly prized by colonists. Here is a family who has made it, and they want everyone to know about it. The roots of their representation are in the old country, their allegiance there also, to the mother country. Australia is a colony, part of the British Empire, an outpost of all that is right and proper in the world. Imagine just for a second that you are back in the 1850s. No electricity, only candle power. Now imagine arriving at a home with these portraits, or the landscapes of John Glover, lit by candle light. The skin would be luminescent, the golden frames glowing in the light; the trees in the Glover paintings would have writhed, seeming almost alive in the flickering light. A forbidding landscape indeed.

In portraiture, the same disposition can be seen in the early daguerreotype and ambrotype photographs of Aboriginals and colonists.

“Within a decade of the arrival of European colonists in the Port Phillip District a number of professional photographers had established studios in Melbourne, and prominent among these was Douglas Kilburn. Around 1847, Kilburn made a series of portraits [see below] of people thought to be from the Kulin nation. The images testify to the power of photographs to record kin and define identity. They also show Aboriginal people who had experienced a decade of dispossession following the arrival of settlers. It is believed Kilburn’s subjects were among the numbers of First Nations people who had few choices other than to return to Melbourne because they had been driven out of their Country.” (Exhibition text)

If we look at these small, personal, one-off photographs housed in leather cases that can be closed off from the world, when opened to reveal the Aboriginal sitters … we notice how frontal they are, how they face straight on to the camera, how grouped they are, how they fill the picture plane with little negative space around them, how the camera seems to press in on them, as though to capture every last detail of their countenance and clothing. Their visage. The aspect of their being. These are ethnographic documents as much as they are portraits, for they map the condition of the captives. If, as Michael Graham-Stewart states in his book Bitter fruit: Australian photographs to 1963, “photography operates not only as an instrument of oppression, but also as a means of connecting with people of the past,” what do contemporary Indigenous Australians make of these images. Do they find evidence of wrongdoing and suffering but also of resistance, adaptation, and continuity? Are they also angry and sad at what they have lost, as in a thriving and incredibly diverse culture? I would be.

Again, by way of contrast we look at how the colonists viewed themselves in these personal treasures. Here, we must remember that these early photographs would have been relatively expensive for a family to have commissioned them, almost as expensive say, in contemporary terms, as buying a plasma television when they first came out. Only the well-to-do would have been able to afford to have their portrait taken. Two examples of this providence and bounty can be seen in this posting. The portrait of The Lashmar family by William Millington Nixon (1857-58, see below) shows a family who were pioneering pastoralists on Kangaroo Island in the 1850s. “Despite the relative remoteness of their home, and the harshness of the environment, the family evidently prospered. Thomas Young Lashmar not only had the means to travel to Adelaide with his wife and family, but was also able to commission photographic portraits at a time when it was still a relatively expensive exercise.” (Exhibition text) While Aboriginals while forced from their land and massacred, pastoralists were making money and prospering from the confiscated lands.

Nothing better shows the sense of entitlement that the early pastoralists had (and still do today, with their illegal land clearing) towards their possession of the land and their identity that arose from that possession, than the commissioned set of five portraits by daguerreotype portraitist George Goodman of the daughters of prominent local land holder William Lawson II in the town of Bathurst, north-west of Sydney. Dressed in their finest, the young daughters, arms covered, clutch flowers and either look away from the camera or directly at it. The camera is placed directly at eye level, or slightly below it, and the space around the sitter is open and amorphous, a plain background which isolates the figure in space. Unlike the claustrophobic portraits by Douglas Kilburn of the Aboriginals from the Kulin nation, here the sitters seem to possess the space of the photograph, they inhabit and can breathe in the pictorial plane. In particular, the portrait of Susannah Caroline Lawson (1845, below) pictures a young woman with an incredibly determined stare and haughty demeanour. She seems to radiate a perfect sense of entitlement within the physical presence of the photograph.

Other photographs reinforce this vision of the world that the colonists enacted. Thomas Bock’s Portrait of two boys (1848-50, below) “shows that he was a skilled photographer by 1848… Any parent would have been thrilled by such a vivid image of their sons, especially as, like many colonial sons, they might be getting ready to be sent ‘home’ to the United Kingdom for schooling. The image of the boys was a memento for their parents as well as proof for relatives in Britain that colonial society could produce the same well-dressed and well-bred young boys as the old country.” (Gael Newton)

There is the rub. For migrants who were a long way from home, photography was proof that they were alive, successful, flourishing… and could live up to the expectations of their family back home and the standards of the old country. “Photography served several interrelated roles associated with the experience of migration and colonisation. For those European migrants transplanted halfway across the world, often without family or friends, the most immediate and heartfelt use for the camera was portraiture. Some of Australia’s earliest surviving photographs are small, sturdily cased portraits which provided ‘likenesses as if by magic’ of those depicted and were sent back ‘home’, thus providing an emotional connection to family members.” (Exhibition text) An emotional connection for people living in a far off land to those back “home”, and an emotional connection to family in a forbidding land, to remind themselves of their strength and unity in the face of the unknown.

What this exhibition does not show, because they are later photographs, is evidence of the overt oppression of Indigenous peoples that photography documented. While terra nullius is a Latin expression meaning “nobody’s land” usually associated with colonising Australia, the British Government using this term to justify the dispossession of Indigenous people, there is also another term, terra incognita, a term used in cartography for regions that have not been mapped or documented. In many ways the terror that Indigenous people experienced during invasion is still being mapped and explored. Much of it is still not known or is unaccepted, as a terror incognita. Dr Katherine Ellinghaus in her article “Criss-Cross History Hidden in a Letter,” notes that, “Reconciliation Australia’s own biennial survey [2016 Australian Reconciliation Barometer survey 5 September 2016] has found that more than one in three Australians don’t accept that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were subject to mass killings, incarceration, and forced removal from their lands.”

This is the terror that still exists in the Australian psyche. The terror of cutting ties to the motherland, the terror of an incognita, an “unknown land”, and the hidden terror prescribed and enacted on the cultural body of the Aboriginal, unacknowledged by some even today.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Word count: 1,853

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Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All installation photographs © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria.

Unknown photographer
Robert Lyall with the New Norfolk Cup (installation view)
1851
Ambrotype
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 2004
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Robert Lyall was a successful Tasmanian publican and businessman whose interests extended to horse racing. In 1851 his prized horse Patience won the New Norfolk Cup and Lyall was the recipient of a handsome silver presentation cup. Not only evidence of his success and standing, the cup was apparently also of great personal significance to Lyall as he included it as a decorative element when this large-scale ambrotype was commissioned. Unlike more intimately scaled cased images, this photograph was framed so that it could be prominently displayed on the wall.

Exhibition text

Douglas T. Kilburn (attributed to) (England 1811 – Australia 1871, Australia from 1846)
No title (Group of Koori men) (installation views)
c. 1847
Daguerreotype; leather, wood, velvet, brass
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1983
Photos: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Within a decade of the arrival of European colonists in the Port Phillip District a number of professional photographers had established studios in Melbourne, and prominent among these was Douglas Kilburn. Around 1847, Kilburn made a series of portraits of people thought to be from the Kulin nation. The images testify to the power of photographs to record kin and define identity. They also show Aboriginal people who had experienced a decade of dispossession following the arrival of settlers. It is believed Kilburn’s subjects were among the numbers of First Nations people who had few choices other than to return to Melbourne because they had been driven out of their Country.

Exhibition text

Douglas T. Kilburn (attributed to) (England 1811 – Australia 1871, Australia from 1846)
No title (Group of Koori men)
c. 1847
Daguerreotype; leather, wood, velvet, brass
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1983

Kulin

The Kulin nation is an alliance of five Indigenous Australian tribes in south central Victoria, Australia. Their collective territory extended around Port Phillip and Western Port, up into the Great Dividing Range and the Loddon and Goulburn River valleys. Before British colonisation, the tribes spoke five related languages. These languages were spoken in two groups: the Eastern Kulin group of Woiwurrung, Boonwurrung, Taungurong and Ngurai-illam-wurrung; and the western language group of just Wathaurung.

The central Victoria area has been inhabited for an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 years before European settlement. At the time of British settlement in the 1830s, the collective populations of the Woiwurrung, Boonwurrung and Wathaurong tribes of the Kulin nation was estimated to be under 20,000. The Kulin lived by fishing, hunting and gathering, and made a sustainable living from the rich food sources of Port Phillip and the surrounding grasslands.

Due to the upheaval and disturbances from British settlement from the 1830s on, there is limited physical evidence of the Kulin peoples’ collective past. However, there is a small number of registered sites of cultural and spiritual significance in the Melbourne area.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Left

Douglas T. Kilburn (attributed to) (England 1811 – Australia 1871, Australia from 1846)
No title (South-east Australian Aboriginal man and two younger companions) (installation view)
1847
Daguerreotype
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 2007

Right

Douglas T. Kilburn (attributed to) (England 1811 – Australia 1871, Australia from 1846)
No title (Two Koori women) (installation view)
c. 1847
Daguerreotype, brass, glass, gold, velvet
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 2004

Photos: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

As a way of attracting attention to his newly opened business Douglas Kilburn took at least eight daguerreotypes of Aboriginal people in the lands of the Kulin nation. As a result of the nineteenth-century belief that the Aboriginal people were doomed to annihilation, Kilburn intended the images as ethnographic studies rather than individual portraits; nevertheless, his unnamed sitters project a proud and dignified presence. His photographs were popular with local artists such as Eugene von Guérard and John Skinner Prout, who copied them, and they also reached an international audience when they were used as the basis for wood engravings in William Westgarth’s Australia Felix in 1848, Nordisk Penning-Magazin in 1849 and the Illustrated London News in 1850.

Exhibition text

George Goodman (active in Australia 1842-1851)

Left

Maria Emily Lawson
1845
Daguerreotype
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Presented 1993

Middle

Susannah Caroline Lawson
1845
Daguerreotype; leather, velvet
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Presented by Sir Kenneth Street, 1960

Right

Eliza Lawson
1845
Daguerreotype, leather, velvet
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Presented by Sir Kenneth Street, 1960

Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

George Goodman (active in Australia 1842-1851)

Left

Caroline and Thomas James Lawson
1845
Daguerreotype, leather, velvet
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Presented 1991

Middle

Sophia Rebecca Lawson
1845
Daguerreotype, leather, velvet
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Presented by Sir Kenneth Street, 1960

Right

Sarah Ann Lawson
1845
Daguerreotype, leather, velvet
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Presented by Sir Kenneth Street, 1960

Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

George Goodman arrived in Sydney in 1842 and established the first professional photography studio in Australia. Although he is known to have made photographs of Tasmanian street scenes, his stock-in-trade was portraiture. Goodman travelled to regional towns where he advertised his services as a daguerreotype portraitist. In 1845 he visited the town of Bathurst, north-west of Sydney, and was commissioned to photograph the family of prominent local land holder William Lawson II. The resulting series includes five individual portraits of Lawson’s young daughters and a charming, and surprisingly informal, image showing his wife Caroline Lawson and their young son.

Exhibition text

George Goodman (active in Australia 1842-1851)
Susannah Caroline Lawson
1845
Daguerreotype; leather, velvet
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Presented by Sir Kenneth Street, 1960

George Goodman (active in Australia 1842-1851)
Eliza Lawson
1845
Daguerreotype, leather, velvet
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Presented by Sir Kenneth Street, 1960

George Goodman (active in Australia 1842-1851)
Caroline and Thomas James Lawson
1845
Daguerreotype, leather, velvet
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Presented 1991

George Goodman (active in Australia 1842-1851)
Sophia Rebecca Lawson
1845
Daguerreotype, leather, velvet
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Presented by Sir Kenneth Street, 1960

George Goodman (active in Australia 1842-1851)
Sarah Ann Lawson
1845
Daguerreotype, leather, velvet
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Presented by Sir Kenneth Street, 1960

Unknown photographer (working 1850s)
Pair of portraits: George Taylor, his wife Ann (nee Collis Pratt)
c. 1856, Adelaide
Two ambrotypes, colour dyes, gold paint
9.4 x 6.8cm (each image, oval)
J.C. Earl Bequest Fund 2010
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Freeman Brothers Studio, Sydney (1854-1900)
James Freeman (England 1814 – Australia 1890, Australia from early 1850s)
William Freeman (England 1809 – Australia 1895, Australia from early 1850s)
No title (Mother and children)
1855-1856
Daguerreotype, oil paint; leather, gold, paint, glass, velvet, metal, wood (case)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gerstl Bequest, 2001
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

One of the largest and most celebrated Sydney photographic studios was run by the Freeman Brothers, whose skilful portraits were much admired. This pair of entrepreneurial photographers used the latest processes, building a large, well-appointed studio and actively promoting their work through display in international exhibitions. James Freeman was also extremely well versed in the potential uses of the medium, delivering a comprehensive lecture on the topic to a Sydney society in 1858.

Exhibition text

Thomas Glaister (England 1824 – United States 1904, Australia 1850s)
No title (Seated woman)
c. 1858
Ambrotype, coloured dyes
13.6 h x 10.7 w cm (case)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1983
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Left

Professor Robert Hall (active in Australia mid 19th century)
No title (Portrait of a gentleman with check pants)
1855-1865
Stereo ambrotype, colour dyes
8.8 x 17.1cm (overall)
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
R. J. Noye Collection
Gift of Douglas and Barbara Mullins, 2004

Right

Thomas Glaister (England 1824 – United States 1904, Australia 1850s)
George Coppin
c. 1855
Daguerreotype, hand tinted, gilt-matted and glazed
5.2 x 12.7cm
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

George Selth Coppin (8 April 1819 – 14 March 1906) was a comic actor, entrepreneur and politician, active in Australia. For more information see the Australian Dictionary of Biography entry.

Meade Brothers Studio, Melbourne (studio active in Australia 1850s)
Thomas Glaister (attributed to) (photographer England 1825 – United States 1904)
No title (Gentleman)
c. 1854
Daguerreotype, colour pigments; gold, leather, velvet, brass, glass (case)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through the NGV Foundation with the assistance of T. H. Lustig and Moar Families, Governor, 2001
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Left

Thomas Bock (attributed to) (England 1790 – Australia 1855, Australia from 1824)
William Robertson Jnr.
c. 1852
Daguerreotype, hand coloured
case: 9.2 x 8.0cm, image: 7.0 x 5.5cm
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
Gift of Fiona Turner (nee Robertson) and John Robertson, 2001
Donated through the Australia Government’s Cultural Gifts Program

Right

Thomas Bock (attributed to) (England 1790 – Australia 1855, Australia from 1824)
Margaret Robertson
c. 1852
Ambrotype, hand coloured
case: 9.3 x 8.0cm, image: 7.0 x 6.0cm
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
Gift of Fiona Turner (nee Robertson) and John Robertson, 2001
Donated through the Australia Government’s Cultural Gifts Program

Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

News of scientific discoveries reached Australia via the flotillas of ships plying the southern trade routes. The first demonstrations of photography occurred in England and France in 1839. News of this reached Australia that same year and was described in an account in the Tasmanian newspaper The Cornwall Chronicle on 19 October 1839. Former convict Thomas Bock was one of the earliest Tasmanian photographers, first advertising his studio in September 1843. His daguerreotype portraits resemble his paintings and drawings in their composition and use of hand-colouring.

Exhibition text

Thomas Bock

1790-1855

Thomas Bock, artist, printmaker and photographer, is believed to have been born at Sutton Coldfield, near Birmingham, in 1790. He completed an apprenticeship as an engraver with Thomas Brandard in Birmingham and in 1814 established his own business there, advertising himself as an ‘Engraver and Miniature Painter’. In April 1823, Bock and a woman named Mary Day Underhill appeared at the Warwickshire Assizes charged with ‘administering concoctions of certain herbs to Ann Yates, with the intent to cause a miscarriage.’ Both were found guilty and sentenced to transportation for fourteen years. At the time of his conviction, Bock was thirty-two, married and father to five children. Bock arrived in Hobart aboard the Asia in January 1824. His convict record stated he had ‘served an apprenticeship to the Engraving Business’ and described him as ‘well connected and very orderly.’ The colonial authorities found immediate use for Bock, some of his earliest Tasmanian works being bank notes engraved for the Bank of Van Diemen’s Land and a drawing of executed cannibal, Alexander Pearce, made in July 1824 at the request of the Colonial Surgeon. Bock worked as a printmaker during the 1820s, engraving stationery along with illustrations for publications such as the Hobart Town Almanack while also producing portraits. He received a conditional pardon in 1832 and free pardon a year later, thereafter establishing a highly successful practice as Hobart’s most sought-after portrait artist. Bock was particularly known for his portrait drawings utilising watercolour, pencil, chalk and pastel (or ‘French crayon’), but his practice was diverse, incorporating printmaking and oil painting as well as photography. On his death in Hobart in March 1855 he was described as ‘an artist of a very high order’ whose works ‘adorned the homes of a number of our old colonists and citizens.’

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

William Robertson (1839-1892), barrister and politician, was the third of the seven children of pastoralist William Robertson (1798-1874) and his wife Margaret (née Whyte, 1811-1866). Robertson was born and educated in Hobart and then at Wadham College, Oxford. He is believed to be the first Australian to row in an Oxford eight, his team victorious against Cambridge in the Boat Race of 1861. Robertson graduated with a BA in 1862 and was married and called to the bar the following year. On his return to Australia, Robertson practised law in Hobart before heading to Victoria in 1864. He worked as a barrister in Melbourne and then assisted in the management of the family property, Corangamarah, which he and his three brothers jointly inherited on the death of their father in 1874. Robertson served as a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly between 1871 and 1874 and again from 1881 to 1886; he was also President of the Colac Shire council in 1880-81. After the dissolution of the partnership with his brothers in 1885, Robertson became sole owner of Corangamarah, later called The Hill, and in retirement enjoyed the lifestyle of an ‘hospitable and sports-loving country gentleman.’

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Margaret Robertson (née Whyte, 1811-1866) was the daughter of settlers George and Jessie Whyte, who emigrated to Van Diemen’s Land from Scotland in 1832. In September 1834, Margaret married Scottish-born entrepreneur and landowner William Robertson (1798-1874), who had arrived in the colony in 1822 and who, in the decade leading up to his marriage, had acquired land nearby to a property owned by Margaret’s family. The first of Margaret and William’s seven children – four sons and three daughters – was born in 1835. The family resided in Hobart until the early 1860s, when Roberston relocated to his Victorian estate, where Margaret died in February 1866.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Thomas Bock (England 1790 – Australia 1855, Australia from 1824)
No title (Portrait of two boys)
1848-1850, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Daguerreotype
case closed 7.0 h x 6.0 w cm case open 7.5 h x 13.0 w cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 2009
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

The daguerreotype was first demonstrated in Australia in Sydney in May 1841. Late the following year, London’s George Goodman set up the first commercial studio in Sydney, claiming to have an exclusive license to use the daguerreotype in the colonies. Goodman was working in Hobart in August 1843, where he came in direct competition with British convict artist Thomas Bock.

Although an engraver by trade, Bock had a keen interest in photography and, in the Hobart Town Advertiser of 29 September 1843, he advertised that ‘in a short time he would be enabled to take photographic likenesses in the first style of the art’. Infuriated, Goodman threatened legal action and Bock promptly withdrew until five years later when he opened a portrait photography studio in Hobart.

Bock’s stepson Alfred assisted him in the photography-side of the studio business. They had seen daguerreotype portraits brought from London by Reverend Francis Russell Nixon in Hobart in June 1843 – before Goodman’s arrival in Tasmania – and had purchased a camera from a Frenchman in Hobart so that they could learn the new art form using photographic formulas published in English magazines. Their lack of proper training, however, shows in Hobart dignitary GTYB Boyes’s records of August 1849, in which he comments, ‘Bock understands the nature of his apparatus but very imperfectly!’ Despite this and other unfavourable remarks between 1849 and 1853, Boyes continued to visit Bock’s studios for daguerreotype portraits.

Bock’s portrait of two freckle-faced boys dressed in matching outfits shows that he was a skilled photographer by 1848 – a year before Boyes’s initial disparaging remark. Any parent would have been thrilled by such a vivid image of their sons, especially as, like many colonial sons, they might be getting ready to be sent ‘home’ to the United Kingdom for schooling. The image of the boys was a memento for their parents as well as proof for relatives in Britain that colonial society could produce the same well-dressed and well-bred young boys as the old country. The sitters are as yet unidentified but the daguerreotype has been dated by comparison with several identified examples of double portraits of children that have survived out of the hundreds of images made by the Bock studio.

Gael Newton
Senior Curator, Photography
in artonview, issue 61, autumn 2010

William Millington Nixon (England 1814 – Australia 1893, Australia from 1855)
The Lashmar family (installation views)
1857-1858
Daguerreotype, coloured inks; gold, leather, brass, metal, velvet and glass (case)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 2004
Photos: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Shortly after his arrival in Adelaide in 1855, William Millington Nixon began making daguerreotypes, and quickly become a skilled daguerreotypist. By 1858 he had built a reputation as a portraitist and established a studio in King William Street, Adelaide.

The Lashmar family were pioneering pastoralists on Kangaroo Island in the 1850s. Despite the relative remoteness of their home, and the harshness of the environment, the family evidently prospered. Thomas Young Lashmar not only had the means to travel to Adelaide with his wife and family, but was also able to commission photographic portraits at a time when it was still a relatively expensive exercise.

Exhibition text

Unknown photographer
No title (Portrait of a nun) (installation view)
c. 1860
Ambrotype with hand tinting
4.0 x 16.5 x 12.5cm (box)
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
R.J. Noye Collection
Gift of Douglas and Barbara Mullins, 2004
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Thomas Glaister (England 1824 – United States 1904, Australia 1850s)
Reverend Jabez Bunting Waterhouse (installation view)
1861
Ambrotype, coloured-dyes
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

WATERHOUSE BROTHERS: Jabez Bunting (1821-1891), Joseph (1828-1881), and Samuel (1830-1918), Wesleyan ministers, were the fifth, ninth and tenth children of Rev. John Waterhouse (d. 1842) and his wife Jane Beadnell, née Skipsey. In 1838 their father, a prominent Yorkshire Methodist, was appointed general superintendent of the Wesleyan Methodist Mission in Australia and Polynesia with a roving commission. With his wife, seven sons and three daughters, he reached Hobart Town in the James on 1 February 1839.

Jabez was born in London on 19 April 1821, educated at Kingswood School in 1832-35 and apprenticed to a printer. In Hobart, A. Bent’s printing premises were purchased and worked by Jabez. In 1840 he became a local preacher extending his ministry to convict road menders. Received as a probationer in 1842, he returned to England to enter Richmond (Theological) College and in 1845 was appointed to Windsor circuit. After his ordination at the Methodist chapel, Spitalfields, he was sent to Van Diemen’s Land in 1847, and ministered successively in the Hobart, Westbury, Campbell Town and Longford circuits. In 1855 the first conference of the Wesleyan Church in Australia appointed him to South Australia; he served at Kapunda, Willunga and Adelaide, his ministry marked by his business acumen and his role as secretary of the Australasian Conference at Adelaide in 1862.

In 1864 Waterhouse was transferred to New South Wales and was appointed successively to Maitland, Goulburn, Orange, Waverley, Parramatta, Newcastle and Glebe. In 1874-1875 he was secretary of the New South Wales and Queensland Annual Conference and president in 1876; he was elected secretary of the first three general conferences of the Australasian Wesleyan Methodist Church: in Melbourne 1875, Sydney 1878 and Adelaide 1881. In 1882 he retired as a supernumerary, but remained on committees such as those of the Sustentation and Extension Society and the Missionary Society, frequently looking after missionary interests during the absence of George Brown. He supported the Wesleyan Church in Tonga in the dispute with S. W. Baker and published The Secession and the Persecution in Tonga … (Sydney, 1886). Regarded as a gifted preacher by his denomination and as the architect of most of the conference legislation, he died of heart disease and dropsy at Randwick on 18 January 1891 and was buried in the Wesleyan section of Rookwood cemetery. He was survived by his wife Maria Augusta, née Bode, whom he had married at Windsor, England, on 13 August 1847, and by seven sons; his second son John was headmaster of Sydney High School.

Niel Gunson. Australian Dictionary of Biography

Left

Freeman Brothers Studio (Sydney 1854-1900)
James Freeman (England 1814 – Australia 1890, Australia from early 1850s)
William Freeman (England 1809 – Australia 1895, Australia from early 1850s)
Jemima Jane Davis
c. 1860
Ambrotype, coloured dyes; wood, leather, velvet, glass and gilt metal (case)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Warwick Reeder, 1991

Right

Freeman Brothers Studio (Sydney 1854-1900)
James Freeman (England 1814 – Australia 1890, Australia from early 1850s)
William Freeman (England 1809 – Australia 1895, Australia from early 1850s)
Walter Davis
c. 1860
Ambrotype, coloured dyes; wood, leather, velvet, glass and gilt metal (case)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Warwick Reeder, 1991

Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Freeman Brothers Studio (Sydney 1854-1900)
James Freeman (England 1814 – Australia 1890, Australia from early 1850s)
William Freeman (England 1809 – Australia 1895, Australia from early 1850s)
Walter Davis
c. 1860
Ambrotype, coloured dyes; wood, leather, velvet, glass and gilt metal (case)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Warwick Reeder, 1991
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Freeman Brothers Studio (Sydney 1854-1900)
James Freeman (England 1814 – Australia 1890, Australia from early 1850s)
William Freeman (England 1809 – Australia 1895, Australia from early 1850s)
Walter Davis
c. 1860
Ambrotype, coloured dyes; wood, leather, velvet, glass and gilt metal (case)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Warwick Reeder, 1991

Unknown photographer
No title (Portrait of a man, woman and child)
c. 1860
Ambrotype, coloured dyes; wood, leather, brass, glass, silk (velvet) (case)
Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Unknown photographer
No title (Portrait of mother and child)
c. 1855
Ambrotype, coloured dyes; wood, leather, brass, glass, silk (velvet) (case)
Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney
Gift of Tooth & Company Ltd under the Australian Government’s Tax Incentives for the Arts Scheme, 1986
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Left

Unknown photographer
Jemima, wife of Jacky with William T. Mortlock
c. 1860
Daguerreotype
Ayers House Museum, National Trust of South Australia, Adelaide

Right

Unknown photographer
Jacky, known as Master Mortlock
c. 1860-1865
Daguerreotype
Ayers House Museum, National Trust of South Australia, Adelaide

Photos: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

The Mortlock family were wealthy pastoralists in South Australia. Along with the daguerreotypes of family members they commissioned around 1860 are two portraits of their domestic servants known as Jemima and Jacky. Each member of the Mortlock family has been named in these images, but the identity of the two Aboriginal sitters has been lost – initially with the assignment of European first names and then the addition of the surname ‘master Mortlock’, which identified them as servants of the pastoralists who employed them.

Exhibition text

Unknown photographer
Brothers William Paul and Benjamin Featherstone
c. 1860
Ambrotype, gold paint
15.5 x 12.1cm (case)
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
J.C. Earl Bequest Fund, 2010
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Thomas Glaister (England 1824 – United States 1904, Australia 1850s)
Professor John Smith
c. 1858
Daguerreotype
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart
Presented by Miss Kate Crouch, 1942
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Unknown photographer
Emily Spencer Wills
c. 1859
Daguerreotype, coloured dyes; brass, glass, leather, wood
1/6th plate daguerreotype with applied colour in al brass matt (without original leather case)
Frame: 8.5 x 7.2cm, sight: 6.6 x 5.4cm
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra Gift of T S Wills Cooke 2014
Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Photography served several interrelated roles associated with the experience of migration and colonisation. For those European migrants transplanted halfway across the world, often without family or friends, the most immediate and heartfelt use for the camera was portraiture. Some of Australia’s earliest surviving photographs are small, sturdily cased portraits which provided ‘likenesses as if by magic’ of those depicted and were sent back ‘home’, thus providing an emotional connection to family members.

This group of family portraits shows members of the Wills family, including Thomas Wentworth Wills, who was a prominent sportsman and one of the authors of the rules of the game that later became known as Australian Rules.

Exhibition text

Left

Unknown photographer
No title (Group of people in front of a crushing plant on a goldfield)
1860s
Ambrotype; embossed leather, wood, velvet, brass, gilt metal
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 2007

Right

Henry King (Australia 1855-1923)
Henry Kay
1855-1860
Ambrotype, coloured dyes
2 photographs: ambrotypes with hand-colouring ; 8.9 x 6.5cm (oval, sight, f.1) in pinchbeck and gilt brass mount 10.9 x 8.3cm and 9.6 x 7.0cm (oval, sight, f.2) in gilt brass mount 10.9 x 8.2cm, in brown union case 12.0 x 9.4cm
Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Mrs W.G. Haysom 1964

Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

The discovery of gold in 1851 led to extraordinary change in the colonies as migrants flooded in and previously unknown wealth enabled expansion and development. Across the colony mines were dug and small towns and settlements were established. This ambrotype shows a working mine in central Victoria and also reveals the environmental damage that resulted from the scramble for gold.

The desire to make a fortune on the goldfields brought about significant social change. Migrants such as Henry Kay, who arrived from Penang in the 1850s, came seeking gold but stayed on in various other roles, including that of court interpreter.

Exhibition text

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia

Federation Square
Corner of Russell and  Flinders Streets, Melbourne

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

National Gallery of Victoria website

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Feb

Photographs: American daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes of men

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, black and white photography, documentary photography, existence, intimacy, light, memory, New York, photography, portrait, space and time
Tags: abolitionist, African American, African American daguerreotype, ambrotype, Ambrotype two men one with trug of tools, ambrotypes, Ambrotypes of men, American Ambrotypes, American Daguerreotypes, American photography, American tintypes, antislavery, Charles Calistus Burleigh, Cross-eyed man in three-quarter profile, daguerreotype, Daguerreotype African American, Daguerreotype handsome man with fifth finger ring, Daguerreotype Man in button braces, Daguerreotype man with pistols, Daguerreotype portrait of violinist holding instrument, Daguerreotype sailor wearing hoop earrings, Daguerreotype two men in caps, daguerreotypes, Daguerreotypes of men, early 19th century photography, early American photography, early photographic processes, Group of three men, Group of three men daguerreotype, Handsome man with fifth finger ring, Jeremiah Gurney, Jeremiah Gurney Cross-eyed man in three-quarter profile, Man in button braces, Man on crutches, Man on crutches ambrotype, Man with pistols, Portrait of violinist holding instrument, Sailor wearing hoop earrings, Samuel F.B. Morse, tintype, Tintype Two firemen, Two firemen, Two men in caps, Two men one with trug of tools, Two young men with straw hats, Two young men with straw hats tintype, William J. Shew, William J. Shew Charles Calistus Burleigh, William J. Shew photographer

February 2018

Jeremiah Gurney (American) at 349 Broadway, New York
Untitled (Cross-eyed man in three-quarter profile)
Nd
Half-plate daguerreotype

All of these photographs came from the Internet, most from an auction site selling them at prices way beyond what I could afford.

As you can see, I have given most of them a digital clean. Even though this might seem too clinical, unethical? or just wrong – you can now see the photographs as they were originally intended, without the grunge and gunk of years of dust and degradation over the top of them.

Just look at the photograph above, and you can immediately get an idea of the unique spatiality of the image, from front to back. A really low depth of field that is focused diagonally across the front of the body and jacket, making the hands, the table and the back of the head out of focus. Because it is occluded with all the scratches and dust on the original, you have little idea of the complexity of the visualisation of this portrait until you observe the image in its pristine state, as it was meant to be seen just after it was taken.

I just love these early portraits and photographic processes for the presence they bring to their subjects. For example the hair, the gaze and the attitude of the right hand in Handsome man with fifth finger ring is just magnificent. I could go on cleaning them for a very long time, and never get bored.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Unknown photographer (American)
Untitled (Group of three men)
c. 1850
Sixth-plate daguerreotype
Unusual period frame of cast thermoplastic

Unknown photographer (American)
Untitled (Man on crutches)
c. 1850-1860s
Sixth-plate ambrotype
Housed in a moulded leather case

Unknown photographer (American)
Untitled (Man with pistols)
c. 1850-1860s
Sixth-plate daguerreotype, delicately tinted
Housed in a moulded leather case

Unknown photographer (American)
Untitled (Man, possibly a sailor, wearing hoop earrings)
Nd
Sixth-plate daguerreotype
Housed in a moulded leather case

Unknown photographer (American)
Untitled (African American)
c. 1850s
Sixth-plate daguerreotype

Unknown photographer (American)
Untitled (Two men in caps, elegantly dressed)
c. 1850s
Sixth-plate daguerreotype
Housed in a moulded leather case

Unknown photographer (American)
Untitled (Handsome man with fifth finger ring)
c. 1850s
Sixth-plate daguerreotype

Unknown photographer (American)
Untitled (Portrait of violinist holding instrument)
c. 1855
Sixth-plate daguerreotype
Union case

Unknown photographer (American)
Untitled (Two men, one with trug of tools)
c. 1850-1860s
Sixth-plate ambrotype
Housed in a moulded leather case

Unknown photographer (American)
Untitled (Two firemen)
c. 1850-1860s
Quarter-plate tinted tintype
Leather case

Unknown photographer (American)
Untitled (Man in button braces)
c. 1850
Ninth-plate daguerreotype

William J. Shew (American, 1820-1903)
Charles Calistus Burleigh (1810-1878)
c. 1845-1850
Quarter-plate daguerreotype
11.5 x 9.5cm (cased)
Boston Public Library, Print Department

Charles Calistus Burleigh (1810-1878)

An ardent abolitionist and journalist, Burleigh was vocal against Connecticut’s “Black Law” and became editor of the Unionist, originally published in defence of Prudence Crandall’s school.

Eccentric in dress and with a flowing beard he vowed not to remove until the end of slavery, Burleigh turned his back on a professional career to become agent and lecturer for the Middlesex Anti-Slavery. He was a regular contributor to the Liberator and one of the editors of the Pennsylvania Freeman.

He was a supportive friend of Abby Kelley. Active in a number of reform movements, Burleigh plunged into the Anti-Sabbatarian campaign after he was arrested in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1847 for selling antislavery literature on Sunday. Abby and Stephen Foster had been arrested in Ohio for the same offence in July 1846.

In 1845 he published a pamphlet, Thoughts on the Death Penalty, condemning capital punishment.

Karen Board Moran. “Charles Calistus Burleigh (1810-1878),” on the Worcester Women’s History Project website 26/3/2005 [Online] Cited 10/02/2022

William J. Shew (1820-1903)

William Shew (1820-1903) made a name for himself as a Daguerrotype portrait artist in the United States. He maintained a mobile studio in a wagon that he called his “Daguerrotype Saloon.”

William Shew was born on a farm in Waterton, New York on March 1820. At the age of 20 he read an article by the inventor Samuel F.B. Morse about the daguerreotype process and, along with his three brothers, moved to New York City to study with Morse. His brothers Jacob, Myron and Trueman were also photographers, but not attained the stature of William Shew. Morse would become more famous as the inventor of the telegraph.

After completing his studies, Shew worked briefly in upstate New York before becoming the supervisor at John Plumbe’s gallery in Boston. Three years later he opened John Shew and Company in Boston, where he manufactured his own dyes and created daguerrotypes with wooden frames, thin veneer backings and embossed paper coverings. In 1846, Shew married Elizabeth Marie Studley and had a daughter they named Theodora Alice, born in Feb. 1848. He also became and active member of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

In 1851, he sold his business and sailed on the steamer Tennessee to San Francisco, where he joined his brother Jacob who arrived in 1849. It is believed that Shew set up a gallery shortly after arriving in San Francisco, which may have been destroyed by the 1851 fire that swept the city. After the fire he set up “Shew’s Daguerreian Saloon.”

Sherri Panchaud Onorati. “William Shew (1820-1903) – Photographer & Daguerreotype Innovator,” on the family heirlooms website April 22, 2011 [Online] Cited 10/02/2022

Unknown photographer (American)
Untitled (Two young men with straw hats, seated beside each other)
Nd
Sixth-plate painted tintype
Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

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Sep

Exhibition: ‘Written in Light – The First Photographers’ at Moderna Museet, Stockholm

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: beauty, black and white photography, documentary photography, drawing, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, landscape, light, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, reality, space, time and works on paper
Tags: Alma Sjöman, ambrotypes, American West, American landscape photography, american photographer, arl Jacob Malmberg Gymnastics, Bühler and Höchheimer, Before and Behind the Lens, Bride from Birkeland, British photographer, British photography, British portrait photography, British Pre-Raphaelites, Calla Curman, Calotype, calotype process, Carbon print, carbon printing, Carl Curman, Carl Curman Waldemarsudde 1888, Carl Jacob Malmberg, Carl Jacob Malmberg Gymnastics, Carl Jacob Malmberg The copper quay and the polishing works at Fiskars bruk, Carleton E. Watkins, Carleton E. Watkins Tutueamela El Capitan, Carleton E. Watkins Yosemite, cartes de visite, cartomania, Charles Darwin The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals, daguerreotype, daguerreotypes, Danish photographer, Danish photography, David Octavius Hill, Dutch 17th-century painting, early photographers, early photography, Förkortad Öfversikt af allmän Rörelselära, Fiskars, Fiskars bruk, Fiskars iron mill, Frederick Scott Archers, Gymnastiska Centralinstitutet, history of photography, Hjalmar Ling, Idylls of the King, Idylls of the King and Other Poems, John Hertzberg, Julia Margaret Cameron, Julia Margaret Cameron The Angel at the Grave, Julia Margaret Cameron The Mother of Salome, Karolinska Institute, Knut Frænkel, large-format photographs, Marcus Selmer, Marcus Selmer Bride from Birkeland, Maria Catharina Malmberg, Maria Catharina Malmberg with Children, Mary Ann Hillier, Misses Grierson, Moderna Museet, Nils Strindberg, Nils Strindberg 14/7 1897, Nils Strindberg The Eagle Balloon after landing, Nils Strindberg The Flight of the Eagle, Norwegian photography, Nya Idun, Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Oscar Gustave Rejlander Lesson, Oscar Gustave Rejlander The Two Ways of Life, Per Olof Sundman, Per Olof Sundman The Flight of the Eagle, photographic literature, photographs of gymnasts, photography, pictures of gymnasts, polar history, polar photographic history, polar photography, R. Sjöman & Comp, Renaissance painting, Robert Adamson, Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill Misses Grierson, Rosalie Sjöman, Rosalie Sjöman Alma Sjöman, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Salomon August Andrée, Salted paper print, Scandinavian Folklore, Scandinavian photography, Scottish photographers, Scottish portrait photography, Short Summary of General Exercise Physiology, Stockholm, Swedish cartes-de-visite, Swedish photographer, Swedish photography, Swedish portrait photography, tableaux-vivants, The American West, The Angel at the Grave, The copper quay and the polishing works at Fiskars bruk, The Eagle Balloon after landing, The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals, The First Photographers, The Flight of the Eagle, The Mother of Salome, The Pencil of Nature, The Two Ways of Life, Tutueamela El Capitan, Waldemarsudde, Waldemarsudde 1888, William Etty, women photographers, writing with light, Written in Light, Written in Light - The First Photographers, Yosemite, Yosemite Valley

Exhibition dates: 8th April – 3rd September 2017

Curator: Anna Tellgren

Nils Strindberg (Swedish, 1872-1897)
Örnen efter landningen. Ur serien Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd, 14/7 1897
14/7 1897. The Eagle Balloon after landing
From the series The Flight of the Eagle
1897/1930
Gelatin silver print

Nils Strindberg (Swedish, 1872-1897)
14/7 1897. After the crash
From the series The Flight of the Eagle
1897/1930
Gelatin silver print
Some rights reserved by Tekniska museet

Nils Strindberg (Swedish, 1872-1897)
Setting up-camp, raising the Swedish flag
From the series The Flight of the Eagle
1897/1930
Gelatin silver print
Some rights reserved by Tekniska museet

Nils Strindberg (Swedish, 1872-1897)
Moving a boat through the icy waters
From the series The Flight of the Eagle
1897/1930
Gelatin silver print
Some rights reserved by Tekniska museet

Nils Strindberg (1872-1897)

In July 1897, Salomon August Andrée (1854-1897) embarked on his voyage to the North Pole in the balloon Örnen [The Eagle], accompanied by the engineer Knut Frænkel (1870-1897) and the photographer Nils Strindberg. A few days later, the balloon crashed on the ice, and they were forced to continue their journey on foot. The conditions were severe, and the expedition ended in disaster. After a few months, in October, they made up camp on Kvitøya on Svalbard. This is where their bodies were found thirty years later, along with Strindberg’s camera.

The expedition and the events surrounding it, were widely publicised both at the time of the expedition, and later when they were found. Per Olof Sundman’s book The Flight of the Eagle (1967) was turned into a film by Jan Troell in 1982. Although these photographs were taken as scientific observations, and to document the work of the members of the expedition, they now appear as some of the most remarkable and beautiful photographs in polar history.

John Hertzberg (1871-1935) was a photographer and docent at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. He was commissioned to develop the exposed films, and managed successfully to process ninety-three of Strindberg’s photographs. He made copies of the negatives, which were used to produce the prints on paper that are now at institutions including Moderna Museet, the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm and Grenna Museum – Polarcenter in Gränna.

The original negatives ended up at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Hertzberg re-touched some of the pictures, and these are primarily the ones that have been published and embody the public perception of the expedition. Moderna Museet has both sets, and the re-touched photographs are shown above the un-retouched versions in this exhibition.

More fascinating insights into the Flight of the Eagle can be found on James McArdle’s excellent website.

Nils Strindberg (Swedish, 1872-1897)
At camp
From the series The Flight of the Eagle
1897/1930
Gelatin silver print
Some rights reserved by Tekniska museet

Nils Strindberg (Swedish, 1872-1897)
Camp on White Island
From the series The Flight of the Eagle
1897/1930
Gelatin silver print
Some rights reserved by Tekniska museet

While there are some outstanding photographs in this posting, the selection seems rather ad hoc. It is always good to see the work of Julia Margaret Cameron and other illuminati of late 19 century photography, but the highlight in this posting are the ethereal and tragic photographs from the Eagle polar expedition. We can only be grateful that so many negatives have survived, a testament to both the photographer, the developer and the coldness of the ice, leaving us with such transcendent images of human endurance.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

.
Many thankx to Moderna Museet for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877)
Four Shelves of Books
1844
Salted Paper Print

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877)

The Scientist William Henry Fox Talbot in Britain experimented with various silver salt solutions on paper. In the mid-1830s, he succeeded in producing a negative image on photosensitive paper in a camera and had thus ingeniously invented the negative.

In 1844-1846, he published what could be regarded as the first photographically illustrated magazine, The Pencil of Nature, in which he described the technique and how photography could be used in practice. He himself claimed that its most important use was to produce evidence, but he also had artistic ambitions for his photographic images. It was Talbot who eventually launched the term “photography” (writing with light) for his invention. Many different words and metaphors were used to describe this new medium, but photography was soon established as its proper name.

Oscar Gustave Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875)
Lesson
1860
Albumen silver print

Carl Jacob Malmberg (Swedish, 1824-1895)
The copper quay and the polishing works at Fiskars bruk, Finland
1872
Albumen silver print

Fiskars (Swedish, Finnish: Fiskari) is a village in the town of Raseborg (Raasepori) in western Uusimaa, Finland. The village is the site of the former Fiskars Bruk, which was founded in 1646 and gave rise to the company Fiskars.

The exhibition Written in Light – The First Photographers explores Moderna Museet’s collection of photography from the second half of the 19th century. It includes the Museum’s unique collection of daguerreotypes and works by a few of the world’s most famous photographers: Julia Margaret Cameron, Oscar Gustave Rejlander, and Carleton E. Watkins.

Since its invention, photography has developed, changed, and been used for many different aims and purposes. With the breakthrough of digital images, and their omnipresence in social media, photography is once again in a period of change. This gives all the more reason to look back and consider the impact of its legacy on contemporary photography. This exhibition highlights the Museum’s collection of daguerreotypes, but also gives examples of other early photographic techniques.

Thanks to two significant acquisitions in the mid-1960s, the Helmut Gernsheim Duplicate Collection, and the Helmer Bäckström Photographic Collection, some of the most internationally famous photographers in history are represented at Moderna Museet.

Before and Behind the Lens

Written in Light and Film Inside an Image are part of the photographic project Before and Behind the Lens, which consists of a series of exhibitions, discussions and guided tours. Before and Behind the Lens examines the role of photographic images in art and the transformation of the medium since the early experiments with new technology in the 19th century, to today’s explorations of the potential of the optical lens. Moderna Museet has one of Europe’s finest collections of photography, ranging from pioneers such as Julia Margaret Cameron to many of the most influential contemporary artists who visualise the world for us with the camera lens.

Press release from Moderna Museet

Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill
Misses Grierson
c. 1845
Salted paper print, calotype

Robert Adamson (1821-1848) and David Octavius Hill (1802-1870)

The first prominent calotype practitioners were active in Scotland, which was exempt from Talbot’s patent restrictions. David Octavius Hill was a portrait painter, and Robert Adamson an engineer. In 1843, they began collaborating as photographers, after Hill had been assigned to portray a group of clergymen and laymen who had left the Church of Scotland and founded the Free Church of Scotland. Hill wanted to use photographs to create individual portraits of the several hundred participants in this assembly.

It took them more than a year to produce a calotype of each member, and the painting took another 20 years for Hill to complete. They continued working together for four years, until Adamson’s premature death, producing nearly 3,000 photographs of architecture, landscapes, but especially portraits, which they always signed together. They also documented working women and men in the fishing village of Newhaven near Edinburgh in a natural and personal style that was unusual for that period.

Salted Paper Print, Calotype

Silver in common salt on/in paper 1839 – c. 1870

A paper is first soaked in a saline solution and then brushed on one side with silver nitrate, forming light-sensitive silver chloride. After allowing the paper to dry in the dark, it is exposed in sunlight for hours, in contact with a negative, until the image appears (printing-out). Excess silver chloride is then subjected to fixation in a strong saline solution or in sodium thiosulphate and is rinsed away in water. Subsequent gold toning (after 1849) lent the picture a richer tonal range and greater permanence. After 1850 they were often waxed and/or sometimes coated with a layer of albumen. Salted paper prints have a matte finish, and the paper fibres of the support are clearly visible in magnification. When fixed in salt, the image tone is reddish brown; in sodium sulphate it is a yellowish orange. Permanence is relatively low, and when faded or discoloured the prints turn to a yellowish brown. This technique was the first used to reproduce an image on paper from a negative. Although the term calotype is sometimes used, a calotype is actually a salted paper negative.

Johan Wilhelm Bergström (Swedish, 1812-1881)
Self-Portrait
c 1850
Daguerreotype

In 1844 Bergström became a photographer, an occupation he would hold for about ten years. As a daguerreotypist he became diligently engaged, and took pictures of the great people of the day. He also took a series of topographic images, which today are of great value. During a visit to Uppsala in 1845, he captured what is today the oldest known photographic image of the city, as well as a stereoscope image.

Amalgam on silver-coated copper 1839 – c. 1865

A copper plate is coated with a thin layer of silver, buffed and treated with iodine vapour in a closed container, transforming the silver to light-sensitive silver iodide. After being exposed in the camera for 10-30 minutes, the image is developed in heated mercury vapour. Silver and mercury form a white amalgam and the image is a reverse, low contrast positive. The picture was initially fixed in a saline bath, later in a bath of sodium sulphite. A subsequent toning in gold solution strengthened the sharpness and stability of the image. To protect the image against chemical and physical damage, the plate was tightly sealed with mats and glass and often enclosed in a case. Daguerreotypes are detailed, neutral in tone, sometimes hand-tinted, and are easily distinguishable by their alternately negative and positive impressions, depending on the angle of the light in which they are viewed.

Marcus Selmer (Danish worked Norway, 1819-1900)
Bride from Birkeland
1855
Daguerreotype, hand coloured

Marcus Selmer (Danish worked Norway, 1819-1900)
Bride from Birkeland (detail)
1855
Daguerreotype, hand coloured

It is not immediately clear what drew Marcus Selmer (1819-1900), a Danish portrait photographer, to spend most of his life working in Norway. He trained as a pharmacist in his native Denmark, and was working in a chemist owned by his uncle when he discovered daguerreotype photography. He experimented with this new technology in his spare time and began sending his pictures in to local exhibitions. In 1852, Selmer travelled to Norway, to visit some of his uncle’s family in the city of Bergen. He never returned.

He soon found work as a photographer in Bergen and, within a year, was able to establish his own studio. This became the first permanent photographic studio in Bergen, as few photographers who visited would stay all year round. Photographers often visited Bergen in the summer, hoping to capture the fjords and mountains that surround the area, but, as they needed good light for their work, the dark and cold weather had driven most of them away by the time winter rolled around. Selmer ingeniously built his studio almost entirely out of glass, allowing enough light into the space, which enabled him to continue working throughout the year.

Selmer’s work quickly became well-known throughout Norway. He sold many books of his photographs, and sold individual images to the press and the burgeoning tourist industry, before eventually being appointed the royal photographer in 1880. Although his career was varied, Selmer is primarily remembered today for his portraits of local people in national folk costume… These photographs depict the customs, traditions and culture of the Norwegian people, and reflect Selmer’s interest in his adopted home.

Anonymous. “Marcus Selmer’s Photographs of 19th-Century Norwegians,” on the The Public Domain Review website March 2, 2017 [Online] Cited 05/08/2017

Carl Jacob Malmberg (Swedish, 1824-1895)
Maria Catharina Malmberg with Children
c. 1860
Ambrotype

Ambrotype

Silver in collodion on glass
1854 – c. 1880

A glass plate, coated with silver halogens in collodion, is sensitised with silver nitrate and then exposed wet in the camera. After being developed in iron sulphate – occasionally with the addition of silver nitrate – and fixed in potassium cyanide and washed, the plate is allowed to dry. The picture is then lacquered or protected with a sheet of glass, and the back is coated with black lacquer, textile, or cardboard so that the picture – actually a thin negative – is seen as a positive. It is a direct positive which is often tastefully displayed with mats and under glass in cases. Ambrotypes have a neutral tone, but are sometimes hand-tinted. The surface is characterised by a typical “doubleness”, as high-keys can be seen in the negative on the glass surface and low-keys against the dark background lining.

Oscar Gustave Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875)
No title (Shoeless boy playing whistle)
c. 1860
Albumen silver print

Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1813-1875)

One of few internationally famous Swedish photographers is Oscar Gustave Rejlander, but little is known of his early life in Sweden. He settled in Britain around 1840, where he worked as a photographer until he died. He had probably studied art and was interested in art history. His works show distinct influences from Italian renaissance, Spanish baroque, Dutch 17th-century painting and the British Pre-Raphaelites.

In his studio, he would build and photograph a kind of “tableaux vivants”, or staged scenes. Perhaps the most famous of Rejlander’s works is The Two Ways of Life from 1857, a negative montage consisting of some 30 exposures combined into a composition. Rejlander’s oeuvre also includes a series of pictures of poor children and families. Towards the end of his life, Rejlander met Charles Darwin and was commissioned to illustrate his acclaimed book The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872).

Oscar Gustave Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875)
The Two Ways of Life
1857
Albumen silver print

In 1857 Rejlander made his best-known allegorical work, The Two Ways of Life. This was a seamlessly montaged combination print made of thirty-two images in about six weeks. First exhibited at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, the work shows two youths being offered guidance by a patriarch. Each youth looks toward a section of a stage-like tableaux vivant – one youth is shown the virtuous pleasures and the other the sinful pleasures. (Wikipedia)

Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916)
Down the Valley, Yosemite
1861
Albumen silver print

Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916)
Tutueamela, El Capitan, 3000ft, Yosemite
1861
Albumen silver print

Carleton E. Watkins (1829-1916)

Voyages of discovery, nature and landscapes were popular motifs for the early photographers. The growing tourism increased demand for pictures from exotic places, making this a source of income for publishers of photographic literature. The American West was one such region, and some of the photographers who began working there also documented the American Civil War. One of the most prominent of these was Carleton E. Watkins, who had travelled and photographed the Yosemite Valley on several occasions in the first half of the 1860s.

In his large-format photographs, so-called mammoth prints, he captured the massive mountain formations, dramatic waterfalls and gigantic trees. His heavy equipment was carried by some ten mules, and it is almost a miracle, considering the difficult conditions, that so many of his photographs survived.

A definite advancement in the process of creating negatives was made by the Brit Frederick Scott Archers (1813-1857), who discovered how to use glass sheets for the negative instead of paper. Collodion was used to bind the necessary silver salt to the glass, but it could only be exposed while wet, hence the term wet plate process. The glass negatives gave sharp details, and a large number of paper prints could be made from one negative.

Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879)
The Mother of Salome
1870
Albumen silver print

Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879)
The Angel at the Tomb
1870
Albumen silver print

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879)

In Victorian Britain, a small group of photographers were the very first to attempt to create and formulate art photography. Julia Margaret Cameron, who belonged to this group, left behind a fantastic collection of intimate portraits of her family and large circle of friends. She was an amateur photographer who was active mainly in the 1860s and 1870s.

Her staged pictures, inspired by myths, biblical stories and English literature, have a characteristically expressive soft focus. Cameron’s photographs are reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelites and renaissance painting. The Moderna Museet collection of Julia Margaret Cameron includes portraits of Charles Darwin, Henry Taylor and Alfred Tennyson, along with staged tableaux of The Angel at the Grave and the melodramatic Maud from one of Tennyson’s most famous poems. Cameron’s last major photographic project in the UK, before she and her family moved to Ceylon, present Sri Lanka, was to illustrate Tennyson’s work Idylls of the King (1874-75).

Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879)
Maud “There has Fallen a splendid Tear From the Passion Flower at the Gate”
1875
Illustration to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Other Poems. Sitter is Mary Ann Hillier
Albumen silver print

Albumen Silver Print

Silver in albumen on paper 1850 – c. 1900

A paper is brushed with a solution of albumen (egg white) and table salt and is allowed to dry. It is then bathed in silver nitrate and again allowed to dry, this time in darkness. Albumen, salt and silver form an emulsion containing light-sensitive silver salts which are exposed in daylight in direct contact with a negative until the desired image appears (printing-out). Residual light-sensitive silver salts are then removed through fixation, and the picture is washed in water. After 1855, most albumen silver photographs were gold-toned, followed by additional fixation and rinsing. Commercially produced albumen silver paper became available in 1863. Albumen silver prints have a thin paper support and are therefore normally mounted. The surface is usually glossy, and the tone may vary from yellow/red/brown to a violet blue, depending on exposure time and toning. Prints commonly change in tone to yellow/yellow-green in high-keys due to deterioration of the albumen. In magnification characteristic cracks can be seen.

Rosalie Sjöman (Swedish, 1833-1919)
Alma Sjöman
c. 1875
Albumen silver print, hand coloured

Rosalie Sjöman (1833-1919)

Rosalie Sjöman was one of many prominent women photographers. She opened a studio in 1864 on Drott-ninggatan 42 in Stockholm, after being widowed with three small children. The photographer Carl Jacob Malmberg had had his studio at this address previously, and there are some indications that Sjöman may have been working for him. Her business prospered, and towards the end of the 1870s Rosalie Sjöman had five female employees, and she seems to have chosen to hire women only. R. Sjöman & Comp. later opened studios on Regeringsgatan 6, and in Kalmar, Halmstad and Vaxholm.

Her oeuvre includes numerous carte-de-visite portraits and larger so-called cabinet cards, with a mixture of classic portraits, various staged scenes, people wear-ing local folk costumes, and mosaics. The expertly hand-tinted photographs are especially eye-catching; several of them portray her daughter Alma Sjöman.

In the 1860s, photography progressed from being an exclusive novelty into a more widespread and popular medium. The popular carte-de-visite were introduced in France in the mid-1850s, but became extremely fashionable when Emperor Napoleon III had his portrait made in the new format (6 x 9 cm). This trend spread rapidly, and portrait studios opened in large cities and smaller towns. This cartomania lasted for a decade, and the market stabilised around the mid-1870s, when the photographic medium entered a calmer phase.

Carl Jacob Malmberg (Swedish, 1824-1895)
No title
From the series Gymnastics
c. 1875
Albumen silver print

Carl Jacob Malmberg (1824-1895)

The collection Carl Jacob Malmberg left behind includes most photographic techniques and image types. He is also an example of a photographer’s career development after the first innovative period in the 1840s and up to the 1890s. Malmberg was born in Finland and first studied to be a goldsmith in St Petersburg, where he also learned photography.

He moved to Stockholm, where he opened a studio in 1859 on Drottninggatan 42, and later on Norrtullsgatan 2, and finally on Regeringsgatan 6. Around this period, when cartes-de-visite portraits came into fashion, Malmberg’s practice really took off. On a visit to Finland in 1872, he took a series of photographs at Fiskars iron mill, documenting all the workshops and buildings. A slightly odd portfolio in Malmberg’s collection consists of more than 100 pictures of gymnasts. He had been commissioned by Hjalmar Ling at the Gymnastiska Centralinstitutet in Stockholm to take these pictures to illustrate the book Förkortad Öfversikt af allmän Rörelselära (Short Summary of General Exercise Physiology, 1880).

David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson
William Etty
1844/c. 1880
Carbon Print
Reproduction photo: Prallan Allsten/Moderna Museet

Carbon Print

Charcoal (and colour) pigments and potassium bichromate in gelatin on paper 1864 – c. 1930

An emulsion with pigment and potassium dichromate in gelatin on thin paper is exposed in contact with a negative in daylight. The gelatin is hardened in relation to the amount of light during the exposure. The soaked paper is then turned over and pressed against a new support, coated with insoluble gelatin. The original support comes off in a bath of warm water or may be pulled off, and leaves an image with hardened pigmented gelatin. Any unexposed gelatin can then be washed off. The picture is finally subjected to an alum bath to remove the residual light-sensitive dichromate and to further harden the remaining gelatin. The result is a reversed image. It can be corrected by first reversing the negative or by transferring the image to a new support (Autotype).

Bühler and Höchheimer: A direct process on fabricated papers which were sensitised in alcohol, exposed in contact with a negative and developed in water. Carbon prints have a clear relief character with raised and glossy low-key areas. The tone is usually deep brown or black, but may vary with the choice of pigment. In magnification the emulsion gives a “ragged” impression, especially in high-keys.

Carl Curman (Swedish, 1833-1913)
Waldemarsudde 1888
1888
Cyanotype

Carl Curman (1833-1913)

The physician Carl Curman had many interests, and studied both medicine and art as a young man. Eventually, he became a famous balneologist, and initiated the plan for public baths in Stockholm and eventually also the Sturebadet swimming baths.

He built a photographic studio at the Karolinska Institute in the early 1860s, and was a pioneer of medical photography, before being appointed a professor of plastic anatomy at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1869. His lectures have been documented, in pictures showing students gathered around Curman for dissections. These photographic studies of the human anatomy were also used in the emerging field of eugenics – a troubling part of Western history.

Curman was never a professional photographer, but is one of the many practitioners who have made their mark on the history of photography. His more private projects include pictures from Lysekil, where he worked as a balneologist, from Stockholm where he lived, and from various travels abroad, together with his wife Calla Curman, co-founder of the women’s society Nya Idun.

Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Moderna Museet is ten minutes away from Kungsträdgården, and twenty minutes from T-Centralen or Gamla Stan. Walk past Grand Hotel and Nationalmuseum on Blasieholmen, opposite the Royal Palace. After crossing the bridge to Skeppsholmen, continue up the hill. The entrance to Moderna Museet and Arkitekturmuseet is on the left-hand side.

Opening hours:
Tuesday 10-20
Wednesday-Sunday 10-18
Monday closed

Moderna Museet website

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Aug

Exhibition: ‘The Memory of the Future. Photographic Dialogues between Past, Present and Future’ at the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, black and white photography, colour photography, documentary photography, drawing, exhibition, existence, gallery website, installation art, landscape, light, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, space, time and works on paper
Tags: 3D digitization, Adiantum tenerum, Adrien Constant Delessert, ambrotype, ambrotypes, American photography, Andreas Müller-Pohle, Andreas Muller-Pohle Digital scores V, Animal Locomotion, Anna Atkins, Anna Atkins Adiantum tenerum, Anonymous Portrait of a young girl, Ante la Imagen, appearance and disappearance, archeology of the present, artistic value of industrial objects, Óscar Muñoz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Bernd and Hilla Becher Gas Tank, Bernd And Hilla Becher Gas tank near Wuppertal, Bernd And Hilla Becher Gas Tanks, Bernd And Hilla Becher Gasbehälter bei Wuppertal, Binh Danh, Binh Danh Sphinxes, British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, camera obscura, carbon printing, Charles and Mathilde Horngascher-Odier, chemigram, chemistry of photography, Christian Marclay, Christian Marclay Memento, Christian Marclay Memento (Survival of the Fittest), collage, cyanotypes, Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns, daguerreotype, daguerreotypes, Dennis Gabor, Digital scores V, Eadweard Muybridge, Eadweard Muybridge Animal Locomotion, early photographic processes, early photography, Every ... Bernd and Hilla Becher Prison Type Gasholder, Every ... Bernd and Hilla Becher Spherical Type Gasholder, ferrotype, ferrotypes, French photography, Gabriel Lippmann, Gabriel Lippmann Selfportrait, Gas tank near Wuppertal, Gas Tanks, Gasbehälter bei Wuppertal, Glass 10/9/12, Heliogravure, heritage value of industrial objects, holograms, Hommage à Muybridge 1972, Idris Khan, Idris Khan Every ... Bernd and Hilla Becher Prison Type Gasholder, Idris Khan Every ... Bernd and Hilla Becher Spherical Type Gasholder, Jean-Gabriel Eynard, Jean-Gabriel Eynard Charles and Mathilde Horngascher-Odier, Jerry Spagnoli, Jerry Spagnoli Glass 10/9/12, Joan Fontcuberta, John Dugdale, John Dugdale Mourning Tulips, John Dugdale The Clandestine Mind, JR, JR UNFRAMED Man Ray, Kristen Stewart, La Mémoire du futur, Lausanne le pont Chauderon, Lippmann prisms, Lippmann wave theory of light, loss and the insecurity of human life, Martin Becka, Martin Becka Le Parc, McDonnell Douglas Corp. / Spindler & Hoyer Portrait of Dennis Gabor, McDonnell Douglas Corporation, Memento, memory and forgetting, memory and time, mise en abyme, Mourning Tulips, multiple narratives, Musée de l'Elysée, optical pilgrimage, Oscar Muñoz Ante la Imagen, past and present, Paul Vionnet, Paul Vionnet La cure d'Etoy, Paul Vionnet Lausanne le pont Chauderon, personal archives, Photo-Chimigramme, photo-collage, photographic memory, Pierre Cordier, Pierre Cordier chemigram, Pierre Cordier Photo-Chimigramme, Portrait of a young girl, Portrait of Dennis Gabor, Rene Burri, roots of the industrial world, Spindler & Hoyer, The Clandestine Mind, The Horse in Motion, The Memory of the Future, The Musée de l’Elysée, trompe l'oeil, UNFRAMED Man Ray, Victoria Will, Victoria Will Kristen Stewart, wave theory of light, wavefront reconstruction

Exhibition dates: 25th May – 28th August 2016

Curator: Tatyana Franck, Musée de l’Elysée, assisted by Lydia Dorner and Emilie Delcambre

Artists: Takashi Arai / Israel Ariño / Anna Atkins / Patrick Bailly-Maître-Grand Pierre Cordier / Bernd and Hilla Becher / Martin Becka / Binh Danh /Jayne Hinds Bidaut John Dugdale / Jean-Gabriel Eynard / Joan Fontcuberta / Dennis Gabor / Loris Gréaud / JR Idris Khan / Laure Ledoux / Gustave Le Gray / Gabriel Lippmann / Vera Lutter / Christian Marclay / Mathew Brady / Vik Muniz / Oscar Muñoz / Eadweard Muybridge / France Scully Osterman and Mark Osterman Andreas / Andreas Müller-Pohle / Florio Puenter Benjamin Recordon / Dino Simonett / Jerry Spagnoli / Joni Sternbach / James Turrell Martial Verdier / Paul Vionnet / Pierre Wetzel / Victoria Will / Nancy Wilson-Pajic

3D Digitisation of Jean-Gabriel Eynard (Swiss, 1775-1863)
Charles and Mathilde Horngascher-Odier
1845
© Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

Gabriel Lippmann (colour photography) and Dennis Gabor (holograms). Eadweard Muybridge (movement) and Pierre Cordier (chemigrams). Daguerreotypes, calotypes, negatives on dry waxed paper, tintypes, ambrotypes, cyanotypes. Heliogravure, ferrotype, collage and carbon printing. 3D digitisations that “light up” the image from every angle.

What’s old is new again. Then and now, here and there. The memory of future past.

Marcus

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Many thankx to the Musée de l’Elysée for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

This exhibition is an odyssey into the history of photography where different eras are juxtaposed and where artists and their methods dialogue with each other. Through a selection of historic photographic processes and the works of contemporary artists, the spectator is encouraged to observe the influence of the past on today’s artistic creations. The exhibition The Memory of the Future proposes a three-pronged vision: that of the past with the works of the pioneers of photographic techniques, that of the present with contemporary works that revive this know-how, and that of the future with technologies that give a new perspective on the works of the past.

Through century-old processes such as daguerreotypes, calotypes, negatives on dry waxed paper, tintypes, ambrotypes, cyanotypes and including holograms, The Memory of the Future celebrates the founding fathers of photographic techniques by establishing a dialogue between them and contemporary artists. From Gabriel Lippmann to James Turrell, including Robert Cornelius and Oscar Muñoz, this exhibition brings together for the first time some one hundred works whose common thread is their ability to withstand time. The Memory of the Future also proposes a selection of works from the Musée de l’Elysée’s collections that have never before been presented to the public.

After having launched a campaign to digitise its photography books in 2014 – 1,500 books have been digitised as of this time – the Musée de l’Elysée continues to explore techniques to dematerialise its visual heritage in order to preserve and enhance it. Consistent with its ambition to not only preserve works of value but to prospect for new ones, the Musée de l’Elysée has undertaken a 3D digitisation project of its works using a prototype developed by the EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne). This technology of the future is presented in this exhibition in the form of a touch screen monitor.

Oscar Muñoz (Colombian, b. 1951)
Ante la Imagen
2009
© Oscar Muñoz, courtesy of the artist and Mor charpentier gallery

Oscar Muñoz’s work combines photography, engraving, drawing, installation, video and sculpture, defying all attempts at categorisation. Using non-conventional techniques, his work is a reflection on social concerns and addresses the themes of memory and forgetting, appearance and disappearance, loss and the insecurity of human life. In his work El Coleccionista, the artist uses a triple video projection to show a figure that is sorting, organising and grouping what appears to be personal archives. Oscar Muñoz evokes here the ability of images to be part of multiple narratives, from one image to another, from one context to another. These images propose multiple narrations that overlap and intermingle between the past and present, memory and time.

For Ante la Imagen, Muñoz uses the portrait of the chemist Robert Cornelius (1809-1893), known for having reduced the exposure time of the photographic process of the daguerreotype and for producing one of the first self-portraits, to demonstrate the effectiveness of his method. Muñoz reproduces this portrait by engraving it on a reflecting metallic surface, like a daguerreotype. With each manipulation, the viewer sees the portrait of Cornelius superimposed on his own. The work is composed and decomposed and questions the interior multiplicity of one and the same image. Muñoz replaces this frozen image by a constantly-changing one, vulnerable to deterioration under the effect of air, like life itself.

Gabriel Lippmann (Franco-Luxembourgish, 1845-1921)
Selfportrait
c. 1892
© Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

Professor of physics at the Sorbonne, a member of the French Academy of Sciences and author of many scientific works, the international renown of Gabriel Lippmann Is mainly due to his invention of colour photography using the interferential method. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1908.

In 1891, he presented his invention, which would revolutionise photography, to the public. Lippmann developed the “wave theory of light”, which held that light bodies vibrate (like sound) and that light is propagated by waves of different speeds. The variations in wavelengths lead to changes in colour. To prove the validity of his theory, Lippmann worked for five years to find a method that would fix these interferences. To do so, he developed a device that made it possible to place a special photographic plate (made of layers proportional to the wavelengths) in contact with a mercury mirror, a very complicated process. The sensitive layer of an average wavelength, green, for example, has 4,000 bright points per millimetre in its thickness, separated by dark intervals. The Musée de l’Elysée has the largest collection of Lippmann prisms in the world.

McDonnell Douglas Corp. / Spindler & Hoyer
Portrait of Dennis Gabor
1975
© Jonathan Ross Hologram Collection

Engineer and physicist, Dennis Gabor is known for having invented the hologram in 1947, for which he was awarded the Holweck prize in 1970, and then the Nobel Prize in physics in 1971. Fascinated by Abbé’s theory of the microscope and Gabriel Lippmann’s method of colour photography, he studied electron optics, which led him to propose the concept of holography that he referred to as “wavefront reconstruction” at the time. The initial project consisted of an electron microscope capable of visualising atom networks and the atoms themselves, but that was not put into practice until 20 years later, whereas the hologram as a photographic process would have to wait for the invention of the laser in the 1960s, the light source necessary for the hologram. Subsequently, Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks in the United States and Yuri Denisyuk in Russia contributed to the improvement of Gabor’s invention and presented three-dimensional holograms. Since then, holograms are widely know to the general public through advertising, the production of packaging materials and jewellery items.

The life-size version of the portrait of Gabor can be seen at the offices of the McDonnell Douglas Corporation in the United States, one of the first companies to have attempted to market the holograph. The reduced-size copy presented here was made several years later by Spindler & Hoyer, a German optical company.

Eadweard Muybridge (English, 1830-1904)
Animal Locomotion, Plate 597
1887
© Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

Christian Marclay (American-Swiss, b. 1955)
Memento (Survival of the Fittest)
2008
© Christian Marclay, courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

A well-known filmmaker and multimedia artist, Christian Marclay made his mark on the contemporary art scene by combining the visual arts, film and musical culture. In 2007, he began a project that explores the interactions between sound and vision, as well as the manipulation and the conservation of different forms of recordings. He initiated a series together with the Graphicstudio, University of South Florida involving the use of two archaic recording systems – the cyanotype photography process and the audiotape.

He adopted and adapted the subject of the audiotape, which has become just about obsolete as a result of technological developments, and placed it at the center of his visual abstraction to capture the old soundtracks of hundreds of cassette tapes unfurled like so many streamers, using the cyanotype process. “We assume, because we’re able to capture sounds or images, that they will exist forever – when, in fact, obsolescence makes you feel the limit of those assumptions.” By combining these two mediums, the artist brilliantly explores the resonances between the past and present.

JR
UNFRAMED, Man Ray revu par JR, Femme aux cheveux longs, 1929, Vevey, Suisse
2010
© JR / Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

JR has “the largest art gallery in the world”. Thanks to the technique of photo collage, he freely exhibits his work on walls worldwide, thus attracting the attention of those who rarely or never go to museums. His work is a mixture of art and action and deals with commitment, freedom, identity and limits. After finding a camera in the Paris Metro in 2001, he travelled throughout Europe to meet other people whose mode of artistic expression involved the use of the walls and façades that give form to our cities. After observing the people he met and listening to their message, JR pasted their portraits up in streets and basements and on the roof tops of Paris.

JR thus creates “pervasive art” that he puts up on buildings in the Paris suburbs, on walls in the Middle East, on broken bridges in Africa and in the favelas of Brazil. These artistic actions make no distinction between the actors and the spectators. JR’s approach presented here is a mixture of the reinterpretation and recontextualisation of the icons of the history of photography taken from the collections of the Musée de l’Elysée of Lausanne, which he applies to the façades of buildings in the city of Vevey. He thus crops and enlarges the photos of Robert Capa, Man Ray, Gilles Caron and Helen Levitt so that the city becomes a gigantic open-air museum.

Binh Danh (American born Vietnam, b. 1979)
Sphinxes (by Arthur Putnam, 1912)
2014
Artist and Haines Gallery courtesy, San Francisco
© Binh Danh

“Landscape is what defines me. When I am somewhere new or unfamiliar, I am constantly in dialogue with the past, present and my future self. When I am thinking about landscape, I am thinking about those who have stood on this land before me. Whoever they are, hopefully history recorded their makings on the land for me to study and contemplate.”

Born in Viet Nam, Binh Danh addresses themes of collective and personal memories, history, heritage and mortality. Known for printing his works on unconventional supports such as leaves or grass, he experiments with the photographic process of the daguerreotype in his most recent creations in order to document the history of the city of San Francisco.

Reminiscent of the work of photographic pioneers such as Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), Charles Marville (1813-1879) and Eugène Atget (1857-1927), Binh Danh explores the complexities of a constantly evolving city, from the first major expansion in recent years of Silicon Valley. He places San Francisco, cliché of the culture of technology and success, in another time space in order to incite the viewer to reflect on the rapid pace of changes in a city. By choosing the daguerreotype, the artist works on the reflecting surface of the process to incorporate the spectator into his work and to thus transform it into a shared experience.

Paul Vionnet (Swiss, 1830-1914)
La cure d’Etoy
1870
Tirage sur papier aristotype
13.4 × 17.8cm
Collection iconographique vaudoise
© Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

With the exhibition The Memory of the Future. Photographic Dialogues between Past, Present and Future, the Musée de l’Elysée encourages contemporary artists to take a close look at photography as a medium, innovates as it reveals a 3D digitization technology developed by a spin-off from Lausanne’s Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), and displays its unique visual heritage.

The Memory of the Future. Photographic Dialogues between Past, Present and Future is the first exhibition that Director Tatyana Franck has curated at the Musée de l’Elysée. It opens up a dialogue between the work of the pioneers of photographic techniques (the past), those of contemporary artists that breathe new life into these skills (the present), and avant-garde technologies that update these early processes (the future). Works from the museum’s collections, contemporary artists and new technologies come face to face and join forces to give a brand new vision of the history of photography. The Memory of the Future aims to configure the present by reconfiguring the past in order to prefigure the future.

Techniques over time

First of all, early photographic processes such as ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, ferrotypes, cyanotypes, etc. are displayed next to works by contemporary artists who breathe life into them. The technical innovations of the past are fertile ground for contemporary art and design. The exhibition includes a waxed paper negative by Gustave Le Gray in dialogue with those by Martin Becka, while cyanotypes by Anna Atkins and Paul Vionnet converse with those by Christian Marclay, Nancy Wilson-Pajic and John Dugdale. Jean-Gabriel Eynard’s daguerreotypes from the museum’s collections are exhibited next to portraits by Takashi Arai and Patrick Bailly-Maître-Grand and landscapes by Binh Danh and Jerry Spagnoli. And as for contemporary ferrotypes, The Memory of the Future shows the work of Joni Sternbach and Jayne Hinds Bidaut as well as portraits taken by Victoria Will at the Sundance Independent Film Festival in 2014.

Works of two scientists who won a Nobel Prize and invented a photographic technique also have pride of place – a self portrait by Gabriel Lippmann (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1908) who invented color photography using the interferential method and a portrait of Dennis Gabor (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971), the inventor of the holographic process, a photographic technique in relief – echoing a holographic picture by James Turrell, a contemporary artist primarily concerned with light. Lastly, and as a point of convergence for all these photographic processes to fix an image on to a support, the camera obscura is presented through the works of Florio Puenter, Dino Simonett and Vera Lutter. Loris Gréaud – an artist invited to present an original installation capturing the spirit of the Musée de l’Elysée by recording its shadows and light – also explores this technique.

Homage and metamorphosis

The exhibition also presents the “mise en abyme” of iconic pictures from the history of photography reinterpreted by contemporary artists whose works examine the very notion of time or memory.

The earliest photograph in history – by Nicéphore Niépce and dating back to 1826 – is thus transformed by Joan Fontcuberta (Googlegramme Niépce, 2005) using PhotoMosaïque freeware connected online to the Google search engine, and by Andreas Müller-Pohle (Digital Scores VI). The first photographic self portrait in history – by Robert Cornelius in 1839 – is reproduced on a series of mirrors by Oscar Muñoz in 2009 to examine the paradox of the aging of the photographic support, which is, however, supposed to record an image for eternity. While Pierre Cordier pays homage to Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic breaking down of movement, Idris Khan (who took part in the reGeneration exhibition in 2005) pays homage to the iconic photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Innovating to preserve and showcase

Having launched a campaign in 2014 to digitise its photography books – 1500 books have been scanned so far – the Musée de l’Elysée is continuing to explore techniques to dematerialise its visual heritage for conservation and promotion purposes. Launched in 2015 thanks to the Engagement Migros development fund, an ambitious three dimensional digitisation project puts the Musée de l’Elysée at the forefront of museum innovation.

A venue for exhibitions, conservation and now an experimentation, as part of the exhibition La Mémoire du futur the Musée de l’Elysée is proposing for the first time a space dedicated to the presentation of digitised virtual objects from its collections. This innovative project aims to introduce new collaborative and interactive experiences using the Museum’s collections to a wide range of audiences – whether they be photography enthusiasts, curators or researchers.

Thanks to the Engagement Migros development fund, Innovation partner of the Musée de l’Elysée, the public is invited to experimentally test the first 3D digitisations carried out in partnership with the start-up Artmyn, created at EPFL’s Audiovisual Communications Laboratory (LCAV) led by Martin Vetterli. It will thus be possible to look at the works in 3D with unprecedented precision, but above all, to make the different textures of which they are composed appear on screen by lighting up the digital replicas from any angle.

This new technology comes in the form of a scanner made up of a dome on which are fixed several small lamps of precisely-adjusted intensity that switch on and off in turn depending on each picture scanned. “We are returning to an ancient theory of vision that imagined the eye’s projection towards the world, allowing the spectator once again to become an actor in the photographic experience,” explains Martin Vetterli in the exhibition catalogue.

Preliminary work was carried out with the Collections Department to select the processes that would most benefit from this scanning technology – heliogravure, ambrotype, ferrotype, collage and carbon printing. The first results will be presented in the exhibition. A tactile device supplemented by a video tour of the work presents a collage by René Burri from the René Burri Foundation housed at the Musée de l’Elysée. Rendered in real time and very high resolution, the images that have been cut out and superimposed by the artist can be freely explored so that the visitor can appreciate the visual richness of the work. Visitor experience appraisal is an integral part of the project to optimise presentation techniques and create a digital experimentation area in the museum.

The active participation of visitors to the Museum is an essential step for this first test phase: the interactions and different perceptions of the benefits of the prototype presented will be taken into account for the purpose of developing teaching and learning tools that will subsequently be used to refine and expand the user’s experience and to develop a digital, educational discovery space within the exhibition areas.

Press release from the Musée de l’Elysée

Paul Vionnet (Swiss, 1830-1914)
Lausanne, le pont Chauderon en construction
1904
Tirage au gélatino-bromure d’argent
39.5 × 23.0cm
Collection iconographique vaudoise
© Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

Paul Vionnet, a local photographic pioneer, is at the origin of the Iconographic Collection of the Canton of Vaud. This collection, devoted to the history of the Vaud, is at the very foundation of the creation of the Musée de l’Elysée in 1985 as a museum dedicated to the image. During his childhood, Paul Vionnet spent his vacations at his grandparents’ home in Aubonne and was a frequent visitor of Adrien Constant Delessert (1806-1876), a neighbour and renowned Vaud photographer. During his stays there in 1845, Delessert taught him photographic techniques and the calotype.

Fascinated by the sciences, nature and his canton, Paul Vionnet took it upon himself to collect the greatest number of iconographic documents possible concerning the history, landscapes and monuments of the region for the purpose of enriching the collection of the Historical Monuments Service in Lausanne. The documents that he was not able to acquire himself were reproduced using photography. Following in his father’s footsteps, he was ordained pastor in 1856, and assigned to Granges de Sainte-Croix, near Aubonne, and then to Pampigny in 1858. He nevertheless continued to take photographs, having since adopted the wet collodion technique, documenting landscapes and monuments during his free time.

He retired in 1896 and founded the Collection historiographique vaudoise that would house his documents. In 1903, Paul Vionnet bequeathed his private collection to the canton of Vaud, forming the fifth section of the Musée Cantonal des Antiquités. He was named assistant curator, and several years later, the municipality commissioned him to take the photographs for Lausanne à travers les âges.

Anna Atkins (English, 1799-1871)
Adiantum tenerum (Jamaica)
c. 1852
© Wilson Centre for Photography

A British photographer considered to be the first woman to create a photograph, Anna Atkins is also known to have published the first books on botany illustrated with cyanotypes. Passionately interested in science and art, she became a member of the Botanical Society of London in 1839 and realised that the photographic process could be used to obtain precise and detailed botanical images and to provide information at all levels of a society increasingly eager for knowledge.

Anna Atkins drew her inspiration from the inventor of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), and from a close family friend, John Herschel (1792-1871), a scientist known for the invention and the improvement of the cyanotype. She subsequently developed the process on her own that would allow her to obtain authentic and inexpensive photographic reproductions and that would make her part of the great tradition of her teachers. In 1843, she published her work, British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, the first volume of which preceded the famous work of Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, by several months. In 1853, she applied the same process to ferns and published Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns, a page of which is presented here.

Anonymous
Portrait of a young girl
1860-1870
© Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

John Dugdale (American, b. 1960)
The Clandestine Mind
1999
© The John Dugdale Studio

John Dugdale (American, b. 1960)
Mourning Tulips
1999
© The John Dugdale Studio

John Dugdale’s interest in photography goes back to his childhood when he received his first camera at the age of 12 and dreamed of becoming one of the major photographers of the 20th century. After a brilliant career as a fashion photographer, the year 1993 marked the turning point in the life of the artist who lost his sight following a stroke and CMV retinitis. Dugdale nevertheless refused to give up photography and began to take an interest in 19th century photographic techniques, using his family and friends as assistants. He discovered the large format and decided to use the cyanotype process, considering it to be the most direct and the easiest to use.

In his blue works, he portrays his everyday life by reversing the roles. Dugdale poses with a simplistic spirituality that could appear to be in contradiction with the 21st century. Generally posing in the nude, he considers that “life is transient. Once you leave this world, you fly into the universe without clothes. I want people to learn you cannot protect yourself by hiding behind clothes.”

Thanks to its low toxicity, the use of this process allows him to be involved in the printing of his photographs. His sensitivity to historic techniques emphasises the poetry of his work and the transitory nature of time and place. In the hopes of sharing his experience and his healing, Dugdale creates a new body of art by “showing the beauty of life and how one should act around illness.”

Jerry Spagnoli (American, b. 1956)
Glass 10/9/12
2012
© Jerry Spagnoli

When the photographer Jerry Spagnoli discovered a daguerreotype at a flea market, he described it as the most perfect photograph he had ever seen, a discovery that would influence the rest of his work. After familiarising himself with the process in his studio in San Francisco, the artist experimented with it using equipment from the 19th century and studying the effects obtained in order to understand the technical aspects as well as the visual and expressive potential.

By studying the body and the roots of photographic imagination in his series Anatomical Studies, the portrait, objects and contemporary street scenes, events and non-events in his series The Last Great Daguerreian Survey of the Twentieth Century, Spagnoli attempts to highlight the qualities of the daguerreotype – uniqueness, richness of detail – through the four series presented here, in order to allow a contemporary public to rediscover its virtues. It is also a way for him to approach the optical essence of photography. “With other processes the material substrate of the image can be intrusive, but when you look at a daguerreotype, there is a transparency to the depiction as if you were looking through the lens itself.”

Vik Muniz (Brazilian, b. 1961)
The Steerage (After Alfred Stieglitz)
2000
from the Pictures of Chocolate series

Non-conformist reproductions of masterpieces, trompe-l’œil, ephemeral homages… It is difficult to put a label on the work of Vik Muniz. Starting off as a sculptor, he became widely known in 1997 as a result of his series Pictures of Chocolate, an example of which is presented here, and again in 2006 through his series Pictures of Junk and by his film Waste Land that was released in 2014. For the past 20 years, the artist, fascinated by the power of the image and optics, has transformed all sorts of unusual raw materials into works of art. He then uses photography to immortalise the works that he creates with these materials.

In Steerage after Alfred Stieglitz, Muniz uses chocolate as the medium to pay tribute to one of the modern pioneers of photography, Alfred Stieglitz. He involves the spectator and forces him to take a new look at a painting or a photograph that has been seen time and time again and that has become commonplace despite its beauty. Vik Muniz encourages the public to look at and to decipher his compositions, as well as to use their other senses to transform his flat reproductions into original and three-dimensional works.

Pierre Cordier (Belgian, b. 1933)
Photo-Chimigramme 17/6/76 I “Hommage à Muybridge 1972”
1976
© Pierre Cordier

Pierre Cordier is a Belgian artist known as the father of the chemigram and for its development as a means of artistic expression. In 1956, writing a dedication with nail polish on photographic paper to a young German woman, Pierre Cordier discovered what he later called the chemigram. This technique “combines the physics of painting (varnish, oil, wax) and the chemistry of photography (photosensitive emulsion, developer and fixer), without the use of a camera or enlarger, and in full light.”

He worked for 30 years as a lecturer on the history of photography at the École Nationale des Arts Visuels in Brussels. When he gave up photography in 1968 to devote himself exclusively to the chemigram, he wanted to pay tribute to the great photography pioneers – Muybridge in 1972 and Marey in 1975. The Homage to Muybridge presented here was inspired by Allan Porter, chief editor of the Swiss revue Camera, one of the most prominent revues in the history of photography. In the issue of Camera of October 1972, we can read: “Cordier used Muybridge’s famous sequence, The Horse in Motion, which he transformed in three different ways: 1. Still subject and mobile camera. 2. Mobile subject and still camera. 3. Subject and camera, both mobile. He then combined the three sequences into one and treated it according to the photochemigram process.”

Andreas Muller-Pohle (German, b. 1951)
Digital scores V (after Nicephore Niepce)
2001
Inkjet print
10 7/8 in x 11 in; mat: 16 1/8 in x 20 1/8 in; paper: 12 1/8 in x 12 1/8 in

Andreas Müller-Pohle is one of the key figures involved in the ontological as well as the representational nature of photography. Since the 1990s, he has reflected on the radical changes in the essence of technical images. His first artistic project focused on questions of photographic perception and on the recycled photograph.

In the mid-1990s, Müller-Pohle began to explore the use of digital, genetic and political codes. He is one of the first artists to have broken down and translated the analog and the digital codes of images. In his series Digital Scores (after Nicéphore Niépce), he takes us back to the origin of analog photography by translating the photograph of Niépce, View from the Window at Le Gras (taken from a window of his house in 1826), into alphanumeric code. The complete binary transcription of this photograph is then distributed over eight panels.

Martin Becka (Czech, b. 1956)
Le Parc
2002
© Martin Becka

After studying photography, Martin Becka worked as a print developer for the Sepia Agency before becoming an independent news photographer. As of the beginning of the 1980s, he began doing research on the history of photography and the pre-industrial photographic processes that he incorporated into his personal creative work. By using traditional processes to photograph ultramodern cities like Dubai and business districts such as La Défense in Paris, the artist proposes a sort of “archeology of the present”, making the spectator reflect on the period in which he lives, the future, and the multiplication of images at a time when their reproducibility is unlimited. He sees photography as a means to “bend time in every possible direction.”

In his installation Le Parc (the André Citroën Public Park in Paris), Becka establishes a dialogue between the past and the present by paying homage to the photographic work of Alfred-Nicolas Normand (1822-1909) and the dry waxed paper negative process developed in 1851 by Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884). By choosing this century-old technique that requires an approach to work that is radically different from those currently in vogue, he is able to obtain negatives with a density adapted to a presentation by transparency and to create and control movement and unique atmospheres. Becka thus encourages the spectator to reflect on the notion of the photographic object.

Bernd and Hilla Becher
Gas Tank: Essen-Karnap D
1973
Gelatin silver print

Bernd And Hilla Becher
Gasbehälter bei Wuppertal (Gas tank near Wuppertal)
1966
Gelatin silver print

Born during the period of industrial archeology, the Bechers’ work consists, in the words of Pierre Restany, “of an optical pilgrimage at the roots of the industrial world”. The couple proposes a way do see industrial architecture by taking an approach based on inventory methodology. Their work is a reflection on the creation of heritage and raises the question of the heritage value of industrial objects, which is inseparable from their artistic value.

With a focus on archiving and industrial memory, Bernd and Hilla Becher’s approach consists of establishing a detailed inventory and keeping track of industrial structures by photographing sites threatened by obsolescence and often abandoned. The series Gas Tanks includes nine photographs from the period between 1965 and 1973, taken according to the extremely stringent protocol that is characteristic of their work (frontal view, centring of the subject, mid-height, absence of light, etc.). The composition of each portrait is standardised and identical, with emphasis on the frontal aspect and the monumentality of industrial constructions classified according to their functionality and form.

Taking advantage of the extremely reproducible nature of the photograph, the Bechers reveal the massive diffusion and production of images that contribute to erasing our memories of their origins and their authors. In doing so, they observe a civilisation on the decline and highlight the production of an era, vestiges of the human imagination and life.

Idris Khan (British, b. 1978)
Every … Bernd and Hilla Becher Spherical Type Gasholder
One panel triptych, 2003
Lambda Digital C print mounted on aluminium
20 1/2 x 26 1/2 inches

Idris Khan (British, b. 1978)
Every … Bernd and Hilla Becher Prison Type Gasholder
2004
Lambda Digital C print mounted on aluminium
80 × 65 inches

“I try to capture the essence of the building – something that’s been permanently imprinted in someone’s mind, like a memory.”

Idris Khan is fascinated by the photographic medium. Fuelled by images and influential theoretical essays on the history of photography, he re-appropriates the works that had an impact on him and subjects them to a series of transformations in order to see them from a different perspective. His work is a reflection on the passage of time, the accumulation of experiences and, as such, the decrease of unique moments. In his series Homage…, he presents rephotographed works, enlarged and superimposed in multiple layers. He uses digital tools to play with the opacity of the layers so as to strengthen the mystery of the original objects whose layering reveals new details. The work Homage to Bernd Becher shown here reproduces and compiles the photographs that correspond to the Bechers’ typology in order to celebrate the vestiges of these vanished industrial infrastructures.

Fascinated by the ability of the photographic medium to capture the soul as well as the body image, Idris Khan, in his series Rising Series… After Eadweard Muybridge “Human and Animal Locomotion”, pays homage to Muybridge’s early scientific experiments using the camera to sequentially record human and animal movement. Beyond the tribute paid to photography that is defined here as a compilation of knowledge, Idris Khan positions himself with respect to a medium laden with history and with a bright future ahead of it.

Victoria Will (American, b. 1980)
Kristen Stewart
2014
© Victoria Will

Kristen Stewart poses for a tintype (wet collodion) portrait at The Collective and Gibson Lounge, during the 2014 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Victoria Will/Invision/AP)

Victoria Will began her career as a staff photographer for the New York Post. Specialized at the time in portraits and fashion, her photographs were disseminated worldwide by the magazines W, the New York Times and Vogue. When she was invited for the fourth time to the Sundance Film Festival, an American independent film festival, she decided to try something new and to replace her digital reflex camera with the century-old tintype process to make portraits of movie stars. Following her success, she renewed the experience in the following years and gradually improved this complex technique.

Overcoming the difficulties of the process, its sensitivity to time and the danger of the chemical products involved, the photographer successively made portraits in 7 to 8 minutes of actors such as Vincent Cassel, Robert Redford, Jennifer Connelly, Spike Lee and Ethan Hawke. “What I love about the process is how raw it is,” says Victoria. “We live in an age of glossy magazines and overly retouched skin. But there is no lying with tintypes. You can’t get rid of a few wrinkles like in Photoshop.”

Both the photographer and her public “appreciate the honesty of these photographs. Development leaves a lot of room for the unexpected: we discover a face that we thought was familiar while being the contrary of digital portraits. The stages in the darkroom contribute to the idea of creating something unique and refreshing.”

The Musée de l’Elysée
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CH - 1014 Lausanne
Phone: + 41 21 316 99 11

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Mar

Exhibition: ‘In Focus: Daguerreotypes’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, landscape, light, memory, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space and time
Tags: a mirror with a memory, Acropolis, Alphonse-Louis Poitevin, Alphonse-Louis Poitevin The Pantheon Paris, american artist, American Daguerreotypes, american photographer, American photography, Auguste Belloc, Auguste Belloc Portrait of a Woman, Carl Durheim, Carl Durheim Postmortem of a Child, Charles Richard Meade, Charles Richard Meade Portrait of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Chinese Woman with a Mandolin, daguerreotype, daguerreotypes, Daguerreotypist Displaying Thirteen Daguerreotypes, Daguerreotypomania, Dighton Rock, Dr Hugo Stangenwald, early American photography, Edgar Allan Poe, Facade and North Colonnade of the Parthenon on the Acropolis, Frederick Langenheim, French daguerreotypes, General Zachary Taylor, Horatio B. King, Horatio B. King Seth Eastman at Dighton Rock, Hugo Stangenwald Portrait of Queen Kalama of Hawaii, In Focus: Daguerreotypes, j. paul getty museum, J. Paul Getty Museum In Focus: Daguerreotypes, James Maguire, James Maguire Daguerreotypist, James Maguire Portrait of Zachary Taylor, James P. Weston, James P. Weston Portrait of an Asian Man in Top Hat, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey Facade and North Colonnade of the Parthenon on the Acropolis, Kalama Hakaleleponi Kapakuhaili, La Daguerreotypomanie, London Stereoscopic Company, Louis Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Nicéphore Niépce, Nude Woman in Photographer's Studio, Parthenon on the Acropolis, Portrait of a Girl Holding a Doll, Portrait of a Nurse and a Child, Portrait of a Young Man in a Top Hat, Portrait of an Asian Man in Top Hat, Portrait of an Unidentified Daguerreotypist, Portrait of Edgar Allan Poe, Portrait of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Portrait of Queen Kalama of Hawaii, Portrait of Young Girl with a Guitar, Portrait of Zachary Taylor, President Zachary Taylor, Queen Kalama of Hawaii, Seth Eastman, Seth Eastman at Dighton Rock, Stangenwald and Goodfellow, Stephen Goodfellow, Stereo daguerreotype, Théodore Maurisset, Théodore Maurisset La Daguerreotypomanie, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Pantheon Paris, The Sands of Time, Thomas Richard Williams, Thomas Richard Williams The Sands of Time, ugo Stangenwald, William Langenheim, William Langenheim Portrait of Frederick Langenheim, Zachary Taylor

Exhibition dates: 3rd November 2015 – 20th March 2016

Unknown maker (American)
Portrait of Young Girl with a Guitar
c. 1850
Daguerreotype
1/6 plate
Open: 9.2 x 15.2cm (3 5/8 x 6 in.)
Graham Nash Collection

The last in my trilogy of postings on 19th century photography features a rather uninspiring collection of daguerreotypes. Perhaps there were better ones in the exhibition.

Of most interest to me are two:

Nude Woman in Photographer’s Studio (c. 1850, below) with its almost van Gogh-esque perspective of the figure, chair and rug. The image is also notable for the daguerreotypes of men who stare down on the women from the wall behind: the objectification of the male gaze – of the photographer and of the observers. This daguerreotype also reminds me of the later haunting photographs by E. J. Bellocq (1873-1949) of the prostitutes of Storyville, New Orleans.

Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey’s ghostly, evocative Facade and North Colonnade of the Parthenon on the Acropolis, Athens (1842, below). Can you imagine being shown this full plate, I repeat, full plate daguerreotype of one of the wonders of Ancient Greece just 3 years after the public announcement of the invention of photography. You would have never seen many, if any, images of foreign places in your life before, and that moment of initiation into the magic arts of photography would have taken on the deepest significance. Even now, the effect of this plate on the imagination and consciousness of the viewer is outstanding.

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The rest of the daguerreotypes in this posting are more prosaic: vaguely interesting still life vanitas or portrait social documentation. If you were not told that these were images of a president of the United States, the inventor of the daguerreotype, or the writer Edgar Allen Poe they could be any “Portrait of a man” or “Portrait of a woman”. It’s amazing how even at this early stage of photography the codification of the image, its semiotic language if you like, was intimately tied up with the caption and text that accompanied it. Of course, unless we know that it’s called the Eiffel Tower then a photograph of the object without that knowledge would mean very little; but as soon as that title is present in collective consciousness, then anywhere an image of that structure is found, it is already known as such.

Now there’s a good idea for an exhibition: the influence of the title on the interpretation of the photographic image. ‘(Un)titled images’ anyone?

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

James Maguire (American, 1816-1851)
[Portrait of Zachary Taylor]
1847
Daguerreotype
1/4 plate
Image: 7.9 x 5.4cm (3 1/8 x 2 1/8 in.)
Mat: 12.7 x 10.8cm (5 x 4 1/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

James Maguire (American, 1816-1851) Daguerreotypist, dealer in daguerreian supplies; active Tuscaloosa, Ala., before 1842; New Orleans 1842-50; Natchez, Miss., 184; Vicksburg, Miss., 1842; Plaquemine, La., 1842; Baton rouge, La., 1842; Belfast, Ireland, 1844; London, England, 1844; Paris, France, 1844.

According to his obituary, James Maguire was born in Belfast, Ireland, around 1815. By early 1842 he had learned the daguerreian art from Frederick A. P. Barnard and Dr. William H. Harrington in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Maguire was one of the earliest daguerreians to establish a permanent gallery in New Orleans. In that city on January 28, 1842 he advertised that he had opened a portrait gallery at 31 Canal Street, upstairs, where he would “remind a short time.” …

Maguire’s New orleans gallery flourished during the Mexican War, when the city enjoyed a boom as a key shipping centre and rendezvous for troops bound for Mexico…

When General Zachary Taylor passed through New Orleans in late 1847 on his triumphant return from the Mexican War, he favoured Acquire by sitting for his portrait. The Daily Picayune noted not January 11, 1848, that Macquire’s portrait was ‘the best and most striking likeness of ‘Old Zach’ we have yet seen of him anywhere.”

Peter E. Palmquist and Thomas R. Kailbourn. Pioneer Photographers from the Mississippi to the Continental Divide: A Biographical Dictionary 1839-1865. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, pp. 411-412.

Zachary Taylor (November 24, 1784 – July 9, 1850) was the 12th President of the United States, serving from March 1849 until his death in July 1850. Before his presidency, Taylor was a career officer in the United States Army, rising to the rank of major general.

Taylor’s status as a national hero as a result of his victories in the Mexican-American War won him election to the White House despite his vague political beliefs. His top priority as president was preserving the Union, but he died seventeen months into his term, before making any progress on the status of slavery, which had been inflaming tensions in Congress.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Unknown maker (American)
Nude Woman in Photographer’s Studio
c. 1850
Daguerreotype
1/6 plate
Image: 9.5 x 7.6cm (3 3/4 x 3 in.)
Graham Nash Collection

Unknown maker (American)
Nude Woman in Photographer’s Studio (detail)
c. 1850
Daguerreotype
1/6 plate
Image: 9.5 x 7.6cm (3 3/4 x 3 in.)
Graham Nash Collection

Unknown maker (American)
Portrait of Edgar Allan Poe
late May – early June 1849
Daguerreotype
1/2 plate
Image: 12.2 x 8.9cm (4 13/16 x 3 1/2 in.)
Mat (and overmat): 15.6 x 12.7cm (6 1/8 x 5 in.)
Object (whole): 17.9 x 14.9cm (7 1/16 x 5 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Unknown maker (American)
Portrait of a Nurse and a Child
c. 1850
Daguerreotype, hand-coloured
1/6 plate
Image: 6.2 x 4.8cm (2 7/16 x 1 7/8 in.)
Mat: 8.3 x 7.1cm (3 1/4 x 2 13/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Charles Richard Meade (American, 1826-1858)
Portrait of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
1848
Daguerreotype, hand-coloured
1/2 plate
Image: 15.7 x 11.5cm (6 3/16 x 4 1/2 in.)
Mat: 16 x 12cm (6 5/16 x 4 13/16 in.)
Object (whole): 22.1 x 17.8cm (8 11/16 x 7 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Louis Daguerre (1787 – 10 July 1851) was born in Cormeilles-en-Parisis, Val-d’Oise, France. He was apprenticed in architecture, theatre design, and panoramic painting to Pierre Prévost, the first French panorama painter. Exceedingly adept at his skill of theatrical illusion, he became a celebrated designer for the theatre, and later came to invent the diorama, which opened in Paris in July 1822.

In 1829, Daguerre partnered with Nicéphore Niépce, an inventor who had produced the world’s first heliograph in 1822 and the first permanent camera photograph four years later. Niépce died suddenly in 1833, but Daguerre continued experimenting, and evolved the process which would subsequently be known as the daguerreotype. After efforts to interest private investors proved fruitless, Daguerre went public with his invention in 1839. At a joint meeting of the French Academy of Sciences and the Académie des Beaux Artson 7 January of that year, the invention was announced and described in general terms, but all specific details were withheld. Under assurances of strict confidentiality, Daguerre explained and demonstrated the process only to the Academy’s perpetual secretary François Arago, who proved to be an invaluable advocate. Members of the Academy and other select individuals were allowed to examine specimens at Daguerre’s studio. The images were enthusiastically praised as nearly miraculous, and news of the daguerreotype quickly spread. Arrangements were made for Daguerre’s rights to be acquired by the French Government in exchange for lifetime pensions for himself and Niépce’s son Isidore; then, on 19 August 1839, the French Government presented the invention as a gift from France “free to the world”, and complete working instructions were published. In 1839, he was elected to the National Academy of Design as an Honorary Academician.

Daguerre died on 10 July 1851 in Bry-sur-Marne, 12 km (7 mi) from Paris. A monument marks his grave there.

Text from the Wikipedia website

James P. Weston (American, active South America about 1849 and New York 1851-1852 and 1855 -1857)
[Portrait of an Asian Man in Top Hat]
c. 1856
Daguerreotype, hand-coloured
1/9 plate
Image: 5.4 x 4.3cm (2 1/8 x 1 11/16 in.)
Mat: 6.4 x 5.1cm (2 1/2 x 2 in.)
Open: 5.1 x 10.8cm (2 x 4 1/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

A “mirror with a memory,” a daguerreotype is a direct-positive photographic image fixed on a silver-coated metal plate. The earliest form of photography, this revolutionary invention was announced to the public in 1839. In our present image-saturated age, it is difficult to imagine a time before the ability to record the world in the blink of an eye and the touch of a fingertip. This exhibition, drawn from the Getty Museum’s permanent collection with loans from two private collections, presents unique reflections of people, places, and events during the first two decades of the medium.

Popularly described as “a mirror with a memory,” the daguerreotype was the first form of photography to be announced to the world in 1839 and immediately captured the imagination of the public. The “Daguerreotypomania” that followed may seem surprising today, as photographs have become an omnipresent part of contemporary life. In Focus: Daguerreotypes, on view from November 3, 2015 – March 20, 2016 at the Getty Center, offers the photography enthusiast and the general visitor alike a unique opportunity to view rare and beautiful examples of this early photographic process. The works in the exhibition are drawn from the Getty Museum’s exceptional collection of more than two thousand daguerreotypes alongside loans from the outstanding private collections of musician Graham Nash and collector Paul Berg.

“Today, photographs can be taken, edited, and deleted within seconds and are the principal record of our everyday lives,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “It takes a leap of the imagination to appreciate what they represented to the pioneer inventors and to the public of the day. This exhibition explores how these first captured images – fragile, one-of-a-kind works – were treasured, not only by those who were just discovering the possibilities of the medium, but by those being photographed as well.”

By the mid-1840s, exposure times and costs had decreased markedly and, as a result, daguerreotypes became more accessible to a broader audience. Over the years, attempts were made to enhance the capabilities of the daguerreotype. To make up for the deficiency of colour, many portrait daguerreotypists employed former miniature painters to hand-paint each plate; an example of which is Portrait of a Woman with a Mandolin (1860), where light specks of colour enhance the ornamentation on the costume. Daguerreotypes were also nearly impossible to reproduce, though some attempts were made, including making the daguerreotype plate into a printing plate. Examples of this process will be on view in the exhibition.

Inside the Portrait Studio

Daguerreotype studios were plentiful by the mid-19th century, and each studio developed novel ways to create distinctive and personal images for its customers. Confined to a well-lit indoor or outdoor location, many daguerreotypists would stage everyday scenes that might include painted backdrops of domestic interiors and subjects posing as if in conversation or seated at tables with everyday props. As it was extremely difficult to capture a smiling face without blurring the features, most sitters wore somber expressions. An unusual exception on view in the exhibition is Portrait of a Father and Smiling Child (about 1855).

Customers remarked on the incredible fidelity of the silver image and praised it as a means of preserving a loved one’s presence. Some family members – often children – passed away before they could pose for the camera, and their likenesses were preserved in post-mortem portraits, as in Carl Durheim’s (Swiss, 1810-1890) Postmortem Portrait of a Child (about 1852), which creates the illusion of quiet slumber rather than death.

Prominent and well-known members of society also had their daguerreotype portraits taken, which made their likenesses more accessible to the public than ever before. “The exhibition will include daguerreotypes of the Duke of Wellington, Edgar Allen Poe, and Queen Kalama of Hawaii,” says Karen Hellman, assistant curator of photographs in the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Department of Photographs and curator of the exhibition. “Because of the unique direct positive process, we find ourselves face to face with these historical figures.”

Outside the Portrait Studio

Some of the first subjects for the daguerreotype process were ancient monuments and far-off cityscapes that were previously accessible only to a small, educated elite. Some photographers traveled long distances to capture these remote locales; the exhibition includes images of the Parthenon in Athens, the Pantheon in Rome, and the Temple of Seti I in Egypt. Others trained their lenses closer to home, focusing on vernacular architecture or such structures of national significance as John Plumbe Jr.’s (American, born Wales, 1809-1857) 1846 image of the United States Capitol.

Despite its inability to capture fleeting moments, the daguerreotype nevertheless was used to document historical events. The exhibition includes images of parades and military festivals as well as pivotal historical moments, such as Ezra Greenleaf Weld’s (American, 1801-1874) image of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law Convention in Cazenovia, New York.

Because it was perceived as a faithful record, it was difficult to elevate the daguerreotype to the status of an art form. Nevertheless some photographers attempted to expand their studio practice to create more artistic scenes, such as The Sands of Time (1850-52), a still-life by Thomas Richard Williams (English, 1825-1871) that features books, glasses, an hourglass, and a human skull. Daguerreotypes were sometimes used for scientific experimentation, as is the case with Antoine Claudet, who used the medium as an instrument to measure focal distance.

The exhibition also features a selection of distinctive daguerreotype cases – wrapped in leather or decorated with oil painting, shell inlay, and gold foil. These elaborate cases emphasise the care that families took in protecting these treasured images, and the value they held from generation to generation.

In Focus: Daguerreotypes is on view November 3, 2015-March 20, 2016 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center. The exhibition is curated by Karen Hellman, assistant curator of photographs in the Getty Museum’s Department of Photographs.

Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum

William Langenheim (American, born Germany, 1807-1874)
Portrait of Frederick Langenheim
c. 1848
Daguerreotype
1/4 plate
Image: 8.9 x 7cm (3 1/2 x 2 3/4 in.)
Mat: 10.6 x 8.3cm (4 3/16 x 3 1/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Carl Durheim (Swiss, 1810-1890)
Postmortem of a Child
c. 1852
Daguerreotype, hand-coloured
1/4 plate
Image: 6.8 x 9.4cm (2 11/16 x 3 11/16 in.)
Object (whole): 12.7 x 15.1cm (5 x 5 15/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Unknown maker (American)
Portrait of a Family
c. 1850
Framed: 35.6 x 40.6cm (14 x 16 in.)
Graham Nash Collection

Unknown maker (American)
Portrait of a Family (detail)
c. 1850
Framed: 35.6 x 40.6cm (14 x 16 in.)
Graham Nash Collection

Théodore Maurisset (French, active 1834-1859)
La Daguerreotypomanie (Daguerreotypomania)
December 1839
Lithograph
Image: 26 x 35.7cm (10 1/4 x 14 1/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr.

Horatio B. King (American, 1820-1889)
Seth Eastman at Dighton Rock, July 7, 1853
1853

Dighton Rock

The Dighton Rock is a 40-ton boulder, originally located in the riverbed of the Taunton River at Berkley, Massachusetts (formerly part of the town of Dighton). The rock is noted for its petroglyphs (“primarily lines, geometric shapes, and schematic drawings of people, along with writing, both verified and not.”), carved designs of ancient and uncertain origin, and the controversy about their creators. In 1963, during construction of a coffer dam, state officials removed the rock from the river for preservation. It was installed in a museum in a nearby park, Dighton Rock State Park. In 1980 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP).

Seth Eastman

Seth Eastman (1808-1875) and his second wife Mary Henderson Eastman (1818 – 24 February 1887) were instrumental in recording Native American life. Eastman was an artist and West Point graduate who served in the US Army, first as a mapmaker and illustrator. He had two tours at Fort Snelling, Minnesota Territory; during the second, extended tour he was commanding officer of the fort. During these years, he painted many studies of Native American life. He was notable for the quality of his hundreds of illustrations for Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s six-volume study on Indian Tribes of the United States (1851-1857), commissioned by the US Congress. From their time at Fort Snelling, Mary Henderson Eastman wrote a book about Dakota Sioux life and culture, which Seth Eastman illustrated. In 1838, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Honorary Academician…

Having retired as a Union brigadier general for disability during the American Civil War, Seth Eastman was reactivated when commissioned by Congress to make several paintings for the US Capitol. Between 1867 and 1869, he painted a series of nine scenes of American Indian life for the House Committee on Indian Affairs. In 1870 Congress commissioned Eastman to create a series of 17 paintings of important U.S. forts, to be hung in the meeting rooms of the House Committee on Military Affairs. He completed the paintings in 1875.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Thomas Richard Williams (English, 1825-1871)
The Sands of Time
1850-1852
Stereo-daguerreotype
Two 1/6 plates
Image (each): 7 x 5.9cm (2 3/4 x 2 5/16 in.)
Object (whole): 8.3 x 17.1cm (3 1/4 x 6 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Thomas Richard Williams (English, 1825-1871)
The Sands of Time (detail)
1850-1852
Stereo-daguerreotype
Two 1/6 plates
Image (each): 7 x 5.9cm (2 3/4 x 2 5/16 in.)
Object (whole): 8.3 x 17.1cm (3 1/4 x 6 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Thomas Richard Williams (5 May 1824 – 5 April 1871) was a British professional photographer and one of the pioneers of stereoscopy.

Williams’s first business was in London around 1850. He is known for his celebrated stereographic daguerreotypes of the Crystal Palace. He also did portrait photography, now in the Getty Museum’s archives, which he regarded as his greatest success…

Williams’ first studio in Lambeth served both as business and home. Here, “Williams rapidly acquired a fine reputation as portraitist. One source describes how the vicinity of the studio was often ‘blocked with a dozen carriages awaiting the visitors at Mr. Williams’ studio.’ His portraits were exquisitely crafted, and displayed a restrained elegance which became his hallmark.”

Soon his success allowed him to open a studio separate from his home, in Regent Street in 1854. With over twenty photography studios nearby competition was keen – and included his former mentor and teacher, Claudet. “Williams, with his characteristic discretion and low-key approach, did not advertise his business or put up large signs to attract clientele. It seems, though, that the gentry beat a path to his door, and his stereoscopic portraits became highly popular.”

While the mainstay of his business was his stereoscopic (3-D) portraits, he was coming into his own with an artistic vision of what photography could and would become. He became one of the first photographers on record to shoot still life and other artistic compositions. These images became popular to the point that they became “part of the birth of a new genre that was to become the stereoscopic boom of the 1850s.” The Victorians loved them; sales boomed.

In the mid-1850s, Williams contracted with the London Stereoscopic Company to publish his images. The LSC published the work of many eminent stereo photographers, including William England, and was able to mass-produce his works, which helped meet growing demand for his prints.

The LSC published three stereoscopic series by Williams.

His “First Series” was made up of portraits, artistic compositions and still life, many taken in his studio. Dr. Brian May and Elena Vidal write: “The still life studies, with their fine detail and careful composition, showed a clear influence from the 17th century Dutch painting tradition, and a profound knowledge of the iconography surrounding this genre. Photographs such as ‘The Old Larder,’ ‘Mortality’ and ‘Hawk and Duckling’ are superb examples of the unique power of stereography, with their superb three-dimensional compositions, and wealth of detail, which, combined with an outstanding artistic sensibility, resulted in images of astonishing finesse. Another remarkable group of images in this series, entitled “The Launching of the Marlborough”, taken on 31 July 1855, was highly praised in the Victorian press, since they embodied the achievement of ‘instantaneous’ photography, executed as they were from a moving boat, and managing to ‘freeze’ the waves on the surface of the sea.”

The second series was “The Crystal Palace,” this time at Sydenham, as the original Palace in Hyde Park had been dismantled. “The quality of Williams’ original daguerreotypes from this event are such that, though they contain images of hundreds of people, individual facial features of Queen Victoria and her party are clearly discernible.” …

May and Vidal write, “Through his work, Williams is now widely recognised as pivotal in the history of stereoscopic photography, since his stereo cards were the first examples of photographic art for its own sake ever to achieve wide commercial success.”

Text from the Wikipedia website

Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey (French, 1804-1892)
Facade and North Colonnade of the Parthenon on the Acropolis, Athens
1842
Daguerreotype
Whole plate
Image: 18.8 x 24cm (7 3/8 x 9 7/16 in.)
Object (whole): 18.8 x 24cm (7 3/8 x 9 7/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Alphonse-Louis Poitevin (French, 1819-1882)
The Pantheon, Paris
1842
Daguerreotype
1/2 plate
Image: 15.1 x 10.2cm (5 15/16 x 4 in.)
Mat: 21.5 x 15.6cm (8 7/16 x 6 1/8 in.)
Object (whole): 27.9 x 21.9cm (11 x 8 5/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Unknown maker (American)
Portrait of a Young Man in a Top Hat
c. 1850s
Daguerreotype
1/9 plate
Open: 7.3 x 12.4cm (2 7/8 x 4 7/8 in.)
Graham Nash Collection

Attributed to Dr. Hugo Stangenwald (Austrian, born Germany, 1829-1899)
Portrait of Queen Kalama of Hawaii
c. 1853-1854
Daguerreotype, hand-coloured
1/16 plate
Image: 3 x 2.5cm (1 3/16 x 1 in.)
Mat: 4.1 x 3.5cm (1 5/8 x 1 3/8 in.)
Open: 5.1 x 8.9cm (2 x 3 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Kalama Hakaleleponi Kapakuhaili (1817 – September 20, 1870) was a Queen consort of the Kingdom of Hawai’i alongside her husband, Kauikeaouli, who reigned as King Kamehameha III. Her second name is Hazelelponi in Hawaiian.

Dr Hugo Stangenwald was an Austrian physician and pioneer photographer who arrived in Honolulu in 1853.

“In January 1853m Stangenwald landed at Hilo, on the island of Hawaii, aboard a British brig. He was bound for Sydney, Australia, with his partner, Stephen Goodfellow, recently a resident of San Franciso. Together, as Stangenwald and Goodfellow, they found a profitable field of enterprise taking portraits of American missionaries and views of Hawaiian scenery during what was to have been a temporary stay. Missionary titus Coan called Stangenwald “the chief artist” and “a physician (so reported),” and summed him up as “a pleasant and pious young man.” On February 10, Coan wrote that Stangenwald and Goodfellow “are now using up all the faces in Hilo, and they soon with be through.” Can added that their prices were comparatively moderate; they charged “3$ for the smallest plates in a neat case, and a frame in proportion to the size, the amount of gold in ornamentation.” This helpful missionary went so far as to enlist the help of his colleagues in Honolulu to assist Stangenwald and Goodfellow in establishing themselves in that town.

By March 26, Stangenwald and Goodfellow were advertising the imminent opening of the daguerreian rooms next to the shoe store of J. H. Woods in Honolulu. After a week engaged in setting up their equipment and adjusting there work to the light, they were prepared to take portraits and “correct views of gentlemen’ residences, vessels, machinery and parts of the city … without reversing.” When a devastating outbreak of smallpox hit Honolulu in May, Goodfellow elected to dissolve his partnership with Stangenwald and resume his voyage to Australia. Stangenwald decided to remain in Hawaii.”

Peter E. Palmquist and Thomas R. Kailbourn. Pioneer Photographers of the Far West: A Biographical Dictionary 1840-1865. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 515.

Unknown maker (American)
[Portrait of an Unidentified Daguerreotypist Displaying a Selection of Daguerreotypes] / Daguerreotypist (?) Displaying Thirteen Daguerreotypes
1845
Daguerreotype, hand-coloured
1/6 plate
Image: 6.7 x 5.2cm (2 5/8 x 2 1/16 in.)
Mat: 8.3 x 7cm (3 1/4 x 2 3/4 in.)
Open: 8.9 x 15.2cm (3 1/2 x 6 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Unknown maker (American)
[Chinese Woman with a Mandolin]
1860
Daguerreotype, hand-coloured
1/4 plate
Image: 9 x 6.5cm (3 9/16 x 2 9/16 in.)
Mat: 10.8 x 8.3cm (4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in.)
Open: 12.7 x 20.6cm (5 x 8 1/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Unknown maker (American)
[Chinese Woman with a Mandolin] (detail)
1860
Daguerreotype, hand-coloured
1/4 plate
Image: 9 x 6.5cm (3 9/16 x 2 9/16 in.)
Mat: 10.8 x 8.3cm (4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in.)
Open: 12.7 x 20.6cm (5 x 8 1/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Unknown maker (American)
Portrait of a Girl Holding a Doll
c. 1845
Daguerreotype
Framed: 24.1 x 19.1cm (9 1/2 x 7 1/2 in.)
Graham Nash Collection

Auguste Belloc (French, 1800-1867)
Portrait of a Woman
May 1844
Daguerreotype
Image: 10.2 x 7.6cm (4 x 3 in.)
Framed: 24.8 x 22.9cm (9 3/4 x 9 in.)
Graham Nash Collection

Auguste Belloc (French, 1800-1867)
Portrait of a Woman (detail)
May 1844
Daguerreotype
Image: 10.2 x 7.6cm (4 x 3 in.)
Framed: 24.8 x 22.9cm (9 3/4 x 9 in.)
Graham Nash Collection

Auguste Belloc (French, 1800-1867) was born in the beginning of the 19th century, in Montrabe, located in the Southwest of France (Haute-Garonne).

He began his career as a painter of miniatures and watercolours. Belloc’s first photographic studio was mentioned in 1851. Practicing daguerreotype, he became involved in wet collodion development and improved the wax coating process, helping the pictures to keep their wet-like luster.

But the most important research he led was about color stereoscopy (3 dimensional photography). Known for his nudes and portraits, he looked for the best way to express the reality and found a new method. This practice considered erotic photography and was declared illegal by the police in 1856 and 1860.

Marion Perceval. “Auguste Belloc,” in John Hannavy (ed.,). Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography. Routledge, 2008, p. 146.

The J. Paul Getty Museum
1200 Getty Center Drive
Los Angeles, California 90049

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

The J. Paul Getty Museum website

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Nov

Exhibition: ‘Photography – A Victorian Sensation’ at the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, documentary photography, English artist, exhibition, existence, gallery website, Henry Fox Talbot, intimacy, landscape, light, London, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space, time and works on paper
Tags: 1851 Great Exhibition, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Amateur photographers: Julia Margaret Cameron, Balmoral Castle, Balmoral Castle from the N.W., British art, British photography, British stereoscopes, Calotype, Calotype images, calotype photography equipment, Cramb Brothers, Cramb Brothers Dr E W Pritchard, D.O. Hill and Robert Adamson, daguerreotype, Daguerreotype camera, daguerreotype portraits in Scotland, Dr E W Pritchard, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dr John Adamson, early cameras, early photographic processes, early photography, Edinburgh, Elliot & Fry, Elliot & Fry Alfred Lord Tennyson, Francis Bedford, Francis Bedford Lydstep - the Natural Arch, Gathering Water Lilies, George Washington Wilson, George Washington Wilson Balmoral Castle from the N.W., Giroux et Cie, Giroux et Cie Daguerreotype camera, Great Eastern, Henry Frederick Van Der Weyde, Henry Frederick Van Der Weyde Richard Mansfield as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Hill and Adamson, Hill and Adamson Mrs Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall, Idylls of the King, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Isambard Kingdom Brunel Standing Before the Launching Chains of the Great Eastern, Julia Margaret Cameron, Julia Margaret Cameron Alfred Tennyson, London School of Photography, London School of Photography Portrait of a horse held by a groom, London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company, London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company The Armstrong Trophy and Naval Court, Lydstep - the Natural Arch, Marcus Guttenberg, Marcus Guttenberg Portrait group of four unidentified children, Mayall, Mayall The Queen gazing at a bust of Prince Albert, Mrs Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall, National Museum of Scotland, niagara falls, Niagara Falls from the American side, Pencil of Nature, Peter Henry Emerson, Peter Henry Emerson Gathering Water Lilies, Photography - A Victorian Sensation, Platt D Babbitt Niagara Falls from the American side, Platt D. Babbitt, Poet Laureate, Portrait group of four unidentified children, Portrait of a horse held by a groom, Prince Albert, Queen Victoria, Richard Mansfield, Richard Mansfield as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Howlett, Robert Howlett Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Robert Howlett Isambard Kingdom Brunel Standing Before the Launching Chains of the Great Eastern, Ross and Thomson, Ross and Thomson Unknown little girl sitting on a striped cushion, Salt print, Scottish daguerreotypes, Scottish photographer, Scottish photographers, Scottish photography, Scottish portrait photography, Scottish stereoscopes, Talbot The Pencil of Nature, Talbot's calotype photography equipment, Talbot's home-made camera, The Armstrong Trophy and Naval Court, The Ladder, The Open Door, The Pencil of Nature, The Queen gazing at a bust of Prince Albert, Thomas Davidson, TR Williams, Unknown little girl sitting on a striped cushion, William England, William Henry Fox Talbot, William Henry Fox Talbot The Ladder, William Henry Fox Talbot The Open Door

Exhibition dates: 19th June – 22nd November 2015

William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877)
The Open Door
1844-1846
Salt print from a calotype negative
Plate VI from the Pencil of Nature, the first book to be illustrated with photographs
© National Museums Scotland

In our contemporary image-saturated, comprehensively mediated way of life it is difficult for us to understand how “sensational” photography would have been in the Victorian era. Imagine never having seen a photograph of a landscape, city or person before. To then be suddenly presented with a image written in light, fixed before the eye of the beholder, would have been a profoundly magical experience for the viewer. Here was a new, progressive reality imaged for all to see. The society of the spectacle as photograph had arrived.

Here was the expansion of scopophilic society, our desire to derive pleasure from looking. That fetishistic desire can never be completely fulfilled, so we have to keep looking again and again, constantly reinforcing the ocular gratification of images. Photographs became shrines to memory. They also became shrines to the memory of desire itself.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Many thankx to the National Museum of Scotland for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Hill and Adamson

Dr Sara Stevenson, photo historian, talks about the origins of Hill and Adamson’s partnership and their photography skills.

Scottish daguerreotypes

Dr Alison Morrison Low, Principal Curator of Science, National Museums Scotland, talks about daguerreotype portraits in Scotland and the work of Thomas Davidson.

Amateur photographers: Julia Margaret Cameron

Anne Lyden, International Photography Curator, National Galleries of Scotland, talks about photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.

George Washington Wilson

Emeritus Professor Roger Taylor talks about George Washington Wilson’s life and work.

TR Williams

Dr Brian May, CBE, musician and collector of stereo-photography talks about the photography of TR Williams.

William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877)
The Ladder
1844-1846
Salt print from a calotype negative
Plate XIV from the Pencil of Nature, the first book to be illustrated with photographs
© National Museums Scotland

Calotype images are not as pin-sharp as daguerreotypes, but they had one great advantage: more than one image could be produced from a single negative. Yet both processes were cumbersome and very expensive. What was needed was a faster, cheaper method to really fuel the fire of Victorian photomania.

Giroux et Cie
Daguerreotype camera
1839
© National Museums Scotland

This camera was bought by WHF Talbot in October 1839.

William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877)
Talbot’s home-made camera
1840s
© National Museums Scotland

Some of his early equipment appears to have been constructed to his design by the estate carpenter.

William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877)
Talbot’s calotype photography equipment
c. 1840
© National Museums Scotland

Camera, printing frame, small domestic iron and chemical balance.

Platt D Babbitt (American, 1822-1879)
Niagara Falls from the American side
c. 1855
Whole plate daguerreotype
Platt D Babbitt ensconced himself at a leading tourist spot beside Niagara Falls, from 1853
© Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland

Platt D Babbitt (American, 1822-1879)
Niagara Falls from the American side (detail)
c. 1855
Whole plate daguerreotype
© Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland

Platt D Babbitt ensconced himself at a leading tourist spot beside Niagara Falls, from 1853.

Ross and Thomson of Edinburgh
Unknown little girl sitting on a striped cushion holding a framed portrait of a man, possibly her dead father
1847-1860
Ninth-plate daguerreotype
© Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland

D.O. Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
Mrs Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall, a Newhaven fishwife, famous for her beauty and self-confidence
1843-1848
From an album presented by Hill to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1850
Salt print from a calotype negative,
© National Museums Scotland

Robert Howlett (British, 1831-1858)
Isambard Kingdom Brunel Standing Before the Launching Chains of the Great Eastern]
November 1857
Carte-de-visite
Sold by the London Stereoscopic Company
© Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland

Calotype photographs from an album compiled by Dr John Adamson, among the earliest in Scotland

Photograph burnt in on glass, a group of workmen, Paris 1858

A major exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland explores the Victorian craze for photography and examine how it has influenced the way we capture and share images today, when more photographs are taken in two minutes than were taken in the whole of the 19th century. Photography: A Victorian Sensation takes visitors back to the very beginnings of photography in 1839, tracing its evolution from a scientific art practised by a few wealthy individuals to a widely available global phenomenon, practised on an industrial scale.

The exhibition showcases National Museums Scotland’s extensive early photographic collections, including Hill and Adamson’s iconic images of Victorian Edinburgh, and the Howarth-Loomes collection, much of which has never been publicly displayed. Highlights include an early daguerreotype camera once owned by William Henry Fox Talbot; an 1869 photograph of Alfred, Lord Tennyson by Julia Margaret Cameron; a carte-de-visite depicting Queen Victoria and Prince Albert as a middle-class couple and an early daguerreotype of the Niagara Falls. The exhibition covers the period from 1839 to 1900, by which point photography had permeated the whole of society, becoming a global sensation. Images and apparatus illustrate the changing techniques used by photographers and studios during the 19th century, and the ways in which photography became an increasingly accessible part of everyday life.

From the pin-sharp daguerreotype and the more textured calotype process of the early years, to the wet collodion method pioneered in 1851, photography developed as both a science and an art form. Visitors can follow the cross-channel competition between photographic trailblazers Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot, enter the world of the 1851 Great Exhibition and snap their own pictures inside the photographer’s studio. They can also discover the fascinating stories of some of the people behind hundreds of Victorian photographs. These range from poignant mementos of loved ones to comical shots and early attempts at image manipulation. Photographs of family members were important mementos for Victorians and on display is jewellery incorporating both images of deceased loved ones and elaborately woven locks of their hair.

Sharing images of loved ones drove the craze for collecting cartes-de-visite. The average middle class Victorian home would have had an album full of images of friends and family members as well as never-before-seen famous faces ranging from royalty to well-known authors and infamous criminals. Such images sold in their hundreds of thousands. Also hugely popular were stereoscopes, relatively affordable devices which allowed people to view 3D photographs of scenes from around the world from the comfort of their own homes. On display are a range of ornate stereoscopes as well as early photographs showing views from countries ranging from Egypt to Australia. The increasing affordability of photographs fuelled the demand for the services of photographic studios, and visitors have the opportunity to get a taste of a Victorian studio by posing for their own pictures. They also have the chance to see typical objects from the photographer’s studio, including a cast iron head rest, used to keep subjects still for a sufficient period of time to capture their image.

Alison Morrison Low, Principal Curator of Science at National Museums Scotland commented: “Just as today we love to document the world around us photographically, so too were the Victorians obsessed with taking and sharing photographs. Photography: A Victorian Sensation will transport visitors back to the 19th century, linking the Victorian craze for photography with the role it plays in everyday life today. The period we’re examining may be beyond living memory, but the people featured in these early images are not so different from us.”

A book, Scottish Photography: The First 30 Years by Sara Stevenson and Alison Morrison-Low has been published by NMSEnterprises Publishing to accompany Photography: A Victorian Sensation.

Text from the National Museum of Scotland website

Taken by a photographer of the London School of Photography, based at Newgate Street and Regent Circus, London
Portrait of a horse held by a groom
1858-1860
Quarter- plate ambrotype
© Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland

George Washington Wilson (Scottish, 1823-1893)
Balmoral Castle from the N.W.
1863
Stereo albumen prints from a wet collodion negative
© Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland

Staff photographer of the London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company (probably William England)
The Armstrong Trophy and Naval Court
1862
Stereo albumen prints from a wet collodion negative
From the series of International Exhibition of 1862, No. 133
© Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland

It shows material lent to the exhibition by the Northern Lighthouse Board, Edinburgh, now in the collections of National Museums Scotland.

Mayall, London & Brighton
The Queen, gazing at a bust of Prince Albert, together with the Prince and Princess of Wales, married 10 March 1863
1863
Carte-de-visite
© Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland

Cramb Brothers, of Glasgow
Dr E W Pritchard, His Wife, Mother-in-Law and Family
1865
Carte-de-visite
© Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland

Edward William Pritchard (1825-65) was notorious for poisoning with antimony his wife and mother-in-law, both seen in this family portrait in happier days. He was the last person to be publicly executed in Glasgow.

Cramb Brothers, of Glasgow
Dr E W Pritchard
1865
Carte-de-visite
© Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland

Cramb Brothers advertised this image, Price 1 shilling each. They stated: These Portraits are all Copyright, and bear the Publishers’ Names. Legal Proceedings will be taken against any one offering Pirated Copies for Sale.

Marcus Guttenberg (British born Poland, 1828-1891)
Portrait group of four unidentified children
1860s-1870s
Carte-de-visite
© Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland

Elliot & Fry, 55 Baker Street, Portman Square, London
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
1865-1886
Carte-de-visite
© Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland

Tennyson (1809-1892) became Poet Laureate in 1850, after the death of William Wordsworth; his poems In Memoriam (1850) and Idylls of the King (1859) were hugely popular during Victorian times, but less so today.

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879)
Alfred Tennyson
3 June 1870
Albumen print from a wet collodion negative
© Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland

Henry Frederick Van Der Weyde, 182 Regent Street, London (English born Holland, 1838-1924)
Richard Mansfield as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
c. 1888
© Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland

Mansfield made his name in the title role of R.L. Stevenson’s novella, made into a play and shown in London in 1888.

Henry Frederick Van Der Weyde, 182 Regent Street, London (English born Holland, 1838-1924)
Richard Mansfield as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (detail)
c. 1888
© Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland

Francis Bedford (English, 1815-1894)
Lydstep – the Natural Arch
1860s
Half of a stereoscopic albumen print
From his series South Wales Illustrated
© Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland

Peter Henry Emerson (British, 1856-1936)
Gathering Water Lilies
1886
Platinum print
© Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland

Peter Henry Emerson (British, 1856-1936)
Gathering Water Lilies (detail)
1886
Platinum print
© Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland

National Museum of Scotland
Chambers Street,
Edinburgh,
EH1 1JF
Phone: 0300 123 6789

Opening hours:
Daily: 10.00 – 17.00
Christmas Day: Closed
Boxing Day: 12.00 – 17.00
New Year’s Day: 12.00 – 17.00

National Museum of Scotland website

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Oct

Exhibition: ‘In Focus: Animalia’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: African photography, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, installation art, jewellery, landscape, light, memory, photographic series, photography, psychological, reality, space, time, William Eggleston and works on paper
Tags: Alfred Stieglitz, Alfred Stieglitz Spiritual America, American animal photography, american artist, american photographer, American photography, André Kertész Wooden Mouse and Duck, Andre Kertesz, Animalia, British photographer, British photography, Capt. Horatio Ross, Capt. Horatio Ross Dead stag in a sling, Chong Ju, daguerreotype, Daniel Naudé, Daniel Naudé Africanis 17, David Webb Jeweled Toad, Dead stag in a sling, Dog sitting on a table, Dog sitting on a table daguerreotype, Eadweard J. Muybridge, Eadweard J. Muybridge Running (Galloping), Eadweard Muybridge, Frank Haes, Frank Haes The South African Cheetah, Frank Haes The Tiger, Frank Haes The Zebra, Goodbye to a Horse, Hiro, Hiro David Webb Jeweled Toad, Horatio Ross Dead stag in a sling, In Focus: Animalia, In the Box/Out of the Box, j. paul getty museum, Jean-Gabriel Eynard, Keith Carter, Keith Carter Goodbye to a Horse, Korean artist, Korean photographer, Korean photography, los angeles, Memphis, photographs of animals in zoos, photographs of caged animals, photography of animals, Portrait of a Girl with her Deer, Portrait of a Girl with her Deer daguerreotype, Revenge of the Goldfish, Running (Galloping), Sandy Skoglund, Sandy Skoglund Revenge of the Goldfish, Soon Tae (Tai) Hong, Soon Tae (Tai) Hong Chong Ju, South African artist, South African photographer, South African photography, Spiritual America, stereoscopes of animals, Taryn Simon, Taryn Simon White Tiger (Kenny), taxidermied game, The South African Cheetah, White Tiger (Kenny), William Eggleston, William Eggleston Memphis, William Wegman, William Wegman In the Box/Out of the Box, Wooden Mouse and Duck, working animals, Yasuhiro Wakabayashi

Exhibition dates: 26th May – 18th October 2015

Daniel Naudé (South African, b. 1984)
Africanis 17. Danielskuil, Northern Cape, 25 February 2010
2010
Chromogenic print
60 x 60cm (23 5/8 x 23 5/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Daniel Naudé

Some of the photographs in this postings are sad, others are just gruesome.

One animal’s in/humanity to many others.

Marcus

.
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Taryn Simon (American, b. 1975)
White Tiger (Kenny), Selective Inbreeding Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge and Foundation Eureka Springs, Arkansas
2007
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Taryn Simon

In the United States, all living white tigers are the result of selective inbreeding to artificially create the genetic conditions that lead to white fur, ice-blue eyes and a pink nose. Kenny was born to a breeder in Bentonville, Arkansas on February 3, 1999. As a result of inbreeding, Kenny is mentally retarded and has significant physical limitations. Due to his deep-set nose, he has difficulty breathing and closing his jaw, his teeth are severely malformed and he limps from abnormal bone structure in his forearms. The three other tigers in Kenny’s litter are not considered to be quality white tigers as they are yellow-coated, crosseyed, and knock-kneed.

Frank Haes (British, 1832-1916)
The South African Cheetah (Felis Jubata.)
c. 1865
Albumen silver print
8.2 x 17.2 cm (3 1/4 x 6 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Frank Haes (British, 1832-1916)
The South African Cheetah (Felis Jubata.) (detail)
c. 1865
Albumen silver print
8.2 x 17.2cm (3 1/4 x 6 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Frank Haes (British, 1832-1916)
The Zebra, Burchell’s, or Dauw. (Asinus Burchellii.)
c. 1865
Albumen silver print
8.3 x 17.2cm (3 1/4 x 6 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Frank Haes (British, 1832-1916)
The Zebra, Burchell’s, or Dauw. (Asinus Burchellii.) (detail)
c. 1865
Albumen silver print
8.3 x 17.2 cm (3 1/4 x 6 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Frank Haes (British, 1832-1916)
The Tiger. (Felis Tigris.)
c. 1865
Albumen silver print
8.2 x 17.1cm (3 1/4 x 6 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Frank Haes (British, 1832-1916)
The Tiger. (Felis Tigris.) (detail)
c. 1865
Albumen silver print
8.2 x 17.1cm (3 1/4 x 6 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Capt. Horatio Ross (British, 1801-1886)
[Dead stag in a sling]
c. 1850s – 1860s
Albumen silver print
27.9 x 33.2cm (11 x 13 1/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Capt. Horatio Ross (British, 1801-1886)
[Dead stag in a sling] (detail)
c. 1850s – 1860s
Albumen silver print
27.9 x 33.2cm (11 x 13 1/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Animals have never been camera shy – almost since the introduction of the medium in 1839, they have appeared in photographs. While early photographs typically depicted animals that were tame, captive, or dead, modern and contemporary artists have delved into the interdependent relationship between man and beast.

Drawn entirely from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s photographs collection, In Focus: Animalia, on view May 26-October 18, 2015 at the Getty Center, illustrates some of the complex relationships between people and animals. From an intimate studio portrait with dog and owner to the calculated cruelty of inbreeding practices, these photographs offer nuanced views of the animal kingdom.

“It is easy to understand why artists choose animals for their subject matter – their lives are profoundly intertwined with our own, often eliciting powerful emotions,” says Timothy Potts, Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Whether seen as beloved pets, kept in zoos, or threatened by human activity, animals continue to fascinate and act as catalysts for artistic creativity. This exhibition highlights the many different ways in which animals as subject matter have served as an endearing theme for photographers throughout history right up to the present day.”

Photographs of pets, working animals, taxidermied game, and exotic beasts in newly opened zoos circulated widely during the second half of the 19th century. Early daguerreotypes required a subject to remain still for several minutes to ensure that the image would not blur, so photographing moving animals posed a problem. In Study of a White Foal (about 1845) the Swiss nobleman and amateur daguerreotypist Jean-Gabriel Eynard (1775-1863), focused the lens of his camera on a foal at rest, a moment when its movements were limited, in order to make a successful picture.

By the early 1850s most major cities in Europe and America could boast studios specialising in daguerreotype photography. Customers sat for portraits in order to preserve their own images, and also commissioned photographs of their family members and loved ones, including pets. In Dog Sitting on a Table (about 1854; artist unknown) an eager dog is photographed sitting on a tasseled pedestal. The slight blurring of the head, indicating movement during exposure, betrays the barely contained energy of this otherwise well-trained animal.

The mid-19th century saw increasing demand for stereoscopic photographs – two nearly identical prints made with a double lens camera that created a three-dimensional image when viewed in a stereoscope viewer. Frank Haes (British, 1832-1916) made a reputation for himself by photographing animals at the London Zoo, much to the delight of those fascinated by hippos, lions, zebras, and other exotic beasts. Eadweard J. Muybridge’s (American, born England, 1830-1904) pioneering work in motion studies are best remembered for his depictions of animals. Devising a system for successively tripping the shutters of up to 24 cameras, Muybridge created the illusion of movement in a galloping horse.

Artists have also relied on animals to convey symbolism and to represent fantastical worlds. A photograph by Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) of a harnessed and castrated horse serves as a critical metaphor for American identity in the early 1920s, which Stieglitz viewed as materialist and culturally bankrupt. An elaborately staged photograph by Sandy Skoglund (American, b. 1946) presents a dreamlike atmosphere filled with handmade, larger-than-life sculptures of goldfish that create a scene at once playful and disturbing. Recently-acquired works by Daniel Naudé (South African, b. 1984) depict portraits of wild dogs the photographer found on the arid plains of South Africa. Made from a low vantage point, individual dogs are cast against broad views of the landscape, and the photographs harken back to the equestrian portrait tradition popular during the 17th century. Taryn Simon’s photograph of a caged white tiger (American, b. 1975) demonstrates the oftentimes debilitating results of the inbreeding practices utilised to obtain highly desired traits such as a white coat. This work illuminates the mistakes and failures of human intervention into a territory governed by natural selection.

In Focus: Animalia is on view May 26 – October 18, 2015 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center. The exhibition will be accompanied by the publication of Animals in Photographs (Getty Publications) by Arpad Kovacs.

Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Sandy Skoglund (American, b. 1946)
Revenge of the Goldfish
1981
Color photograph
27 1/2″ x 35″
Individually hand-made ceramic goldfish by the artist, with live models in painted set
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© 1981 Sandy Skoglund

Like many of her other works, such as Radioactive Cats and Fox Games, the piece is a set composed of props and human models, which Skoglund poses and then photographs. In the piece, a child sits on the edge of a bed while an adult sleeps next to him. The set of the scene is a monochromatic blue, with contrasting bright orange goldfish floating through the room. The goldfish in the piece were sculpted by Skoglund out of terracotta and bring an element of fantasy to an otherwise normal scene. According to Skoglund, “If the fish are eliminated the image shows nothing unusual; just a room with two people in bed.” The piece was first on display at the Saint Louis Art Museum in 1981. Since then, the piece has been in several collections at various museums, including Smith College Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Akron Art Museum, and Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Smith College Museum of Art also owns the original installation.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Eadweard J. Muybridge (American, born England, 1830-1904)
Running (Galloping)
1878-1881
Iron salt process
18.9 x 22.6cm (7 7/16 x 8 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Unknown maker (American)
Portrait of a Girl with her Deer
c. 1854
Daguerreotype 1/4 plate
Image: 6.9 x 9cm (2 11/16 x 3 9/16 in.)
Plate: 8.1 x 10.7cm (3 3/16 x 4 3/16 in.)
Mat: 8.2 x 10.6cm (3 3/16 x 4 3/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Unknown maker (American)
Portrait of a Girl with her Deer (detail)
c. 1854
Daguerreotype 1/4 plate
Image: 6.9 x 9cm (2 11/16 x 3 9/16 in.)
Plate: 8.1 x 10.7cm (3 3/16 x 4 3/16 in.)
Mat: 8.2 x 10.6cm (3 3/16 x 4 3/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

William Eggleston (American, b. 1939)
Memphis
Negative 1971; print 1974
Dye imbibition print
32.9 x 47.9cm (12 15/16 x 18 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

Keith Carter (American, b. 1948)
Goodbye to a Horse
1993
Gelatin silver print
39 x 39.2cm (15 3/8 x 15 7/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© Keith Carter

André Kertész (American born Hungary, 1894-1985)
[Wooden Mouse and Duck]
1929
Gelatin silver print
20.9 x 16.7cm (8 1/4 x 6 9/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Estate of André Kertész

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
Spiritual America 
1923
Gelatin silver print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Unknown maker (American)
[Dog sitting on a table]
c. 1854
Hand-coloured daguerreotype 1/6 plate
Image: 6.8 x 5.7cm (2 11/16 x 2 1/4 in.)
Mat: 8.3 x 7cm (3 1/4 x 2 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Hiro (American born China, 1930-2021)
David Webb, Jeweled Toad, New York, 1963
1963
Dye imbibition print
50.2 x 39.1cm (19 3/4 x 15 3/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Hiro

Legendary photographer Yasuhiro Wakabayashi, known as “Hiro,” the man whose fashion photography revolutionized the medium as an art form and defined the aesthetic of a generation, died this week at the age of 90.

Though the son of Japanese parents, Hiro was born in Shanghai, China, in 1930, one year before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. He and his family eventually repatriated to Japan in 1946, but it wasn’t long after that he relocated to New York City. There, Hiro became an apprentice to Richard Avedon, whose iconic and exclusively black-and-white photography brought a new facet to fashion photography: stark portraiture that bordered on the surreal and often showed celebrities and other high-profile figures as they were, not gilded by fashion editors.

By 1956, Hiro had become a staff photographer for the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar, where he remained until the mid-1970s. He opened his own New York studio in 1958, just months after the untimely death of fashion icon Christian Dior. A decade earlier, Dior had debuted his “New Look,” which was a strikingly architectural approach to fashion that emphasized the female figure by casting it in dresses designed to accentuate a “figure eight,” with pronounced shoulders and hips and a tiny waist. Dior’s simple silhouettes dominated the fashion and art world just as Hiro was coming of age into it.

Hiro, similar to his mentor Avedon, dealt in stark, clean images with elements of the surreal. One collector described his work as a “simple but elegant design with sophisticated technique and striking color.”

“A diamond-and-ruby Harry Winston necklace draped on the hoof of a Black Angus steer. A pyramid of Cartier watches set in a luminous lunar landscape of vivid green and shocking blue. A mysterious woman in the dunes at twilight, floating like a ghost off the ground in a windblown black nightgown,” wrote the New York Times’s Robert D. McFadden in a description of Hiro’s most famous images. His work was more “brilliant and infinitely more beautiful than reality.”

Beyond simply beautiful, Hiro’s photography is known for its precision: light, lines, objects all precisely placed and measured to create works reminiscent of surrealist artists such as Salvador Dali and Renee Magritte. The effect was something phantasmagorical but adamantly, elegantly real.

His life itself was surreal. His father was a Japanese linguist living in Shanghai putatively for the purpose of creating a Japanese-Chinese dictionary. However, the New York Times noted in Hiro’s obituary, his father might have actually been a spy. Following the end of World War II, Hiro and his family returned home to a changed, and occupied, Japan reeling in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Amid that chaos, Hiro became “fascinated with Jeeps, Red Fox beer cans and other artifacts of American culture.” He collected fashion magazines and saved for a camera, honing his skills until he could travel to the United States, where he worked entry-level jobs until he was able to score the coveted New York apprenticeship with Avedon.

He became an American citizen in 1990.

Hiro eventually became so influential in fashion photography that American Photographer dedicated an issue entirely devoted to Hiro’s work, provocatively asking, “Is this man America’s greatest photographer?”

“Hiro stands as one of the pre-eminent photographers of his adopted country,” the 1982 magazine said. “With the pragmatic brilliance of a Renaissance master, Hiro has changed the way photographs look, and with an endlessly inventive technique has changed the way photographers work.”

Yasuhiro Wakabayashi is survived by his wife, designer Elizabeth Clark, two sons, and several grandchildren, as well as a remarkable body of work that will continue to live on far after.

Emily Zanotti. “Hiro Wakabayashi, 1930-2021,” on the Yahoo News! website August 20, 2021 [Online] Cited 25/12/2022

Soon Tae (Tai) Hong (South Korean, b. 1934)
Chong Ju
1970
Gelatin silver print
24.8 x 20cm (9 3/4 x 7 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Hong Soon Tae (Tai)

William Wegman (American, b. 1943)
In the Box/Out of the Box [right]
1971
Gelatin silver print
35.4 x 27.7cm (13 15/16 x 10 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© William Wegman

William Wegman (American, born 1943)
In the Box/Out of the Box [left]
1971
Gelatin silver print
35.5 x 27.7cm (14 x 10 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© William Wegman

The J. Paul Getty Museum
1200 Getty Center Drive
Los Angeles, California 90049

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

The J. Paul Getty Museum website

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Jul

Exhibition: ‘In Light of the Past’ at the National Gallery of Art, Washington

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, documentary photography, English artist, Eugene Atget, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, landscape, light, memory, Paris, photographic series, photography, portrait, Robert Frank, space, street photography, time and works on paper
Tags: 1920s avant-garde photography, 19th century photography, 25 Years of Photography at the National Gallery of Art, 291, 291 gallery, A Scene in York, A Scene in York: York Minster from Lop Lane, Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes, Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes The Letter, Alfred Steiglitz Camera Work, Alfred Stieglitz 291, alvin langdon coburn, American civil right photography, American civil rights, American Daguerreotypes, American fine art photography, American landscape, American modernism, American modernists, American modernists of the 1920s, American Photo-Secession, american photographer, American photography, American pictorialism, American Pictorialist photographs, American street photography, An Anaemic Little Spinner in a New England Cotton Mill, An Apple A Boulder A Mountain, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Arte Povera group, avant-garde photography, Édouard-Denis Baldus, Édouard-Denis Baldus Toulon Train Station, Black White and Things, British photography, Calotypes, Camera work, Carleton E. Watkins, Carleton E. Watkins Piwac Vernal Falls, Charles Nègre, Charles Nègre Market Scene at the Port of the Hotel de Ville, City of London, Clarence H. White The Hillside, Clarence White, conceptual photography, daguerreotype, Dr Guillaume-Benjamin-Amant Duchenne, Duchenne de Boulogne, Edward Steichen, Edward Steichen An Apple A Boulder A Mountain, Entering the Work, Eugène Cuvelier, Eugène Cuvelier Belle-Croix, Eugene Atget, Eugene Atget Saint-Cloud, Figure 63 Fright from Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, Fort Peck Dam Montana, French photography, Gertrude Käsebier, Giovanni Anselmo, Giovanni Anselmo Entering the Work, Gustave Le Gray, Gustave Le Gray The Pont du Carrousel Paris, György Kepes, György Kepes Juliet with Peacock Feather and Red Leaf, In Light of the Past, In Light of the Past: Celebrating 25 Years of Photography at the National Gallery of Art, In Light of the Past: Twenty-Five Years of Photography at the National Gallery of Art, industrial landscape, Irving Penn Woman with Roses, Italian Arte Povera group, John Milton L'Allegro, Julia Margaret Cameron, Julia Margaret Cameron The Mountain Nymph, Juliet with Peacock Feather and Red Leaf, Lee Friedlander, Lee Friedlander New York City, Lewis Hine, Lewis Hine An Anaemic Little Spinner in a New England Cotton Mill, Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn in Lafaurie Dress, Margaret Bourke-White, Margaret Bourke-White Fort Peck Dam Montana, Market Scene at the Port of the Hotel de Ville, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, Mechanism of human physiognomy, Mississippi Freedom Marcher, modern industrial landscape, National Child Labor Committee, National Gallery of Art Washington, New Topographics, New York City, paul strand, Paul Strand People Streets of New York, People Streets of New York, perceptive photography, Photo-Secession, photography and social reform, Photography at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, photography between the wars, physiognomy, Piwac Vernal Falls, Postwar Photography, pseudoscience, Robert Adams, Robert Adams Colorado Springs, Robert Frank, Robert Frank Black White and Things, Robert Frank City of London, Robert Frank Trolley - New Orleans, Robert Frank Woman/Paris, Roy DeCarava, Roy DeCarava Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Salted paper print, snapshots, social documentary photographers, social documentary photography, Southworth and Hawes, Southworth and Hawes The Letter, The Hillside, The Invention of Photography, The Letter, The Mountain Nymph Sweet Liberty, The Nineteenth Century: The Invention of Photography, The Pont du Carrousel Paris, Toulon Train Station, Trolley - New Orleans, William Henry Fox Talbot, William Henry Fox Talbot A Scene in York, Woman with Roses, York Minster from Lop Lane

Exhibition dates: 3rd May – 26th July 2015

Curators: The curators of In Light of the Past: Celebrating 25 Years of Photography at the National Gallery of Art are Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs, and Diane Waggoner, associate curator, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art.

Charles Nègre (French, 1820-1880)
Market Scene at the Port of the Hotel de Ville, Paris
before February 1852
Salted paper print
14.7 x 19.9cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund, 2003

What a great title for an exhibition. Photography always evidences light of the past, we live in light of the past (the light of the Sun takes just over 8 minutes to reach Earth) and, for whatever reason, human beings never seem to learn from mistakes, in light of the past history of the human race.

My favourites in this postings are the 19th century photographs, to which I am becoming further attuned the more I look at them. There is almost a point when you become psychologically enmeshed with their light, with the serenity of the images, a quality that most contemporary photographs seem to have lost. There is a quietness to their presence, a contemplation on the nature of the world through the pencil of nature that is captivating. You only have to look at Gustave Le Gray’s The Pont du Carrousel, Paris: View to the West from the Pont des Arts (1856-1858, below) to understand the everlasting, transcendent charisma of these images. Light, space, time, eternity.

Marcus

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Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

The Collection of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (110kb Word doc)

William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877)
A Scene in York: York Minster from Lop Lane
1845
Salted paper print
16.2 x 20.4cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Edward J. Lenkin Fund, Melvin and Thelma Lenkin Fund and Stephen G. Stein Fund, 2011

A British polymath equally adept in astronomy, chemistry, Egyptology, physics, and philosophy, Talbot spent years inventing a photographic process that created paper negatives, which were then used to make positive prints – the conceptual basis 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 just turned the corner and encountered this scene.

Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916)
Piwac, Vernal Falls, 300 feet, Yosemite
1861
Albumen print
39.9 x 52.3cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mary and David Robinson, 1995

The westward expansion of America opened up new opportunities for photographers such as Watkins and William Bell. Joining government survey expeditions, hired by railroad companies, or catering to tourists and the growing demand for grand views of nature, they created photographic landscapes that reached a broad audience of scientists, businessmen, and engineers, as well as curious members of the middle class. Watkins’s photographs of the sublime Yosemite Valley, which often recall landscape paintings of similar majestic subjects, helped convince Congress to pass a bill in 1864 protecting the area from development and commercial exploitation.

Eugène Cuvelier (French, 1837-1900)
Belle-Croix
1860s
Albumen print
25.4 x 34.3cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gail and Benjamin Jacobs for the Millennium Fund, 2007

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 demand for pictures of Paris, drew on the medium’s documentary abilities to record the nation’s architectural patrimony and the modernisation 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 point to dealing with movement, light, and changing atmospheric conditions during long exposure times.

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
The Pont du Carrousel, Paris: View to the West from the Pont des Arts
1856-1858
Albumen print
37.8 x 48.8cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund, 1995

Édouard-Denis Baldus (French, 1813-1889)
Toulon, Train Station
c. 1861
Albumen print
27.4 x 43.1cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund, 1995

In Light of the Past: Celebrating 25 Years of Photography at the National Gallery of Art, on view in the West Building from May 3 through July 26, 2015, will commemorate more than two decades of the Gallery’s robust photography program. Some 175 of the collection’s most exemplary holdings will reveal the evolution of the art of photography, from its birth in 1839 to the late 1970s. In Light of the Past is one of three stellar exhibitions that will commemorate the 25th anniversary of the National Gallery of Art’s commitment to photography acquisitions, exhibitions, scholarly catalogues, and programs.

“In Light of the Past includes some of the rarest and most compelling photographs ever created,” said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art, Washington. “It also honours the generous support of our donors who have enabled us to achieve this new place of prominence for photography at the Gallery.

About the exhibition

In Light of the Past begins with exceptional 19th-century salted paper prints, daguerreotypes, and albumen prints by acclaimed early practitioners such as William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884), Roger Fenton (1819-1869), Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), Albert Sands Southworth (1811-1894), and Josiah Johnson Hawes (1808-1901). It also displays works by American expeditionary photographers, including William Bell (1830-1910) and Carleton E. Watkins (1829-1916).

The exhibition continues with late 19th- and early 20th-century American Pictorialist photographs by Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), Clarence H. White (1871-1925), Gertrude Käsebier (1852-1934), and Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966), among others, as well as European masters such as Eugène Atget (1857-1927). The exhibition also examines the international photographic modernism of artists such as Paul Strand (1890-1976), André Kertész (1894-1985), Marianne Brandt (1893-1983), László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), and Ilse Bing (1899-1998) before turning to the mid-20th century, where exceptional work by Walker Evans (1903-1975), Robert Frank (b. 1924), Harry Callahan (1912-1999), Irving Penn (1917-2009), Lee Friedlander (b. 1934), and Diane Arbus (1923-1971) will be on view.

The exhibition concludes with pictures from the 1960s and 1970s, showcasing works by photographers such as Robert Adams (b. 1937), Lewis Baltz (1945-2014), and William Eggleston (b. 1939), as well as Mel Bochner (b. 1940) and Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), which demonstrate the diverse practices that invigorated photography during these decades.

Press release from the National Gallery of Art

Albert Sands Southworth (American, 1811-1894) and Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, 1808-1901)
The Letter
c. 1850
Daguerreotype
Plate: 20.3 x 15.2cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund, 1999

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 by exposing a silver-coated copper plate to light and then treating it with chemicals to bring out the image. The heyday of the technique was the 1840s and 1850s, when it was used primarily for making portraits. The daguerreotype’s long exposure time usually resulted in frontal, frozen postures and stern facial expressions; this picture’s pyramidal composition and strong sentiments of friendship and companionship are characteristic of Southworth and Hawes’s innovative approach.

Clarence H. White (American, 1871-1925)
The Hillside
c. 1898
Gum dichromate print
20.8 x 15.88cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund, 2008

The Photo-Secession

At the turn of the century in America, Alfred Stieglitz and his colleague Edward Steichen led the movement to establish photography’s status as a fine art. In 1902 Stieglitz founded an organisation called the Photo-Secession, consisting of young artists who shared his belief in the creative potential of the medium. Many of the photographers featured here were members of the group, including Gertrude Käsebier, Clarence White, and Alvin Langdon Coburn. Through the exhibitions Stieglitz organised in his New York gallery, called 291, and the essays he published in his influential quarterly, Camera Work, he and the Photo-Secession promoted the Pictorialist aesthetic of softly textured, painterly pictures that elicit emotion and appeal to the imagination. Occasionally the photographers’ compositions refer to other works of art, such as Steichen’s portrait of his friend Auguste Rodin, whose pose recalls one of the sculptor’s most famous works, The Thinker. Influenced by the modern European and American painting, sculpture, and drawing he exhibited at 291, Stieglitz lost interest in the Photo-Secession in the early 1910s and began to explore a more straightforward expression.

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Saint-Cloud
1926
Albumen print
22.2 x 18.1cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon and Patrons’ Permanent Fund, 2006

Using a cumbersome camera mounted on a tripod, Atget recorded the myriad facets of Paris and its environs at the turn of the century. Transforming ordinary scenes into poetic evocations, he created a visual compendium of the objects, architecture, and landscapes that were expressive of French culture and its history. He sold his photographs to artists, architects, and craftsmen, as well as to libraries and museums interested in the vanishing old city. Throughout his career he returned repeatedly to certain subjects and discovered that the variations caused by changing light, atmosphere, and season provided inexhaustible subjects for the perceptive photographer.

Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879)
The Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty
June 1866
Albumen print
36.1 x 26.7cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, New Century Fund, 1997

Ensconced in the intellectual and artistic circles of midcentury England, Cameron manipulated focus and light 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 poem L’Allegro. Describing the happy life of one who finds pleasure and beauty in the countryside, the poem includes the lines:

Come, and trip it as ye go
On the light fantastic toe;
And in thy right hand lead with thee,
The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty.

Dr Guillaume-Benjamin-Amant Duchenne (de Boulogne) (French, 1806-1875)
Figure 63, “Fright” from “Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine (Mechanism of human physiognomy)” (1862)
1854-1855
Albumen print
21.5 × 16cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund, 2015

A neurologist, physiologist, and photographer, 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 then photographed his subjects to establish a precise visual lexicon of human emotions, such as pain, surprise, fear, and sadness. In 1862 he included this photograph representing fright in a treatise on physiognomy (a pseudoscience that assumes a relationship between external appearance and internal character), which enjoyed broad popularity among artists and scientists.

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
An Anaemic Little Spinner in a New England Cotton Mill (North Pownal, Vermont)
1910
Gelatin silver print
24.1 × 19.2cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund, 2015

Trained as a sociologist and initially employed as a teacher, Hine used the camera both as a research tool and an instrument of social reform. One of the earliest and most influential social documentary photographers of his time, he made many pictures under the auspices of the National Child Labor Committee, an organisation formed in 1904 to promote better working conditions for children. Hine’s focus on the thin, frail body of this barefoot twelve-year-old spinner, who stands before rows of bobbins in the mill where she worked, was meant to illustrate the unhealthy effects of her employment. Photographs like this one were crucial to the campaign to change American child labor laws in the early twentieth century.

In Light of the Past: Twenty-Five Years of Photography at the National Gallery of Art

Georgia O’Keeffe and the Alfred Stieglitz Estate laid the foundation of the photography collection of the National Gallery of Art in 1949 with their donation of 1,650 Stieglitz photographs, an unparalleled group known as the Key Set. Yet the Gallery did not start actively acquiring photographs until 1990, when it launched an initiative to build a collection of works by European and American photographers from throughout the history of the medium and mount major exhibitions with scholarly publications. Now including nearly fifteen thousand prints, the collection encompasses the rich diversity of photographic practice from fine art to scientific and amateur photography, as well as photojournalism. It is distinguished by its large holdings of works by many of the medium’s most acclaimed masters, such as Paul Strand, Walker Evans, André Kertész, Ilse Bing, Robert Frank, Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, Gordon Parks, Irving Penn, and Robert Adams, among others.

In Light of the Past celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1990 initiative by presenting some of the Gallery’s finest photographs made from the early 1840s to the late 1970s. It is divided into four sections arranged chronologically. The first traces the evolution of the art of photography during its first decades in the work of early British, French, and American practitioners. The second looks at the contributions of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographers, from Stieglitz and the American Pictorialists to European masters such as Eugène Atget. The third section examines the international photographic modernism of the 1920s and 1930s, and the fourth features seminal mid-twentieth-century photographers. The exhibition concludes with pictures representing the varied practices of those working in the late 1960s and 1970s.

The Nineteenth Century: The Invention of Photography

In 1839 a new means of visual representation was announced to a startled world: photography. Although the medium was immediately and enthusiastically embraced by the public at large, photographers themselves spent the ensuing decades experimenting with techniques and debating the nature of this new invention. The works in this section suggest the range of questions addressed by these earliest practitioners. Was photography best understood as an art or a science? What subjects should photographs depict, what purpose should they serve, and what should they look like? Should photographers work within the aesthetics established in other arts, such as painting, or explore characteristics that seemed unique to the medium? This first generation of photographers became part scientists as they mastered a baffling array of new processes and learned how to handle their equipment and material. Yet they also grappled with aesthetic issues, such as how to convey the tone, texture, and detail of multicoloured reality in a monochrome medium. They often explored the same subjects that had fascinated artists for centuries – portraits, landscapes, genre scenes, and still lifes – but they also discovered and exploited the distinctive ways in which the camera frames and presents the world.

Photography at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

In the late nineteenth century, improvements in technology and processing, along with the invention of small handheld cameras such as the Kodak, suddenly made it possible for anyone of middle-class means to take photographs. Many amateurs took up the camera to commemorate family, friends, and special events. Others, such as the sociologist Lewis Hine, used it as a tool for social and political change. Partially in response to the new ease of photography, more serious practitioners in America and Europe banded together to assert the artistic merit of the medium. Called Pictorialists, they sought to prove that photography was just as capable of poetic, subjective expression as painting. They freely manipulated their prints to reveal their authorial control, often resulting in painterly effects, and consciously separated themselves from amateur photographers and mechanised processes.

Photography Between the Wars

In the aftermath of World War I – the first modern, mechanised conflict – sweeping changes transformed photography. Avant-garde painters, graphic designers, and journalists turned to the medium, seeing it as the most effective tool to express the fractured, fast-paced nature of modernity and the new technological culture of the twentieth century. A wide variety of new approaches and techniques flourished during these years, especially in Europe. Photographers adopted radical cropping, unusual angles, disorienting vantage points, abstraction, collage, and darkroom alchemy to achieve what the influential Hungarian teacher László Moholy-Nagy celebrated as the “new vision.” Other photographers, such as the German August Sander or the Americans Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Walker Evans, sought a more rigorous objectivity grounded in a precise examination of the world.

Postwar Photography

Photography thrived in the decades after World War II, invigorated by new ideas, practices, and expanding venues for circulating and displaying pictures. Immediately after the war, many photographers sought to publish their pictures in illustrated magazines, which prospered during these years. Some, such as Gordon Parks, made photographs highlighting racial, economic, and social disparities. Others, such as Louis Faurer, Sid Grossman, and Robert Frank, turned to the street to address the conditions of modern life in pictures that expose both its beauty and brutality. Using handheld cameras and available light, they focused on the random choreography of sidewalks, making pictures that are often blurred, out of focus, or off-kilter.

In the later 1950s and 1960s a number of photographers pushed these ideas further, mining the intricate social interactions of urban environments. Unlike photographers from the 1930s, these practitioners, such as Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Diane Arbus, sought not to reform American society but to record it in all its complexity, absurdity, and chaos. By the late 1960s and 1970s, other photographers, such as Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz, looked beyond conventional notions of natural beauty to explore the despoliation of the urban and suburban landscape. Their pictures of tract houses, highways, and motels are stripped of any artistic frills, yet they are exquisitely rendered and replete with telling details. Also starting in the 1960s, many conceptual or performance artists working in a variety of media embraced what they perceived to be photography’s neutrality and turned to it as an essential part of their experiments to expand traditional notions of art. In the late 1960s, improvements in colour printing techniques led others, such as William Eggleston, to explore the artistic potential of colour photography.

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973)
An Apple, A Boulder, A Mountain
1921
Platinum print
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund, 2014

After World War I, Steichen became disillusioned with the painterly aesthetic of his earlier work and embarked on a series of experiments to study light, form, and texture. Inverting an apple, he demonstrated how a small object, when seen in a new way, can assume the monumentality and significance of a much larger one. His close-up scrutiny of a natural form closely links this photograph with works by other American modernists of the 1920s, such as Edward Weston, Paul Strand, and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
People, Streets of New York, 83rd and West End Avenue
1916
Platinum print
24.2 x 33cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund, 1990

Strand was introduced to photography in high school by his teacher Lewis Hine, who instilled in him a strong interest in social issues. In 1907, Hine took his pupil to Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery in New York, which launched Strand’s desire to become a fine art photographer. By the early 1910s, influenced by Stieglitz, he began to make clearly delineated portraits, pictures of New York, and nearly abstract still lifes. Strand came to believe that photography was a gift of science to the arts, that it was an art of selection, not translation, and that objectivity was its very essence.

American 20th Century
Untitled
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print
5.7 x 10cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Robert E. Jackson, 2007

Snapshots

After World War I, a parade of technological improvements transformed the practice of photography. With smaller cameras, faster shutter speeds, and more sensitive film emulsions, both amateurs and more serious practitioners could now easily record motion, investigate unexpected angles and points of view, and work in dim light and inclement weather. The amateur’s less staid, more casual approach began to play an important role in the work of modernist photographers as they explored spontaneity and instantaneity, seeking to capture the cacophony and energy of modern life. Blurriness, distorted perspectives, and seemingly haphazard cropping-once considered typical amateur mistakes-were increasingly embraced as part of the modern, vibrant way of picturing the world.

Robert Frank (Swiss, 1924-2019)
City of London
1951
Gelatin silver print
23 x 33.6cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Robert Frank Collection, Purchased as a Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, 1991

Robert Frank (Swiss, 1924-2019)
Woman/Paris
1952
Gelatin silver print in bound volume
Image: 35.1 x 25.4cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Robert Frank Collection, Gift (Partial and Promised) of Robert Frank, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, 1990

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Frank made several handbound volumes of photographs, exploring different ways to link his pictures through non-narrative sequences. While in Zurich in October 1952, he assembled pictures taken in Europe, South America, and the United States in a book called Black White and Things. With a brief introductory quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – “it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye” – the photographs are arranged in a sophisticated sequence that uses formal repetition, conceptual contrasts, and, as here, witty juxtapositions to evoke a range of ideas …

While in Zurich in October of 1952, Frank assembled photographs taken in Europe, South America, and the United States in the preceding years into a bound book called Black White and Things. Designed by Frank’s friend Werner Zryd, and with only a brief introductory statement describing the three sections, the photographs appear in a sophisticated sequence that relies on subtle, witty juxtapositions and powerful visual formal arrangements to evoke a wide range of emotions.

Frank made three copies of this book, all identical in size, construction, and sequence. He gave one copy to his father, gave one to Edward Steichen, and kept one. The book that belonged to his father is now in a private collection; Steichen’s copy resides at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and in 1990 Frank gave his copy to the Robert Frank Collection at the National Gallery of Art.

Robert Frank (Swiss, 1924-2019)
Trolley – New Orleans
1955
Gelatin silver print
Sheet: 21 x 31.6cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Maria and Lee Friedlander, 2001

Roy DeCarava (American, 1919-2009)
Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington, D.C.
1963
Gelatin silver print
25.5 x 33cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation through Robert and Joyce Menschel, 1999

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
New York City
1966
Gelatin silver print
Image: 13.3 x 20.6 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Trellis Fund, 2001

Heir to the tradition of documentary photography established by Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, and Robert Frank, Friedlander focuses on the American social landscape in photographs that can seem absurd, comical, and even bleak. In dense, complex compositions, he frequently depicts surprising juxtapositions that make the viewer look twice. He has made numerous self-portraits, yet he appears in these pictures in oblique and unexpected ways, for example reflected in a mirror or window. The startling intrusion of Friedlander’s shadow onto the back of a pedestrian’s coat, at once threatening and humorous, slyly exposes the predatory nature of street photography.

Giovanni Anselmo (Italian, b. 1934)
Entering the Work
1971
Photographic emulsion on canvas
49 x 63.5cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Glenstone in honor of Eileen and Michael Cohen, 2008

Conceptual Photography

In the 1960s, many painters and sculptors questioned the traditional emphasis on aesthetics and turned to creating art driven by ideas. Photography’s association with mechanical reproduction appealed to them as they sought to downplay the hand of the artist while promoting his or her role as idea maker. Some conceptual artists, such as Sol Lewitt and Mel Bochner, used photographs to explore an interest in perspective, scale, and mathematics. Others turned to photography as a tool to record performances and artistic undertakings, the resulting pictures acting as an integral part of those projects.

Anselmo was a member of the Italian Arte Povera group, which sought to break down the separation of art and life through experimental performances and the use of natural materials such as trees and leaves. To make this work, Anselmo set his camera up with a timed shutter release, and raced into view so that his running figure creates a modest yet heroic impression on the landscape.

Robert Adams (American, b. 1937)
Colorado Springs, Colorado
1974
Gelatin silver print, printed 1983
15.2 x 15.2cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon and Patrons’ Permanent Fund, 2006

For more than forty years, Adams has recorded the changing American landscape, especially the ongoing settlement of the West. Although he has photographed roads, tract houses, and strip malls that have utterly transformed the landscape, he has also captured the beauty that remains and indeed, that refuses to die, as in his poetic picture of morning fog over California hills. He is convinced, as he wrote in 1974, that “all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty.”

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971)
Fort Peck Dam, Montana
1936
Gelatin silver print
33.02 × 27.31cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund, 2014

One of the most iconic photographs by the pioneering photojournalist Bourke-White, Fort Peck Dam, Montana was published on the cover of the inaugural issue of Life magazine on November 23, 1936. A striking representation of the machine age, the photograph depicts the stark, massive piers for an elevated highway over the spillway near the dam. The two men at the bottom of the print indicate the piers’ massive scale while revealing the vulnerable position of the worker in the modern industrial landscape.

György Kepes (American born Hungary, 1906-2001)
Juliet with Peacock Feather and Red Leaf
1937-1938
Gelatin silver print with gouache
15.7 × 11.6cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund, 2014

Trained as a painter at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, Kepes was an influential designer, educator, aesthetic theorist, and photographer. In 1930 he moved to Berlin, where he worked with László Moholy-Nagy, but eventually settled in Chicago and later Cambridge, Massachusetts. Created soon after his arrival in America, this startling photograph is both an intimate depiction of Kepes’s wife and a study of visual perception. Like the red leaf that seems to float above the image, the peacock feather – its eye carefully lined up with Juliet’s – obscures not only her vision but also the viewer’s ability to see her clearly.

Irving Penn (American, 1917-2009)
Woman with Roses (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn in Lafaurie Dress), Paris
1950
Platinum/palladium print, 1977
55.1 x 37cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Irving Penn, 2002

One of the most influential fashion and portrait photographers of his time, Penn made pictures marked by refinement, elegance, and clarity. Trained as a painter and designer, he began to photograph in the early 1940s while working at Vogue; more than 150 of his photographs appeared on the cover of the magazine during his long career. A perfectionist, Penn explored earlier printing techniques, such as a late nineteenth-century process that used paper coated with solutions of platinum or palladium rather than silver, to achieve the subtle tonal range he desired.

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May

Exhibition: ‘The photograph and Australia’ at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: architecture, Australian artist, Australian cabinet cards and cartes de visite, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, curator, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, Indigenous Australians, intimacy, landscape, light, memory, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space, street photography, time and works on paper
Tags: Aboriginal and settler relations, Aboriginal stockman, Aboriginal stockman Central Australia, Adelaide River, Adelaide River Northern Territory, AGNSW, AGNSW The photograph and Australia, Alfred and Fred Thomas, Alfred and Fred Thomas proprietors of the Ravenswood Hotel, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of New South Wales The photograph and Australia, Australian and Indigenous identity, Australian cartes de visite, Australian colonial photographer, Australian colonial photography, Australian daguerreotype, Australian photographer, Australian photography, Australian photography makes a nation, Australian scenery Middle Harbour Port Jackson, Axel Poignant, Axel Poignant Aboriginal stockman Central Australia, Blacks' Spur, Bushman and an Aboriginal man, Caroline and son Thomas James Lawson, cartes de visite, Central Australia, Charles Bayliss, Charles Bayliss and Henry Beaufoy Merlin Untitled 1872, Charles Bayliss Lawrence Hargrave trochoided plane model, Chowilla Station, collecting and distributing photography, colonial photography, daguerreotype, David Moore, David Moore Migrants arriving in Sydney, David Moore Redfern Interior, earliest Australian X-rays, early Australian photography, Ernest B Docker, Ernest B Docker The Three Sisters Katoomba, exploration (mining landscape and stars), Fairy scene at the Landslip, Flinders Island, Frank Styant Browne, Frank Styant Browne Hand X-ray, George Goodman, George Goodman Caroline and son Thomas James Lawson, Gough Whitlam, Group of local Aboriginal people Chowilla Station, Harold Cazneaux, Harold Cazneaux Spirit of endurance, Henry Beaufoy Merlin, history of Australian photography, Husbandry 1, I made a camera, Indigenous identity, Isabella Carfrae, Isabella Carfrae on horseback, J. J. Dwyer, J. J. Dwyer Kalgoorlie's first post office, J. W. Lindt, J. W. Lindt Joe Byrne, JJ Dwyer Kalgoorlie's first post office, Joanna Kate Norton, Joe Byrne member of the Kelly gang, John Gill, John Gill and Joanna Kate Norton, JW Lindt No 37 Bushman and an Aboriginal man, Kalgoorlie, Kalgoorlie's first post office, Keast Burke, Keast Burke Husbandry 1, Lawrence Hargrave, Lawrence Hargrave trochoided plane model, Lower Murray River, Melvin Vaniman, Melvin Vaniman Panorama of intersection of Collins and Queen Streets Melbourne, Mervyn Bishop, Mervyn Bishop Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pours soil into the hands of traditional land owner Vincent Lingiari, Midday camp, Migrants arriving in Sydney, Ngarrindjeri people, Nicholas Caire, Nicholas Caire Fairy scene at the Landslip, No 37 Bushman and an Aboriginal man, Northern Territor, Northern Territory photography, NSW Government Printer, NSW Government Printer The General Post Office Sydney, Olive Cotton, Olive Cotton Only to taste the warmth the light the wind, Only to taste the warmth the light the wind, Panorama of intersection of Collins and Queen Streets Melbourne, Paul Foelsche, Paul Foelsche Adelaide River, Photography and Australia, photolithograph, Port Jackson, Portrait of a Distant Land, portraiture and engagement, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pours soil into the hands of traditional land owner Vincent Lingiari, Ravenswood Hotel, Redfern Interior, Richard Daintree, Richard Daintree Midday camp, Ricky Maynard, Ricky Maynard The Healing Garden, Ricky Maynard: Portrait of a Distant Land, Self-portrait with camera (1960-2006), south australia, Spirit of endurance, stereograph, Sue Ford, Sue Ford Self-portrait, Sue Ford Self-portrait 1986, tasmania, The General Post Office Sydney, The Healing Garden, the history of Australian photography, the Kelly gang, The photograph and Australia, The Three Sisters Katoomba, Thomas James Lawson, Tracey Moffatt, Tracey Moffatt I made a camera, Unknown photographer Australian scenery Middle Harbour, Views of scenery on the Darling and Lower Murray during the flood of 1886, Vincent Lingiari

Exhibition dates: 21st March – 8th June 2015

Curator: Judy Annear, Senior curator of photographs, AGNSW

Judy Annear. The photograph and Australia. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2015. p. 236

“Cultural theorist Ross Gibson has written that ‘being Australian might actually mean being untethered or placeless … and appreciating how to live in dynamic patterns of time rather than native plots of space’. Photographs always enable imaginative time and space regardless of their size and how little we might know of the ostensible subject. When people are oriented toward the camera and photographer, there is a gap which the viewer intuitively recognises. The gap is time as much as space. Occasionally – as in an anonymous 1855 daguerreotype taken at Ledcourt, Victoria, of Isabella Carfrae on horseback where we see a servant standing on the verandah, shading her eyes, and in the 1877 Fred Kruger photograph of the white-clad cricketer at Coranderrk – a subject in the photograph presses so close to the picture plane that we know for the time of the exposure they look directly into an unknowable future and collide now with our gaze as we look back.”

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Judy Annear. “Time,” in Judy Annear. ‘The photograph and Australia’. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2015. p. 19.

This is an important exhibition and book by Judy Annear and team at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, an investigation into the history of Australian photography that is worthy of the subject. Unfortunately, I could not get to Sydney to see the exhibition and I have only just received the catalogue. I have started reading it with gusto. With regard to the exhibition all I have to go on is a friend of mine who went to see the exhibition, and whose opinion I value highly, who said that is was the messiest exhibition that she had seen in a long while, and that for a new generation of people approaching this subject matter for the first time it’s non-chronological nature would have been quite off putting. But this is the nature of the beast (that being a thematic not chronological approach) and personally I believe that modern audiences are a lot more understanding of what was going on in the exhibition than she would give them credit for.

In the “Introduction” to the book, Annear rightly credits the work undertaken by colleagues – especially Gael Newton’s Shades of light: photography and Australia 1839-1988, published in 1988; Alan Davis’ The mechanical eye in Australia: photography 1841-1900, published in 1977; and Helen Ennis’ Photography and Australia, published in 2007. As the latter did, this new book “emphasises the ways in which photographs, especially in the nineteenth century, function in social, cultural and political contexts, exploring photography’s role in representing relationships between Indigenous and settler cultures, the construction of Australia, and its critique.” (Annear, p. 10)

While Ennis’ book took a chronological approach, with sections titled First Photographs, Black to Blak, Land and Landscape, Being Modern, Made in Australia, Localism and Internationalism, The Presence of the Past – Annear’s book takes a more conceptual, thematic approach, one that crosses time and space, linking past and present work in classificatory sections titled Time, Nation, People, Place and Transmission. Both books acknowledge the key issues that have to be dealt with when formulating a book on the photograph and Australia: “the medium itself, Australia’s history, and the relationship between them. Is Australian photography different? If so, how, and in relation to what? One has to look at places with not dissimilar histories, such as Canada and New Zealand. And other questions: what has preoccupied photographers working in relation to Australia at various points in time? Have their concerns been primarily commercial, aesthetic, historical, realist, interpretive, or theoretical? Have they developed projects unique to the photographic medium; for example, large-scale classificatory projects? What have they achieved, what did it mean then, and what does it mean now?” (Annear, p.10)

These questions are the nexus of Annear’s investigation and she seeks to answer them in the well researched chapters that follow, while being mindful of “preserving some of the slipperiness of the medium.” And there is the rub. In order to define these classificatory sections in the exhibition and book, it would seem to me that Annear shoehorns these themes onto the fluid, mutable “state of being” of the photograph, imposing classifications to order the mass of photography into bite sized entities. While “the book encourages the reader to explore connections – between different forms of photography, people and place, past and present” it also, inevitably, imposes a reading on these historical photographs that would not have been present at the time of their production.

The press release for the book says, “The photograph and Australia investigates how photography was harnessed to create the idea of a nation.” Now I find the use of that word “harnessed” – as in control and make use of – to be hugely problematic. Personally, I don’t think that the slipperiness and mutability of photography can ever be controlled by anyone to help create the idea (imagination?) of a nation. Nations build nations, not photography. As a friend of mine said to me, it’s a long bow to draw… and I would agree. The crux of the matter is that THERE ARE NO HANDLES, only the ones that we impose, later, from a distance. There is no definitive answer to anything, there are always twists and turns, always another possibility of how we look at things, of the past in the present.

Photography and photographs, “with its ability to capture both things of the world and those of the imagination,” are always unstable (which is why the photograph can still induce A SENSE OF WONDER) – always uncertain in their interpretation, then and now. Photographs do not belong to a dimension or a classification of time and space because you feel their being NOT their (historical) consequence. Hence, all of these classifications are essentially the same/redundant. Perhaps it’s only semantics, but I think the word “utilises” – make practical and effective use of – would be a better word in terms of Annear’s enquiries. It also occurred to me to turn the question around: instead of “how photography was harnessed to create the idea of a nation”; instead, “how the idea of a nation helped change photography.” Think about it.

Finally, a comment on the book itself. Beautifully printed, of a good size and weight, the paper stock is of excellent quality and thickness. The type is simple and legible and the book is lavishly illustrated with photographs. The reproductions are a little ‘flat’ but the main point of concern is the size of the reproductions. Instead of reproducing carte de visite at 1:1 scale (that is, 64 mm × 100 mm), their mounted on card size – they are reproduced at 40 mm x 68 mm (see p. 236 of the catalogue below). Small enough already, this printing size renders the detailed reading of the images almost impossible. Worse, the images are laid out horizontally on a vertical page, with no size attribution of the original, nor whether they are 1/9th, 1/6th daguerreotype’s or ambrotypes, CDV’s or cabinet cards next to the image.

The reproduction size of the daguerreotypes and ambrotypes is even worse, making the images almost unreadable. For example, in an excellent piece of writing at the end of the first chapter, “Time”, Annear refers to “an anonymous 1855 daguerreotype taken at Ledcourt, Victoria, of Isabella Carfrae on horseback where we see a servant standing on the verandah, shading her eyes,”. In the image in this posting (below) we can clearly see this woman standing on the verandah, but in the reproduction in the book (p. 139), she is reduced to a mere smudge in history, an invisibility caused by the size of the reproduction, thereby negating all that Annear comments upon. Instead of the “subject in the photograph presses so close to the picture plane that we know for the time of the exposure they look directly into an unknowable future and collide now with our gaze as we look back,” there is no pressing, hers has no presence, and our gaze cannot collide with this vision from the future past. Why designers of photographic books consistently fall prey to these traps is beyond me.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

.
Many thank to the Art Gallery of New South Wales for allowing me to publish the photographs and text in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Unknown photographer
Australian scenery, Middle Harbour, Port Jackson
c. 1865
Carte de visite
Art Gallery of New South Wales, gift of Josef & Jeanne Lebovic, Sydney 2014

Unknown photographer
Australian scenery, Middle Harbour, Port Jackson (verso)
c. 1865
Carte de visite
Art Gallery of New South Wales, gift of Josef & Jeanne Lebovic, Sydney 2014

The first large-scale exhibition of its kind to be held in Australia in 27 years, The photograph and Australia presents more than 400 photographs from more than 120 artists, including Richard Daintree, Charles Bayliss, Frank Hurley, Harold Cazneaux, Olive Cotton, Max Dupain, Sue Ford, Carol Jerrems, Tracey Moffatt, Robyn Stacey, Ricky Maynard and Patrick Pound.

The works of renowned artists are shown alongside those of unknown photographers and everyday material, such as domestic and presentation albums. These tell peoples’ stories, illustrate where and how they lived, as well as communicate official public narratives. Sourced from more than 35 major collections across Australia and New Zealand, including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia and the Australian Museum, The photograph and Australia uncovers hidden gems dating from 1845 until now.

A richly illustrated publication accompanies the exhibition, reflecting the exhibition themes and investigating how Australia itself has been shaped by photography.

Extract from “Introduction”

“The task of this book is to formulate questions around Australian photography and its history, regardless of Australia’s, and the medium’s, permeable identity. While early photography in Australia made histories of the colonies visible, and a great deal can be read from the surviving photographic archives, interpretation of this material is often conjecture, and much remains oblique. Patrick Pound describes the sheer mass of photographs and images in the world today as an “unhinged album.”11 This dynamic of making, accumulating, ordering, disseminating, reinterpreting, re-collecting and re-narrating is an important aspect of photography. The intimate relationship, historically, between the photograph and the various arts and sciences, along with the adaptability to technological change and imaginative interpretations, allows for a constant montaging or weaving together of uses and meanings. This works against the conventional linear structure of classical histories and the idea of any progressive evolution of the medium. If what we are dealing with is a phenomenon rather than simply a form then analysing the phenomenon and its dynamic relationship to art, society, peoples, sciences, genres, and processes is critical to our modern understanding of ourselves and our place in the world as well as of the medium itself.12

In the 1970s, cultural theorist Roland Barthes wrote an essay entitled The photographic message.13 While he focussed primarily on press photography and made a distinction between reportage and ‘artistic’ photography, his pinpointing of the special status of the photographic image as a message without a code – one could say, even, a face without a name – and his understanding of photography as a simultaneously objective and invested, natural and cultural, is relevant in the colonial and post-colonial context.

We search for clues in photographs of our past and present. In some ways this is a melancholy activity, in other ways valuable detective work. In many cases it is both. Photography since its inception has belonged in a nether world of being and not being, legibility and opacity. This book preserves some of the slipperiness of the medium, while providing a series of texts touching on the photographs at hand. The history of the photograph and its relationship to Australia remains tantalisingly partial; the ever-burgeoning archives await further excavation.”14

Judy Annear. “Introduction,” in Judy Annear. The photograph and Australia. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2015. p. 13.

11. See ‘Transmission’ pp. 227-33
12. See Geoffrey Batchen, A Subject For, A History About, Photography accessed 23 December 2021
13. Roland Barthes, ‘The photographic message’, Image, music, text, trans Stephen Heath, Flamingo, London, 1984, pp. 15-31
14. Parts of this Introduction were in a paper delivered at the symposium, Border-lands: photography & cultural contest, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 31 Mar 2012

Time

The relationship of the photograph to ‘Time’ is discussed in chapter one, which examines how contemporary artists such as Anne Ferran, Rosemary Laing and Ricky Maynard reinvent the past through photography. The activities of nineteenth-century photographers such as George Burnell and Charles Bayliss are also discussed… The manipulation by artists and photographers of imaginative time – the time of looking at the photographic image – allows for consideration of the nexus between space and time, how subjects can be momentarily tethered and, equally, how they can float free.

Nation

Chapter two considers the idea of ‘Nation’: looking at the public role of the photograph in representing Australia at world exhibitions before Federation in 1901. Photography in this period enabled new classificatory systems to come into existence… Of particular importance was the use of the photograph to cement Darwinistic views that determined racial hierarchies according to superficial physical differences. The photograph also advertised the growing colonies to potential migrants and investors through the depiction of landscapes and amenities.

People

The third chapter, ‘People’, analyses the uncertain post-colonial heritage that all Australian inherit and how that can be evidenced and examined in photographs. The chapter encompasses portraits by Tracy Moffatt and George Goodman, for example, and considerations of where and how people lived and chose to be photographed. These include the people of the Kulin nation of Victoria, those who resided at Poonindie Mission in South Australia, the Yued people living at New Norcia mission in Western Australia, as well as the Henty family in Victoria, the Mortlocks of South Australia, the children living at The Bungalow in Alice Springs and the people of Tumut in New South Wales.

Place

‘Place’ is examined in chapter four, particularly in terms of the use of photography to enable exploration, whether to Antarctica (Frank Hurley), to map stars and further the natural sciences (Henry Chamberlain Russell, Joseph Turner), or to open up ‘wilderness’ for tourism or mining (JW Beattie, Nicholas Caire, JW Lindt, Richard Daintree) … Photographs are examined as both documents and imaginative interpretations of activity and place.

Transmission

Chapter five, ‘Transmission’, considers the traffic in photographs and the fascination with the medium’s reproducibility and circulation… The evidential aspect of the photograph has proven to be fleeting and only tangentially related to the thing it traces. The possibility of being able to fully decipher a photograph’s meaning is remote, even when it has been promptly ordered and annotated in some form of album. Each photographic form expands the possibility of instant and easy communication, but the swarm of material serves only to prove the impossibility of order, classification, and accuracy. The photograph as an aestheticised object continues regardless of platform, and the imaginative possibilities of the medium have not been exhausted.

Sections from Judy Annear. “Introduction,” in Judy Annear. The photograph and Australia. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2015. p. 12.

Charles Bayliss
Group of local Aboriginal people, Chowilla Station, Lower Murray River, South Australia
1886
From the series New South Wales Royal Commission: Conservation of water. Views of scenery on the Darling and Lower Murray during the flood of 1886
Albumen photograph
Art Gallery of New South Wales, purchased 1984

This tableaux of Ngarrindjeri people fishing was carefully staged by photographer Charles Bayliss in 1886. Not just subjects, they actively participated in the photography process. It was observed at the time that the fishermen arranged themselves into position, with “the grace and unique character of which a skilful artist only could show.”

“In one extraordinary image created in 1886 by the photographer Charles Bayliss, the Ngarrindjeri people of the lower Murray River were active participants in the staging of a fishing scene. Writing in his journal, Bayliss’s companion Gilbert Parker noted: “Without a word of suggestion, these natives arranged themselves in a group, the grace and unique character of which a skilful artist only could show.” Annear says the image looks like a museum diorama to modern eyes. “But these people were very active in deciding how they wanted to be photographed,” she says. “They were determined to create an image they felt was appropriate.”

The first photographs of indigenous Australians were formal, posed portraits, taken in blazing sunlight. The sitters are often pictured leaning against each other (stillness was required for long exposure times) with eyes turned to the camera and bodies wrapped in blankets or kangaroo skins. Some wore headdresses or necklaces that may or may not have belonged to them.

“Indigenous Australians agreed to be photographed out of curiosity, or perhaps for food,” says Judy Annear, curator of The photograph and Australia, a major new photography exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. “In the past, it was considered that these sorts of early pictures were indicative of the colonial gaze. But now there is a lot of research going on into how these early photos were made. Often, the local people would have been invited to come into a studio and they were paid. They would have been dressed up and told what to do.””

Text in quotations from Elissa Blake. “Art Gallery of NSW photography exhibition: Stories told in black and white,” on the the Sydney Morning Herald website April 2, 2015 [Online] Cited 28/05/2015.

Ernest B Docker (Australian, 1842-1923)
The Three Sisters Katoomba – Mrs Vivian, Muriel Vivian and Rosamund 7 Feb 1898
1898
Stereograph
Macleay Museum, The University of Sydney

Charles Nettleton (Australian, 1825-1902)
Untitled
1867-1874
Carte de visite
6.2 x 9.1 cm image; 6.3 x 10.0 cm mount card
Purchased 2014
Art Gallery of New South Wales

Charles Nettleton was a professional photographer born in the north of England who arrived in Australia in 1854, settling in Melbourne. He joined the studio of Townsend Duryea and Alexander McDonald, where he specialised in outdoor photography. Nettleton is credited with having photographed the first Australian steam train when the private Melbourne-Sandridge (Port Melbourne) line was opened on 12 September 1854. Nettleton established his own studio in 1858, offering the first souvenir albums to the Melbourne public. He worked as an official photographer to the Victorian government and the City of Melbourne Corporation from the late 1850s to the late 1890s, documenting Melbourne’s growth from a colonial town to a booming metropolis. He photographed public buildings, sewerage and water systems, bridges, viaducts, roads, wharves, and the construction of the Botanical Gardens. In 1861 he boarded the ‘Great Britain’ to photograph the first English cricket team to visit Australia and in 1867 was appointed official photographer of the Victorian visit of the Duke of Edinburgh. For the Victorian police he photographed the bushranger Ned Kelly in 1880. This is considered to be the only genuine photograph of the outlaw.

Tracey Moffatt (Australian, b. 1960)
I made a camera
2003
Photolithograph
Collection of the artist
© Tracey Moffatt, courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

The Art Gallery of New South Wales is proud to present the major exhibition The photograph and Australia, which explores the crucial role photography has played in shaping our understandings of the nation. It will run from 21 March to 8 June 2015.

Tracing the evolution of the medium and its many uses from the 1840s until today, this is the largest exhibition of Australian photography held since 1988 that borrows from collections nationwide. It presents more than 400 photographs by more than 120 artists, including Morton Allport, Richard Daintree, Paul Foelsche, Samuel Sweet, JJ Dwyer, Charles Bayliss, Frank Hurley, Harold Cazneaux, Olive Cotton, Max Dupain, Sue Ford, Carol Jerrems, Tracey Moffatt, Robyn Stacey, Ricky Maynard, Anne Ferran and Patrick Pound.

Iconic images are shown alongside works by unknown and amateur photographers, including photographic objects such as cartes de visite, domestic albums and the earliest Australian X-rays. The exhibition’s curator – Judy Annear, senior curator of photographs, Art Gallery of NSW – said:

“Weaving together the multiple threads of Australia’s photographic history, The photograph and Australia investigates how photography invented modern Australia. It poses questions about how the medium has shaped our view of the world, ourselves and each other. Audiences are invited to experience the breadth of Australian photography, past and present, and the sense of wonder the photograph can still induce through its ability to capture both things of the world and the imagination.”

The exhibition brings together hundreds of photographs from more than 35 private and public collections across Australia, England and New Zealand, including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia and the State Library of Victoria. Highlights include daguerreotypes by Australia’s first professional photographer, George Goodman, and recent works by Simryn Gill. From mass media’s evolution in the 19th century to today’s digital revolution, The photograph and Australia investigates how photography has been harnessed to create the idea of a nation and reveals how our view of the world, ourselves and each other has been changed by the advent of photography. It also explores how photography operates aesthetically, technically, politically and in terms of distribution and proliferation, in the Australian context.

Curated from a contemporary perspective, the exhibition takes a thematic rather than a chronological approach, looking at four interrelated areas: Aboriginal and settler relations; exploration (mining, landscape and stars); portraiture and engagement; collecting and distributing photography. A lavishly illustrated 308-page publication, The photograph and Australia (Thames & Hudson, RRP $75.00), accompanies the exhibition, reflecting its themes and investigating the medium’s relationship to people, place, culture and history.

Press release from the Art Gallery of New South Wales

David Moore (Australian, 1927-2003)
Migrants arriving in Sydney
1966, printed later
Gelatin silver photograph
30.2 x 43.5cm
Gift of the artist 1997
© Lisa, Karen, Michael and Matthew Moore

In this evocative image Moore condenses the anticipation and apprehension of immigrants into a tight frame as they arrive in Australia to begin a new life. The generational mix suggests family reconnections or individual courage as each face displays a different emotion.

Moore’s first colour image Faces mirroring their expectations of life in the land down under, passengers crowd the rail of the liner Galileo Galilei in Sydney Harbour was published in National Geographic in 1967.1 In that photograph the figures are positioned less formally and look cheerful. But it is this second image, probably taken seconds later, which Moore printed in black-and-white, that has become symbolic of national identity as it represents a time when Australia’s rapidly developing industrialised economy addressed its labour shortage through immigration. The strength of the horizontal composition of cropped figures underpinned by the ship’s rail is dramatised by the central figure raising her hand – an ambiguous gesture either reaching for a future or reconnecting with family. The complexity of the subject and the narrative the image implies ensured its public success, which resulted in a deconstruction of the original title, ‘European migrants’, by the passengers, four of whom it later emerged were Sydneysiders returning from holiday, alongside two migrants from Egypt and Lebanon.2 Unintentionally Moore’s iconic image has become an ‘historical fiction’, yet the passengers continue to represent an evolving Australian identity in relation to immigration.

1. Max Dupain and associates. Accessed 17/06/2006. No longer available online
2. Thomas D & Sayers A 2000, From face to face: portraits by David Moore, Chapter & Verse, Sydney

David Moore (Australian, 1927-2003)
Redfern Interior
1949
Silver gelatin print
26.7 x 35.4cm
Purchased with funds provided by the Art Gallery Society of New South Wales 1985

David Moore’s career spanned the age of the picture magazines (for example: Life, Time, The Observer) through to major commissions such as the Sydney Opera House, CSR, and self initiated projects like To build a Bridge: Glebe Island. The breadth and depth of his career means there is an extraordinary archive of material which describes and interprets the last 50 years of Australian life, the life of the region, and events in Britain and the United States. He was instrumental in advancing Australian photography throughout his career and in the early 1970s was active in setting up the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney. From well-known images such as Migrants arriving in Sydney to Redfern interior, Moore has documented events and conditions in Sydney.

Charles Bayliss (England, Australia 1850-1897)
Henry Beaufoy Merlin (England, Australia 1830-1873)
Untitled
c. 1872
Albumen photograph
Dimensions
24.5 x 29.4cm image/sheet
Gift of Josef & Jeanne Lebovic, Sydney 2014

Paul Foelsche (Australian, 1831-1914)
Adelaide River
1887
Albumen photograph
Art Gallery of New South Wales, gift of Josef & Jeanne Lebovic, Sydney 2014

This photo of people relaxing on the banks of the Adelaide River in the Northern Territory was taken by Paul Foelsche, a policeman and amateur anthropologist.

The collection of 19th century images brought together in The photograph and Australia show indigenous people in formal group portraits or as “exotic” subjects. They are photographed alongside early settlers, working as stockmen or holding tools. Amateur gentleman photographers such as the Scottish farmer John Hunter Kerr captured such images on his own property, Fernyhurst Station, in Victoria. Another amateur photographer, Paul Foelsche, the first policeman in the Northern Territory, took portraits of the Larrakia people, which have since become a priceless archive for their descendants.

NSW Government Printer
The General Post Office, Sydney
1892-1900
Albumen photograph
State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, presented 1969

Melvin Vaniman (American, 1866-1912)
Panorama of intersection of Collins and Queen Streets, Melbourne
1903

Melvin Vaniman (American, 1866-1912)

Chester Melvin Vaniman (October 30, 1866 – July 2, 1912) was an American aviator and photographer who specialised in panoramic images. He shot images from gas balloons, ships masts, tall buildings and even a home-made 30-metre (98 ft) pole. He scaled buildings, hung from self-made slings, and scaled dangerous heights to capture his unique images.

Vaniman’s photographic career began in Hawaii in 1901, and ended some time in 1904. He spent over a year photographing Australia and New Zealand on behalf of the Oceanic Steamship Company, creating promotional images for the company, many as panoramas and which popularised the format in Australia, which was taken up with enthusiasm by Robert Vere Scott among others. During this time the New Zealand Government also commissioned panoramas.

Beginning in 1903, he spent over a year photographing Sydney and the surrounding areas. It was during this time that he created his best known work, the panorama of Sydney, shot from a hot air balloon he had specially imported from the United States. Vaniman is best known for his images of Hawaii, Australia, and New Zealand.

Text from the Wikipedia website

J. W. Lindt (Germany 1845 – Australia from 1862, Australia 1926)
Body of Joe Byrne, member of the Kelly gang, hung up for photography, Benalla
1880
Gelatin silver print

Australia’s first ever press photograph pushed boundaries few journalists would transgress today. Captured by J.W, Lindt in 1880, the photo shows the dead body of a member of Ned Kelly’s infamous gang, strung up on a door outside the jail house in Benalla in regional Victoria.

Joe Byrne died from loss of blood after being shot in the groin during the siege of Glenrowan pub. Another photographer is pictured mid-shot, while an illustrator walks away from the new technology with his hat on and portfolio tucked under his arm. “We see this as the first Australian press photograph. It has that spontaneity media photographs have, and it’s also very evocative with many different stories in it,” the gallery’s senior curator of photographs, Judy Annear, said.

Text from Rose Powell. “First Australian press photo shows body of Kelly Gang member Joe Byrne,” on the Sydney Morning Herald website March 20, 2015 [Online] Cited 30/05/2015.

Richard Daintree (Australian, 1832-1878)
Midday camp
1864-1870
Albumen photograph, overpainted with oils
Queensland Museum, Brisbane

This image was an albumen photograph (using egg whites to bind chemicals to paper) which was then hand-coloured with oil paints to bring it to life. The photographer took it in the 1860s to advertise Australia as a land of opportunity.

Ricky Maynard (Australian, b. 1953)
Ben Lomond, Tasmania , Cape Portland, Tasmania
The Healing Garden, Wybalenna, Flinders Island, Tasmania, from the series Portrait of a distant land
2005, printed 2009
Gelatin silver photograph, selenium toned
34.0 x 52.0cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, purchased with funds provided by the Aboriginal Collection Benefactors’ Group and the Photography Collection Benefactors’ Program 2009

Ricky Maynard has produced some of the most compelling images of contemporary Aboriginal Australia over the last two decades. Largely self taught, Maynard began his career as a darkroom technician at the age of sixteen. He first established his reputation with the 1985 series Moonbird people, an intimate portrayal of the muttonbirding season on Babel, Big Dog and Trefoil Islands in his native Tasmania. The 1993 series No more than what you see documents Indigenous prisoners in South Australian gaols.

Maynard is a lifelong student of the history of photography, particularly of the great American social reformers Jacob Riis, Lewis Hines, Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. Maynard’s images cut through the layers of rhetoric and ideology that inevitably couch black history (particularly Tasmanian history) to present images of experience itself. His visual histories question ownership; he claims that ‘the contest remains over who will image and own this history…we must define history, define whose history it is, and define its purpose as well as the tools used for the telling it’.

In Portrait of a distant land Maynard addresses the emotional connection between history and place. He uses documentary style landscapes to illustrate group portraits of Aboriginal peoples’ experiences throughout Tasmania. Each work combines several specific historical events, creating a narrative of shared experience – for example The Mission relies on historical records of a small boy whom Europeans christened after both his parents died in the Risdon massacre. This work highlights the disparity between written, oral and visual histories, as Maynard attempts to create ‘a combination of a very specific oral history as well as an attempt to show a different way of looking at history in general’.

JW Lindt (Australian born Germany, 1845-1926)
No 37 Bushman and an Aboriginal man
1873
Albumen photograph
Grafton Regional Gallery Collection, Grafton, gift of Sam and Janet Cullen and family 2004

Professional photographers such as the Frankfurt-born John William Lindt (who became famous for photographing the capture of the Kelly Gang at Glenrowan in 1880) took carefully posed tableaux images in his Melbourne studio. One set of Lindt photographs, taken between 1873 and 1874, show settlers and indigenous people posing with the tools of their trade. One unusual image shows a settler holding a spear and a local man holding a rifle.

Annear says the photographs speak of a time when early settlers and indigenous people were engaged in an exchange of cultures. “These photos weren’t just a passive, one-way process,” Annear says. “It wasn’t just about capture and exoticism. We are finding contemporaneous accounts that point to a level of exchange going on that was extremely important. These photos show who those people were, where they lived and what they were doing. They have a very powerful presence in that regard, and Aboriginal people today are going back through these photographs in order to trace their family trees.” …

Annear says she could have put together an exhibition of images of the “great suffering” experienced by Aboriginal people in Australia, but chose not to. “I found the 19th century material so rich and strong and most people aren’t aware of these images. It seemed like a great opportunity to bring them forward,” she says. “I don’t want to whitewash history, but I do want people to see how rich life was, how people were adapting, and then how that was removed. After Federation and the White Australia policy and other assimilation policies, photos of indigenous people seem to disappear. Why did they disappear? The people were still here. They were greatly diminished in many senses, but nonetheless they were still here.”

Elissa Blake. “Art Gallery of NSW photography exhibition: Stories told in black and white,” on the Sydney Morning Herald website, April 2, 2015 [Online] Cited 30/05/2015

Charles Bayliss (Australian born England, 1850-1897)
Lawrence Hargrave trochoided plane model
1884
Albumen photograph
Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney, gift of Mr William Hudson Shaw 1994

Unknown photographer
Duryea Gallery, Grenfell Street, Adelaide
c. 1865
Carte de visite
State Library of South Australia, Adelaide

J. J. Dwyer (Australian, 1869-1928)
Kalgoorlie’s first post office
c. 1900
Gelatin silver photograph
Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth
Photo: Acorn Photo, Perth

Harold Cazneaux (Australian, 1878-1953)
Spirit of endurance
1937
Gelatin silver photograph
Art Gallery of New South Wales, gift of the Cazneaux family 1975

Keast Burke (New Zealand, Australia 1896-1974)
Husbandry 1
c. 1940
Gelatin silver photograph, vintage
30.5 x 35.5cm image/sheet
Gift of Iris Burke 1989

Eric Keast Burke (16 January 1896 – 31 March 1974) was a New Zealand-born photographer and journalist.

Unknown photographer
Isabella Carfrae on horseback, Ledcourt, Stawell, Victoria
c. 1855
Daguerreotype, hand-tinted
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2012

“In the late 19th century, cameras were taking us both inside the human body and all the way to the moon. By the 1970s the National Gallery of Victoria had begun collecting photographic art, and within another decade the digital revolution was underway. But this exhibition – the largest display of Australian photography since Gael Newton mounted the 900-work Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1838-1988 at the National Gallery of Australia 27 years ago – is not chronological.

It opens with a salon hang of portraits of 19th and 20th century photographers, as if to emphasise their say in what we see, and continues with works grouped by themes: Aboriginal and settler relations; exploration; mining, landscape and stars; portraiture and engagement; collecting and distributing photography.

“A number of institutions and curators have tackled Australian photography from a chronological perspective and have done an extremely good job of it,” Annear says. “I have used their excellent research as a springboard into another kind of examination of the history of photography in this country. Nothing in photography was actually invented here, so I have turned it around and considered how photography invented Australia.”

Most of the photographs – about three quarters of the show, in fact – date from the first 60 years after Frenchman Louis Daguerre had his 1839 revelation about how to capture detailed images in a permanent form. Annear says the decades immediately following photography’s arrival in Australia provide a snapshot of all that has followed since.

“In terms of the digital revolution it is interesting to look back at the 19th century. What is going on now was all there then, it is just an expansion. There is a very clear trajectory from the birth of photography towards multiplication. After the invention of the carte de visite in the late 1850s they were made like there was no tomorrow. There are millions of cartes de visite in existence.”

There are quite a few of these small card-mounted photographs (the process was patented in Paris, hence the French) in the exhibition too, including one of a woman reflected in water at Port Jackson dating from circa 1865. With the trillions of images now in existence, it is easy to forget that once upon a time catching your reflection in the water, glass or a mirror was the only way to glimpse your own image (short of paying hefty sums for an artist to draw you).

After the invention of photography, people were quick to see how easily they could manipulate the impression created. While photographs are about fixing a moment in time, we can never be really sure just what it is they are fixing. “It’s not as simple as windows and mirrors – what we are looking at has always been constructed in some way,” Annear says. “What’s interesting about the medium is that you think it’s recording, fixing and capturing, but it is just creating an endless meditation on whatever a photograph’s relationship might be to whatever was real at the time it was taken.”

Extract from Megan Backhouse. “How the Photograph Shaped a Nation,” on the Art Guide Australia website, 20 April 2015 [Online] Cited 30/05/2015. No longer available online.

Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009)
Self-portrait
1986
From the series Self-portrait with camera (1960-2006) 2008
Colour Polaroid photograph
Art Gallery of New South Wales, purchased with funds provided by the Paul & Valeria Ainsworth Charitable Foundation, Russell Mills, Mary Ann Rolfe, the Photography Collection Benefactors and the Photography Endowment Fund 2015
© Sue Ford Archive

George Goodman (Australian born England, 1815-1891)
Caroline and son Thomas James Lawson
1845
Daguerreotype
State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, presented 1991

Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
‘Only to taste the warmth, the light, the wind’
c. 1939
Gelatin silver photograph
Art Gallery of New South Wales, purchased with funds provided by John Armati 2006

Unknown photographer
John Gill and Joanna Kate Norton
1856
Albumen photograph
Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne

Unknown photographer
Alfred and Fred Thomas, proprietors of the Ravenswood Hotel
1880-1890
Tintype
State Library of Western Australia, Perth

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pours soil into the hands of traditional land owner Vincent Lingiari, Northern Territory
1975
Type R3 photograph
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Hallmark Cards Australian Photography Collection Fund 1991
© Mervyn Bishop. Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet

Mervyn Bishop (born July 1945) is an Australian news and documentary photographer. Joining The Sydney Morning Herald as a cadet in 1962 or 1963, he was the first Aboriginal Australian to work on a metropolitan daily newspaper and one of the first to become a professional photographer. In 1971, four years after completing his cadetship, he was named Australian Press Photographer of the Year. He has continued to work as a photographer and lecturer.

Axel Poignant (England, Australia, England 1906-1986)
Aboriginal stockman, Central Australia
c. 1947, printed 1982
Type C photograph
35.6 x 24.4cm image/sheet
Purchased 1984
© Courtesy Roslyn Poignant

Though not born in Australia, Axel Poignant’s work is largely about the ‘Outback’, its flora and fauna and the traditions of Australian and Indigenous identity. Poignant was born in Yorkshire in 1906 to a Swedish father and English mother, and arrived in Australia in 1926 seeking work and adventure. After tough early years of unemployment and homelessness, he eventually settled in Perth and found work as a portrait photographer, before taking to the road and the bush in search of new subjects. Poignant became fascinated with the photo-essay as a means of adding real humanity to the medium, and much of his work is in this form. The close relationships he developed with Aborigines on his travels are recorded in compassionate portraits of these people and their lives – the low angles and closely cropped frames appear more natural and relaxed than the stark compositions of earlier ethnographic photography.

Nicholas Caire (Australian born England, 1837-1918)
Fairy scene at the Landslip, Blacks’ Spur
c. 1878
Albumen photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, purchased 1994

Nicholas John Caire (28 February 1837 – 13 February 1918) was an Australian photographer. Caire was born in Guernsey, Channel Islands, to Nicholas Caire and Hannah Margeret. As a boy Caire spoke French found he had a passion for photography that his parents encouraged. Caire moved to Adelaide, Australia, along with both his parents in 1860. Around this time Caire Found a mentor in Townsend Duryea. in 1867 he opened his own studio in Adelaide, Australia. He was married to Louisa Master in 1870 and then shortly after moved to Talbot, Victoria where he continued his photography and started to write for Life and Health Magazine. Caire died in 1918 in Armadale, Victoria.

Frank Styant Browne (Australian born England, 1854-1938)
Hand
1896
X-ray
Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery collection, Launceston

Art Gallery of New South Wales
Art Gallery Road, The Domain
Sydney NSW 2000, Australia

Opening hours:
Open every day 10am – 5pm
except Christmas Day and Good Friday

Art Gallery of New South Wales website

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May

Exhibition: ‘Hold That Pose: Erotic Imagery in 19th Century Photography’ at the Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, Indiana Part 1

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, landscape, light, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, reality, space, time and works on paper
Tags: 19th century men and women engaged in sexual activity, Alfred Kinsey American sexuality, Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden Man seated beside a tree, Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden Two nude men standing in a forest, cylindres photomicroscopiques, daguerreotype, early photographic processes, early photography, Erotic Imagery, Erotic Imagery in 19th Century Photography, erotic photography, gender, hand colored photographs, hand-coloured photographs, Hold That Pose, Hold That Pose: Erotic Imagery in 19th Century Photography, Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, Institute for Sexology, Kinsey Institute, Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex Gender and Reproduction, Lord Stanhope, Magnus Hirschfeld, Man seated beside a tree, men and women engaged in sexual activity, Nude woman in a room with a mirror, Nude woman reclining on a fallen tree, Oh ! you naughty man, photomontage, Photomontage of men and women engaged in sexual activity, René Prudent Patrice Dagron, reproduction, sex, Sex Gender and Reproduction, Stanhope lens, Stanhope lenses and holders, Stanhopes, Stereo daguerreotype, Stereo photography, Stereocard, stereoscope, The Entanglement, Two nude men standing in a forest, Two nude women in a room with a mirror, Underwood & Underwood, Underwood & Underwood Oh ! you naughty man, Unknown photographer The Entanglement, Webster & Albee, Webster & Albee Woman standing on the back of a kneeling man, Woman penetrating a woman with a dildo, Woman standing on the back of a kneeling man

Exhibition dates: 23rd January – 4th September 2015

Kinsey Institute Gallery, Indiana University

PLEASE NOTE THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF HUMAN EROTIC ACTIVITY AND NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN

Gallery wall of the exhibition Hold That Pose at the Kinsey Institute

A first for Art Blart – photographs from the world famous Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction!

After visiting the Kinsey Institute as part of my PhD in 2001 I was not allowed to publish any photographs from the collection for my research, which was a pity. Things have changed over the last decade and a half I am happy to say. As I observed in an email to Catherine Johnson-Roehr, Curator of Art, Artifacts, and Photographs recently, I understood that they had to be more sensitive than most institutions, especially with some of the material they hold in their collection. In reply, Catherine noted that while the Kinsey still had to be careful with the use of their materials especially when they are made public online, things had improved in the last 15 years. “Although we have collected artworks since the 1940s, we did not exhibit any of the materials until the 1990s and then on a very limited basis until 2002. When I arrived here in 2000, we had only a few tame images on our website, but now we have online galleries for some of our exhibitions (including all the juried art shows).”

Therefore, after some negotiation for online release, it is with great pleasure that I can feature 40 images in this two-part posting. Nobody should be offended by these glorious, historic photographs of the human body and a human action that everyone does, and it is fantastic to see the Kinsey opening up their collection to the world. We must oppose bigoted views such as that of Nazi Germany where they destroyed the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexology) headed by Magnus Hirschfeld, in 1933… by making these images visible in the world, not hiding them away behind closed doors. These are joyous photographs of the male and female body, a body in which everyone of us lives, desires, and enjoys pleasure.

See Part 2 of the posting.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

.
Many thankx for the Kinsey Institute for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

The Kinsey Institute research collection contains thousands of examples of erotic imagery produced over centuries by artists around the world. When the new technology of photography was announced in France in 1839, it was not long before it became the most popular medium for depictions of the nude figure, as well as erotic imagery. The first photographic process to be widely used was the daguerreotype, which produced a unique image. With the invention of other processes that used negatives to make multiple prints, the mass production of erotic photographs became possible. Hold That Pose features daguerreotypes, tintypes, albumen and gelatin silver prints, stereocards, and other examples of photographic processes that were used by professional photographers in the 19th century to produce and distribute erotic material.

Photo process display case from the exhibition Hold That Pose at the Kinsey Institute

Stanhopes on display from the exhibition Hold That Pose at the Kinsey Institute

Unknown photographers
Stanhope lenses and holders
19th or early 20th century

Unknown photographer
Stanhope lens and holder (detail)
19th or early 20th century

Stanhope lenses and holders
19th or early 20th century

Stanhopes derive their name from Lord Stanhope, who created the tiny rod-shaped lens before the invention of photography. In 1859, an entrepreneurial French inventor named René Prudent Patrice Dagron patented a process for making “cylindres photomicroscopiques”, and then created a successful business selling them as inexpensive novelty items. A photograph smaller than the head of a pin was mounted on a Stanhope lens, and then both were placed in a holder such as a pen knife, ring, or other small object. Stanhopes were popular souvenir items – many featured photographs of places or famous monuments such as the Eiffel Tower, but images of nude women or explicit sexual activity were also produced.

Gallery wall from the exhibition Hold That Pose at the Kinsey Institute

Stereoscope display case from the exhibition Hold That Pose at the Kinsey Institute

Stereoscope on display in the exhibition Hold That Pose at the Kinsey Institute

Stereo photography

The stereoscope, a device for viewing images in three dimensions, was invented in England in1838, just as the first photographic processes were being developed in France. The first stereo photographs were created using the daguerreotype process, which preserved an image on a highly polished silver plate. Initially a single camera was used to produce two nearly identical images that when viewed through a stereo device gave the illusion of seeing in 3-D, but soon a camera equipped with two lenses came into use for the production of stereo images. Stereoscopes became as popular as televisions are today, as a form of affordable home entertainment that could be enjoyed by children and adults.

Webster & Albee (Publishers, United States)
Woman standing on the back of a kneeling man
Late 19th century
Hand-colored stereocard

See the installation photograph above and the card in the Stereoscope

Unknown photographer (France)
Two nude women in a room with a mirror
c. 1850-1855
Stereo daguerreotype under glass

Underwood & Underwood (United States)
Oh ! you naughty man
1900
Stereocard

Unknown photographer
The Entanglement
Mid 19th century
Hand-coloured stereocard

Unknown photographer (France)
Nude woman in a room with a mirror
c. 1850-1855
Copy photograph of stereo daguerreotype

Unknown photographer
Photomontage of men and women engaged in sexual activity
1895-1900
Gelatin silver print

Unknown photographer
Photomontage of men and women engaged in sexual activity (detail)
1895-1900
Gelatin silver print

Posts Tagged ‘daguerreotype

Exhibition dates: 15th March – 15th July 2018

Terror incognita

Kulin

Thomas Bock

February 2018

Charles Calistus Burleigh (1810-1878)

William J. Shew (1820-1903)

Exhibition dates: 8th April – 3rd September 2017

Nils Strindberg (1872-1897)

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877)

Robert Adamson (1821-1848) and David Octavius Hill (1802-1870)

Salted Paper Print, Calotype

Daguerreotype

Ambrotype

Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1813-1875)

Carleton E. Watkins (1829-1916)

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879)

Albumen Silver Print

Rosalie Sjöman (1833-1919)

Carl Jacob Malmberg (1824-1895)

Carbon Print

Carl Curman (1833-1913)

Exhibition dates: 25th May – 28th August 2016

Techniques over time

Homage and metamorphosis

Innovating to preserve and showcase

Exhibition dates: 3rd November 2015 – 20th March 2016

Inside the Portrait Studio

Outside the Portrait Studio

Dighton Rock

Seth Eastman

Exhibition dates: 19th June – 22nd November 2015

Hill and Adamson

Scottish daguerreotypes

Amateur photographers: Julia Margaret Cameron

George Washington Wilson

TR Williams

Exhibition dates: 26th May – 18th October 2015

Exhibition dates: 3rd May – 26th July 2015

About the exhibition

The Photo-Secession

In Light of the Past: Twenty-Five Years of Photography at the National Gallery of Art

The Nineteenth Century: The Invention of Photography

Photography at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Photography Between the Wars

Postwar Photography

Snapshots

Conceptual Photography

Exhibition dates: 21st March – 8th June 2015

Extract from “Introduction”

Time

Nation

People

Place

Transmission

Melvin Vaniman (American, 1866-1912)

Exhibition dates: 23rd January – 4th September 2015

*PLEASE NOTE THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF HUMAN EROTIC ACTIVITY AND NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN*

Stereo photography

PLEASE NOTE THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF HUMAN EROTIC ACTIVITY AND NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN