Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900) Montserrat (Barcelona). The Devil’s Rock
September 1871
Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona
I’ve assembled five photography exhibitions before they all finish around the 3rd of September, so let’s have a posting on a Monday!
After the recent Louis Stettner posting, this is the second of three fine photography exhibitions at Fundación MAPFRE.
The third of the trio, an exhibition on the revolutionary (in more ways than one) Italian photographer Tina Modotti, will be posted this weekend – to be followed in quick succession by the exhibitions Conditions of Living (photographs of the housing in the East End of London), Images of Italy (19th century views of Italy) and Berenice Abbott’s New York Album.
As usual, an eclectic mix if ever there was one.
As also with this exhibition which “brings to light” the Spanish views of the Levante peninsula and Catolonia by the long forgotten photographer Jules Ainaud, acknowledging his place in photographic history.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Fundación MAPFRE for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Jules Ainaud has been a practically unknown photographer, until his work is now exhibited today one hundred and fifty years after it was first seen in Barcelona. Ainaud always worked for Jean Laurent, whose studio was, as is well known, was one of the great centres for the production of photographs in Spain in the middle decades of the 19th century and up to 1885.
Ainaud was one of the photographers that Laurent “commissioned” to obtain images of some provinces and thus complete his catalogue. In his case, the Levante peninsula and a large part of Catalonia, in an activity that as a whole lasted between 1870 and 1872. The exhibition recovers practically all the images corresponding to Catalonia, in an exhibition that wants to give Ainaud his proper place in photographic history.
Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website
Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900) Barcelona. The Main Theater
1872
Arxiu Fotogràfic of Barcelona
Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900) Barcelona. The Provincial Council
1872
Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona
Jules Ainaud’s Catalonia (1871-1872)
This exhibition, which continues the line of exhibition programming started by Fundación MAPFRE with the desire to deepen the knowledge of photographic archives and funds, presents the photographic work that Jules Ainaud made during his trip through Catalonia between 1871 and 1872. The exhibition restores the legitimate authorship of this photographer and makes his work known.
It has been more than 150 years since the set of photographs that Jules Ainaud took in Catalonia between 1871 and 1872 on behalf of the J. Laurent house were exhibited at the Ateneu Barcelonès for the first and only time. Like the photographs of the Levant area that this house marketed, for a long time these images had been considered to be the work of Jean Laurent himself. “today (…) with the documentary evidence on the table, it can be affirmed that Jules Ainaud was the effective author of these shots taken in this area that the J. Laurent house used for marketing between 1872 and 1879”, says the curator of the exhibition, Jep Martí Baiget.
The firm J. Laurent, for which Ainaud worked, was founded in Madrid in 1856 by the Frenchman Jean Laurent, and represents the main example in Spain of the emergence and development, since the middle of the 19th century, of companies destined to satisfy the increasingly intense demand for photographic images, for private portraits, but also for reproductions of works of art, landscapes and views of cities and monuments.
The exhibition presents one hundred vintage copies on albumen paper from wet collodion glass negatives. In addition, it includes fourteen stereoscopic views and thirteen reproductions of the glass plate negatives of these views, which allow one to appreciate the richness of image detail compared to works on paper. All these photographs were part of the catalogs that the Laurent company used for marketing between 1872 and 1879. The tour is completed with an oil portrait of Ainaud, the only one that is preserved, documentation and four letters that talk about the author’s trip to Catalonia in 1871 and 1872.
Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website
Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900) Barcelona. Private house of the 17th century
1872
Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona
Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900) Barcelona. Panoramic view of Barcelona, from Montjuïc
1872
Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona
Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900) Barcelona. Panoramic view of Barcelona, from Montjuïc
1872
Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona
Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900) Poblet (Tarragona). Royal Gate of the convent
September 1871
National Library of Spain, Madrid
Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900) Tarragona. The Cyclopean Wall
1871-1872
National Library of Spain, Madrid
Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900) Tarragona. View of the port from the city
1871-1872
National Library of Spain, Madrid
It is now over one hundred and fifty years since the set of photographs Jules Ainaud took in Catalonia between 1871 and 1872, commissioned by the Laurent house, were exhibited for the first and only time to date at the Ateneo Barcelonés. Like the pictures of the Levante area marketed by that firm, this interesting set of images was long considered to be the work of Jean Laurent himself.
Jules Ainaud’s Catalonia (1871-1872) is the first public presentation that restores his legitimate authorship and highlights his contribution to the history of our photography.
The firm “J. Laurent & Cía.” for which Ainaud worked had been founded in Madrid in 1856 by the Frenchman Juan Laurent and represents the main example in Spain of the appearance and development, from the mid-19th century onwards, of companies aimed at satisfying the increasingly intense demand for photographic images, initially of private portraits, but soon also of reproductions of works of art, landscapes and views of cities and monuments.
This exhibition brings together around a hundred period prints on albumen paper from wet collodion glass negatives and is completed by fourteen stereoscopic views and thirteen reproductions of the glass plate negatives of these views, which allow the richness of the image details to be appreciated in comparison with the works on paper. All the prints were included in the catalogues that the Laurent company used to market them between 1872 and 1879.
Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website
Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900) Barcelona. The castle of Montjuïc
1872
National Library of Spain, Madrid
Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900) Barcelona. Plaza del Comercio, before the Palace
June 4, 1872
National Library of Spain, Madrid
Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900) Tarragona. General view of Tarragona
1871-1872
National Library of Spain, Madrid
Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900) Tarragona. Quarries of Tarragona
February 8, 1872
National Archaeological Museum of Tarragona
Exhibition dates: 3rd December 2019 – 13th December 2020
Likely by Antoine-François-Jean Claudet (French, Lyon 1797 – 1867 London)
Possibly by Nicolaas Henneman (Dutch, Heemskerk 1813 – 1898 London) The Chess Players (detail)
c. 1845
Salted paper print from paper negative Sheet: 9 5/8 × 7 11/16 in. (24.5 × 19.6cm) Image: 7 13/16 × 5 13/16 in. (19.8 × 14.7cm)
Bequest of Maurice B. Sendak, 2012
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain
An excellent selection of photographs in this posting. I particularly like the gender-bending, shape-shifting, age-distorting 1850s-60s Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits by an unknown artist. I’ve never seen anything like it before, especially from such an early date. Someone obviously took a lot of care, had a great sense of humour and definitely had a great deal of fun making the album.
Other fascinating details include the waiting horses and carriages in Fox Talbot’s View of the Boulevards of Paris (1843); the mannequin perched above the awning of the photographic studio in Dowe’s Photograph Rooms, Sycamore, Illinois (1860s); and the chthonic underworld erupting from the tilting ground in Carleton E. Watkins’ California Oak, Santa Clara Valley (c. 1863).
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
When The Met first opened its doors in 1870, photography was still relatively new. Yet over the preceding three decades it had already developed into a complex pictorial language of documentation, social and scientific inquiry, self-expression, and artistic endeavour.
These initial years of photography’s history are the focus of this exhibition, which features new and recent gifts to the Museum, many offered in celebration of The Met’s 150th anniversary and presented here for the first time. The works on view, from examples of candid portraiture and picturesque landscape to pioneering travel photography and photojournalism, chart the varied interests and innovations of early practitioners.
The exhibition, which reveals photography as a dynamic medium through which to view the world, is the first of a two-part presentation that plays on the association of “2020” with clarity of vision while at the same time honouring farsighted and generous collectors and patrons. The second part will move forward a century, bringing together works from the 1940s through the 1960s.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Likely by Antoine-François-Jean Claudet (French, Lyon 1797 – 1867 London)
Possibly by Nicolaas Henneman (Dutch, Heemskerk 1813 – 1898 London) The Chess Players
c. 1845
Salted paper print from paper negative Sheet: 9 5/8 × 7 11/16 in. (24.5 × 19.6cm) Image: 7 13/16 × 5 13/16 in. (19.8 × 14.7cm)
Bequest of Maurice B. Sendak, 2012
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain
Lewis Carroll (British, Daresbury, Cheshire 1832 – 1898 Guildford) [Alice Liddell]
June 25, 1870
Albumen silver print from glass negative Sheet: 6 1/4 × 5 9/16 in. (15.9 × 14.1cm) Image: 5 7/8 × 4 15/16 in. (15 × 12.6cm)
Bequest of Maurice B. Sendak, 2012
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain
Eighteen-year-old Alice Liddell’s slumped pose, clasped hands, and sullen expression invite interpretation. A favoured model of Lewis Carroll, and the namesake of his novel Alice in Wonderland, Liddell had not seen the writer and photographer for seven years when this picture was made; her mother had abruptly ended all contact in 1863. The young woman poses with apparent unease in this portrait intended to announce her eligibility for marriage. The session closed a long and now controversial history with Carroll, whose portraits of children continue to provoke speculation. In what was to be her last sitting with the photographer, Liddell embodies the passing of childhood innocence that Carroll romanticised through the fictional Alice.
Unknown photographer (American) [Surveyor]
c. 1854
Daguerreotype Case: 1.6 × 9.2 × 7.9cm (5/8 × 3 5/8 × 3 1/8 in.)
Gift of Charles Isaacs and Carol Nigro, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary, 2019
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain
This portrait of a surveyor from an unknown daguerreotype studio was made during the heyday of the Daguerreian era in the United States, a time that coincided with an increased need for survey data and maps for the construction of railways, bridges, and roads. The unidentified surveyor, seated in a chair, grasps one leg of the tripod supporting his transit, a type of theodolite or surveying instrument that comprised a compass and rotating telescope. The carefully composed scene, in which the angle of the man’s skyward gaze is aligned with the telescope and echoed by one leg of the tripod, conflates its surveyor subject with an astronomer. As a result, the lands of young America are compared to the vast reaches of space, with both territories full of potential discovery.
Unknown photographer (American) [Surveyor]
c. 1854
Daguerreotype Case: 1.6 × 9.2 × 7.9cm (5/8 × 3 5/8 × 3 1/8 in.)
Gift of Charles Isaacs and Carol Nigro, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary, 2019
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain
Alphonse Delaunay (French, 1827-1906) Patio de los Arrayanes, Alhambra, Granada, Spain
1854
Albumen silver print from paper negative
10 in. × 13 5/8 in. (25.4 × 34.6cm)
Gift of W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg, 2017
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain
One of the most talented students of famed French photographer Gustave Le Gray, Delaunay was virtually unknown before a group of his photographs appeared at auction in 2007. Subsequent research led to the identification of several bodies of work, including the documentation of contemporary events through instantaneous views captured on glass negatives. Delaunay also was a particular devotee of the calotype (or paper negative) process, with which he created his best pictures – including this view of the Alhambra. Among a group of pictures he made between 1851 and 1854 in Spain and Algeria, this view of the Patio de los Arrayanes reveals the extent to which Delaunay was able to manipulate the peculiarities of the paper negative. He revels in the graininess of the image, purposefully not masking out the sky before printing the negative, so that the marble tower appears somehow carved out of the very atmosphere that surrounds it. In contrast, the reflecting pool remains almost impossibly limpid, its dark surface offering a cool counterpart to the harsh Spanish sky.
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) [Classical Head]
probably 1839
Salted paper print
6 1/2 × 5 7/8 in. (16.5 × 15cm)
Purchase, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, 2019
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain
This luminous head seems to materialise before our very eyes, as if we are observing the moment in which the latent photographic image becomes visible. Nineteenth-century eyewitnesses to Hippolyte Bayard’s earliest photographs (direct positives on paper) described a similarly enchanting effect, in which hazy outlines coalesced with light and tone to form charmingly faithful, if indistinct, images. These works, which Bayard referred to as essais (tests or trials), often included statues and busts, which he frequently arranged in elaborate tableaux. In this case, he photographed the lone subject (an idealised classical head) from the front and side, as if it were a scientific specimen. The singular object emerges as a relic from photography’s origins and now distant past.
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, Dorset 1800 – 1877 Lacock) Group Taking Tea at Lacock Abbey
August 17, 1843
Salted paper print from paper negative Mount: 9 15/16 in. × 13 in. (25.3 × 33cm) Sheet: 7 3/8 × 8 15/16 in. (18.7 × 22.7cm) Image: 5 in. × 7 1/2 in. (12.7 × 19cm)
Bequest of Maurice B. Sendak, 2012
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain
Although Talbot’s groundbreaking calotype (paper negative) process allowed for more instantaneous image making, works such as this one nevertheless reflect the technical limitations of early photography. Here, he adapts painterly conventions to the new medium, staging a genre scene on his family estate. The stilted arrangement of figures – rigidly posed to produce a clear image – belies Talbot’s attempt to show action in progress. To achieve sufficient light exposure, he photographed the domestic tableau outdoors, arranging his subjects before a blank backdrop to create the illusion of interior space.
Unknown artist (American or Canadian) [Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]
1850s-1860s
Albumen silver prints
5 15/16 × 5 1/8 × 2 1/16 in. (15.1 × 13 × 5.3cm)
Bequest of Herbert Mitchell, 2008
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain
Beginning in the late 1850s, cartes de visite, or small photographic portrait cards, were produced on a scale that put photography in the hands of the masses. This unusual collection of collages is ahead of its time in spoofing the rigidity of the format. The images play with scale and gender by juxtaposing cutout heads and mismatched sitters, thereby highlighting the difference between social identity – which was communicated in part through the exchange of calling cards – and individuality.
Unknown artist (American) [Studio Photographer at Work]
c. 1855
Salted paper print Image: 5 1/8 × 3 13/16 in. (13 × 9.7cm) Sheet: 9 1/2 × 5 5/8 in. (24.1 × 14.3cm)
William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
In this evocative image, picture making takes centre stage. Underneath a canopy of dark cloth, the photographer poses as if to adjust the bellows of a large format camera. The view reflected on its ground glass would appear reversed and upside down. Viewers’ expectations are similarly overturned, because the photographer’s subject remains unseen.
Unknown artist (American) [Boy Holding a Daguerreotype]
1850s
Daguerreotype with applied colour Image: 3 1/4 × 2 3/4 in. (8.3 × 7cm)
William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The boy in this picture clutches a cased image to his chest, as if to illustrate his affection for the subject depicted within. Daguerreotypes were a novel form of handheld picture, portable enough to slip into a pocket or palm. Portraits exchanged between friends and family could be kept close – a practice often mimed by sitters, who would pose for one daguerreotype while holding another.
James Fitzallen Ryder (American, 1826-1904) Locomotive James McHenry (58), Atlantic and Great Western Railway
1862
Albumen silver print Image: 7 3/8 × 9 1/4 in. (18.7 × 23.5cm) Mount: 10 × 13 in. (25.4 × 33cm)
William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
In spring 1862, the chief engineer in charge of building the Atlantic and Great Western Railway – which ran from Salamanca, New York, to Akron, Ohio, and from Meadville to Oil City, Pennsylvania – engaged James Ryder to make photographs that would convince shareholders of the worthiness of the project. Ryder’s assignment was “to photograph all the important points of the work, such as excavations, cuts, bridges, trestles, stations, buildings and general character of the country through which the road ran, the rugged and the picturesque.” In a converted railroad car kitted out with a darkroom, water tank, and developing sink, he processed photographs that make up one of the earliest rail surveys.
Attributed to Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, Wayland, Massachusetts 1808 – 1901 Crawford Notch, New Hampshire) Winter on the Common, Boston
1850s
Salted paper print Window: 6 15/16 × 8 15/16 in. (17.6 × 22.7cm) Mat: 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8cm)
William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Having originally set his sights on a career as a painter, Josiah Hawes gave up his brushes for a camera upon first seeing a daguerreotype in 1841. Two years later, he joined Albert Sands Southworth in Boston to form the celebrated photographic studio Southworth & Hawes. Turning to paper-based photography in the early 1850s, Hawes frequently depicted local scenery. This surprising picture, which presents Boston Common through a veil of snow-laden branches, shows that Hawes brought his creative ambitions to the nascent art of photography.
Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916) [California Oak, Santa Clara Valley]
c. 1863
Albumen silver print Image: 12 in. × 9 5/8 in. (30.5 × 24.5cm) Mount: 21 1/4 in. × 17 5/8 in. (54 × 44.8cm)
William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
For viewers today, the crown of this majestic oak tree, with its complex network of branches, might evoke the allover paintings of Abstract Expressionism with their layers of dripped paint. As photographed by Carleton Watkins, the dark, flattened silhouette of the tree feathers out across the camera’s field of view. The sloped horizon line, uncommon in Watkins’s output, both echoes the ridge in the distance and grounds the energy of the tree canopy, ably demonstrating his masterful command of pictorial composition.
George Wilson Bridges (British, 1788-1864) Garden of Selvia, Syracuse, Sicily
1846
Salted paper print from paper negative Image: 6 15/16 × 8 9/16 in. (17.7 × 21.7cm) Sheet: 7 5/16 × 8 13/16 in. (18.5 × 22.4cm)
Bequest of Maurice B. Sendak, 2012
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain
The monk’s gesture of prayer in this image by George Wilson Bridges is a touchstone of stillness against the impressive landscape and vegetation that rise up behind him. Bridges was an Anglican reverend and friend of William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the calotype (paper negative), who instructed him on the method before it was patented. Bridges was also one of the earliest photographers to embark upon a tour of the Mediterranean region; he wrote to Talbot that he conceived of the excursion both as a technical mission to advance photography and as a pilgrimage to collect imagery of religious sites.
Pietro Dovizielli (Italian, 1804-1885) [Spanish Steps, Rome]
c. 1855
Albumen silver print from glass negative Image: 14 11/16 × 11 5/16 in. (37.3 × 28.8cm) Sheet: 24 7/16 × 18 7/8 in. (62 × 48cm)
Gift of W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary, 2019
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain
Made in late afternoon light, Pietro Dovizielli’s picture shows a long shadow cast onto Rome’s Piazza di Spagna that almost obscures one of the market stalls flanking the base of the famed Spanish Steps. Rising above the sea of stairs is the church of Trinità dei Monti, its facade neatly bisected by the Sallustiano obelisk. In the piazza, a lone figure – the only visible inhabitant of this eerily empty public square – rests against the railing of the Barcaccia fountain. Keenly composed pictures like this led reviewers of Dovizielli’s photographs to proclaim them “the very paragons of architectural photography.”
Edouard Baldus (French (born Prussia), 1813-1889) [Amphitheater, Nîmes]
c. 1853
Salted paper print from paper negative
Overall: 12 3/8 × 15 3/16 in. (31.5 × 38.5cm)
Gift of Joyce F. Menschel, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary, 2019
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Instead of photographing the entire arena in Nîmes, as he had two years earlier, Baldus focusses here on a section of the façade, playing the superimposed arches against the vertical, shadowed pylons in the foreground. The resulting composition manages to isolate and monumentalise the architecture, while creating a rhythmic play of light and dark that energises the picture. The photograph was part of a massive, four-year project, Villes de France photographiées, in which the views from the south of France were said to surpass all of the photographer’s previous work in the region.
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, Dorset 1800 – 1877 Lacock) View of the Boulevards of Paris
1843
Salted paper print from paper negative Mount: 9 in. × 10 1/16 in. (22.8 × 25.6cm) Sheet: 7 3/8 × 10 1/8 in. (18.7 × 25.7cm) Image: 6 5/16 × 8 1/2 in. (16.1 × 21.6cm)
Bequest of Maurice B. Sendak, 2012
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain
In May 1843 Talbot traveled to Paris to negotiate a licensing agreement for the French rights to his patented calotype process. His invention used a negative-positive system and a paper base – not a copper support as in a daguerreotype. Although his negotiations were not fruitful, Talbot’s views of the elegant new boulevards of the French capital were highly successful.
Filled with the incidental details of urban life, architectural ornamentation, and the play of spring light, this photograph appears as the second plate in Talbot’s groundbreaking publication The Pencil of Nature (1844). The chimney posts on the roofline of the rue de la Paix, the waiting horses and carriages, and the characteristically French shuttered windows evoke as vivid a notion of mid-nineteenth-century Paris now as they must have 170 years ago.
Lewis Dowe (American, active 1860s-1880s) [Dowe’s Photograph Rooms, Sycamore, Illinois]
1860s
Albumen silver print Image: 5 7/8 × 7 5/8 in. (14.9 × 19.3cm) Mount: 8 × 10 in. (20.3 × 25.4cm)
William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Above a bustling thoroughfare in Sycamore, Illinois, boldface lettering advertises the services of photographer Lewis Dowe, a portraitist who also published postcards and stereoviews. Easier to miss in the image is a mannequin perched above the awning to promote the studio. The flurry of activity below Dowe’s storefront and the prime location of the outfit, poised between a tailor and a saloon, speak to the important role of photography in town life.
E. & H. T. Anthony (American) [Specimens of New York Bill Posting]
1863
Albumen silver prints Mount: 3 1/4 in. × 6 3/4 in. (8.3 × 17.1cm) Image: 2 15/16 in. × 6 in. (7.5 × 15.3cm)
William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Benefit concerts, minstrel shows, lectures, and horse races all clamour for attention in this graphic field of broadsides posted in the Bowery neighbourhood of Manhattan. The stereograph format lends added depth and dimensionality to the layered fragments of text, transporting viewers to a hectic city sidewalk. Published for a national market, the scene indexes a precise moment in the summer of 1863, offering armchair tourists an inadvertent trend report on downtown cultural life.
Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) The Diamond and Wasp, Balaklava Harbour
March, 1855
Albumen silver print from glass negative Image: 8 in. × 10 1/8 in. (20.3 × 25.7cm) Mount: 19 5/16 × 24 3/4 in. (49 × 62.9cm)
Gift of Thomas Walther Collection, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary, 2019
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Fenton’s view of the Black Sea port of Balaklava, which the British used as a landing point for their siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, shows a busy but orderly operation. The British naval ships, HMS Diamond and HMS Wasp, oversaw the management of transports into and out of the harbour, which explains the presence of ships and rowboats, as well as the large stack of crates near the rail track in the foreground. Against claims of “rough-and-tumble” mismanagement of Balaklava in the British press, Fenton (commissioned by a Manchester publisher to record the theatre of war) offers documentation of a well-functioning port.
Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) The Mamelon and Malakoff from front of Mortar Battery
April, 1855
Salted paper print from glass negative Image: 9 1/8 × 13 1/2 in. (23.1 × 34.3cm) Sheet: 14 3/4 × 17 13/16 in. (37.5 × 45.3cm)
Gift of Joyce F. Menschel, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary, 2019
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Fenton’s extensive documentation of the Crimean War – the first use of photography for that purpose – was a commercial endeavour that did not include pictures of battle, the wounded, or the dead. His unprepossessing view of a vast rocky valley instead discloses, in the distance, a site of crucial strategic importance. Fort Malakoff, the general designation of Russian fortifications on two hills (Mamelon and Malakoff) is just perceptible at the horizon line. Malakoff’s capture by the French in September 1855, five months after Fenton made this photograph, ended the eleven-month siege of Sevastopol and was the final episode of the war.
Felice Beato (British (born Italy), Venice 1832-1909 Luxor) and James Robertson (British, 1813-1881) [Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem]
1856-1857
Albumen silver print Image: 9 in. × 11 1/4 in. (22.9 × 28.6cm) Mount: 17 5/8 in. × 22 1/2 in. (44.8 × 57.2cm)
Gift of Joyce F. Menschel, 2013
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
This detailed print showing the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem provides a sense of the structure’s natural and architectural surroundings. Felice Beato depicted the religious site from a pilgrim’s point of view – walls and roads are given visual priority and stand between the viewer and the shrine. Holy sites such as this were the earliest and most common subjects of travel photography. Beato made multiple journeys to the Mediterranean and North Africa, and he is perhaps best known for photographing East Asia in the 1880s.
R.C. Montgomery (American, active 1850s) [Self-Portrait (?)]
1850s
Daguerreotype with applied colour Image: 3 1/4 × 4 1/4 in. (8.3 × 10.8cm)
William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The insouciant subject here may be the daguerreotypist himself, posing in bed for a promotional picture or a private joke. His rumpled suit and haphazard hairstyle affect intimacy, perhaps in an effort to showcase an informal portrait style. Because they required long exposure times, daguerreotypes often captured sitters at their most stilted. With this surprising picture, the maker might have hoped to attract clients who were in search of a more novel or natural likeness.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York, New York 10028-0198 Phone: 212-535-7710
Unknown photographer Photograph of Allied War exhibition, Serbian Section, V&A (installation view)
1917
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The older I grow, the more exponentially I appreciate and love these early photographs. Imagine having a collection like this!
Wonderful to see Edward Steichen’s Portrait – Lady H (1908, below) as I have a copy of Camera Work 22 in my collection.
The V&A has been collecting photographs since 1856, the year the Museum was founded, and it was one of the first museums to present photography exhibitions. Since then the collection has grown to be one of the largest and most important in the world, comprising around 500,000 images. The V&A is now honoured to have added the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) collection to its holdings, which contains around 270,000 photographs, an extensive library, and 6,000 cameras and pieces of equipment associated with leading artists and photographic pioneers.
Take a behind-the-scenes look at our world class photography collection following the transfer of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) Collection, which has enabled a dramatic reimagining of the way photography is presented at the V&A. The photographs curators introduce a series of five highlights that are on display in the new Photography Centre, which opened on 12th October 2018. The first phase of the centre will more than double the space dedicated to photography at the Museum.
Text from the V&A and YouTube websites
Unknown photographer Photograph of Allied War exhibition, Serbian Section, V&A (installation view)
1917
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The V&A has been collecting and exhibiting photographs since the 1850s. This image shows part o a photographic exhibition held over 100 years ago in the same galleries you are standing in today. The exhibition presented a densely packed display of images depicting the Allied Powers during the First World War.
Installation views of the V&A Photography Centre, London Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (French, 1765-1833) Christ Carrying his Cross (installation views)
1827
Heliograph on pewter plate
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photos: Marcus Bunyan
The French inventor Niépce made the earliest surviving photographic images, which he called ‘heliographs’ or ‘sun-writing’. Only 16 are thought to still exist. Although Niépce experimented with light-sensitive plates inside a camera, he made most of his images, including this one, by placing engravings of works by other artists directly onto a metal plate. He would probably have had the resulting heliographs coated in ink and printed.
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (French, 1765-1833) Christ Carrying his Cross (installation view)
1827
Heliograph on pewter plate
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) The Adamson Family (installation view)
1843-1845
Salted paper print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The partnership between Scottish painter Hill and chemist Adamson merged the art and science of photography. The pair initially intended to create preliminary studies for Hill’s paintings, but soon recognised photography’s artistic potential. With Hill’s knowledge of composition and lighting, and Adamson’s considerable sensitivity and dexterity in handling the camera, together they produced some of the most accomplished photographic portraits of their time.
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800-1877) The Haystack
1844
From The Pencil of Nature
Salted paper print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Benjamin Brecknell Turner (British, 1815-1894) Hedgerow Trees, Clerkenleap (installation views)
1852-1854
Albumen print; Calotype negative
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Turner took out a licence to practice ‘calotype’ photography from Talbot in 1848. He contact-printed positive images from paper negatives. The negative (below) and its corresponding positive (above) are reunited here to illustrate this process, but the pairing as you see them would not have been the photographer’s original intention for display. Although unique negatives were sometimes exhibited in their own right, only showing positive prints was the norm.
Benjamin Brecknell Turner (British, 1815-1894) Hedgerow Trees, Clerkenleap (installation view)
1852-1854
Albumen print; Calotype negative
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) The Road to Chailly, Forest of Fontainebleau (installation view)
1852
Albumen print from a collodion glass negative
Bequeathed to the V&A by Chauncey Hare Townshend Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the V&A Photography Centre, London Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) The Marseillaise (The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792), by Francois Rude, 1833-35, Arc de Triomphe de l’Etoile, Paris (installation view)
1852
Albumen print
Bequeathed to the V&A by Chauncey Hare Townshend Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) The Marseillaise (The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792), by Francois Rude, 1833-35, Arc de Triomphe de l’Etoile, Paris (installation view)
1852
Albumen print
Bequeathed to the V&A by Chauncey Hare Townshend Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) Parian Vase, Grapes and Silver Cup (installation view)
1860
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Fenton was one of the most versatile and technically brilliant photographers of the 19th century. He excelled at many subjects, including war photography, portraiture, architecture and landscape. He also made a series of lush still lives. Here, grapes, plums and peaches are rendered in exquisite detail, and the silver cup on the right reflects a camera tripod.
Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) Parian Vase, Grapes and Silver Cup (installation view)
1860
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) Parian Vase, Grapes and Silver Cup (installation view)
1860
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) Parian Vase, Grapes and Silver Cup (installation view detail)
1860
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) Still Life with Fruit and Decanter
1860
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Oscar Gustaf Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Head of St John the Baptist on a Charger(installation view)
c. 1856
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rejlander probably intended this photograph to be part of a larger composition telling the biblical story of Salome, in which the severed head of John the Baptist was presented to her on a plate. Rejlander never made the full picture, however, and instead produced multiple prints of the head alone.
Oscar Gustaf Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Head of St John the Baptist on a Charger (installation view)
c. 1856
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Francis Frith (British, 1822-1898) The Pyramids of Dahshoor [Dahshur], from the East, from Egypt, Sinai, and Jerusalem: A Series of Twenty Photographic Views by Francis Frith (installation view)
1858 (published 1860 or 1862)
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Frith’s photographs were popular and circulated widely, both because of their architectural interest and because they often featured sites mentioned in the Bible. Photographs of places described in biblical stories brought a new level of realism to a Christian Victorian audience, previously only available through the interpretations of a painter or illustrator.
Francis Frith (British, 1822-1898) The Pyramids of Dahshoor [Dahshur], from the East, from Egypt, Sinai, and Jerusalem: A Series of Twenty Photographic Views by Francis Frith (installation view)
1858 (published 1860 or 1862)
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Francis Frith (British, 1822-1898) The Pyramids of Dahshoor [Dahshur], from the East, from Egypt, Sinai, and Jerusalem: A Series of Twenty Photographic Views by Francis Frith
1858 (published 1860 or 1862)
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the V&A Photography Centre, London Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) Solar Effect in the Clouds – Ocean(installation view)
1856-1859
Albumen Print
Bequeathed to the V&A by Chauncey Hare Townshend Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) Solar Effect in the Clouds – Ocean
1856-1859
Albumen Print
Art Institute of Chicago
Creative Commons Zero (CC0)
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) The Imperial Yacht, La Reine Hortense, Le Havre (installation view)
1856-1857
Albumen print
Bequeathed to the V&A by Chauncey Hare Townshend Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) The Imperial Yacht, La Reine Hortense, Le Havre (installation view)
1856-1857
Albumen print
Bequeathed to the V&A by Chauncey Hare Townshend Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) The Imperial Yacht, La Reine Hortense, Le Havre
1856-1857
Albumen print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) Pavilion Richelieu, Louvre, Paris (installation view)
1857-1859
Albumen print
Bequeathed to the V&A by Chauncey Hare Townshend Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) Pavilion Richelieu, Louvre, Paris (installation view)
1857-1859
Albumen print
Bequeathed to the V&A by Chauncey Hare Townshend Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) Balaclava from Guard’s Hill, the Crimea (installation view)
1855
Albumen print
Bequeathed to the V&A by Chauncey Hare Townshend Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Roger Fenton (British, 1819-69) Balaclava from Guard’s Hill, the Crimea (installation view)
1855
Albumen print
Bequeathed to the V&A by Chauncey Hare Townshend Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, born India, 1815-1879) Lucia (installation view)
1864-1865
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Charles Lutwide Dodgson (also known as Lewis Carroll)(British, 1832-1898) Tea Merchant (On Duty) and Tea Merchant (Off Duty) (installation view)
1873
Albumen prints
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lewis Carroll is best known as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but he was also an accomplished amateur photographer. Approximately half of his photographs are portraits of children, sometimes wearing foreign costumes or acting out scenes. Here, Alexandra ‘Xie’ Kitchen, his most frequent child sitter, poses in Chinese dress on a stack of tea chests.
Charles Lutwide Dodgson (also known as Lewis Carroll)(British, 1832-1898) Tea Merchant (On Duty) (installation view)
1873
Albumen prints
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Charles Lutwide Dodgson (also known as Lewis Carroll)(British, 1832-1898) Tea Merchant (Off Duty) (installation view)
1873
Albumen prints
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, born India, 1815-1879) Pomona (installation view)
1887
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The South Kensington museum (now the V&A) was the only museum to collect and exhibit Julia Margaret Cameron’s during her lifetime. This is one of several studies she made of Alice Liddell, who as a child had modelled for the author and photographer Lewis Carroll and inspired his novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Cameron, Carroll and Liddell moved in overlapping artistic and intellectual circles. Here, surrounded by foliage, a grown-up Alice poses as the Roman goddess of orchards and gardens.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, born India, 1815-1879) Pomona (installation view)
1887
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the V&A Photography Centre, London Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Alvin Langdon Coburn (American 1882-1966) Frederick Holland Day (installation view)
1900
Gum platinum print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The British-American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn enjoyed success on both sides of the Atlantic. Active in the early 20th century, he gained recognition from a young age as a talented photographer. His style ranged from the painterly softness of Pictorialism to the unusual vantage points and abstraction of Modernism. As well as being a practising photographer, Coburn was an avid collector. In 1930 he donated over 600 photographs to the Royal Photographic Society. The gift included examples of Coburn’s own work alongside that of his contemporaries, many of whom are now considered to be the most influential of their generation. Coburn also collected historic photographs, and was among the first in his time to rediscover and appreciate the work of 19th-century masters like Julia Margaret Cameron and Hill and Adamson.
Fredrick Holland Day (American, 1864-1933) Head of a Girl, Hampton, Virginia (installation view)
1905
Gum platinum print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Day made this portrait when he visited the Hampton Institute in Virginia, which was founded after the American Civil War as a teacher-training school for freed slaves. The institute’s camera club invited Day to visit the school and critique the work of its students. Day’s friend and fellow photographer, Frederick Evans, donated this strikingly modern composition to the Royal Photographic Society in 1937.
Fredrick Holland Day (American, 1864-1933) Head of a Girl, Hampton, Virginia (installation view)
1905
Gum platinum print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Fredrick Holland Day (American, 1864-1933) Head of a Girl, Hampton, Virginia (installation view)
1905
Gum platinum print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Fredrick Holland Day (American, 1864-1933) Head of a Girl, Hampton, Virginia
1905
Gum platinum print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) The Letter
1906
Platinum print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Käsebier studied painting before opening a photography studio in New York. Her Pictorialist photographs often combine soft focus with experimental printing techniques. These sisters were dressed in historic costume for a ball, but their pose transforms a society portrait into a narrative picture. In a variant image, they turn to look at the framed silhouette on the wall.
Installation views of the V&A Photography Centre, London Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Francis James Mortimer (British, 1874-1944) Alvin Langdon Coburn at the Opening of His One-Man Exhibition the Royal Photographic Society, London (installation view)
1906
Carbon print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Annie Wardrope Brigman (American, 1869-1950) The Spirit of Photography
c. 1908
Platinum print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Alvin Langdon Coburn (American 1882-1966) Kensington Gardens (installation view)
1910
Platinum print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Cover of Camera Work Number XXVI(installation view) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973) Portrait – Lady H(installation view)
1908 Camera Work 22
1908
Photogravure
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973) Portrait – Lady H
1908 Camera Work 22
1908
Photogravure
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) New York (installation view)
1916 Camera Work 48
1916
Photogravure
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) was an American photographer, publisher, writer and gallery owner. From 1903-1917, he published the quarterly journal Camera Work, which featured portfolios of exquisitely printed photogravures (a type of photograph printed in ink), alongside essays and reviews. Camera Work promoted photography as an art form, publishing the work of Pictorialist photographers who drew inspiration from painting, and reproducing 19th-century photographs. It also helped to introduce modern art to American audiences, including works by radical European painters such as Matisse and Picasso.
Alvin Langdon Coburn (American 1882-1966) Vortograph (installation view)
1917
Bromide print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Rudolph Koppitz (American, 1884-1936) Bewegungsstudie (Movement Study)
1926
Carbon print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Koppitz was a leading art photographer in Vienna between the two World Wars, as well as a master of complex printing processes, including the pigment, gum and broccoli process of transfer printing. Tis dynamic and sensual composition captures dancers from the Vienna State Opera Ballet frozen mid-movement.
Herbert Bayer (Austrian American, 1900-85) Shortly Before Dawn (installation view)
1932-39
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Bayer had a varied and influential career as a designer, painter, photographer, sculptor, art director and architect. He taught at the Bauhaus school in Dessau, Germany, and later began to use photomontage, both in his artistic and advertising work. Using this process, he combined his photographs with found imagery, producing surreal or dreamlike pictures.
Herbert Bayer (Austrian American, 1900-85) Shortly Before Dawn (installation view)
1932-39
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Bernard Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Reguliersbreestraat, Amsterdam (installation view)
1934
Foto-choma Eilers
Given by Joan Luckhurst Eilers Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In the 1930s, the Dutch photographer Bernard Eilers developed an experimental new photographic colour separation process known as ‘Foto-chroma Eilers’. Although the process was short-lived, Eilers successfully used this technique to produce prints like this of great intensity and depth of colour. Here, the misty reflections and neon lights create an atmospheric but modern view of a rain-soaked Amsterdam at night.
Bernard Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Reguliersbreestraat, Amsterdam (installation view)
1934
Foto-choma Eilers
Given by Joan Luckhurst Eilers Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Valentine to Charis(installation view)
1935
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
When Weston met the model and writer Charis Wilson in 1934, he was immediately besotted. This valentine to her contains a cluster of objects arranged as a still life, including the photographer’s camera lens and spectacles. Some of the objects seem to hold a special significance that only the lovers could understand. The numbers on the right possibly refer to their ages – there were almost thirty years between them.
Horst P. Horst (German-American, 1906-1999) Portrait of Gabrielle (‘Coco’) Chanel
1937
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Variant, American Vogue, 1 December 1937, p. 86: ‘Fashion: Mid-Season Prophecies’
Caption reads: Chanel in her fitted, three-quarters coat / Mademoiselle Chanel, in one of her new coats that are making the news – a three quarters coat buttoned tightly and trimmed with astrakham like her cap. 01/12/1937
Nickolas Muray (American, 1892-1965)
Women with headscarf, McCall’s Cover, July 1938(installation view)
1938
Tricolour carbro print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Hardware Store(installation view)
1938
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Between 1935 and 1939, the Federal Art Project emptied Abbott to make a series of photographs entitled Changing New York, documenting the rapid development and urban transformation of the city. This picture shows the facade of a downtown hardware store, its wares arranged in a densely-packed window display with extend onto the pavement.
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Hardware Store(installation view)
1938
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Hardware Store
1938
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Walker Evans (American, 1903-75)
Photographs of African masks, from an exhibition entitled African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (installation view)
1935
Gelatin silver prints
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In 1935, the Museum of Modern Art commissioned Evans to photograph objects in its major exhibition of African art. Using his 8 x 10 inch view camera, he highlighted the artistry and detail of the objects, alternating between front, side and rear views. In total, Evans produced 477 images, and 17 complete sets of them were printed. Several of these sets were donated to colleges and libraries in America, and the V&A bought one set in 1936 to better represent African art in its collection.
The term ‘negro’ is given here in its original historical context.
Walker Evans (American, 1903-75)
Photograph of African mask, from an exhibition entitled African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (installation view)
1935
Gelatin silver prints
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Walker Evans (American, 1903-75)
Photograph of African mask, from an exhibition entitled African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (installation view)
1935
Gelatin silver prints
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Walker Evans (American, 1903-75)
Photograph of African mask, from an exhibition entitled African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (installation view)
1935
Gelatin silver prints
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Bill Brandt (British, 1904-1983) Dubuffet’s Right Eye Alberto Giacometti’s Left Eye Louise Nevelson’s Eye Max Ernst’s Left Eye (installation view)
1960-1963
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Bill Brandt (British, 1904-83) Dubuffet’s Right Eye (installation view)
1960-1963
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
German-born Brandt moved to London in the 1930s. In his long and varied career, he made many compelling portraits of people including Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, the Sitwell family, Robert Graves and E.M. Forster. For this series he photographed the eyes of well-known artists over several years, creating a substantial collection of intense and unique portraits. The pictures play upon ideas of artistic vision and the camera lens, which acts as a photographer’s ‘mechanical eye’.
Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) Simple Still Life, Egg (installation view)
1950
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Throughout his career, Sudek used various photographic styles but always conveyed an intensely lyrical vision of the world. Here, his formal approach to a simple still life presents a poetic statement, and evokes an atmosphere of contemplation. Sudek’s motto and advice to his students – ‘hurry slowly’ – encapsulates his legendary patience and the sense of meditative stillness in his photographs.
Otto Steiner (German, 1915-1978) Luminogram (installation view)
1952
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Otto Steiner (German, 1915-1978) Luminogram (installation view)
1952
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Mark Cohen (American, b. 1943) True Color (installation views)
1974-1987
Portfolio of thirty dye transfer prints, printed in 2007
American Friends of the V&A through the generosity of The Michael G. and C. Jane Wilson 2007 Trust Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Known for his dynamic street photography, Cohen’s work presents a fragmented, sensory image of his hometown of Wiles-Barre, Pennsylvania. This set of pictures was taken at a time when colour photography was just beginning to be recognised as a fine art. Until the 1970s, colour had largely been associated with other advertising or family snapshots, and was not thought of as a legitimate medium for artists. Cohen and other photographers like William Eggleston transferred this perception using the dye-transfer printing process. Although complicated and time-consuming, the technique results in vibrant and high quality colour prints.
Mark Cohen (American, b. 1943) True Color (installation view detail)
1974-1987
Portfolio of thirty dye transfer prints, printed in 2007
American Friends of the V&A through the generosity of The Michael G. and C. Jane Wilson 2007 Trust Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Mark Cohen (American, b. 1943) True Color (installation view detail)
1974-1987
Portfolio of thirty dye transfer prints, printed in 2007
American Friends of the V&A through the generosity of The Michael G. and C. Jane Wilson 2007 Trust Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Graham Smith (British, b. 1947) What she wanted & who she got (installation view)
1982
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Since the 1980s, Graham Smith has been photographing his hometown of South Bank near Middlesbrough. His images convey his deep sensitivity towards the effects of changing working conditions on the former industrial north-east. In this photograph, despite the suggested humour of the title, we are left wondering who the couple are and what the nature of their relationship might be.
Jan Kempenaers (Belgian, b. 1968) Spomenik #3
2006
C-type print
The Kosmaj monument in Serbia is dedicated to soldiers of the Kosmaj Partisan detachment from World War II.
Jan Kempenaers (Belgian, b. 1968) Spomenik #4
2007
C-type print
This monument, authored by sculptor Miodrag Živković, commemorates the Battle of Sutjeska, one of the bloodiest battles of World War II in the former Yugoslavia.
Kempenaers toured the balkans photographing ‘Spomeniks’ – monuments built in former Yugoslavia in the 1960s and ’70s on the sites of Second World War battles and concentration camps. Some have been vandalised in outpourings of anger against the former regime, while others are well maintained. In Kempenaers’ photographs, the monuments appear otherworldly, as if dropped from outer space into a pristine landscape.
Installation view of the V&A Photography Centre, London Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Victoria and Albert Museum
Cromwell Road
London
SW7 2RL Phone: +44 (0)20 7942 2000
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Two Ways of Life (Hope in Repentance)
1857
Albumen silver print
21.8 x 40.8cm (8 9/16 x 16 1/16 in.)
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Oscar Rejlander, the father of photography, sets in motion many of the later developments of photographic art.
I could wax lyrical about the light, staging and humour of the images; the allegorical, religious and emotional portraits; the influence of photography on painting; the spontaneous act caught on film (Eh!); the combination printing, precursor to digital manipulation (Two Ways of Life); the costume dramas (The Comb Seller); or the presaging of the work of August Sander (The Juggler). But I won’t.
Instead, I just want you to think about the period in which these photographs were made – that Dickensian era of archetypal humanity, intricate narrative. I want you to feel that these reality pictures are alive and how they transcend the time of their creation through the lyricism of the print.
From the mind of the artist to works of art that stare down that cosmic time shift, from cradle to grave.
Marcus
Many thanks 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.
“It is the mind of the artist, and not the nature of his materials which makes his production a work of art.”
Oscar G. Rejlander
Oscar Gustav Rejlander is best known for his work “Two Ways of Life,” a masterpiece for which he used over 32 different negatives. It took him around six weeks to create it and over 3 days to produce a final print.
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) The Infant Photography Giving the Painter an Additional Brush
c. 1856
Albumen silver print
6 × 7.1cm (2 3/8 × 2 13/16 in.)
Courtesy The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
After emigrating from Sweden to England in 1839 and taking up photography in 1852, he became one of the first to recognise photography’s potential as a “handmaid of art” – exemplified by early photographs like “The Infant Photography Giving the Painter an Additional Brush.” This tiny print served to demonstrate how photography could preserve an allegorical scene for a painter’s extended study. It also functioned as a self-portrait and hinted at Rejlander’s hidden ambitions: reflected in the convex mirror, he presents himself as a modern-day Jan van Eyck.
Extract from Dana Ostrander. “The Overlooked Legacy of Oscar Rejlander, Who Elevated Photography to an Art,” on the Hyperallergic website April 2, 2019 [Online] Cited 06/06/2019
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Non Angeli sed Angli (Not Angels but Anglos), after Raphael’s Sistine Madonna
c. 1854-1856
Albumen silver print
20.5 x 26.3cm (8 1/16 x 10 3/8 in.)
Princeton University Art Museum
Museum purchase, David H. McAlpin, Class of 1920, Fund
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Mary Constable and Her Brother
1866
Albumen silver print
16.8 x 22.1cm (6 5/8 x 8 11/16 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection
Purchase, Harriette and Noel Levine Gift, 2005
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) The Bachelor’s Dream
c. 1860
Albumen silver print
13.9 x 19.6cm (5 1/2 x 7 11/16 in.)
George Eastman Museum, purchase Photo: Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Hard Times (The Out of Work Workman’s Lament)
1860
Albumen silver print
13.8 x 19.7cm (5 7/16 x 7 3/4 in.)
George Eastman Museum, purchase Photo: Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Head of St. John the Baptist in a Charger
c. 1860
Albumen silver print
14.1 x 17.8cm (5 9/16 x 7 in.)
George Eastman Museum, purchase Photo: Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Study of Hands
1856
Albumen silver print
14.8 x 17.6cm (5 13/16 x 6 15/16 in.)
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Purchased 2014
Oscar G. Rejlander (British, born Sweden, 1813-1875) was one of the 19th century’s greatest innovators in the medium of photography, counting Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, Charles Darwin, Lewis Carroll and Julia Margaret Cameron among his devotees. Nevertheless, the extent of Rejlander’s work and career has often been overlooked. Oscar Rejlander: Artist Photographer, on view March 12 – June 9, 2019 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles, is the first exhibition to explore the prolific career of the artist who became known as “the father of art photography,” and whose bold experimentation with photographic techniques early in the medium’s development and keen understanding of human emotion were ahead of their time.
The exhibition features 150 photographs that demonstrate Rejlander’s remarkable range, from landscapes and portraits to allegories and witty commentaries on contemporary society, alongside a selection of his early paintings, drawings, and prints.
“Rejlander tells us in his writings that ‘It is the mind of the artist, and not the nature of his materials, which makes his production a work of art’,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “While technologies have dramatically changed, some of the fundamental issues that Rejlander grappled with in his photographs still resonate with photographic practice today. His photographs, though made a century and a half ago, are both meticulously of their time and timeless, foreshadowing many later achievements of the medium through to the digital age.”
Oscar G. Rejlander was born in Sweden and moved to England in 1839, working first as a painter before turning to photography in 1852. He made a living as a portrait photographer while experimenting with photographic techniques, most notably combination printing, in which parts of multiple negatives were exposed separately and then printed to form a single picture. Rejlander moved to London in 1862, where his business continued to grow and where his wife, Mary Bull, worked alongside him in his photography studios.
Portraits and Images of Everyday Life
Portraiture, particularly of members of the higher ranks of London society, was Rejlander’s main professional activity and supported his livelihood. Art critics and clients alike admired his skill with lighting as well as the natural and seemingly spontaneous expressions he was able to capture. Rejlander photographed some of the most important figures of the day, including the English scientist Charles Darwin, known for his theory of evolution, and poets Alfred Lord Tennyson and Henry Taylor. He also guided the first photographic efforts of the writer and mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (known as Lewis Carroll), the creator of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as well as photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.
From the beginning of his career as a photographer, Rejlander was keenly interested in depicting the activities of ordinary people, particularly the middle and lower classes of society. It was through his staged domestic images that he illustrated familial relationships with tenderness and humour, often using models and props to re-create in his studio the scenes he had witnessed in the streets, from young boys who swept up dirt and debris in exchange for tips, to street vendors such as “flower girls” who offered bouquets for sale to passersby. Like a modern street photographer, Rejlander chose his compositions and subjects based on what he saw and heard, realising the final images in the studio.
In 1863 Rejlander constructed a unique iron, wood, and glass “tunnel studio,” where the sitter, positioned in the open, light-filled part of the studio, would look into the darker part of the room where the camera and operator were situated, nearly invisible. The pupils of the sitters’ eyes expanded, allowing for “more depth and expression,” as a writer observed in Photographic News. In addition to this technique, Rejlander often exploited his own unique ability to enact exaggerated emotions to assist his subjects. Charles Darwin illustrated many of Rejlander’s expressive photographs in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872.
Combination Printing and Two Ways of Life
Rejlander holds an important place in the history of photography primarily because of the groundbreaking way he applied the technique of combination printing. On view in the exhibition is the most ambitious example of the artist’s pioneering experimentation, the epic photograph, Two Ways of Life, or Hope in Repentance (1857). It attracted immediate attention upon its exhibition both for its large size and the ambition of its production, which included the combination printing of over 30 separate wet collodion on glass negatives, a process that took more than three days.
The work represents an intricate allegory of two opposing philosophies of life: Vice and Virtue. In the centre of the picture, a wise man guides a younger man to the right, toward a life of virtue – work, study, and religion. To the left, a second young man is tempted by the call of desire, gambling, idleness, and vice. Prince Albert may have worked with Rejlander on the overall conception of the picture, and he and Queen Victoria purchased three versions for their art collection.
Despite this support from the Royal Family, Two Ways of Life divided the photographic community, with professional photographers considering it a technical tour de force, and amateurs seeing it as not only artificial in production but also immoral in its subject. However, it remains one of finest examples of combination printing to come from this period.
Art and Photography
Today, the debate about photography’s status as an art may be obsolete, but the arts community in 19th-century Britain was passionately divided over Rejlander’s chosen medium. Rejlander strongly advocated the view that photography was an independent art, while he was also convinced that a photograph could help artists by providing an effective substitute for working from live models. He was possibly the first to provide artists with visual references for their work in photographs, creating figure studies in a range of poses and costumes, including close-ups of hands, feet, drapery, and even fleeting facial expressions. Although many painters were reluctant to disclose their reliance on photography, several collected Rejlander’s photographs, including George Frederic Watts (English, 1817-1904) and Henri Fantin-Latour (French, 1836-1904).
Paintings also strongly influenced Rejlander’s choice of subjects, leading him not only to imitate the styles of artists but also to re-create the figures found in their compositions. He frequently photographed actors or models posing as a “Madonna,” a “Devotee,” a “Disciple,” or specific Christian figures such as John the Baptist. He may have intended these studies, as well as others showing figures in classical robes, for artists to consult as well.
“What we hope comes through in the exhibition is Rejlander’s humanity and humour, as well as his humble nature, particularly evident in the fact that he often sent his work to exhibitions under the name ‘amateur’,” says Karen Hellman, assistant curator of photographs at the Getty Museum. “His explanation: ‘When I compare what I have done with what I think I ought to do, and some day hope I shall do, I think of myself as only an amateur, after all – that is to say, a beginner’.”
Oscar Rejlander: Artist Photographer, is on view March 12 – June 9, 2019 at J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center. The exhibition is curated by Lori Pauli, curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Canada, and Karen Hellman, assistant curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Mr. Collett’s Return 1841
Black chalk, charcoal and white wash highlights on paper (backed)
92.8 × 74.4cm
The Collection: Art and Archaeology in Lincolnshire (Usher Gallery, Lincoln)
Attributed to Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) [Landscape] c. 1855
Salted paper print
22.3 × 19.7cm
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Purchased 2014
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Ariadne
1857
Albumen print from a wet collodion negative
Paul Mellon Fund
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
“I believe photography will make painters better artists and more careful draughtsmen. You may test their figures by photography. In Titian’s Venus and Adonis, Venus has her head turned in a manner that no female could turn it and at the same time shows so much of her back. Her right leg also is too long. I have proved the correctness of this opinion by photography with variously shaped female models.” ~ Oscar G. Rejlander 1863
“He was perhaps the first to market photographic nude studies to artists, and he even used them to test the anatomical accuracy of the Old Masters. His photograph “Ariadne” was created, in part, to expose the unnatural pose and elongated feminine proportions in Titian’s “Venus and Adonis.” Many of Rejlander’s contemporaries came to rely on these nude studies, and the exhibition contains at least three originally owned by the painter Henri Fantin-Latour.”
Extract from Dana Ostrander. “The Overlooked Legacy of Oscar Rejlander, Who Elevated Photography to an Art,” on the Hyperallergic website April 2, 2019 [Online] Cited 06/06/2019
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist
c. 1860
Albumen silver print
17.8 × 12.4cm (7 × 4 7/8 in.)
Courtesy The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Young Lady in a Costume
c. 1860
Albumen silver print
Courtesy National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Eh!
negative about 1854-1855; print about 1865
Albumen silver print
8.9 x 5.9cm (3 1/2 x 2 5/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
In “The First Negative,” Rejlander restages Pliny’s account of the origins of painting, boldly suggesting that the act of tracing a shadow is more akin to creating a photographic negative than a painting.
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) The Participles, or Grammar for Little Boys: Catching
1857
Albumen silver print
18.7 x 12.7cm (7 3/8 x 5 in.)
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) The Participles, or Grammar for Little Boys: Caught
1857
Albumen silver print
20.3 x 15.7cm (8 x 6 3/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Please Give Us a Copper
c. 1866-1868
Albumen silver print
17.9 x 12.6cm (7 1/16 x 4 15/16 in.)
Princeton University Art Museum. Museum purchase
A copper is a brown coin of low value made of copper or bronze.
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Enchanted by a Parrot (Mary Rejlander?)
c. 1860
Albumen silver print Image (approx.): 50 x 30cm (19 11/16 x 11 13/16 in.)
William Talbott Hillman Collection Photo: Hans P. Kraus, Jr., New York
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) The Cup that Cheers
c. 1860
Albumen silver print
19.9 x 15cm (7 13/16 x 5 7/8 in.)
Princeton University Art Museum
Museum purchase, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Max Adler
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Knuckle Bones
1860
Albumen silver print
15.4 x 12.5cm (6 1/16 x 4 15/16 in.)
George Eastman Museum, purchase Photo: Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum
Knucklebones
Knucklebones, also known as Tali, Fivestones, or Jacks, is a game of ancient origin, usually played with five small objects, or ten in the case of jacks. Originally the “knucklebones” (actually the astragalus, a bone in the ankle, or hock) were those of a sheep, which were thrown up and caught in various manners. Modern knucklebones consist of six points, or knobs, projecting from a common base, and are usually made of metal or plastic. The winner is the first player to successfully complete a prescribed series of throws, which, though similar, differ widely in detail. The simplest throw consists in either tossing up one stone, the jack, or bouncing a ball, and picking up one or more stones or knucklebones from the table while it is in the air. This continues until all five stones or knucklebones have been picked up. Another throw consists in tossing up first one stone, then two, then three and so on, and catching them on the back of the hand. Different throws have received distinctive names, such as “riding the elephant”, “peas in the pod”, “horses in the stable”, and “frogs in the well”.
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) “Father Times” (Where’s the Cat?)
c. 1860
Albumen paper print
16.5 x 14.2cm (6 1/2 x 5 9/16 in.)
Wilson Centre for Photography
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Night in Town (Poor Jo, Homeless)
before 1862; print after 1879
Carbon print
20.3 x 15.7cm (8 x 6 3/16 in.)
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Purchased 1993
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Grief (Hidden Her Face, Yet Visible Her Anguish)
1864
Albumen silver print
19.6 x 14cm (7 11/16 x 5 1/2 in.)
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. Gift of John H. Rubel
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) The Comb Seller (Oscar and Mary Rejlander)
c. 1860
Albumen silver print
20 x 14.9cm (7 7/8 x 5 7/8 in.)
University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque. Gift of Eleanor and Van Deren Coke
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Lionel Tennyson
c. 1863
Albumen print from a wet collodion negative Image (oval): 18.3 x 14.3cm (7 3/16 x 5 5/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Paul Mellon Fund
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)
1863
Albumen silver print
8.9 x 5.9cm (3 1/2 x 2 5/16 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection
Purchase, Sam Salz Foundation Gift, 2005
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Allegorical Study (Sacred and Profane Love)
c. 1860
Albumen paper print
12 x 17.5cm (4 3/4 x 6 7/8 in.)
Wilson Centre for Photography
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Henry Taylor
1863
Albumen silver print
20.2 x 15cm (7 15/16 x 5 7/8 in.)
Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas
Gift of Dr. and Mrs. William D. Paden
Sir Henry TaylorKCMG (18 October 1800 – 27 March 1886) was an English dramatist and poet, Colonial Office official, and man of letters.
Oscar G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Self-Portrait with Parrot
c. 1865
In “Album of Photographs by Oscar G. Rejlander,” 1856-72
Albumen silver print Closed: 37.4 x 27.6 x 0.3cm (14 3/4 x 10 7/8 x 1/8 in.)
Sir Nicholas Mander Collection
The J. Paul Getty Museum
1200 Getty Center Drive
Los Angeles, California 90049
There are some beautiful photographs in this posting, mainly by British photographers evidencing the colonial gaze.
This is how the British saw their subjects “Under Indian Skies” not how the Indians would have seen themselves. The only Indian photographer in this posting is Lala Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905). His photograph The Char Minar, Hyderabad (1880s, below) is a much more fluid, street photography representation of Indian life (long time exposure, blurred figures) than the other grandiose representations of Indian palaces and architecture.
The portraits are also instructive, aping as they do the classical aspirations of contemporary European carte de visite and cabinet cards. Even though the photograph Portrait of a young Indian woman by an unknown photographer (1870s, below) portrays her in Indian dress, she is accompanied to the left by a reproduction of a classical Greek statue. Of course, the aspersion is that while she may be beautiful and different, the Orient is always reliant on Europe and Greece as the birthplace of civilisation, for its existence.
I have included extra information about locations and photographers were possible.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The David Collection for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.
The invention of photography in 1839 revolutionised the way in which the world was documented and interpreted, not only in Europe, but also in Asia. As early as the beginning of the 1850s, the British authorities in India launched an impressive photographic survey of architecture. Enthusiastic amateur photographers soon followed suit with atmospheric images of life in the period, including that of maharajas, snake charmers, and elephants bathing in the Ganges.
Through a selection of pictures from a private British collection, this photo exhibition focuses on some of the challenges and subjects that preoccupied the earliest European and Indian photographers. It also displays the distinctive beauty of vintage photos created with difficult to handle apparatuses, big glass negatives, long exposure times, and complex chemical processes.
The exhibition consists of over 80 photographs and photo albums from around 1850 to the beginning of the 20th century. The catalogue was written by the British photo historian John Falconer, who for many years was responsible for the photograph collections in the British Library’s Indian and Oriental departments. The catalogue costs DKK 200 and can be purchased in the museum shop, which also sells the lovely exhibition poster for DKK 40.
Text from The David Collection website [Online] Cited 24/03/2019
Sir Donald Horne Macfarlane (July 1830 – 2 June 1904) was a Scottish merchant who entered politics and became a Member of Parliament (MP), firstly as a Home Rule League MP in Ireland and then as Liberal and Crofters Party MP in Scotland. Macfarlane was born in Scotland, the youngest son of Allan Macfarlane, J.P., of Caithness and his wife Margaret Horne. He became an East Indies merchant as a tea trader and indigo plantation owner. While in India he was a passionate amateur photographer. He experimented freely and produced semi-abstract images
View of one of the Chattar Manzil [Umbrella Palaces] showing the King’s boat called The Royal Boat of Oude on the Gomti River, Lucknow, India.
The Chattar Manzil (Urdu: چھتر منزل, Hindi: छतर मंज़िल), or Umbrella Palace is a building in Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh which served as a palace for the rulers of Awadh and their wives. It was constructed by order of NawabGhazi Uddin Haider and completed after his death by his successor, Nawab Nasir Uddin Haider.
The Chattar Manzil stand on the banks of the River Gomti. The Chattar Manzil consisted of a Bari (larger) Chattar Manzil and Chhoti (smaller) Chattar Manzil, however only the larger one still exists. These two buildings were examples of the Indo-European-Nawabi architectural style, even though the Bari Chattar Manzil has been altered over the years. The palaces were named after the chattris (umbrella-shaped domes) on the octagonal pavilions, which crown the buildings. The imposing building has large underground rooms and a dome surmounted by a gilt umbrella.
Felice Beato (1832 – 29 January 1909), also known as Felix Beato, was an Italian-British photographer. He was one of the first people to take photographs in East Asia and one of the first war photographers. He is noted for his genre works, portraits, and views and panoramas of the architecture and landscapes of Asia and the Mediterranean region. Beato’s travels gave him the opportunity to create images of countries, people, and events that were unfamiliar and remote to most people in Europe and North America. His work provides images of such events as the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Second Opium War, and represents the first substantial body of photojournalism. He influenced other photographers, and his influence in Japan, where he taught and worked with numerous other photographers and artists, was particularly deep and lasting. …
In February 1858 Beato arrived in Calcutta and began travelling throughout Northern India to document the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. During this time he produced possibly the first-ever photographic images of corpses. It is believed that for at least one of his photographs taken at the palace of Sikandar Bagh in Lucknow he had the skeletal remains of Indian rebels disinterred or rearranged to heighten the photograph’s dramatic impact17. He was also in the cities of Delhi, Cawnpore, Meerut, Benares, Amritsar, Agra, Simla, and Lahore. Beato was joined in July 1858 by his brother Antonio, who later left India, probably for health reasons, in December 1859. Antonio ended up in Egypt in 1860, setting up a photographic studio in Thebes in 1862.
Interior of the Secundra Bagh after the Slaughter of 2,000 Rebels by the 93rd Highlanders and 4th Punjab Regiment. First Attack of Sir Colin Campbell in November 1857, Lucknow. Albumen silver print, by Felice Beato, 1858. Located on the outskirts of Lucknow, it was the scene of intense fighting in November, 1857. Following the action, the British dead were buried in a deep trench but the Indian corpses were left to rot. Later, the city had to be evacuated and was not recaptured until March 1858 and it was shortly afterwards that Beato probably took this photograph. As one contemporary commentator described it: “A few of their [rebel] bones and skulls are to be seen in front of the picture, but when I saw them every one was being regularly buried, so I presume the dogs dug them up.” A British officer, Sir George Campbell, noted in his memoirs Beato’s presence in Lucknow and stated that he probably had the bones uncovered to be photographed. However, William Howard Russell of The Times recorded seeing many skeletons still lying around in April 1858. Photographic views of Lucknow taken after the Indian Mutiny, Albumen silver print 26.2 x 29.8 cm. The image was taken by Felice Beato, a Corfiote by birth, who visited India during the period of the Indian Mutiny or First War of Indian Independence; possibly on a commissioned by the War Office in London he made documentary photographs showing the damage to the buildings in Lucknow following the two sieges. It is known that he was in Lucknow in March and April of 1858 within a few weeks of the capture of that city by British forces under Sir Colin Campbell. His equipment was a large box camera using 10″ x 12″ plates which needed a long exposure, and he made over 60 photographs of places in the city connected with the military events. Beato also visited Delhi, Cawnpore and other ‘Mutiny’ sites where he took photographs.
View of the front facade of the Alai Darwaza gatehouse at the Qutb complex in Delhi. The building is almost entirely covered with intricately carved geometric and floral patterns, which also adorn the pierced latticework screens that cover the arched windows flanking the archway over the entrance.
This photograph shows a gateway into the extended Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque. Known as the Alai Darwaza, it was built in 1311 by the Afgan ruler Alauddin Khalji. He had grand plans to extend the original mosque. Most of them were abandoned after his death in 1315, but this gateway is the most notable addition he made. It is 17.2 metres square.
The mosque and gateway are made out of rubble. It is the first of many Indian Islamic monuments to use a combination of white marble and red sandstone for the façade. Its distinctive features are the use of symmetry and the finely carved calligraphic and arabesque decoration on the southern façade of the gateway. This is also the first monument in which a true arch, using the radiating voussoirs shown here, is fully integrated into the design. The design is influenced by the architectural traditions of the empire of the Saljugs from western Asia.
The British photographer Samuel Bourne lived and worked in India between 1862 and 1869. During this time he toured the Himalayas and travelled through the subcontinent, photographing its landscape, architecture and historical sites. He set up a studio in Simla with Charles Shepherd and sold his prints sold to an eager public both in India and Britain.
The Qutb complex are monuments and buildings from the Delhi Sultanate at Mehrauli in Delhi in India. The Qutub Minar in the complex, named after Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki, was built by Qutb-ud-din Aibak, who later became the first Sultan of Delhi of the Mamluk dynasty. The Minar was added upon by his successor Iltutmish (a.k.a. Altamash), and much later by Firoz Shah Tughlaq, a Sultan of Delhi from the Tughlaq dynasty in 1368 AD. The Qubbat-ul-Islam Mosque (Dome of Islam), later corrupted into Quwwat-ul Islam, stands next to the Qutb Minar.
Many subsequent rulers, including the Tughlaqs, Alauddin Khalji and the British added structures to the complex. Apart from the Qutb Minar and the Quwwat ul-Islam Mosque, other structures in the complex include the Alai Gate, the Alai Minar, the Iron pillar, the ruins of several earlier Jain temples, and the tombs of Iltutmish, Alauddin Khalji and Imam Zamin.
Akbar’s tomb is the tomb of the Mughal emperor, Akbar and an important Mughal architectural masterpiece. It was built in 1604-1613 and is situated in 119 acres of grounds in Sikandra, a sub of Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India.
The first photographs from India
The David Collection’s new special exhibition provides a hitherto unknown first-hand impression of 19th-century India, primarily – but not exclusively – seen with the eyes of western photographers. Through original vintage photographs, the viewer is taken back to photography’s birth and earliest childhood and up to around 1900.
Photography had made a breakthrough in British-dominated India in the early 1850s. With its magnificent architecture, exotic landscapes, and many different peoples and cultures, India offered fantastic motifs: splendid Islamic palaces, mosques, and sepulchral monuments. Princes, maharajas, ministers, and warriors in all their glory. But also an abundance of life among the common people, with everyone from stonemasons to snake charmers as well as elephants bathing in the Ganges.
Motifs of a completely different type that can be seen in the exhibition are those of the shattered palaces and dead warriors that spoke admonishingly of the rebellion against British rule in 1857-1858. The rebellion broke out after Muslim and Hindu soldiers had been forced by the British to use cartridges supposedly greased with fat from pigs and cows. These are some of history’s earliest war photographs, which in Europe served as the basis for newspaper illustrations.
The photographs were often taken under difficult working conditions. The heavy photo equipment had to be transported to distant regions along impassible roads, and its chemicals dried out in the tropical heat. The exposure time could be very long, and processing the negatives and the positives was often arduous.
Experiments were made with the new media by both visiting and local photo pioneers. The exhibition bears witness to the exchanges and competition between amateurs and the professional photographers whose studios popped up in innumerable places in India in the years up to 1900. The photographs also show how the new medium developed in the tension field between documentation and creative art form.
The over 80 works in the exhibition comprise photographs and photo albums, all of which were lent by the same private collection. The exhibition catalogue was written by the British photo historian John Falconer, who for many years was responsible for the photograph collections in the British Library’s Indian and Oriental departments. The author is one of the world’s leading specialists in this field and his catalogue provides a detailed and lively account of the photographers’ India in the 19th century and their photographic techniques.
Book
Under Indian Skies is the book behind the forthcoming exhibition of the same name, which opens at The David Collection on 23 November 2018. The book – and the exhibition – offer a previously unknown, first-hand impression of 19th-century India, as seen through the eyes of primarily Western photographers. At the beginning of the 1850s photography made its breakthrough in colonial India. With its impressive architecture, exotic landscapes and many different ethnic groups and cultures, the country offered fantastic motifs. The Indian architecture with its magnificent Islamic palaces and mausolea. Princes, maharajas, ministers and soldiers in all of their splendour. But also ordinary people and daily life: stone-cutters and woodcarvers, carpenters and dyers, daily life with the elephants that bathe in the Ganges, cotton harvesters and gardeners, acrobats, snake charmers, dancers, musicians and religious processions.
In the book we are led all the way back to the conception and early years of photography, just before 1850, and right up until around 1900, when the medium was long established. What is more, the book includes what may well be the first examples of war photography – the ruins and corpses left behind after a large, bloody uprising in the end of the 1850s, triggered when the British forced local Hindu and Muslim troops to use cartridges greased with the fat of cows and pigs.
The photographers travelling to India to undertake ‘reportage’ photography were akin to explorers and their journeys were difficult expeditions, during which with great effort – and an army of helpers – they surveyed the remotest regions. The photographs of the first decades were composed in much the same way as paintings from the same period. The technical challenges were immense and exposure times, for instance, were extremely long, so everything had to be planned to the smallest detail.
Under Indian Skies presents a riveting, kaleidoscopic picture of an India that for the most part has disappeared today. Some monuments are still standing and one might still see similar scenes there, but the present infrastructure and political circumstances are completely different to that time.
In addition to the presentation of eighty-three selected photographs, the book contains two essays, on the history of photography in India and early photographic processes respectively.
About the Author
John Falconer is a British historian of photography, who for many years was responsible for the photography collection at the British Library’s Indian and Oriental departments. He has written many books on early Indian photography and is one of the world’s leading specialists in this area.
Press release from The David Collection website [Online] Cited 24/03/2019
Installation view of the exhibition Under Indian Skies – 19th-Century Photographs from a Private Collection at The David Collection, Copenhagen, Denmark
Although Robert Tytler and his wife Harriet only took up photography after the Uprising of 1857-58, they managed to produce over 500 photographs of the sites of conflict in less than six months. Their use of very large paper negatives such as this, with the associated technical difficulties, was an ambitious choice for photographers new to the medium. The production of negatives of this size needed extremely large and unwieldy cameras, with consequently long exposures: a note on the back of this negative states that it required an exposure of twenty-five minutes. This decision probably owed much to the tuition the Tytlers received from the established photographer John Murray, who used a similar-sized camera and whose processing procedures they also adopted. This view (laterally reversed in the negative), is taken from outside the Taj Mahal complex from a position in front of the west gate (Fatehpuri Darwaza), looking north along the outer western wall towards the tomb of Fatehpuri Begum in the distance.
Text from the book Under Indian Skies
Harriet Christina Tytler (née Earle; 3 October 1828 – 24 November 1907) was a British artist, writer, and a pioneer photographer. With her husband Robert Christopher Tytler, she created over 300 photographs. She is well known for the documentation of monuments and Siege of Delhi from mughals. …
Photography and artwork
Harriet’s photographic work is mixed with those of her husband. Some pictures bear the “S.C.T.” which have been identified as standing for her son Stanley. Many of her photographs are included in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada and the Harrison D. Horblit Collection of Early Photography. Although never having painted before she began work on a large canvas of 6×18 feet, to depict from memory the palace of the Emperor of Delhi as a cyclorama. She completed this work in 1872, following the death of Robert.Harriet kept a diary and her memoirs were published in 1986 as An Englishwoman in India. Her son Stanley grew up in Australia and became an artist of repute. He moved to British Columbia where he was a founding member of the B.C. Society of Fine Arts in 1909.
Lala Deen Dayal was trained as an engineer but took up photography around 1864. He entered government service in 1866, founded the firm “Lala Deen Dayal & Sons” in 1868, and was commissioned to photograph temples and palaces of India. In 1886, Dayal retired from government service and became a professional photographer, moving to Hyderabad, India to work for the Nizam of Hyderabad, who conferred the honorary title of “raja” upon him.
Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website
The Charminar (“Four Minarets”), constructed in 1591, is a monument and mosque located in Hyderabad, Telangana, India. The landmark has become a global icon of Hyderabad, listed among the most recognised structures of India. Charminar has been a historical place with Mosque on the top floor for over 400 years and also known for its surrounding markets. It is one of the tourist attractions in Hyderabad. It is where many famous festivals are celebrated, such as Eid-ul-adha and Eid-ul-fitr.
Meadows Taylor (British, 1808-76) and James Fergusson (British, 1808-1886) Architecture at Beejapoor, London
1866
Album
Architecture at Beejapoor, an ancient Mahometan capital in the Bombay Presidency / photographed from drawings by Capt. P.D. Hart … ; with an historical and descriptive memoir by Captain Meadows Taylor ; and … notes by James Fergusson. 1866.
Meadows Taylor (British, 1808-76) and James Fergusson (British, 1808-1886)
“Malik-I-Mydan” – “The Master of the Plain.” Architecture at Beejapoor, London (detail)
1866
Album
This gun was brought back from Ahmadnagar in the 17th century as a trophy of war and is thought to be the largest medieval cannon in the world.
The title of Sirdar (or Sardar), from the Persian for a commander, could apply to a wide variety of senior positions, either military or administrative. The precise role of this figure in the Maharajah of Gwalior’s administration has not been established: the term was also often used by the British in a more general sense in the nineteenth century to denote a nobleman.
This delicately hand-coloured image depicts a Rajput ruler wearing an elaborate eighteenth-century armour known as Chahelta Hazah (Coat of a Thousand Nails). The inscription (in a Rajasthani form of Hindi, written in Devanagari script) identifies the sitter as Maharaj Shri Savan (or Sovan) Singhji. While the photographer is not named, it states that ‘Shivlal the painter coloured it’ and supplies a date of late September 1866.
Bikaner is a city in the north Indian state of Rajasthan, east of the border with Pakistan. It’s surrounded by the Thar Desert. The city is known for the 16th-century Junagarh Fort, a huge complex of ornate buildings and halls. Within the fort, the Prachina Museum displays traditional textiles and royal portraits. Nearby, the Karni Mata Temple is home to many rats considered sacred by Hindu devotees.
Jeremiah Gurney (American) at 349 Broadway, New York Untitled (Cross-eyed man in three-quarter profile)
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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 (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.”
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
Exhibition dates: 30th August – 27th November 2016
Curator: Karen Hellman, assistant curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) Pavillon Mollien Pavilion, the Louvre, Paris 1859
Albumen silver print from a glass negative
36.7 x 47.9cm (14 7/16 x 18 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
The best fun I had was putting together Nadar’s Self-Portrait (c. 1855, below) with Henri Le Secq’s North Transept, Chartres Cathedral (Negative 1852; print 1870s, below). The relationship of the hands between the two prints is just delicious. I also love the waxed paper negative and salted paper prints: such a feeling of ephemerality can be obtained in the final image even though the photographs are rendering solid objects. According to my friend Ellie Young of Gold Street Studios who is an expert in early photographic processes, salted paper prints (and their relative, the Calotype) can be as light as a feather or as strong and solid as an albumen print. “Salt prints from Calotype negatives exhibit an expressive softness of tone much prized by early photographers.” With their use of chiaroscuro (from chiaro ‘clear, bright’ – from Latin clarus + oscuro ‘dark, obscure’ – from Latin obscurus), Gustave Le Gray’s seascapes, for which he is widely known and admired, are masterful.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
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.
Édouard Baldus (French born Germany, 1813-1889) Amphitheater, Nîmes 1850s
Albumen silver print from a paper negative
33.3 x 43.3cm (13 1/8 x 17 1/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Calotypes and Waxed Paper Negatives
“The Calotype proper is a negative image (along with its offshoot the waxed paper negative), although its positive counterpart, the salted paper print, is the more common form in which it is encountered. Calotypes are made by brushing the best quality drawing or writing paper with a solution of silver nitrate, drying the paper, and then immersing it in a solution of potassium iodide to form a light-sensitive layer of silver iodide. Immediately before use the surface it treated with ‘gallo-nitrate of silver’ (a mixture of silver nitrate solution and gallic acid) to act as an accelerator. Exposure in a camera, where the paper must be held in a dark slide, produces a latent (invisible) image which is developed by washing in gallo-nitrate of silver, fixed in hypo and thoroughly washed. The translucency of Calotypes can be improved by waxing, and a positive can be made by repeating the original process or by ‘printing out’ the image in much the same way as making a Photogenic Drawing. When toned, in, for instance, gold chloride solution (to give it a purpleish tone), a positive produced in this way is known as a ‘salted paper print’.
With the exception perhaps of the waxed paper process, which was invented in 1851 by Gustave Le Gray (1820-1882) and extended the life of paper negatives into the 1870s, the first generation processes – the Daguerreotype, Photogenic Drawing and Calotype – were all extinct by the end of the 1850s, having given way to their own offspring: the wet collodion glass negative and the albumen print.”
Anonymous. “Calotypes,” on the University of Oxford Museum of the History of Science website [Online] Cited 11/11/2016. No longer available online
Salted Paper Print
Once a paper negative had been secured, any number of positive prints could be created by contact printing. Preparation involved soaking good quality paper in a sodium chloride solution (table salt) and then brushing it with a solution of silver nitrate to produce light-sensitive silver chloride. Exposure of the sensitised paper to sunlight, in contact with a negative held in a frame, resulted in the emergence of a visible image without subsequent development. This ‘printed-out’ image was then fixed and toned. Salt prints, unless subsequently coated, have a characteristically matt appearance, with the image embedded in the paper. Although lacking the sharpness of detail associated with the daguerreotype, salt prints from Calotype negatives exhibit an expressive softness of tone much prized by early photographers. This portrait of the Rev. Julius Wood is one of a large series taken by Hill and Adamson to serve as references for a group portrait of the founders of the Free Church of Scotland that Hill had been commissioned to paint. These portraits, with other scenes and views, were later issued in a small ‘edition’ of 12 known copies, entitled One Hundred Calotype Sketches.
Wet collodion negative
Frederick Scott Archer’s wet collodion process, announced in 1851, became the standard photographic negative process for both amateurs and professionals from the mid-1850s until the early 1880s. The glass negative, with its structureless film, fine grain and clear whites proved immediately popular and within a decade had superseded both the daguerreotype and the calotype processes. To prepare the negative for exposure, a sheet of glass was coated with a solution of iodised collodion (a syrupy liquid composed of soluble gun-cotton, ether and alcohol) and then made light-sensitive by immersion in a bath of silver nitrate. Known as a wet process because the glass negative required sensitising, exposing and processing while the chemicals were still damp, it required considerable manipulative skill, but produced a negative of unsurpassed sharpness and a broad tonal range. This view, on a 10 x 12 inch glass plate, is one of a large collection of photographs of architectural subjects commissioned from Lyon by the Madras and Bombay Governments in the late 1860s.
Albumen Print
The albumen print, announced by the French photographer and publisher Louis-Désiré Blanquard-Évrard in 1850, was the most widespread print medium in use between the mid-1850s and the 1890s. While the printing process was chemically similar to the salt print, the albumen print is generally distinguishable by the glossy sheen imparted by a preliminary sizing of the paper with albumen (egg white) and salt. This sealing of the paper created a surface layer on which the silver image was formed, and made possible much greater density, contrast and sharpness in the final image than had been possible with the plain salted paper print. After the albumen coating had been applied, the paper was made light sensitive by the addition of silver nitrate, and printed in contact with the negative. The fixed print could then be toned to create a wide variety of colours, ranging from purple-black to a rich chocolate brown. Although it continued to be used well into the twentieth century, its popularity declined after the mid-1890s, in favour of a variety of manufactured papers. This print is one of a series of studies of objects in the Royal Armoury at Madrid made around 1866 and is notable for its finely-controlled lighting and rich toning. The blacking-out of the background in this image isolates and increases the dramatic impact of the objects.
Anonymous. “Historic Photographs: Historic Processes,” on the British Library website [Online] Cited 11/11/2016
Henri Le Secq (French, 1818-1882) Tower of the Kings at Reims Cathedral
Negative, 1851-1853; print, 1853
Salted paper print from a paper negative
35.1 x 25.9cm (13 13/16 x 10 3/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Édouard Baldus (French born Germany, 1813-1889) Tour Saint-Jacques, Paris 1852-1853
Salted paper print from a paper negative
42.9 x 34cm (16 7/8 x 13 3/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Henri Le Secq (French, 1818-1882) Small Dwelling in Mushroom Cave 1851
Salted paper print from a paper negative
35.1 x 22.7cm (13 13/16 x 8 15/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Charles Nègre (French, 1820-1880) Notre-Dame, Paris c. 1853
Waxed paper negative
33.6 x 24cm (13 1/4 x 9 7/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Charles Nègre (French, 1820-1880) Tarascon 1852
Waxed paper negative with selectively applied pigment
23.7 x 33.2cm (9 5/16 x 13 1/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Charles Nègre (French, 1820-1880) Tarascon c. 1852
Albumen silver print from paper negative
In the shadow of the political revolutions of 1848, an artistic revolution was also brewing in France within the young medium of photography. An unprecedented period of creativity and discovery among photographers emerged between the first French announcement of a paper negative process in 1847 and more mechanical processes for photographs in the 1860s, sparking debates about photography’s prospects in the divergent fields of art and science.
Organised around the Getty Museum’s rich holdings of early French photography and supplemented with important international loans, Real/Ideal: Photography in France, 1847-1860, on view August 30-November 27, 2016 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, highlights the work of four pioneering photographers – Édouard Baldus (1813-1889), Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884), Henri Le Secq (1818-1882), and Charles Nègre (French, 1820-1880) – alongside other artists who championed the paper and glass negative and contended with photography’s unprecedented “realism.”
“This exhibition tells a pivotal story about a short period – some 12 years – in the early history of photography; one that the Getty is uniquely positioned to tell given our extensive holdings of nineteenth-century French photographs,” explains Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “It is also an opportunity to showcase – for the first time – an important, recent acquisition of paper negatives from the collection of Jay McDonald. The exhibition sheds light on the freedom that early photographers enjoyed as they explored new means for developing images, and as they balanced the ‘real’ recording of the world as it is with the ‘ideal’, creative possibilities of the medium.”
The Paper Negative and Possibilities
The first paper negatives, created by William Henry Fox Talbot in England in the 1830s, first inspired French photographers in the early 1840s. In 1847, a cloth manufacturer named Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard (1802-1872) published a method of improving the paper negative, a process which created a more refined positive image. Due to the political turmoil of 1848, his discovery went unnoticed by the French government, which had long favoured the hyper-real quality of the silver-plated daguerreotype invented by Louis Daguerre (French, 1787-1851) in 1839.
Without a national mandate or commercial viability, French photographers using the paper negative enjoyed a brief period of freedom and experimentation between 1847 and 1860. Gustave Le Gray’s innovation of the “waxed paper negative,” which involved the addition of a layer of wax before the negative was sensitised with photo chemistry, was particularly vital, rendering the negative more translucent and portable. Rare waxed paper negatives by these photographers from the Getty Museum’s collection and from the Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine and the Musée D’Orsay in Paris will be on view. The exhibition will also include a view of Montmartre from “barrière de Clichy,” a photographic school and studio that Le Gray founded in 1849, as well as other early prints from paper negatives by Hippolyte Bayard, Henri-Victor Regnault, and Humbert de Molard.
The Rise of Realism
Originally trained as painters, Baldus, Le Gray, Le Secq, and Nègre saw the creative potential of photography and became its greatest champions. They were founding members of the Société héliographique, the first professional group devoted to photography, which published an important journal, La lumière. Experimentation in photography coincided with an increasing interest in “realism” – a word first used by critics in reference to paintings exhibited by Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877) at the 1849 Salon des Beaux-Arts. Artists and writers were increasingly rejecting academic, idealist subjects for everyday ones, and vanguard photographers similarly turned their attention towards the common individual, the worker, and the everyday scene. Nègre’s staged genre scenes of figures posed on the streets of Paris demonstrate how photography could interweave the “real” and “ideal.” Additionally, in Baldus’s documentation of the southern French seaside town of Bandol the idealised landscape is abandoned for a more realistic view, including the rugged foreground and industrial elements that lead back to a recently-constructed railroad bridge far in the distance.
Commissions, Demolitions, and Renovations
The new photographers of the period increased their profile through commissioned work for the French government. The Mission héliographique, which formed in 1851, hired five photographers (Baldus, Le Gray, Le Secq, Auguste Mestral, and Hippolyte Bayard) to travel across France and record hundreds of significant historical monuments before they were transformed through restoration under the government of Napoléon III. Nègre also pursued a six-month project to document the Midi region of France. The exhibition features examples from these projects, including images of Reims Cathedral, Chateau of Chenonceaux, and St. Gabriel près Arles.
Upon returning from their respective photographic missions, Baldus, Le Secq, Le Gray, and Nègre turned their attention to documenting the transformations – through demolition and restoration – of Parisian monuments, including the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the Hotel de Ville, the Louvre Museum, the Place du Carrousel, and the Tour Saint-Jacques, images of which are also on view in the exhibition.
“Baldus and Nègre, who were friends as well as competitors, took a subject like the same cloister of Saint-Trophime in Arles and photographed it in different ways,” says Karen Hellman assistant curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum and curator of the exhibition. “Nègre captured a narrow, vertical section of the colonnade, while Baldus carefully joined ten negatives to create a more all-encompassing view of the space.”
The Rise of Commercial Photography
The administration of Napoléon III and its free-market policies led to an explosion of commercial activity in photography, which was becoming increasingly industrialised and commonplace. The use of the paper negative fell out of favour and was gradually replaced by the sharper and more sensitive glass plate negative. The Getty’s exhibition thus presents a rare insight into a brief yet important moment in the history of photography that was shaped by these four pioneering photographers.
Real/Ideal: Photography in France 1847-1860 is on view August 30-November 27, 2016 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center. The exhibition is curated by Karen Hellman, assistant curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum. An accompanying publication, Real/Ideal: Photography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France will be available, with essays by Sylvie Aubenas, Anne de Mondenard, Paul-Louis Roubert, Sarah Freeman and Karen Hellman. Also on view in the Center for Photographs will be Richard Learoyd: In the Studio, curated by Arpad Kovacs, assistant curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) Seascape with a Ship Leaving Port 1857
Albumen silver print from a glass negative
31.3 x 40.3cm (12 5/16 x 15 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Édouard Baldus (French born Germany, 1813-1889) Cloister of Saint-Trophime, Arles c. 1861
Albumen silver print from a glass negative
33.7 x 42.9cm (13 1/4 x 16 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Henri Le Secq (French, 1818-1882) Statue of Christ at Reims Cathedral Negative 1851; print 1870s
Photolithograph
35 x 24.8cm (13 3/4 x 9 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Charles Nègre (French, 1820-1880) Organ Grinder at 21, Quai de Bourbon, Paris c. 1853
Salted paper print from a paper negative
10 x 8.3cm (3 15/16 x 3 1/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Charles Nègre (French, 1820-1880) Aisle of the Cloister of Saint-Trophime, Arles c. 1852
Salted paper print from a paper negative
32.4 x 23.2cm (12 3/4 x 9 1/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Henri Le Secq (French, 1818-1882) South Porch, Central Portal, Chartres Cathedral 1852
Waxed paper negative
34 x 24cm (13 3/8 x 9 7/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Édouard Baldus (French born Germany, 1813-1889) Viaduct, La Voulte-sur-Rhône c. 1861
Albumen silver print from a glass negative, from the album Chemins de Fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée 31 x 42.7cm (12 3/16 x 16 13/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Nadar (Gaspard Félix Tournachon) (French, 1820-1910) Self-Portrait c. 1855
Salted paper print from a glass negative
20.5 x 17cm (8 1/16 x 6 11/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Henri Le Secq (French, 1818-1882) North Transept, Chartres Cathedral Negative 1852; print 1870s
Photolithograph
33.3 x 22.9cm (13 1/8 x 9 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Nadar (Gaspard Félix Tournachon) (French, 1820-1910) Jean-François Philibert Berthelier, Actor 1856-1859
Salted paper print from a glass negative
24.2 x 18.9cm (9 1/2 x 7 7/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Nadar (Gaspard Félix Tournachon) (French, 1820-1910) George Sand (Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin), Writer c. 1865
Albumen silver print from a glass negative
24.1 x 18.3 cm (9 1/2 x 7 1/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Jean-Louis-Marie-Eugène Durieu (French, 1800-1874)
Possibly with Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798-1863) Draped Model c. 1854
Albumen silver print
18.6 x 13cm (7 5/16 x 5 1/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) The Sun at Its Zenith, Normandy 1856
Albumen silver print from a glass negative
32.5 x 41.6cm (12 13/16 x 16 3/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
The J. Paul Getty Museum
1200 Getty Center Drive
Los Angeles, California 90049
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
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
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’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.
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.
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.
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 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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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 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.
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.
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.”
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Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
This is how best a contemporary art exhibition can show the work to advantage. Just gorgeous!
The well curated, comprehensive content is complemented by a beautifully paced hang nestled within stunning contemporary art spaces. Labels are not just plonked on the wall, but are discretely displayed on horizontal shelves next to the work – accessible but so as not to interrupt the flow of the work. Coloured walls add to the ambience of the installation and act as an adjunct to the colours of the art. Beautiful modernist contemporary display cabinets keep the spaces fresh and vibrant.
A discussion of the content of the exhibition to follow in part 2 of the posting.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All images are photographed by Bryan James.
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“Exploring the art of cameraless photography, encompassing historical, modern and contemporary works. Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph is the first comprehensive survey of cameraless photography held anywhere in the world, presenting more than 200 examples, from 1839 – when photography’s invention was announced – through to contemporary artists. We present the most complete study of cameraless photography to date, focusing on the cameraless mode from the 1830s through to today and offering a global perspective on this way of working.
The theme of the exhibition is inspired by artist Len Lye’s cameraless photographs from 1930 and 1947, and it’s the first time all 52 of Lye’s photograms have been seen together. Emanations is an opportunity to put Lye’s photographic work in a suitably global context, surrounded by his predecessors, contemporaries and successors. Emanations includes many masterpieces of photographic art and showcases the talents of some of the world’s leading contemporary photographic artists.
The exhibition has work by photographic pioneers William Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins, important modernist photographers Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy, and many of today’s most significant photographic artists including Walead Beshty, Marco Breuer, Liz Deschenes, Joan Fontcuberta, Christian Marclay, Thomas Ruff, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Emanations also includes work by both senior and emerging Australian and New Zealand artists, from Anne Noble and Anne Ferran to Andrew Beck and Justine Varga.
The exhibition presents artwork by more than 50 artists hailing from New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, England, Canada and the United States. Almost every photographic process is included in the exhibition – photogenic drawings, calotypes, daguerreotypes, and tintypes, as well as gelatin silver, chromogenic and ink-jet photographic prints, photocopies, verifax and thermal prints.
The exhibition is accompanied by a major book by the same name and on the same theme, co-published by the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and DelMonico Books/Prestel, based in New York and Munich. The book contains 184 full-page colour plates and a 25,000 word essay by Geoffrey Batchen. The Govett-Brewster is also publishing another book reproducing all the cameraless photographs by Len Lye, along with an essay by Wystan Curnow.
Emanations is curated by Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of Art History at Victoria University of Wellington, and a world-renowned historian and curator of photography.”
Text from the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery website
Installation views of Andrew Beck (New Zealand, b. 1987) Double Screen
2016
Glass, acrylic paint, gelatin silver photographs
In the 1930s, László Moholy-Nagy made art that combined a cameraless photograph, plexiglass and paint. New Zealand artist Andrew Beck works in a similar way to produce sculptural installations that complicate our expectations of the relationship between light and shadow, the natural and the artificial, images and objects, art and reality. He forces us to look very closely at what we are seeing, and even to critically reflect on the act of seeing itself.
Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with at left, Anne Ferran and at right, Joyce Campbell
Installation view of Joyce Campbell (New Zealand, b. 1971) LA Bloom
2002
Cibachrome photographs
Courtesy of the artist, Auckland
In 2002 the New Zealand photographer Joyce Campbell decided to conduct a microbial survey of Los Angeles, a city in which she lives for part of each year. She swabbed the surfaces of plants and soil from twenty-seven locations chosen out of her Thomas Guide to the city. She then transferred each sample onto a sterilised plexiglass plate of agar and allowed it to grow as a living culture. The Cibachrome positive colour contact prints she subsequently made from these plates resemble abstract paintings and yet also offer a critical mapping of the relative fertility of this particular urban landscape, revealing its dependence on the politics of water distribution.
Although raised in Italy, Aldo Tambellini was working in New York in 1969 when he manipulated the cathode ray tube of a TV set into the shape of a spiral (for this artist, a universal sign of energy) and exposed sheets of light-sensitive paper by laying them over its screen. The calligraphic inscriptions that resulted made his paper look as if it had been scorched from the inside out. These ‘videograms,’ as Tambellini called them, highlight the chaos and chance operations that lurk just beneath the surface of technology’s apparent rationality.
Installation views of Shaun Waugh (New Zealand, b. 1982) ΔE2000 1.1
2014
24 Agfa boxes with mounted solid colour inkjet photographs
This work by New Zealand artist Shaun Waugh began with the purchase of empty boxes that once held Agfa photographic paper. Waugh then took readings of all four sides of the inside lip of each box lid using a spectrophotometer, employing this data and Photoshop to generate a solid orange-red inkjet print. The box lid is used to frame a two-dimensional version of itself, bringing analogue and digital printing into an uncomfortably close proximity to create a memorial to a kind of photography that is now defunct. Hung salon style, like so many small paintings, Waugh’s work manages to turn the photograph inside out, and thus into something other than itself.
Wall text from the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with at left, Anne Ferran and at right, Adam Fuss
In 1998 Australian artist Anne Ferran was offered an artist-in-resident’s position at an historic homestead not far from Sydney that had been occupied by successive generations of the same family since 1813. Ferran spent six months systematically making contact prints using the dresses, bodices, skirts, petticoats, and collars still contained in the house. Hovering in a surrounding darkness, softly radiating an inner light, the ghostly traces of these translucent garments now act as residual filaments for a century of absorbed sunshine. Many of them have been patched over the years and their signs of wear and repair are made clear. This allows us to witness a history of the use of each piece of clothing, seeing inside them to those small and skilful acts of home economy – the labour of women – usually kept hidden from a public gaze.
Anne Ferran (Australian, b. 1949)
Untitled (baby’s bonnet) 1998
Unique gelatin silver photograph
Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with at left, Adam Fuss and at right, Lisa Clunie
Installation view of Adam Fuss (UK/Australia/US) Caduceus 2010 (left) and Untitled 1991 (right)
Born in England, raised in Australia, and resident in New York, Adam Fuss has produced a diverse range of large cameraless photographs since the 1980s, asking his light-sensitive paper to respond to the physical presence of such phenomena as light, water, a slithering snake, flocks of birds, and sunflowers.
Adam Fuss (British, b. 1961) Untitled 1991
Type C photograph
Lisa Clunie (New Zealand) Fold I
2014
Silver gelatin photograph
The work of New Zealand artist Lisa Clunie looks back to the work of pioneer modernist László Moholy-Nagy in order to manifest the idea that our lives are shaped by a continual play of forces. Like Moholy, she wets her photographic paper and then tightly folds it, before moving the paper back and forth under her enlarger, selectively exposing these folds to the ‘force’ of light. The resulting work reminds us that a photograph has weight, surface, texture, tension and edges.
Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with at right, the work of Robert L. Buelteman
Installation view of Robert L. Buelteman (American, b. 1954) Cannabis sativa (left)
2002
Digital chromogenic development photograph
Robert L. Buelteman (American, b. 1954) Eucalyptus polyanthemos (right)
2002
Digital chromogenic development photograph
The San-Franciscan artist Robert Buelteman takes his leaves and other botanical specimens and slices them into paper-thin sections, before charging them, in a complicated and dangerous process, with a pulse of 40,000 volts of electricity. This leaves behind a colorised trace on his photographic paper, a photogram in which these plants appear to be aflame, as if emitting an energy all their own. Hovering between life and death, this is a nature that seems to be on the cusp of its transmutation into something else entirely.
Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with at centre, Robert Owen and at right, Joan Fontcuberta
Robert Owen (Australian, b. 1937) Endings (Rothko died today) – Kodachrome 64, No. 21, 26/02/1970
2009
Pigment ink-jet print
The photographic work of Australian artist Robert Owen is part of a broader tendency on the part of contemporary artists to reflect in morbid terms on aspects of photography’s past. Owen has been collecting film stubs since 1968. Although better known as a painter and sculptor, he recently decided to print these end strips of film as a series of large colour photographs, paying homage to this residue of the Kodak era in a chronological sequence of readymade chromatic fields. This one was collected on the day that the American abstract painter Mark Rothko killed himself.
Adam Fuss (British, b. 1961) Untitled (from the series My Ghost)
2001
Unique gelatin silver photograph
In his series, titled My Ghost, Adam Fuss put together a body of contact photographs of such things as plumes of smoke, patterns of light, a butterfly, a swan and a baptism dress. As his title suggests, Fuss’s work aims to evoke rather than describe; for all their evident tactility, these photographs are meant as metaphors, as prayers, perhaps even as poems.
Installation view of Adam Fuss (British, b. 1961) Untitled
1989
Cibachrome photograph
Adam Fuss (British, b. 1961) Untitled
1989
Cibachrome photograph
Installation views of Joan Fontcuberta (Spanish, b. 1955) MN 62: OPHIUCUS (NGC 6266), AR 17 h. 01,2 min. / D -30º 07′ (left) LAMBDA CORONAE AUSTRALIS (Mags 5,1/9,7 Sepn 29,2″ AP 214º), AR 18 h 43,8 min. / D -38º 19′ (right)
both 1993
From the Constellations series
Cibachrome photographs
Photographs from the Constellations series by Spanish artist Joan Fontcuberta come filled with fields of sparkling blackness, their speckled surfaces redolent of infinite space and twinkling stars. Their titles imply we are looking upwards towards the heavens. But this artist’s prints actually record dust, crushed insects and other debris deposited on the windscreen of his car, a trace of the evidence of his own rapid passage through terrestrial space and time. The artist applied sheets of 8-by-10-inch film directly onto the glass windscreen and shone a light through, creating photograms which were then made into glossy Cibachrome prints.
Installation views and detail of Paul Hartigan (New Zealand, b. 1939) Colourwords 1980-1981
Colour photocopy
Consistently defined by a subversive edge and a darkly witty humour, the work of New Zealand artist Paul Hartigan is often subtly permeated by astute social and political perceptions. Shortly after they were introduced into New Zealand in 1980, Hartigan explored the creative possibilities of a colour photocopying machine, making a series of images in which words and found objects ironically refer to each other in an endless loop. With the objects arranged to spell out their own colour, each picture offers an oscillation of word and meaning, flatness and dimension, art and detritus.
Installation view of Gavin Hipkins (left) and Lucinda Eva-May (right) as part of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
Installation view of Gavin Hipkins (New Zealand, b. 1968) The Coil
1998
Silver gelatin photographs
Inspired by the kinetic films of Len Lye, in the 1990s Gavin Hipkins made a series of cameraless photographs that play with sequence and implied movement. The 32 images that make up The Coil were made by resting polystyrene rings on sheets of photographic paper and then exposing them to light.
Installation view of Lucinda Eva-May (Australia) Unity in light #6, 2012 (left) Unity in light #9, 2012 (right)
C-type prints
Australian artist Lucinda Kennedy has sought to capture a phenomenological representation of the feelings and sensations of sexual intercourse through the direct imprint on sheets of photographic paper of this most primal of human interactions. Turned into a single blurred organism by the extended duration of the exposure, the artist and her partner become an abstraction, thereby aptly conjuring an experience that has always been beyond the capacity of mere description.
Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with at left, Thomas Ruff, and at right, Justine Varga
Installation views of Thomas Ruff (Germany, b. 1958) r.phg.07_II
2013
Chromogenic print
Thomas Ruff (Germany, b. 1958) r.phg.07_II
2013
Chromogenic print
German artist Thomas Ruff uses his computers to construct virtual objects with simulated surfaces and to calculate the lights and shadows they might cast in different compositions. He then prints the results, in colour and at very large scale. Combining variations of spheres, curves, zig-zags and sharp edges, all set within richly coloured surrounds, Ruff’s images are both untethered abstractions and historical ciphers. Although referred to by the artist as photograms, the final prints are perhaps better conceived as being about the photogram, studiously replaying an analogue process in digital terms so as to make a spectacle of its logic.
Installation view of the exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with at left, Shimpei Takeda and at right, Justine Varga
Justine Varga (Australian, b. 1984) Desklamp
2011-12
Chromogenic photograph
Australian artist Justine Varga creates photographic works from an intimate and often prolonged exchange between a strip of film and the world that comes to be inscribed on it. Desklamp involved the year-long exposure of a large format negative placed on top of the artist’s desk lamp. Exit was derived from a similar piece of film that was scarred and weathered during a three-month exposure on her windowsill during a residency in London. Both were then turned into luscious colour photographs in the darkroom via various printing procedures.
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre
Queen St, New Plymouth, New Zealand Phone: +64 6 759 6060 Email:info@govettbrewster.com
Blackwood’s Panorama of Sydney & Harbour from Government House 1858 front cover
We can only imagine the impact viewing this immense panorama (over 3m long) of eleven imperial size, wet plate photographs had on the populace of Sydney. They would have seen little like it before, and of such clarity and quality. I have included text, additional photographs and paintings to help the viewer and researcher position the panorama historically within the context of time and place. For example, note how illustriously and romantically the artist captures every detail in a painting such as Conrad Martens Campbell’s Wharf (1857, below), then notice how rough and ready the sections of this photographic panorama are even as they pertain to the veracity of the occasion. The length of each exposure can be estimated by the movement of the large sailing ship in the centre of section 7 of the panorama – at a guess probably just under a minute.
While larger individual images of the panorama can be found on the State Library of New South Wales website, the whole panorama photograph on that site is very small and gives little idea of how the individual sections concertina out. Some of the images also seem denuded, drained of their colour, probably due to the poor condition of the images (notably sections 2, 8, 9 and 11) . Hopefully these images – which can be reproduced without getting permission from institutions – more fully reflect the beauty and sensitivity of the panorama.
It was a great pleasure to meet collector Dennis Joachim, the owner of this panorama, up at Mossgreen in Armadale, Victoria recently. What a remarkable man and such great energy!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the long small image below to see the full panorama. Click again to enlarge and scroll from left to right.
William Blackwood (Australian, 1824-1897) Panorama of Sydney & Harbour from Government House
1858
12 albumen photoprints (comprising 1 panorama in 11 sections – 1 photoprint) in a leather and gold embossed album
Images 19 x 29cm
Panorama length 324.5cm
Olaf William Blackwood, also known as William Blackwood, was a portrait painter of Swedish and Scottish descent. It was, however as a professional photographer of panoramic Sydney views that he achieved the greatest success. By 1858, he had established a photographic studio in Woolloomooloo and began photographing surrounding street scenes, using the collodion wet-plate process. He took eleven imperial size, wet plate photographs from the roof of Government House which he then combined to form a large scale Panorama of Sydney Harbour, the first and largest produced in the colony. His panoramic views were met with critical acclaim, and were praised by The Sydney Morning Herald as ‘faultless’, ‘super-excellent’ and the ‘largest yet seen’1
By August, his 180 degree panorama of Sydney Harbour was again praised as ‘superior to anything of the kind we have seen. Nothing dim or smoky appears … no muddled trees – no hazy outlines – no hard sheets of glaring white for water’2 This was the most sophisticated and extensive panorama photography ever produced in Australia. Blackwood published another album that same year consisting of some of the earliest Australian architectural studies, and photographs of Sydney’s nine banks. From a technical point of view, Blackwood’s albums were an extraordinary achievement.
Large format views required extreme skill on the part of the photographer, and he coated his plates and processed them while still wet. In the early 1860s Blackwood worked in partnership with Henry Goodes and they created eight photographic views which were submitted to the New South Wales section of the 1862 London International Exhibition. Between 1862 and 1864, Blackwood worked with James Walker at Walker’s Pitt Street studio. Despite his early, energetic and entrepreneurial projects, little is known of Blackwood’s output after 1859 and he seems to have left photography after 1864.
1/ Sydney Morning Herald, 26 March 1858
2/ Sydney Morning Herald, 4 August 1858
Text from the Mossgreen website
Blackwood’s Panorama of Sydney & Harbour from Government House 1858 section 1
Entrance to Government House, Macquarie Street, city view including Customs House, Sydney Cove
Blackwood’s Panorama of Sydney & Harbour from Government House 1858 section 2
Entrance to Government House, Macquarie Street, city view including Customs House, Sydney Cove.
(The Customs House is horizontally left of the tall ship’s mast with the row of double windows)
Charles Percy Pickering (Australian, 1825-1908) Customs House 1872
New South Wales. Government Printing Office
Collection of the State Library of New South Wales
The Customs House is an historic Sydney landmark located in the city’s Circular Quay area. Constructed initially in 1844-1845, the building served as the headquarters of the Customs Service until 1990. The driving force behind the construction of the original sandstone edifice on Circular Quay was Colonel John George Nathaniel Gibbes, the Collector of Customs for New South Wales for a record term of 25 years from 1834 to 1859. Colonel Gibbes persuaded the Governor of New South Wales, Sir George Gipps, to begin construction of the Customs House in 1844 in response to Sydney’s growing volume of maritime trade. The building project also doubled as an unemployment relief measure for stonemasons and labourers during an economic depression which was afflicting the colony at the time.
The two-storey Georgian structure was designed by Mortimer Lewis and featured 13 large and expensive windows in the facade to afford a clear view of shipping activity in Sydney Cove. Colonel Gibbes, who dwelt opposite Circular Quay on Kirribilli Point, was able to watch progress on the Customs House’s construction from the verandah of his private residence, Wotonga House (now Admiralty House). The Customs House opened for business in 1845 and replaced cramped premises at The Rocks. It was partially dismantled and expanded to three levels under the supervision of the then Colonial Architect, James Barnet, in 1887. Various additions were made over the next century, particularly during the period of the First World War, but some significant vestiges of the original Gibbes-Lewis building remain.
Blackwood’s Panorama of Sydney & Harbour from Government House 1858 section 3
City view, Sydney Cove, The Rocks, Campbell’s Wharf and Dawes Point
Conrad Martens (England 1801 – Australia 1878; Australia from 1835) Campbell’s Wharf 1857
Watercolour with highlights in gum arabic Image: 46.0 x 66.0cm
National Gallery of Australia
From his arrival in 1835 until his death in 1878, Conrad Martens was the most celebrated artist in Sydney. Although a skilled painter in oils, his greatest works were executed in watercolour, and Campbell’s Wharf is among his most ambitious compositions. Commissioned by John Campbell in 1857, the work portrays the income source of the Campbell family, whose eighteenth and nineteenth century business interests encompassed wharfing, storing and merchant shipping.
On the right is Campbell’s Wharf and warehouses that stretched along the west side of Sydney Cove. To their left are the old Campbell residence and the new Mariners Church. In the centre of the painting rises the four-storied Miles Building, and to its left juts the Cumberland Place buildings along the skyline. All this is viewed through a jumble of trading vessels, the source of the Campbell family wealth. The painting is, however, more than a depiction of maritime industry and family property. Martens was well acquainted with the work of the British painter JMW Turner, whose romantic landscapes are suffused with delicate evocations of light. Silhouetted against a soft pink sky, Martens transforms an industrial setting into a picturesque landscape awash with luminous colour.
Blackwood’s Panorama of Sydney & Harbour from Government House 1858 section 4
City view, Sydney Cove, The Rocks, Campbell’s Wharf & Dawes Point
Dawes Point, New South Wales
By the 1840s the people of Dawes Point and Millers Point were a maritime community in which rich and poor mixed more than elsewhere in Sydney. Wharf owners and traders lived and worked beside those who worked on the wharves and bond stores, as well as those who arrived and left on ships. Only two of the merchant houses, built by and for the early wharf owners, survive. One is Walker’s 50-foot wide villa built around 1825 and now part of Milton Terrace at 7-9 Lower Fort Street; the other is the home and offices of Edwards and Hunter, built in 1833 above their wharves which is where the Wharf Theatre now stands.
The fortunes of Dawes Point and Millers Point fluctuated more than elsewhere in Sydney. Mostly prosperous in its early years, the area was less desirable by the 1890s, and in 1900 there was a catastrophic event that led to a complete reshaping of Millers Point. At the beginning of the 20th century the government compulsorily acquired all private wharves, homes and commercial properties in the Rocks, Dawes Point and Millers Point. Modern and efficient wharves with dual level access were built, as well as new accommodation for workers, such as the Workers Flats of Lower Fort Street designed by Government Architect Vernon.
Most people still believe this redevelopment can be attributed entirely to an outbreak of plague in 1900, with the government acting benevolently as it demolished homes as well as wharves, and not for the last time decimated a community, while presenting their actions as ‘slum clearance’. In the 1960s and ’70s the government tried again to clear the area and build high-rise offices, but this was thwarted by the Green Bans, supported community and unions. In 2016, the NSW Government is again ‘relocating’ the long-term community of Dawes Point, Millers Point and The Rocks, and only a handful of these residents remain, while the majority of houses and flats along Lower Fort Street and Trinity Avenue are vacant.
Blackwood’s Panorama of Sydney & Harbour from Government House 1858 section 5
Sydney Harbour, Fort Macquarie, views to the North Shore
North Shore
Before British settlement, the Lower North Shore was home to the Gorualgal (Mosman and southern Willoughby) and Cammeraygal (North Sydney and Eastern Lane Cove). After the establishment of Sydney in 1788, settlement of the North Shore of the harbour was quite limited. One of the first settlers was James Milson who lived in the vicinity of Jeffrey Street in Kirribilli, directly opposite Sydney Cove. The north shore was more rugged than the southern shore and western areas of the harbour and had limited agricultural potential. The early activities in the area included tree felling, boatbuilding and some orchard farming in the limited areas of good soil. The North Shore railway line was built in the 1890s. Access to the Sydney CBD, located on the southern shore of the harbour remained difficult until the completion of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932. This led to commencement the development of suburbs on the North Shore.
Blackwood’s Panorama of Sydney & Harbour from Government House 1858 section 6
Sydney Harbour, Fort Macquarie (Bennelong Point/Opera House), views to the North Shore
Fort Macquarie (Bennelong Point/Opera House)
Fort Macquarie was a square castellated battlement fort built at Bennelong Point, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, where the Sydney Opera House now stands. A half moon battery on the east point of Bennelong Point was constructed in May 1798 when the ship HMS Supply was withdrawn from service, Lieutenant William Kent and crew were assigned to man the battery. The battery consisted of some of the guns taken from HMS Supply.
Governor Lachlan Macquarie directed that a fort be built between December 1817 to February 1821 under the direction of Francis Greenway. The fort was named after Governor Lachlan Macquarie. It was a square fort with circular bastions at each corner and a castellated square tower. The battery consisted of fifteen pieces of ordnance: ten 24-pounders and five 6-pounders. Three sides of the fort abutted Sydney Harbour. The two-storey tower in the middle of the fort, housed a guardroom and storehouse. The tower was 27.4 m (90 ft) in circumference. A powder magazine capable of storing 350 barrels of gunpowder was constructed underneath and the tower could provide accommodation for a small military detachment of 1 officer and 18 men, with stores for the battery. A drawbridge, on the landward side, over a small channel leading to a gate beneath the tower provided entry to the fort.
Fort Macquarie was demolished in 1901 to make way for new electric tramway sheds named Fort Macquarie Tram Depot.
The point was originally a small tidal island, Bennelong Island, that largely consisted of rocks with a small beach on the western side. The island was located on the tip of the eastern arm of Sydney Cove and was apparently separated from the mainland at high tide. For a brief period in 1788, this relatively isolated protrusion into Port Jackson (Sydney’s natural harbour) was called Cattle Point as it was used to confine the few cattle and horses that had been brought from Cape Town by Governor Phillip with the First Fleet.
The area at that time was also strewn with discarded oyster shells from many long years of gathering by the local aboriginal women. Those shells were regathered by the newly arrived convict women and burnt to make lime for cement mortar. The point was called Limeburners’ Point for that reason, though those shells only furnished enough lime to make a single building, the two-storey government house. In the early 1790s, the Aborigine Bennelong – employed as a cultural interlocutor by the British – persuaded New South Wales Governor Arthur Phillip to build a brick hut for him on the point, giving it its name.
In the period from 1818 to 1821, the tidal area between Bennelong Island and the mainland was filled with rocks excavated from the Bennelong Point peninsula. The entire area was levelled to create a low platform and to provide suitable stone for the construction of Fort Macquarie. While the fort was being built, a large portion of the rocky escarpment at Bennelong Point was also cut away to allow a road to be built around the point from Sydney Cove to Farm Cove. This was known as Tarpeian Way. The existence of the original tidal island and its rubble fill were largely forgotten until the late 1950s when both were rediscovered during the excavations related to the construction of the Sydney Opera House. Prior to the Opera House’s construction, Bennelong Point had housed Fort Macquarie Tram Depot.
Kerry & Co. Fort Macquarie
1870
Albumen photograph
From the collections of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
Fort Macquarie was built on the end of Bennelong Point, where the Sydney Opera House now stands. Completed by convict labour in 1821 using stone from the Domain, the fort had 15 guns and housed a small garrison. The powder magazine beneath the tower was capable of storing 350 barrels of gunpowder. The fort was demolished in 1901 to make way for the tramway sheds that occupied the site until the construction of the Utzon masterpiece
Kerry & Co. Fort Macquarie
1870
Albumen photograph
From the collections of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
Anonymous photographer The tram shed at Bennelong Point before the Sydney Opera House was built
1952
Blackwood’s Panorama of Sydney & Harbour from Government House 1858 section 7
Sydney Harbour view, sailing ships, Fort Denison (to the far right in the distance), Garden Island, Lady Macquarie’s Chair
Anonymous photographer SS Nieuw Holland passing Fort Denison, Sydney Harbour
c. 1930
Australian National Maritime Museum collection
Fort Denison was built on an island that was known to Indigenous people in the area as Muddawahnyuh, meaning ‘rocky island’. After European settlement in 1788 the island was called Pinchgut by convicts who were marooned there with meagre rations of bread and water as punishment for serious breaches of the peace. The island was originally a 15 metre sandstone rock, but during the 1800s it was excavated to provide sandstone to build Circular Quay, at that time the centre of shipping in Sydney.
Anonymous photographer Fort Denison
c. 1930
Glass negative, quarter plate
Tom Lennon Photographic Collection from the Powerhouse Museum
Fort Denison
In 1839, two American warships entered the harbour at night and circled Pinchgut Island. Concern with the threat of foreign attack caused the government to review the harbour’s inner defences. Barney, who had earlier reported that Sydney’s defences were inadequate, recommended that the government establish a fort on Pinchgut Island to help protect Sydney Harbour from attack by foreign vessels. Fortification of the island began in 1841 but was not completed. Construction resumed in 1855 because of fear of a Russian naval attack during the Crimean War, and was completed on 14 November 1857. The newly built fort then took its current name from Sir William Thomas Denison, the Governor of New South Wales from 1855 to 1861.
The fortress features a distinctive Martello tower, the only one ever built in Australia and the last one ever constructed in the British Empire. It was constructed using 8,000 tonnes (7,900 long tons) of sandstone from nearby Kurraba Point, Neutral Bay. The tower’s walls are between 3.3-6.7 metres (11-22 ft) thick at the base and 2.7 metres (8 ft 10 in) thick at the top. However, developments in artillery rendered the fort largely obsolete by the time it was completed. The tower itself had quarters for a garrison of 24 soldiers and one officer. Fort Denison’s armament included three 8-inch (200 mm) muzzle loaders in the tower, two 10-inch (250 mm) guns, one on a 360-degree traverse on the top of the tower and one in a bastion at the other end of the island, and twelve 32-pound (15 kg) cannons in a battery between the base of the tower and the flanking bastion. Eventually all the guns were removed, except for the three 8-inch (200 mm) muzzle-loading cannons in the gun room in the tower, which were installed before construction was complete.
George Roberts (Australian born United Kingdom, c. 1800-1865) [Mrs Macquarie’s chair]
c. 1843-1865
Watercolour
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
American & Australasian Photographic Company Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, Sydney (B. O. Holtermann seated at centre)
c. 1870-1875
State Library of New South Wales
Bernhardt Otto Holtermann
Bernhardt Otto Holtermann (29 April 1838 – 29 April 1885) was a successful gold miner, businessman, sponsor of photography for the encouragement of immigration and member of parliament. Perhaps his greatest claim to fame is his association with the Holtermann Nugget, the largest gold specimen ever found, 1.5 meters (59 inches) long, weighing 286 kg (630 pounds), in Hill End, near Bathurst, and with an estimated gold content of 3000 troy ounces (93 kg).
Holtermann financed and possibly participated in photographer Beaufoy Merlin’s project to photograph New South Wales and exhibit the results abroad to encourage immigration. The work was taken up after Merlin’s death in 1873 by his assistant, Charles Bayliss. In 1875, Holtermann and Bayliss produced the Holtermann panorama, a series of “23 albumen silver photographs which join together to form a continuous 978-centimetre view of Sydney Harbour and its suburbs.”Some of the photographs, including the panorama, were displayed at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, where they won a bronze medal.The panorama was also displayed at the 1878 Exposition Universelle Internationale in Paris.
Almost seventy years after Holtermann’s death, more than 3,000 of the glass negatives created by Merlin and Bayliss were retrieved from a garden shed in the Sydney suburb of Chatswood. The UNESCO-listed collection of negatives, known as The Holtermann Collection, is housed in the State Library of New South Wales.
Mrs Macquarie’s Chair (also known as Lady Macquarie’s Chair) is an exposed sandstone rock cut into the shape of a bench, on a peninsula in Sydney Harbour, hand carved by convicts from sandstone in 1810 for Governor Macquarie’s wife Elizabeth. The peninsula itself is named Mrs Macquarie’s Point, and is part of the The Domain, near the Royal Botanic Gardens. Mrs Macquarie was the wife of Major-General Lachlan Macquarie, Governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821. Folklore has it that she used to sit on the rock and watch for ships from Great Britain sailing into the harbour. She was known to visit the area and sit enjoying the panoramic views of the harbour.
Above the chair is a stone inscription referring to Mrs Macquarie’s Road. That road was built between 1813 and 1818, and ran from the original Government House (now the Museum of Sydney) to Mrs Macquarie’s Point. It was built on the instruction of Governor Macquarie for the benefit of his wife.There is no remaining evidence of the original road, other than a culvert over which the road ran.
Blackwood’s Panorama of Sydney & Harbour from Government House 1858 section 8
Sydney Harbour view, sailing ships, Fort Denison, Garden Island, Lady Macquarie’s Chair
Blackwood’s Panorama of Sydney & Harbour from Government House 1858 section 9
Farm Cove, views to Potts Point and Darlinghurst
Blackwood’s Panorama of Sydney & Harbour from Government House 1858 section 10
Farm Cove, views to Potts Point and Darlinghurst
Potts Point is named for Joseph Hyde Potts, who was employed by the Bank of New South Wales. He purchased six-and-a-half acres of harbourside land in an area then known as Woolloomooloo Hill – which he renamed Potts Point. Much of the area that today comprises Potts Point and the adjacent suburb of Elizabeth Bay, originally constituted part of a land grant to Alexander Macleay, who was the New South Wales Colonial Secretary from 1826 to 1837, and for whom Macleay Street is named. NSW Judge Advocate, John Wylde (for whom Wylde Street is named) was another 19th-century public servant who owned land in the area.
Blackwood’s Panorama of Sydney & Harbour from Government House 1858 section 11
The Government Domain, Government House Stables
Blackwood’s Panorama of Sydney & Harbour from Government House 1858
Government House with porte cochère
In 1845 the British government agreed that a new Government House in Sydney had become a necessity, and the royal architect, Edward Blore, was instructed to draw up plans. Construction commenced in 1837 and was supervised by colonial architect Mortimer Lewis and Colonel Barney of the Royal Engineers. Stone, cedar, and marble for the construction were obtained from various areas of New South Wales. A ball in honour of the birthday of Queen Victoria was held in the new building in 1843, although construction was not complete. The first resident, Governor George Gipps, did not move in until 1845.
Government House, with its setting on Sydney Harbour, has a garden area of 5 hectares and is located south of the Sydney Opera House, overlooking Farm Cove. It was designed in a romantic Gothic revival style – castellated, crenellated, turreted and is decorated with oil portraits and the coats of arms of its successive occupants. Additions have included a front portico in 1873, an eastern verandah in 1879 and extensions to the ballroom and governor’s study in 1900-01.
Definition of porte cochère. 1: a passageway through a building or screen wall designed to let vehicles pass from the street to an interior courtyard. 2: a roofed structure extending from the entrance of a building over an adjacent driveway and sheltering those getting in or out of vehicles.
John Paine (Australian born England, 1833-1908) The entrance gates of Government House, Sydney
c. 1878
Albumen print
15 x 20.4cm
Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection
The Government House entrance gates and guardhouse, completed in 1848, are shown here in their original location on Macquarie Street. The elaborate iron gates were supported by six sandstone piers: in the centre was the ceremonial entrance, marked by metalwork lanterns complete with crowns, and this was flanked by two carriage gates and a pair of pedestrian gates. The design of the gates and guardhouse is attributed to the Colonial Architect Mortimer Lewis, the gatehouse being identical to the ‘Forest Gate Keeper’s Lodge’ illustrated in H B Zeigler’s ‘The Royal Lodges in Windsor Great Park’ (1839) The Gothic Revival guardhouse consisted of four rooms to accommodate the guard, with open verandahs on two sides, and it was to also serve the Treasury, completed on the opposite side of Macquarie Street c. 1850 (also designed by Lewis). The entrance gates and guardhouse, as a Gothic style entrance lodge, were consistent with Picturesque ideals for the entrance to a large estate and formed an appropriately imposing entrance to the vice regal residence.
Blackwood’s Panorama of Sydney & Harbour from Government House 1858 back cover
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![Unknown artist. '[Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]' 1850s-1860s](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/anon-collaged-portraits-b.jpg "Unknown artist. '[Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]' 1850s-1860s")
![Unknown artist. '[Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]' 1850s-1860s](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/anon-collaged-portraits-c.jpg "Unknown artist. '[Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]' 1850s-1860s")
![Unknown artist. '[Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]' 1850s-1860s](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/anon-collaged-portraits-d.jpg "Unknown artist. '[Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]' 1850s-1860s")
![Unknown artist. '[Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]' 1850s-1860s](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/anon-collaged-portraits-e.jpg "Unknown artist. '[Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]' 1850s-1860s")
![Unknown artist. '[Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]' 1850s-1860s](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/anon-collaged-portraits-f.jpg "Unknown artist. '[Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]' 1850s-1860s")
![Unknown artist. '[Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]' 1850s-1860s](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/anon-collaged-portraits-g.jpg "Unknown artist. '[Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]' 1850s-1860s")
![Unknown artist. '[Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]' 1850s-1860s](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/anon-collaged-portraits-h.jpg "Unknown artist. '[Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]' 1850s-1860s")
![Unknown artist (American) '[Studio Photographer at Work]' c. 1855](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/unknown-artist-american-studio-photographer-at-work-c-1855.jpg "Unknown artist (American) '[Studio Photographer at Work]' c. 1855")
![Unknown artist (American) '[Boy Holding a Daguerreotype]' 1850s](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/unknown-american-active-1850s-boy-holding-a-daguerreotype-1850s.jpg "Unknown artist (American) '[Boy Holding a Daguerreotype]' 1850s")
![Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916) '[California Oak, Santa Clara Valley]' c. 1863](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/watkins-california-oak-santa-clara-valley.jpg "Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916) '[California Oak, Santa Clara Valley]' c. 1863")
![Pietro Dovizielli (Italian, 1804-1885) '[Spanish Steps, Rome]' c. 1855](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/dovizielli-spanish-steps.jpg "Pietro Dovizielli (Italian, 1804-1885) '[Spanish Steps, Rome]' c. 1855")
![Edouard Baldus (French (born Prussia), 1813-1889) '[Amphitheater, Nîmes]' c. 1853](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/baldus-amphitheater.jpg "Edouard Baldus (French (born Prussia), 1813-1889) '[Amphitheater, Nîmes]' c. 1853")
![Lewis Dowe (American, active 1860s-1880s) '[Dowe's Photograph Rooms, Sycamore, Illinois]' 1860s](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/lewis-dowe-dowes-photograph-rooms-sycamore-illinois-1860s.jpg "Lewis Dowe (American, active 1860s-1880s) '[Dowe's Photograph Rooms, Sycamore, Illinois]' 1860s")
![E. & H. T. Anthony (American) '[Specimens of New York Bill Posting]' 1863](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/e-h-t-anthony-specimens-of-new-york-bill-posting-1863.jpg "E. & H. T. Anthony (American) '[Specimens of New York Bill Posting]' 1863")
![Felice Beato (British (born Italy), Venice 1832-1909 Luxor) and James Robertson (British, 1813-1881) [Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem] 1856-1857](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/beato-dome.jpg "Felice Beato (British (born Italy), Venice 1832-1909 Luxor) and James Robertson (British, 1813-1881) [Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem] 1856-1857")
![R.C. Montgomery (American, active 1850s) '[Self-Portrait (?)]' 1850s](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/r.c.-montgomery-self-portrait-1850s.jpg "R.C. Montgomery (American, active 1850s) '[Self-Portrait (?)]' 1850s")
![Francis Frith (British, 1822-98) 'The Pyramids of Dahshoor [Dahshur], from the East, from Egypt, Sinai, and Jerusalem: A Series of Twenty Photographic Views by Francis Frith' 1858 (published 1860 or 1862)](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/frith-the-pyramids-of-dahshoor-web.jpg "Francis Frith (British, 1822-98) 'The Pyramids of Dahshoor [Dahshur], from the East, from Egypt, Sinai, and Jerusalem: A Series of Twenty Photographic Views by Francis Frith' 1858 (published 1860 or 1862)")
![Attributed to Oscar G. Rejlander (British, born Sweden, 1813-1875) '[Landscape]' c. 1855](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/rejlander-landscape-c-1855-web.jpg "Attributed to Oscar G. Rejlander (British, born Sweden, 1813-1875) '[Landscape]' c. 1855")
![J[eremiah] Gurney (American) 'Untitled [Cross-eyed man in three-quarter profile]' Nd](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/dag-half-plate-jeremiah-gurney-at-349-broadway-new-york-orig.jpg "J[eremiah] Gurney (American) 'Untitled [Cross-eyed man in three-quarter profile]' Nd")
![J[eremiah] Gurney (American) 'Untitled [Cross-eyed man in three-quarter profile]' Nd](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/dag-half-plate-jeremiah-gurney-at-349-broadway-new-york-web.jpg "J[eremiah] Gurney (American) 'Untitled [Cross-eyed man in three-quarter profile]' Nd")
![Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Group of three men]' c. 1850](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/dag-unsigned-unusual-period-frame-of-cast-thermoplastic-circa-1850-web.jpg "Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Group of three men]' c. 1850")
![Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Man on crutches]' c. 1850-1860s](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/man-on-crutches-sixth-plate-ambrotype-1850-60s-web.jpg "Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Man on crutches]' c. 1850-1860s")
![Unknown photographer (American) Untitled [Man with pistols] c. 1850-1860s](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/man-with-pistols-sixth-plate-daguerreotype-1850-60s-orig.jpg "Unknown photographer (American) Untitled [Man with pistols] c. 1850-1860s")
![Unknown photographer (American) Untitled [Man with pistols] c. 1850-1860s](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/man-with-pistols-sixth-plate-daguerreotype-1850-60s-web.jpg "Unknown photographer (American) Untitled [Man with pistols] c. 1850-1860s")
![Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Man, possibly a sailor, wearing hoop earrings]' Nd](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/man-possibly-a-sailor-wearing-hoop-earrings-orig.jpg "Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Man, possibly a sailor, wearing hoop earrings]' Nd")
![Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Man, possibly a sailor, wearing hoop earrings]' Nd](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/man-possibly-a-sailor-wearing-hoop-earrings-web.jpg "Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Man, possibly a sailor, wearing hoop earrings]' Nd")
![Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [African American]' c. 1850s](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/dag-unsigned-sixth-plate-american-circa-1850s-web.jpg "Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [African American]' c. 1850s")
![Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [African American]' c. 1850s](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/dag-unsigned-sixth-plate-american-circa-1850s-b-web.jpg "Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [African American]' c. 1850s")
![Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Two men in caps, elegantly dressed]' c. 1850s](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/unsigned-dag-two-men-in-caps-elegantly-dressed-american-circa-1850s-web.jpg "Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Two men in caps, elegantly dressed]' c. 1850s")
![Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Handsome man with fifth finger ring]' c. 1850s](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/dag-unsigned-1850s-web.jpg "Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Handsome man with fifth finger ring]' c. 1850s")
![Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Portrait of violinist holding instrument]' c. 1855](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/dag-sixth-plate-portrait-of-violinist-holding-instrument-circa-1855-web.jpg "Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Portrait of violinist holding instrument]' c. 1855")
![Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Two men, one with trug of tools]' c. 1850-1860s](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/two-men-one-with-trug-of-tools-sixth-plate-ambrotype-web.jpg "Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Two men, one with trug of tools]' c. 1850-1860s")
![Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Two firemen]' c. 1850-1860s](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/two-firemen-quarter-plate-tinted-tintype-1850-60s-web.jpg "Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Two firemen]' c. 1850-1860s")
![Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Man in button braces]' c. 1850](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/dag-unsigned-ninth-plate-american-circa-1850-web.jpg "Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Man in button braces]' c. 1850")
![Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Man in button braces]' c. 1850](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/dag-unsigned-ninth-plate-american-circa-1850-web1.jpg "Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Man in button braces]' c. 1850")
![Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Two young men with straw hats, seated beside each other]' Nd](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/two-young-men-with-straw-hats-web.jpg "Unknown photographer (American) 'Untitled [Two young men with straw hats, seated beside each other]' Nd")
![Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon] (French, 1820-1910) 'Self-Portrait' c. 1855](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/realideal12-web.jpg "Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon] (French, 1820-1910) 'Self-Portrait' c. 1855")
![Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon] (French, 1820-1910) 'Jean-François Philibert Berthelier, Actor' 1856-1859](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/realideal21-web.jpg "Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon] (French, 1820-1910) 'Jean-François Philibert Berthelier, Actor' 1856-1859")
![Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon] (French, 1820-1910) 'George Sand (Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin), Writer' c. 1865](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/realideal5-web.jpg "Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon] (French, 1820-1910) 'George Sand (Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin), Writer' c. 1865")
![George Roberts (Australian born United Kingdom, c. 1800-1865) '[Mrs Macquarie's chair]' c. 1843-1865](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/mrs-macquaries-chair-web.jpg "George Roberts (Australian born United Kingdom, c. 1800-1865) '[Mrs Macquarie's chair]' c. 1843-1865")
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