“Sometimes theory leads to an over determination. Something is gained but at a price. Finding images that evoke a sound can only be saved by paying the higher price of remembering how images look when their sound is removed.”
~ Ian Lobb
From my knowledge of photography, I have added further images that I can hear … but not in the exhibition that I know of. You may like to recall other photographs that you could include in the exhibition.
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.
Though photographs are silent, photographers have long conjured sound in their images. Whether depicting crowded urban spaces, musicians performing, people engaged in conversations, or even more abstract depictions of sound, the pictures in this exhibition show photography’s power to communicate beyond the visual. The images date from the 19th century to the recent past, and in each, the audible plays as much of a role as the visual. As you look at these photographs, you are invited to imagine what you might “hear” as well.
Photographs may be silent, but photographers have long conjured sound in their images.
Whether depicting crowded urban spaces, musicians performing, or people engaged in conversation, the pictures in this exhibition prove photography’s power to communicate beyond the visual.
Drawn from Getty’s permanent collection, In Focus: Sound, on view June 28 through September 2, 2022, unites two sensory perceptions – sight and sound – in photographs that record the visual while also imitating the audible.
“Photography and sound have more in common than one might expect,” says Karen Hellman, curator of the exhibition. “Photographs can evoke a sensory perception that they cannot actually depict. Looking at photographs while thinking about sound could provide a new way of viewing and appreciating photography.”
The 19th century saw a keen scientific and philosophical interest in reproducing ephemeral phenomena. This led to the development of the photograph as well as the phonograph. This interlinked history perhaps explains photography’s connection to sound and why photographers, even subconsciously, have endeavoured to picture it. In each image in this exhibition, which date from the 19th century to the recent past, the audible plays as much of a role as the visual.
This exhibition includes works by known and lesser-known makers from the 19th century to the recent past, including Julia Margaret Cameron, Walker Evans, Man Ray, Graciela Iturbide, Marco Breuer, Naoya Hatakeyama, and Christian Marclay.
In Focus: Sound will be on view June 28 through September 2, 2022, at the Getty Center.
“Bowery old-timers claim her voice has had no match for power and ferocity since Maggie Cline used to stun with “Knock ‘Em Down McCloskey”.”
The uncredited text, referring to this photograph of the bar singer known as “Tillie,” accompanied a group of Lisette Model’s photographs made at Sammy’s Bar that were reproduced in the September 1994 Harper’s Bazaar magazine. Taken from below and at a slight diagonal angle, the image captures the vitality and vibrancy of the performer belting it out on the stage at Sammy’s, a local favourite in the Bowery district of New York, also visited by photographers Weegee and Diane Arbus. The angle from which the photograph was made also emphasises the gleaming microphone, which seem to rise up to meet the challenge of projecting Tillie’s already powerful voice.
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Studio 54, New York City
May 1977
Silver gelatin print
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Songs of the Sky
1924
Gelatin silver print
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Songs of the Sky
1924
Gelatin silver print
Eva Besnyö (Dutch, 1910-2003) Boy With Cello, Balaton, Hungary
1931
Gelatin silver print
42.5 x 39.2cm (16.7 x 15.4 in)
Arnold Newman (American, 1918-2006) Igor Stravinsky
1945
Gelatin silver contact sheet
Santu Mofokeng (South African, b. 1956) Opening Song, Hand Clapping and Bells
1986
From the series Train Church
Gelatin silver print Image: 19 x 28.5cm
Platt D Babbitt (American, 1822-1879) Niagara Falls from the American side
c. 1855
Whole plate daguerreotype
Platt D Babbitt (American, 1822-1879) [Scene at Niagara Falls]
c. 1855
Daguerreotype
Platt D Babbitt (American, 1822-1879) Niagara Falls
c. 1860
Daguerreotype
Henri Huet (French, 1927-1971)/AP ‘Life’ magazine photographer Larry Burrows (far left) struggles through elephant grass and the rotor wash of an American evacuation helicopter as he helps GIs carry a wounded soldier on a stretcher from the jungle to the chopper in Mimot, Cambodia
4 May 1970
Gelatin silver print
Henri Huet (French, 1927-1971) The body of an American paratrooper killed in action in the jungle near the Cambodian border is raised up to an evacuation helicopter, Vietnam
1966
Gelatin silver print
James Barnor (Ghanian, b. 1929) E. K. Nyame, the legendary Ghanaian musician, photographed for a record cover, Accra
c. 1975
Gelatin silver print
Roger Scott (Australian, b. 1944) Ghost train
1972
Gelatin silver print
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) The House of Horrors
1961
Gelatin silver print
Robert H. Jackson (American, born 1934) FATAL BULLET HITS OSWALD. Jack Ruby fires bullet point blank into the body of Lee Harvey Oswald at Dallas Police Station. Oswald grimaces in agony
November 24, 1963
Robert H. Jackson (American, b. 1934) Jack Ruby (52) shoots Lee Harvey Oswald (24)
24 November 1963
Originally published in the Dallas Times Herald, November 25, 1963. Cropped from the source image to the portion that was published in 1963. Winner of the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Photography.
Unknown photographer Survivors of the atomic bomb attack of Nagasaki walk through the destruction as fire rages in the background Aug. 9 1945
1945
John Williams (Australian, 1933-2016) Open Air Shower, Bronte Beach
1964
Gelatin silver print
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Man Stepping from Cable Car, San Francisco
1956
Gelatin silver print
Kaho Yu (Australian) Untitled from the series Infinitesimal Residual Vibration of An Unknown Sound
2009-2011
Kaho Yu (Australian) Untitled from the series Infinitesimal Residual Vibration of An Unknown Sound
2009-2011
The photographs in this series were taken during a period when I was feeling existentially bored. Instead of distracting myself with activities and accumulating new sensations, I decided to “look” at boredom, to study, and perhaps to understand it. The most natural strategy was to observe the immediate environments where my daily activities take place – train stations, cubicles, copy machines room, etc. I carried a medium format camera on a tripod and spent the odd hours wandering alone through those familiar spaces.
My “study” did not lead me to any revelation or answer. Instead, I found myself spending a lot of time waiting in a long silence, between the opening and the closing of the camera shutter.
Charles Babbage, a scientist in 1837, postulated that every voice and sound, once imparted on the air particles, does not dissipate but remains in the diffused movements of all the particles in the atmosphere. Thus, there might one day come a person equipped with the right mathematical knowledge of these motions who will be able to capture the infinitesimal vibrations and to trace back to their ultimate source.
Taking a long exposure, letting the light slowly accumulate an image on the celluloid surface, to me, is not unlike a sound seeker searching in the air particles, for the tiny residual movements that have been conveyed through the history of mankind, from the beginning of time.
Kaho Yu artist statement
… i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces
… i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces brings together a collection of early photographs related to music, a group of 78rpm recordings, and short excerpts from various literary sources that are contemporary with the sound and images. It is a somewhat intuitive gathering, culled from artist Steve Roden’s collection of thousands of vernacular photographs related to music, sound, and listening. The subjects range from the PT Barnum-esque Professor McRea – “Ontario’s Musical Wonder” (pictured with his complex sculptural one man band contraption) – to anonymous African-American guitar players and images of early phonographs. The images range from professional portraits to ethereal, accidental, double exposures – and include a range of photographic print processes, such as tintypes, ambrotypes, cdvs, cabinet cards, real photo postcards, albumen prints, and turn-of-the-century snapshots.
The two CDs display a variety of recordings, including one-off amateur recordings, regular commercial releases, and early sound effects records. there is no narrative structure to the book, but the collision of literary quotes (Hamsun, Lagarkvist, Wordsworth, Nabokov, etc.). Recordings and images conspire towards a consistent mood that is anchored by the book’s title, which binds such disparate things as an early recording of an American cowboy ballad, a poem by a Swedish Nobel laureate, a recording of crickets created artificially, and an image of an itinerant anonymous woman sitting in a field, playing a guitar. The book also contains an essay by Roden.
Text from the Dust to Digital website Nd [Online] Cited 23/07/2022. Published by Dust-to-Digital, 2011. The book is out of stock but available on Abe.com website.
… i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces book cover (2011)
The J. Paul Getty Museum
1200 Getty Center Drive
Los Angeles, California 90049
Exhibition dates: 19th June 2021 – 9th January 2022
Curator: Anna Tellgren
Artists represented in the exhibition: Anna Boberg, Helmer Bäckström, Julia Margaret Cameron, Uno Falkengren, Gustaf Fjæstad, Ferdinand Flodin, Henry B. Goodwin, John Hertzberg, Gösta Hübinette, Eugène Jansson, Nicola Perscheid and Ture Sellman.
Otto Girl in Chair
c. 1892 Reproduction photo: Prallan Allsten/Moderna Museet
Apologies, a short text today… my lower back is not very good and I am not feeling that well.
Another “niche” exhibition that Art Blart likes to promote, one that fills a gap in our greater knowledge of world art and artists. But why the distinction in the title of the exhibition between art and photography? That old chestnut rears its ugly head again… why not just ‘art around 1900’?
My particular favourites in the posting are the muscular yet translucent Anna Boberg painting A Quiet Evening. Study from North Norway (Nd); the gossamer wispiness and beauty of Ferdinand Flodin’s Portrait of a young lady (1922); and the velvety softness and light of Ture Sellman’s Untitled landscape (c. 1915).
I have added detail of the artists and sitters where possible and information on early photographic processes.
Enjoy!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Moderna Museet for allowing me to publish the photographs and the text in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Moderna Museet highlights Pictorialism – a movement in photography that arose around 1900. The exhibition In Lady Barclay’s Salon – Art and Photography Around 1900 also includes paintings from the same period, treating visitors to a selection of nearly 300 works from the collections of Moderna Museet and Nationalmuseum.
This exhibition is based on the rich collections of Moderna Museet and Nationalmuseum, with art and photography dating from the late 1800s to the First World War. During this period, pictorialism was a style that many prominent photographers worked in; it was inspired by impressionism, symbolism and naturalism.
Pictorialism was the first international art photography movement, with many active practitioners throughout Europe and the USA. Sweden was on the periphery of this movement, but the style became popular here too among several influential amateur and professional photographers. This was a pivotal period in painting, where the younger artists who went abroad and were inspired by a freer approach broke with the more conservative academic painters. This exhibition will highlight works by famous photographers and painters from the years around the turn of the century.
Dark haired, almond eyed, and irresistibly charming, Lady Sarita Enriqueta Barclay was an influential figure of Stockholm’s Pictorialism movement. Captivated by the experimental nature of Swedish art during the fin de siècle, she hosted elaborate viewings and events, and was photographed often. Known for diffused light, sepia tones, and romanticism, the impressionistic photographs of the era capture a cultural moment in Swedish history.
Look into Lady Barclays Salon: Live curator talk
Look into Lady Barclay’s salon and discover Pictorialism, the first art photo stream. Many prominent photographers worked in the style that prevailed from the 1890s and a few decades onwards. Anna Tellgren, curator and Karin Malmquist, program curator, talk about Pictorialism and some of the approximately 300 paintings and photographs that you can see in the exhibition “In Lady Barclays Salon”.
August Strindberg (Swedish, 1849-1912) Underlandet (The Wonderland)
1894
Oil on cardboard
72.5cm (28.5 in) x 52cm (20.4 in)
Nationalmuseum (Stockholm)
Johan August Strindberg
Johan August Strindberg (22 January 1849 – 14 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg’s career spanned four decades, during which time he wrote more than sixty plays and more than thirty works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed innovative forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition. He is considered the “father” of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. In Sweden, Strindberg is known as an essayist, painter, poet, and especially as a novelist and playwright, but in other countries he is known mostly as a playwright. …
Strindberg, something of a polymath, was also a telegrapher, theosophist, painter, photographer and alchemist. Painting and photography offered vehicles for his belief that chance played a crucial part in the creative process.
Strindberg’s paintings were unique for their time, and went beyond those of his contemporaries for their radical lack of adherence to visual reality. The 117 paintings that are acknowledged as his were mostly painted within the span of a few years, and are now seen by some as among the most original works of 19th-century art.
Today, his best-known pieces are stormy, expressionist seascapes, selling at high prices in auction houses. Though Strindberg was friends with Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin, and was thus familiar with modern trends, the spontaneous and subjective expressiveness of his landscapes and seascapes can be ascribed also to the fact that he painted only in periods of personal crisis.
Joseph Mallard William Turner (British, 1775-1851) A View of Deal
Nd
Oil on paper on panel
32 x 24cm (12.6 x 9.6 inches)
Nationalmuseum (Stockholm)
The years from 1890 to the first World War were a golden era for the arts in Sweden. This exhibition presents beautiful Pictorialist photographs and selected paintings from this period. The more than 300 works from the rich collections of Moderna Museet and Nationalmuseum give us an insight into art at the time.
In Lady Barclay’s Salon, we imagine a meeting between photographers and painters, their friends and the public. Lady Sarita Enriqueta Barclay (1891-1985) was married to a British diplomat, and they both lived in Stockholm for a few years around 1921. She was portrayed several times in the studio of the photographer Henry B. Goodwin. We can assume that she was prominent in the city’s social life and went to previews, dinners and other events.
This exhibition is an opportunity to see a selection of some 300 works by famous photographers and painters in the Moderna Museet and Nationalmuseum collections, including Anna Boberg, Helmer Bäckström, Julia Margaret Cameron, Uno Falkengren, Gustaf Fjæstad, Ferdinand Flodin, Henry B. Goodwin, John Hertzberg, Gösta Hübinette, Eugène Jansson, Nicola Perscheid and Ture Sellman.
Around the end of the previous century
In the years around 1900, a number of colourful personalities emerged in literature, music, art and architecture, and patrons such as Prince Eugen and Ernest Thiel were building major art collections. The Art and Industry Exhibition in Stockholm in 1897 and the Baltic Exhibition in Malmö in 1914 had sections for art and photography.
The exhibition “In Lady Barclay’s Salon” gives a picture of the visual culture at the time. It features mainly Swedish material, with a few international highlights. The works date from the late-19th century to 1930, a period when Pictorialism was emerging in photography. The style was inspired by impressionism, symbolism and naturalism, and there were lively debates on how to make photography more artistic.
Unlike the increasing number of amateur and professional photographers – who had gained access to the medium thanks to technological progress – the Pictorialists emphasised craftsmanship. Their images are characterised by soft focus and with colours ranging from brown, earthy tones to strong reds and blues. They worked with a variety of processes with the purpose of creating or “painting” on light-sensitive paper. This was the first international art photography movement, and it had many prominent practitioners throughout Europe and the USA.
A pivotal time for painting
This was a pivotal period in painting, when the younger artists who travelled abroad and were inspired by a freer approach broke with the more conservative academic painters. The French painter Paul Gauguin and the Pont-Aven school had a strong influence on Swedish artists who adopted symbolist or synthetist approaches. Images were reproduced and distributed more widely in books, posters and magazines, making it easier to share ideas. No longer was it necessary to visit other countries to see the latest art, but Paris was still a mecca for art students. Towards the end of the century, however, Paris was rivalled by Berlin, Munich, Dresden and Hamburg. Copenhagen, with its international relations and exhibitions, also offered a natural meeting place for Swedes.
Text from the Moderna Museet website
Ferdinand Flodin (Swedish, 1863-1935) View from My Window over Skeppsholmen, Stockholm
1929
Bromoil print mounted on board
Moderna Museet Reproduction photo: Prallan Allsten/Moderna Museet
Eugène Jansson (Swedish, 1862-1915) Hornsgatan nattetid (Hornsgatan at night)
1902
Oil on canvas
152cm (59.8 in) x 182cm (71.6 in)
National Museum (Stockholm)
Moderna Museet highlights Pictorialism – a movement in photography that arose around 1900. The exhibition In Lady Barclay’s Salon – Art and Photography Around 1900 also includes paintings from the same period, treating visitors to a selection of nearly 300 works from the collections of Moderna Museet and Nationalmuseum.
Lady Sarita Enriqueta Barclay (1891-1985) became a prominent figure on the Stockholm arts scene after her husband, a British diplomat, had been posted to Stockholm. Lady Barclay frequently hosted cultural gatherings and events in the five years following the end of the First World War when she lived here. The photographer Henry B. Goodwin (1878-1931) portrayed Lady Barclay on several occasions, and his pictures show her as a stylish woman with a cosmopolitan air – an emblem of Sweden’s flourishing arts scene at the time.
In the years around 1900, a number of colourful personalities emerged in literature, music, art and architecture, and patrons such as Prince Eugen and Ernest Thiel were building major art collections. The Art and Industry Exhibition in Stockholm in 1897, and the Baltic Exhibition in Malmö in 1914, included separate sections for art and photography.
The exhibition In Lady Barclay’s Salon gives a picture of the visual culture at the time, and consists mainly of Swedish material, with a few international highlights. The works date from the late-19th century to 1930, a period when Pictorialism was emerging in photography. The style embraced inspiration from impressionist, symbolist and naturalism, and there was a lively debate on how to make photography more artistic. Unlike the increasing number of amateur and professional photographers – who had gained access to the medium thanks to technological progress – the Pictorialists emphasised craftsmanship. Their images are characterised by soft focus and with colours ranging from brown, earthy tones to strong reds and blues. They worked with a variety of processes with the purpose of creating or “painting” on light-sensitive paper.
Painting also moved into a new phase around 1900. While the older members of the artist federation Konstnärsförbundet, founded in 1886, maintained their dominance, a younger generation was beginning to step in at the turn of the century. The French artist Paul Gauguin and the Pont-Aven school had a strong influence on Swedish artists who adopted symbolist or synthetist approaches. Ideas could be shared more easily with mass-produced images in books, posters and magazines.
In Lady Barclay’s Salon presents a fictive encounter between photographers and painters, their friends and the audience. The exhibition features some 300 works from the collections of Moderna Museet and Nationalmuseum, including works by Anna Boberg, Helmer Bäckström, Julia Margaret Cameron, Uno Falkengren, Gustaf Fjæstad, Ferdinand Flodin, Henry B. Goodwin, John Hertzberg, Gösta Hübinette, Eugène Jansson, Nicola Perscheid and Ture Sellman.
“This is an opportunity to discover a less well-known part in the history of photography, where the artistic aspects of the medium were discussed fervently, and where there are many intriguing links to painting at the time,” says the exhibition’s curator, Anna Tellgren. “The exhibition highlights both famous and unknown photographers and artists who were practising around 1900, and reveals some fantastic visual treasures from our collection.”
Press release from Moderna Museet
Prince Eugen, Duke of Närke (Swedish, 1865-1947) Tidig vintermorgon (Early winter morning)
1906-1907
Oil on canvas
77cm (30.3 in) x 89cm (35 in)
Nationalmuseum (Stockholm)
Prince Eugen
After finishing high school, Prince Eugen studied art history at Uppsala University. Although supported by his parents, Prince Eugen did not make the decision to pursue a career in painting easily, not least because of his royal status. He was very open-minded and interested in the radical tendencies of the 1880s. The Duke became one of the era’s most prominent landscape painters. He was first trained in painting by Hans Gude and Wilhelm von Gegerfelt.
Between 1887 and 1889, he studied in Paris under Léon Bonnat, Alfred Philippe Roll, Henri Gervex and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Puvis de Chavannes’s classical simplicity had the greatest influence on Prince Eugen’s work. The Duke devoted himself entirely to landscape painting. He was mainly interested in the lake Mälaren, the countryside of Stockholm (such as Tyresö, where he spent his summers), Västergötland (most notably Örgården, another summer residence) and Skåne (especially Österlen).
Henry B. Goodwin (Swedish born Germany, 1878-1931) Bragevägen Stockholm’s loveliest street
1917 Reproduction photo: Prallan Allsten/Moderna Museet
About the exhibition In Lady Barclay’s Salon
The exhibition “In Lady Barclay’s Salon – Art and Photography around 1900” highlights the period from 1890 and up to the First World War. It was a golden age for the arts in Sweden. A number of noteworthy figures appear within the fields of literature, music, art and architecture. Among them are Verner von Heidenstam, Ellen Key, Selma Lagerlöf and August Strindberg.
Art patrons Prince Eugen and Ernest Thiel acquired large art collections, that can still be admired in their respective homes: Waldermarsudde and Thielska Galleriet on Djurgården. Both buildings were designed by the architect Ferdinand Boberg, who included Renaissance, oriental and late Jugend style elements.
The renowned artist Eva Bonnier was another important figure. Better communications in the form of railways and telephone networks contributed to the development of cities, and a growing, export-oriented industry in Sweden. The 1897 Art and Industry Exposition in Stockholm and, a few years later, the 1914 Baltic Exhibition in Malmö, were manifestations of this progressive outlook. Both included sections that showed art and photography.
It was a time of Scandinavianism, and many Nordic collaborations and groups were formed. The women’s movement gained momentum, and in 1919 women were finally given the right to vote. For the first time, after a long struggle, they were able to cast their vote in the 1921 lower house election – exactly one hundred years ago.
Pictorialism developed as a photographic movement
This exhibition offers a glimpse of visual culture from this period by means of some 300 works from the rich collections of Moderna Museet and National museum. While most of these are Swedish in origin, there are some international examples.
The works span a period from the late 19th century to 1930. During this period, Pictorialism developed as a distinct movement that took a different direction from amateur and professional photography. Technical advances, the arrival of roll film for example, made photography accessible to a wider circle of practitioners. The Pictorialists, however, were interested in the craft of photography.
The style was inspired by impressionism, symbolism and naturalism, and there was a heated debate on how to develop photography as an art form. The monochrome portrait paintings of the symbolist Eugène Carrière, for example, clearly influenced art photography around 1900.
The Pictorialists’ images are characterised by soft focus and a palette that ranges from brown, earthy tones to strong reds and blues. They worked with a variety of processes such as gum bichromate, platinum and bromoil printing with the purpose of creating or “painting” on light-sensitive paper.
This was the first international art photography movement to have a large number of prominent practitioners across Europe and the United States. Clubs were formed to promote this new art photography, among them were the Wiener Camera-Club, the Photo-Club de Paris and the Photo-Secession in New York, with famous members such as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. The works were judged in competitions and shown in galleries and museums and at international salons. The style thus spread to Belgium, Holland, Italy, Poland, Russia, Spain and the Nordic countries.
The artistic period
Sweden was on the periphery of this movement, but it found a following here too, with a number of talented photographers. This period is known as the “artistic period” (konstnärstiden), a term coined in an article by the keen Pictorialist Professor Helmer Bäckström. Bäckström was also an active member of Fotografiska Föreningen (the Photographic Association), a Swedish version of the clubs abroad. The association was established in 1888. Its purpose was to organise meetings and dinners where photography was discussed.
In the 1890s, the professional photographer Herman Hamnqvist was an important introducer of Pictorialism. He promoted artistic photography in his many articles and lectures. Other colourful representatives were Uno Falkengren, Ferdinand Flodin, John Hertzberg, Gösta Hübinette and Ture Sellman.
In Sweden, these new ideas were first picked up by the older generation. They were followed by a younger generation of photographers who introduced and disseminated Pictorialism. This second wave includes Henry B. Goodwin, a major figure in Sweden and the Nordic countries. Goodwin was renowned for his expressive, subdued portraits and his many Stockholm cityscapes.
He also kept up with what went on abroad; among his contacts was the well-known portrait photographer Nicola Persheid, who was active in Berlin for many years. Women photographers disappeared from the history of photography during this period. The networking that took place in clubs and associations seems to have excluded many women, even if they had their own successful studios.
Atmospheric style typical of the period
Around 1900, painters entered a new, exciting era. The older members of Konstnärsförbundet (the Artists’ Association), established in 1886, continued to dominate, but a new generation came to the fore around the turn of the century. The French artist Paul Gaugin and the Pont-Aven school were important influences among the Swedish artists.
Helmer Osslund was able to visit Gauguin’s studio, and he later put this experience to practice in his northern landscapes. Carl Wilhelmson was known for his many portraits with motifs from his native West Coast. He taught at the Valand art school in Gothenburg and had a major influence on many artists. Maja and Gustaf Fjæstad founded an artists’ colony by Lake Racken in Värmland where a style in line with current national romanticism tendencies developed. Several local circles or schools in a similar vein were formed across Sweden.
Other important artists at the time were Richard Bergh, Eugène Jansson, Nils Kreuger and Karl Nordström, who all represented and developed an atmospheric style typical of the period. New ideas were now rapidly disseminated via mass-produced pictures in books, volumes of prints and magazines. The artists did not always have to travel abroad in order to find inspiration. However, study trips to Paris, the current art hub, were still important, although Berlin, Munich, Dresden and Hamburg were taking over that role at the end of the 1800s. To Swedish artists, Copenhagen, with its international outlook and exhibitions, became a natural place to gather.
New ways of framing and cropping
Japanese art, especially colour woodcuts, which reached Europe via the impressionists were fashionable and encouraged painters and photographers to try new ways of cropping and framing their motifs. The ornamental details and undulating lines that are typical of the Jugend (Art Noveau) period also inspired many painters. Eccentrics such as Ivar Arosenius and Olof Sager-Nelson (see below) were renowned for their sensitive, almost fairy tale-like portraits.
The author August Strindberg (see above) experimented with both painting and photography, which has been studied closely in recent years. Around the turn of the last century, an intermediary generation were overshadowed by great national artists such as Bruno Liljefors, Carl Larsson and Anders Zorn. However, they became an important link to the emerging expressionism and other modernist movements that came to the fore in the first decades of the 20th century.
Lady Barclay’s Salon
In Lady Barclay’s Salon we have created a fictional encounter between photographers, painters, their friends and audiences. Sarita Barclay was married to a British diplomat, and the couple lived in Stockholm for a few years around 1921. During these years she attended several portrait sittings with Henry B. Goodwin. We can assume she visited exhibition openings, dinners and other society events.
Social circles do not seem to have mixed a great deal, but there is clear evidence of links between painting and photography. Portraits are a common motif, but the many landscapes, cityscapes, dancers and nudes also offer us information about and a glimpse of the past.
Text from the Moderna Museet website
Ferdinand Flodin (Swedish, 1863-1935) Greta Gustavsson Garbo
1923 Reproduction photo: Prallan Allsten/Moderna Museet
Greta Garbo
Greta Garbo (born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson 18 September 1905 – 15 April 1990) was a Swedish-American actress. She was known for her melancholic, somber persona due to her many portrayals of tragic characters in her films and for her subtle and understated performances. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Garbo fifth on its list of the greatest female stars of classic Hollywood cinema. She was nicknamed “The Divine” because of her whimsical attitude and her willingness to avoid the press. Garbo launched her career with a secondary role in the 1924 Swedish film The Saga of Gösta Berling.
James Bourn (Swedish, Gothenburg) No title
1905
Herrman Sylwander (Swedish, 1883-1948) Tora Teje in ‘Inom lagens gränser’ (Tora Teje in ‘Within the Limits of the Law’)
1914
Tora Teje (17 January 1893 – 30 April 1970) was a Swedish theatre and silent film actress. She appeared in ten films between 1920 and 1939.
Photographic Processes and Materials around 1900
In 1888, Kodak launched the first roll-film hand camera. It revolutionised the market and turned photography into something everyone could enjoy. The specially constructed cameras were sent back to the factory where the pictures were processed. In 1900, Kodak introduced the popular Brownie, a classic box camera.
Another aspect of the increased interest in and use of photographs was that mass produced pictures were now easy to publish in books, volumes of prints and magazines. One example is photogravure, but there were many other processes. The Pictorialists used various processing methods and materials, some of which were closer to printmaking and painting, and they avoided regular photographic materials. The craft of making photographs was important, which was in line with an interest in and revival of older techniques as industrialism gained momentum during the Jugend period.
Professional photographers engaged in portrait photography and took on other commissions for their customers. Among the most prominent Pictorialists, many had second jobs. The tension between, or the different preconditions for photographers who embraced a more artistic form of expression and those who were forced to earn a living from selling their photographs is relevant to this day. There were many conflicts between members of Fotografiska Föreningen (the Photographers’ Association) – which to begin with only accepted amateurs – and the industry association Svenska Fotografers Förbund (the Association of Professional Photographers). At the same time, there are many examples of contacts and collaborations between different types of photographers around the turn of the last century.
Terminology was often translated from German and English, and in older literature you often find processes described in Swedish as gummitryck (gum print), pigmenttryck (pigment print) or oljetryck (oil print). However, the process is not strictly “printing”; the images were developed on light-sensitive paper. Instead of using the most common type of photographic paper with light-sensitive coating of silver salts in gelatine or albumin, the Pictorialists worked with other light-sensitive solutions. The image was often contact printed under a negative, which resulted in a picture with the same dimensions as the negative. The Pictorialists’ images are characterised by soft focus and often a grainy, print-like texture in hues that go from earthy browns to strong reds and blues.
Carbon print
A pigment, potassium bichromate and gelatine emulsion on thin paper is subjected to natural light in contact with a negative. The image is formed with the help of pigment in the desired colour. After exposure, the image is transferred to a new paper. This is the original. The image stands out in clear relief and is reversed, which can be corrected by repeating the transfer process onto a new paper. The tone is often dark brown or black, but it varies depending on the type of pigment used. Factory-made paper by Bühler and Höchheimer were sensitised in alcohol. This process is called carbon print, especially when it features black pigment. It was in use between 1864 until the end of the 1930s.
John Hertzberg (Swedish, 1871-1935) No title
1903
Gum Bichromate Print
Gum Bichromate print
The gum bichromate process was invented in 1894. It is achieved by applying a solution of pigment, potassium bicharbonate and gum arabic to paper. The components are mixed in water and brushed on. When the coat has dried, it is light-sensitive, and the areas under the negative that are not exposed to light is stabilised. The rest is rinsed off in water. The colour range is very limited. The motif is often built up through multiple coats, erasures and applications of colour. The images are generally monochrome, reminiscent of charcoal or pastels. It is necessary to use a coarse-grained or uneven paper for the emulsion to adhere, which enhances the graphic qualities of the image. Custom-made paper for this method was marketed by Höchheimer, Bühler and Fresson.
Ture Sellman (Swedish, 1888-1969) Landskap (Landscape)
c. 1913
Pigment print mounted on board
27.5 × 21.4cm
Oil print
An emulsion consisting of potassium bichromate and gelatine is applied to paper and exposed to light. It results in an almost invisible gelatine image in relief. The gelatine absorbs and repels greasy pigments, which can be fixed by means of a rubber roller or brush. This method gives a grainy image that resembles art prints and drawings.
Olof Sager-Nelson (Swedish, 1868–1896) Flickhuvud II (A Girl’s Head II)
1902
Oil on canvas
41cm (16.1 in) x 33cm (12.9 in)
Nationalmuseum (Stockholm)
Ebba-Lisa Roberg (Swedish, 1904-1993) No title
1927
Bromoil print
Bromoil print
Colour pigments on a silver, potassium bichromate and gelatine emulsion on paper. A silver bromide image on paper is sensitised by means of potassium bichromate with an addition of copper sulphate and potassium bromide, then fixer is added. The image is soaked in water, and a gelatine relief is produced, which can be coloured multiple times by brushing or rolling on greasy ink. The tone is determined by the pigments in the ink. A variation is achieved when the wet, tinted gelatine relief is pressed against a paper and the ink is transferred. The image is reversed with a matt finish and pressure marks from the original print. This method was used between 1907 and the 1940s.
Uno Falkengren (Swedish, 1889-1964) Nöd. Arranged dance group with Anna Behle in the middle, Stockholm
1917
Sepia platinum type mounted on paper
23.7 x 24.2cm
Platinum print
A paper is given a coat of a potassium chloropatinate and iron oxalate. It is then exposed to daylight through a negative. The image is developed as potassium oxalate dissolves the iron salts and transform the platinum salts to metallic platinum embedded in the paper fibres. This process offers few opportunities for manual manipulation. Platinum prints are characterised by a smooth, neutral greyscale. Platinum was relatively inexpensive before the First World War, and prepared papers were readily available. Today, platinum is used in combination with palladium. The method was used as far back as in 1873.
Photogravure
Colour pigment on paper. A paper base coated in potassium bichromates in gelatine are exposed to UV light in contact with a transparent positive. The gelatine coating is thereby stabilised and is then transferred face down to a copper plate. When ink is applied to the plate, it adheres to the etched areas after which the image is printed on paper in a printing press. Photogravures have a clearly defined depression from the edges of the plate, and each print is an original. Shadows are similar to charcoal pigment and highlights match the colour of the paper. This method is classified as a photomechanical print and is not in fact a true photograph. It has been used since the 1880s.
Nils Kreuger (Swedish, 1838-1930) Vårafton (Spring evening)
1896
Oil on mahogany panel
48.5cm (19 inches) x 60.1cm (23.6 inches)
Nationalmuseum (Stockholm)
Nils Edvard Kreuger
Nils Edvard Kreuger (11 October 1858 – 11 May 1930) was a Swedish painter. He specialised in landscapes and rural scenes.
In 1874, he began his studies at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, but was forced to discontinue them due to illness. In 1878, he was able to resume studying at the private painting school of Edvard Perséus. He then went to Paris, in 1881, and studied with Jean-Paul Laurens at the Académie Colarossi. Much of his time was spent painting en plein air in Grez-sur-Loing. As his style progressed, he showed a preference for painting at dawn or dusk, in haze or rain. His first exhibition at the Salon came in 1882.
After 1885, he was a supporter of the “Opponenterna [sv]”, a group that was opposed to the outmoded teaching methods at the Royal Academy. He was also active in creating the Konstnärsförbundet [sv] (Artists’ Union). At this time, he abandoned painting en plein air in favour of Romantic nationalism. In 1886, he married Bertha Elisabeth von Essen (1857-1932), the daughter of an army officer, and settled in Bourg-la-Reine.
In 1887, he returned to Sweden, looking for a quiet place to paint, and chose Varberg, where he worked with Richard Bergh and Karl Nordstrom to establish what came to be known as the Varbergsskolan [sv]; a term coined by Prince Eugen, himself an amateur artist. It was a reaction to the prevailing realistic style of landscape painting and may have been inspired by Bergh’s attraction to the works of Paul Gauguin. He was also influenced by Van Gogh, whose paintings were exhibited in Copenhagen in 1893.
In 1896, he moved to Stockholm, but visited Öland in the summers, where he painted cows and horses. After 1900, his palette lightened and he began adding dots to his work. He also did illustrations, designed furniture and produced some humorous paintings called the “historiska baksidor” (historic backs), showing famous rulers from behind. Between 1904 and 1905, he executed some large wall paintings at the Engelbrektsskolan [sv]. In his final years, he had problems with his eyesight, but was able to continue painting.
The most common form of black and white photography in the 20th century. A photo paper with a coating of light-sensitive silver halogens in gelatine are exposed and developed. There are many varieties of this process with different texture and glossiness, dynamic range and contrast. The result depends on the types of paper, developer and additive tones that are used.
Bibliography
Håkan Petersson, “Photographic materials”, Another Story. Photography from the Moderna Museet Collection, ed. Anna Tellgren, Stockholm: Moderna Museet and Göttingen: Steidl, 2011, pp. lxi-lxiii.
Pär Rittsel and Rolf Söderberg, “Konstnärstidens metoder”, Den svenska fotografins historia 1840–1940, Stockholm: Bonnier Fakta Bokförlag AB, 1983, p. 240-241.
Lena Johannesson, Den massproducerade bilden. Ur bildindustrialismens historia, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell Förlag AB, 1978.
Impressionist Camera. Pictorial Photography in Europe, 1889-1918, ed. Philip Prodger, London/New York: Merrell Publishers Limited, 2006, pp. 322-324.
Text from the Moderna Museet website
Henry B. Goodwin (Swedish born Germany, 1878-1931) Carin
1920 Reproduction photo: Prallan Allsten/Moderna Museet
Henry B. Goodwin (Swedish born Germany, 1878-1931)
Henry B. Goodwin, born in Munich as Henry Buergel, was the most successful representative of Pictorialism. He arrived in Sweden in 1905 in order to teach German at Uppsala University. Some ten years later, in 1914, he moved to Stockholm where he opened a studio, Kamerabilder, which was popular with painters and artists.
His many superb portraits were achieved with small means: the subject is captured against a dark, neutral backdrop. His soft, smoky Stockholm cityscapes have been collected in a series of special editions, and Goodwin’s keen interest in gardening was expressed through meticulously arranged close-ups of plants.
Goodwin enjoyed a large, international network and launched the term bildmässig (pictorial) photography as an alternative to artistic photography. It was a term that came to be used frequently in the photographic debate.
Text from the Moderna Museet website
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) The Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty
1866
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879)
A small pioneering group of photographers in Victorian England were the first to experiment with, and who attempted to formulate, an aesthetic around artistic photography. Julia Margaret Cameron was part of this group. She left behind a wonderful collection of intimate portraits of members of her family and large circle of friends. She was an amateur, predominantly active during the 1860s and 1870s.
Cameron specialised in expressive soft-focus photographs of staged motifs borrowed from mythology, the Bible or English literature, as in her rendering of Alfred Tennyson’s famous poem “Maud” from 1855.
Cameron’s photographs evoke the Pre-Raphaelites with their penchant for the Middle Ages and Renaissance painting. She was a precursor of the photographers that a few decades later formed part of the pictorial movement.
Text from the Moderna Museet website
Helmer Bäckström (Swedish, 1891-1964) Segel till tork (Drying sails)
1923
Helmer Bäckström (Swedish, 1891-1964)
Helmer Bäckström was an important member of Fotografiska Föreningen (the Photographic Association). The association, which was formed in 1888, organised meetings where photography was discussed. A library of books on photography was accumulated, but most important were the photo competitions. Bäckström was a researcher, collector, historian and photographer. In 1948, he was appointed professor of photography at the Royal Institute of Technology. Throughout his career, he wrote about early photography and technical innovations in a series of articles entitled “Samlingar till kamerans och fotografins svenska historia” (Collections of the Swedish History of Cameras and Photography). They were published in the association’s journal, “Nordisk Tidskrift för Fotografi”.
Bäckström was also a Pictorialist; studies of flora and fauna were his favourite motifs. His large collection of photographs was acquired by the Swedish state in 1965. It has been part of the Moderna Museet collection since 1971.
Text from the Moderna Museet website
Anna Boberg (Swedish, 1864-1935) Stilla afton. Studie från Nordlandet (A Quiet Evening. Study from North Norway) Nd
40.5 x 70.5cm
Nationalmuseum (Stockholm)
Anna Boberg (Swedish, 1864-1935)
Anna Scholander’s family was part of the Stockholm elite. She was well educated and moved with ease in the salons of Paris and other cities. In Paris she met Ferdinand Boberg, who was to become one of Sweden’s leading architects. They were married in 1888. The couple dedicated their lives to work and travel.
Anna Boberg was highly versatile. She designed textiles, glass and Jugend pottery – one example is the elegant peacock vase from around 1897 for Rörstrand. In 1901, she made a life-changing trip to northern Norway where she fell in love with the rocky landscape around Lofoten, which seemed to rise out of the sea. It woke in her an irresistible urge to paint.
Anna Boberg returned to this location over a period of thirty years. Contrary to her life as a society lady, she embarked on strenuous expeditions on foot and by sea, and she made oil sketches of what she saw which she later used as inspiration in her studio.
Text from the Moderna Museet website
Ferdinand Flodin (Swedish, 1863-1935) Portrait of a young lady
1922
Ferdinand Flodin (Swedish, 1863-1935)
One of the foremost portrait photographers of the period was Ferdinand Flodin. During his long career he tried all the different processes that were typical of Pictorialism, and he became a highly skilled photographer. As a young man, he travelled to the United States, and for a number of years he worked in Worcester near Boston. After his return in 1889, he opened a studio in Stockholm where he received celebrities associated with the theatre, art, politics and science.
Besides portraits, his large body of work includes a number of beautiful cityscapes in different colour tones. Flodin continued to travel; he was interested in the international scene and he knew a great deal about early photography. He went on to build a collection of historical photographs, later acquired by Helmer Bäckström. Flodin was active in Svenska Fotografers Förbund (the Swedish Association of Professional Photographers) for many years, and he regularly wrote about technical and financial matters in the association’s journal.
Text from the Moderna Museet website
Gösta Hübinette (Swedish, 1897-1980) Japanskt
c. 1925
Gösta Hübinette (Swedish, 1897-1980)
With their more independent position and experimental approach, amateur photographers were fundamental to the development of the pictorial movement in Sweden and internationally. Gösta Hübinette was interested in art from an early age, but on his family’s advice he studied business administration, and he worked at the carpet business, Myrstedts Matthörna, until he retired. He practiced several disciplines, including painting, but he was most successful as a photographer. Hübinette was part of the circle around Henry B. Goodwin, and in the 1920s he often took part in exhibitions and the important photo competitions.
Hübinette’s photographs are testament to his proficiency in painting, drawing and printmaking. With delicate works such as “Japanskt” (c. 1925) he is also one of the Swedish photographers for whom Japanese woodcuts served as inspiration.
Text from the Moderna Museet website
Ture Sellman (Swedish, 1888-1969) No title
c. 1915
Ture Sellman (Swedish, 1888-1969)
As an architect, Ture Sellman had his own approach to photography. He was well acquainted with the compositional and technical aspects and was therefore an important figure who also gave lectures. He later became an astute critic. Sellman was among the most vociferous advocates of photography as an artistic medium. His early Bromoil prints are some of the most graphic examples of Swedish Pictorialism.
After having experimented with different artisan processes, Sellman did a complete U-turn in 1920 and became a supporter of the straight photography expression, but his interest in tonality and composition are still visible in his soft-focus photographs from the 1920s.
Sellman designed some seventy buildings, and many of his photographs are testament to his eye for architecture.
Text from the Moderna Museet website
Nicola Perscheid (German, 1864-1930) No title
c. 1920
Nicola Perscheid (German, 1864-1930)
Nicola Perscheid was one of the international figures that came to have a major influence on Pictorialism in Sweden. In the autumn of 1913, he arrived in Stockholm in order to conduct what we would today call a workshop. It was enormously popular. His fame had reached Sweden partly via his former pupil, Henry B. Goodwin.
Perscheid was against retouching, which meant he spend a great deal of time on preparations. Among his portraits are many full-length and half-length photographs of distinguished men and nameless women. Especially his expansive, pared down photographs of women with their soft lines and ornamental jewellery and flowers evoke the pictorial language of symbolism, but also older painting practices.
The Perscheid lens was launched in 1920. This soft-focus lens became especially popular in Europe and Japan.
Text from the Moderna Museet website
Uno Falkengren (Swedish, 1889-1964) Nöd. Arranged dance group with Anna Behle in the middle, Stockholm
1917
Sepia platinum type mounted on paper
23.7 x 24.2cm
Uno Falkengren (Swedish, 1889-1964)
Uno Falkengren belonged to the inner circle around Henry B. Goodwin. Goodwin was also instrumental in allowing Falkengren to study under the distinguished German photographer Nicola Perscheid in Berlin. It was a formative period during which Falkengren developed a minimalistic, elegant style. Among his works are a number of interesting portraits of famous dancers in expressive scenes and groups.
In 1916, he was appointed head of the Nordiska Kompaniet studio. He then worked at his own studio for a few years until he moved to Berlin in 1924. Only a year later, he returned to Stockholm and gave up photography completely. On account of his homosexuality, Falkengren lived an itinerant, partly secret, life. There are elements of queer culture within Pictorialism, as practitioners were often attracted to alternative settings or artists’ communities.
Text from the Moderna Museet website
Anna Behle (Swedish, 1876-1966)
Anna Charlotta Behle (Stockholm, August 9, 1876 – Gothenburg, October 2, 1966) was a Swedish dancer and dance teacher. Considered a pioneer of modern dance in Sweden, she first became interested in the art after watching Isadora Duncan perform. She was born to unwed parents, and was adopted, along with her brother August, by the Granbäck family, who ensured that she had a full education. After initial studies in singing with Eugène Crosti and Emile Wartel in Paris, she studied dance with Duncan and with Emile Jacques-Dalcroze; later she would open her own school in Stockholm.
John Hertzberg (Swedish, 1871-1935) No title
1903
Gum Bichromate Print
John Hertzberg (1871-1935)
John Hertzberg was a technically accomplished photographer. He developed colour photography in Sweden. He was educated in Vienna and was later offered to teach at the Royal Institute of Technology where he was later senior lecturer in photography. He was thereby a key figure in photographic circles.
When Nils Strindberg’s rolls of film were discovered on Kvitøya in the Svalbard archipelago thirty years after S. A. Andrée’s failed balloon Arctic Expedition in 1897, Hertzberg was given the prestigious task of developing the exposed films. He was also editor of the journal “Nordisk Tidskrift för Fotografi” for many years and chairman of Fotografiska Föreningen.
He experimented with different techniques and groups of motifs in a style typical of the time. These include pictures of Stockholm from the water as well as compositions of clouds and shadows.
Text from the Moderna Museet website
Eugène Jansson (Swedish, 1862-1915) Hornsgatan nattetid (Hornsgatan at night)
1902
Oil on canvas
152cm (59.8 in) x 182cm (71.6 in)
National Museum (Stockholm)
Eugène Jansson (Swedish, 1862-1915)
Eugène Jansson became a member of the Konstnärsförbundet association of artists in 1886. Inspired by periods spent in France, they painted plein air, impressionist landscapes. Jansson was influenced by these movements from early on. However, he soon progressed to depicting moods rather than the concrete objects he observed.
Many know him from his blue, early evening panoramas of south Stockholm, where he moved in the mid-1890s. In “Hornsgatan nattetid” (1902), everything seems to merge into a blue vision where houses, gas lights and sky form a synthesis.
When Eugène Jansson embarked on a new phase a few years into the 20th century, his motifs were athletic, sun-lit, bathing men. Many found these paintings offensive. Eugène Jansson was a homosexual man at a time when sexual activity between men was against the law.
Text from the Moderna Museet website
Gustaf Fjæstad (Swedish, 1868-1948) Vinterafton vid en älv (Winter evening by a river)
1907
Oil on canvas
150cm (59 in) x 185cm (72.8 in)
Nationalmuseum (Stockholm)
Gustaf Fjæstad (Swedish, 1868-1948)
After having attended art school in Stockholm, Gustaf Fjæstad settled by Lake Racken in Värmland where he founded an artists’ colony. The collective had no common programme, but they supported each other and exhibited their work together. There was also an idea of not distinguishing art from craft.
Fjæstad was not only a painter, he also designed furniture and textiles. “Vinterafton vid en älv” (Winter Evening at the River Bank, 1907) is testament to Fjæstad’s interest in Japanese woodcuts. The painting communicates a strong sense of nature and existential intensity. The surface is accentuated by fields of colour and a Jugend-inspired linear pattern. The motif is a seemingly random section of the river. The trees are cropped at the top of the canvas but touch the water where the eddies evoke the growth rings of the wood.
Text from the Moderna Museet website
Henry B. Goodwin (Swedish born Germany, 1878-1931) Lady Barclay
1921
Lady Sarita Enriqueta Barclay (British, 1891-1985)
The portraits that Henry B. Goodwin took of Lady Barclay between 1920 and 1922 show a fashion-conscious society woman. Sarita Barclay moved to Stockholm just after the end of the First World War with her husband, Sir Colville Barclay, and their three children. Her husband was Minister to Sweden, a high-ranking British diplomat.
During the five years that Lady Barclay lived in Stockholm she hosted various events, including a dinner in conjunction with an exhibition of French art at the Liljevalchs art gallery at the initiative of Prince Eugen in 1923. Sarita was the daughter of the British sculptor Herbert Ward.
After the death of her first husband, she married Robert Vansittart, a diplomat who spoke out against Nazism before and during the Second World War.
Text from the Moderna Museet website
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Moderna Museet is ten minutes away from Kungsträdgården, and twenty minutes from T-Centralen or Gamla Stan. Walk past Grand Hotel and Nationalmuseum on Blasieholmen, opposite the Royal Palace. After crossing the bridge to Skeppsholmen, continue up the hill. The entrance to Moderna Museet and Arkitekturmuseet is on the left-hand side.
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
It’s taken me more than a moment of reflection to write this text. The events are almost too close to write about my surrogate mother in Australia, my friend and fellow artist, Joycie. I can only write about the person I knew, not the time before I knew her – and so this will be a very personal reflection on one of the most incredible human beings that I have ever met.
Do not go gentle into that good night
Rage, rage, against the dying of the light
Vale Joyce Evans.
Human, female, lover, mother, grandmother, wife, poet, publisher, writer, romantic, creative, humanist, universalist, spiritualist, bohemian, pioneer, gallery director, teacher, lecturer, collector, philanthropist, activist, artist, feminist, supporter of artists, Indigenous rights, civil rights, and the disenfranchised, exhibitor… and working photographer.
.
I met the force of nature that was Joyce Olga Evans (1929-2019) through a mutual friend, Alison Inglis, who knew of our love of photography. It was the start of an intense friendship that lasted just seven or eight years until Joycie, as I used to call her, passed away at Easter this year. Before she passed she knew that she had been awarded an OAM (Medal of the Order of Australia) for service to photography. This was a long overdue tribute to a pioneer and supporter of photography in Australia, one of the first women to be the director of an independent, commercial photography gallery in this country.
Joyce had an incredible passion for and knowledge about photography, whether it was historical Australian or world photographers and their prints from any era, or contemporary artists here and overseas. Her collection of both local and international photographs was almost unparalleled in private hands in this country. She had such a keen eye. When attending a local auction with her she purchased an original William Mortensen for next to nothing. Nobody else had recognised the power and presence of the image by this master artist.
This incisive vision translated into her work as an artist who was a working photographer. At heart, that’s what Joyce was – a working photographer and a storyteller. She believed in photography like photographers get photography… not like an academic or a theoretician, but like an avid fan, an enthusiast, a passionate collector, a teacher. Photography was an integral part of her life, her soul.
She said to me of being an artist, “If we can find out what we are… that is the artist. The core element of your being, and the core element of your enquiry as an artist remains the same. The concerns that you had when you started being an artist are with you until the end. If the core part of your life is the search for truth then that becomes a core part of your identity. It becomes embedded in your soul.”
In this sense, photography becomes something of you, more than just intention – it becomes your essence, your shape…. your physical shape, a tangible thing.
Photography and its spirit inhabited Joyce as Joyce lived in the world. To Joyce, photography was just as much about the world and creativity as it was about the image. The image was just a manifestation of spirit, something that you worked at, recognised, and captured for what it was and could be. As Minor White said, “There is always a dragon in the negative,” and a dragon, that symbol of power, strength, and good luck, lived inside Joyce (see my favourite photograph of her below) and in her work. Her photographs possessed a spiritual and psychological sensation of the place.
As she said, “Making photographs that are memorable requires more than just camera, light and a story. It requires a type of harmony, unity, and an indefinable something, which I can best explain as becoming emotionally attached to the subject so that the images almost make themselves.”
Joyce’s commitment to photography was legendary. She was in it for the long haul.
I was always amazed when we were out in public, going to the exhibitions that we loved to visit, that she would always be taking photographs. Whenever she saw something that interested her out would come her beloved iPhone or digital camera, and she would talk to strangers and their children and take their photos. She was a totally open spirit and had no fear about the path she took. People embraced her, talked to her, responded to her energy and spirit. I remember travelling up to Sydney with her to see an exhibition of her favourite photographer, “Our Julia”, Julia Margaret Cameron at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and just observing that sparkle in her eyes, that unparalleled love that transcends all our pasts and futures in the simple moment of being and looking at these photographs.
Joyce was uncompromising. If she thought you were being a fuckwit she told you so in no uncertain terms. But she was a rock on which I came to depend. As someone said of her, “Joyce wasn’t into niceties and didn’t take any shit from anyone! I hope I grow up to be as tough as her. She was a visionary.” She really did not stand fools gladly (thank god), and had little truck for fine art photographers who didn’t understand the medium, its history or their small place within the grand scheme of things. As the playwright Edward Albee commented at the American painter Lee Krasner’s memorial at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in both her life and her work, ‘… she looked you straight in the eye, and you dared not flinch’. It was the same with Joycie. She could see deep inside you to the core of your being.
Joyce loved helping people. She was so generous of her time and energy, of her wisdom and knowledge. Some of the best times of my life were spent in her kitchen talking about art, love and life. People were drawn to her. As Julie Moss has observed, she was “such a strong, creative and vibrant role model for so many female photographers” in a sea of male prejudice and ambivalence. What Joyce did not do is live on her memories… she was ever active, ever inquiring. She stood up for what she believed. A couple of weeks before she passed she said to me, “I don’t want to go yet, I still have so much that I want to do.” She was still raging against the dying of the light, not going gently into that good night.
But what she achieved in her truly remarkable life is a testament to her unquenchable spirit. In a journey full of determination, intelligence, exploration and love she achieved so much and touched so many. I miss her terribly.
I am the (sublime) space where I am, that surrounds me with countless presences.
This photograph, showing students smoking and drinking outside the pub at Largs Bay, was published in an Adelaide newspaper. At the time this was considered to be immoral behaviour. Note the man in the background with his fingers up in a derogatory manner.
The names of the three women who have been identified are from left to right: Joyce Evans (nee Zerfas) photographer, Jill Warwick, deceased, (producer of TV programme “It Could Be You”) Val Groves, psychologist. I have been unable to identify the men. ~ Joyce Evans
“Making photographs that are memorable requires more than just camera, light and a story. It requires a type of harmony, unity, and an indefinable something, which I can best explain as becoming emotionally attached to the subject so that the images almost make themselves.”
Joyce Evans
“Photography for me is a type of communion with my subject. Like everybody else I take photographs which have little meaning. But sometimes I sense an underlying value in the land, a group of people, a location, and then I make photograph, which is satisfying to myself. I think I would like to call that the way in which the quintessential spirit of what I am seeing has stirred me to need to make a photograph of it.
To me, I am alive, and my life and the life of everything in the world is connected. For me it is that universality that is the basis of my idea of the spiritual. I feel uncomfortable about formal organised religion and am perhaps more than a humanist, a universalist.”
Joyce Evans
“Aesthetically, I enjoy the camera’s capacity to record relationships and detail, which my subconscious may perceive, but I may not fully see.
My appreciation of aesthetics goes back to when I studied painting with John Olsen at the Bakery Art School, Sydney in 1967-1968. Olsen made me aware of the power of the edge of the image to relate to what was not shown in the image. My formal education was further enhanced when I did a degree in fine arts at Sydney University 1969-1971. There, Dr Anton Wilhelm taught me how to read an image. My understanding of the limits and potentials of two-dimensional imagery was expounded by Professor Bernard Smith.
Informally, my knowledge of photography and my practice was refined through formative conversations with a wide range of great photographers such as Andre Kertesz, Max Dupain, Ansel Adams and Bill Henson, Julie Millowick and Linda Connor.
Each of these relationships helped me to clarify my photographic position, which is based on a search for the essence of a subject.”
Joyce Evans
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Rain Dreaming, Yuendumu, NT
2005
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Rain Dreaming, Yuendumu, NT
2005
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Rain Dreaming, Yuendumu, NT
2005
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Rain Dreaming, Yuendumu, NT
2005
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Rain Dreaming, Yuendumu, NT
2005
Joyce Evans short biography
Joyce Olga Evans is well known in Australian photography. In 1976 Joyce opened Church Street Photographic Centre, a pioneer Australian commercial gallery devoted to Photography. It showcased the best of Australian and International photographers. Joyce exhibited works by Frank Hurley, Imogen Cunningham, Bill Henson, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Julia Margret Cameron, Max Dupain and many other renowned photographers – she says that they were her teachers.
Passionately dedicated to photography, she has had many solo exhibitions of both her landscapes (she photographed in the Dandenongs and Mt Martha regions in the outer Melbourne; along the Hume Highway; in the Central Desert and outback Australia, most notably Oodnadatta, Oodlawirra, Menindee, and Lake Mungo; vineyards and rural villages in the South of France; the old Jewish cemetery in the centre of Prague; and numerous others) and her portraits (she photographed Australian intelligentsia and personalities, including Marianne Baillieu; Barbara Blackman; Baron Avid von Blumenthal; Tim Burstall; Dur-e Dara; Robert Dessaix; Germaine Greer; Elena Kats-Chernin; Joan Kerr; Ellen Koshland; David Malouf; Dame Elisabeth Murdoch; Lin Onus; Jill Reichstein; Chris Wallace-Crabbe; and innumerable others) throughout Australia and Europe.
Joyce has spent two decades documenting Australia for the National Library of Australia, who are acquiring her life’s work for their permanent collection. When this acquisition is complete the Library will hold over 30,000 analogue images and 80,000 digital files. Also included are diaries and other relevant documents and files. Much of this work is destined for display on Trove, the library’s online viewing resource. She has exhibited extensively in Australia and in France and her photographs are held in many major collections. Joyce has been published widely. Her monograph Only One Kilometre was published in 2003 by Lothian Press. It detailed her many years of studying the unique qualities of the Balcombe Estuary Reserve, at Mount Martha as well as poems and articles by distinguished writers. Her work is held in many collections both locally and internationally.
Joyce Evans also plays an important educational role in Australian photography. She taught history of photography at Melbourne’s RMIT University; appointed inaugural assistant director of Waverley City Gallery (now Monash Gallery of Art), 1990-1991, the first municipal public collection in Melbourne to specialise in photography; established and inaugurated a course on the History of Photography and appointed Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, 1997-2010.
Evans worked as an honorary photographer for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Central Australia and for over ten years documented Australian country towns and events for the National Library of Australia. Important publications on Joyce Evans include a monograph Only One Kilometre (Melbourne: Lothian Press, 2003), and exhibition catalogues with essays by Alison Inglis, Eugene Barilo von Reisberg, Tim Page, Victoria Hammond, and many others.
Anonymous text from the Joyce Evans Photographer website Nd [Online] Cited 16th June 2019. No longer available online
William Yang (Australian, b. 1943) Marcus and Joyce
2018
Being two photographers, the only photograph of Joyce and Marcus together, taken by another photographer William Yang.
Michael Silver (Australian) Joyce Evans
2013
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Joyce Evans standing in front of Max Dupain’s ‘Sunbaker’ 1937 2018
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Joyce and the dragon
2016
Joyce standing in front of the fireplace at Jacques Reymond’s restaurant for the birthday of her friend Marcus Bunyan. In Chinese mythology the dragon traditionally symbolises potent and auspicious powers and also is a symbol of power, strength, and good luck for people who are worthy of it.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) Beatrice
1866
Albumen silver print
Erich Salomon (German, 1886-1944) (Portrait of Madame Vacarescu, Romanian Author and Deputy to the League of Nations, Geneva)
1928
Gelatin silver print
29.7 × 39.7cm (11 11/16 × 15 5/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
In 1928, pioneering photojournalist, Erich Salomon photographed global leaders and delegates to a conference at the League for the German picture magazine Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. In a typically frank image, Salomon has shown Vacarescu with her head thrown back passionately pleading before the international assembly.
Elena Văcărescu or Hélène Vacaresco (September 21, 1864 in Bucharest – February 17, 1947 in Paris) was a Romanian-French aristocrat writer, twice a laureate of the Académie française. Văcărescu was the Substitute Delegate to the League of Nations from 1922 to 1924. She was a permanent delegate from 1925 to 1926. She was again a Substitute Delegate to the League of Nations from 1926 to 1938. She was the only woman to serve with the rank of ambassador (permanent delegate) in the history of the League of Nations.
For such an engaging subject, this presentation looks to be a bit of a lucky dip / ho hum / filler exhibition. You can’t make a definitive judgement from a few media images but looking at the exhibition checklist gives you a good idea of the overall organisation of the exhibition and its content. Even the press release seems unsure of itself, littered as it is with words like posits, probes, perhaps (3 times) and problematic.
Elements such as physiognomy are briefly mentioned (with no mention of its link to eugenics), as is the idea of the mask – but again no mention of how the pose is an affective mask, nor how the mask is linked to the carnivalesque. Or how photographs portray us as we would like to be seen (the ideal self) rather than the real self, and how this incongruence forms part of the formation of our identity as human beings.
The investigation could have been so deep in so many areas (for example the representation of women, children and others in a patriarchal social system through facial expression; the self-portrait as an expression of inner being; the photograph as evidence of the mirror stage of identity formation; and the photographs of “hysterical” women of the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris; and on and on…) but in 45 works, I think not. The subject deserved, even cried out for (as facial expressions go), a fuller, more in depth investigation.
For more reading please see my 2014 text Facile, Facies, Facticity which comments on the state of contemporary portrait photography and offers a possible way forward: a description of the states of the body and the air of the face through a subtle and constant art of the recovering of surfaces.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
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.
The human face has been the subject of fascination for photographers since the medium’s inception. This exhibition includes posed portraits, physiognomic studies, anonymous snapshots, and unsuspecting countenances caught by the camera’s eye, offering a close-up look at the range of human stories that facial expressions – and photographs – can tell.
Emmett Leo Kelly (December 9, 1898 – March 28, 1979) was an American circus performer, who created the memorable clown figure “Weary Willie”, based on the hobos of the Depression era.
Kelly began his career as a trapeze artist. By 1923, Emmett Kelly was working his trapeze act with John Robinson’s circus when he met and married Eva Moore, another circus trapeze artist. They later performed together as the “Aerial Kellys” with Emmett still performing occasionally as a whiteface clown.
He started working as a clown full-time in 1931, and it was only after years of attempting to persuade the management that he was able to switch from a white face clown to the hobo clown that he had sketched ten years earlier while working as a cartoonist.
“Weary Willie” was a tragic figure: a clown, who could usually be seen sweeping up the circus rings after the other performers. He tried but failed to sweep up the pool of light of a spotlight. His routine was revolutionary at the time: traditionally, clowns wore white face and performed slapstick stunts intended to make people laugh. Kelly did perform stunts too – one of his most famous acts was trying to crack a peanut with a sledgehammer – but as a tramp, he also appealed to the sympathy of his audience.
From 1942-1956 Kelly performed with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, where he was a major attraction, though he took the 1956 season off to perform as the mascot for the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team. He also landed a number of Broadway and film roles, including appearing as himself in his “Willie” persona in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). He also appeared in the Bertram Mills Circus.
Hill & Adamson (David Octavius Hill, Scottish 1802-1870 and Robert Adamson, Scottish 1821-1848) (Scottish, active 1843-1848) Mrs Grace Ramsay and four unknown women
1843
Salter paper print from Calotype negative
15.2 x 20.3cm (6 x 8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Lewis W. Hine (American, 1874-1940) Connecticut Newsgirls
c. 1912-1913
Gelatin silver print
11.8 × 16.8cm (4 11/16 × 6 5/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Nadar (Gaspard Félix Tournachon) (French, 1820-1910) (Mme Ernestine Nadar)
1880-1883
Albumen silver print Image (irregular): 8.7 × 21cm (3 7/16 × 8 1/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Nadar (Gaspard Félix Tournachon) (French, 1820-1910)
(Mme Ernestine Nadar) (detail)
1880-1883
Albumen silver print Image (irregular): 8.7 × 21cm (3 7/16 × 8 1/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) Ophelia
Negative 1875; print, 1900
Carbon print
35.2 x 27.6cm (13 7/8 x 19 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Unknown maker (German) Close-up of Open Mouth of Male Student
c. 1927
Gelatin silver print
5.7 x 8.4cm (2 1/4 x 3 5/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
From Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, to Edvard Munch’s The Scream, to Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, the human face has been a crucial, if often enigmatic, element of portraiture. Featuring 45 works drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection, In Focus: Expressions, on view May 22 to October 7, 2018 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, addresses the enduring fascination with the human face and the range of countenances that photographers have captured from the birth of the medium to the present day.
The exhibition begins with the most universal and ubiquitous expression: the smile. Although today it is taken for granted that we should smile when posing for the camera, smiling was not the standard photographic expression until the 1880s with the availability of faster film and hand-held cameras. Smiling subjects began to appear more frequently as the advertising industry also reinforced the image of happy customers to an ever-widening audience who would purchase the products of a growing industrial economy. The smile became “the face of the brand,” gracing magazines, billboards, and today, digital and social platforms.
As is evident in the exhibition, the smile comes in all variations – the genuine, the smirk, the polite, the ironic – expressing a full spectrum of emotions that include benevolence, sarcasm, joy, malice, and sometimes even an intersection of two or more of these. In Milton Rogovin’s (American, 1909-2011) Storefront Churches, Buffalo (1958-1961), the expression of the preacher does not immediately register as a smile because the camera has captured a moment where his features – the opened mouth, exposed teeth, and raised face – could represent a number of activities: he could be in the middle of a song, preaching, or immersed in prayer. His corporeal gestures convey the message of his spirit, imbuing the black-and-white photograph with emotional colour. Like the other works included in this exhibition, this image posits the notion that facial expressions can elicit a myriad of sentiments and denote a range of inner emotions that transcend the capacity of words.
In Focus: Expressions also probes the role of the camera in capturing un-posed moments and expressions that would otherwise go unnoticed. In Alec Soth’s (American, born 1969) Mary, Milwaukee, WI (2014), a fleeting expression of laughter is materialised in such a way – head leaning back, mouth open – that could perhaps be misconstrued as a scream. The photograph provides a frank moment, one that confronts the viewer with its candidness and calls to mind today’s proliferation and brevity of memes, a contemporary, Internet-sustained visual phenomena in which images are deliberately parodied and altered at the same rate as they are spread.
Perhaps equally radical as the introduction of candid photography is the problematic association of photography with facial expression and its adoption of physiognomy, a concept that was introduced in the 19th century. Physiognomy, the study of the link between the face and human psyche, resulted in the belief that different types of people could be classified by their visage. The exhibition includes some of the earliest uses of photography to record facial expression, as in Duchenne de Boulogne’s (French, 1806-1875) Figure 44: The Muscle of Sadness (negative, 1850s). This also resonates in the 20th-century photographs by Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) of Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County Alabama (negative 1936) in that the subject’s expression could be deemed as suggestive of the current state of her mind. In this frame (in others she is viewed as smiling) she stares intently at the camera slightly biting her lip, perhaps alluding to uncertainty of what is to come for her and her family.
The subject of facial expression is also resonant with current developments in facial recognition technology. Nancy Burson (American, born 1948) created works such as Androgyny (6 Men + 6 Women) (1982), in which portraits of six men and six women were morphed together to convey the work’s title. Experimental and illustrative of the medium’s technological advancement, Burson’s photograph is pertinent to several features of today’s social media platforms, including the example in which a phone’s front camera scans a user’s face and facial filters are applied upon detection. Today, mobile phones and social media applications even support portrait mode options, offering an apprehension of the human face and highlighting its countenances with exceptional quality.
In addition to photography’s engagement with human expression, In Focus: Expressions examines the literal and figurative concept of the mask. Contrary to a candid photograph, the mask is the face we choose to present to the world. Weegee’s (Arthur Fellig’s) (American, born Austria, 1899-1968) Emmett Kelly, Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus (about 1950) demonstrates this concept, projecting the character of a sad clown in place of his real identity as Emmett Kelly.
The mask also suggests guises, obscurity, and the freedom to pick and create a separate identity. W. Canfield Ave., Detroit (1982) by Nicholas Nixon (American, born 1947) demonstrates this redirection. Aware that he is being photographed, the subject seizes the opportunity to create a hardened expression that conveys him as distant, challenging, and fortified, highlighted by the opposing sentiments of the men who flank him. In return, the audience could be led to believe that this devised pose is a façade behind which a concealed and genuine identity exists.
Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum
Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne (French, 1806-1875) Figure 44, The Muscle of Sadness
Negative 1854-1856; print 1876
From the book Mecanisme de la Physionomie Humaine ou Analyse Electro-Physiologique de l’Expression des Passions
Albumen silver print
11 x 9cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Duchenne de Boulogne (French, 1806-1875)
Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne (de Boulogne) (September 17, 1806 in Boulogne-sur-Mer – September 15, 1875 in Paris) was a French neurologist who revived Galvani’s research and greatly advanced the science of electrophysiology. The era of modern neurology developed from Duchenne’s understanding of neural pathways and his diagnostic innovations including deep tissue biopsy, nerve conduction tests (NCS), and clinical photography. This extraordinary range of activities (mostly in the Salpêtrière) was achieved against the background of a troubled personal life and a generally indifferent medical and scientific establishment.
Neurology did not exist in France before Duchenne and although many medical historians regard Jean-Martin Charcot as the father of the discipline, Charcot owed much to Duchenne, often acknowledging him as “mon maître en neurologie” (my teacher in neurology). … Duchenne’s monograph, the Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine – also illustrated prominently by his photographs – was the first study on the physiology of emotion and was highly influential on Darwin’s work on human evolution and emotional expression.
In 1835, Duchenne began experimenting with therapeutic “électropuncture” (a technique recently invented by François Magendie and Jean-Baptiste Sarlandière by which electric shock was administered beneath the skin with sharp electrodes to stimulate the muscles). After a brief and unhappy second marriage, Duchenne returned to Paris in 1842 in order to continue his medical research. Here, he did not achieve a senior hospital appointment, but supported himself with a small private medical practice, while daily visiting a number of teaching hospitals, including the Salpêtrière psychiatric centre. He developed a non-invasive technique of muscle stimulation that used faradic shock on the surface of the skin, which he called “électrisation localisée” and he published these experiments in his work, On Localized Electrization and its Application to Pathology and Therapy, first published in 1855. A pictorial supplement to the second edition, Album of Pathological Photographs (Album de Photographies Pathologiques) was published in 1862. A few months later, the first edition of his now much-discussed work, The Mechanism of Human Physiognomy, was published. Were it not for this small, but remarkable, work, his next publication, the result of nearly 20 years of study, Duchenne’s Physiology of Movements, his most important contribution to medical science, might well have gone unnoticed.
The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression
Influenced by the fashionable beliefs of physiognomy of the 19th century, Duchenne wanted to determine how the muscles in the human face produce facial expressions which he believed to be directly linked to the soul of man. He is known, in particular, for the way he triggered muscular contractions with electrical probes, recording the resulting distorted and often grotesque expressions with the recently invented camera. He published his findings in 1862, together with extraordinary photographs of the induced expressions, in the book Mecanisme de la physionomie Humaine (The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, also known as The Mechanism of Human Physiognomy).
Duchenne believed that the human face was a kind of map, the features of which could be codified into universal taxonomies of mental states; he was convinced that the expressions of the human face were a gateway to the soul of man. Unlike Lavater and other physiognomists of the era, Duchenne was skeptical of the face’s ability to express moral character; rather he was convinced that it was through a reading of the expressions alone (known as pathognomy) which could reveal an “accurate rendering of the soul’s emotions”. He believed that he could observe and capture an “idealized naturalism” in a similar (and even improved) way to that observed in Greek art. It is these notions that he sought conclusively and scientifically to chart by his experiments and photography and it led to the publishing of The Mechanism of Human Physiognomy in 1862 (also entitled, The Electro-Physiological Analysis of the Expression of the Passions, Applicable to the Practice of the Plastic Arts. in French: Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, ou Analyse électro-physiologique de l’expression des passions applicable à la pratique des arts plastiques), now generally rendered as The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression. The work compromises a volume of text divided into three parts:
1/ General Considerations,
2/ A Scientific Section, and
3/ An Aesthetic Section.
These sections were accompanied by an atlas of photographic plates. …
Duchenne defines the fundamental expressive gestures of the human face and associates each with a specific facial muscle or muscle group. He identifies thirteen primary emotions the expression of which is controlled by one or two muscles. He also isolates the precise contractions that result in each expression and separates them into two categories: partial and combined. To stimulate the facial muscles and capture these “idealized” expressions of his patients, Duchenne applied faradic shock through electrified metal probes pressed upon the surface of the various muscles of the face.
Duchenne was convinced that the “truth” of his pathognomic experiments could only be effectively rendered by photography, the subject’s expressions being too fleeting to be drawn or painted. “Only photography,” he writes, “as truthful as a mirror, could attain such desirable perfection.” He worked with a talented, young photographer, Adrien Tournachon, (the brother of Felix Nadar), and also taught himself the art in order to document his experiments. From an art-historical point of view, the Mechanism of Human Physiognomy was the first publication on the expression of human emotions to be illustrated with actual photographs. Photography had only recently been invented, and there was a widespread belief that this was a medium that could capture the “truth” of any situation in a way that other mediums were unable to do.
Duchenne used six living models in the scientific section, all but one of whom were his patients. His primary model, however, was an “old toothless man, with a thin face, whose features, without being absolutely ugly, approached ordinary triviality.” Through his experiments, Duchenne sought to capture the very “conditions that aesthetically constitute beauty.” He reiterated this in the aesthetic section of the book where he spoke of his desire to portray the “conditions of beauty: beauty of form associated with the exactness of the facial expression, pose and gesture.” Duchenne referred to these facial expressions as the “gymnastics of the soul”. He replied to criticisms of his use of the old man by arguing that “every face could become spiritually beautiful through the accurate rendering of his or her emotions”, and furthermore said that because the patient was suffering from an anesthetic condition of the face, he could experiment upon the muscles of his face without causing him pain.
Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne (French, 1806-1875) Figure 44, The Muscle of Sadness (detail)
Negative 1854-1856; print 1876
From the book Mecanisme de la Physionomie Humaine ou Analyse Electro-Physiologique de l’Expression des Passions
Albumen silver print
11 x 9cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Duchenne and his patient, an “old toothless man, with a thin face, whose features, without being absolutely ugly, approached ordinary triviality.” Duchenne faradize’s the mimetic muscles of “The Old Man.” The farad (symbol: F) is the SI derived unit of electrical capacitance, the ability of a body to store an electrical charge. It is named after the English physicist Michael Faraday
Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne (French, 1806-1875) Figure 27, The Muscle of Pain
Negative 1854-1856; print 1876
From the book Mecanisme de la Physionomie Humaine ou Analyse Electro-Physiologique de l’Expression des Passions
Albumen silver print
11 x 9cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne (French, 1806-1875) Figure 27, The Muscle of Pain (detail)
Negative 1854-1856; print 1876
From the book Mecanisme de la Physionomie Humaine ou Analyse Electro-Physiologique de l’Expression des Passions
Albumen silver print
11 x 9cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama
Negative 1936; print 1950s
Gelatin silver print
24.3 × 19.2cm (9 9/16 × 7 9/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama (detail)
Negative 1936; print 1950s
Gelatin silver print
24.3 × 19.2cm (9 9/16 × 7 9/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Depression-era photography
In 1935, Evans spent two months at first on a fixed-term photographic campaign for the Resettlement Administration (RA) in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. From October on, he continued to do photographic work for the RA and later the Farm Security Administration (FSA), primarily in the Southern United States.
In the summer of 1936, while on leave from the FSA, he and writer James Agee were sent by Fortune magazine on assignment to Hale County, Alabama, for a story the magazine subsequently opted not to run. In 1941, Evans’s photographs and Agee’s text detailing the duo’s stay with three white tenant families in southern Alabama during the Great Depression were published as the groundbreaking book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Its detailed account of three farming families paints a deeply moving portrait of rural poverty. The critic Janet Malcolm notes that as in the earlier Beals’ book there was a contradiction between a kind of anguished dissonance in Agee’s prose and the quiet, magisterial beauty of Evans’s photographs of sharecroppers.
The three families headed by Bud Fields, Floyd Burroughs and Frank Tingle, lived in the Hale County town of Akron, Alabama, and the owners of the land on which the families worked told them that Evans and Agee were “Soviet agents,” although Allie Mae Burroughs, Floyd’s wife, recalled during later interviews her discounting that information. Evans’s photographs of the families made them icons of Depression-Era misery and poverty. In September 2005, Fortune revisited Hale County and the descendants of the three families for its 75th anniversary issue. Charles Burroughs, who was four years old when Evans and Agee visited the family, was “still angry” at them for not even sending the family a copy of the book; the son of Floyd Burroughs was also reportedly angry because the family was “cast in a light that they couldn’t do any better, that they were doomed, ignorant.”
View of a group of woman with pained expressions on their faces with several holding handkerchiefs and one holding a card photograph of a young man.
Unknown maker (American) (Smiling Man)
1860
Ambrotype
8.9 x 6.5cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Baron Adolf de Meyer (American born France, 1868-1946) (Ruth St. Denis)
c. 1918
Platinum print
23.3 × 18.7cm (9 3/16 × 7 3/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Woodbury & Page (British, active 1857-1908) (Javanese woman seated with legs crossed, basket at side)
c. 1870
Albumen silver print
8.9 × 6cm (3 1/2 × 2 3/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Photography in Australia, the Far East, Java and London
In 1851 Woodbury, who had already become a professional photographer, went to Australia and soon found work in the engineering department of the Melbourne waterworks. He photographed the construction of ducts and other waterworks as well as various buildings in Melbourne. He received a medal for his photography in 1854.
At some point in the mid-1850s Woodbury met expatriate British photographer James Page. In 1857 the two left Melbourne and moved to Batavia (now Jakarta), Dutch East Indies, arriving 18 May 1857, and established the partnership of Woodbury & Page that same year.
During most of 1858 Woodbury & Page photographed in Central and East Java, producing large views of the ruined temples near Surakarta, amongst other subjects, before 1 September of that year. After their tour of Java, by 8 December 1858 Woodbury and Page had returned to Batavia.
In 1859 Woodbury returned to England to arrange a regular supplier of photographic materials for his photographic studio and he contracted the London firm Negretti and Zambra to market Woodbury & Page photographs in England.
Woodbury returned to Java in 1860 and during most of that year travelled with Page through Central and West Java along with Walter’s brother, Henry James Woodbury (born 1836 – died 1873), who had arrived in Batavia in April 1859.
On 18 March 1861 Woodbury & Page moved to new premises, also in Batavia, and the studio was renamed Photographisch Atelier van Walter Woodbury, also known as Atelier Woodbury. The firm sold portraits, views of Java, stereographs, cameras, lenses, photographic chemicals and other photographic supplies. These premises continued to be used until 1908, when the firm was dissolved.
In his career Woodbury produced topographic, ethnographic and especially portrait photographs. He photographed in Australia, Java, Sumatra, Borneo and London. Although individual photographers were rarely identified on Woodbury & Page photographs, between 1861 and 1862 Walter B. Woodbury occasionally stamped the mounts of his photographs: “Photographed by Walter Woodbury, Java.”
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) The Critic
November 1943
Gelatin silver print
25.7 x 32.9cm (10 1/8 x 12 15/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
“I go around wearing rose-colored glasses. In other words, we have beauty. We have ugliness. Everybody likes beauty. But there is an ugliness…” ~ Weegee, in a July 11, 1945 interview for WEAF radio, New York City
While Weegee’s work appeared in many American newspapers and magazines, his methods would sometimes be considered ethically questionable by today’s journalistic standards. In this image, a drunk woman confronts two High Society women who are attending the opera. Mrs. George Washington Kavanaugh and Lady Decies appear nonplussed to be in close proximity to the disheveled woman. Weegee’s flash illuminates their fur wraps and tiaras, drawing them into the foreground. The drunk woman emerges from the shadows on the right side, her mouth tense and open as if she were saying something, hair tousled, her face considerably less sharp than those of her rich counterparts.
The Critic is the second name Weegee gave this photograph. He originally called it, The Fashionable People. In an interview, Weegee’s assistant, Louie Liotta later revealed that the picture was entirely set up. Weegee had asked Liotta to bring a regular from a bar in the Bowery section of Manhattan to the season’s opening of the Metropolitan Opera. Liotta complied. After getting the woman drunk, they positioned her near the red carpet, where Weegee readied his camera to capture the moment seen here.
Anonymous text. “The Critic,” on the J. Paul Getty Museum website [Online] Cited 24/02/2022
Dorothea Lange made this portrait study not as a social document but rather as a Pictorialist experiment in light and shadow, transforming a character-filled face into an art-for-art’s-sake abstraction. This image bridges the two distinct phases of Lange’s work: her early, soft-focus portraiture and her better-known documentary work of the 1930s.
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Photograph – New York
Negative 1916; print June 1917
Photogravure
22.4 × 16.7cm (8 13/16 × 6 9/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
“I remember coming across Paul Strand’s ‘Blind Woman’ when I was very young, and that really bowled me over … It’s a very powerful picture. I saw it in the New York Public Library file of Camera Work, and I remember going out of there over stimulated: That’s the stuff, that’s the thing to do. It charged me up.” ~ Walker Evans
The impact of seeing this striking image for the first time is evident in Walker Evans’s vivid recollection. At the time, most photographers were choosing “pretty” subjects and creating fanciful atmospheric effects in the style of the Impressionists. Paul Strand’s unconventional subject and direct approach challenged assumptions about the medium.
At once depicting misery and endurance, struggle and degradation, Strand’s portrait of a blind woman sets up a complex confrontation. “The whole concept of blindness,” as one historian has noted, “is aimed like a weapon at those whose privilege of sight permits them to experience the picture. …”
Anonymous text. “New York [Blind Woman],” on the J. Paul Getty Museum website [Online] Cited 24/02/2022
Camille Silvy (French, 1834-1910) (Madame Camille Silvy)
c. 1863
Albumen silver print
8.9 × 6cm (3 1/2 × 2 3/8 in.)
Gift in memory of Madame Camille Silvy born Alice Monnier from the Monnier Family
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography is curated by Phillip Prodger PhD, Head of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, London
Poster for the catalogue for the exhibition Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography at the National Portrait Gallery, London
Oh Clementina! the light, the stars!
There is enough text in the posting for me not to really have to say anything. It’s all there…
Art, influence, technology;
Classical, formal, diaristic;
Intimacy, mystery, atmospheric;
Motherhood, sexuality, feminist identity, nascent womanhood;
‘Profil perdu’ (French, ‘lost profile’, which refers to a portrait in which the profile cannot be seen), mirror, loss, duplication and replication, illusion, and fetish
… all woven into a performative, psychological, expressive and creative (self) portraiture.
The real stars of the show are most definitely the women… the avant-garde artists of their era.
Many thankx to the National Portrait Gallery, London for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
This major exhibition is the first to examine the relationship between four ground-breaking Victorian artists: Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), Lady Clementina Hawarden (1822-1865) and Oscar Rejlander (1813-1875). Drawn from public and private collections internationally, the exhibition features some of the most breath-taking images in photographic history. Influenced by historical painting and frequently associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the four artists formed a bridge between the art of the past and the art of the future, standing as true giants in Victorian photography.
“The women are the real stars of this exhibition. Their pictures are bolder and bigger, more imaginative and more daring. They portray people with a raw reality that is not just the result of the collodion method but a powerful, visionary insight.
Hawarden’s pictures of Victorian women have an intimacy that transcends time and a mystery that asserts the autonomy of her subjects. They are feminist, and gothic too, in their eerie atmosphere. In an 1863-4 picture called ‘Photographic Study’, she poses a young woman by a mirror so that we see her twice. The “real” woman is in brooding profile while her reflection is a shadowy full-face image. The effect is spookily absorbing as we become witnesses to her melancholic introspection.
Hawarden’s ultra-sharp yet shadow-rich prints create unresolved stories featuring women free to show who they really are. None of them look happy. All are curiously defiant – these pictures anticipate those of the 1970s US artist Francesca Woodman. As portraits of women created by women, these Victorian photographers’ subversive creations have almost no precedents.
Not that Cameron looked to the handful of earlier women artists as models. She was trying to be a new Rembrandt: her portraits consciously compete with the masterpieces of the baroque age. While the painted portraits of male Victorian artists such as John Everett Millais and George Frederic Watts are period pieces at best, her great 1866 photograph Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty (Mrs Keene) with its subtle mix of resolution and suggestiveness brings us face to face with someone whose eyes hold ours and whose mind is as real to us as her tangled hair. There is a sensitivity to the magic of being human in Cameron’s portraits that makes her the greatest British artist of her time. This exhibition puts her in a brilliantly delineated context of experiment and imagination, the first avant-garde artist of the camera.”
Her life cruelly cut short by pneumonia at the age of forty-two, Clementina Maude, Viscountess Hawarden produced some 800 photographs in her lifetime, nearly all are of her eight children posed in poignant tableaux. She began to photograph on her family’s estate, outside Tipperary, around 1857, later moving to Princes Gardens, London, near Hyde Park. Frequently compared to Cameron, she was much admired by Carroll, and on her death, Rejlander wrote her obituary. (Wall text)
.
“In that vein, the greatest discovery in the exhibition is a thrillingly strange image by Hawarden, to my mind always the most intriguing photographer of the four. Hawarden was a Scottish countess who had ten children. She photographed all of her daughters repeatedly, and there were so many of them it’s hard to keep track. Her photographs, which are often classical in their formal qualities, nevertheless anticipate the diaristic work of the 20th century photographers Sally Mann and Nan Goldin. They often contain more than one girl, and often feature mirrors, so that everything is about multiplication or reflection – an effect that might also be seen as a form of self-portraiture in the mother of so many.” (Gaby Wood. “A jewel-like show of photographs Victorian Giants, National Portrait Gallery, review,” on The Telegraph website 27th February 2018 [Online] Cited 14/02/2022)
Her photographic years were brief but prolific. Hawarden produced over eight hundred photographs between 1857 and her sudden death in 1864. During this time she gave birth to three of her eight children. Lady Hawarden’s photographic focus remained on her children. There is only one photograph believed to feature the Viscountess Hawarden, yet it could also be a portrait of her sister Anne Bontine.
A collection of 775 portraits were donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London in 1939 by Hawarden’s granddaughter, Clementina Tottenham. The photographs were torn, or cut, from family albums for reasons that are still unclear. This accounts for the torn or trimmed corners which are now considered a hallmark of Hawarden’s work.
Carol Mavor writes extensively about the place of Hawarden’s work in the history of Victorian photography as well as contemporary interpretations of the work. She states, “Hawarden’s pictures raise significant issues of gender, motherhood, and sexuality as they relate to photography’s inherent attachments to loss, duplication and replication, illusion, fetish.” (Mavor, Carol (1999). Becoming: the photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (1st ed.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.)
“Although her work has often been linked to that of Julia Margaret Cameron, the best known woman photographer of the Victorian epoch, Clementina Hawarden struck out into areas and depicted moods unknown to the art photographers of her age.” ~ Graham Ovenden 1974
This remarkable photograph shows a woman gazing into a mirror, but not at her own reflection. Instead, the picture was carefully arranged so that the woman’s face is seen in profile, while only her reflection looks back out of the mirror. Hawarden excelled at producing ambiguous narrative photographs such as this one, suggesting the rich inner life of the subject, without telling a clear story. The heroes of her pictures are nearly always women, who seem all but trapped in domestic interiors.
Clementina, Lady Hawarden, is a poetic, if elusive, presence among nineteenth-century photographers. As a devoted mother, her life revolved around her eight children. She took up photography in 1857; using her daughters as models, she created a body of work remarkable for its technical brilliance and its original depiction of nascent womanhood. Lady Hawarden showed her work in the 1863 and 1864 exhibitions of the Photographic Society. With the exception of a few rare examples, her photographs remained in the possession of her family until 1939, when the more than eight hundred images were donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Only recently have they been the objects of research, publication, and exhibition.
Clementina Maude, her mother’s preferred model, is seen here in a reflective pose against a star-studded wall. The casual placement of the shawl on the table and the girl’s loose hair contribute to the feeling of intimacy. In the airy room time seems to be suspended. The sensuous curves of the table legs, the soft weight of the crushed velvet, and the crispness of the starry wallpaper are enhanced by the skilful handling of the collodion technique. The composition, devoid of Victorian clutter, brings together light, shadow, and compositional elements in a spare and appealing interplay. In contrast to the prevailing fashion of giving literary or sentimental titles to portraits of young women, Lady Hawarden titled her works simply “Photographic Study.”
Hawarden frequently dressed up her sitters and arranged them in enigmatic narratives like this one. Although not derived from any known painting, the manner of dress, including the cloak and tricorn hat of the male figure (actually one of Hawarden’s daughters dressed up), suggest an eighteenth century reference.
Working from upstairs rooms at 5 Princes Gardens, near to the South Kensington Museum (where both she and Julia Margaret Cameron were frequent visitors), Hawarden used light streaming from large floor to ceiling windows to illuminate her pictures. Her subjects were usually her children, especially her daughters Clementina, Florence, and Isabella Grace, whom she posed in domestic tableaux.
Both Carroll and Rejlander knew and admired Hawarden. On at least one occasion, Rejlander photographed her daughter Isabella Grace; after Hawarden’s death, he also photographed her youngest daughter, Antonia.
Virginia Dodier thinks that this photograph belongs to an ‘Orientalist’ series. Here, Lady Hawarden gives her drawing room a tent-like atmosphere. Such scenes were popularised by the painter J. F. Lewis, and Roger Fenton exhibited his photographic ‘Nubian Series’ in 1859. Dodier writes that the idea of Orientalism allowed European artists to ‘evoke sensuality on the premise of presenting quasi-ethnographical information about the customs of the East’. The idea of the fancy dress or allegorical portrait stems from an earlier tradition in English art. They are found, for example, in the work of the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792).
Lady Clementina Hawarden: Themes & Style (extract)
With careful choice of props, clothing, mirrors, balcony, and posture, Hawarden produced exquisite studies of her adolescent daughters. The figures and dress are the main subject, carefully framed in the room, and often in front of the balcony. The city beyond often provides a blurred background.
The writer Carol Mavor in Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden suggests that the often provocative poses of Hawarden’s daughters are significant. The Victorians were bothered by the idea of sexuality and adolescence, and in 1861 the Offences Against the Person Act raised the age of consent from 10 to 12. This was also the year in which Hawarden began to make this kind of photograph, though there is no evidence that she was deliberately exploring this controversial topic.
Hawarden liked to use natural light in her studio at her South Kensington home, in a way that was seen at the time as ‘daring’. She placed mirrors to reflect light and used them to explore the idea of ‘the double’, just as other photographers (and occasionally Hawarden herself) used a stereoscopic camera to produce twin prints.
From around 1862 Hawarden concentrated on photographing her daughters in costume tableaux, a popular subject at the time. Costumes from the dressing up box are combined with dresses at the height of fashion to produce beautiful and detailed studies that confound the contemporary with the make-believe.
Text from the Victoria and Albert Museum website [Online] Cited 16/05/2018. No longer available online
Clementina Hawarden (British, 1822-1865) Photographic Study (Clementina and Florence Elizabeth Maude)
1859-1861
Uncut stereo albumen print
Figure 60 and 61 of the catalogue for the exhibition Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography at the National Portrait Gallery, London
Figure 112 and 113 of the catalogue for the exhibition Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography at the National Portrait Gallery, London
Oscar Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875)
According to his naturalisation papers, Rejlander was born in Stockholm on October 19, 1813. He was the son of Carl Gustaf Rejlander, a stonemason and Swedish Army Officer. During his youth, his family moved to the Swedish-speaking community in Rauma, Finland (then Russia). In the 1830s, he relocated to England, initially settling in Lincoln, England. In the 1850s he abandoned his original profession as a painter and portrait miniaturist, apparently after seeing how well a photograph captured the fold of a sleeve.
He set up as a portraitist in the industrial Midlands town of Wolverhampton, probably around 1846. In the early 1850s he learned the wet-collodion and waxed-paper processes at great speed with Nicholas Henneman in London, and then changed his business to that of a photography studio. He undertook genre work and portraiture. Rejlander also produced nude studies, mainly for use as studies by painters. There are no known erotic photographs of children by Rejlander. His so-called ‘Charlotte Baker’ photograph is a well-known forgery, produced by convicted child sex offender Graham Ovenden by Ovenden’s friend Howard Grey in the 1970s, rephotographed and printed to look antique by Ovenden. No person by the name Charlotte Baker ever seems to have posed for Rejlander.
Rejlander undertook many experiments to perfect his photography, including combination printing, which he did not invent; however, he created more elaborate and convincing composite photographs than any prior photographer. He had articles feature in the Wolverhampton Chronicle, on 15 November 1854 an article called “Improvement in Calotypes, by Mr. O.G. Rejlander, of Wolverhampton” it suggests that by 1854 he was experimenting with combination printing from several negatives. He was a friend of photographer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known by the nom de plume Lewis Carroll), who collected Rejlander’s work and corresponded with him on technical matters. Rejlander later created one of the best known and most revealing portraits of Dodgson.
Rejlander participated in the Paris Exhibition of 1855. In 1856 he made his best-known allegorical work, The Two Ways of Life. This was a seamlessly montaged combination print made of thirty-two images (akin to the use of Photoshop today, but then far more difficult to achieve) in about six weeks. First exhibited at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, the work shows a man being lured to paths of vice or virtue by good and bad angels. The image’s partial nudity, which showed real women as they actually appeared and not the idealised forms then common in Victorian art, was deemed ‘indecent’ by some. Rejlander was also accused of using prostitutes as models, although Rejlander categorically denied this and no proof was ever offered. Reservations about the work subsided when Queen Victoria ordered a 10-guinea copy to give to Prince Albert. Victoria and Albert would go on to purchase three copies of the work, all of which are now lost. …
Rejlander moved his studio to Malden Road, London around 1862 and largely abandoned her early experiments with double exposure, photomontage, photographic manipulation and retouching. Instead, he became one of Britain’s leading portraitists, creating pictures with psychological charge. He became a leading expert in photographic techniques, lecturing and publishing widely, and sold work through bookshops and art dealers. He also found subject-matter in London, photographing homeless London street children to produce popular ‘social-protest’ pictures such as “Poor Joe,” also known as “Homeless”. …
Rejlander’s ideas and techniques were taken up by other photographers and this, to some extent, justifies labelling him as the father of art photography.
Starting in the late 1860s, Charles Darwin began collecting photographs for use in the research that would eventually become his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Hoping to find authentic photographs, that captured emotional expressions as they actually occurred, he visited print shops and studios in London, and contacted several photographers hoping to commission new pictures. Few, if any, of the photographs he acquired met his ambitious expectations.
In April, 1871, Darwin wrote, ‘I am now rich in photographs, for I have found in London Rejlander, who for years has had a passion for photographing all sorts of chance expressions, exhibited on various occasions … instantaneously.’ Rejlander would go on to become the main contributor of photographs to Darwin’s book.
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Oscar Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) The Two Ways of Life
1856-1957
Albumen print, made from approximately 32 separate negatives
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
One of the most famous pictures in photographic history, Rejlander’s Two Ways of Life caused a sensation when it was exhibited at the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition in 1857. To make it, Rejlander combined some thirty-two separate negatives (there were variations between printings, and it is not always clear where negatives begin and end). Some viewers were offended by the nudes, whose bodies appear frank and realistic compared to the ideal fantasies painters were expected to produce. Others objected to its ambition, since Rejlander seemed to be saying that photography could be used to produce pictures just as meaningful, and as artistically composed, as any painting.
To make Two Ways of Life, Rejlander had to arrange the various subjects within it at the right size to maintain visual perspective. This was a challenge, since enlargement and reduction of negatives was not yet possible in the darkroom. The only way he could change the size of something in the negative was to rephotograph it.
This is the finest known print of the photograph, which is also known in a reduced form. The photograph is a parable featuring Rejlander himself, who stands in the middle, listening to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ angels luring him to paths of vice and virtue. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert loved the picture and bought three copies, none of which survive.
Iphigenia was a daughter of King Agamemnon who appears in legends about the Trojan War. When her father accidentally offended the goddess Artemis, he was forced to sacrifice Iphigenia to appease the goddess so that she would allow his ships to sail to Troy. She was tricked into going to the town of Aulis under the pretence that she would marry the heroic warrior Achilles. In some versions she was killed, while in others she was rescued by Artemis.
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Oscar Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Ariadne
1857
Albumen print from a wet collodion negative
Rejlander produced a number of nude studies which he sold to painters for use as studies. He considered these pictures significant because they pointed up errors historically made by painters when depicting human anatomy. Although he was happy for painters to use photographs to improve their paintings, he also saw accuracy of depiction as one of the things that made photography special when compared to other art forms.
This photograph is a based on the famous painting The Virgin in Prayer painted by the Italian Baroque painter Sassoferrato 1640-1650, now in the collection of the National Gallery, London. The rise of public art spaces in Britain in the nineteenth century, including the National Gallery (1824), and the National Portrait Gallery (1856), provided inspiration for countless photographers. Rejlander was particularly enthusiastic about restaging famous paintings, often in order to demonstrate mistakes that painters had made in scale and perspective. The process was fun, and the results fuelled the debate about photography’s role among the arts.
Cameron invited Rejlander to the Isle of Wight in 1863. Before the visit, Rejlander provided her with some of his own negatives, so that she could practise printing. She experimented with some, decorating them with ferns. This picture, which descended through Cameron’s family, was once believed to have been made by her. However, it is now recognised as one of the pictures Cameron printed from a Rejlander negative. The subject is one who frequently appears in Rejlander’s work, and may even have been his wife, Mary.
This photograph shows two sisters side by side in profile, their hands clasped in prayer. One girl seems almost to be a mirror reflection of the other. Rejlander exhibited versions of this photograph with two different titles. Purify My Heart is a reference to the biblical passage James 4:8: ‘Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded.’ Lewis Carroll admired this photograph and purchased a copy for his personal collection.
Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography is curated by Phillip Prodger PhD, Head of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, London
Cover of the catalogue for the exhibition Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography at the National Portrait Gallery, London
A two-part bumper posting on this exhibition, Part 1 featuring the work of Lewis Carroll and our Julia… JMC, Julia Margaret Cameron, the most inventive, audacious and talented photographer of the era. In a photographic career spanning eleven years of her life (1864-1875) what Julia achieved in such a short time is incredible.
“Her style was not widely appreciated in her own day: her choice to use a soft focus and to treat photography as an art as well as a science, by manipulating the wet collodion process, caused her works to be viewed as “slovenly”, marred by “mistakes” and bad photography. She found more acceptance among pre-Raphaelite artists than among photographers.” (Wikipedia)
As with any genius (a person who possesses exceptional intellectual or creative power) who goes against the grain, full recognition did not come until later. But when it does arrive, it is undeniable. As soon as you see a JMC photograph… you know it is by her, it could be by no one else. Her “signature” – closely framed portraits and illustrative allegories based on religious and literary works; far-away looks, soft focus and lighting, low depth of field; strong men (“great thro’ genius”) and beautiful, sensual, heroic women (“great thro’ love”) – is her genius.
There is something so magical about how JMC can frame a face, emerging from darkness, side profile, filling the frame, top lit. Soft out of focus hair with one point of focus in the image. Beautiful light. Just the most sensitive capturing of a human being, I don’t know what it is… a glimpse into another world, a ghostly world of the spirit, the soul of the living seen before they are dead.
Many thankx to the National Portrait Gallery, London for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real & Ideal & sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to poetry and beauty.”
Julia Margaret Cameron to Sir John Herschel, 31 December 1864
This major exhibition is the first to examine the relationship between four ground-breaking Victorian artists: Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), Lady Clementina Hawarden (1822-1865) and Oscar Rejlander (1813-1875). Drawn from public and private collections internationally, the exhibition features some of the most breath-taking images in photographic history. Influenced by historical painting and frequently associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the four artists formed a bridge between the art of the past and the art of the future, standing as true giants in Victorian photography.
Figure 94 and 95 from the catalogue for the exhibition Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography at the National Portrait Gallery, London
Lewis Carroll (English, 1832-1898)
In 1856, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) took up the new art form of photography under the influence first of his uncle Skeffington Lutwidge, and later of his Oxford friend Reginald Southey. He soon excelled at the art and became a well-known gentleman-photographer, and he seems even to have toyed with the idea of making a living out of it in his very early years.
A study by Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling exhaustively lists every surviving print, and Taylor calculates that just over half of his surviving work depicts young girls, though about 60% of his original photographic portfolio is now missing. Dodgson also made many studies of men, women, boys, and landscapes; his subjects also include skeletons, dolls, dogs, statues, paintings, and trees. His pictures of children were taken with a parent in attendance and many of the pictures were taken in the Liddell garden because natural sunlight was required for good exposures.
By the time that Dodgson abruptly ceased photography (1880, over 24 years), he had established his own studio on the roof of Tom Quad, created around 3,000 images, and was an amateur master of the medium, though fewer than 1,000 images have survived time and deliberate destruction. He stopped taking photographs because keeping his studio working was too time-consuming. He used the wet collodion process; commercial photographers who started using the dry-plate process in the 1870s took pictures more quickly.
Known primarily as the author of children’s books, Lewis Carroll was also a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford University and an ordained deacon. He took his first photograph in 1856 and pursued photography obsessively for the next twenty-five years, exhibiting and selling his prints. He stopped taking pictures abruptly in 1880, leaving over three thousand negatives, for the most part portraits of friends, family, clergy, artists, and celebrities. Ill at ease among adults, Carroll preferred the company of children, especially young girls. He had the uncanny ability to inhabit the universe of children as a friendly accomplice, allowing for an extraordinarily trusting rapport with his young sitters and enabling him to charm them into immobility for as long as forty seconds, the minimum time he deemed necessary for a successful exposure. The intensity of the sitters’ gazes brings to Carroll’s photographs a sense of the inner life of children and the seriousness with which they view the world.
Carroll’s famous literary works, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865) and “Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There” (1872), were both written for Alice Liddell, the daughter of the dean of Christ Church, Oxford. For Carroll, Alice was more than a favourite model; she was his “ideal child-friend,” and a photograph of her, aged seven, adorned the last page of the manuscript he gave her of “Alice’s Adventures Underground.” The present image of Alice was most likely inspired by “The Beggar Maid,” a poem written by Carroll’s favourite living poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in 1842. If Carroll’s images define childhood as a fragile state of innocent grace threatened by the experience of growing up and the demands of adults, they also reveal to the contemporary viewer the photographer’s erotic imagination. In this provocative portrait of Alice at age seven or eight, posed as a beggar against a neglected garden wall, Carroll arranged the tattered dress to the limits of the permissible, showing as much as possible of her bare chest and limbs, and elicited from her a self-confident, even challenging stance. This outcast beggar will arouse in the passer-by as much lust as pity. Indeed, Alice looks at us with faint suspicion, as if aware that she is being used as an actor in an incomprehensible play. A few years later, a grown-up Alice would pose, with womanly assurance, for Julia Margaret Cameron.
The fourth of ten children and later the inspiration for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass, Alice Liddell is the most famous of Carroll’s child sitters. Contrary to popular belief, Carroll did not photograph her particularly often, and never photographed her in the nude. Of the 2,600 photographs recorded by Carroll, only twelve solo portraits of Alice are known. By comparison, he made six individual portraits of Alice’s sister, Ina, and forty-five of another favoured sitter, Xie Kitchin (see preceding room).
Hallam Tennyson (British, 1852-1928), Alfred Tennyson’s eldest son, was five years old when Carroll photographed him at Monk Coniston Park in the Lake District. Taken while the poet and his family were visiting friends, the portrait shows Hallam standing on a chair, holding what may be a hoop rolling stick. Carroll posed him with his legs crossed – a tricky stance for such a young child to maintain. As an adult, Hallam would marry May Prinsep, Julia Margaret Cameron’s niece. Carroll did make one portrait of Alfred Tennyson during his Lake District trip, but he was determined to make more. In 1864, he visited the Isle of Wight to try to photograph him again, armed with a ‘carpet bag full’ of his photographs to show Cameron and others. He was unable to photograph Tennyson, but Cameron and Carroll staged a ‘mutual exhibition’ in Cameron’s living room. (Wall text)
Hallam Tennyson, 2nd Baron Tennyson, GCMG, PC (11 August 1852 – 2 December 1928) was a British aristocrat who served as the second Governor-General of Australia, in office from 1903 to 1904. He was previously Governor of South Australia from 1899 to 1902.
Tennyson was born in Twickenham, Surrey, and educated at Marlborough College and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was the oldest son of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and served as his personal secretary and biographer; he succeeded to his father’s title in 1892. Tennyson was made Governor of South Australia in 1899. When Lord Hopetoun resigned the governor-generalship in mid-1902, he was the longest-serving state governor and thus became Administrator of the Government. Tennyson was eventually chosen to be Hopetoun’s permanent replacement, but accepted only a one-year term. He was more popular than his predecessor among the general public, but had a tense relationship with Prime Minister Alfred Deakin and was not offered an extension to his term. Tennyson retired to the Isle of Wight, and spent the rest of his life upholding his father’s legacy.
The Liddell family arrived at Christ Church, Oxford in 1856, just as Carroll was beginning to take up photography. He and the family became close friends. Henry Liddell served as Dean of the College throughout Carroll’s career, and initially supported his photographic efforts. In 1863, Carroll and the family broke off relations for unknown reasons. Speculation has included disappointment that Carroll went against the family’s wishes by refusing to court their governess or one of the older Liddell children – Ina has been mentioned as a candidate. Carroll was enormously charmed by the Liddell children, all of whom he photographed, and nearly all of whom made their way into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and other, related writings.
Carroll spent months trying to arrange an introduction to Rossetti (1828-1882) so that he could photograph the famous Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet, and his family. This is one of several photographs he made in the garden of Tudor House, 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, during a four-day session in which he photographed the family and some of Rossetti’s artwork, including drawings of his late wife, Elizabeth Siddal.
The relationship between Carroll, Cameron, Hawarden, Rejlander and the Pre-Raphaelites was complex. They had many common friends and associates, and it is believed that several Pre-Raphaelite painters used photographs as studies for their paintings and sculpture. However, all four photographers were attracted to later styles of painting, especially the Spanish and Italian National Portrait Gallery, London Baroque, and the Dutch Golden Age. Led by the cantankerous critic John Ruskin, an associate of Henry Liddell’s at Oxford (Alice Liddell’s father), the Pre-Raphaelites were opposed to such painting, which they considered too literal and mundane.
Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882), generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a British poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Rossetti was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. His work also influenced the European Symbolists and was a major precursor of the Aesthetic movement.
Rossetti’s art was characterised by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism. His early poetry was influenced by John Keats. His later poetry was characterised by the complex interlinking of thought and feeling, especially in his sonnet sequence, The House of Life. Poetry and image are closely entwined in Rossetti’s work. He frequently wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures, spanning from The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Astarte Syriaca (1877), while also creating art to illustrate poems such as Goblin Market by the celebrated poet Christina Rossetti, his sister. Rossetti’s personal life was closely linked to his work, especially his relationships with his models and muses Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris.
Irish-born architect Benjamin Woodward (1815-1861) is best known for having designed a number of buildings in Cork, Dublin and Oxford in partnership with Sir Thomas Deane and his son Sir Thomas Newenham Deane. Inspired by the writings of critic John Ruskin, his most important buildings include the museum at Trinity College, Dublin (1853-1857). Through Ruskin, Woodward met Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other Pre-Raphaelite artists, whom Woodward employed in 1857 to decorate his recently completed Oxford Union building.
John Ruskin (8 February 1819 – 20 January 1900) was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, as well as an art patron, draughtsman, water colourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy.
His writing styles and literary forms were equally varied. He penned essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale. He also made detailed sketches and paintings of rocks, plants, birds, landscapes, and architectural structures and ornamentation. The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art gave way in time to plainer language designed to communicate his ideas more effectively. In all of his writing, he emphasised the connections between nature, art and society.
He was hugely influential in the latter half of the 19th century and up to the First World War. After a period of relative decline, his reputation has steadily improved since the 1960s with the publication of numerous academic studies of his work. Today, his ideas and concerns are widely recognised as having anticipated interest in environmentalism, sustainability and craft.
Lewis Carroll took this photograph of himself with the assistance of Ina Liddell, Alice’s older sister. His diary records: ‘Bought some Collodion at Telfer’s […] and spent the morning at the Deanery … Harry was away, but the two dear little girls, Ina and Alice, were with me all the morning. To try the lens, I took a picture of myself, for which Ina took off the cap, and of course considered it all her doing!’
This is the only portrait of Alice that Carroll is known to have made after the publication of Alice in Wonderland, some seven years earlier. Showing Alice at age eighteen, the innocence of her earlier portraits has now completely drained away, replaced by a severe, inscrutable expression. The moment captured is unusually intimate, with Alice’s head lowered slightly and cocked to one side, looking up at the viewer, and her body slumped in a padded armchair. It is unclear whether Carroll orchestrated this pose, or whether Alice assumed it naturally.
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The National Portrait Gallery is to stage an exhibition of photographs by four of the most celebrated figures in art photography, including previously unseen works and a notorious photomontage, it was announced today, Tuesday 22 August 2017.
Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography (1 March – 20 May 2018), will combine for the first time ever portraits by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), Oscar Rejlander (1813-1875) and Lady Clementina Hawarden (1822-1865). The exhibition will be the first to examine the relationship between the four ground-breaking artists. Drawn from public and private collections internationally, it will feature some of the most breath-taking images in photographic history, including many which have not been seen in Britain since they were made.
Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography will be the first exhibition in London to feature the work of Swedish born ‘Father of Photoshop’ Oscar Rejlander since the artist’s death. it will include the finest surviving print of his famous picture Two Ways of Life of 1856-1857, which used his pioneering technique combining several different negatives to create a single final image. Constructed from over 30 separate negatives, Two Ways of Life was so large it had to be printed on two sheets of paper joined together. Seldom-seen original negatives by Lewis Carroll and Rejlander will both be shown, allowing visitors to see ‘behind the scenes’ as they made their pictures.
An album of photographs by Rejlander purchased by the National Portrait Gallery following an export bar in 2015 will also go on display together with other treasures from the Gallery’s world-famous holdings of Rejlander, Cameron and Carroll, which for conservation reasons are rarely on view. The exhibition will also include works by cult hero Clementina Hawarden, a closely associated photographer. This will be the first major showing of her work since the exhibition Lady Hawarden at the V&A in London and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 1990.
Lewis Carroll’s photographs of Alice Liddell, his muse for Alice in Wonderland, are among the most beloved photographs of the National Portrait Gallery’s Collection. Less well known are the photographs made of Alice years later, showing her a fully grown woman. The exhibition will bring together these works for the first time, as well as Alice Liddell as Beggar Maid on loan from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Visitors will be able to see how each photographer approached the same subject, as when Cameron and Rejlander both photographed the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the scientist Charles Darwin, or when Carroll and Cameron both photographed the actress, Ellen Terry. The exhibition will also include the legendary studies of human emotion Rejlander made for Darwin, on loan from the Darwin Archive at Cambridge University.
Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography celebrates four key nineteenth-century figures, exploring their experimental approach to picture-making. Their radical attitudes towards photography have informed artistic practice ever since.
The four created an unlikely alliance. Rejlander was a Swedish émigré with a mysterious past; Cameron was a middle-aged expatriate from colonial Ceylon (now Sri Lanka); Carroll was an Oxford academic and writer of fantasy literature; and Hawarden was landed gentry, the child of a Scottish naval hero and a Spanish beauty, 26 years younger. Yet, Carroll, Cameron and Hawarden all studied under Rejlander briefly, and maintained lasting associations, exchanging ideas about portraiture and narrative. Influenced by historical painting and frequently associated with the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, they formed a bridge between the art of the past and the art of the future, standing as true giants in Victorian photography.
Lenders to the exhibition include The Royal Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin; Munich Stadtsmuseum; Tate and V & A. Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography will include portraits of sitters such as Charles Darwin, Alice Liddell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Thomas Carlyle, George Frederick Watts, Ellen Terry and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director, National Portrait Gallery, London, says: ‘The National Portrait Gallery has one of the finest holdings of Victorian photographs in the world. As well as some of the Gallery’s rarely seen treasures, such as the original negative of Lewis Carroll’s portrait of Alice Liddell and images of Alice and her siblings being displayed for the first time, this exhibition will be a rare opportunity to see the works of all four of these highly innovative and influential artists.’
Phillip Prodger, Head of Photographs, National Portrait Gallery, London, and Curator of Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography, says: ‘When people think of Victorian photography, they sometimes think of stiff, fusty portraits of women in crinoline dresses, and men in bowler hats. Victorian Giants is anything but. Here visitors can see the birth of an idea – raw, edgy, experimental – the Victorian avant-garde, not just in photography, but in art writ large. The works of Cameron, Carroll, Hawarden and Rejlander forever changed thinking about photography and its expressive power. These are pictures that inspire and delight. And this is a show that lays bare the unrivalled creative energy, and optimism, that came with the birth of new ways of seeing.’
Press release from the National Portrait Gallery
Figure 25 and 26 from the catalogue for the exhibition Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography at the National Portrait Gallery, London
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879)
In 1863, when Cameron was 48 years old, her daughter gave her a camera as a present, thereby starting her career as a photographer. Within a year, Cameron became a member of the Photographic Societies of London (1864) and Scotland. She remained a member of the Photographic Society, London, until her death. In her photography, Cameron strove to capture beauty. She wrote, “I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied.” In 1869 she collated and gave what is now known as The Norman Album to her daughter and son-in-law in gratitude for having introduced her to photography. The album was later deemed by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art to be of “outstanding aesthetic importance and significance to the study of the history of photography and, in particular, the work of Julia Margaret Cameron – one of the most significant photographers of the 19th century.”
The basic techniques of soft-focus “fancy portraits”, which she later developed, were taught to her by David Wilkie Wynfield. She later wrote that “to my feeling about his beautiful photography I owed all my attempts and indeed consequently all my success”.
Lord Tennyson, her neighbour on the Isle of Wight, often brought friends to see the photographer and her works. At the time, photography was a labour-intensive art that also was highly dependent upon crucial timing. Sometimes Cameron was obsessive about her new occupation, with subjects sitting for countless exposures as she laboriously coated, exposed, and processed each wet plate. The results were unconventional in their intimacy and their use of created blur both through long exposures and leaving the lens intentionally out of focus. This led some of her contemporaries to complain and even ridicule the work, but her friends and family were supportive, and she was one of the most prolific and advanced amateurs of her time. Her enthusiasm for her craft meant that her children and others sometimes tired of her endless photographing, but it also left us with some of the best of records of her children and of the many notable figures of the time who visited her.
During her career, Cameron registered each of her photographs with the copyright office and kept detailed records. Her shrewd business sense is one reason that so many of her works survive today. Another reason that many of Cameron’s portraits are significant is because they are often the only existing photograph of historical figures, becoming an invaluable resource. Many paintings and drawings exist, but, at the time, photography was still a new and challenging medium for someone outside a typical portrait studio.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) Mary Fisher (Mrs Herbert Fisher)
1866-1867
Albumen print
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) Julia Jackson
1864
Albumen print
Born in Calcutta, Julia Prinsep Jackson (1846-1895) was the youngest of three daughters of Maria Pattle and the physician John Jackson. Greatly admired by the leading artists of the day, both Edward Burne-Jones and G.F. Watts painted her and she was extensively photographed by her aunt and godmother Julia Margaret Cameron. Julia Jackson’s first husband, Herbert Duckworth, died in 1870 after only three years of marriage. She later married Leslie Stephen, editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. Together they had four children, including the painter Vanessa Bell and the writer Virginia Woolf.
Positioned high in the frame against a dark neutral backdrop, with piercing eyes and determined expression, the Mountain Nymph reveals the psychological charge of Cameron’s best portraits. The title derives from John Milton’s poem L’Allegro (published 1645): ‘Come, and trip it as ye go / On the light fantastick toe, / And in thy right hand lead with thee, / The Mountain Nymph, sweet Liberty’. Little is known about the sitter, Mrs Keene. She may have been a professional model as she also sat for the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones.
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Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) Virginia Dalrymple
1868-1870
Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin
Marie Euphrosyne Spartali (Greek: Μαρία Ευφροσύνη Σπαρτάλη), later Stillman (10 March 1844 – 6 March 1927), was a British Pre-Raphaelite painter of Greek descent, arguably the greatest female artist of that movement. During a sixty-year career, she produced over one hundred and fifty works, contributing regularly to exhibitions in Great Britain and the United States.
Lewis Carroll’s photographs of Alice Liddell are well-known; less familiar are the portraits Julia Margaret Cameron made of her years later, several of which respond directly to Carroll’s pictures. In this photograph, the twenty-year-old Alice is posed in full profile, much as Carroll depicted her in his famous seated portrait of 1858, shown nearby. However, Cameron shows Alice’s long wavy hair cascading in front of and behind her, merging with a background of blooming hydrangeas, the flowering of the plant echoing her coming of age. Cameron named the portrait after the Greek Aletheia, meaning ‘true’ or ‘faithful’.
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Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) Ellen Terry at Age Sixteen
1864
Albumen print
With a stage career that began at the age of nine and spanned sixty-nine years, Ellen Alice Terry (1847-1928) is regarded as one of the greatest actresses of her time. She was particularly celebrated for her naturalistic portrayals. Already an established professional, she married the artist G.F. Watts, thirty years her senior, a week before her seventeenth birthday, the year this photograph was made. Although they separated after less than a year, Watts painted Ellen on several occasions. One such portrait is currently on view in Room 26, on the Gallery’s first floor. Cameron’s idea to use a photograph of a particular subject at a specific time to embody a broad, abstract concept was particularly bold. Many believed that photography was better suited to recording minute detail than communicating universal themes.
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Dame Alice Ellen Terry, GBE (27 February 1847 – 21 July 1928), known professionally as Ellen Terry, was an English actress who became the leading Shakespearean actress in Britain. Born into a family of actors, Terry began performing as a child, acting in Shakespeare plays in London, and toured throughout the British provinces in her teens. At 16 she married the 46-year-old artist George Frederic Watts, but they separated within a year. She soon returned to the stage but began a relationship with the architect Edward William Godwin and retired from the stage for six years. She resumed acting in 1874 and was immediately acclaimed for her portrayal of roles in Shakespeare and other classics.
In 1878 she joined Henry Irving’s company as his leading lady, and for more than the next two decades she was considered the leading Shakespearean and comic actress in Britain. Two of her most famous roles were Portia in The Merchant of Venice and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. She and Irving also toured with great success in America and Britain.
In 1903 Terry took over management of London’s Imperial Theatre, focusing on the plays of George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen. The venture was a financial failure, and Terry turned to touring and lecturing. She continued to find success on stage until 1920, while also appearing in films from 1916 to 1922. Her career lasted nearly seven decades.
Julia Prinsep Stephen, née Jackson (7 February 1846 – 5 May 1895) was a celebrated English beauty, philanthropist and Pre-Raphaelite model. She was the wife of the agnostic biographer Leslie Stephen and mother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, members of the Bloomsbury Group.
Born in India, the family returned to England when Julia Stephen was two years old. She became the favourite model of her aunt, the celebrated photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron, who made over 50 portraits of her. Through another maternal aunt, she became a frequent visitor at Little Holland House, then home to an important literary and artistic circle, and came to the attention of a number of Pre-Raphaelite painters who portrayed her in their work. Married to Herbert Duckworth, a barrister, in 1867 she was soon widowed with three infant children. Devastated, she turned to nursing, philanthropy and agnosticism, and found herself attracted to the writing and life of Leslie Stephen, with whom she shared a mutual friend in Anny Thackeray, his sister-in-law.
After Leslie Stephen’s wife died in 1875 he became close friends with Julia and they married in 1878. Julia and Leslie Stephen had four further children, living at 22 Hyde Park Gate, South Kensington, together with his seven year old handicapped daughter. Many of her seven children and their descendants became notable. In addition to her family duties and modelling, she wrote a book based on her nursing experiences, Notes from Sick Rooms, in 1883. She also wrote children’s stories for her family, eventually published posthumously as Stories for Children and became involved in social justice advocacy. Julia Stephens had firm views on the role of women, namely that their work was of equal value to that of men, but in different spheres, and she opposed the suffrage movement for votes for women. The Stephens entertained many visitors at their London home and their summer residence at St Ives, Cornwall. Eventually the demands on her both at home and outside the home started to take their toll. Julia Stephen died at her home following an episode of influenza in 1895, at the age of 49, when her youngest child was only 11. The writer, Virginia Woolf, provides a number of insights into the domestic life of the Stephens in both her autobiographical and fictional work.
Cameron had a genius for recognising the expressive potential of chance events in her work. In this incomparable portrait, she allowed the many speck marks that cover this picture, caused by dust or debris settling on the plate after sensitising, to remain as part of the image. As a result, the poet Browning (1812-1889) becomes a transcendent figure, seemingly emerging from a field of stars. Browning developed an early interest in literature and the arts, encouraged by his father who was a clerk for the Bank of England. He refused to pursue a formal career and from 1833, he dedicated himself to writing poems and plays. In 1846 he married the poet Elizabeth Barrett. The couple lived in Italy until Elizabeth’s death in 1861, five years before this picture was taken.
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Robert Browning (7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of the dramatic monologue made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. His poems are known for their irony, characterisation, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings, and challenging vocabulary and syntax.
Browning’s early career began promisingly, but was not a success. The long poem Pauline brought him to the attention of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and was followed by Paracelsus, which was praised by William Wordsworth and Charles Dickens, but in 1840 the difficult Sordello, which was seen as wilfully obscure, brought his poetry into disrepute. His reputation took more than a decade to recover, during which time he moved away from the Shelleyan forms of his early period and developed a more personal style.
In 1846 Browning married the older poet Elizabeth Barrett, who at the time was considerably better known than himself, thus starting one of the most famous literary marriages. They went to live in Italy, a country he called “my university”, and which features frequently in his work. By the time of her death in 1861, he had published the crucial collection Men and Women. The collection Dramatis Personae and the book-length epic poem The Ring and the Book followed, and made him a leading British poet. He continued to write prolifically, but his reputation today rests largely on the poetry he wrote in this middle period.
When Browning died in 1889, he was regarded as a sage and philosopher-poet who through his writing had made contributions to Victorian social and political discourse – as in the poem Caliban upon Setebos, which some critics have seen as a comment on the theory of evolution, which had recently been put forward by Darwin and others. Unusually for a poet, societies for the study of his work were founded while he was still alive. Such Browning Societies remained common in Britain and the United States until the early 20th century.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) Thomas Carlyle
1865
Albumen print
Lent by Her Majesty The Queen
Cameron portrayed the eminent historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) completely out of focus – a disembodied, ethereal being, with light playing across his head, face, and beard.
Born in Scotland, Carlyle is considered one of the most important social commentators of his time. His ideas about the role of ‘great men’ in shaping history informed his lecture series and book On Heroes, Hero-Worship and The Heroic in History (1841). Instrumental in the founding of the National Portrait Gallery, he became one of its first Trustees. Carlyle was lifelong friends with Henry Taylor (shown in the next room), to whom Cameron was also close.
Cameron portrayed astronomer and physicist John Frederick William Herschel (1792-1871) as a romantic hero, his wild white hair and shining eyes emerging from darkness. Cameron and Herschel were lifelong friends. They had met in South Africa in 1836, where he was mapping the sky of the southern hemisphere, and where she was recovering from illness. A pioneer in the invention of photography, Herschel was responsible for numerous advancements and is credited with coining the terms ‘negative’, ‘positive’, and ‘photograph’. He introduced Cameron to photography in 1839 and shared the results of his early experiments with her. Rejlander also photographed Herschel, several years previously.
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Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet KH FRS (7 March 1792 – 11 May 1871) was an English polymath, mathematician, astronomer, chemist, inventor, and experimental photographer, who also did valuable botanical work. He was the son of Mary Baldwin and astronomer William Herschel, nephew of astronomer Caroline Herschel and the father of twelve children.
Herschel originated the use of the Julian day system in astronomy. He named seven moons of Saturn and four moons of Uranus. He made many contributions to the science of photography, and investigated colour blindness and the chemical power of ultraviolet rays; his Preliminary Discourse (1831), which advocated an inductive approach to scientific experiment and theory building, was an important contribution to the philosophy of science.
Here, Cameron shows the poet emerging out of inky darkness, crowned by wild locks of hair on either side of his head, sporting an abundant beard, and framed by two points of his lapel. She positioned him on high, god-like and looking down, the viewer’s eye fixed at the height of his top button.
In the summer of 1868, Darwin and his family rented a holiday cottage on the Isle of Wight from Cameron’s family. The visit gave Cameron the opportunity to make this famous photograph. Publically, Darwin wrote of this portrait: ‘I like this photograph very much better than any other which has been taken of me.’ Privately, he was less positive, describing it as ‘heavy and unclear’. This particular print once belonged to Virginia Woolf, who was Julia Margaret Cameron’s great niece.
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National Portrait Gallery
St Martin’s Place
London, WC2H 0HE
Opening hours:
Open daily: 10.30 – 18.00
Friday and Saturday: 10.30 – 21.00
Nils Strindberg (Swedish, 1872-1897) Örnen efter landningen. Ur serien Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd, 14/7 1897
14/7 1897. The Eagle Balloon after landing
From the series The Flight of the Eagle
1897/1930
Gelatin silver print
While there are some outstanding photographs in this posting, the selection seems rather ad hoc. It is always good to see the work of Julia Margaret Cameron and other illuminati of late 19 century photography, but the highlight in this posting are the ethereal and tragic photographs from the Eagle polar expedition.
We can only be grateful that so many negatives have survived, a testament to both the photographer, the developer and the coldness of the ice, leaving us with such transcendent images of human endurance.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Moderna Museet for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Nils Strindberg (Swedish, 1872-1897)
14/7 1897. After the crash
From the series The Flight of the Eagle
1897/1930
Gelatin silver print Some rights reserved by Tekniska museet
Nils Strindberg (Swedish, 1872-1897)
Setting up-camp, raising the Swedish flag
From the series The Flight of the Eagle
1897/1930
Gelatin silver print Some rights reserved by Tekniska museet
Nils Strindberg (Swedish, 1872-1897)
Moving a boat through the icy waters
From the series The Flight of the Eagle
1897/1930
Gelatin silver print Some rights reserved by Tekniska museet
Nils Strindberg (Swedish, 1872-1897)
In July 1897, Salomon August Andrée (1854-1897) embarked on his voyage to the North Pole in the balloon Örnen [The Eagle], accompanied by the engineer Knut Frænkel (1870-1897) and the photographer Nils Strindberg. A few days later, the balloon crashed on the ice, and they were forced to continue their journey on foot. The conditions were severe, and the expedition ended in disaster. After a few months, in October, they made up camp on Kvitøya on Svalbard. This is where their bodies were found thirty years later, along with Strindberg’s camera.
The expedition and the events surrounding it, were widely publicised both at the time of the expedition, and later when they were found. Per Olof Sundman’s book The Flight of the Eagle (1967) was turned into a film by Jan Troell in 1982. Although these photographs were taken as scientific observations, and to document the work of the members of the expedition, they now appear as some of the most remarkable and beautiful photographs in polar history.
John Hertzberg (1871-1935) was a photographer and docent at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. He was commissioned to develop the exposed films, and managed successfully to process ninety-three of Strindberg’s photographs. He made copies of the negatives, which were used to produce the prints on paper that are now at institutions including Moderna Museet, the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm and Grenna Museum – Polarcenter in Gränna.
The original negatives ended up at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Hertzberg re-touched some of the pictures, and these are primarily the ones that have been published and embody the public perception of the expedition. Moderna Museet has both sets, and the re-touched photographs are shown above the un-retouched versions in this exhibition.
Nils Strindberg (Swedish, 1872-1897) At camp
From the series The Flight of the Eagle 1897/1930
Gelatin silver print Some rights reserved by Tekniska museet
Nils Strindberg (Swedish, 1872-1897) Camp on White Island
From the series The Flight of the Eagle
1897/1930
Gelatin silver print Some rights reserved by Tekniska museet
William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Four Shelves of Books
1844
Salted Paper Print
William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877)
The Scientist William Henry Fox Talbot in Britain experimented with various silver salt solutions on paper. In the mid-1830s, he succeeded in producing a negative image on photosensitive paper in a camera and had thus ingeniously invented the negative.
In 1844-1846, he published what could be regarded as the first photographically illustrated magazine, The Pencil of Nature, in which he described the technique and how photography could be used in practice. He himself claimed that its most important use was to produce evidence, but he also had artistic ambitions for his photographic images. It was Talbot who eventually launched the term “photography” (writing with light) for his invention. Many different words and metaphors were used to describe this new medium, but photography was soon established as its proper name.
Oscar Gustave Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Lesson
1860
Albumen silver print
Carl Jacob Malmberg (Swedish, 1824-1895) The copper quay and the polishing works at Fiskars bruk, Finland
1872
Albumen silver print
Fiskars (Swedish, Finnish: Fiskari) is a village in the town of Raseborg (Raasepori) in western Uusimaa, Finland. The village is the site of the former Fiskars Bruk, which was founded in 1646 and gave rise to the company Fiskars.
The exhibition Written in Light – The First Photographers explores Moderna Museet’s collection of photography from the second half of the 19th century. It includes the Museum’s unique collection of daguerreotypes and works by a few of the world’s most famous photographers: Julia Margaret Cameron, Oscar Gustave Rejlander, and Carleton E. Watkins.
Since its invention, photography has developed, changed, and been used for many different aims and purposes. With the breakthrough of digital images, and their omnipresence in social media, photography is once again in a period of change. This gives all the more reason to look back and consider the impact of its legacy on contemporary photography. This exhibition highlights the Museum’s collection of daguerreotypes, but also gives examples of other early photographic techniques.
Thanks to two significant acquisitions in the mid-1960s, the Helmut Gernsheim Duplicate Collection, and the Helmer Bäckström Photographic Collection, some of the most internationally famous photographers in history are represented at Moderna Museet.
Before and Behind the Lens
Written in Light and Film Inside an Image are part of the photographic project Before and Behind the Lens, which consists of a series of exhibitions, discussions and guided tours. Before and Behind the Lens examines the role of photographic images in art and the transformation of the medium since the early experiments with new technology in the 19th century, to today’s explorations of the potential of the optical lens. Moderna Museet has one of Europe’s finest collections of photography, ranging from pioneers such as Julia Margaret Cameron to many of the most influential contemporary artists who visualise the world for us with the camera lens.
Press release from Moderna Museet
Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill Misses Grierson
c. 1845
Salted paper print, calotype
Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) and David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)
The first prominent calotype practitioners were active in Scotland, which was exempt from Talbot’s patent restrictions. David Octavius Hill was a portrait painter, and Robert Adamson an engineer. In 1843, they began collaborating as photographers, after Hill had been assigned to portray a group of clergymen and laymen who had left the Church of Scotland and founded the Free Church of Scotland. Hill wanted to use photographs to create individual portraits of the several hundred participants in this assembly.
It took them more than a year to produce a calotype of each member, and the painting took another 20 years for Hill to complete. They continued working together for four years, until Adamson’s premature death, producing nearly 3,000 photographs of architecture, landscapes, but especially portraits, which they always signed together. They also documented working women and men in the fishing village of Newhaven near Edinburgh in a natural and personal style that was unusual for that period.
Salted Paper Print, Calotype
Silver in common salt on/in paper 1839 – c. 1870
A paper is first soaked in a saline solution and then brushed on one side with silver nitrate, forming light-sensitive silver chloride. After allowing the paper to dry in the dark, it is exposed in sunlight for hours, in contact with a negative, until the image appears (printing-out). Excess silver chloride is then subjected to fixation in a strong saline solution or in sodium thiosulphate and is rinsed away in water. Subsequent gold toning (after 1849) lent the picture a richer tonal range and greater permanence. After 1850 they were often waxed and/or sometimes coated with a layer of albumen. Salted paper prints have a matte finish, and the paper fibres of the support are clearly visible in magnification. When fixed in salt, the image tone is reddish brown; in sodium sulphate it is a yellowish orange. Permanence is relatively low, and when faded or discoloured the prints turn to a yellowish brown. This technique was the first used to reproduce an image on paper from a negative. Although the term calotype is sometimes used, a calotype is actually a salted paper negative.
Johan Wilhelm Bergström (Swedish, 1812-1881) Self-Portrait
c 1850
Daguerreotype
In 1844 Bergström became a photographer, an occupation he would hold for about ten years. As a daguerreotypist he became diligently engaged, and took pictures of the great people of the day. He also took a series of topographic images, which today are of great value. During a visit to Uppsala in 1845, he captured what is today the oldest known photographic image of the city, as well as a stereoscope image.
Daguerreotype
Amalgam on silver-coated copper 1839 – c. 1865
A copper plate is coated with a thin layer of silver, buffed and treated with iodine vapour in a closed container, transforming the silver to light-sensitive silver iodide. After being exposed in the camera for 10-30 minutes, the image is developed in heated mercury vapour. Silver and mercury form a white amalgam and the image is a reverse, low contrast positive. The picture was initially fixed in a saline bath, later in a bath of sodium sulphite. A subsequent toning in gold solution strengthened the sharpness and stability of the image. To protect the image against chemical and physical damage, the plate was tightly sealed with mats and glass and often enclosed in a case. Daguerreotypes are detailed, neutral in tone, sometimes hand-tinted, and are easily distinguishable by their alternately negative and positive impressions, depending on the angle of the light in which they are viewed.
Marcus Selmer (Danish worked Norway, 1819-1900) Bride from Birkeland
1855
Daguerreotype, hand coloured
Marcus Selmer (Danish worked Norway, 1819-1900) Bride from Birkeland (detail)
1855
Daguerreotype, hand coloured
It is not immediately clear what drew Marcus Selmer (1819-1900), a Danish portrait photographer, to spend most of his life working in Norway. He trained as a pharmacist in his native Denmark, and was working in a chemist owned by his uncle when he discovered daguerreotype photography. He experimented with this new technology in his spare time and began sending his pictures in to local exhibitions. In 1852, Selmer travelled to Norway, to visit some of his uncle’s family in the city of Bergen. He never returned.
He soon found work as a photographer in Bergen and, within a year, was able to establish his own studio. This became the first permanent photographic studio in Bergen, as few photographers who visited would stay all year round. Photographers often visited Bergen in the summer, hoping to capture the fjords and mountains that surround the area, but, as they needed good light for their work, the dark and cold weather had driven most of them away by the time winter rolled around. Selmer ingeniously built his studio almost entirely out of glass, allowing enough light into the space, which enabled him to continue working throughout the year.
Selmer’s work quickly became well-known throughout Norway. He sold many books of his photographs, and sold individual images to the press and the burgeoning tourist industry, before eventually being appointed the royal photographer in 1880. Although his career was varied, Selmer is primarily remembered today for his portraits of local people in national folk costume… These photographs depict the customs, traditions and culture of the Norwegian people, and reflect Selmer’s interest in his adopted home.
Carl Jacob Malmberg (Swedish, 1824-1895) Maria Catharina Malmberg with Children
c. 1860
Ambrotype
Ambrotype
Silver in collodion on glass 1854 – c. 1880
A glass plate, coated with silver halogens in collodion, is sensitised with silver nitrate and then exposed wet in the camera. After being developed in iron sulphate – occasionally with the addition of silver nitrate – and fixed in potassium cyanide and washed, the plate is allowed to dry. The picture is then lacquered or protected with a sheet of glass, and the back is coated with black lacquer, textile, or cardboard so that the picture – actually a thin negative – is seen as a positive. It is a direct positive which is often tastefully displayed with mats and under glass in cases. Ambrotypes have a neutral tone, but are sometimes hand-tinted. The surface is characterised by a typical “doubleness”, as high-keys can be seen in the negative on the glass surface and low-keys against the dark background lining.
Oscar Gustave Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) No title (Shoeless boy playing whistle)
c. 1860
Albumen silver print
Oscar Gustave Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875)
One of few internationally famous Swedish photographers is Oscar Gustave Rejlander, but little is known of his early life in Sweden. He settled in Britain around 1840, where he worked as a photographer until he died. He had probably studied art and was interested in art history. His works show distinct influences from Italian renaissance, Spanish baroque, Dutch 17th-century painting and the British Pre-Raphaelites.
In his studio, he would build and photograph a kind of “tableaux vivants”, or staged scenes. Perhaps the most famous of Rejlander’s works is The Two Ways of Life from 1857, a negative montage consisting of some 30 exposures combined into a composition. Rejlander’s oeuvre also includes a series of pictures of poor children and families. Towards the end of his life, Rejlander met Charles Darwin and was commissioned to illustrate his acclaimed book The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872).
Oscar Gustave Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) The Two Ways of Life
1857
Albumen silver print
In 1857 Rejlander made his best-known allegorical work, The Two Ways of Life. This was a seamlessly montaged combination print made of thirty-two images in about six weeks. First exhibited at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, the work shows two youths being offered guidance by a patriarch. Each youth looks toward a section of a stage-like tableaux vivant – one youth is shown the virtuous pleasures and the other the sinful pleasures. (Wikipedia)
Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916) Down the Valley, Yosemite
1861
Albumen silver print
Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916) Tutueamela, El Capitan, 3000ft, Yosemite
1861
Albumen silver print
Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916)
Voyages of discovery, nature and landscapes were popular motifs for the early photographers. The growing tourism increased demand for pictures from exotic places, making this a source of income for publishers of photographic literature. The American West was one such region, and some of the photographers who began working there also documented the American Civil War. One of the most prominent of these was Carleton E. Watkins, who had travelled and photographed the Yosemite Valley on several occasions in the first half of the 1860s.
In his large-format photographs, so-called mammoth prints, he captured the massive mountain formations, dramatic waterfalls and gigantic trees. His heavy equipment was carried by some ten mules, and it is almost a miracle, considering the difficult conditions, that so many of his photographs survived.
A definite advancement in the process of creating negatives was made by the Brit Frederick Scott Archers (1813-1857), who discovered how to use glass sheets for the negative instead of paper. Collodion was used to bind the necessary silver salt to the glass, but it could only be exposed while wet, hence the term wet plate process. The glass negatives gave sharp details, and a large number of paper prints could be made from one negative.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) The Mother of Salome
1870
Albumen silver print
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) The Angel at the Tomb
1870
Albumen silver print
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879)
In Victorian Britain, a small group of photographers were the very first to attempt to create and formulate art photography. Julia Margaret Cameron, who belonged to this group, left behind a fantastic collection of intimate portraits of her family and large circle of friends. She was an amateur photographer who was active mainly in the 1860s and 1870s.
Her staged pictures, inspired by myths, biblical stories and English literature, have a characteristically expressive soft focus. Cameron’s photographs are reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelites and renaissance painting. The Moderna Museet collection of Julia Margaret Cameron includes portraits of Charles Darwin, Henry Taylor and Alfred Tennyson, along with staged tableaux of The Angel at the Grave and the melodramatic Maud from one of Tennyson’s most famous poems. Cameron’s last major photographic project in the UK, before she and her family moved to Ceylon, present Sri Lanka, was to illustrate Tennyson’s work Idylls of the King (1874-75).
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) Maud “There has Fallen a splendid Tear From the Passion Flower at the Gate” 1875
Illustration to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Other Poems. Sitter is Mary Ann Hillier
Albumen silver print
Albumen Silver Print
Silver in albumen on paper 1850 – c. 1900
A paper is brushed with a solution of albumen (egg white) and table salt and is allowed to dry. It is then bathed in silver nitrate and again allowed to dry, this time in darkness. Albumen, salt and silver form an emulsion containing light-sensitive silver salts which are exposed in daylight in direct contact with a negative until the desired image appears (printing-out). Residual light-sensitive silver salts are then removed through fixation, and the picture is washed in water. After 1855, most albumen silver photographs were gold-toned, followed by additional fixation and rinsing. Commercially produced albumen silver paper became available in 1863. Albumen silver prints have a thin paper support and are therefore normally mounted. The surface is usually glossy, and the tone may vary from yellow / red / brown to a violet blue, depending on exposure time and toning. Prints commonly change in tone to yellow / yellow-green in high-keys due to deterioration of the albumen. In magnification characteristic cracks can be seen.
Rosalie Sjöman (Swedish, 1833-1919) Alma Sjöman
c. 1875
Albumen silver print, hand coloured
Rosalie Sjöman (Swedish, 1833-1919)
Rosalie Sjöman was one of many prominent women photographers. She opened a studio in 1864 on Drott-ninggatan 42 in Stockholm, after being widowed with three small children. The photographer Carl Jacob Malmberg had had his studio at this address previously, and there are some indications that Sjöman may have been working for him. Her business prospered, and towards the end of the 1870s Rosalie Sjöman had five female employees, and she seems to have chosen to hire women only. R. Sjöman & Comp. later opened studios on Regeringsgatan 6, and in Kalmar, Halmstad and Vaxholm.
Her oeuvre includes numerous carte-de-visite portraits and larger so-called cabinet cards, with a mixture of classic portraits, various staged scenes, people wear-ing local folk costumes, and mosaics. The expertly hand-tinted photographs are especially eye-catching; several of them portray her daughter Alma Sjöman.
In the 1860s, photography progressed from being an exclusive novelty into a more widespread and popular medium. The popular carte-de-visite were introduced in France in the mid-1850s, but became extremely fashionable when Emperor Napoleon III had his portrait made in the new format (6 x 9 cm). This trend spread rapidly, and portrait studios opened in large cities and smaller towns. This cartomania lasted for a decade, and the market stabilised around the mid-1870s, when the photographic medium entered a calmer phase.
Carl Jacob Malmberg (Swedish, 1824-1895) No title
From the series Gymnastics
c. 1875
Albumen silver print
Carl Jacob Malmberg (Swedish, 1824-1895)
The collection Carl Jacob Malmberg left behind includes most photographic techniques and image types. He is also an example of a photographer’s career development after the first innovative period in the 1840s and up to the 1890s. Malmberg was born in Finland and first studied to be a goldsmith in St Petersburg, where he also learned photography.
He moved to Stockholm, where he opened a studio in 1859 on Drottninggatan 42, and later on Norrtullsgatan 2, and finally on Regeringsgatan 6. Around this period, when cartes-de-visite portraits came into fashion, Malmberg’s practice really took off. On a visit to Finland in 1872, he took a series of photographs at Fiskars iron mill, documenting all the workshops and buildings. A slightly odd portfolio in Malmberg’s collection consists of more than 100 pictures of gymnasts. He had been commissioned by Hjalmar Ling at the Gymnastiska Centralinstitutet in Stockholm to take these pictures to illustrate the book Förkortad Öfversikt af allmän Rörelselära (Short Summary of General Exercise Physiology, 1880).
David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson William Etty
1844/c. 1880
Carbon Print Reproduction photo: Prallan Allsten/Moderna Museet
Carbon Print
Charcoal (and colour) pigments and potassium bichromate in gelatin on paper 1864 – c. 1930
An emulsion with pigment and potassium dichromate in gelatin on thin paper is exposed in contact with a negative in daylight. The gelatin is hardened in relation to the amount of light during the exposure. The soaked paper is then turned over and pressed against a new support, coated with insoluble gelatin. The original support comes off in a bath of warm water or may be pulled off, and leaves an image with hardened pigmented gelatin. Any unexposed gelatin can then be washed off. The picture is finally subjected to an alum bath to remove the residual light-sensitive dichromate and to further harden the remaining gelatin. The result is a reversed image. It can be corrected by first reversing the negative or by transferring the image to a new support (Autotype).
Bühler and Höchheimer: A direct process on fabricated papers which were sensitised in alcohol, exposed in contact with a negative and developed in water. Carbon prints have a clear relief character with raised and glossy low-key areas. The tone is usually deep brown or black, but may vary with the choice of pigment. In magnification the emulsion gives a “ragged” impression, especially in high-keys.
Carl Curman (Swedish, 1833-1913) Waldemarsudde 1888
1888
Cyanotype
Carl Curman (Swedish, 1833-1913)
The physician Carl Curman had many interests, and studied both medicine and art as a young man. Eventually, he became a famous balneologist, and initiated the plan for public baths in Stockholm and eventually also the Sturebadet swimming baths.
He built a photographic studio at the Karolinska Institute in the early 1860s, and was a pioneer of medical photography, before being appointed a professor of plastic anatomy at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1869. His lectures have been documented, in pictures showing students gathered around Curman for dissections. These photographic studies of the human anatomy were also used in the emerging field of eugenics – a troubling part of Western history.
Curman was never a professional photographer, but is one of the many practitioners who have made their mark on the history of photography. His more private projects include pictures from Lysekil, where he worked as a balneologist, from Stockholm where he lived, and from various travels abroad, together with his wife Calla Curman, co-founder of the women’s society Nya Idun.
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Moderna Museet is ten minutes away from Kungsträdgården, and twenty minutes from T-Centralen or Gamla Stan. Walk past Grand Hotel and Nationalmuseum on Blasieholmen, opposite the Royal Palace. After crossing the bridge to Skeppsholmen, continue up the hill. The entrance to Moderna Museet and Arkitekturmuseet is on the left-hand side.
Some of the earlier photographs in this posting from the 19th and early 20th century are bold and striking. They also make me feel incredibly sad.
Human beings subjugated, brought to Britain, displayed, exoticised and exhibited for the delectation of royalty and the white masses. Exiled to Britain never to see their homeland again except for a few brief, controlled visits; presented to Queen Victoria, as if a gift, from King Gezo of Dahomey; or made a servant of an explorer. And the fate of most of these people is disease, dis-ease, and an early death.
As documentary evidence, the photographs attest to the lives of the disenfranchised. They mark the lives of individual people as that most valuable thing, a human life. In this sense they are important. But I find this photographic documentation of Britain’s imperial history of empire and expansion quite repugnant, both morally and spiritually. Where the “Sir Johns” and “Sir Roberts” are named, but the pygmies are displayed anonymously all dressed up in Western attire: “Pygmies of Central Africa.”
As Caroline Molloy observes, while standing as testament to cultural diversity in the late 19th/early 20th century, “the historical colonial connotations of the photographic exhibition strategies used in the Expansion and Empire gallery cannot be ignored.” The taxonomic ordering of individual sitters identified by name, status, biography, by group portraits of racial type and status. Basically a white patriarchy in which a standard of male supremacism is enforced through a variety of cultural, political, and interpersonal strategies. Super/racism.
“Colonialism is the establishment of a colony in one territory by a political power from another territory, and the subsequent maintenance, expansion, and exploitation of that colony. The term is also used to describe a set of unequal relationships between the colonial power and the colony and often between the colonists and the indigenous peoples.” (Wikipedia)
Unequal relationships; exploitation; and the probing gaze of the camera to document it all.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS George Hurrell’s photographs are a knockout!
Many thankx to the National Portrait Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
‘There is an umbilical connection. There is no understanding Englishness without understanding its imperial and colonial dimensions.’
Portraits of black Britons unearthed after 125 years in new exhibition
Photographs uncovering Britain’s black history before the Windrush Generation have been unveiled in a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Curator Renée Mussai explains the history behind the Black Chronicles collection.
Sir (John) Benjamin Stone (British, 1838-1914) Four Hausa Gun Carriers of the South Nigerian Regiment
1902
Platinum print, 1902
6 1/8 in. x 8 in. (157mm x 203mm)
Given by House of Commons Library, 1974
The Southern Nigeria Regiment was a British colonial regiment which operated in Nigeria in the early part of the 20th century. The Regiment was formed out of the Niger Coast Protectorate Force and part of the Royal Niger Constabulary. The Lagos Battalion or Hausa Force was absorbed into the Regiment in May 1906 and became the Regiment’s second battalion. On 1 January 1914 the Southern Nigeria Regiment’s two battalions were merged with those of the Northern Nigeria Regiment to become simply the Nigeria Regiment.
Sir (John) Benjamin Stone (British, 1838-1914) Sergeant and three Privates of the King’s African Rifles
1902
Platinum print, 1902
6 1/8 in. x 8 in. (156mm x 203mm)
Given by House of Commons Library, 1974
The King’s African Rifles (KAR) was a multi-battalion British colonial regiment raised from Britain’s various possessions in British East Africa in the present-day African Great Lakes region from 1902 until independence in the 1960s. It performed both military and internal security functions within the colonial territory, and later served outside these territories during the World Wars. The rank and file (askaris) were drawn from native inhabitants, while most of the officers were seconded from the British Army. When the KAR was first raised there were some Sudanese officers in the battalions raised in Uganda, and native officers were commissioned towards the end of British colonial rule.
Sir (John) Benjamin Stone (British, 1838-1914) Pygmies of Central Africa 1905
Platinum print, 1905
6 1/8 in. x 8 in. (157mm x 203mm)
Given by House of Commons Library, 1974
Sir John Benjamin Stone (9 February 1838 – 2 July 1914), known as Benjamin, was a British Conservative politician, and noted photographer. …
He was a prolific amateur documentary photographer who travelled widely in pursuit of his hobby. He made 26,000 photographs and wrote books as he travelled to Spain, Norway, Japan and Brazil. Amongst his published works were A Summer Holiday in Spain (1873), Children of Norway (1882), and a fairy tale called The Traveller’s Joy. He also made an invaluable record of the folk customs and traditions of the British Isles, which influenced later photographers of note, including Homer Sykes, Daniel Meadows, Anna Fox and Tony Ray-Jones. Stone wrote of his purpose as being “to portray for the benefit of future generations the manners and customs, the festivals and pageants, the historic places and places of our times.”
Stone travelled with a scientific expedition to northern Brazil to see the 1893 total solar eclipse. Notable images taken by Stone include those of the deposition of governor José Clarindo de Queirós of the then province of Ceará in Brazil, in which he prevented the rebels from firing at the governor’s palace until he had taken photographs of them beside their guns.
The Benjamin Stone Photographic Collection housed in the Library of Birmingham contains many thousands of examples of his work. In 1897 he founded the National Photographic Record Association, of which he became president. The National Portrait Gallery holds 62 of his portraits and many photographs of people and places in and around Westminster. His amateur career culminated in 1911 with his appointment as official photographer to the coronation of King George V. He became president of the Birmingham Photographic Society, a Justice of the Peace, and a member of the Society of Antiquaries and of the Geological Society.
Sir (John) Benjamin Stone (British, 1838-1914) African Pygmies in London (including William Hoffman) 1905 Platinum print, 9 August 1905 8 in. x 6 1/8 in. (203mm x 156mm) Given by House of Commons Library, 1974
“There’s nothing like a photograph for reminding you about difference. There it is. It stares you ineradicably in the face”
~ Professor Stuart Hall, 2008
Black Chronicles showcases over forty photographs that present a unique snapshot of black lives and experiences in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. Developed in collaboration with Autograph ABP, this intervention in three gallery spaces includes some of the earliest photographs in the Gallery’s Collection alongside recently rediscovered photographs from the Hulton Archive, a division of Getty Images.
These portraits of individuals of African and Asian heritage bear witness to Britain’s imperial history of empire and expansion. They highlight an important and complex black presence in Britain before 1948, a watershed moment when the Empire Windrush brought the first large group of Caribbean immigrants to Britain. Research is ongoing and new information emerges continuously.
This display is part of Autograph ABP’s The Missing Chapter, an ongoing archive research programme supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Autograph ABP is a London-based arts charity that works internationally in photography and film, race, representation, cultural identity and human rights.
The portrait of the younger members of the choir, Albert Jonas and John Xiniwe, is a playful take on the photographic process, as they pose for each other while posing for us. The large camera is as much a subject as the aspiring photographer. It also shows the natural exuberance and curiosity of young people towards new technology. The photographer has sought to create the appearance of a snapshot, despite the image being as carefully staged as the portraits of the adult subjects.
Krysia Kitch. “Back In Black,” on the National Portrait Gallery website 6 March 2017 [Online] Cited 31/03/2024
The African Choir were a group of young South African singers that toured Britain between 1891 and 1893. They were formed to raise funds for a Christian school in their home country and performed for Queen Victoria at Osborne House, a royal residence on the Isle of Wight. At some point during their stay, they visited the studio of the London Stereoscopic Company to have group and individual portraits made on plate-glass negatives.
Eleanor Xiniwe, a member of the African Choir who toured London from 1891 to 1893.
On his return to South Africa, choir member Paul Xiniwe (1857-1902) became a leader in Imbumba Yama Nyama (South African Aborigines Association), an organisation that sought to unite African people in their struggle for political rights. He and his wife Eleanor were members of a small group of educated African elite that were involved in national politics, working towards social change and self-government.
Krysia Kitch. “Back In Black,” on the National Portrait Gallery website 6 March 2017 [Online] Cited 31/03/2024
Peter Jackson, 2 December 1889, London. Born in 1860 in St Croix, then the Danish West Indies, Jackson was a boxing champion who spent long periods of time touring Europe. In England, he staged the famous fight against Jem Smith at the Pelican Club in 1889. In 1888 he claimed the title of Australian heavyweight champion.
Musa Bhai travelled to England in 1888 as part of the Booth family, who founded the Salvation Army.
The National Portrait Gallery in partnership with Autograph ABP presents a unique ‘snapshot’ of black lives and experiences in Britain. An important display of photographs, which will reveal some of the stories of Black and Asian lives in Britain from the 1860s through to the 1940s, opens in May at the National Portrait Gallery. Black Chronicles: Photographic Portraits 1862-1948 will bring together some of the earliest photographs of Black and Asian sitters in the National Portrait Gallery’s Collection.
These will be exhibited alongside recently discovered images from the Hulton Archive, a division of Getty Images. The display of over 40 photographs will highlight an important and complex black presence in Britain before 1948, a watershed moment when the Empire Windrush brought the first group of Caribbean migrants to Great Britain. In addition, Black Chronicles: Photographic Portraits 1862-1948 will highlight new acquisitions including a series of portraits by Angus McBean, of Les Ballets Nègres, Britain’s first all-black ballet company and a selection of photographs of the pioneer of classical Indian dance in Britain, Pandit Ram Gopal, by George Hurrell.
Individuals with extraordinary stories, from performers to dignitaries, politicians and musicians, alongside unidentified sitters, will collectively reveal the diversity of representation within 19th and 20th century photography and British society, often absent from historical narratives of the period. They will include the celebrated portraits by Camille Silvy of Sarah Forbes Bonetta, one of the earliest photographic portraits of a black sitter in the Gallery’s Collection. Born in West Africa of Yoruba descent, Sarah was captured at the age of five during the Okeadon War. She was thought to be of royal lineage and was presented to Queen Victoria, as if a gift, from King Gezo of Dahomy. As Queen Victoria’s protégée, Sarah was raised among the British upper class and educated in both England and Sierra Leone. In 1862, she married the merchant and philanthropist James Pinson Labulo Davies.
Black Chronicles: Photographic Portraits 1862-1948 will also feature Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a celebrated British composer of English and Sierra Leonean descent who was once called the ‘African Mahler’; Dadabhai Naoroji, the first British Indian MP for Finsbury in 1892; members of the African Choir, a troupe of entertainers from South Africa who performed for Queen Victoria in 1891; international boxing champion Peter Jackson a.k.a ‘The Black Prince’ from the island of St Croix; and Ndugu M’Hali (Kalulu), the ‘servant’ of British explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley, who inspired Stanley’s 1873 book My Kalulu, Prince, King and Slave: A Story of Central Africa.
Black Chronicles: Photographic Portraits 1862-1948 will include original albumen cartes-de-visite and cabinet cards from the Gallery’s permanent Collection, presented alongside a series of large-scale modern prints from 19th century glass plates in the Hulton Archive’s London Stereoscopic Company collection, which were recently unearthed by Autograph ABP for the first time in 135 years and first shown in the critically acclaimed exhibition ‘Black Chronicles II’ at Rivington Place in 2014.
Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director, National Portrait Gallery, London says: “We are delighted to have the opportunity to collaborate with Autograph ABP and present this important display – bringing together some of the earliest photographs from our Collection alongside new acquisitions and striking images from Hulton Archive’s London Stereoscopic Company collection.”
Renée Mussai, Curator and Head of Archive at Autograph ABP, says: “We are very pleased to share our ongoing research with new audiences at the National Portrait Gallery. The aim of the Black Chronicles series is to open up critical inquiry into the archive to locate new knowledge and support our mission to continuously expand and enrich photography’s cultural histories. Not only does the sitters’ visual presence in Britain bear direct witness to the complexities of colonial history, they also offer a fascinating array of personal narratives that defy pre-conceived notions of cultural diversity prior to the Second World War.
McPhail Hall’s reference to the cause and effect of colonialism resonates with all of the life stories represented in the exhibition, but perhaps none more poignantly than that of Ndugu M’Hali (c. 1865-1877). M’Hali was only about seven years old when he was given as a slave to the journalist Sir Henry Morton Stanley, who was in Africa in search of the legendary Dr David Livingston. Stanley renamed the young boy ‘Kalulu’, and he became Stanley’s personal servant, accompanying him in his travels across the globe. M’hali died with four others when their canoe overturned navigating rapids in the Lualaba River in the Congo. Stanley named them ‘Kalulu Falls’ in his honour. There were several photographs of M’hali in the exhibition – two from the series with Stanley ‘recreating’ scenes from the search for Livingstone, with painted backdrop and rocks and vegetation strategically placed in the foreground. M’hali is clearly depicted as servant to his master, serving him tea in one image and carrying his second gun in another. In the solo portrait he is standing, leaning lightly on a heavy chair, his sombre face a sharp contrast to his casual stance. His slightly crumpled three-piece suit adds to the relaxed style of the portrait, yet it still feels staged – M’hali conveys a sense of caution rather than ease.
Krysia Kitch. “Back In Black,” on the National Portrait Gallery website 6 March 2017 [Online] Cited 31/03/2024
Ndugu M’Hali (c. 1865-1877) was the personal servant to explorer and journalist Sir Henry Morton Stanley. As a slave he was given to Stanley by an Arab merchant in present day Tanzania during the explorer’s quest to find the missing Dr David Livingstone. Named ‘Kalulu’ by Stanley, he was educated in London and accompanied Stanley on his travels to Europe, America and the Seychelles. He died during an expedition in 1877 in the Lualaba River, the headstream of the River Congo, Stanley named these rapids ‘Kalulu Falls’ in his memory.
Samuel A. Walker (British, 1841-1922) Farina’s Friendly Zulus
1879
Albumen carte-de-visite
Courtesy of Michael Graham Stewart collection
This man was brought to Britain with a Zulu troupe during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 and was part of explorer Guillermo Antonio Farini’s exhibition of ‘Friendly Zulus’ in London, 1879.
Advert for the Lion Troupe of Ashante Warriors, the Wonders of the World
c. 1890
Courtesy of Michael Graham Stewart collection
In the centre of the gallery is an original cartes-de-visite day book from the Camille Silvy archive, open on a page with portraits of a finely dressed Sarah Forbes Bonetta (1862). Bonetta, goddaughter to Queen Victoria, was born of royal Yoruba blood, captured and enslaved as a child. She was gifted to Queen Victoria, who arranged for her fostering and education. The Bonetta photographs exemplify the strength of the research, and succeed in complicating colonial narratives.
The additional intervention into the National Portrait archive to compliment the Hulton Archive studio portrait photographs are exhibited in galleries 23 and 31. They are more complex responses to Black Chronicles. Drawing from existing NPG archive material, the photographs and paintings selected use different registers to evidence historical Black and Asian contributions to British history. The inclusion of Angus McBean’s distinct black and white photographs of the Ballets Negres in gallery 31 are notable in their historical context. McBean’s photographs document the first black ballet company. The cartes-de-viste photographs in gallery 23 are displayed as original photographs in a glass cabinet in the centre of the Expansion and Empire room. The individual sitters are identified by name, status and biography, the group portraits by racial type, status and having visited the House of Commons. Whilst these images stand testament to cultural diversity in the late 19th / early 20th century, the historical colonial connotations of the photographic exhibition strategies used in the Expansion and Empire gallery cannot be ignored.
Sarah Forbes Bonetta (1843-1880) was a Yoruba woman, thought to be of royal lineage, captured during a slave raid when she was only five. King Gezo of Dahomey (in present-day Benin) sent her as a gift to Queen Victoria, who arranged for her education. The Queen maintained an interest in the young woman, and was particularly impressed by her academic and musical abilities. Sarah became a regular visitor to Windsor Castle and an admired member of the royal court. Shortly after she married the businessman and philanthropist James Pinson Labulo Davies (1829-1906), they moved to Sierra Leone. Queen Victoria was godmother to their first child Victoria.
Krysia Kitch. “Back In Black,” on the National Portrait Gallery website 6 March 2017 [Online] Cited 31/03/2024
Camille Silvy, considered one of the greatest French photographers of the nineteenth century, established many of the conventions of early portrait photography. Under the patronage of Queen Victoria, he photographed members of the upper echelons of society, as well as the aspiring middle classes, from his studio in Bayswater. The National Portrait Gallery London has twelve of Silvy’s Daybooks in its collection, examples of every studio session set out chronologically, and all sitters documented by number and name. Sarah Davies (formerly Forbes Bonetta) and James Pinson Labulo Davies appear in Daybook volume nine, photographed separately and together on the occasion of their marriage in 1862.
Krysia Kitch. “Back In Black,” on the National Portrait Gallery website 6 March 2017 [Online] Cited 31/03/2024
Born in west Africa of Yoruba descent, Sarah Forbes Bonetta (1843-1880) was captured at the age of five during the Okeadon War. She was thought to be of royal lineage and was presented to Queen Victoria, as if a gift, from King Gezo of Dahomey. She was named after Captain Frederick E. Forbes of the Royal Navy, who brought her to England, onboard his ship HMS Bonetta. As Queen Victoria’s protégée, Sarah was raised among the British upper class, and educated in both England and Sierra Leone. She became an accomplished pianist and linguist.
In 1862 at St Nicholas’s Church in Brighton she married the merchant and philanthropist James Pinson Labulo Davies (1829-1906). These photographs were taken to mark their marriage. James was born in Sierra Leone to Nigerian parents, and enlisted with the British Navy. He is credited with pioneering cocoa farming in West Africa. The couple returned to Africa soon after their wedding. Queen Victoria was godmother to their first child, Victoria who later attended Cheltenham Ladies College. The photographs are pasted into one of the daybooks that record the work of Camille Silvy, one of the most successful portrait photographers in London at the time.
Album 1-12: Camille Silvy Daybooks
A collection of twelve albums representing the output of Camille Silvy’s (1834-1910) photographic portrait studio based at 38 Porchester Terrace, Bayswater, London. Compiled by the studio, each album is arranged almost entirely chronologically and in sitter number order. Each page is divided into a grid of four sections with each section featuring one cartes-de-visite sized albumen print from the sittings, pasted beneath the sitter number and a handwritten identification of the photograph’s subject.
Sitters range from royalty, peers and the landed gentry to London’s thriving migrant merchant community, and as a result, the Daybooks paint a unique view of London society and its visitors during the 1860s. In addition to studio portraits, there are a number of equestrian and post-mortem portraits. Non-portrait material includes copies of various paintings, such as the ‘Windsor Beauties’ by Sir Peter Lely, and other works of art, such as Marochetti’s sculptures, and reproductions from the Marquis d’Azeglio’s ‘Manuscrit Sforza’ and the ‘Manuscript d’Avalos’. There are also several views of the exterior of Silvy’s photographic establishment, as well as many portraits of Silvy himself, his family, and his business partner Auguste Renoult.
Camille Silvy (French, 1834-1910) Sarah Forbes Bonetta
Brighton, 1862
Albumen print
Courtesy of Paul Frecker collection/The Library of Nineteenth-Century Photography
Samuel Ajayi Crowther (c. 1809 – 31 December 1891) was a linguist and the first African Anglican bishop in Nigeria. Born in Osogun (in what is now Iseyin Local Government, Oyo State, Nigeria), Crowther was a Yoruba who also identified with Sierra Leone’s ascendant Creole ethnic group…
Crowther was also a close associate and friend of Captain James Pinson Labulo Davies [husband of Sarah Forbes Bonetta featured above], an influential politician, mariner, philanthropist and industrialist in colonial Lagos. Both men collaborated on a couple of Lagos social initiatives such as the opening of The Academy (a social and cultural center for public enlightenment) on October 24, 1866 with Crowther as the 1st patron and Captain J.P.L Davies as 1st president.
Crowther was selected to accompany the missionary James Schön on the Niger expedition of 1841.Together with Schön, he was expected to learn Hausa for use on the expedition. The goal of the expedition was to spread commerce, teach agricultural techniques, spread Christianity, and help end the slave trade. Following the expedition, Crowther was recalled to England, where he was trained as a minister and ordained by the Bishop of London. This after Schön had written to the Church Missionary Society noting Crowther’s usefulness and ability on the expedition, recommending them to prepare him for ordination.He returned to Africa in 1843 and with Henry Townsend, opened a mission in Abeokuta, in today’s Ogun State, Nigeria.
Crowther began translating the Bible into the Yoruba language and compiling a Yoruba dictionary. In 1843, a grammar book which he started working on during the Niger expedition was published; and a Yoruba version of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer followed later. Crowther also compiled A vocabulary of the Yoruba language,including a large number of local proverbs, published in London in 1852. He also began codifying other languages. Following the British Niger Expeditions of 1854 and 1857, Crowther produced a primer for the Igbo language in 1857, another for the Nupe language in 1860, and a full grammar and vocabulary of Nupe in 1864.
In 1864, Crowther was ordained as the first African bishop of the Anglican Church; he was consecrated a bishop on St Peter’s day 1864, by Charles Longley, Archbishop of Canterbury at Canterbury Cathedral.He later received the degree of Doctor of Divinity from the University of Oxford.
Martha Ann Erskine Ricks (1816-1901) began life as a slave in Tennessee, until her father bought the whole family’s freedom in 1830, whereupon they moved to Liberia. She was an industrious woman and prospered in her new country. Later in her life, Ricks designed and made an intricate cotton silk quilt depicting a Liberian coffee tree with over three hundred pointed green leaves with bright red coffee berries, all hand appliquéd onto white fabric. It is thought that the material is a combination of Liberian cotton silk and cotton, interwoven as if representing two strands of her life experience. The quilt took her over twenty-five years to make, and, in 1892, she travelled to Britain hoping to present it to Queen Victoria. Through the efforts of the Liberian ambassador she was granted an audience with the queen at Windsor Castle, thus achieving her long-standing desire. In her portrait, Ricks is very smartly and fashionably dressed – it would be fascinating to know whether her outfit was her own creation.
Krysia Kitch. “Back In Black,” on the National Portrait Gallery website 6 March 2017 [Online] Cited 31/03/2024
Martha Ann Erskine Ricks (1816-1901) had been enslaved on a Tennessee plantation. She settled in Liberia in 1830, as did many freed American slaves, after her father bought the family’s freedom. In 1892, Ricks travelled to Britain to fulfil her dream of presenting Queen Victoria with a quilt depicting a Liberian coffee tree in bloom, which took twenty-five years to make. With the help of the Liberian ambassador, Edward Blyden, she gained an audience with the queen at Windsor Castle. During her time in London, Ricks met John Archer, the first black mayor of a London borough.
Antoine Claudet (French, 1797-1867) Maharajah Duleep Singh
1860s
Albumen carte-de-visite
3 1/2 in. x 2 1/4 in. (89mm x 57mm)
acquired Clive Holland, 1959
Maharaja Duleep Singh, GCSI (6 September 1838 – 22 October 1893), also known as Dalip Singhand later in life nicknamed the Black Prince of Perthshire, was the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire. He was Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s youngest son, the only child of Maharani Jind Kaur.
After the assassinations of four of his predecessors, he came to power in September 1843, at the age of five. For a while, his mother ruled as Regent, but in December 1846, after the First Anglo-Sikh War, she was replaced by a British Resident and imprisoned. Mother and son were not allowed to meet again for thirteen and a half years. In April 1849 ten-year-old Duleep was put in the care of Dr John Login.
He was exiled to Britain at age 15 and was befriended and much admired by Queen Victoria, who is reported to have written of the Punjabi Maharaja: “Those eyes and those teeth are too beautiful”.The Queen was godmother to several of his children. In 1856, he tried to contact his mother, but his letter and emissaries were intercepted by the British in India, and did not reach her. However, he persisted and, with help from Login, was allowed to meet her on 16 January 1861 at Spence’s Hotel in Calcutta and return with her to the United Kingdom.During the last two years of her life, his mother told the Maharaja about his Sikh heritage and the Empire which once had been his to rule. …
Duleep Singh died in Paris in 1893 at the age of 55, having seen India after the age of fifteen during only two brief, tightly-controlled visits in 1860 (to bring his mother to England) and in 1863 (to scatter his mother’s ashes). Duleep Singh’s wish for his body to be returned to India was not honoured, in fear of unrest, given the symbolic value the funeral of the son of the Lion of the Punjab might have caused, given growing resentment of British rule. His body was brought back to be buried according to Christian rites, under the supervision of the India Office in Elveden Church beside the grave of his wife Maharani Bamba, and his son Prince Edward Albert Duleep Singh. The graves are located on the west side of the Church.
A life-size bronze statue of the Maharaja showing him on a horse was unveiled by HRH the Prince of Wales in 1999 at Butten Island in Thetford, a town which benefited from his and his sons’ generosity.
Antoine François Jean Claudet (August 18, 1797 – December 27, 1867), was a French photographer and artist who produced daguerreotypes. He was born in La Croix-Rousse son of Claude Claudet, a cloth merchant and Etiennette Julie Montagnat, was active in Great Britain and died in London. He was a student of Louis Daguerre.
Having acquired a share in L. J. M. Daguerre’s invention, he was one of the first to practice daguerreotype portraiture in England, and he improved the sensitising process by using chlorine (instead of bromine) in addition to iodine, thus gaining greater rapidity of action. He also invented the red (safe) dark-room light, and it was he who suggested the idea of using a series of photographs to create the illusion of movement. The idea of using painted backdrops is also attributed to him.
From 1841 to 1851 he operated a studio on the roof of the Adelaide Gallery (now the Nuffield Centre), behind St. Martin’s in the Fields church, London. He opened subsequent studios at the Colosseum in Regent’s Park (1847-1851) and at 107 Regent Street (1851-1867).
Antoine Claudet (French, 1797-1867) Maharani Duleep Singh
1860s
Albumen carte-de-visite
3 1/2 in. x 2 1/4 in. (88mm x 57mm)
acquired Clive Holland, 1959
Maharani Bamba Duleep Singh (born Bamba Müller; July 6, 1848 – September 18, 1887) was the wife of Maharaja Duleep Singh. Brought up by Christian missionaries, she married Duleep Singh and became Maharani Bamba, wife of the last Maharaja of Lahore.Her transformation from illegitimate girl living in a Cairo mission to a Maharani living a life of luxury with the “Black Prince of Perthshire” has been compared to the “Cinderella” story.
On his return from Bombay Duleep passed through Cairo and visited the missionaries there on 10 February 1864. He visited again a few days later and was taken around the girls’ school, where he first met Bamba Müller, who was an instructor. She was the only girl there who had committed herself to a Christian life. On each visit Duleep made presents to the mission of several hundreds of pounds.
Duleep Singh wrote to the teachers at the missionary school at the end of the month in the hope that they would recommend a wife for him as he was to live in Britain and he wanted a Christian wife of Eastern origin. Queen Victoria had told Duleep that he should marry an Indian princess who had been educated in England, but he desired a girl with less sophistication. The final proposal had to be done via an intermediary as Duleep did not speak Arabic, Müller’s only language. The missionaries discussed this proposal with Müller. She was unsure whether to accept the proposal offered via the missionaries. Her first ambition was to rise to teach children in a missionary school. Her father was consulted but he left the choice to his daughter. Müller eventually made her decision after praying for guidance. She decided that the marriage was God’s call for her to widen her ambitions. Singh made a substantial contribution of one thousand pounds to the school and married Müller on 7 June 1864 in the British Consulate in Alexandria, Egypt. …
The couple had three sons and three daughters whom they brought up at Elveden Hall in Suffolk, England. Her six children were: Victor Albert Jay (1866-1918), Frederick Victor (1868-1926), Bamba Sophia Jindan (1869-1957), Catherina Hilda(1871-1942), Sophia Alexandra (1876-1948), and Albert Edward Alexander (1879-1893) … In 1886 her husband resolved to return to India. On his way there he was arrested in Aden and forced to return to Europe. Bamba died on September 18, 1887 and was buried at Elveden. Her husband went on to marry again in 1889 to Ada Douglas Wetherill and had two more children. Her son Albert Edward Alexander Duleep Singh died aged thirteen in Hastings on May 1, 1893 and was buried next to his mother. When Bamba’s husband died, his body has brought back to England and buried with his wife and son at Elveden.
Henry Joseph Whitlock (British, 1835-1918) Photographer; son of Joseph Whitlock and older brother of Frederick Whitlock
Henry’s father Joseph Whitlock was the first person to establish a permanent photographic studio in Birmingham, in 1843. In 1852 Henry Whitlock joined the family firm, and three years later he left Birmingham to set up his own studio in Worcester. He returned to Birmingham in 1862, after the death of both his parents, and founded the firm H.J. Whitlock & Sons of Birmingham and Wolverhampton.
Keshab Chandra Sen (Bengali: কেশবচন্দ্র সেন, Keshob Chôndro Shen) (19 November 1838 – 8 January 1884) was an Indian Bengali Hindu philosopher and social reformer who attempted to incorporate Christian theology within the framework of Hindu thought. Born a Hindu, he became a member of the Brahmo Samaj in 1856but founded his own breakaway “Brahmo Samaj of India” in 1866while the Brahmo Samaj remained under the leadership of Maharshi Debendranath Tagore (who headed the Brahmo Samaj till his death in 1905).In 1878 his followers abandoned him after the underage child marriage of his daughter which exposed his campaign against child marriage as hollow.Later in his life he came under the influence of Ramakrishna and founded a syncretic “New Dispensation” or Nôbobidhan inspired by Christianity, and Vaishnavbhakti, and Hindu practices.
Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917) was an educator, social reformer and political leader active in India and Britain. He was the first Indian elected to the House of Commons, and was a Liberal MP from 1892 to 1895. The portrait was made in the year that he was elected, and depicts him with relaxed yet pensive countenance. Despite humble beginnings, Naoroji achieved outstanding academic results and became the first Indian professor at the prestigious Elphinstone College in Mumbai, teaching mathematics and natural philosophy. Naoroji moved to London in 1855, taught Gujurati at University College London, and founded the London Zoroastrian Association in 1861. He played a leading role in establishing the Indian National Congress and was president three times. The organisation was a precursor to the Indian Nationalist Movement.
Krysia Kitch. “Back In Black,” on the National Portrait Gallery website 6 March 2017 [Online] Cited 31/03/2024
Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917) was the first Indian MP to be elected to the House of Commons. Born near Mumbai, the son of a Parsi priest, he was educated at Elphinstone College where he became the first Indian professor of mathematics and natural philosophy. He travelled to London in 1855, becoming professor of Gujurati at University College London and founding the London Zoroastrian Association (1861). He campaigned to open the Indian Civil Service to Indians and formulated the ‘drain theory’, outlining how British rule drained the financial resources of India. He was elected Liberal MP for Finsbury in 1892 and financially supported the Pan-African Conference in 1900.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) Dejazmatch Alamayou Tewodros on the Isle of Wight
1868
Albumen print
Courtesy of Jenny Allsworth collection
Dejazmatch Alemayehu Tewodros, often referred to as HIH Prince Alemayehu or Alamayou of Ethiopia (23 April 1861 – 14 November 1879) was the son of Emperor Tewodros II of Ethiopia. Emperor Tewodros II committed suicide after his defeat by the British, led by Sir Robert Napier, at the Battle of Magdala in 1868. Alemayehu’s mother was Empress Tiruwork Wube.
The young prince was taken to Britain, under the care of Captain Tristram Speedy. The Empress Tiruwork had intended to travel to Britain with her son following the death of her husband, but died on the way to the coast leaving Alemayehu an orphan. Initially, Empress Tiruwork had resisted Captain Speedy’s efforts to be named the child’s guardian, and had even asked the commander of the British forces, Lord Napier, to keep Speedy away from her child and herself. After the death of the Empress however, Napier allowed Speedy to assume the role of caretaker. Upon the arrival of the little Prince’s party in Alexandria however, Speedy dismissed the entire Ethiopian entourage of the Prince much to their distress and they returned to Ethiopia.
While staying at Speedy’s home on the Isle of Wight he was introduced to Queen Victoria at her home at Osborne House. She took a great interest in his life and education. Alamayehu spent some time in India with Speedy and his wife, but the government decided he should be educated in England and he was sent to Cheltenham to be educated under the care of Thomas Jex-Blake, principal of Cheltenham College. He moved to Rugby School with Jex-Blake in 1875, where one of his tutors was Cyril Ransome (the future father of Arthur Ransome). In 1878 he joined the officers’ training school at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, but he was not happy there and the following year went to Far Headingley, Leeds, West Yorkshire, to stay with his old tutor Cyril Ransome. Within a week he had contracted pleurisy and died after six weeks of illness, despite the attentions of Dr Clifford Allbutt of Leeds and other respected consultants.
Queen Victoria mentioned the death of the young prince in her diary, saying what a good and kind boy he had been and how sad it was that he should die so far from his family. She also mentioned how very unhappy the prince had been, and how conscious he was of people staring at him because of his colour.
Queen Victoria arranged for Alamayehu to be buried at Windsor Castle. The funeral took place on 21 November 1879, in the presence of Cyril Ransome, Chancellor of the Exchequer Stafford Northcote, General Napier, and Captain Speedy. A brass plaque in the nave of St George’s chapel commemorates him and bears the words “I was a stranger and ye took me in”, but Alamayehu’s body is buried in a brick vault outside the chapel.Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia arranged for second plaque commemorating the Prince to be placed in the chapel as well.
Angus McBean (8 June 1904 – 9 June 1990) was a Welsh photographer, set designer and cult figure associated with surrealism.
… [Ivor] Novello was so impressed with McBean’s romantic photographs that he commissioned him to take a set of production photographs as well, including young actress Vivien Leigh. The results, taken on stage with McBean’s idiosyncratic lighting, instantly replaced the set already made by the long-established but stolid Stage Photo Company. McBean had a new career and a photographic leading lady: he was to photograph Vivien Leigh on stage and in the studio for almost every performance she gave until her death thirty years later.
McBean resultantly became one of the most significant portrait photographers of the 20th century, and was known as a photographer of celebrities. In the Spring of 1942 his career was temporarily ruined when he was arrested in Bath for criminal acts of homosexuality. He was sentenced to four years in prison and was released in the autumn of 1944. After the Second World War, McBean was able to successfully resume his career.
In 1945, not sure whether he would find work again, McBean set up a new studio in a bomb-damaged building in Endell Street, Covent Garden.He sold his Soho camera for £35, and bought a new half-plate Kodak View monorail camera to which he attached his trusted Zeiss lenses. McBean was commissioned first by the Stratford Memorial Theatre to photograph a production of Anthony and Cleopatra, and all his former clients quickly returned. Through the late 1940s and 50s he was the official photographer at Stratford, the Royal Opera House, Sadler’s Wells, Glyndebourne, the Old Vic and at all the productions of H. M. Tennent, servicing the theatrical, musical and ballet star system. (An example of his work in this genre from 1951 can be seen on the page about Anne Sharp, whom he photographed in a role in one of Benjamin Britten’s operas.) Magazines such as The Sketch and Tatler and Bystander vied to commission McBean’s new series of surreal portraits. In 1952 he photographed Pamela Green as Botticelli’s Venus, with David Ball his boyfriend as Zephyrus.
Despite the decline in demand for theatre and production art during the 1950’s, McBean’s creative and striking ideas provided him with work in the emergent record cover business with companies such as EMI, when he was commissioned to create Cliff Richard’s first four album sleeves. McBean’s later works included being the photographer for the cover of The Beatles’ first album Please Please Me, as well as commissions by a number of other performers. In 1969 he returned with the Beatles to the same location to shoot the cover for their album Get Back. This later came out as Let It Be with a different cover, but McBean’s photo was used (together with an outtake from the Please Please Me cover shoot) for the cover of the Beatles’ 1962-1966 and 1967-1970 compilations in 1973.In his later years he became more selective of the work he undertook, and continued to explore surrealism whilst taking portrait photographs of individuals such as Agatha Christie, Audrey Hepburn, Laurence Olivier and Noël Coward. Both periods of his work (pre and post war) are now eagerly sought by collectors and his work sits in many major collections around the world.
Berto Pasuka(1911-1963), Jamaican dancer and choreographer. The co-founder of ground-breaking dance troupe Les Ballets Negre.
Born Wilbert Passerley in Jamaica, Pasuka ignored his family’s wishes for him to become a dentist, instead following his own passion to dance. He studied classical ballet in Kingston, where he first saw a group of descendants of runaway slaves dancing to the rhythmic beat of a drum. Feeling inspired to take black dance to new audiences, he moved to London in 1939, enrolling at the Astafieva dance school to polish off his choreography skills. Following his work on the movie Men of Two Worlds he and fellow Jamaican dancer Richie Riley, decided to create their own dance company. Les Ballet Negres was born in the 1940’s bringing traditional and contemporary black dance to the UK and Europe with sell-out tours.
Pandit Ram Gopal (1912-2003), Dancer, choreographer and teacher
Dancer, choreographer and teacher. The pioneer of classical Indian dance in this country, Ram Gopal was born in Bangalore, and initially trained in the classical Indian dance style of Kathakali. After the War he starred in a number of Hollywood epics made on location, such as The Purple Plain (1954), and William Dieterle’s Elephant Walk (1954), for which he had also choreographed the dance sequences. After a series of successful world tours he settled in this country in 1954 in London. In the 1960s Gopal was a partner of Alicia Markova, having appeared with her at the Prince’s Theatre in 1960, in a duet – Radha-Krishna – choreographed by him, which transferred to the Edinburgh Festival later that year.
“I love to move, to leap, to float … well, just let the spirit seize me at the sound of drums or music.”
~ Ram Gopal, Rhythm in the Heavens, 1957
Ram Gopal was an international pioneer of Indian classical dance. Gopal’s skill in Bharata Natyam and Kathakali learnt from leading teachers was recognised early. Born in Bangalore, he defied the wishes of his father, a Rajput lawyer and his Burmese mother, to take up dance. He was supported by the Yuvaraja of Mysore and in the 1930s began touring extensively overseas, first with American dancer La Meri.
Gopal made his celebrated London debut in 1939, performing to a full house at the Aldwych Theatre. His performances received glowing reviews from dancers and critics alike. During the Second World War, Gopal returned to India to help the British war effort by dancing for the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA). He settled in London in the 1950s but continued to tour internationally. The dance historian Cyril Beaumont wrote, “I should doubt if any male dancer has travelled more than he, and always with success and a request to return.” Widely recognised for his work as a dancer and choreographer, Gopal also enjoyed a successful career in America, directing dance sequences for Hollywood epics and appearing in films such as Elephant Walk (1954). His best-known creations are the Legend of the Taj Mahal, Dance of the Setting Sun and Dances of India of which he wrote, “I feel I have justified the past while keeping in touch with the present.”
In 1960 the English ballerina Dame Alicia Markova collaborated with Gopal to create the duet Radha-Krishna. Gopal spoke frequently of the ways ballet and Indian dance could complement each other, bringing together diverse cultural experiences. He hoped that through dance “the highest cultures of the East and the West will be drawn together and will work towards a true culture which is above all distinctions of race, nation, and faith.” In 1990 Gopal was given the honorific Indian title of Pandit and was appointed OBE in 1999. Five vintage photographs by Carl Van Vechten, Madame D’Ora and George Hurrell show Gopal in various costumes and dances.
Anonymous text. “Black Chronicles: Photographic Portraits 1862-1948,” on the National Portrait Gallery website [Online] Cited 30/10/2021. No longer available online
National Portrait Gallery
St Martin’s Place
London, WC2H 0HE
Curators: Dr Carol Jacobi, Curator of British Art 1850-1915 at Tate Britain, and Dr Hope Kingsley, Curator, Education and Collections, Wilson Centre for Photography, with Tim Batchelor, Assistant Curator at Tate Britain
Peter Henry Emerson (British, 1856-1936) Haymaker with Rake
c. 1888, published 1890
From Pictures of East Anglian Life portfolio Photogravure on paperImage: 277 x 196mm
Victoria and Albert Museum
Gift from the photographer
An interesting concept for an exhibition. I would have liked to have seen the exhibition to make a more informed comment. Parallels can be drawn, but how much import you put on the connection is up to you vis-à-vis the aesthetic feeling and formal construction of each medium. It is fascinating to note how many of the original art works are photographs with the painting following at a later date, or vice versa. Photographically, Julia Margaret Cameron and John Cimon Warburg are the stars.
Photographs have always been used by artists as aide-mémoire since the birth of photograph. Eugené Atget called his photographs of Paris “Documents pour artistes”, declaring his modest ambition to create images for other artists to use as source material … but I take that statement with a pinch of salt. Perhaps a salt print from a calotype paper negative!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Tate for allowing me to publish the art work and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Tate Britain presents the first major exhibition to celebrate the spirited conversation between early photography and British art. It brings together photographs and paintings including Pre-Raphaelite, Aesthetic and British impressionist works. Spanning 75 years across the Victorian and Edwardian ages, the exhibition opens with the experimental beginnings of photography in dialogue with painters such as J.M.W. Turner and concludes with its flowering as an independent international art form.
Stunning works by John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, JAM Whistler, John Singer Sargent and others will for the first time be shown alongside ravishing photographs by pivotal early photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron, which they inspired and which inspired them.
John Everett Millais (English, 1829-1896) The Woodman’s Daughter 1850-51
Oil paint on canvas
889 x 648mm
Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (English, 1828-1882) Proserpine
1874
Oil on canvas Support: 1251 x 610mm Frame: 1605 x 930 x 85mm
Presented by W. Graham Robertson 1940
Zaida Ben-Yusuf (American born England, 1869-1933) The Odor of Pomegranates
1899, published 1901
Photogravure on paper
Tate
Zaida Ben-Yusuf (21 November 1869 – 27 September 1933) was a New York-based portrait photographer noted for her artistic portraits of wealthy, fashionable, and famous Americans of the turn of the 19th-20th century. She was born in London to a German mother and an Algerian father, but became a naturalised American citizen later in life. In 1901 the Ladies Home Journal featured her in a group of six photographers that it dubbed, “The Foremost Women Photographers in America.” In 2008, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery mounted an exhibition dedicated solely to Ben-Yusuf’s work, re-establishing her as a key figure in the early development of fine art photography…
In 1896, Ben-Yusuf began to be known as a photographer. In April 1896, two of her pictures were reproduced in The Cosmopolitan Magazine, and another study was exhibited in London as part of an exhibition put on by The Linked Ring. She travelled to Europe later that year, where she met with George Davison, one of the co-founders of The Linked Ring, who encouraged her to continue her photography. She exhibited at their annual exhibitions until 1902.
In the spring of 1897, Ben-Yusuf opened her portrait photography studio at 124 Fifth Avenue, New York. On 7 November 1897, the New York Daily Tribune ran an article on Ben-Yusuf’s studio and her work creating advertising posters, which was followed by another profile in Frank Leslie’s Weekly on 30 December. Through 1898, she became increasingly visible as a photographer, with ten of her works in the National Academy of Design-hosted 67th Annual Fair of the American Institute, where her portrait of actress Virginia Earle won her third place in the Portraits and Groups class. During November 1898, Ben-Yusuf and Frances Benjamin Johnston held a two-woman show of their work at the Camera Club of New York.
In 1899, Ben-Yusuf met with F. Holland Day in Boston, and was photographed by him. She relocated her studio to 578 Fifth Avenue, and exhibited in a number of exhibitions, including the second Philadelphia Photographic Salon. She was also profiled in a number of publications, including an article on female photographers in The American Amateur Photographer, and a long piece in The Photographic Times in which Sadakichi Hartmann described her as an “interesting exponent of portrait photography”.
1900 saw Ben-Yusuf and Johnston assemble an exhibition on American women photographers for the Universal Exposition in Paris. Ben-Yusuf had five portraits in the exhibition, which travelled to Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and Washington, D.C. She was also exhibited in Holland Day’s exhibition, The New School of American Photography, for the Royal Photographic Society in London, and had four photographs selected by Alfred Stieglitz for the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1901, Scotland.
In 1901, Ben-Yusuf wrote an article, “Celebrities Under the Camera”, for the Sunday Evening Post, where she described her experiences with her sitters. By this stage she had photographed Grover Cleveland, Franklin Roosevelt, and Leonard Wood, amongst others. For the September issue of Metropolitan Magazine she wrote another article, “The New Photography – What It Has Done and Is Doing for Modern Portraiture”, where she described her work as being more artistic than most commercial photographers, but less radical than some of the better-known art photographers. The Ladies Home Journal that November declared her to be one of the “foremost women photographers in America”, as she began the first of a series of six illustrated articles on “Advanced Photography for Amateurs” in the Saturday Evening Post.
Ben-Yusuf was listed as a member of the first American Photographic Salon when it opened in December 1904, although her participation in exhibitions was beginning to drop off. In 1906, she showed one portrait in the third annual exhibition of photographs at Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, the last known exhibition of her work in her lifetime.
Many photographers trained as painters. They set up studios and employed artists’ models, skilled at holding poses for the time it took to take a picture. Later in the century, improved photographic negatives required shorter exposure times and it became easier to stage and capture difficult positions and spontaneous gestures.
Painters and illustrators used photographs as preparatory studies and as substitutes for props, costumes and models, and art schools created photographic archives for their students. Photographs commissioned and sold by institutions such as the British Museum made classical sculpture and old master paintings more accessible, inspiring both painters and photographers.
Henry Wallis (British, 1830-1916) Chatterton
1856
Oil paint on canvas Support: 622 x 933mm Frame: 905 x 1205 x 132mm
Tate
Bequeathed by Charles Gent Clement 1899
Chatterton is Wallis’s earliest and most famous work. The picture created a sensation when it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856, accompanied by the following quotation from Marlowe:
Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight
And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough.
Ruskin described the work in his Academy Notes as ‘faultless and wonderful’.
Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) was an 18th Century poet, a Romantic figure whose melancholy temperament and early suicide captured the imagination of numerous artists and writers. He is best known for a collection of poems, written in the name of Thomas Rowley, a 15th Century monk, which he copied onto parchment and passed off as mediaeval manuscripts. Having abandoned his first job working in a scrivener’s office he struggled to earn a living as a poet. In June 1770 he moved to an attic room at 39 Brooke Street, where he lived on the verge of starvation until, in August of that year, at the age of only seventeen, he poisoned himself with arsenic. Condemned in his lifetime as a forger by influential figures such as the writer Horace Walpole (1717-1797), he was later elevated to the status of tragic hero by the French poet Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863).
Wallis may have intended the picture as a criticism of society’s treatment of artists, since his next picture of note, The Stonebreaker (1858, Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery), is one of the most forceful examples of social realism in Pre-Raphaelite art. The painting alludes to the idea of the artist as a martyr of society through the Christ-like pose and the torn sheets of poetry on the floor. The pale light of dawn shines through the casement window, illuminating the poet’s serene features and livid flesh. The harsh lighting, vibrant colours and lifeless hand and arm increase the emotional impact of the scene. A phial of poison on the floor indicates the method of suicide. Following the Pre-Raphaelite credo of truth to nature, Wallis has attempted to recreate the same attic room in Gray’s Inn where Chatterton had killed himself. The model for the figure was the novelist George Meredith (1828-1909), then aged about 28. Two years later Wallis eloped with Meredith’s wife, a daughter of the novelist Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866).
Frances Fowle. “Chatterton,” on the Tate website December 2000 [Online] Cited 16/02/2023
James Robinson The Death of Chatterton
1859
Two photographs, hand-tinted albumen prints on paper mounted on card
Collection Dr Brian May
James Robinson The Death of Chatterton (detail)
1859
Two photographs, hand-tinted albumen prints on paper mounted on card
Collection Dr Brian May
THIS STEREOCARD IS NOT IN THE EXHIBITION
One of the most famous paintings of Victorian times was Chatterton, 1856 (Tate) by the young Pre-Raphaelite-style artist, Henry Wallis (1830-1916). Again, the tale of the suicide of the poor poet, Thomas Chatterton, exposed as a fraud for faking medieval histories and poems to get by, had broad appeal. Chatterton was also an 18th-century figure, but Wallis set his picture in a bare attic overlooking the City of London which evoked the urban poverty of his own age. The picture toured the British Isles and hundreds of thousands flocked to pay a shilling to view it. One of these was James Robinson, who saw the painting when it was in Dublin. He immediately conceived a stereographic series of Chatterton’s life. Unfortunately Robinson started with Wallis’s scene (The Death of Chatterton, 1859). Within days of its publication, legal procedures began, claiming his picture threatened the income of the printmaker who had the lucrative copyright to publish engravings of the painting. The ensuing court battles were the first notorious copyright cases. Robinson lost, but strangely, in 1861, Birmingham photographer Michael Burr published variations of Death of Chatterton with no problems. No other photographer was ever prosecuted for staging a stereoscopic picture after a painting and the market continued to thrive…
Robinson’s The Death of Chatterton illustrates the way this uncanny quality [the ability to record reality in detail] distinguishes the stereograph from even the immaculate Pre-Raphaelite style of Wallis’s painting of the same subject. The stereograph represented a young man in 18th-century costume on a bed. The backdrop was painted, but the chest, discarded coat and candle were real. Again, the light and colour appear crude in comparison with the painting but the stereoscope records ‘every stick, straw, scratch’ in a manner that the painting cannot. The torn paper pieces, animated by their three-dimensionality, trace the poet’s recent agitation, while the candle smoke, representing his extinguished life, is different in each photograph due to their being taken at separate moments. The haphazard creases of the bed sheet are more suggestive of restless movement, now stilled, than Wallis’s elegant drapery. Even the individuality of the boy adds potency to his death.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (English, 1828-1882) Beata Beatrix
c. 1864-1870
Oil on canvas Support: 864 x 660mm Frame: 1212 x 1015 x 104mm
Presented by Georgiana, Baroness Mount-Temple in memory of her husband, Francis, Baron Mount-Temple 1889
Rossetti draws a parallel in this picture between the Italian poet Dante’s despair at the death of his beloved Beatrice and his own grief at the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddal, who died on 11 February 1862. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) recounted the story of his unrequited love and subsequent mourning for Beatrice Portinari in the Vita Nuova. This was Rossetti’s first English translation and appeared in 1864 as part of his own publication, The Early Italian Poets.
The picture is a portrait of Elizabeth Siddall in the character of Beatrice. It has a hazy, transcendental quality, giving the sensation of a dream or vision, and is filled with symbolic references. Rossetti intended to represent her, not at the moment of death, but transformed by a ‘sudden spiritual transfiguration’ (Rossetti, in a letter of 1873, quoted in Wilson, p.86). She is posed in an attitude of ecstasy, with her hands before her and her lips parted, as if she is about to receive Communion. According to Rossetti’s friend F.G. Stephens, the grey and green of her dress signify ‘the colours of hope and sorrow as well as of love and life’ (‘Beata Beatrix by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, Portfolio, vol. 22, 1891, p. 46).
In the background of the picture the shadowy figure of Dante looks across at Love, portrayed as an angel and holding in her palm the flickering flame of Beatrice’s life. In the distance the Ponte Vecchio signifies the city of Florence, the setting for Dante’s story. Beatrice’s impending death is evoked by the dove – symbol of the holy spirit – which descends towards her, an opium poppy in its beak. This is also a reference to the death of Elizabeth Siddall, known affectionately by Rossetti as ‘The Dove’, and who took her own life with an overdose of laudanum. Both the dove and the figure of Love are red, the colour of passion, yet Rossetti envisaged the bird as a messenger, not of love, but of death. Beatrice’s death, which occurred at nine o’clock on 9th June 1290, is foreseen in the sundial which casts its shadow over the number nine. The picture frame, which was designed by Rossetti, has further references to death and mourning, including the date of Beatrice’s death and a phrase from Lamentations 1:1, quoted by Dante in the Vita Nuova: ‘Quomodo sedet sola civitas’ (‘how doth the city sit solitary’), referring to the mourning of Beatrice’s death throughout the city of Florence.
Frances Fowle. “Beata Beatrix,” on the Tate website December 2000 [Online] Cited 16/02/2023
In late 1865, Julia Margaret Cameron began using a larger camera. It held a 15 x 12 inch glass negative, rather than the 12 x 10 inch negative of her first camera. Early the next year she wrote to Henry Cole with great enthusiasm – but little modesty – about the new turn she had taken in her work. Cameron initiated a series of large-scale, closeup heads that fulfilled her photographic vision. She saw them as a rejection of ‘mere conventional topographic photography – map-making and skeleton rendering of feature and form’ in favour of a less precise but more emotionally penetrating form of portraiture. Cameron also continued to make narrative and allegorical tableaux, which were larger and bolder than her previous efforts.
In this image, Cameron concentrates upon the head of her maid Mary Hillier by using a darkened background and draping her in simple dark cloth. The lack of surrounding detail or context obscures references to narrative, identity or historical context. The flowing hair, lightly parted lips and exposed neck suggest sensuality. The title, taken from a line in the poem ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ from Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’, transforms the subject into a tragic heroine.
Mid-nineteenth century innovations in science and the arts became part of intense debates about ‘truth’ – variously defined as objective observation and as individual artistic vision. Inspired by artist and critic John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelite circle took a new approach to nature, discovering meaning in details previously overlooked, ‘rejecting nothing, selecting nothing’.
As the quality of paints and lenses improved, painters and photographers tested the bounds of perception and representation. They moved out of the studio, to explore light and other atmospheric effects as well as geological subjects, landscape and architecture. New photographic materials like glass plate negatives and coated printed papers offered greater accuracy and photography became a valuable aid for painters.
John Brett (British, 1831-1902) Glacier of Rosenlaui
1856
Oil on canvas Height: 445 mm (17.52 in) Width: 419 mm (16.5 in)
Tate Britain
Purchased 1946 Photo: Tate, London, 2011
Thomas Ogle (British, 1813 – about 1882) The Bowder Stone in Our English Lakes, Mountains and Waterfalls as seen by William Wordsworth by A.W. Bennett
Published 1864
Tate
View taken by Thomas Ogle of the Bowder Stone in Borrowdale, Cumbria, illustrating Our English Lakes, Mountains, And Waterfalls, as seen by William Wordsworth (1864). The book juxtaposes photographs of the Lake District with poems by the English Romantic poet. The Bowder Stone, an enormous boulder, was probably deposited by glaciation during the last Ice Age. It rests in Borrowdale, a valley of woods and crags in the Lake District whose scenic beauty inspired artists, writers and poets of the Romantic Movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Wordsworth (1770-1850) was among them, and the photograph of the Bowder Stone accompanies his poem, Yew-Trees (1803), from which the following passage is taken:
“…But worthier still of note
Are those fraternal four of Borrowdale,
Joined in one solemn and capacious grove;
Huge trunks! – and each particular trunk a growth
Of intertwined fibres serpentine
Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved, –
Nor uninformed with phantasy, and looks
That threaten the profane; – a pillared shade,
Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue,
By sheddings from the pining umbrage tinged
Perenially – beneath whole sable roof
Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked
With unrejoicing berries, ghostly shapes
May meet at noontide – Fear and trembling Hope,
Silence and Foresight – Death the skeleton
And Time the shadow…”
Text from the British Library website [Online] Cited 18/09/2016
Atkinson Grimshaw (English, 1836-1893) Bowder Stone, Borrowdale
c. 1863-1868
Oil on canvas Support: 400 x 536mm Frame: 662 x 709 x 100mm
Purchased with assistance from the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1983
Tate Britain uncovers the dynamic dialogue between British painters and photographers; from the birth of the modern medium to the blossoming of art photography. Spanning over 70 years, the exhibition brings together nearly 200 works – many for the first time – to reveal their mutual influences. From the first explorations of movement and illumination by David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (1821-1848) to artful compositions at the turn-of-the-century, the show discovers how painters and photographers redefined notions of beauty and art itself.
The dawn of photography coincided with a tide of revolutionary ideas in the arts, which questioned how pictures should be created and seen. Photography adapted the Old Master traditions within which many photographers had been trained, and engaged with the radical naturalism of JMW Turner (1775-1851), the Pre-Raphaelites, and their Realist and Impressionist successors. Turner inspired the first photographic panoramic views, and, in the years that followed his death, photographers and painters followed in his footsteps and composed novel landscapes evoking meaning and emotion. The exhibition includes examples such as John Everett Millais’s (1829-1896) nostalgic The Woodman’s Daughter and John Brett’s (1831-1902) awe inspiring Glacier Rosenlaui. Later in the century, PH Emerson (1856-1936) and TF Goodall’s (c. 1856-1944) images of rural river life allied photography to Impressionist painting, while JAM Whistler (1834-1903) and Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966) created smoky Thames nocturnes in both media.
The exhibition celebrates the role of women photographers, such as Zaida Ben-Yusuf (1869-1933) and the renowned Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879). Cameron’s artistic friendships with George Frederic Watts (1817-1904) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1830-94) are recognised in a room devoted to their beautiful, enigmatic portraits of each other and shared models, where works including Cameron’s Call, I Follow, I Follow, Let Me Die and Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix are on display.
Highlights of the show include examples of three-dimensional photography, which incorporated the use of models and props to stage dramatic tableaux from popular works of the time, re-envisioning well-known pictures such as Henry Wallis’s (1830-1916) Chatterton. Such stereographs were widely disseminated and made art more accessible to the public, often being used as a form of after-dinner entertainment for middle class Victorian families. A previously unseen private album in which the Royal family painstakingly re-enacted famous paintings is also exhibited, as well as rare examples of early colour photography.
Carol Jacobi, Curator British Art 1850-1915, Tate Britain says: “Painting with Light offers new insights into Britain’s most popular artists and reveals just how vital painting and photography were to one another. Their conversations were at the heart of the artistic achievements of the Victorian and Edwardian era.”
Painting with Light: Art and Photography from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Modern Age is curated by Dr Carol Jacobi, Curator of British Art 1850-1915 at Tate Britain, and Dr Hope Kingsley, Curator, Education and Collections, Wilson Centre for Photography, with Tim Batchelor, Assistant Curator at Tate Britain. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue from Tate Publishing and a programme of talks and events in the gallery.”
Press release from Tate Britain
‘Whisper of the Muse’
As the nineteenth century progressed, some artists moved away from the clarity and detail that had been the aim of earlier Pre-Raphaelite art, turning instead to a search for pure beauty. The aesthetic movement, as this tendency came to be known, emphasised the sensual qualities of art and design and explored imaginative themes and effects.
In London and on the Isle of Wight, a community of artists forged closer links between the visual arts, music and literature. This circle included the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, painters George Frederic Watts and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the poet Alfred Tennyson. Rossetti and Cameron worked with similar subjects, many inspired by Tennyson’s poetry. Together with Watts they developed a newly-intimate form of portraiture, exploring emotional and psychological states. They also shared models, whose striking looks introduced new types of modern beauty.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) Whisper of the Muse 1865
Photograph, albumen print on paper
325 x 238mm
Wilson Centre for Photography
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (English, 1828-1882) Mariana
1870
Oil on canvas
Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museum Collection
Into Light and Colour
In the second half of the nineteenth century Japanese culture became an important influence in Britain. Japanese goods were sold in London in new department stores such as Liberty, while the Japanese Village, established in Knightsbridge in 1885, attracted more than a million visitors.
Japanese props and motifs appeared in art and design and the vogue for Japanese prints inspired painters and photographers. Painters experimented with new colour palettes, flattened picture planes and condensed, cropped formats, innovations also important to later British impressionist works. Such experiments in light and colour were paralleled in photography with the 1907 introduction of the autochrome, the first practical colour photographic process.
John Cimon Warburg (British, 1867-1931) Peggy in the Garden
1909, printed 2016
Photograph, transparency on lightbox from autochrome
Royal Photographic Society / National Media Museum / Science and Society Picture Library
John Cimon Warburg (1867-1931) British photographer born to a wealthy family dedicated his whole life to photography. In 1897, he joined the Royal Photographic Society. During his photographic career, John Cimon Warburg used a wide range of photographic processes, but excelled especially in autochromes. Best known for his atmospheric landscapes and its fascinating studies of his children, Warburg lectured and written about the process and explained his autochromes the annual exhibition of the Royal Photographic Society.
Text from the Autochrome website [Online] Cited 18/09/2016. No longer available online
Patented by the Lumière brothers in 1903, Autochrome produced a colour transparency using a layer of potato starch grains dyed red, green and blue, along with a complex development process. Autochromes required longer exposure times than traditional black-and-white photos, resulting in images with a hazy, blurred atmosphere filled with pointillist dots of colour.
John Singer Sargent (American, 1856-1925) Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose 1885-1886
Oil paint on canvas
1740 x 1537 mm
Tate. Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey
Bequest 1887
The inspiration for Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose came during a boating expedition Sargent took on the Thames at Pangbourne in September 1885, with the American artist Edwin Austin Abbey, during which he saw Chinese lanterns hanging among trees and lilies. He began the picture while staying at the home of the painter F.D. Millet at Broadway, Worcestershire, shortly after his move to Britain from Paris. At first he used the Millets’s five-year-old daughter Katharine as his model, but she was soon replaced by Polly and Dorothy (Dolly) Barnard, the daughters of the illustrator Frederick Barnard, because they had the exact hair-colour Sargent was seeking.
He worked on the picture, one of the few figure compositions he ever made out of doors in the impressionist manner, from September to early November 1885, and again at the Millets’s new home, Russell House, Broadway, during the summer of 1886, completing it some time in October. Sargent was able to work for only a few minutes each evening when the light was exactly right. He would place his easel and paints beforehand, and pose his models in anticipation of the few moments when he could paint the mauvish light of dusk.
As autumn came and the flowers died, he was forced to replace the blossoms with artificial flowers. The picture was both acclaimed and decried at the 1887 Royal Academy exhibition. The title comes from the song The Wreath, by the eighteenth-century composer of operas Joseph Mazzinghi, which was popular in the 1880s. Sargent and his circle frequently sang around the piano at Broadway. The refrain of the song asks the question ‘Have you seen my Flora pass this way?’ to which the answer is ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’.
Unknown photographer H.R.H. Princess Alexandra, H.R.H. Princess Victoria & Mr. Savile, “Two’s company and three’s none” in Tableaux Vivants Devonport c. 1892-1893
Bound volume. Displayed open at Marcus C. Stone’s ‘Two’s Company, Three’s None”
Photograph, albumen print on paper
360 x 480 x 58mm – book closed
Wilson Centre for Photography
Unknown photographer H.R.H. Princess Alexandra, H.R.H. Princess Victoria & Mr. Savile, “Two’s company and three’s none” in Tableaux Vivants Devonport (detail)
c. 1892-1893
Bound volume. Displayed open at Marcus C. Stone’s ‘Two’s Company, Three’s None”
Photograph, albumen print on paper
360 x 480 x 58mm – book closed
Wilson Centre for Photography
The relationship between landscape painting and photography continued to develop into the twentieth century. The etchings and nocturnes of James Abbott McNeill Whistler inspired photographers, who adopted his atmospheric subjects and aesthetics. While photography had achieved a technical sophistication that allowed photographers to produce highly resolved, realistic images, many chose to pursue soft-focus effects rather than detail and precision. Such photographs paralleled the unpeopled landscapes of painters like John Everett Millais and the gas-lit cityscapes of John Atkinson Grimshaw.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903) Three Figures Pink and Grey 1868-1878
Oil paint on canvas Support: 1391 x 1854mm Frame: 1701 x 2158 x 75mm
Tate
Purchased with the aid of contributions from the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers as a Memorial to Whistler, and from Francis Howard 1950
This picture derives from one of six oil sketches that Whistler produced in 1868 as part of a plan for a frieze, commissioned by the businessman F.R. Leyland (1831-1892), founder of the Leyland shipping line. Known as the ‘Six Projects’, the sketches (now in the Freer Art Gallery, Washington) were all scenes with women and flowers, and all six were strongly influenced by his admiration for Japanese art. Another precedent for these works was The Story of St George, a frieze that Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) executed for the artist and illustrator Myles Birket Foster (1825-1899) in 1865-1867. The series of large pictures was destined for Leyland’s house at Prince’s Gate, but never produced, and only one – The White Symphony: Three Girls (1867) was finished, but was later lost. Whistler embarked on a new version, Three Figures: Pink and Grey, but was never satisfied with this later painting, and described it as, ‘a picture in no way representative, and in its actual condition absolutely worthless’ (quoted in Wilton and Upstone, p. 117). He followed the original sketch closely, but made a number of pentimenti which suggest that the picture is not simply a copy of the lost work. In spite of Whistler’s dissatisfaction, it has some brilliant touches and a startlingly original composition.
Although the three figures are clearly engaged in tending a flowering cherry tree, Whistler’s aim in this picture is to create a mood or atmosphere, rather than to suggest any kind of theme. Parallels have been drawn with the work of Albert Moore, whose work of this period is equally devoid of narrative meaning. The design is economical and the picture space is partitioned like a Japanese interior. The shallow, frieze-like arrangement, the blossoming plant and the right-hand figure’s parasol are also signs of deliberate Japonisme. Whistler has suppressed some of the details in the oil sketch, effectively disrobing the young girls by depicting them in diaphanous robes. The painting is characterised by pastel shades, a ‘harmony’ of pink and grey, punctuated by the brighter reds of the flower pot and the girls’ bandannas, and the turquoise wall behind. It has been suggested that Whistler derived his colour schemes, and even the figures themselves, in their rhythmically flowing drapery, from polychrome Tanagra figures in the British Museum, which was opposite his studio in Great Russell Street.
The 1880s brought a renewed interest in landscape. Rural scenes provided common ground for British painters and photographers. Their distinctive style derived from French realism and impressionism, which had been introduced by independent galleries, and by artists such as George Clausen and Henry La Thangue who studied in Paris. This new approach was shared by their friend and fellow painter Thomas Goodall, and influenced his collaboration with the photographer Peter Henry Emerson. Emerson and Goodall’s first project, a photographic series on the Norfolk Broads, focused on the life of working people, as described in their album Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, published in 1887.
In the 1880s Clausen devoted himself to painting realistic scenes of rural work after seeing such pictures by the French artist Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884). In this picture he shows a family of field workers topping and tailing swedes for sheep fodder. It was painted at Chilwick Green near St Albans, where the artist had moved in 1881. He uses subdued colouring to capture the dull light and cold of winter, and manages to convey the hard reality of country work. Such unromanticised scenes of country life were often rejected by the selectors of the Royal Academy annual exhibitions.
Thomas Frederick Goodall (British, 1856-1944) and Peter Henry Emerson (British, 1856-1936) Setting the Bow-Net, in Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads 1885, published 1887
Book – open at The Bow Net
Photograph, platinum print on paper
300 x 420mm (book closed)
Private collection
Thomas Frederick Goodall (British, 1856-1944) The Bow Net 1886
Oil paint on canvas
838 x 1270mm
National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery
Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) The Water Carrier
1858
Albumen Print, Wilson Center for Photography
In the late nineteenth century, painters and photographers pursued the representation of an idealised beauty, inspired by Italian Renaissance artists such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Themes of allegory and myth were widely explored in the arts at this time, particularly in Britain in the writings of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde.
At the turn of the century painting and photography were part of a wider artistic search for harmony between subject matter and expression. Artists found inspiration in each other’s practice and continued to share ideas through illustrated books and journals. This spirit of collaboration and interchange led photographer Fred Holland Day to claim that ‘the photographer no longer speaks the language of chemistry, but that of poetry’.
Alvin Langdon Coburn (American, 1882-1966) Regent’s Canal c. 1904-1905, published 1909 Photogravure on paper Image: 206 x 161 mm Frame: 508 x 406 mm
Wilson Centre for Photography
Arthur Hacker (English, 1858-1919) A Wet Night at Piccadilly Circus 1910
Oil on canvas
710 x 915mm
Royal Academy of Arts, London
Alvin Langdon Coburn (American, 1882-1966) Leicester Square (The Old Empire Theatre) 1908, published 1909
Photogravure on paper Image: 206 x 172mm Frame: 508 x 406mm
Wilson Centre for Photography
Edward Linley Sambourne (English, 1844-1910) Ethel Warwick, Camera Club, 2 August 1900
Photograph, cyanotype on paper
Dimensions Image: 165 x 120mm Frame: 507 x 855mm
18 Stafford Terrace, The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
Tate Britain
Millbank, London SW1P 4RG
United Kingdom Phone: +44 20 7887 8888
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