Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions

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Apr

Exhibition: ‘A New Power: Photography in Britain 1800-1850’ at the S T Lee Gallery, Weston Library, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford

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Tags: A New Power, A New Power: Photography in Britain 1800-1850, Ada Lovelace, Age of Machinery, Alonzo Chappel, Alonzo Chappel Thomas Chalmers: Likeness from a daguerreotype by Claudets, An Ancient Door in Magdalen College, Andrew Ure, Andrew Ure The Philosophy of Manufactures, Anna Atkins, Anna Atkins and cyanotype, Anna Atkins Sargassum bacciferum, Antoine Claudet, Antoine Claudet Portrait of seated man and woman, Art-Union project, Australia Felix after a daguerreotype by Douglas Kilburn, Bodleian Libraries, Bust of Miss Mundy, calotype process, Captain Levett Landon Boscawen Ibbetson, Captain Levett Landon Boscawen Ibbetson Fossils engraved on a daguerreotype plate, Charles Kean, Colosseum Rome, computing and photography, conception of photography in the early 19th century, Copy of an 1852 painting of Ada Lovelace by Henry Wyndam Phillips, cyanotype, Daguerreotype camera, Daguerreotypomania, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson Portrait of James Inglis, Difference Engine, Douglas Kilburn, Douglas T. Kilburn, early American photography, early British photography, early developments in photography, early English photography, early French photography, early French portrait photography, early photographers, early Scottish photography, Ebenezer Landells, Ebenezer Landells London in 1842 Taken from the Summit of the Duke of York's Column, Edward J. Pickering for studio of Antoine Claudet, Edward J. Pickering for studio of Antoine Claudet Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, Egypte: Harem de Méhémet-Ali a Alexandre, Elizabeth Fulhame, Excursions Daguerriennes, Experimental photogenic drawing of the mounting of Sir William Herschel's 40-foot telescope, Fac-Simile of a Photogenic Drawing, Fac-Similes of Photogenic Drawings, fleeting time, Fossils engraved on a daguerreotype plate, George Cruikshank's Omnibus, George Hollis Mr Couldock as Richard III, George William Francis, George William Francis Fac-Similes of Photogenic Drawings, Golding Bird, Golding Bird Fac-Simile of a Photogenic Drawing, H.M.S. Erebus, hand coloured daguerreotypes, Hand-coloured daguerreotype of Prince Albert, Henry Mayhew, Henry Mayhew London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Wyndam Phillips, Hindoo Tract-Seller, Hindoo Tract-Seller From a Daguerreotype by Beard, Illustrated London News, Industrial Revolution, inventing photography, Ira Aldridge, Iron Works Coalbrook Dale, itinerant and transnational character of many early photographers, J. W. Lowry, J. W. Lowry Power loom factory of Thomas Robinson Esqr. Stockport, Jabez Hogg, Jacob George Strutt, James William Newland, James William Newland Portrait of a standing man Calcutta, Jenny Lind, John Constable, John Constable Study of clouds, John Ruskin, John Ruskin View of the façade of a building in Venice, John Sartain, John Sartain The Duke of Wellington, John Tallis, John Tallis and Jacob George Strutt, John Tallis and Jacob George Strutt Tallis's history and description of the Crystal Palace, Joseph John Jenkins, Joseph John Jenkins Joseph Paxton designer of the Crystal, Joseph Paxton designer of the Crystal Palace, Laman Blanchard, Laman Blanchard Photographic Phenomena, Le Palais de Justice Rouen, Lieutenant Graham Gore, light-sensitive chemistry, Loch Katrine, London in 1842 Taken from the Summit of the Duke of York's Column, London labour London poor, M. de St Croix, M. de St Croix Parliament Street from Trafalgar Square, Mary Somerville, Mr Charles Kean as Hamlet, Mr Couldock as Richard III, Mr Ira Aldridge as Aaron in Titus Andronicus, Nicolaas Henneman The West Façade of Westminster Abbey, Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours, Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours Egypte: Harem de Méhémet-Ali a Alexandre, Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours Excursions Daguerriennes, Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours St Pauls and London, Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours West façade of Notre Dame cathedral, only known painting of a daguerreotypist at work, Palace of Justice Rouen, Parliament Street from Trafalgar Square, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg Iron Works Coalbrook Dale, Photogenic Drawings, Photographic Phenomena, photographic sketches of architecture and landscape, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, Photography in Britain 1800-1850, Pictures Formed by the Action of Light, Portrait bust of a man, Portrait of a man (resembling Jabez Hogg) operating a daguerreotype camera, Portrait of a standing man Calcutta, Portrait of an older man, Portrait of Henry Mayhew, Portrait of James Inglis, Portrait of Jenny Lind standing at a piano, Portrait of Maria Edgeworth, Portrait of Michael Faraday, Portrait of seated man and woman, Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, Power loom factory of Thomas Robinson Esqr. Stockport, Prince Albert, Queen Victoria et al, Rev. Calvert Richard Jones, Rev. Calvert Richard Jones Colosseum Rome, revolutionary shifts in the experience of time space and subjectivity, Richard Beard, salt prints, Sargassum bacciferum, Seated man holding a copy of the Illustrated London News, Sir Francis Leggatt Chantrey, Sir Francis Leggatt Chantrey Bust of Miss Mundy, Sir John Franklin, Sir John Herschel, Sir John Herschel Experimental photogenic drawing of the mounting of Sir William Herschel's 40-foot telescope, Sir Joseph Paxton, Smyth The Tyrolese Minstrels from a photograph taken by Beard, St Pauls and London, Studio of Antoine Claudet, Studio of Antoine Claudet Portrait of Michael Faraday, Studio of Richard Beard, Studio of Richard Beard Jr., Studio of Richard Beard Jr. Tyrolese Singers, Studio of Richard Beard Lieutenant Graham Gore, Studio of Richard Beard Portrait bust of a man, Studio of Richard Beard Portrait of an older man, Studio of Richard Beard Portrait of Maria Edgeworth, Studio of Richard Beard Sir John Franklin, Studio of William Edward Kilburn Portrait of Jenny Lind standing at a piano, Studio of William Edward Kilburn The Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, Study of clouds, sun pictures, Swedish Nightingale, Tallis's Drawing Room Table Book of Theatrical Portraits Memoirs and Anecdotes, The Art-Union: Monthly Journal of the Fine Arts and the Arts Decorative Ornamental, The Blind Boot-Lace Seller, The Blind Boot-Lace Seller From a Daguerreotype by Beard, The Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, The Duke of Wellington, The Great Exhibition, The Great Exhibition: The east nave viewed from the south-western gallery, The Irish Street-Seller, The Irish Street-Seller From a Daguerreotype by Beard, The London Coffee-Stall, The London Coffee-Stall From a Daguerreotype by Beard, The Magazine of Science, The Mechanic and Chemist: a Magazine of the Arts and Sciences, the Mechanical Age, The Philosophy of Manufactures, The Spitalfields Ball, The Spitalfields Ball Costume Portraits from daguerreotypes by Beard, The Tyrolese Minstrels from a photograph taken by Beard, The Walpole Islanders at the Panopticon, The Walpole Islanders at the Panopticon From a photograph by Claudet, The West Façade of Westminster Abbey, Thomas Chalmers, Thomas Chalmers: Likeness from a daguerreotype by Claudets, Tyrolese Singers, View of one of the towers of Orleans Cathedral, View of the façade of a building in Venice, Views of London, West façade of Notre Dame cathedral, William Edward Kilburn, William Edward Kilburn Queen Victoria et al, William Edward Kilburn Studio, William Edward Kilburn Studio Prince Albert, William Edward Kilburn Studio Queen Victoria et al, William Henry Fox Talbot, William Henry Fox Talbot An Ancient Door in Magdalen College, William Henry Fox Talbot Lace, William Henry Fox Talbot Loch Katrine, William Henry Fox Talbot Palace of Justice Rouen, William Henry Fox Talbot View of one of the towers of Orleans Cathedral, women and photography

Exhibition dates: 1st February – 7th May 2023

Curator: Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of the History of Art at the University of Oxford

Artist unknown (England)
Portrait of a man (resembling Jabez Hogg) operating a daguerreotype camera
c. 1845
Oil on canvas
The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

This painting was acquired by the Bodleian Libraries at an auction and is the only known painting of a daguerreotypist at work. The man bears a strong resemblance to the photographer (and later ophthalmic surgeon) Jabez Hogg, who in 1843 published a ‘Manual of Photography’ and worked at the Illustrated London News from 1850 to 1866.

Fickle, fleeting time: illuminating a relationship between adaptability and uncertainty

The new medium – (in art) the substance the artist uses to create a piece of artwork, (in science) the substance that transfers the energy, or light from one substance to another substance or from one place to another, or from one surface to another, (in spirit) a person reputedly able to make contact with the world of spirits – of photography possessed the power to capture a pictorial truth to reality that could liberate, educate and memorialise while at the same time being used by the coercive power of the state, police, scientists and doctors (for example) to classify and control the sick, criminals, deviants, “natives” and “other” subjugated peoples.

In the Age of Machinery this instrument of new power harnessed technology and science to capture light in order to reflect back to man an image of himself as he would like to be seen – freezing a moment in time – as indeed the sitter had to stand still in order for their likeness to be captured in the early photographic processes. This action machine, an all dancing singing mix of paraphernalia, lens, metal, wood, glass and chemical reaction, forced a stillness in the sitter commensurate with the stillness of the resulting portrait image, im/mortal at one and the same time. By then by reflecting on that captured image the viewer could transcend time, bringing past time to present future time.

Imagine having never seen your picture before except in a cut-out silhouette or in a portrait drawing or oil painting. Imagine the shock of seeing your likeness before your eyes as a manifestation of a truth: this is what I look like at this point in time from the camera’s point of view – a manifestation of the energy of a person captured through the suspension of time, through the the spirit of the medium and, perhaps, through the medium of the spirit. That moment when the photograph is taken when you are taken out of yourself into another time and space. And then by looking at that image, coming to the understanding that you were already picturing your own death.

Within this exhibit one could dwell upon the Power of the new medium (to do what? to illuminate – make (something) visible/to help clarify or explain. What something is it helping to explain?) but rather, you might like to consider its adapt/ability to be so many things to so many people, to time travel a singular truth into the many truths to which reality points us. The shadow moves. In a medium where everything is supposedly “fixed” nothing is fixed, for everything is up for negotiation. Despite classification systems used to define categories and stereotypes in a bourgeois capitalist industrial society, this uncertainty of representation would have been incredibly confronting to a Victorian sensibility based on order and control – where everything, and every body (literally), had to be kept in its place.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

A New Power: Photography in Britain 1800-1850 is a free exhibition in the Weston Library, running until the 7th May, 2023. This exhibition explores the early history of photography and its impact on British life. It examines the invention of the medium in its earliest incarnation, and how the broad range of uses had an unequivocal impact on British culture. From the invention of celebrity to the very first ‘travel photography’ and how this helped to consolidate colonial sensibilities. By showing how photography intersected with all aspects of a nascent modernity, A New Power reveals photography’s crucial role in making Britain the society it is today.

“The advent of photography was a complex historical event involving social, cultural and technological changes in about equal measure. These changes included significant developments in European society, such as the onset of the Industrial Revolution, but also important advances in scientific thinking and technology, and revolutionary shifts in the experience of time, space and subjectivity. All these elements were necessary to the conception of photography in the early 19th century.” (Exhibition text)

“We are in the infancy of invention with sun pictures, and no man can predict the results which may be obtained from a further advance in the paths of discovery … an instrument of new power [has been] placed at the disposal of Ingenuity and of Art.”

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From a leaflet published in 1846

Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg RA (French, 1740-1812)
Iron Works, Coalbrook Dale
c. 1824
From The romantic and picturesque scenery of England and Wales, London 1805, pl.[7]
Etching, aquatint

“The men, women, children, country and houses are all black … The country continues black, … everywhere, smoking and burning coal heaps, intermingled with wretched huts and carts and little ragged children”

The Princess Victoria in a diary entry about a trip to Birmingham, 1832

The advent of photography was a complex historical event involving social, cultural and technological changes in about equal measure. These changes included significant developments in European society, such as the onset of the Industrial Revolution, but also important advances in scientific thinking and technology, and revolutionary shifts in the experience of time, space and subjectivity. All these elements were necessary to the conception of photography in the early 19th century.

“Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it … the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word”

Thomas Carlisle (1829)

J. W. Lowry (British, 1803-1879)
Power loom factory of Thomas Robinson Esqr. Stockport, Cheshire
c. 1849-1850
(after drawing by James Nasmyth)
From Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures
Engraving trimmed to platemark
17.5 x 32cm
Science Museum Group Collection
© The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

View of factory interior with five rows of c. 100 power looms using overhead lathe drives, operatives women, visitor and children looking around, spare rollers in corner. [James Nasmyth patents for printing calicoes etc, 1849-1850; Thomas Robinson textile machinery patents, 1844-1849] Factory located in Stockport, Cheshire.

About the exhibition

The announcement of photography’s invention in January 1839, first in Paris and then in London, introduced a ‘new power’ into British life. This new power – derived from photography’s capacity to automatically capture the images created in a camera – was soon being used for every conceivable purpose.

A New Power: Photography in Britain 1800-1850 explores the early history of photography, starting with the invention of the medium and the earliest dissemination of photographic images in Britain and ending with the famous Great Exhibition of 1851. It examines the broad range of uses that photography would quickly come to fill, from documenting the invention of celebrity to the very first ‘travel photography’ and how this helped to shore up colonial sensibilities.

By showing how photography intersected with all aspects of a nascent modernity, A New Power reveals photography’s crucial role in making Britain the society it is today.

Early experiments

In June 1802, Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy co-authored an essay in the Journals of the Royal Institution. It described various experiments the two men had undertaken on making images by exposing to light some pieces of white paper or leather moistened with a solution of silver nitrate. The essay is often considered to be the first to describe specifically photographic experiments. Davy’s colleague Thomas Young made further experiments with silver nitrate in 1804.

“White paper, or white leather, moistened with solution of nitrate of silver, undergoes no change when kept in a dark place; but, on being exposed to the day light, it speedily changes colour, and, after passing through different shades of grey and brown, becomes at length nearly black … Nothing but a method of preventing the unshaded part of the delineation from being coloured by exposure to the day is wanting, to render the process as useful as it is elegant.”

Humphry Davy and Thomas Wedgwood (1802)

“I formed an image of the rings, by means of the solar microscope, with the apparatus which I have described in the Journals of the Royal Institution, and I threw this image on paper dipped in a solution of nitrate of silver, placed at the distance of about nine inches from the microscope”

Thomas Young (1804)

Scientific entertainments

Scientific experiments were frequently presented as public entertainments in the early 19th century. One satirical cartoon shows an experiment conducted at the Royal Institution in London by Thomas Young. He is seen administering nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, to Sir John Coxe Hippisley, with hilariously unfortunate results. On Young’s left is Humphry Davy, holding a pair of bellows. The audience includes many celebrities of the time. Davy and Young also conducted photographic experiments in this laboratory.

Fleeting time

A number of artists in the early 19th century tried to reconcile ‘fleeting time’ with the stasis of a painted landscape. In 1822, Louis Daguerre and his fellow artist Charles Marie Bouton opened their Diorama building in Paris. In the Diorama, viewers sat on a platform that slowly moved so that different views of the same painted scene, enhanced by special lighting and other effects, could appear to gradually reveal themselves. This apparatus was described by its inventors as ‘imitating aspects of nature as presented to our sight, that is to say, with all the changes brought by time, wind, light, atmosphere’.

“An attempt has been made to arrest the more abrupt and transient appearance of the Chiar’oscuro in Nature … to give ‘to one brief moment caught from fleeting time’ a lasting and sober existence”

John Constable (1833)

John Constable (British 1776-1837)
Study of clouds
1822
Oil on paper, laid on canvas [verso inscribed ’31 Sep.r 10-11 o’clock morning looking Eastward a gentle wind to East’]
H 48 x W 59cm
Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Presented by Sir E. Farquhar Buzzard, Bt, 1933

One of a group of cloud studies from 1822 which are so accurate in their record of weather conditions, that Constable’s mistake in dating this example can be silently corrected to 1 October 1822.

Computing and photography

Shortly after his announcement of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot sent Charles Babbage eight examples of his photogenic drawings. Babbage went on to display Talbot’s photographs at his famous London soirées, intellectual gatherings that Talbot and his family occasionally attended in person. The other entertainments included a working model of a portion of Babbage’s first computing machine, the Difference Engine. Visitors therefore encountered photography and computing together, seeing both for the first time at the same time.

“Many thanks for the loan of those beautiful photographs. They were much admired last Saturday Evg … In the meantime, I gave Lady Byron a treat to whom I lent them for a few hours”

Charles Babbage, in a letter to William Henry Fox Talbot, 26 February 1844

Women and photography

Women played an often overlooked but important role in the development of British photography. Pioneering scholars like Elizabeth Fulhame and Mary Somerville were among the first to conduct experiments with light-sensitive silver salts and publish their results.

“The possibility of making cloths of gold, silver, and other metals, by chymical processes, occurred to me in the year 1780 ….”

Elizabeth Fulhame, from An Essay On Combustion with a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting, wherein the Phlogistic and Antiphlogistic Hypotheses are Proved Erroneous (November 1794)

“In my experiments … I employ the chloride of silver, which Mr Faraday was so kind as to prepare for me, and which, accordingly, was perfectly pure and white. It was liquid and might be uniformly spread over the paper.”

Mary Somerville, from ‘Extract of a letter from Mrs Somerville to M. Arago: Chemical Rays of the Solar Spectrum’, The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal (October 1836 – April 1837)

Beautiful shadows

English scientist William Henry Fox Talbot first conceived of the possibility of a photographic process in 1833 and soon began experimenting with light-sensitive chemistry at his home, Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire. Initially, he only shared the results of his experiments with family members, including his sister-in-law, Laura Mundy. Her reply is the earliest description we have of photographic images.

“Dear Mr Talbot, Thank you very much for sending me such beautiful shadows.”

Laura Mundy, in a letter to William Henry Fox Talbot, 13 December 1834

Sir Francis Leggatt Chantrey RA (English, 1781-1841)
Bust of Miss Mundy
1825-1826
Plaster
Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

Inventing photography

“The most transitory of things, a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary, may be fettered by the spells of our natural magic, and may be fixed for ever in the position which it seems only destined for a single instant to occupy.”

William Henry Fox Talbot, writing in January 1839

The invention of the daguerreotype – a photographic process in which an image is recorded on a sheet of silver-plated copper – was announced in Paris on 7 January 1839. Daguerreotypomania ensued. The extraordinary news was reported in British newspapers just a few days later. This prompted English scientist William Henry Fox Talbot to reveal that he, too, had been working on photographic experiments, a paper-based process that he called photogenic drawing. These twin announcements heralded the advent of photography in Britain. Soon, actual examples could be seen in shops or in reproduction.

“M. Daguerre has discovered a method to fix the images which are represented at the back of a camera obscura; so that these images are not the temporary reflection of the object, but their fixed and durable impress.”

Hippolyte Gaucheraud, as translated in The Literary Gazette, 12 January 1839

Photogenic drawings

William Henry Fox Talbot published the details of his invention of photogenic drawing in January 1839, so that anyone with the means and some chemical knowledge could use the process. John Herschel soon devised his own light-sensitive formula and made a camera picture, a view of the framework of his father’s forty-foot telescope. He ‘washed out’ the image with hyposulphite of soda, which, unlike Talbot’s use of table salt, entirely prevented further development. In contrast, Talbot’s photogenic drawings remain light sensitive and therefore cannot be displayed in this exhibition.

‘Pictures Formed by the Action of Light’
From The Mechanic and Chemist: a Magazine of the Arts and Sciences (13 April 1839)
Wood engravings after photogenic drawings
Radcliffe Science Library, University of Oxford

“The Mechanic and Chemist was one of the better-established of the pioneering illustrated journals, already entering its fourth year of publication. It was started by George Berger, a publisher and bookseller based in the Strand, who launched a wide range of such publications. Most of these collapsed by the mid-1840s, but were in their heyday in 1839. Wood engravings were the most practical way for these publications to include pictures. Far less expensive and much faster for ‘woodcutters’ or ‘woodpeckers’ to produce than steel or copper engravings, unlike lithographs they were intaglio and could be printed alongside the type in a conventional letterpress. The journal had already published accounts of Daguerre’s and Talbot’s inventions, with a strong bias towards Daguerre, and on 13 April 1839 it attempted to express these inventions in visual form. The photographer here, ‘Q.E.D’, said that the silhouette negative had been “taken with the sun behind, forming a strong contrast of light and shade: the preparation not being sensible enough to show the intermediate shades directly.” Apparently overlooking the fact that Talbot had published the idea of making a print from the negative right from the start, Q.E.D. thought he had invented “a method of transforming such pictures into true representations of nature.””

Larry J Schaaf. “Revelations & Representations,” on the the Talbot Catalogue Raisonné blog 27th May 2016 [Online] Cited 21/02/2023

‘Fac-Simile of a Photogenic Drawing’
From The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction (20 April 1839)
Wood engraving after a photogenic drawing contact photograph by Golding Bird

My personal favourite early woodcut representation of a photogenic drawing is this one, published a week later and coming much closer to mimicking the nature of one of Talbot’s originals. The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction had taken the exceptional step of printing the wood block in a brown ink similar to the tone of photogenic drawings; this would have required a second printing of that sheet in black in for the type and represented a willingness to go to extra expense for the sake of accuracy. (Before colour printing became ubiquitous, I wish that publishers in the 1960s-1980s had recognised the value of this approach more often). The Mirror was one of the older illustrated journals, having started in 1822, and not everyone favoured its antiquarian editor, John Timbs. He explained that “our prefixed engraving is a fac-simile of a photogenic drawing, for which we are indebted to the kindness of Dr. Golding Bird, a distinguished botanist, who has published the following very interesting paper on the application of the photographic art to botanical purposes, in that excellent periodical, the Magazine of Natural History.” Dr. Bird (1814-1854) had been an outstanding chemist ever since a child. By 1836 he held the chair of Natural Philosophy at Guy’s Hospital in London. The next time your physician applies his stethoscope to your chest you will be benefitting from one of Bird’s many inventions. Bird wrote about the effects of light before 1839 and once photography was announced he devoted considerable attention to it in his publications. He at first tried Daguerre’s little-known process on paper, but preferred Talbot’s process, although noting that he wished that Talbot had published even more detailed instructions. Sadly, he died early and none of his own photographs are known to have survived.

Larry J Schaaf. “Revelations & Representations,” on the the Talbot Catalogue Raisonné blog 27th May 2016 [Online] Cited 21/02/2023

‘Fac-Similes of Photogenic Drawings’
From The Magazine of Science (27 April 1839)
Wood engravings after photogenic drawing contact photographs by George William Francis

A very new journal, The Magazine of Science featured the work of a botanist contemporary with Talbot, George William Francis (1800-1865). In 1843 he emigrated to Australia, forming the first Botanic Garden there, in Adelaide. Francis explained that he had photographically sensitised boxwood blocks and made the above photographic impressions directly on them. These were then sent to the wood engraver. The editor felt that the lace was accurately represented but “in the flowers he has failed to express the delicacy and beauty of the drawings.”

Unlike the other journals, The Magazine of Science had delayed publishing about the new invention “because we were desirous in this, as in all things else, to test and, if possible, improve upon the experiments suggested by Mr. Talbot, and since pursued with such ardour by all the philosophers and artists of this country, of France, and of Germany. We now however proceed to give all the information in our power, having tried all the different receipts published.”

Larry J Schaaf. “Revelations & Representations,” on the the Talbot Catalogue Raisonné blog 27th May 2016 [Online] Cited 21/02/2023

Sir John Herschel (British, 1792-1871)
Experimental photogenic drawing of the mounting of Sir William Herschel’s 40-foot telescope in the garden of Herschel’s house at Slough
October 1839
Photogenic drawing
History of Science Museum, University of Oxford

At the time that this was taken, Sir William Herschel’s 40-foot telescope was already a famous astronomical symbol, although it was being demolished – hence the absence of the telescope’s tube. The only camera images Sir John Herschel is know to have taken are of his father’s telescope; they also include the first photograph to be taken on glass (now in the Science Museum, London).

Anonymous. “Photogenic Drawing 5,” on the Museum of the History of Science website Nd [Online] Cited 19/02/2023

Daguerreotypes and their copies

Shortly after the announcement of the invention of the daguerreotype in France, British enthusiasts began to import examples of such photographs. The glass shop owned by Claudet & Houghton also offered their customers a selection of French engravings derived from daguerreotypes. Daguerreotypes were taken in London as public demonstrations for the edification of audiences eager to see the latest advances in science and technology. In September 1840, the English journal Westminster Review published two lithographic images, traced from daguerreotypes that had been made in the Polytechnic Institution in London.

Studio of Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours (France) (French, 1807-1873)
West façade of Notre Dame cathedral, Paris
1839-1840
Daguerreotype
Magdalen College, University of Oxford

Lerebours, an optical instrument maker, quickly embraced photography in his business, and pioneered both the market in architectural and scenic Daguerreotypes, as well as their reproduction as engravings, as witnessed in his serial work Excursions Daguerriennes. The plate size is 8.5 x 6.5 inches, the image is laterally reversed, and there is no gold toning – all characteristics of early Daguerreotypes from the period before portraiture became possible.

Anonymous. “Daguerreotype 1,” on the Museum of the History of Science website Nd [Online] Cited 19/02/2023

Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours (French, 1807-1873)
Plate 6: Egypte: Harem de Méhémet-Ali a Alexandre
c. 1840
From Excursions daguerriennes, vues et monuments les plus remarquables du Globe (Paris: Rittner & Goupil, 1840-1842)
Engraving after daguerreotype
10 13/16 × 15 1/2 × 2 3/16 in. (27.5 × 39.3 × 5.5cm) (Book)
Public domain

This print played an important role in popularising the notion of the artist-daguerreotypist as trustworthy eyewitness. In March 1840, while Goupil-Fesquet and his teacher, Horace Vernet, were on a daguerreotype tour of Egypt and the Levant, a fake story circulated in the Parisian press claiming that Vernet had gained access to Muhammad ‘Ali’s harem. With this print and the accompanying text, Goupil-Fesquet aimed to prove, as “both ocular witness and daguerreotype operator,” that they had seen only the guarded entrance.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours (French, 1807-1873)
Plate 4, England, St Pauls and London
c. 1840
From Excursions daguerriennes, vues et monuments les plus remarquables du Globe (Paris: Rittner & Goupil, 1840-1842)
Engraving after daguerreotype
10 13/16 × 15 1/2 × 2 3/16 in. (27.5 × 39.3 × 5.5cm) (Book)
Courtesy of a Private Collection

L.L. Boscawen Ibbetson (English, 1799-1869)
Fossils, engraved on a daguerreotype plate
1840
From The Westminster Review September 1840, p. 460
Ink-on-paper lithograph by A. Friedel

Captain Levett Landon Boscawen Ibbetson (1799 – 8 September 1869) was an English 19th century geologist, inventor, organiser and soldier. He is particularly associated with early developments in photography. He was a member of the London Electrical Society and later a Fellow of the Royal Society (elected 6 June 1850). Capt. Ibbetson developed a method of taking lithographic impressions from daguerreotypes… His illustration of a fossil, “Transverse section of madrepore” in The Westminster Review of September 1840 is credited with being the first example of the use of limelight to shorten exposure times when making daguerreotypes.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Photography and publishing

Paper photographs had one distinct advantage over daguerreotypes: they could be printed in multiple copies and pasted into publications. A number of books and journals containing photographs were produced, seeking to demonstrate the efficacy of the new medium as a means of illustration. These publications met with mixed success, as the unreliable quality of their photographs could not compete with traditional engravings.

Anna Atkins and cyanotype

In a paper delivered to the Royal Society on 13 June 1842, John Herschel proposed a photographic process involving an iron salt that resulted in Prussian-blue images. He decided to call this ‘cyanotype’. Exploiting this invention, the English botanist Anna Atkins issued albums of cyanotype prints of seaweed and algae from 1843, and these are often regarded as the earliest photographic books.

Anna Atkins (British, 1799-1871)
Sargassum bacciferum
1843
From Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843-1853)
Cyanotype
25.3 x 20cm (9 15/16 x 7 7/8 in.)

This photograph: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005.
Public domain

The photograph in the exhibition: Oriel College, University of Oxford

The first book to be photographically printed and illustrated, Photographs of British Algae was published in fascicles beginning in 1843 and is a landmark in the history of photography. Using specimens she collected herself or received from other amateur scientists, Atkins made the plates by placing wet algae directly on light-sensitised paper and exposing the paper to sunlight. In the 1840s, the study of algae was just beginning to be systematised in Britain, and Atkins based her nomenclature on William Harvey’s unillustrated Manual of British Algae (1841), labelling each plate in her own hand.

Although artistic expression was not her primary goal, Atkins was sensitive to the visual appeal of these “flowers of the sea” and arranged her specimens on the page in imaginative and elegant compositions. Uniting rational science with art, Photographs of British Algae is an ambitious and effective book composed entirely of cyanotypes, a process invented in 1842 by Sir John Herschel and long used by architects to duplicate their line drawings as blueprints.

Anonymous. “Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions,” on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website Nd [Online] Cited 22/02/2023

Success and failure

In 1846, the editor of the journal The Art-Union asked William Henry Fox Talbot to supply approximately 7000 salt prints to accompany a story about the calotype process. These prints were made at the Reading Establishment, a printing business run by Talbot’s former Dutch valet Nicolaas Henneman. Unfortunately for Talbot and Henneman, the Art-Union project proved to be a promotional and financial disaster, with most of the photographs, made in a rush, fading soon after publication.

William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877)
View of one of the towers of Orleans Cathedral
Taken on 21 June 1843
Published in The Art‑Union: Monthly Journal of the Fine Arts and the Arts, Decorative, Ornamental (June 1846)
Salted paper photograph from calotype negatives
16.3 x 20.2cm (6 7/16 x 7 15/16 in.)

This photograph: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Barbara Schwartz Gift, in memory of Eugene M. Schwartz, and Rogers Fund, 1996. Public domain

The photograph in the exhibition: Private Collection

In 1840 Talbot devised a negative/positive process that allowed multiple prints of a single image – the procedural basis of nearly all photography since. Talbot’s negatives were made of thin writing paper; the fibrous texture obscured some detail, but it imparted softness and a graded tonality to the resulting print. This photograph, showing the upper levels of one tower of Orléans Cathedral, was made on June 7, 1843, when Talbot was en route to Paris to sell the French rights to his patented process. Because he was unsuccessful in this enterprise, the French did not make paper photographs for another decade.

Anonymous. “Cathedral at Orléans,” on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website Nd [Online] Cited 22/02/2023

Nicolaas Henneman (Netherlands/England, 1813-1898)
The West Façade of Westminster Abbey
Taken before May 1845
Published in The Art-Union: Monthly Journal of the Fine Arts and the Arts, Decorative, Ornamental (June 1846)
Salted paper photograph from calotype negatives
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Jean Horblit, in memory of Harrison D. Horblit, 1994

Talbot’s negative-positive photographic process, first made public in 1839, would change the dissemination of knowledge as had no other invention since movable type. To demonstrate the paper photograph’s potential for widespread distribution – its chief advantage over the contemporaneous French daguerreotype – Talbot produced The Pencil of Nature, the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs. With extraordinary prescience, Talbot’s images and brief texts proposed a wide array of applications for the medium, including portraiture, reproduction of paintings, sculptures, and manuscripts, travel views, visual inventories, scientific records, and essays in art.

Despite the revolutionary nature of Talbot’s undertaking, or perhaps because of it, The Pencil of Nature was not a commercial success. Today fewer than forty substantially complete copies – many quite faded – are extant. The present example, containing all twenty-four plates and still in its rare original fascicle covers, was formerly in the collection of Talbot’s daughter Matilda.

Anonymous. “Westminster Abbey,” on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website Nd [Online] Cited 22/02/2023

Nicolaas Henneman (Netherlands/England, 1813-1898)

Born in the Netherlands village of Heemskerk on December 8, 1813, virtually nothing is known about the life of Nicolaas Henneman, until he was hired as a member of inventor William Henry Fox Talbot’s domestic staff shortly after relocating to England in 1838. He quickly progressed to his master’s valet, and finally his most trusted darkroom assistant. Mr. Henneman was an eager student, and was soon collaborating with Mr. Talbot on a wide range of photographic experiments. He became an expert in the intricate calotype process that required both advanced chemistry knowledge and technical precision, but most of all patience. …

In 1843, Mr. Henneman accompanied his boss to France, where his photographs were subsequently featured in Mr. Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature publication. Buoyed by the critical acceptance, he took the bold move of leaving his employment with Mr. Talbot to open his own full-service calotype business, believed to be the first of its kind. Within the modest grounds of a former schoolyard, Mr. Henneman constructed a glass house to serve as his studio, and he received some modest commissions to illustrate various historical texts, including Mr. Talbot’s Sun Pictures in Scotland and Sir William Stirling’s Annals of the Artists of Spain. In 1848, chemist Thomas Malone became a junior partner, necessitating a name change to Henneman & Malone. With the appointment as “Photographer in Ordinary to Her Majesty,” his conversion to wet-collodion processing, and his successful experiments to reduce exposure times, Mr. Henneman seemed assured of financial prosperity. However, his target market was too small, and his business closed with little notice.

Although Nicolaas Henneman was of the industry’s earliest architects, by the mid-1850s, the London photographic community was becoming exceedingly overcrowded. The soft-spoken Dutchman found himself being pushed out by a younger generation. After Mr. Henneman’s business went bankrupt, his steadfast champion Mr. Talbot quietly paid off his creditors. He moved to Birmingham, where he became an operator for master photographers Napoleon Sarony and Robert White Thrupp, among others. This proved to be both commercially unsuccessful and creatively unsatisfying. Ever the survivor, Mr. Henneman bought and operated a lodging house at 18 Half Moon Street in London during the 1870s. He died on January 18, 1898 at the age of 84, with his photographic contributions virtually forgotten. Fortunately, however, many of Nicolaas Henneman’s photographs have been preserved and can be seen in the collections of Lacock Abbey, Bradford’s National Media Museum, and in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum.

Anonymous. “Nicolaas Henneman,” on the Historic Camera website 3rd May 2020 [Online] Cited 22/02/2023

William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877)
Palace of Justice, Rouen
Taken in May 1843
Published in The Art-Union: Monthly Journal of the Fine Arts and the Arts, Decorative, Ornamental (June 1846)
Salted paper photograph from calotype negatives

Talbot may not have intended his brief diversion to Rouen to be as significant as it has become, but during those four days of miserable weather, the creative baton was handed from art to photography – from Turner to Talbot. During a brief “éclairci” from bad weather, Henry took his camera half a mile from the hotel and into another era of history. Le Palais de Justice was one of the secular buildings of medieval Rouen, completed in 1508, occupying three fifths of an acre in a three sided quadrangle. It was described as an elaborately florid style “sumptuous in its decorations both without and within; its triple canopy windows enriched with mullions and tracery.”

Talbot concentrated on the ornate detail of these windows, isolating the intricate elements sculpted by skilled stonemasons over three centuries earlier. Now housing the Rouen criminal courts, Le Palais de Justice represented Henry’s liberation from rain-soaked captivity. The image above stands in magnificent contrast to his study of the lace curtained view from within the Hotel l’Angleterre. This time he was outside looking in.

Rose Teanby. “Talbot’s Rouen, a tale of two cities,” on the the Talbot Catalogue Raisonné blog 9th March 2018 [Online] Cited 21/02/2023

“The most transitory of things, a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary, may be fettered by the spells of our natural magic, and may be fixed for ever in the position which it seems only destined for a single instant to occupy.”

.
William Henry Fox Talbot, writing in January 1839

Most extraordinary

A first-hand account of a demonstration of the daguerreotype process was given by two naval architects from India in a book they published in 1841: ‘And we also saw [at the Adelaide gallery in London] the Daguerreotype which is the most extraordinary production of modern times. We know not how better to describe it than to say, that it is embodying a shadow … In a room fitted up as a Theatre, with shutters by which the light can be totally excluded, M. Dele Croix, a French gentleman, explains all the process’.

“The appearance of these drawings is very peculiar. The shadows are a dull grey, varying until they become almost blacky and though the pictures they delineate are accurate in the extreme, they are not pleasing. They appear unnatural and look somewhat like a moonlight scene. The Daguerreotype, with all its necessary apparatus, is manufactured and sold in Paris, for about £20. In Bombay, where the sun is always powerful, pictures of scenery could daily be produced.”

Jehangeer Nowrojee and Hirjeebhoy Merwanjee, Journal of residence of two years and a half in Great Britain, London, 1841

Views of London

The earliest photographs of London were taken by visiting Frenchmen. Soon, however, demonstrations of the new process were being offered to audiences at the Polytechnic Institution and Adelaide Gallery in London. In early 1842, Antoine Claudet was commissioned by the newly established Illustrated London News to make a series of daguerreotype views of London. A wood-engraved panorama of the city was then derived from them. This panorama, ‘a picture bigger than anything previously issued’, was promised in the News‘s inaugural issue of 14 May 1842 as a gift to all who subscribed to the journal for six months.

M. de St Croix (French)
Parliament Street from Trafalgar Square
1839
Daguerreotype in wood frame
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

This is the oldest photograph in the Museum’s collection. It is a daguerreotype, a unique image formed on a silvered copper plate. The daguerreotype was the first photographic process, publicised in January 1839. It was named after its inventor, Louis Daguerre. Just a few weeks after the French Government revealed the secrets of daguerreotypy in Paris in August 1839, Monsieur de St Croix organised the first public demonstration of the process in London. This is therefore among the very first photographs taken in London. The scene is reversed – as is characteristic of the process – and the image on the shiny surface is difficult to read. However, once caught at the correct angle, amazing detail emerges. In the foreground there is a statue of Charles I and in the distance the royal Banqueting House. There are also traces of the people who stayed still long enough to register on the exposure, which probably lasted some minutes.

Anonymous. “Parliament Street from Trafalgar Square,” on the V&A website Nd [Online] Cited 22/02/2023

Ebenezer Landells (engraver) et al
‘London in 1842, Taken from the Summit of the Duke of York’s Column (north view)’
From the Illustrated London News (7 January 1843)
Hand-coloured panoramic print, from wood engravings after daguerreotypes by Antoine Claudet taken in 1842

A view of London looking northwards from the summit of the Duke of York’s statue, with Carlton Gardens in the foreground, beyond is Waterloo Place, lower Regent Street and Piccadilly circus.

London labour, London poor

Numerous engraved portraits of members of the working class are featured in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, first published in 1851. Mayhew’s text provided a richly ethnological and often racialised commentary on London’s street workers, based on interviews and social analysis, given added force by the addition of wood engravings based on daguerreotypes.

Portrait of Henry Mayhew (From a Daguerreotype by BEARD)

“My earnest hope is that the book may serve to give the rich a more intimate knowledge of the sufferings, and the frequent heroism under those sufferings, of the poor.”

The London Coffee-Stall (From a Daguerreotype by BEARD)

“The struggle to get a living is so great, that, what with one and another in the coffee-trade, it’s only those as can get good ‘pitches’ that can get a crust at it.”

The Irish Street-Seller (From a Daguerreotype by BEARD)
From Henry Mayhew’s ‘London labour and the London poor: a cyclopedia of the condition and earnings of those that will work, cannot work, and will not work’, Volume 1 page 97, 1851.
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

“I wish people that thinks we’re idle now were with me for a day. I’d teach them.”

Hindoo Tract-Seller (From a Daguerreotype by BEARD)

“The man whose portrait supplies the daguerreotyped illustration of this number is unable to speak a word of English, and the absence of an interpreter, through some accident, prevented his statement being taken at the time appointed.”

The Blind Boot-Lace Seller (From a Daguerreotype by BEARD)

“I only wish vaccination had been in vogue then as it is now, and I shouldn’t have lost my eyes. God bless the man who brought it up, I say; people doesn’t know what they’ve got to thank him for.”

All from

Henry Mayhew (English, 1812-1887)
London labour and the London poor; a cyclopedia of the condition and earnings of those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work: The London street-folk; comprising, street sellers. Street buyers. Street finders. Street performers. Street artizans. Street labourers. With numerous illustrations from photographs
London, 1851

‘London Labour and the London Poor’ is an oral account of London’s working classes in the mid-19th century. Taking the form of verbatim interviews that carefully preserve the grammar and pronunciation of every interviewee, the completed four-volume work amounts to some two million words: an exhaustive anecdotal report on almost every aspect of working life in London.

Henry Mayhew (25 November 1812 – 25 July 1887) was an English journalist, playwright, and advocate of reform. He was one of the co-founders of the satirical magazine Punch in 1841, and was the magazine’s joint editor, with Mark Lemon, in its early days. He is also known for his work as a social researcher, publishing an extensive series of newspaper articles in the Morning Chronicle that was later compiled into the book series London Labour and the London Poor (1851), a groundbreaking and influential survey of the city’s poor.

Priests and politicians

All sorts of celebrities were celebrated in engravings based on daguerreotypes, from priests to politicians. One example is Lájos Kossuth, former regent-president of the Kingdom of Hungary, who arrived as an exile at the port of Southampton on 23 October 1851. Over the next three weeks he toured Britain, giving lectures in support of the struggle to free Hungary from the Hapsburg Empire. During this period, he and his family visited Antoine Claudet’s studio in London to have a number of daguerreotype portraits made. Versions of these images were subsequently distributed around the world in the form of lithographs or engravings.

Alonzo Chappel (American, 1828-1887)(engraver)
Thomas Chalmers: Likeness from a daguerreotype by Claudets [sic]
1873
Steel engraving of a Scottish clergyman after a daguerreotype by Antoine Claudet studio in c. 1847
Public domain

Alonzo Chappel (March 1, 1828 – December 4, 1887) was an American-Spanish painter, best known for paintings depicting personalities and events from the American Revolution and early 19th-century American history.

Thomas Chalmers FRSE (17 March 1780 – 31 May 1847), was a Scottish minister, professor of theology, political economist, and a leader of both the Church of Scotland and of the Free Church of Scotland. He has been called “Scotland’s greatest nineteenth-century churchman.”

Notable commissions

A particularly notable commission for the Beard studio involved making daguerreotype portraits in May 1845 on the deck of the H.M.S. Erebus. The subjects were fourteen of the officers about to set out under the command of Sir John Franklin in search of the Northwest Passage above Canada. These pictures became particularly famous when the entire expedition disappeared, never to be heard from again. After a public campaign by Lady Franklin in the illustrated press, many other ships were sent over during the ensuing years to try and find the expedition.

Installation view of Studio of Richard Beard daguerreotypes of Sir John Franklin (May 1845, below) and Lieutenant Graham Gore, Commander (May 1845, below)

Studio of Richard Beard (English, 1801-1885)
Sir John Franklin
May 1845
Daguerreotype in leather case
The Scott Polar Institute, University of Cambridge
Public domain

Sir John Franklin, 16 May 1845, suffering from influenza before leaving for the Arctic. He is wearing the 1843-1846 pattern Royal Navy undress tailcoat with cocked hat.

Lady Franklin commissioned daguerreotype photographs of the twelve senior officers of HMS Erebus and Captain Crozier of HMS Terror. They were taken on board the Erebus at the dockside in Greenhithe on 16 May 1845, just before the ships sailed. Franklin was fascinated by this new technology and included photographic apparatus as part of the expedition’s equipment.

Sir John Franklin KCH FRS FLS FRGS (16 April 1786 – 11 June 1847) was a British Royal Navy officer and Arctic explorer. After serving in wars against Napoleonic France and the United States, he led two expeditions into the Canadian Arctic and through the islands of the Arctic Archipelago, in 1819 and 1825, and served as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land from 1839 to 1843. During his third and final expedition, an attempt to traverse the Northwest Passage in 1845, Franklin’s ships became icebound off King William Island in what is now Nunavut, where he died in June 1847. The icebound ships were abandoned ten months later and the entire crew died, from causes such as starvation, hypothermia, and scurvy.

Richard Beard (22 December 1801 – 7 June 1885) was an English entrepreneur and photographer who vigorously protected his photographic business by litigation over his photographic patents and helped to establish professional photography in the UK.

Studio of Richard Beard (English, 1801-1885)
Lieutenant Graham Gore, Commander
May 1845
Daguerreotype in leather case
The Scott Polar Institute, University of Cambridge
Public domain

Studio of Richard Beard Jr. (London)
Tyrolese Singers
1851-1852
Hand-coloured enamelled daguerreotype
14.1 x 10.3cm
Royal Collection Trust
Acquired by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1852
© His Majesty King Charles III 2022

This daguerreotype, produced and enamelled by the studio of Richard Beard, was purchased by Queen Victoria in 18522, the same year in which her mother, the Duchess of Kent, arranged for the Tyrolese minstrels to surprise the Queen with a serenade at breakfast for her birthday at Osborne. About the event, the Duchess wrote: “Victoria appeared very much pleased with the surprise.”

Hand-coloured enamelled daguerreotype of a group of Tyrolese singers called Klier, Rainer, Margreiter, Rahm and Holaus. Rahm is seated facing partly left playing a dulcimer and Rainer holds a guitar. All are wearing traditional Tyrolese costume, coloured with both dark and pastel tones. The daguerreotype is mounted in a large dark blue leather case with a red velvet interior. Queen Victoria had first seen this troupe of Tyrolese singers at Kensington Palace in 1833. Her mother, the Duchess of Kent, later arranged for the singers to perform at Osborne on her birthday in 1852. The Duchess recorded in her diary that ‘dearest Victoria appeared very much pleased with the surprise’. Later the same year Queen Victoria acquired this daguerreotype. Beard had shown examples of his enamelled daguerreotypes at the Great Exhibition in 1851. The process involved varnishing the daguerreotype and then heating and adding another coat of varnish after the colour pigments had been added.

Text from the Royal Collection Trust website

Tyrolese minstrels

This daguerreotype shows Tyrolese minstrels in carefully tinted folkloric costumes and holding musical instruments. A variant view was the basis of a wood engraving published in the Illustrated London News in 1851 (below). For Queen Victoria’s birthday at Osborne in 1852, her mother, the Duchess of Kent, arranged for the singers to serenade her at breakfast. ‘Victoria appeared very much pleased with the surprise’, the Duchess wrote. This daguerreotype, enamelled according to Beard’s patented formula, was purchased by the Queen in the same year.

Smyth (engraver)
‘The Tyrolese Minstrels – from a photograph taken by Beard, by desire of H.R.H. The Duchess of Kent’
From the Illustrated London News (6 December 1851)
Wood engraving after a daguerreotype by Richard Beard Jr.
Private Collection

Fascinating people

The popular press, and especially the Illustrated London News, soon included wood engraved copies of photographic portraits of celebrities and indigenous people from the colonies of the British Empire. Equally exotic to middle-class viewers, however, were photographic illustrations of members of the British working class. In every case, the daguerreotype was destroyed during the tracing process that led to its wood-engraved copy, leaving these reproductions behind as a kind of shadow history of the medium. In this form, photographic images circulated all around the globe.

Photographer unknown (English)
Seated man holding a copy of the Illustrated London News
c. 1850
Hand-painted daguerreotype in leather case
Private Collection

Engraver unknown (England)
‘The Walpole Islanders at the Panopticon. – From a photograph by Claudet’
1856
From the Illustrated London News (12 July 1856), page 41
Courtesy of a Private Collection

Modern art and swansdown

These ‘lords and ladies’ dressed in historical costumes for a ball appeared as wood engravings after daguerreotypes taken by Richard Beard Jr. in the Illustrated London News in July 1848. A review in the Nottingham Mercury on 6 October 1848 commended the photographer for the quality of his work, calling it ‘modern art combined with science’.

“Swansdown on black is produced in the most exquisite style, and the finest white lace brought out in bold relief on a dress of white satin.”

Nottingham Mercury (6 October 1848)

Smyth (engraver)
‘The Spitalfields Ball. Costume Portraits, from daguerreotypes, by Beard’
From the Illustrated London News (15 July 1848, p. 24)
Wood engravings after daguerreotypes by Richard Beard Jr.
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

Extraordinary Australians

The English-born photographer Douglas T. Kilburn (brother of Edward Kilburn) arrived in Melbourne, Australia, in 1847. Kilburn made a series of daguerreotypes of local indigenous people in about October of that same year. These daguerreotype images were then reproduced around the world in various media. They found their widest audience when a number of them were reproduced as wood engravings in an 1850 issue of the Illustrated London News, along with an accompanying text that expressed the usual racial prejudices of the time.

Unknown engravers (England)
‘Australia Felix’
From the Illustrated London News (26 January 1850, p. 53)
Wood engravings after daguerreotypes by Douglas Kilburn, Melbourne
Private Collection

Daguerrotype studios

The first commercial photography studio in England was opened by Richard Beard in the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London in March 1841. It made small daguerreotype portraits using an American invention, a camera that employed a concave mirror rather than a lens to focus the light. Soon, superior, lens-enhanced cameras and more light-sensitive plates allowed for larger and more lively portraits to be made by an ever-increasing number of professional studios.

One of the earliest clients of the Richard Beard studio in London was the 73-year-old Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth. She had several portraits taken, at a guinea each, during mid-morning on 25 May 1841. About five years later, she returned to the same studio and had a second portrait made.

Her letter to her half-sister Fanny Wilson describes her first portrait session.

“I fear you will not like any of my daguerreotype faces – I am sure I do not – the truer, the worse”

Maria Edgeworth, in a letter to Fanny Wilson, 28 May 1841

‘Lestock came with me to breakfast here at 8 o’clock and then he took Honora and Captain Beaufort and me to the Polytechnic and we all had our likenesses taken and I will tell you no more lest I should some way or other cause you disappointment. For my own part my object is secure for I have done my dear what you wished. It is a wonderful mysterious operation. You are taken from one room into another up stairs and down and you see various people whispering and hear them in neighbouring passages and rooms unseen and the whole apparatus and stool on high platform under a glass dome casting a snap-dragon blue light making all look like spectres and the men in black gliding about like &c. I have not time to tell you more of that’.

Maria Edgeworth, Letter to Fanny Wilson, 25 May 1841
MS. Eng. Lett. c. 710, fol. 1r

Studio of Richard Beard (English, 1801-1885) (Royal Polytechnic Institution, London)
Portrait of Maria Edgeworth
May 1841
Daguerreotype in vertical leather case

Studio of Richard Beard (English, 1801-1885) (Royal Polytechnic Institution, London)
Portrait of an older man
c. 1841
Courtesy of a Private Collection

Forty a day

Using a number of different operators, the studio owned by Richard Beard claimed to make about 40 daguerreotype portraits per day. Soon he ran three such studios in London and had licensed a dozen more elsewhere in England. As the English patent holder for the daguerreotype process, Beard insisted that each of these daguerreotypes be stamped with the words ‘Beard Patentee’, wherever they were made. Having established photography as a franchise system, he became, in effect, the Colonel Sanders of early English photography.

Laman Blanchard ed.
‘Photographic Phenomena’
George Cruikshank’s Omnibus (London Tilt and Borgue, 1842)
London, 1842
Wood engraving by George Cruikshank of the Beard Studio and a poem by S.L. Blanchard
Courtesy of a Private Collection

Fierce enemy

Disputing who had exclusive rights to the commercial use of the daguerreotype process, Richard Beard and Antoine Claudet took several legal actions against each other. In a letter to William Henry Fox Talbot dated 18 January 1843, Claudet refers to Beard as his ‘competitor and fierce enemy’. Having overturned an injunction prohibiting his use of the process, Claudet quickly became Beard’s greatest rival. Soon, however, other competitors also opened studios in London, with those run by Edward Kilburn and John Mayall among the most significant.

Studio of Antoine Claudet (French, 1797-1867) (Adelaide Gallery, London)
Portrait of Michael Faraday
c. 1848
Daguerreotype and leather case
History of Science Museum, University of Oxford

Claudet invented one of the improvements that made the Daguerreotype fast enough to take portraits; Faraday’s association with photography began in January 1839 when he announced Talbot’s discovery at the Royal Institution in London.

Michael Faraday FRS (22 September 1791 – 25 August 1867) was an English natural philosopher who contributed to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. His main discoveries include the principles underlying electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism and electrolysis.

Antoine François Jean Claudet (French, 1797-1867)

Antoine François Jean Claudet (August 18, 1797 – December 27, 1867) was a French photographer and artist active in London who produced daguerreotypes. …

Early in his career Claudet headed a glass factory at Choisy-le-Roi, Paris, together with Georges Bontemps, and moved to England to promote the factory with a shop in High Holborn, London. Having acquired a share in L. J. M. Daguerre’s invention, he became one of England’s first commercial photographers using the daguerreotype process for portraiture, improving the sensitising process by using chlorine (instead of bromine) in addition to iodine, thus gaining greater rapidity of action.

He invented the red darkroom safelight, 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 has also been 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, where in 1843 he took one of only two surviving photographs of Ada Lovelace. He opened additional studios at the Colosseum, Regent’s Park (1847-1851) and in 1851 he moved his entire business to 107 Regent Street, where he established what he called a “Temple to Photography.”

It has been estimated that he made 1,800 pictures every year with subjects including Michael Faraday and Charles Babbage. His daguerreotype of Hemi Pomara, in the National Library of Australia, is the oldest known photograph of any Māori person.

In 1848 he produced the photographometer, an instrument designed to measure the intensity of photogenic rays; and in 1849 he brought out the focimeter, for securing a perfect focus in photographic portraiture.

He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1853, and in 1858 he produced the stereomonoscope, in reply to a challenge from Sir David Brewster.

Claudet received many honours, among which was the appointment, in 1853, as “Photographer-in-ordinary” to Queen Victoria, and the award, ten years later, of an honor from Napoleon III of France.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Antoine Claudet (French, 1797-1867) (18 King William St Strand)
Portrait of seated man and woman
c. 1850
Half-plate daguerreotype with applied colour in stamped leather case
Courtesy of a Private Collection

Claudet learned photography from Louis Daguerre in the late 1830s, and established his first daguerreotype studio in London in 1841 behind St Martin-in-the-Fields church, receiving honours from both Queen Victoria and Napoleon III for his skills as a photographer. However, he is best known for his experiments with photographic instruments and his chemical experiments, which succeeded in speeding up the photographic process.

Unfortunately horrid

François Arago, in a report to the Chamber of Deputies in Paris on 3 July 1839, warned that touching the surface of a daguerreotype was like ‘brushing the wings of a butterfly’. This fragility is demonstrated in an 1852 group portrait of Queen Victoria and her family. Apparently, Victoria had been captured with her eyes closed. So, she scratched out her face on the plate in a blizzard of annoyance, leaving herself decapitated but the children unblemished. Despite this experience, Victoria and Albert were enthusiastic patrons of photography.

William Edward Kilburn Studio (English, 1818-1881)
Queen Victoria et al
17 January 1852
Scratched daguerreotype
Royal Collection Trust
© His Majesty King Charles III 2022

This group portrait of Queen Victoria with her five eldest children was taken in January 1852 by William Edward Kilburn, who, as one of the leading photographers in London, was commissioned to photograph the Royal family on a number of occasions. The Queen was portrayed with her eyes closed, which is why she wiped out her face on the plate, but spared the images of the children.

“Went back to the Gardens, where a Daguerreotype by Mr. Kilburn was taken of me & 5 of the children. The day was splendid for it. Mine was unfortunately horrid, but the children’s were pretty.”

Queen Victoria, from a diary entry, 1852

William Edward Kilburn Studio (English, 1818-1881)
Prince Albert (1819-1861)
1848
Hand-coloured daguerreotype
6.3 x 8.7cm
Royal Collection Trust RCIN 2932486
© His Majesty King Charles III 2022

Hand-coloured daguerreotype of Prince Albert, seated and facing partly right. His left arm rests on the arm of the chair and his right rests on his lap. He is wearing a beige jacket and a dark brown waistcoat. The background is painted blue with white clouds and the daguerreotype is mounted under glass. On the reverse there is a label reading ‘The Prince from Life 1848’, handwritten by Queen Victoria. Prince Albert was an early enthusiast of photography and closely followed the development of the medium. In February 1847 Kilburn showed examples of his coloured daguerreotypes, made by adding fine coloured powders to the photographic plate, to the Society of Arts. In 1848 Prince Albert commissioned a portrait using the new technique. This is one of two surviving hand-coloured daguerreotypes produced from the sitting. Commissioned by Prince Albert in 1848

Anonymous. “Prince Albert (1819-1861),” on the Royal Collection Trust website Nd [Online] Cited 23/02/2023

Applied colour

By the mid-1840s, it was common for middle-class British citizens to have a daguerreotype portrait made. Often, these were enhanced with applied colour, giving a touch of life to an otherwise monochrome medium.

Studio of Richard Beard (English, 1801-1885)
Portrait bust of a man
c. 1845
Hand-painted daguerreotype in vertical leather case
Courtesy of a Private Collection

Richard Beard was a businessman who purchased a licence to use the daguerreotype process in 1841 and opened the world’s first photographic studio. It was set up in a glasshouse on the roof of London’s Royal Polytechnic Institution to provide all-round lighting necessary to the daguerreotype process. There were huge profits from his studios in London and Liverpool and from the sale of licences to take daguerreotypes, but Beard was ruined by his many legal actions against rivals, and went bankrupt in 1850.

Itinerant and transnational

The career of James William Newland exemplifies the itinerant, transnational character of many early photographers. Born in Suffolk in about 1810, Newland opened his first daguerreotype studio in 1845 in New Orleans in the USA. He subsequently travelled throughout Central and South America and then across the Pacific to Sydney, Australia. In 1848, he established a studio there and exhibited 200 daguerreotypes he had taken during his journey. After Australia, he headed back to England for a brief visit, before moving to India to set up a studio in Calcutta. It was there that he died, killed during the Indian Uprising of 1857.

J.W. Newland (English, c. 1810-1857)
Portrait of a standing man, Calcutta
c. 1855
Quarter-plate daguerreotype in leather case with red velvet pad
Courtesy of a Private Collection

Photo journalism

This daguerreotype records the immense crowds at one of the Chartist rallies held in South London in 1848. Calling for political reform, the Chartist movement was seen by many as a terrifying threat to the established order. Fears were so great, the Duke of Wellington stationed troops across London and the royal family was moved to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. In the event, the rally passed peacefully, and Prince Albert himself purchased this record of it.

Studio of William Edward Kilburn (English, 1818-1881) (234 Regent St, London)
The Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, 10 April 1848
10 April 1848
Daguerreotype Royal Collection, London

Daguerreotype of a large crowd of supporters of the Chartist movement gathered together on Kennington Common. At the centre of the crowd there is a platform for the speakers, and a number of people hold banners and flags. Behind the crowd there is a tall factory chimney and a large house to the right. In the foreground a man stands facing the crowds in a horse-drawn cart. The daguerreotype is mounted under glass.

This daguerreotype records the immense crowds at one of the Chartist rallies held in South London in 1848. Calling for political reform, and spurred on by the recent February Revolution in France, the Chartist movement was seen by many as a terrifying threat to the established order. Fears were so great that on the eve of the meeting, the Duke of Wellington stationed troops across London and the royal family were moved to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. In the event the rally passed peacefully. Prince Albert later spoke about his concern for the working classes at a meeting of the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Labouring Classes, 18 May 1848. This is one of a pair of daguerreotypes of the event acquired by Prince Albert.

One of a pair of daguerreotypes of the Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common purchased by Prince Albert in 1848

Anonymous. “The Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, 10 April 1848,” on the Royal Collection Trust website Nd [Online] Cited 23/02/2023

Ruskin and photography

Although his opinion of photography evolved over the years, John Ruskin was initially enthusiastic about the daguerreotype, importing early examples from France and learning the process himself in order to make photographic sketches of architecture and landscape.

“Daguerreotypes taken by this vivid sunlight are glorious things. It is very nearly the same thing as carrying off the palace itself: every chip of stone and stain is there, and of course there is no mistake about proportions… It is a noble invention.”

John Ruskin, in a letter to his father from Venice, 7 October 1845

John Ruskin (English, 1819-1900) and John Hobbs (?)
View of the façade of a building in Venice
c. 1850
Daguerreotype
History of Science Museum, University of Oxford
Minn Collection
Bequeathed by Henry Minn in 1961

John Ruskin (8 February 1819 – 20 January 1900) was an English writer, philosopher, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy.

Ruskin’s writing styles and literary forms were equally varied. He wrote 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, 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.

Ruskin 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.

Ruskin first came to widespread attention with the first volume of Modern Painters (1843), an extended essay in defence of the work of J. M. W. Turner in which he argued that the principal role of the artist is “truth to nature”. From the 1850s, he championed the Pre-Raphaelites, who were influenced by his ideas. His work increasingly focused on social and political issues. Unto This Last (1860, 1862) marked the shift in emphasis. In 1869, Ruskin became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, where he established the Ruskin School of Drawing. In 1871, he began his monthly “letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain”, published under the title Fors Clavigera (1871-1884). In the course of this complex and deeply personal work, he developed the principles underlying his ideal society. As a result, he founded the Guild of St George, an organisation that endures today.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Stereoscopic still life

This stereo-daguerreotype includes a selection of the instruments found in the studio of London photographer Antoine Claudet in 1853. They include a focimeter (a device of his own devising that aided focus), a distillation device hanging on the back wall, a telescope on a stand, an upside-down globe, an array of chemical jars and glass vessels, a centrifugal force speed controller, a photographometer (an early kind of light metre), three different kinds of stereoscope, the Post Office London Directory of 1852, a magnifying glass, a slide rule, a glass prism, a French treatise on photography, two of his dynactinometers (another device of his own invention), a mortar and pestle, and an apothecary’s scales.

Photographs of paintings

Daguerreotypes were used to make records of paintings and prints. Sometime in the 1850s, the studio of London-based photographer Edward Kilburn was commissioned to make a daguerreotype of a painting then thought to be by Raphael. The client was the British art dealer Morris Moore. Moore engaged in a decades-long struggle to have this painting, now titled Apollo and Marsyas and attributed to Perugino, accepted as an early work by Raphael. This daguerreotype no doubt played a part in that campaign. Moore displayed it, for example, in Berlin in 1856.

Keepsake and memory

Ada Lovelace, the English mathematician and computing pioneer, had a number of daguerreotype portraits made of herself. The last of these, taken by an unknown photographer, is of a small painted portrait of Lovelace. Frail and thin and suffering from cancer, she is shown sitting at her piano. Shortly before she died, Lovelace wrote a note in which she leaves ‘a daguerreotype from Philips’s picture of me’ to her mother’s friend, a Mary Millicent Montgomery.

Photographer unknown (English)
Copy of an 1852 painting of Ada Lovelace by Henry Wyndam Phillips
13 August 1852
Daguerreotype
Private Collection
Reproduction courtesy of Geoffrey Bond
Public domain

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (née Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage’s proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and to have published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is often regarded as the first computer programmer.

Text from the Wikipedia website

2th Sept 1852
I leave to my Mother’s oldest
Friend, Mary Millicent Mont=
=gomery, three articles, viz:
1. A Red Cornelian Brooch which
I have much used I have much used, & to which
I desire my Hair to be added;
2. A Daguerreotype from Philip’s
Picture of me;
3. 4 Books printed out by me.
I request this Paper also to be
given to Mary Millicent Mont=
=gomery; & I wish her to
understand that I leave her …

As well as being customers of the new photographers, Ada Lovelace and her circle were intrigued by the science of photography and the contribution photographic processes might make to science. Apart from her famous paper on Babbage’s Analytical Engine, her only other known publication is in the form of long footnotes to an article by her husband, William Earl of Lovelace, in the Royal Agricultural Society journal. The article, which he describes as being written for the ‘leather-gaiter-and-top-boot-mind’, reviews a paper by the French economist Gasparin, about possible laws linking climate and the yield of crops, referring to a wide variety of observations of weather and plants collected by both professionals and amateurs. Ada Lovelace observes that photographic devices, such as the actinograph designed by her friend John Herschel, allow the construction of ‘meteorological instruments of the utmost delicacy’, and criticises Gasparin ‘who seems to write unaware of the means which photography has offered’.

In similar vein, she reflected on the potential of photography in providing objective evidence of psychic phenomena. In an unpublished article she writes, ‘If amateurs, of either sex, would amuse their idle hours with experimenting on this subject, & would keep an accurate journal of their daily observations, we should in a few years have a mass of registered facts to compare with the observation of the Scientific’, concluding that ‘we believe that it is as yet quite unsuspected how important a part photography is to play in the advancement of human knowledge’.

A third poignant daguerreotype, by an unknown photographer, is a photograph of a small portrait of Ada Lovelace, frail and thin, painted by Henry Wyndham Phillips in the last months of her life, when she was in great pain from uterine cancer. Her husband recorded progress on the portrait in his diary – on 2 August ‘she managed to remain long enough when he came for him to make some progress’, on 3 August that he was ‘getting on with the portrait’, and on 13 August that though ‘the suffering was so great that she could scarce avoid crying out’, yet ‘she sat at the piano some little time so that the artist could portray her hands’. The Bodleian archives contain a note written in her last days, in which she leaves ‘a daguerreotype from Philips’s portrait of me’ to her mother’s friend, Miss Montgomery.

Professor Ursula Martin CBE, University of Oxford. “Only known photographs of Ada Lovelace in Bodleian Display,” on the Bodleian blogs Ada Lovelace website 14 October 2015 [Onlinr] Cited 23/02/2023

George Hollis (British, 1793-1842) (engraver)
Mr Couldock as Richard III
1851
From Tallis’s Drawing Room Table Book of Theatrical Portraits, Memoirs and Anecdotes
Hand-coloured steel engraving after daguerreotype by William Paine of Islington

This engraving: The British Museum CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The engraving in the exhibition: Private collection

Celebrity actors

Tallis’s Drawing Room Table Book of Theatrical Portraits, Memoirs and Anecdotes offered a series of engraved copies of daguerreotype portraits of celebrated Shakespearean actors. Sometimes these actors are shown as if in a portrait studio, but more often they are posing in costume (and even in blackface), as if in the midst of a performance. The series is a reminder of the popularity of the theatre and actors in the mid-19th century (even Queen Victoria bought a copy of this publication), but also of the casual racism that was part of everyday British life.

Engraver unknown (British)
Mr Charles Kean as Hamlet
1851
From Tallis’s Drawing Room Table Book of Theatrical Portraits, Memoirs and Anecdotes
Steel engraving after daguerreotype by William Paine of Islington

This engraving: The British Museum CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The engraving in the exhibition: Private collection

‘Mr Ira Aldridge as Aaron in Titus Andronicus’
From Tallis’s Drawing Room Table Book of Theatrical Portraits, Memoirs and Anecdotes
c. 1851
Steel engraving after daguerreotype by William Paine of Islington
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

Ira Aldridge

Born in New York, Ira Aldridge (1807-1867) was an African-American actor, playwright, and theatre manager. From 1824, the year he emigrated to the UK, Aldridge made his career largely on the London stage and in Europe. He became well known as a performer in plays by Shakespeare, including roles usually played by white actors, such as Richard III, King Lear and Macbeth. Aldridge’s career took off at the height of the movement to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire. He chose to play a number of anti-slavery roles and often addressed his audiences on closing night, speaking passionately about the injustice of slavery.

The Great Exhibition

Six million people – equivalent to a third of the entire population of Britain at the time – visited the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, an international showcase for goods, raw materials and industrial products and machinery. It took place in Hyde Park, London, from 1 May to 15 October in 1851. Photographs were among the thousands of exhibits, but the Great Exhibition was itself much photographed, as evidenced in the many photographic images reproduced in the illustrated press.

“Today is sunshine and mild weather. I peeped in thro’ a window at the East End of the Crystal palace, and found myself in the territories of the United States, who ought rather to have been located in the Far West of the building. The perspective looked beautiful.”

William Henry Fox Talbot, in a letter to his wife Constance, 30 April 1851

Engravers unknown (English)
The Great Exhibition: The east nave, viewed from the south-western gallery
1851
From Illustrated London News, 6 September 1851, p. 296
Stipple and line engraving from daguerreotype by William Edward Kilburn
210 x 270 mm
Courtesy of a Private Collection

Held at Crystal Palace in London in 1851, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations was one of the most influential cultural events of the 19th century and the Illustrated London New did not fail to record its scale and significance using an equally influential invention that would shape the current century and those to come.

Sir Joseph Paxton (1801-1865) began his career as a gardener’s boy, eventually becoming head gardener for the Duke of Devonshire. He remodelled the Duke’s gardens at Chatsworth and Chiswick, designing large glass and iron conservatories for them. These later became the model for his design of the Great Exhibition building, now known as the Crystal Palace, for which he received his knighthood. After this success, Paxton continued to work on landscape gardening and public parks as well as designing various country houses. Published by Peter Jackson, London.

Sir Joseph Paxton (English, 1801-1865)

Sir Joseph Paxton, (born Aug. 3, 1801, near Woburn, Bedfordshire, Eng. – died June 8, 1865, Sydenham, near London), English landscape gardener and designer of hothouses, who was the architect of the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London.

He was originally a gardener employed by the duke of Devonshire, whose friend, factotum, and adviser he became. From 1826 he was superintendent of the gardens at Chatsworth, the duke’s Derbyshire estate; he built in iron and glass the famous conservatory there (1840) and the lily house for the duke’s rare Victoria regia (1850). Also in 1850, after a cumbersome design had been officially accepted by the Great Exhibition’s organisers, Paxton’s inspired plan for a building of prefabricated elements of sheet glass and iron was substituted. His design, based on his earlier glass structures, covered four times the area of St. Peter’s, Rome, and the grandeur of its conception was a challenge to mid-19th-century technology. Although it was built within six months and he was knighted for his efforts (1851), it was not until later that the structure was seen as a revolution in style. In 1852-1854 its components were moved to Sydenham Hill in Upper Norwood, where they remained (reerected in a different form from the original) until destroyed by fire in 1936.

Paxton was a member of Parliament for Coventry from 1854 until his death. During the period of his glass structures, he also designed many houses in eclectic styles and laid out a number of public parks.

Kathleen Kuiper. “Sir Joseph Paxton,” on the Britannica website Nd [Online] Cited 23/02/2023

Joseph John Jenkins (English, 1811-1885) (engraver)
Joseph Paxton, designer of the Crystal Palace
c. 1851
Stipple and line engraving from daguerreotype by William Edward Kilburn

This engraving: from the Britannica website

The engraving in the exhibition: Private collection

Joseph John Jenkins (1811 – 9 March 1885) was a British engraver and watercolour painter. He is best known for his portraits and landscapes paintings.

Jenkins engraved many portraits, and among other works, Susanna and the Elders, after Francesco Mola, and The Greenwich Pensioner and The Chelsea Pensioner, after Michael William Sharp. He engraved plates and drew illustrations for the annuals, such as The Keepsake and Heath’s Book of Beauty, Plates from his drawings are in Charles Heath’s Illustrations to Byron and similar works.

Grand Panorama

The Illustrated London News issued a commemorative Grand Panorama of the Great Exhibition of All Nations 1851 in its December issue. Comprising fold-out pages, each sheet was based on daguerreotypes of the interior of the Exhibition taken by an operator from the Beard studio. The panorama showed frontal views of each side of the interior of the Crystal Palace, with distinct sections suitably captioned and clusters of figures added to give interest to an otherwise drab set of facades.

Commodities and things

The taking of photographs inside the building was restricted to between 6 and 9 am, before it opened to the public, or on Sundays, when it was otherwise closed. Often, the resulting views are undemonstrative and frontal, even if they are also sometimes animated by the engraver through the addition of figures peering at the exhibits. These scenes confirm the fetishisation of the commodity that was the Great Exhibition’s singular attraction, turning that spectacle into a picture to be gazed at in its turn.

John Tallis (English, 1817-1876) and Jacob George Strutt (British, 1790-1864)
Tallis’s history and description of the Crystal Palace, and the exhibition of the world’s industry in 1851 (p. 13)
1852
Steel engravings, from original drawings and daguerreotypes by Beard and Mayall studios

The Swedish Nightingale

Prizes were awarded to photographers whose displays at the Great Exhibition were considered to be particularly notable. One of those prizes was awarded to Edward Kilburn. The jury was particularly impressed by a full-length daguerreotype portrait made by Kilburn in 1848 of Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind, known as the Swedish Nightingale. Lind is posed so that her image is reflected in a large mirror; ‘that the reflection in the glass is equally perfect with the original is the point worthy of remark and commendation’.

“… a masterpiece of this art, not excelled, if equalled, by any other specimen exhibited throughout the entire building.”

Illustrated London News (1851)

Studio of William Edward Kilburn (English, 1818-1881) (234 Regent St, London)
Portrait of Jenny Lind standing at a piano
1848
Daguerreotype
11.5 x 9.1cm
© Royal Collection, London

Daguerreotype of a full length portrait of Jenny Lind standing beside a piano, facing away from the camera, with her head and upper body turned left towards the camera. Her right hand rests on the top of the piano and her left hand is touching the keys. She is wearing a long dress and a dark colour lace shawl. The mirror on the wall to the right reflects her back and there is an ornate side table beneath it. The daguerreotype is mounted under glass.

Queen Victoria attended the first London performance given by the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind on the 4th of May 1847. She described the occasion in her journal: ‘The great event of the evening however was Jenny Lind’s appearance & her complete triumph. She has the most exquisite, powerful, & really quite peculiar voice’. She later sang among the choristers at the wedding of the Prince of Wales in St George’s Chapel in 1863.

William Kilburn exhibited several daguerreotypes at the 1851 Great Exhibition, with this image being particularly well received. The exhibition jury commented: ‘For novelty of design we may mention a small picture of the interior of a room, including a whole-length portrait of Jenny Lind: beside, and near her, is a large mirror, in which the figure is reflected. That the reflection in the glass is equally perfect with the original is the point worthy of remark and commendation’.

The daguerreotype was also reproduced with significant cropping in carte-de-visite format, such as in the example today kept at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (Museum Number S.138:66-2007). Acquired by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1849.

Anonymous. “Jenny Lind (1820-1887),” on the Royal Collection Trust website Nd [Online] Cited 23/02/2023

Really marvellous

Stuffed frogs being shaved and promenading under an umbrella were among the most remarkable of the exhibits daguerreotyped by the Claudet studio at the Great Exhibition. The animals were prepared for anthropomorphic display by Hermann Ploucquert, a taxidermist at the Royal Museum in Stuttgart. The stall at which these creations were exhibited was apparently perpetually surrounded by a crowd. Queen Victoria herself described them in her diaries as ‘really marvellous’. Claudet’s images were issued as a book of coloured wood engravings titled The Comical Creatures from Wurtemberg.

News from home

The dissemination of engravings after daguerreotypes in the Illustrated London News meant that photographic images became itinerant entities. Distributed all over the world, the same image was capable of being experienced, simultaneously, in – say – Sydney, Hong Kong, Calcutta, New York, and London. By 1851, when Harden Melville completed the painting that this coloured engraving commemorates – titled Australia: News from Home – even settlers in outback Australia were able to get copies. One of them is looking at an issue of the Illustrated London News that celebrates the opening of the Great Exhibition in London.

Official reports

Not one of the many photographs exhibited in the Great Exhibition was by William Henry Fox Talbot, England’s claimant to the medium’s invention. Nevertheless, Talbot’s calotype process was chosen to illustrate the official reports on the event, even if the majority of these illustrations was shot and printed by French photographers rather than English ones. The other claimant to photography’s invention, the Frenchman Louis Daguerre, lived long enough to read about London’s Great Exhibition but died two months after it opened. Fittingly, his obituary in the Illustrated London News was accompanied by a wood-engraved portrait based on a daguerreotype.

The Duke of Wellington

The Ryall engraving faithfully imitates the composition and details of the daguerreotype made by the Claudet studio, but reverses the orientation of the Duke’s body. A story in the Illustrated London News, published on 13 November 1852, tells us that the Duke himself was not particularly impressed by the print. Apparently, ‘he looked at it for a moment, shook his head, and, with a half smile and half frown of recognition, muttered “Very old! Hum!” and turned away in thought’. This engraving was in turn copied by others, reappearing in a variety of media over the next few decades, and especially in 1852, the year of Wellington’s death.

Edward J. Pickering, for studio of Antoine Claudet (London)
Portrait of the Duke of Wellington
1 May 1844
Daguerreotype

This image: Getty
Public domain

Image in the exhibition: Wellington Collection, Stratfield Saye House

John Sartain (English, 1808-1897)
The Duke of Wellington
1852
Mezzotint, etching and aquatint engraving (‘engraved by J. Sartain after Claudet’s portrait’)
7 x 4 15/16 in. (17.78 x 12.54cm)

This engraving: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Bequest of Dr. Paul J. Sartain
Public domain

The engraving in the exhibition: Private collection

Salt prints

In September 1840, William Henry Fox Talbot discovered how to greatly increase his photographic paper’s sensitivity to light. This new process produced a latent image which remained invisible to the eye until it was developed for a second time. The result was a sharp negative from which numerous positive salt prints could be made. Resisting his mother’s entreaty to call this process ‘Talbotype’, after himself, he gave it the more modest name of ‘calotype’ (‘beautiful picture’). Other photographers soon took up this new process, including Welshman Calvert Richard Jones and the Scottish duo of David Hill and Robert Adamson.

“A better picture can now be obtained in a minute than by the former process in an hour.”

William Henry Fox Talbot, in a letter to the Literary Gazette, 13 February 1841

William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877)
Lace
Early 1840s
Salt print from a calotype negative
22.7 x 18.7cm

Rev. Calvert Richard Jones (Welsh, 1804-1877)
Colosseum, Rome, 2nd view
1846
Salt print (printed by Nicolaas Henneman) from a calotype negative

This image: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain

Image in the exhibition: MS. WHF Talbot photogr. 6

The Reverend Calvert Richard Jones was the son of a landowner from Wales. He became a marine painter, draftsman, and daguerreotypist before turning to the calotype, the negative/positive paper process invented by William Henry Fox Talbot, with whom Jones occasionally photographed. During travels to Italy in 1841, Jones stopped in France, where he met and photographed with Hippolyte Bayard, the French inventor of direct positive prints on paper. Through Jones, Bayard and Talbot were introduced to each other and their respective pioneering processes.

Jones was enthusiastic about the creative possibilities of photography. He used the photographic panorama, a device that provided the viewer with a wide-angle view of a given scene. His body of work includes marine landscapes and genre portraits of local men and women at work and leisure, as well as travel landscapes of Italy and France. After 1856 Jones apparently gave up photography, although he continued to paint.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877)
Loch Katrine
1844
Salt print (printed by Nicolaas Henneman) from a calotype negative

David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1802-1870 and Scottish, 1821-1848)
Portrait of James Inglis
2 October 1844
Salt print from a calotype negative
History of Science Museum, University of Oxford
Presented by Sir John R. Findlay in 1929

Calotype (salted paper print from a calotype negative) of James Inglis, a doctor from Halifax, seated nearly three-quarter length, head very nearly in profile looking left, a leather glove on his left hand; photographed at the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting at York in 1844. Mostly greenish sepia, pale at edges, retaining the original brown only at centre; discolouration mark from juxtaposed paper on back. For fuller descriptive and historical commentary see narratives.

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

Brewster, sensing that Hill’s intention to sketch each of the several hundred ministers before they returned to the far corners of Scotland would be close to impossible, suggested that the painter use the services of the newly established Adamson to make photographic sketches instead. “I got hold of the artist,” Brewster wrote to Talbot in early June, “showed him the Calotype, & the eminent advantage he might derive from it in getting likenesses of all the principal characters before they were dispersed to their respective homes. He was at first incredulous, but went to Mr. Adamson, and arranged with him preliminaries for getting all the necessary portraits.” Within weeks Hill was completely won over, and the two were working seamlessly in partnership. As artistic director, Hill composed each picture, placing his sitters as they might appear in the finished painting.

Adamson operated the camera and carried out the chemical manipulations. Hill and Adamson were a perfect team. Hill, twenty years older than Adamson, was trained as a painter and had important connections in artistic and social circles in Edinburgh; he easily attracted a distinguished clientele to the team’s portrait studio at Adamson’s home, Rock House. Most of all, he possessed a geniality, a “suavity of manner and absence of all affectation,” that immediately set people at ease and permitted him to pose his sitters without losing their natural sense of posture and expression. Adamson was young but had learned his lessons well. He was a consummate technician, excelling in – and even improving upon – the various optical and chemical procedures developed by Talbot. Both men had a profound understanding of the way the world would translate into monochrome pictures.

If in May Hill had been incredulous, by June he was convinced; by July he was proud to exhibit the first photographs as “preliminary studies and sketches” for his picture, and by the end of the year he and his partner had photographed nearly all the figures who would have a place in his grand painting. Their hundreds of preparatory “sketches” ranged from single portraits to groups of as many as twenty-five ministers posed as Hill envisioned them in his ambitious composition. Some portraits, such as that of Thomas Chalmers, first moderator of the Free Church, were used as direct models for the finished work. However, at each sitting, Hill and Adamson made numerous photographs in various poses, and many photographs of the ministers have no direct correspondence with the painting. Still other portraits, of people who were not present for the signing of the Deed of Demission – but whom Hill apparently thought should have been – were used as models for the painting.

“The pictures produced are as Rembrandt’s but improved,” wrote the watercolorist John Harden on first seeing Hill and Adamson’s calotypes in November 1843, “so like his style & the oldest & finest masters that doubtless a great progress in Portrait painting & effect must be the consequence.” In actuality, though, it was so easy to make the portrait “sketches” by means of photography that Hill’s painting was ultimately overburdened by a surfeit of recognizable faces: 450 names appear on his key to the painting. The final composition – not completed for two decades and as dull a work as one can imagine – lacks not only the fiery dynamism of Hill’s first sketches of the event but also the immediacy and graphic power of the photographs that were meant to serve it.

By August 1844, Hill and Adamson clearly understood the value of their calotypes as works of art in their own right and decided to expand their collaboration far beyond the original mission, announcing a forthcoming series of volumes illustrated with photographs of subjects other than the ministers of the Free Church: The Fishermen and Women of the Firth of Forth; Highland Character and Costume; Architectural Structures of Edinburgh; Architectural Structures of Glasgow, &c.; Old Castles, Abbeys, &c. in Scotland; and Portraits of Distinguished Scotchmen. Although these titles were never issued as published volumes, photographs intended for each survive, and those made in the small fishing town of Newhaven are a particularly noteworthy group.

Malcolm Daniel. “David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (1821-1848),” on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website October 2004 [Online] Cited 23/02/2023

William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877)
An Ancient Door in Magdalen College, Oxford
April 1843
Salted paper print from paper negative
Dimensions overall: 18.8 x 22.7cm (7 3/8 x 8 15/16 in.)

This image: National Gallery of Art, Robert B. Menschel Fund
CC0 1.0 Universal

Image in the exhibition: MS. WHF Talbot photogr. 4, item 3

A New Power: Photography in Britain 1800-1850 is made possible through the generosity of donors and lenders. In particular the Bodleian Libraries would like to thank: Professor Raymond Dwek CBE FRS and Mrs Sandra Dwek Sir Brian and Lady Pomeroy Ian and Caroline Laing
Lenders
His Majesty King Charles III
Blackie House Library and Museum, Edinburgh
The Trustees of the British Museum
English Heritage Trust
Polar Museum, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge
Victoria and Albert Museum
The Wellington Collection, Stratfield Saye House
Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
History of Science Museum, University of Oxford
Oxford University Museum of Natural History
The President and Fellows of Magdalen College
The Provost and Fellows of Oriel College
The Principal and Fellows of Somerville College
Geoffrey Batchen
G C Bond
K & J Jacobson
Gregory Page-Turner
William Zachs

We would like to thank HM Government for providing Government Indemnity for the loans and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and Arts Council England for arranging the indemnity. We are also grateful to those whose skill and labour have made this exhibition possible.

A New Power: Photography in Britain 1800-1850 exhibition poster

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Jan

Exhibition: ‘Unearthed: Photography’s Roots’ at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, drawing, Edward Steichen, English artist, exhibition, existence, gallery website, Japanese artist, light, memory, painting, photographic series, photography, psychological, reality, sculpture, space, time and works on paper
Tags: Adiantum pedatum, Adiantum pedatum Maidenhair Fern, Agave Design I, Anna Atkins, Anna Atkins and Anna Dixon, Anna Atkins Ceylon, Anna Atkins Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns., Anna Atkins Dictyota dichotoma, Anna Dixon, Asplenium onopteris, Auto Immolation, Auto Immolation 002, Bean Longpod, Bory's Spleenwort, British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, Broccoli Leamington, Cecilia Glaisher, Cecilia Glaisher Bory's Spleenwort, Ceylon cyanotype, Charles Jones, Charles Jones Bean Longpod, Charles Jones Broccoli Leamington, Chromo-collotype, Chrysanthemum, collodion negative, Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns, Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns, Delphiniums, Dictyota dichotoma, Dictyota dichotoma in the young state and in fruit, Dulwich Picture Gallery, dye imbibition print, Edward Steichen, Edward Steichen Delphiniums, Edward Steichen Foxgloves France, Edward Steichen Magnolia Blossoms, Edward Weston Pepper no. 30, flower still lifes, Foxgloves France, fragility of existence, Francis Brinkley, Fruit and Flowers, Gyula Holics, Gyula Holics Peas, hand coloured photography, Hand-coloured photograph, hand-coloured photographs, hand-coloured photographs of Japanese flowers, Imogen Cunningham, Imogen Cunningham Agave Design I, Imogen Cunningham Two Callas, Impatiens Glandulifera, Iris Kaempferi, Japan Described and Illustrated by the Japanese, Japanese flowers, Japanese Lilies, K. Ogawa printing factory, Karl Blossfeldt, Karl Blossfeldt Adiantum pedatum, Karl Blossfeldt Impatiens Glandulifera, Karl Blossfeldt Maidenhair Fern, Kokka, Large Poppies, light drawing, Lorenzo Vitturi, Lorenzo Vitturi Yellow and Red Bokkom Mix #2, Magnolia Blossoms, Maidenhair Fern, Mat Collishaw, Mat Collishaw Auto Immolation 002, memento mori, Morning Glory, Ogawa Kazumasa, Ogawa Kazumasa Chrysanthemum, Ogawa Kazumasa Iris Kaempferi, Ogawa Kazumasa Japanese Lilies, Ogawa Kazumasa Morning Glory, Ogawa Kazumasa Some Japanese Flowers, On Reflection, optical unconsciousness, Ori Gersht, Ori Gersht On Reflection, Pepper no. 30, photograms, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, photography and transmutation, Richard Learoyd, Richard Learoyd Large Poppies, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Mapplethorpe Orchid, Robert Mapplethorpe Tulip, Roger Fenton, Roger Fenton Fruit and Flowers, Shashin Shinpō, Some Japanese Flowers, still life, still-life arrangements, Thanatos, The British Ferns – Photographed from Nature, The Day-books of Edward Weston, the moment of creation, transient nature of life, Two Callas, Unearthed: Photography's Roots, Yellow and Red Bokkom Mix #2

Exhibition dates: 8th December 2020 – 9th May 2021

Curator: Alexander Moore

The exhibition will include work by the following 41 artists (in alphabetical order):

Nobuyoshi Araki, Anna Atkins, Alois Auer, Cecil Beaton, Karl Blossfeldt, Adolphe Braun, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Mat Collishaw, Imogen Cunningham, Roger Fenton, Adam Fuss, Ori Gersht, Cecilia Glaisher, Joy Gregory, William Henry Fox Talbot, Sir John Herschel, Gyula Holics, Jan van Huysum, Henry Irving, Charles Jones, Sarah Jones, André Kertész, Nick Knight, Lou Landauer, Richard Learoyd, Pradip Malde, Robert Mapplethorpe, John Moffat, Sarah Moon, James Mudd, Kazumasa Ogawa, T Enami, Dr Albert G Richards, Scowen & Co., Scheltens & Abbenes, Helen Sear, Edward Steichen, Josef Sudek, Lorenzo Vitturi, Edward Weston, Walter Woodbury.

Charles Jones (British, 1866-1959)
Broccoli Leamington
c. 1895-1910
© Sean Sexton
Photo copyright Dulwich Picture Gallery

A difficult thing said simply

What a wonderful selection of photographs to start the year 2021.

As Laura Cumming observes, there is a profound connection between photography and photosynthesis – both created through light, both constructed and political. For the photograph is ALWAYS the choice of the photographer, and the landscape has ALWAYS been shaped and constructed since human beings emerged on this earth. Nothing in the natural world is ever “natural” but always mediated by time, space, context, power and desire. Desire to control the direction of a river, desire for food and shelter, desire for Lebensraum or living space as a practice of settler colonialism, desire to celebrate the “natural” world, desire to procreate, desire to propagate the (genetically modified) vegetable. A desire to desire.

Photography’s symbiotic relationship with the natural world is the relationship of photography and transmutation (the action of changing or the state of being changed into another form), photography and transmogrification (the act or process of changing or being changed completely). The natural world, through an action (that of being photographed), changes its state (flux) and, further, changes its state to a completely different form (fixed in liquid fixer; fixed, saved, but fluid, in the digital pixel). Flowers and vegetables are alive then wither and die, only to remain “the same” in the freeze frame of the death-defying photograph.

Photography’s fluidity and fixity – of movement, time, space, context, representation – allows “the infinite possibility of experimentation” not, as Cumming argues, “without the interference of humanity, accident, sound or movement” but through their very agency. It is the human hand that arranges these pyramidal broccoli, the accident of light in the photogram that allows us to pierce a clump of Bory’s Spleenwort root structure. It is human imagination, the movement of the human mind, that allows the artist Charles Jones to darken the Bean Longpod cases so that these become seared in the mind’s eye, fixed in all time and space as iconic image: the “transformation of an earthy root vegetable into an abstracted object worthy of adulation.”

While the process of photographing flower and vegetable may well be due to the interference of humanity, accident, sound or movement, contemplation or decisive moment, the final outcome of the image – the representation of the natural in the physicality of the print – usually attempts to hide these processes in images that are frozen in time, images that play on the notion of memento mori and the transient nature of life. In the presence of a triple death (ie. the death of the plant or flower, the time freeze or death moment of the photograph, and our knowledge that these plants and flowers in the photograph have already died), it is the abstraction of the death reality in images of flowers, plants and vegetables that allows for a touch of the soul. These photographs “provide a glimpse into the terrain of the unseen, or what German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin coined the “optical unconsciousness”.”1 Here, photography allows us to capture the realm of the unseen and also allows us to glimpse the expansive terrain of the human imaginary. The camera reveals aspects of reality that register in our senses but never quite get processed consciously. (Is there anything “real” about Cunningham’s Two Callas 1929 other than a vibration of the energy of the cosmos?)

Still, still, still we are (unconsciously) aware of all that is embedded within a photograph for photography makes us feel, makes us remember “that which lies beyond the frame, or what photographs compel us to remember and forget, what they enable us to uncover and repress…”. Like any great work of art, when we look at a great photograph it is not what we BELIEVE that matters when we look, but how the art work makes us FEEL, how it touches the depths of our soul. These are the roots of photography, un/earthed, in the languages of image – (sub)conscious stories of the human imagination which seek to make sense of our roots in Earth.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Footnotes

1/ A different nature presents itself to the movie camera than to the naked eye. Instead of being something we enter into unconsciously or vaguely, in film we enter nature analytically. While a painter lovely caresses the surfaces of nature, the cameraman chucks a piece of dynamite at it, then reassembles the pieces:

“Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-clung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling.”

A movie camera can be mounted on a speeding locomotive, dropped down a sewer, or secreted in a valise and carried surreptitiously around a city. The camera reveals aspects of reality that register in our senses but never quite get processed consciously. Film changed how we view the least significant minutiae of reality just as surely as Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life changed how we look at incidental phenomenon like slips of the tongue. In other words, film serves as an optical unconscious. Benjamin asserts the film camera “introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

“Richard Prouty. “The optical unconsciousness,” on the One-Way Street website Oct 16, 2009 [Online] Cited 03/01/2021

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

“The Dulwich show amounts to a political history of photography by other means. Should it aspire to nothing more than the fictions of painting? Should it be a catalogue, a document, a celebration of the natural life? Where Glaisher records the precise difference between two varieties of fern, Jones observes the Sputnik-like eccentricity of a plucked turnip. Where Imogen Cunningham sees the perfect abstraction of a calla lily, Edward Weston anthropomorphises a pepper, so that it momentarily resembles the torso of a body-builder. …

Perhaps the desire to photograph the vegetable world brings its own peace, as well as the infinite possibility of experimentation without the interference of humanity, accident, sound or movement. But perhaps it also has something to do with the profound connection between photography and photosynthesis. The very light that gives life to a rose, before its petals drop, is the same light that preserves it in a death-defying photograph.”

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Laura Cumming. “Unearthed: Photography’s Roots review – cauliflowers saying cheese…” on the Guardian website Sun 29 Nov 2020 [Online] Cited 23/12/2020

Anna Atkins (English, 1799-1871)
Ceylon [examples of ferns]
c. 1850
Cyanotype

After publishing her own book of cyanotype photograms of British algae in the 1840s, Atkins collaborated with her childhood friend and fellow scholar Anna Dixon on a second book of photograms. The book, Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns, was published in 1853 and now resides in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

This particular image [above] is a selection from Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns. A collection of four distinct ferns, it’s simply captioned “Ceylon”. At the time these cyanotypes were being made, the island of Ceylon – modern day Sri Lanka – was under British rule. It would be nearly another century before the island declared independence from Atkins’ home country. Despite the abundant difficulties of travel in the 1850s, Atkins’s many scientific and business connections no doubt helped her obtain several foreign specimens for this book of fern cyanotypes.

Anonymous text on the 20 x 200 website [Online] Cited 24/12/2020

This unique camera-less photograph was part of an extensive project to document plants from Great Britain and British colonies like Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and illustrates an early example of how important photography would become in our attempts to learn about and protect the natural world. Anna Atkins (British, 1799-1871) was a trained botanist who adopted photographic processes in order to describe, analyse, and, in a manner of speaking, preserve plant specimens from around the world. She is widely considered the first person to use photographs to illustrate a book, her British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions published in 1843. This particular photograph was produced with Anna Dixon for a later compilation: Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns in 1854. With these and other projects, Atkins helped establish photography as an important tool in scientific and ecological observation. …

Atkins made all of her cyanotypes in England, often receiving specimens through imperial trade. This image, therefore, was produced over 5,000 miles away from where the plant originated

Brian Piper. “Object Lesson: Ceylon cyanotype by Anna Atkins,” on the New Orleans Museum of Art website March 23, 2020 [Online] Cited 24/12/2020.

Anna Atkins (English, 1799-1871)
Plate 55 – Dictyota dichotoma, in the young state and in fruit
1853
From Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions Volume 1 (Part 1)
Cyanotype
Photo copyright Horniman Museum and Gardens

Cecilia Glaisher (British, 1828-1892)
Bory’s Spleenwort (Asplenium onopteris)
c. 1853-1856
Salted paper print

Cecilia Glaisher (20 April 1828 – 28 December 1892) was an English amateur photographer, artist, illustrator and print-maker, working in the 1850s world of Victorian science and natural history. …

The British Ferns – Photographed from Nature by Mrs Glaisher was planned as an illustrated guide to identifying ferns, with the entomologist Edward Newman (1801-1876), a fern expert and publisher. Made using William Henry Fox Talbot’s photogenic drawing process during what has come to be known as the Victorian fern craze, it was to be published in a number of parts and intended to appeal to the growing number of fern collectors whose enthusiasm was fuelled by increasingly informative and magnificently illustrated fern publications. The use of photography, according to the printed handbill produced by Newman to promote the work, would allow fern specimens to be “displayed with incomparable exactness, producing absolute facsimiles of the objects, perfect in artistic effect and structural details”. A portfolio of ten prints, in mounts embossed with Newman’s publishing details, was presented by him to the Linnean Society in London in December 1855. However, perhaps due to an inability to raise sufficient subscriptions, or difficulties in producing prints in consistent quantities, the project appears to have been abandoned by 1856.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869)
Fruit and Flowers
1860
Albumen print from a collodion negative
Victoria & Albert Museum

In tackling still lifes, Roger Fenton gave form to his ardent belief that no subject was off limits to photography, even one intimately linked to the history of painting and seemingly so dependent on colour. Faced with terrible weather in 1860 that curtailed his ability to photograph landscapes, Fenton drew upon the skills he had perfected earlier in the decade while photographing the collection of the British Museum and trained his lens on carefully balanced still-life arrangements. Cleverly massing and juxtaposing forms and tonal values, and brazenly taking advantage of photography’s ability to convey detail, Fenton quickly produced a series of unprecedented vivaciousness that convincingly demonstrated why photography should be counted as an art. Fruit and Flowers is among the last images this towering figure in the history of photography made before quitting photography for good at age 41.

Fruit and Flowers is an ebullient, in-your-face celebration of summer’s bounty. Shot head on and close up, the densely packed arrangement seems ready to tumble from the large, glossy 14- by nearly 17-inch albumen print made from a collodion negative. Dozens of juicy, sensuous grapes flank a tall, centred vase decorated with a tendril pattern; the vase holds pansies at its top while plums nestle at the base. At right, a few grapes dangle over the edge of a marble tabletop, falling into the viewer’s space, as does a striped, tasseled cloth at left. Star-shaped hoyas are reflected in a chased silver goblet, and two immense lilies, their stems obscured, appear to hover untethered above. The lilies are balanced compositionally by a large rose that faces the viewer, while a second rose, near the bottom, separates the grapes and a nude figurine. Ferns and lily of the valley complete the floral medley.

The prominent roses and lilies may allude to the sacred, as both are associated with the Virgin Mary, but myriad wine references, such as the grapes, the chalice decorated with grape vines, and especially the impish figurine, whose physical attributes link him to bacchanalian Roman festivals, point decidedly to the profane. At the same time, the withering rose, drooping leaves, and tired-looking plums remind the viewer that such pleasures are ephemeral.

Anonymous. “Fruit and Flowers: Roger Fenton,” on the National Gallery of Art website [Online] Cited 24/12/2020.

Charles Jones (British, 1866-1959)
Bean Longpod
c. 1895-1910
© Sean Sexton
Photo copyright Dulwich Picture Gallery

In Bean Longpod (1895-1910), now on view in “Unearthed,” the titular plant cuts through the centre of the composition, leaving little room for anything else. Other works play with their subjects’ placement: Broccoli Leamington (1895-1910), for instance, finds large broccoli heads sitting atop one another in a pyramid-like formation. The overall effect of this unusual treatment, notes the Michael Hoppen Gallery, is the “transformation of an earthy root vegetable into an abstracted” object worthy of adulation. …

According to the Michael Hoppen Gallery, which hosted a 2015 exhibition on Jones, “[t]he extraordinary beauty of each Charles Jones print rests in the intensity of focus on the subject and the almost portrait-like respect with which each specimen is treated.”

Ogawa Kazumasa (Japanese, 1860-1929)
Iris Kaempferi
c. 1894
From Some Japanese Flowers
Chromo-collotype
Hand-coloured photograph
Photo copyright Dulwich Picture Gallery

Ogawa Kazumasa (Japanese, 1860-1929)
Japanese Lilies
c. 1894
From Some Japanese Flowers
Chromo-collotype
Hand-coloured photograph
Photo copyright Dulwich Picture Gallery

Ogawa Kazumasa lived from the 1860s to almost the 1930s, surely one of the most fascinating 70-year stretches in Japanese history. Ogawa’s homeland “opened” to the world when he was a boy, and for the rest of his life he bore witness to the sometimes beautiful, sometimes strange, sometimes exhilarating results of a once-isolated culture assimilating seemingly everything foreign – art, technology, customs – all at once. Naturally he picked up a camera to document it all, and history now remembers him as a pioneer of his art. During the 1890s he published Some Japanese Flowers, a book containing his pictures of just that.

The following year, Ogawa’s hand-coloured photographs of Japanese flowers also appeared in the American books Japan, Described and Illustrated by the Japanese, edited by the renowned Anglo-Irish expatriate Japanese culture scholar Francis Brinkley and published in Boston, the city where Ogawa had spent a couple of years studying portrait photography and processing.

Ogawa’s varied life in Japan included working as an editor at Shashin Shinpō (写真新報), the only photography journal in the country at the time, as well as at the flower magazine Kokka (国華), which would certainly have given him the experience he needed to produce photographic specimens such as these. Though Ogawa invested a great deal in learning and employing the highest photographic technologies, they were the highest photographic technologies of the 1890s, when colour photography necessitated adding colours – of particular importance in the case of flowers – after the fact.

… Even as everything changed so rapidly all around him, as he mastered the just-as-rapidly developing tools of his craft, Ogawa nevertheless kept his eye for the natural and cultural aspects of his homeland that seemed never to have changed at all.

Colin Marshall. “Beautiful Hand-Colored Japanese Flowers Created by the Pioneering Photographer Ogawa Kazumasa (1896),” on the Open Culture website March 22nd, 2019 [Online] Cited 24/12/2020.

The stunning floral images … are the work of Ogawa Kazumasa, a Japanese photographer, printer, and publisher known for his pioneering work in photomechanical printing and photography in the Meiji era. Studying photography from the age of fifteen, Ogawa moved to Tokyo aged twenty to further his study and develop his English skills which he believed necessary to deepen his technical knowledge. After opening his own photography studio and working as an English interpreter for the Yokohama Police Department, Ogawa decided to travel to the United States to learn first hand the advance photographic techniques of the time. Having little money, Ogawa managed to get hired as a sailor on the USS Swatara and six months later landed in Washington. For the next two years, in Boston and Philadelphia, Ogawa studied printing techniques including the complicated collotype process with which he’d make his name on returning to Japan.

In 1884, Ogawa opened a photographic studio in Tokyo and in 1888 established a dry plate manufacturing company, and the following year, Japan’s first collotype business, the “K. Ogawa printing factory”. He also worked as an editor for various photography magazines, which he printed using the collotype printing process, and was a founding member of the Japan Photographic Society.

Anonymous. “Ogawa Kazumasa’s Hand-Coloured Photographs of Flowers (1896),” on The Public Domain Review website [Online] Cited 24/12/2020.

Ogawa Kazumasa (Japanese, 1860-1929)
Chrysanthemum
c. 1894
From Some Japanese Flowers
Chromo-collotype
Hand-coloured photograph
Photo copyright Dulwich Picture Gallery

Ogawa Kazumasa (Japanese, 1860-1929)
Morning Glory
c. 1894
From Some Japanese Flowers
Chromo-collotype
Hand-coloured photograph
Photo copyright Dulwich Picture Gallery

A central focus for the show and a truly rare opportunity for visitors will be a display of 11 works by the inventor and pioneer, Kazumasa Ogawa, whose effectively coloured photographs were created 30 years before colour film was invented. Ogawa combined printmaking and traditions in Japan to create truly original and pioneering photographs. By developing up to 16 different colour plates per image from expertly hand coloured prints he made Japan the world’s leading producer of coloured photographs, the display of which is hoped to be a revelation for many.

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Agave Design I
1920s
Gelatin silver print

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973)
Magnolia Blossoms, Voulangis, France
c. 1921
Gelatin silver print
19.4 x 23.8cm

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973)
Foxgloves, France
1925
Gelatin silver print

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932)
Adiantum pedatum. Maidenhair Fern
before 1926
Private Collection, Derbyshire

Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932)
Impatiens Glandulifera
1928
Gelatin silver print
27 x 20.5cm

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Two Callas
1929
Gelatin silver print

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Pepper No. 30
1930
Gelatin silver print contact print
24.1 × 19.2cm

A year later, during a four-day period from August 2-6, 1930, Weston took at least thirty more negatives of peppers. He first tried again with plain muslin or a piece of white cardboard as the backdrop, but for these images he thought the contrast between the backdrop and the pepper was too stark. On August 3 he found a large tin funnel, and, placing it on its side, he set a pepper just inside the large open end. He wrote:

It was a bright idea, a perfect relief for the pepper and adding reflecting light to important contours. I still had the pepper which caused me a week’s work, I had decided I could go no further with it, yet something kept me from taking it to the kitchen, the end of all good peppers. I placed it in the funnel, focused with the Zeiss, and knowing just the viewpoint, recognizing a perfect light, made an exposure of six minutes, with but a few moments’ preliminary work, the real preliminary was on in hours passed. I have a great negative, – by far the best!

It is a classic, completely satisfying, – a pepper – but more than a pepper; abstract, in that it is completely outside subject matter. It has no psychological attributes, no human emotions are aroused: this new pepper takes one beyond the world we know in the conscious mind.

To be sure, much of my work has this quality… but this one, and in fact all of the new ones, take one into an inner reality, – the absolute, – with a clear understanding, a mystic revealment. This is the “significant presentation” that I mean, the presentation through one’s intuitive self, seeing “through one’s eyes, not with them”: the visionary.”

By placing the pepper in the opening of the funnel, Weston was able to light it in a way that portrays the pepper in three dimensions, rather than as a flat image. It is this light that gives the image much of its extraordinary quality.

Edward Weston (1961). Nancy Newhall (ed.,). The Day-books of Edward Weston, Volume II. NY: Horizon Press. p. 180 quoted on the Wikipedia website.

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973)
Delphiniums
1940
Dye imbibition print
Digital image courtesy of the George Eastman Museum
© 2019 The Estate of Edward Steichen/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Gyula Holics (Hungarian, 1919-1989)
Peas
1950s
Gelatin silver print
23.8 x 18.1cm

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Tulip
1984
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation
Used by permission

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Orchid
1985
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation
Used by permission

Trace the history of photography from the 1840s to present day, as seen through depictions of nature. In Summer 2020, we present our first major photography exhibition, tracing the rich history of the medium told through depictions of nature, bringing together over 100 works by 25 leading international photographers.

This autumn, Dulwich Picture Gallery will present the first exhibition to trace the history of photography as told through depictions of nature, revealing how the subject led to key advancements in the medium, from its very beginnings in 1840 to present day. Unearthed: Photography’s Roots will be the first major photography show at Dulwich Picture Gallery, bringing together over 100 works by 35 leading international photographers, many never seen before.

Presenting just one of the many possible histories of photography, this exhibition follows the lasting legacy of the great pioneers who made some of the world’s first photographs of nature, examining key moments in the medium’s history and the influences of sociological change, artistic movements and technological developments, including Pictorialism through to Modernism, experiments with colour and contemporary photography and new technologies.

Arranged chronologically and with a focus on botany and science throughout, the exhibition will highlight the innovations of some of the medium’s key figures, including William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976) and Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) as well as several overlooked photographers including Japanese artist, Kazumasa Ogawa (1860-1929) and the English gardener, Charles Jones (1866-1959). It will be the first show to publicly exhibit work by Jones, whose striking modernist photographs of plants remained unknown until 20 years after his death, when they were discovered in a trunk at Bermondsey Market in 1981.

Questioning the true age of photography, the exhibition will open with some of the first known Victorian images by William Henry Fox Talbot, positioning his experimentation with paper negatives as the very beginning of photography. It will also introduce a key selection of cyanotypes by one of the first women photographers, Anna Atkins (1799-1871), who created camera-less photograms of the algae specimens found along the south coast of England. Displayed publicly for the first time, these works highlight the ground-breaking accuracy of Atkins’ approach, and the remarkably contemporary appearance of her work which has inspired many artists and designers.

The exhibition will also foreground the artists who produced unprecedented photographic art in the twentieth century without artistic intention. The medium allowed for quick documentation of nature’s infinite specimens, making it an important tool for scientists and botanists such as the German photographer and teacher Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) who captured close-up views of plant specimens in order to study and share an understanding of nature’s ‘architecture’. A selection of Blossfeldt’s ‘study aids’ will be displayed alongside work by the proud gardener Charles Jones, who used a glass plate camera to keep a meticulously illustrated record of his finest crops. Seen together for the first time, the two artists will be examined for their pragmatic approach that set them apart from the romanticised style of their time.

A central focus for the show and a truly rare opportunity for visitors will be a display of 11 works by the inventor and pioneer, Kazumasa Ogawa, whose effectively coloured photographs were created 30 years before colour film was invented. Ogawa combined printmaking and traditions in Japan to create truly original and pioneering photographs. By developing up to 16 different colour plates per image from expertly hand coloured prints, he made Japan the world’s leading producer of coloured photographs, the display of which is hoped to be a revelation for many.

Unearthed: Photography’s Roots will aim to highlight how nature photography has remained consistently radical, inventive and influential over the past two centuries with the final rooms in the exhibition dedicated to more recent advancements in the medium. A selection of work by the renowned symbolist photographers Imogen Cunningham and Robert Mapplethorpe will highlight the coded language of nature in photography. Both artists used nature to tackle the oppression experienced in their lives by channelling the strength and the sexuality of the natural subjects they photographed. This powerful symbolism, in works such as Mapplethorpe’s Tulips (1984) and Cunningham’s Agave Design I (1920s), allowed both artists to express themselves at a time when homosexuality was criminalised and women artists fought for recognition.

The final room culminates with contemporary works that reveal the enduring influence of early forms of photography and still life, with a spotlight on the artists today who are re-shaping the definition of these mediums through digital processes. Mat Collishaw’s (b.1966) Auto-Immolation (2010) combines new technology and ancient religious ideals, whilst Richard Learoyd’s (b.1966) camera-obscura photographs present a new dimension in the traditional still life genre pioneered by the artists of the Dutch Golden Age. The Gallery’s Mausoleum will host On Reflection (2014), by renowned Israeli video artist, Ori Gersht (b.1967), displayed publicly for the first time in the UK. An homage to the work of Flemish still-life painter Jan Brueghel the Elder, this ambitious work uses modern technolgy to capture the dynamic explosion of mirrored glass reflecting meticulously detailed floral arrangements by the Old Master. Brueghel’s Still Life A Stoneware Vase of Flowers, 1607-08, will also be included in the exhibition, on loan from St John’s College, Oxford for the first time in 300 years.

Unearthed: Photography’s Roots is curated by Alexander Moore, Creative Producer at Dulwich Picture Gallery, and former Head of Exhibitions for Mario Testino. He said:

“I am thrilled to present this extensive survey of photography which celebrates botany in its various guises – from Robert Mapplethorpe’s beautifully shot tulips, to Anna Atkins’ algae specimens. There is beauty to be found in all of the works in the exhibition, which includes some new discoveries. More than anything though, this exhibition reveals nature as the gift that keeps on giving – a conduit for the development of photography, it is also a force for hope and well-being that we have come to depend on so much in recent months. I hope the energy of this timely exhibition provides visitors with a new perspective on the power of the natural world – and perhaps the encouragement to take some pictures themselves!”

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The exhibition will include a number of major loans from public and private collections, many never displayed publicly before. Lenders include The Horniman Museum, the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Michael Hoppen Gallery and Blain Southern. A catalogue will accompany featuring essays by Alexander Moore and art historian and 17th-century still life painting specialist, Dr Fred Meijer.

Press release from the Dulwich Picture Gallery

Mat Collishaw (English, b. 1966)
Auto Immolation 002 (still)
2010
Hard Drive, LCD Screen, Steel, Surveillance Mirror, Wood
300 x 113.5 x 52cm

Lorenzo Vitturi (Italian, b. 1980)
Yellow and Red Bokkom Mix #2
2013
Giclee print on Hahnemuhle bamboo paper
29.5 x 44cm
Edition of 7
© Lorenzo Vitturi
Courtesy of Flowers Gallery

Ori Gersht explores the binary oppositions of attraction and repulsion by capturing the moment when “destruction in the exploding mirrors becomes… the moment of creation.”

In the adjacent exhibition rooms, viewers are faced with ten enlarged video stills from the film presented as archival pigment prints. The images somewhat reverse the symbolic value of still-life paintings, or the idea that they are meant to immortalise the experience of nature. Frozen in time, images of the explosion also plays on the notion of memento mori and the transient nature of life. Thanatotic [the name chosen by Freud to represent a universal death instinct] undertones are also seen in the fine network of cracks in the mirrors, which are especially noticeable in On Reflection, Material E01 and On Reflection, Material B02 (both 2014). Gersht’s works provide a glimpse into the terrain of the unseen, or what German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin coined the “optical unconsciousness.” The outcome is a powerful reminder of the fragility of existence.

Crystal Tong. “On Reflection: Ori Gersht,” on the ArtAsiaPacific website [Online] Cited 24/12/2020.

Dulwich Picture Gallery
Gallery Road, London
SE21 7AD
Phone: 020 8693 5254

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 10am – 5pm
Closed Mondays (except Bank Holiday Mondays)

Dulwich Picture Gallery website

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Dec

Exhibition: ‘Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins’ at The New York Public Library, New York

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: beauty, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, light, memory, photographic series, photography, reality, time and works on paper
Tags: Alaria esculenta, Anna Atkins, Anna Atkins Alaria esculenta, Anna Atkins and Anne Dixon Papaver rhoeas, Anna Atkins and Anne Dixon Peacock, Anna Atkins Dictyota dichotoma, Anna Atkins Furcellaria fastigiata, Anna Atkins Grateloupia filicina, Anna Atkins Halyseris polypodioides, Anna Atkins Laminaria phyllitis, Anna Atkins Nitophyllum gmeleni, Anna Atkins Papaver rhoeas, Anna Atkins Photographs of British Algae, Anna Atkins Ulva latissima, Anna Children, Anne Dixon, Blue Prints, Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins, blueprints, British photographer, British photography, Calotypes, cameraless photographs, cameraless photography, cyanotype, cyanotype paper, cyanotype process, cyanotypes, Dictyota dichotoma, early British photography, early photography, first female photographer, first photography book, Furcellaria fastigiata, Grateloupia filicina, Halyseris polypodioides, Laminaria phyllitis, New York Public Library, Nitophyllum gmeleni, Papaver rhoeas, photogenic drawing, photograms, Photographs of British Algae, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, Portrait of Anna Atkins, Sir John Herschel, Talbot The Pencil of Nature, The Pencil of Nature, The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins, Ulva latissima, Unknown photographer Portrait of Anna Atkins, Victorian England, Victorian photography, William Henry Fox Talbot

Exhibition dates: 28th September 2018 – 6th January 2019

Anna Atkins (English, 1799-1871)
Snowden – from the Inn Garden at Capel Curig from an album of watercolours
1835-63

Anna Atkins photographs are remarkable when you consider that

Some sources claim that Atkins was the first female photographer
She learnt directly from William Henry Fox Talbot about two of his inventions relating to photography: the “photogenic drawing” technique (in which an object is placed on light-sensitised paper which is exposed to the sun to produce an image) and calotypes
She learnt the cyanotype process a year after its invention by Sir John Herschel, a friend of the Atkins family, and then applied the process to algae (specifically, seaweed) by making cyanotype photograms that were contact printed “by placing the unmounted dried-algae original directly on the cyanotype paper”
She is often considered the first person to publish a book illustrated with photographic images: the self-published book of her cyanotype photograms in the first instalment of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions in October 1843 (Wikipedia)

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The date is incredibly early, eight months before June 1844, when the first fascicle of William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature was released; that book being the “first photographically illustrated book to be commercially published” or “the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs.” (Wikipedia)

What is interesting to me is not just Atkins choice of the new medium of photography to describe, both scientifically and aesthetically, the beauty and detail of her collection of seaweeds; but within that new medium of photography, she chose not the photogenic or calotype process, but the graphic cyanotype process with its vivid use of the colour blue, a ‘means of reproducing notes and diagrams, as in blueprints’.

Here we have a process that reproduces reality as in a diagram, a diagrammatic process that is then doubly reinforced when Atkins places her specimens directly on the cyanotype paper producing a photogram, a photographic image made without a camera. The resultant negative shadow image shows variations in tone that are dependent upon the transparency of the objects used. (Wikipedia)

Atkins photographs, produced “with great daring, creativity, and technical skill” are “a groundbreaking achievement in the history of photography and book publishing.” While Atkins’ books can be seen as the first systematic application of photography to science, each photograph used for scientific study or display of its species or type, there is a much more holistic creative project going on here.

Can you imagine the amount of work required to learn the calotype process, gather your thoughts, photograph the specimens, make the prints, write the text to accompany the images, and prepare the number of volumes to self-publish the book, all within a year? For any artist, this amount of concentrated, focused work requires an inordinate amount of time and energy and, above all, a clear visualisation of the outcome that you want to achieve.

That this was achieved by a woman in 1843, “in contrast to the constraints experienced by women in Victorian England,” makes Atkins achievement of scientific accuracy, ethereal beauty and sublime transcendence in her photographs truly breathtaking.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Many thankx to The New York Public Library for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Anna Atkins (1799-1871) came of age in Victorian England, a fertile environment for learning and discovery. Guided by her father, a prominent scientist, Atkins was inspired to take up photography, and in 1843 began making cyanotypes – a photographic process invented just the year before – in an effort to visualise and distribute information about her collection of seaweeds. With great daring, creativity, and technical skill, she produced Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, the first book to be illustrated with photographs, and the first substantial application of photography to science. Ethereal, deeply hued, and astonishingly detailed, the resulting images led her and her friend Anne Dixon to expand their visual inquiry to flowering plants, feathers, and other subjects. This exhibition draws upon more than a decade of careful research and sets Atkins and her much-admired work in context, shedding new light on her productions and showcasing the distinctive beauty of the cyanotype process, which is still used by artists today.

Installation view of the exhibition Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins at The New York Public Library

British Algae

Intended as a reference guide to native seaweeds, Anna Atkins Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions was the first book in any field – and in any country – to be printed using photography to replace typesetting and conventional means of illustration. The graphic appeal of British Algae makes it tempting to view its contents as a form of decorative yet austere botanical art. Beauty, however, was not the only aim of its author, who sought to apply a new technology to circulate precise descriptions of her collection of seaweeds. Created at the height of the natural history mania that swept England, British Algae remains an enduring union of the expressive potential of photography and the pursuit to fathom the mysteries of the natural world.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins at The New York Public Library

The Legacy of Pioneering Victorian Photographer Anna Atkins Celebrated in Dual Exhibitions at The New York Public Library

Anna Atkins’s influential photographs to be shown concurrently with an installation of works by contemporary artists guided by Atkins’s cyanotype imagery and process.

The work of Anna Atkins, one of the earliest woman photographers, is the impetus behind two complementary exhibitions opening this fall at The New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Celebrating the 175th anniversary of the debut of her landmark book, Photographs of British Algae, the exhibitions examine Atkins’s life and work, as well as her ongoing legacy. Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins – the first full survey of Atkins’s major projects to be assembled – examines Atkins’s achievements, situating them within the context of her time; Anna Atkins Refracted: Contemporary Works testifies to the resonance of her photographs for artists today.

In contrast to the constraints experienced by women in Victorian England, Atkins conceived, printed, and published Photographs of British Algae, a groundbreaking achievement in the history of photography and book publishing. Carried out between 1843 and 1853, British Algae was the first book illustrated solely by the nascent medium of photography, and the first systematic application of photography to science. Each page of the seminal volume was hand-printed exclusively using the cyanotype, or blueprint, process. Nearly a century later, the timeless appeal of her cyanotypes – known for their deep blue colour – was rediscovered by historians and artists who have recognised her contributions in the field of photography.

Blue Prints explores Atkins’s training, her artistic and scientific pursuits, and her timely embrace of the new medium of photography. Featuring seldom-seen letters, artefacts from family and museum archives, and rare cyanotype volumes depicting various species of seaweeds, and later, ferns, flowering plants, and feathers – the exhibition also highlights the key roles played by Atkins’s scientist father as well as by Sir John Herschel and William Henry Fox Talbot, pivotal figures in the invention of photography, in cultivating her ambitions.

Opening October 19 in the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Gallery, Blue Prints includes items such as:

Comparative copies of her book Photographs of British Algae, including Atkins’s presentation copy to Sir John Herschel, the inventor of the cyanotype process
The only three known portraits of Anna Atkins
A rare album of watercolours, a gift from Atkins to her husband
An album presented by Anne Dixon, a collaborator of Atkins’s, to her nephew Henry Dixon in 1861, the only cyanotype album known to depict subjects other than algae or ferns

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In addition to the Library’s exhibition dedicated to the work of Atkins, the Schwarzman Building will also display recent photographs and video by current artists reflecting the spirit of Atkins’s cyanotype images, her methodical approach, and her preoccupation with nature. This exhibition includes pieces from the mid-1990s through the present by a diverse group of international artists, several of whom have created installations expressly for this exhibition. These contemporary works range from experimental cyanotypes and photograms to time-based digital media. Anna Atkins Refracted opens on September 28 in the Rayner Special Collections Wing and Print Gallery on the third floor. Visitors can access audio commentary from select artists about their works and Atkins’ influence on their art through the Library’s website.

Exhibited artists include: Roy Arden, Erica Baum, Eric William Carroll, Susan Derges, Liz Deschenes, Kathleen Herbert, Katherine Hubbard, Mona Kuhn, Owen Kydd, María Martínez-Cañas, Meghann Riepenhoff, Alison Rossiter, Ulf Saupe, Lindy Smith, Kunié Sugiura, Penelope Umbrico, Mike Ware, Letha Wilson, Ellen Ziegler

Coinciding with these exhibitions, the Library will be publishing two books that attest to Atkins’s photographic achievements. One is an expanded edition of Larry J. Schaaf’s Sun Gardens, an in-depth study of Atkins’s work that first established her historical and artistic significance. The other is a facsimile of the Library’s copy of Photographs of British Algae, which is being produced by Steidl Verlag.

Blue Prints is co-organized by Joshua Chuang, The Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Associate Director for Art, Prints and Photographs, and The Robert B. Menschel Senior Curator of Photography and Larry J. Schaaf, independent scholar, with Emily Walz, Librarian, Art and Architecture

Anna Atkins Refracted is co-curated by Joshua Chuang, The Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Associate Director for Art, Prints and Photographs, and The Robert B. Menschel Senior Curator of Photography and Elizabeth Cronin, Assistant Curator of Photography.

Press release from The New York Public Library

Anna Atkins (English, 1799-1871)
Laminaria phyllitis, from Part V of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions
1844-1845
Cyanotype
Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Anna Atkins (English, 1799-1871)
Furcellaria fastigiata, from Part IV, version 2 of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions
1846 or later
Cyanotype
Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Anna Atkins (English, 1799-1871)
Alaria esculenta, from Part XII of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions
1849-1850
Cyanotype
Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Anna Atkins (English, 1799-1871)
Dictyota dichotoma, in the young state & in fruit, from Part XI of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions
1849-1850
Cyanotype
Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Anna Atkins (English, 1799-1871)
Nitophyllum gmeleni, from Part XI of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions
1849-1850
Cyanotype
New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, Spencer Collection

Anna Atkins (English, 1799-1871)
Grateloupia filicina, from Part IX of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions
1848-1849
Cyanotype
Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Anna Atkins (English, 1799-1871)
Halyseris polypodioides, from Part XII of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions
1849-1850
Cyanotype
Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Anna Atkins (English, 1799-1871)
Ulva latissima, from Volume III of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions
1853
Cyanotype
Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Anna Atkins (English, 1799-1871) and Anne Dixon (British, 1799-1864)
Papaver rhoeas, from a presentation album to Henry Dixon
1861
Cyanotype
Private collection, courtesy of Hans P. Kraus Jr., New York

Anna Atkins (English, 1799-1871) and Anne Dixon (British, 1799-1864)
Peacock, from a presentation album to Henry Dixon
1861
Cyanotype
Private collection, courtesy of Hans P. Kraus Jr., New York

Unknown artist
Anna Children
c. 1820
Pencil
From the Nurstead Court Archives

Unknown photographer
Portrait of Anna Atkins
c. 1862
Albumen print
From the Nurstead Court Archives

New York Public Library
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
476 Fifth Avenue (42nd St and Fifth Ave)
New York, NY, 10018
Phone: (917) 275-6975

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Sunday 1pm – 5pm
Monday 10am – 6pm
Tuesday 10am – 8pm
Wednesday 10am – 8pm
Thursday 10am – 6pm
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Oct

Exhibition: ‘Flowers & Mushrooms’ at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, Japanese artist, light, painting, photographic series, photography, psychological, reality, sculpture, space, time, video and works on paper
Tags: Alois Auer von Welsbach, Andy Warhol Flowers, Anna Atkins, Art Forms in Nature, art photographs of flowers, Auers Naturselbstdruck, Baroque still lifes, Carl Brandis, Carl von Linné, Carsten Höller, charles baudelaire, Charles Baudelaire Les Fleurs du Mal, Chen Lingyang, Christopher Beane, Christopher Beane Study of fungus, Club der Amateur-Photographen, Club of Amateur Photographers, David LaChapelle, David LaChapelle Late Summer, Dieter Huber, Dutch still lifes, Eliška Bartek, flower image, flower photography, flower picture, Flowers & Mushrooms, Flowers of Evil, Franz Holluber, galvanoplasty, Garden of Earthly Delights, genitals of plants, Giovanni Castell, Giovanni Castell Tulpomania 3, Giovanni Castell Tulpomania 3 / Vergissmeinnicht, Hans Peter Feldmann, Heinrich Kühn, Imogen Cunningham, Imogen Cunningham Two Callas, k.u.k. Hof-und Staatsdruckerei, Karl Blossfeldt, Katharina Malli, Katharina Malli Dead nature, KLONES series, Landslide in the South Tyrol, Les Fleurs du Mal, Lou Bonin-Tchimoukoff, Lou Bonin-Tchimoukoff Rayograph #35, Luzia Simons, Luzia Simons Stockage 104, Magic Garden of Nature, Marc Quinn, Marc Quinn Landslide in the South Tyrol, Michael Wesely, Michael Wesely Still life, modelling from plants, Modern Photography magazine, Museum Der Moderne Salzburg, natura morta, Nature vs. artificiality, New Objectivity, Paloma Navares, Paloma Navares Vestidas de Sede, Peter Fischli / David Weiss, Peter Fischli / David Weiss Mushrooms, Peter Fischli / David Weiss Mushrooms / Funghi 18, photogenetic drawings, Photographs of British Algae, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, photographs of flowers, photography of fungi, Pipilotti Rist, Pipilotti Rist Sparking of the Domesticated Synapses, Rayograph #35 - #75, reality and appearance, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Mapplethorpe Flower, Robert Mapplethorpe Thomas, Robert von Stockert, Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, sexual intercourse of plants, Sparking of the Domesticated Synapses, Species Plantarum, Tulpomania 3, Twelve Flower Months, Two Callas, Und Abends blüht die Moldau, Urformen der Kunst, vanitas concept, Vera Lutter, Wiener Kamera-Club, Wiener Photographische Blätter, Wundergarten der Natur

Exhibition dates: 27th July – 27th October 2013

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

Giovanni Castell (German, b. 1964)
Tulpomania 3 / Vergissmeinnicht
2009
C-Print/Plexiglas (Diasec)
130 x 160cm
Courtesy the artist

Fischli/David Weiss
Peter Fischli (Swiss, b. 1952) and David Weiss (Swiss, 1946-2012)
Mushrooms / Funghi 18
1997-98
Inkjet print with Polyester Foil
73.8 x 106.7cm
Bavarian State Painting Collections Munich – Pinakothek der Moderne
Acquired by PIN, Friends of the Art Gallery of modernity for the Modern Collection Art
© The artists; Gallery Sprueth Magers Berlin, London; Galerie Eva Presenhuber Zurich; and Matthew Marks Gallery New York

Michael Wesely (German, b. 1963)
Still life (29.12. – 4.1.2012)
2012
C-Print, UltraSecG, Metallrahmen
100 x 130cm
Courtesy Galerie Fahnemann, Berlin
© VBK, Wien, 2013

Marc Quinn (British, b. 1964)
Landslide in the South Tyrol
2009
Oil in canvas
168.5 x 254 x 3cm
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris. Salzburg
Foto: Ulrich Ghezzi

Pipilotti Rist (Swiss, b. 1962)
Sparking of the Domesticated Synapses
2010
Video installation; Projector and Media Player, miscellaneous
Objects, Regal, Quiet
Video: 5:34 min
Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Zürich
© The artist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine, New York
Foto: Stefan Altenburger Photography Zürich

For some time now, there has been a renaissance of flowers and mushroom themes in fine art. The comprehensive exhibition Flowers & Mushrooms explores the clichées and the various levels of meaning and symbolism of flowers and mushrooms in art. Current social and aesthetic issues are discussed on the basis of a selection of works from the fields of photography, photo-based paintings, video and sculptures/installations.

Today flowers are primarily associated with their decorative function. They also have a symbolic meaning both at weddings, where they represent freshness and fertility, and at funerals, where they represent transitoriness and death. An in-depth exploration of the varied symbolic meanings of flowers in cultural history reveals further levels of meaning, many of which refer to the ambivalence and abysms of human existence. Contemporary art adopts and continues the historical and complex pictorial tradition of flowers and mushrooms by adding new, contemporary perspectives. The exhibition was inspired by the multi-part work series Ohne Titel (Flowers, Mushrooms) by the artist duo Peter Fischli / David Weiss. The Swiss artists have been preoccupied with the role of clichées and common subjects for many years. Different slide projections with a comprehensive series of inkjet prints and Cibachromes included cross-fadings of flower and mushroom motifs.

At the beginning of the exhibition, a historical section shows photographs from the 19th and early 20th century. In particular the new medium of photography developed a special relationship with flower motifs. Photographs of the great variety of different plant and flower species serve as a kind of substitute for the traditional herbarium or as natural models, as “prototypes of art” for ornamental design lessons. From the early beginnings of photography, scientific interest motivated pioneers such as William Henry Fox Talbot or Anna Atkins to capture amazing pictures of plants.

Later on, the affirmative exaggeration of the decorative character of the flower inspired none other than Andy Warhol to take up a simple, photographically reproduced flower motif in his work Flowers (from 1964); through serial repetitions he ironically exaggerated the motif and conferred iconic status on banal everyday objects. Artists such as David LaChapelle and Marc Quinn continue the baroque symbol for opulence with the aggressive colourfulness of their impressively grand flower arrangements, but also emphasise the simultaneously existing threatening moment, when the boundlessness can take on a devouring character.

For some time now, there has been a renaissance of flowers and mushroom themes in fine art. The works of leading “portraitists” of flowers and mushrooms, such as Peter Fischli / David Weiss, David LaChapelle, Marc Quinn, Sylvie Fleury, Nobuyoshi Araki or Carsten Höller, continue the multi-faceted and long pictorial tradition of flowers, which is unparalleled in the history of art. At the same time no other motif is so easily suspected of trivialism. The question arises of how a subject that is frequently accused of being trivial and shallow has been able to gain ground in a field of art that is generally regarded as serious and sophisticated. The picture of a flower is too easily associated with the idea of harmless beauty and the mushroom with cliché-like hallucinogenic states of consciousness. Nevertheless many artists increasingly adopt these motifs, adapt them and find individual ways to put them into the context of socio-critical, feminist, political and media-reflexive art.

It is only at first glance that David LaChapelle and Marc Quinn continue the baroque symbol for opulence with their impressively grand flower arrangements that reveal a threateningly devouring character upon closer inspection. Female artists such as Vera Lutter, Paloma Navares and Chen Lingyang reflect upon flowers in a specifically female way, using them as a symbol for their own identity-defining sexuality, but also for their vulnerability and exposure and thus elevate the flower to a socio-critical and political level. With almost scientific interest, Andrew Zuckerman and Carsten Höller take an analytical view of the morphological characteristics of flowers and mushrooms in their photographs and installations which create an impressive immediacy. The erotic photographs by Nobuyoshi Araki and Robert Mapplethorpe draw parallels between a blossom and the male and female body and create a field of tension between still life and nude. The wilting flower as a classic symbol of vanity is depicted by Michael Wesely in his long-exposure photographs, which accompany the life of a flower from full bloom to its wilting while emphasising their beauty to the very end. Contrastingly, the monstrous, towering plants of the “desolate” video installations created by Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg are devoid of any loveliness and have a menacing effect. They depict violence and abuse give flowers a particularly irritating and disconcerting touch by breaking with their generally positive connotation.

Flowers and buds symbolise eroticism in general, their appearance creating associations with the female and masculine gender (sexual organs) specifically and thus have a sensual appeal. Imogen Cunningham and Robert Mapplethorpe have a reputation as early forerunners of this sexualised and yet apocalyptic perception of flowers. They both implemented this special perception – erotically charged and aloof at the same time – in their photographs by drawing analogies to the human body in their sculptural treatment of the flower. Female artists such as Vera Lutter, Paloma Navares and Chen Lingyang reflect upon flowers in a specifically female way, using them as a symbol for their own identity-defining sexuality, but also for their vulnerability and exposure and thus elevate the flower to a socio-critical and political level.

Thanatos, or death, is closely related to Eros. The wilting flower as a symbol of vanity is depicted by Michael Wesely in his long-exposure photographs, which accompany the life of a flower from full bloom to its wilting while emphasising their beauty to the very end. The flower monstrosities of the “desolate” video installations by Nathalie Djurberg, which deal with violence and abuse, are devoid of any loveliness and even have a threatening effect.

Both in their natural environment and in cultural history, mushrooms are on the shadow side. Mushrooms are mainly associated with dubious alchemism and witchcraft, are desired and feared as hallucinogenic and have become an integral part of art and literature. Similar to flowers, mushrooms have a long tradition in art history and appear frequently within the context of artistic productions. Sylvie Fleury, for example, controls space with a “forest” of over-dimensional mushrooms, whose surface is covered with car paint, thus increasing their intrinsic character of a foreign body. Their over-dimensional size, and glittering appearance evokes scenes from “Alice in Wonderland”, where the protagonist eats from a mushroom to makes her grow or sink. Carsten Höller, by contrast, explores mushrooms with almost scientific interest and documents their individuality and uniqueness in detailed colour photographs or converts them into larger-than-life-size, large-scale sculptures and display cabinets.

The particular appeal of this exhibition organised by the curators of the MdM SALZBURG lies in the comparison and confrontation of the different levels of meaning of images of flowers and mushrooms and their controversial positions in contemporary arts. The title of the exhibition has been inspired by the series of C-prints by the Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli / David Weiss with the title “Flowers, Mushrooms”. Flowers & Mushrooms presents a selection of important works from the fields of photography, photo-based paintings, video and sculpture/installation art with floral motifs, spanning the time from the early beginnings of photography to the immediate presence. Selected works on loan accentuate the focal points and main themes of the exhibition by raising current social and aesthetic issues and thus allow a closer inspection of the multi-faceted symbolic use of flowers and mushrooms. At the same time, new levels of meaning are opened, referring to the ambivalent and mystical dark side of human existence. The exhibition shows how contemporary art adopts and continues the historical and complex pictorial tradition of flowers and mushrooms by adding new, contemporary perspectives. A historical section with photographs from the 19th century and of Classical modernism complements the exhibition and shows, how photography as a new medium has developed a special relationship with floral motifs.

The exhibition features works by Nobuyoshi Araki, Anna Atkins, Eliška Bartek, Christopher Beane, Karl Blossfeldt, Lou Bonin-Tchimoukoff, Balthasar Burkhard, Giovanni Castell, Georgia Creimer, Imogen Cunningham, Nathalie Djurberg, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Peter Fischli / David Weiss, Sylvie Fleury, Seiichi Furuya, Ernst Haas, Carsten Höller, Judith Huemer, Dieter Huber, Rolf Koppel, August Kotzsch, David LaChapelle, Edwin Hale Lincoln, Chen Lingyang, Vera Lutter, Katharina Malli, Robert Mapplethorpe, Elfriede Mejchar, Moritz Meurer, Paloma Navares, Nam June Paik, Marc Quinn, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Zeger Reyers, Pipilotti Rist, August Sander, Gitte Schäfer, Shirana Shahbazi, Luzia Simons, Thomas Stimm, Robert von Stockert, William Henry Fox Talbot, Diana Thater, Stefan Waibel, Xiao Hui Wang, Andy Warhol, Alois Auer von Welsbach, Michael Wesely, Manfred Willmann, Andrew Zuckerman.

Press release from the Museum der Moderne Salzburg website

Paloma Navares (Spanish, b. 1947)
Vestidas de Sede
2009
C-Print on Diasec
125 x 125cm
Courtesy MAM MARIO MAURONER Contemporary Art, Salzburg-Vienna
© VBK, Wien, 2013

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Flower
1988
Silver gelatin print
71.1 x 68.6cm
© The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, New York

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Thomas
1987
Silver gelatin print
71.1 x 68.6cm
© The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, New York

Luzia Simons (Brazilian, b. 1953)
Stockage 104
2010
Scannogramm
Lightjet Print / Diasec
100 x 100cm
Courtesy ALEXANDER OCHS GALLERIES BERLIN ǀ BEIJING
© VBK, Wien 2013

Katharina Malli
From the series Dead nature
2012
Digtal C-Print
40 x 60 cm
KUNSTIMFLUSS; eine Initiative von VERBUND

Flowers & Mushrooms exhibition texts

The title of the exhibition refers to the name of different slide projections and comprehensive photo series created by the Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli / David Weiss, which show cross-fadings of flowers and mushrooms. Fischli / Weiss began with photo series of everyday motifs back in 1987, and ten years later they used 2400 pictures from their extensive archive to make a cross-fading video with a duration of eight hours. Their general aim was to present the entire visual world they had encountered and documented on their excursions or long travels. Ten years later, the seemingly endless impressions of sights and attractions of the old and new world became limited to flowers and mushrooms, whose pictures overlap in double exposures and appear as a kind of hybrid: as newly created “living beings” between the world of flowers, associated in art history with all kinds of christological and erotic symbolism, and the world of mushrooms, which are not plants and are mainly known for their toxicity. Peter Fischli and David Weiss made the representation of flowers and mushrooms, which had mainly been restricted to calendars and trivial photo books respectable and presentable in contemporary visual arts. The time was ripe for this, even though pictures of flowers and mushrooms had experienced a kind of renaissance in contemporary art before: The ongoing interest in artistic productions dealing with different plants and mushrooms seems to confirm this.

Nevertheless the question arises, how the “flower image” which was frequently accused of triviality in the past, has been able to gain ground in sophisticated and serious art. Pictures of flowers could too easily be associated with the idea of harmless beauty and those of mushrooms with cliche-like, hallucinogenic states. For some years, many artists have nevertheless adopted these motifs, adapted them and found individual ways to put them into the context of socio-critical, feminist, political and media-reflexive art.

Many of the artists represented here in this exhibition deliberately continue this multi-faceted tradition which testifies to a respectable history the “flower picture”: Integrated into the context of Christian iconography in late antiquity and the Middle Ages until the Renaissance period, it timidly began to develop an autonomy during the Baroque period as a result of the newly arising scientific interest in the morphology of flowers and the related wish to classify them encyclopaedically. The rise of the “flower image” to a significant motif that appeals to the audience came to a temporary standstill in the 19th century, when it became an empty academic shell. It re-gained importance only during the Art Deco and New Objectivity period and even became a model for some contemporary forms of expression. While flowers have always been used as photographic motif all over the world due to their beauty and their specific shapes, which are frequently associated with human genitals, mushrooms seem to have inspired most artists who used them in their works due to their sculptural potential and possibly their hallucinogenic effect.

Our exhibition wants to present the use of flowers and mushroom in contemporary art photography, slide and video projections, installations, sculptures and photo-based paintings in all its different faces and assign the works to different themes for better understanding, however without clear boundaries between the individual categories. In a kind of art-historical prologue with the Latin title Species Plantarum we want to show, how scientists and artists have dealt with the representation of plants and blossoms and more rarely of mushrooms since the mid-19th century – parallel to the invention of photography – in photographic studies and “still lifes”. Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose shows that even seemingly trivial photographs of a flower or a mushroom viewed with disinterested pleasure can and should no longer be regarded as neutral and is linked with connotations of everyday experience and cultural education. Les Fleurs du Mal focuses on cryptic and unfathomable, abysmal aspects hidden in flower motifs. The works presented in the section Garden of Earthly Delights establish connections between gender, eroticism and sexuality – but also transitoriness and death – and the symbolism of flowers and associations used by many artists in their works. Nature versus artificiality finally heralds human interventions in nature and the wish to control and experiment with nature and the reflection of this development in visual art.

Species Plantarum

The 19th century was marked by social upheavals, which allowed civil society to intervene in many areas, such as politics, humanism and cultural history, but also natural sciences. The publication of Charles Darwin’s (1809-1882) Origin of Species (1859) intensified the public interest in forms of nature and increased the significance of natural phenomena. This not only encouraged the scientific curiosity of scientists, but also inspired artists to find new approaches to representing nature.

The newly discovered medium of photography, (further) developed out of the desire for an accurate reproduction for scientific purposes and used for various optical and chemical experiments, expanded the range of artistic forms of expression. Artists with an interest in botany eagerly and enthusiastically applied new techniques -such as nature prints, airbrush techniques or photogenetic drawings – and also embraced the new medium and instantly recognised its potential, inspired by pioneers such as Anna Atkins (1799-1871) and William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877). Early photographic experiments found their expression in the floral Art Nouveau style and in teaching concepts and teaching aids. The most famous collection of designs was Urformen der Kunst / Art Forms in Nature (1928) by Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932). His photographs became incunabula for the representation of plant-derived forms using the precise stylistic means of New Objectivity.

The artistic impulses of the following decades contributed to an exploration of nature through alternative cognitive forms. Photography detached itself from the primacy of representation, dominated by form and surface stimuli, and turned towards visual stimuli for the human power of imagination.

Anna Atkins

The botanist and illustrator Anna Atkins (1799-1871) is regarded as pioneer of photography. Her father, the British chemist, mineralogist and zoologist John George Children (1777-1852) aroused her passion for natural sciences. At a time when there was no scientific education for women, ladies from noble families had to content themselves with being “amateur helpers” for their fathers and husbands and worked in the background, compiling herbariums and making drawings. Through her friendship with the physicist John Herschel (1792-1871), who closely collaborated with William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), Atkins became familiar with cyanotype, a printing process invented by Herschel, and began to use this new photographic printing process for mapping scientific samples. The first photographic herbarium was published under the title Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions between 1843 and 1854, comprising 12 issues with 389 illustrations. The photograms, which get their characteristic blue colour on the parts of the paper exposed to light from the use of an iron complex, produce particularly accurate representations of the plants. Their special allure is their diaphanous appearance. Anna Atkins’s works, which were forgotten for a long time, are today regarded as a milestone in the history of scientific and photographic illustration and have contributed to the rediscovery of cyanotype as printing technique.

Alois Auer von Welsbach

Alois Auer von Welsbach (1813-1869) was an Austrian printer, inventor and illustrator specialising in books on botany. He was head of the “k.u.k. Hof-und Staatsdruckerei” printing company founded in 1804 in Vienna and developed it into a large-scale enterprise that offered all state-of-the-art printing techniques and methods of representation known at that time. The printing company became renowned for its nature prints developed and perfected by Auer in cooperation with Andreas Worring. Nature printing is a printing process that uses natural objects to produce an image. Dried or pressed objects are placed between a plate of steel and another of lead and drawn through a pair of zinc rollers under considerable pressure to produce in impression in the leaden plate. The printing plate is produced by electrotyping, also called galvanoplasty. Gravure printing is used for plants. The use of several colours in one printing cycle produced polychrome and particularly “authentic” prints. Until today no printing process has been able to surpass the high level of detail of this technique. For Auer nature printing was as important as photography, and he published books to promote this printing process. “Auers Naturselbstdruck” was patented in 1852 and released for general use in 1853. Over the centuries nature printing has been used for decorating everyday objects and for illustrations on substrates such as papyrus, parchment and paper.

Robert von Stockert

In the 1890s a small community of aristocrats and upper class people with an interest in arts established the “Club der Amateur-Photographen” (Club of Amateur Photographers) – later renamed “Wiener Kamera-Club”. Their photographs were largely influenced by painting. Members of the club include many famous names such as Heinrich Kühn (1866-1944), but also less famous contemporaries such as Carl Brandis (active around 1885-1900), Franz Holluber (1858-1942) or Robert von Stockert (1848-1918), who specialised in flower still lifes. For von Stockert, nature was an interesting theme for various reasons: He had the ambition to contribute to the “development of photographic art”, benefited from his own gardens and the decorative talent of his daughters and used his photographs for book illustrations. He regularly published his experience in illustrated supplements to the association’s publication “Wiener Photographische Blätter”. His pictorial vocabulary ranges from purely decorative flower arrangements to sophisticated still lifes. To convey the colourfulness of his motifs, von Stockert experimented with various techniques, both with photographic techniques, like the use of various colour filters and sensitive plates, and with reproduction techniques. His favourite printing techniques include platinum print, which provides a particularly rich and intensive range of grey nuances. For colour reproductions he used the new multicolour collotype process.

Karl Blossfeldt

The plant photographs of German photographer Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) are milestones in the transitions from the playfully stylising Art Nouveau style to the unemotional, cool spirit of “New Objectivity” and have become incunabula of the history of photography. His motivation behind his imagery and motifs is rooted in his education as sculptor and modeller in an art foundry. At the Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin – today the Universität der Künste (University of the Arts) – he collaborated in a project of his art teacher Moritz Meurer and compiled teaching aids for ornamental design. As lecturer for “modelling from plants” he received an official assignment in 1889 which provided further impetus for the production of illustrative material. Blossfeldt became famous for his book Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature) (1928); another volume – Wundergarten der Natur (Magic Garden of Nature). A sequel to Art Forms in Nature was published in 1932. The photographs here on display are a small selection from a collection of 6,000 pictures, whose clarity, rich contrast and acutance testify to his technical precision, craftsmanship and passion for photography and teaching. Graphic details, structures, forms and surfaces are emphasized by the targeted selection of details, magnified 2 to 45 times. Blossfeldt achieves a sculptural effect by using a monochrome, light background and thus liberates the plants from their natural context.

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose

What Getrude Stein wrote in the mid-1920s and later became so influential and was often misunderstood, can be used as a motto for the works here on display, but also to point out ironically that the use of flower motifs is trivial only at first sight.

Like portraits or interieurs, flower pictures are part of the repertoire of art history. Even more so: No living being is used more frequently in symbolism than the flower, and few subjects are as complex as the history of the flower motif. In the past, flower still lifes were used to convey encrypted and symbolic messages, most of which are lost to us today. We no longer know the symbolic meaning of the individual flowers or their arrangements. Many artists have used floral themes in their work, as a reaction to the apparent triviality of the century-old flower motif, and have so continued this traditional theme. Today the flower motif has become the basis for new reflections and observations.

The oldest photographers whose works are here on display – Ernst Haas and Balthasar Burkhard – already liberated the flower from its temporal and spatial context and focused on depicting the flower not as a decorative still-life at the height of its beauty, but as a fragile plant subjected to instability and transformation. The American photographer Andrew Zuckerman portrays crystal-clear, razor-sharp images of different blossoms with an accurate eye, capturing the fine details of their surface structure and colour transitions. His strict staging abandons the common understanding of flowers and releases them from their context. As a result, Zuckerman’s pictures assume an almost cool, abstract quality.

Christopher Beane shares a similar love for details. His close-up pictures of petals convey sensuousness and opulence. As a staging photographer he completely restrains himself and entirely leaves the stage to his protagonists, allowing them to unfold their full beauty in exciting, suspenseful intersections, contours and curves. The scannograms by Luzia Simons show an opulence and splendour that reminds us of traditional Dutch still lifes of flowers. The large-format photographs are thoughtful reflections on the proud, but also tragic role of the tulip in the early 17th century Netherlands in connection with the “tulip mania”, which is generally considered the first recorded speculation bubble. In Giovanni Castelli’s photographs, flowers appear as mysterious plants, monumental and unreal at the same time. The artist finds his motifs in nocturnal parks, capturing close-ups of colourful flowers against a jet-black sky. The result are eerily beautiful flower portraits which seem to be from another world and elegantly refute our conventional visual concepts.

Carsten Höller

b. 1961 in Brussels/Belgium, lives and works in Stockholm/Sweden

Carsten Höller, who has a doctorate in agricultural science, works at the frontier between art and natural science. Dissatisfied with the restrictive structures of the academic world, he turned his back on it and chose the path of greatest-possible openness: he became an artist. “As an artist I do not have to submit to any formalistic constraints and can develop things as far as I think makes sense in a particular framework, without always having to undergo specialist training in the relevant fields.” Höller has not abandoned his first life, but combines the two disciplines, which appear to be so different from one another, in a highly idiosyncratic and humorous manner. He creates bizarre hybrid forms from a variety of types of mushrooms. He either grows them to a threatening height or exhibits them, like jewels in a glass cabinet, in orderly rows as though in a natural-history museum. Fly agaric is always present. Höller explores this mushroom and its hallucinogenic effects in great detail. In this context he is on the trail of a mysterious potion called soma, which is thought to have been made of fly agaric and was used for ritual purposes as early as the second century BC. Drinking it is said to impart good fortune and riches, the power to be victorious, and awareness and access to the divine sphere.

Hans Peter Feldmann

b. 1941 in Düsseldorf/Germany, lives and works in Düsseldorf

The large-format photographs of flowers by Hans-Peter Feldmann are at first glance reminiscent of the floral postcards of the 1950s: we see flowers popular at the time, such as roses and lilies, in close-up in front of a neutral, colourful background. The colour aesthetic of flower and background, too, corresponds to the time. Clear and uncompromising, the blossoms present themselves to the viewer in their full glory, while simultaneously appearing distant and artificial. In this respect they do not match today’s ideas of the bourgeois idyll. The magnification makes the kitschy look sublime. The blossom appears like a fetish behind glass, frozen for the next millennium. Feldmann has always been interested in the everyday and the banal. He lives his passion for collecting at flea markets and in his own shop of knick-knacks. He often works with found materials such as postcards and newspaper cuttings. The photographs shown here are not enlargements of these collected objects, however. They were created by Feldmann, based on the aesthetic of the small-format postcards of which they are ironic imitations. Feldmann’s artistic concept includes the practice of not dating and not signing his works: “Bakers don’t sign their rolls either, do they? Art has to taste and smell, one has to be able to experience it.” For Feldmann, one of the first concept artists, the works of art are already there. He considers it to be his job to find them. They should not lose their vitality despite the transformation.

Luzia Simons

b. 1953 in Quixadá/Brazil, lives and works in Stuttgart and Berlin/Germany

The tulip is, in the eyes of Luzia Simons, an element that connects cultures, and a symbol of transcultural identity. As a nomad among flowers, the tulip was brought to Europe from Asia, and connects the Orient and the Occident. It is at home both here and there, and has established itself as a virtu despite having been transferred via several different cultures. The tulip conquered the Netherlands in the late sixteenth century, and tulips featuring special colours and patterns commanded exorbitant prices on the market in a rapidly expanding “tulip mania”. Speculation with tulip bulbs led to a speculative bubble. The bubble burst in 1637, with far-reaching social and economic consequences. Simons sets the scene for the majestic and simultaneously tragic character of the tulip, as well as for its long-standing traditions, in her series entitled Stockage. The artist stages the flowers in large-format arrangements in which they surge towards the viewer in bright colours out of a neutral darkness, revealing their beauty and fugacity in sharp focus. Both through the inescapable vanitas concept and in its painterly effect Simons’s oeuvre is reminiscent of Baroque still lifes. Paradoxically, Simons makes use of a very modern method to generate the images, however: the flowers are “read” by a scanner before they are printed using a carbon-printing process, and finally they unfold their vibrant depth effect behind acrylic glass.

Peter Fischli / David Weiss

b. 1952 in Zurich/Switzerland, lives in Zurich / b. 1946 in Zurich, d. 2012 in Zurich

The Swiss artist duo Fischli / Weiss began work in 1979 and was highly successful in the spheres of film, photography, sculpture, art books and video installations. Cryptic and playful, often seen as though through the eyes of children, they re-arranged art and the everyday in their work. Their subtly ironic works, which often appear to be imbued with subversive nonsense messages, received numerous international awards. From kinetic experimental arrangements using everyday objects to interpersonal re-enactments using sausage leftovers: Fischli / Weiss transformed the apparently banal and the absurd into art. For this reason the flower motif also entered the work of Fischli / Weiss from 1997 onwards. The Flowers series (1997-1998) exists in two presentation forms: colour prints, and a double-slide projection. It shows a chaotic view of nature, as though from an ant’s perspective, using a hallucinatory and intensely colourful technique of superimposition. The arrangement of double and quadruple exposures and the resulting translucent layering of close-ups of flowers, mushrooms, snails and many other things creates the impression of a nature that is unordered and exuberant, unreal and simultaneously beautiful. This playful approach to reality and appearance, the conceptual claim of the visualisation of the world – in this case nature, which is just “there” and is in no need of legitimisation in order to be shown in the context of art – and the interest in the banal, in combination with a more serious artistic interest, constitutes the framework that encompasses the entire oeuvre of die Fischli / Weiss.

Les Fleurs du Mal. Reality and Appearance

In his poetry collection Les Fleurs du Mal (1857-1868) the French writer Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) painted a picture of a pessimistic modern city dweller that is characterised by despondency, anger and rebellion against all conformities. Man is torn between Christian morality, the good ideal and virtuousness on the one hand and the reprehensible and yet appealing fascination with the evil and ugly on the other hand, and forced to establish a new position for himself continuously.

What the artists represented in this part of the exhibition and Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal have in common is their questioning of conventional views on beauty and morality, symbolised by flowers which are generally regarded as beautiful, and the deliberate discussion of the transience of beauty as well as socio-political principles and ethics. In particular the vanity theme is directly related to the “Flowers of Evil”, as it belies the human desire for eternal beauty and eternal life. Bourgeois decadence in the form of Baudelaire’s positive re-interpretation is no longer a common term today, but has a stronger presence than ever in the classic meaning of the decline of a social system, in particular with reference to the frequently heralded fall of capitalism. In the 21st century artists approach this subject in a differentiated way. Works closely related to traditional genres of art history, such as the still life, exist side by side with current series of works dealing with the concept of time as such, for example by intensely visualising the blossoming and withering of flowers or linking this with socio-political issues. The delightful moment of the pictures and materials is sometimes opposed to the subject matter or explicitly border-crossing contents.

Marc Quinn

b. 1964 in London/Great Britain, lives and works in London

Marc Quinn’s 2009 paintings Landslide in the South Tyrol and Aleppo Shore from 2010 are based on photographs that he took of model landscapes he himself had composed. To this end he arranged lush and colourful plant ensembles in his studio. Drawing on Baroque bouquets, which are artificial creations and consciously unnatural in their composition, Quinn negates the passing of the seasons and combines plants that do not blossom at the same time as each other. His enormous square compositions confront viewers with paradisiacal gardens bursting with life, allowing viewers to immerse themselves in an apparently idyllic, magical world. Closer inspection reveals that the white surface to which the luminosity is owed is in fact a snowfield, and this causes consternation. The first impression of cheerful colourfulness and light-heartedness dissipates and the scenery that is now perceived as artificial suddenly feels threatening in a very subtle way. In the midst of life we are surrounded by death! The viewer is surrounded not by a lively garden landscape, but by an arrangement of frozen, dead plants. The unnatural brightness of the colours, which knows no soft nuances, points to the artificially generated world, and reveals the difference between beautiful appearances and reality. One senses that critique of civilisation is a driving force: the artist exposes humankind’s reckless approach to nature because we are willing to sacrifice nature for the sake of its perfect beauty.

Eliška Bartek

b. 1950 in Nov Jičín/former Czechoslovakia, lives and works in Berlin/Germany and Lucerne/Switzerland

For the series Und Abends blüht die Moldau Eliška Bartek uses highly sensitive film that blurs the contours while simultaneously making details as visible as though they are being viewed through a microscope. As a result the surfaces of the flower petals appear exquisitely delicate and fragile. This feeling corresponds to the traditional symbolism of flowers. They are viewed as the ultimate symbols of the beauty of the moment, which already contains the seeds of transience. The flowers come from a Berlin wholesaler or are cut fresh by the owner of a botanical garden in Pila, a small village in Ticino. Bartek exposes them to particular light influences and in this way alters their colours. In addition to the extreme magnification and closely framed composition of the pictorial subjects it is this intense colourfulness in particular, further enhanced by the dark background and dramatically heightened by unusual light and shadow effects, that creates an extraordinary vitality and releases the pictorial subject from its static nature. For a short time the photo artist breathes an intoxicating beauty into the blossoms, for which the flowers pay the ultimate price: the extreme light burns the delicate petals and destroys the natural splendour. Bartek’s subtle play with reality and appearance, or with artificiality and naturalness, also points to the fallibility of our perception.

Vera Lutter

b. 1960 in Kaiserslautern/Germany, lives and works in New York/USA

With the project Samar Hussein Vera Lutter reveals herself to be a socio-critical artist who rescues the civilian victims of the Iraq war from oblivion and creates a memorial to them. More than 120,000 civilians have been killed since the invasion by the American army in March 2003. They are referred to in military jargon as “collateral damage” – an appalling word that downplays the suffering for which it stands. The artist has gathered the names and dates for her work of art from the Iraq Body Count Project. The biggest publicly accessible database of this kind worldwide, it records the civilians who have lost their lives in military and paramilitary campaigns, and documents the collapse of public safety following the invasion. Lutter uses the image of a budding, blossoming and finally wilted and withered hibiscus blossom as a metaphor for the human life cycle. The artist sees analogies between human life with its beauty and fullness, as well as its vulnerability and destructibility, on the one hand, and the tones of this flower, reminiscent of the colour of flesh, and the sensuous shape of its blossom, on the other hand. The names of the dead are superimposed on the printed and projected photographs in chronological order according to the date of death. The first picture is named after Samar Hussein. It is for this 13-year-old girl, the first civilian victim to have been recorded in the database, that the art project as a whole, Vera Lutter’s remarkably poetic and touching elegy for the senseless casualties of war, is named.

Paloma Navares

b. 1947 in Burgos/Spain, lives and works in Madrid and Alicante/Spain

Paloma Navares’s oeuvre spans the fields of photography, sculpture, installation and performance, and explores historical female positions in our society. Navares, who suffers from a rare eye condition that will eventually lead to the loss of her eyesight, employs her memory, which she refers to as her “inner eye”, as an artistic device. The multimedia artist uses a poetical pictorial language that aims to draw the viewer’s attention in a delicate and subtle way to existential human questions: might putative mistakes or what society judges to be incapacity lead to recognition after all? The photographs of delicate orchid blossoms tell of the fates of women, and are in some respects symbolic. They stand, for example, for Meerabai, a late-fourteenth-century princess from northern India who wrote love songs and laments, and who, as a devotee of Krishna, vehemently opposed marriage. The pressure exerted on her by society at court forced her to commit suicide by drinking from a poisoned cup. Female Korean entertainers, known as kisaeng, were similarly despised and judged by society for their nonconformity. Navares’s depictions of flowers are homages to great female poets of past eras whose lyrical works were ignored and who, in the face of the contempt with which society treated them, chose to die by their own hands. The images represent a plea for justice and self-determination, and simultaneously stand for grace, strength and beauty.

Garden of Earthly Delights

Flowers and blossoms have always held a great fascination for man and are symbolically and culturally linked with love, beauty, youth and sensuality. Opulent flowers are thus instinctively associated with eroticism and seduction, but also inevitably with the aspect of transitoriness. From a biological point of view, the attraction of flowers is due to their signal effect for the purpose of pollination and thus reproduction and survival of a plant species. Not only poems use flowers as metaphor for human desire; the flower as analogy for man and corporeality is also found in fine arts. Artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Nobuyoshi Araki and Rolf Koppel combine nudes with floral still lifes and both in form and context refer to the sensual analogies to the erotic desires of man. Robert Mapplethorpe has made the most explicit comments on the relationship between flowers – in particular blossoms with strongly emphasised seeds such as the calla or anthuria – and the phallus. Mapplethorpe once said that his way of photographing a flower does not differ significantly from his way of photographing male genitals. The natural scientist Carl von Linné (1707-1778), who established the basis for modern botanical and zoological classifications, commented two centuries ago on the relationship between the corporeality of plants, animals and man. “We look at the genitals of plants with pleasure, those of animals with revulsion and our own with wondrous thoughts.” In his writings he poses the question, who is aware that the flowers a man gives to the woman he adores are “cut-off genitals of higher plants” and that the floral splendour must be regarded as “sexual intercourse of plants”? Within the context of cultural history, plants have been used until today as a symbol for the sexuality of man which is still a taboo.

Chen Lingyang

b. 1975 in Zhejiang province/China, lives and works in Beijing/China

The subject of Chen Lingyang’s twelve-part series of photographs Twelve Flower Months is the artist’s monthly cycle, which is associated with twelve different flowers. The viewer sees twelve geometric formats that correspond to traditional Chinese window and door shapes. They feature reflections of Chen Lingyang’s vagina, and the menstrual blood that drips from it. The shape of the mirror, too, varies from month to month. The viewer is supposed to feel disturbed by the juxtaposition of flowers – which are the ideal expression of the beauty of nature – and the bleeding genitals. Looking at the mirror, a Western symbol of flirtatiousness and beauty, viewers simultaneously become secret viewers of an intimate depiction. The apparent contrast also reveals unusual similarities, however: Chen Lingyang shows two natural cycles of growth and decay. The artist herself has commented on this work that “in traditional Chinese culture there is the idea of the person who lives in harmony with nature. … To me, ‘nature’ refers most importantly to the laws and rhythms of the universe. And these laws and rhythms are connected to cycles. It is easy for a woman to observe this from monthly physiological and psychological changes.”

Nature vs. artificiality

“Planting means to dig holes to force nature to become unnatural (cultural). […] Owing to the gesture of planting man has lived in an artificial world since the Neolithic period”, the media philosopher and communication scientist Vilém Flusser (1920-1991) once said. In this way he descriptively refers to the general circumstance that we can no longer view nature as something “given”, but as something that is “man-made” and constructed and controlled by man. Accordingly, culture has monopolised nature and its original autonomy to a large extent.

The main purpose of fine arts as a cultural manifestation is not only aesthetic edification. Artists, in particular modern and contemporary artists, also serve as introspective seismographs for development processes of civilisation. Their thinking, designs and creations bring about a change of perspective that goes beyond conventional acceptance and reception and thus refers to phenomena that inspire the viewer to reflect and take a closer look. The preoccupation with flower and mushroom motifs also has to be understood in this context. Primarily decorative and trivial at first glance, their meta levels contain far-reaching statements.

The installation of the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist explores socially standardised patterns of behaviour of civilised man. Rist makes these patterns tangible in her works by depicting the way people deal with artfully arranged flower decorations. In a comparable, yet differing way Gitte Schäfer explores nature and its “domestic use” in her flower wall. About three hundred small flower vases with an artistically kitschy design are affixed to a wall of diagonally placed mirrored tiles and filled by the artist with cut flowers in the form of a symmetrical picture.

The transient splendour of the flower arrangements symbolises earthly transitoriness and were a characteristic feature of 17th century Baroque still lifes. The Italian term for this category of painting natura morta – also alludes to the notion of vanity. In her four-part work series with the same title, the Austrian artist Katharina Malli shows close-up coloured pictures of crops and ornamental plants against a neutral white background, whose aesthetics deliberately quote the documentary style of Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932). Upon closer inspection, they are industrially produced artificial flowers. As perverted products of civilisation they represent this dead nature and at the same time symbolise the notion of immortality. Dieter Huber’s works also focus on artificially generated nature and play with the wishful thought of potential immortality. In his work series he presents apparently “documentary” pictures of plant hybrids that herald a “brave new world”. The works by Nam June Paik and Zeger Reyers create a concrete connection between nature and technology. The instruments used, such as TV sets and record players, symbolically refer to social progress and are an expression of human inventiveness. They emphasize “manmade” things, juxtapose them with naturally occurring objects and thus describe them in relation to one another.

Andy Warhol

b. 1928 in Pittsburgh/USA, d. 1987 in New York/USA

By the second half of the twentieth century the flower as an artistic motif had become insignificant. It had become overburdened with the general suspicion of triviality and kitsch. However, Pop Art, which took a deliberate interest in the world of trivial imagery, immersed itself in this subject. Andy Warhol’s Flowers are exemplary of the approach of Pop Art artists. Warhol based his flowers on a folded insert in the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography magazine, a reproduction of a colour photograph of seven hibiscus blossoms. The photograph had been taken by the editor in chief, Patricia Caulfield, and was included as an illustration accompanying an article about a Kodak colour processor. Warhol cropped the photograph to alter the pictorial format, number and arrangement of the blossoms. Numerous variations of what was now a square image were then produced using the screen-printing process, differing from one another in colour and size. In total, more than 500 pictures of flowers must have been produced in this way. The Flowers appear to float in a diffuse space, detached from the background and unconnected to their stalks and leaves. In some versions the blossoms and the pictorial ground are painted by hand in DayGlo colours, further emphasising this impression. Warhol presented the prints in such a way that they covered entire gallery walls as though they were wallpaper. In this way he succinctly demonstrated the plant’s natural potential for rank growth as well as its technical reproducibility as a decorative mass subject.

Dieter Huber

b. 1962 in Schladming/Austria, lives and works in Vienna and Salzburg/Austria

Since as early as 1986 Dieter Huber has worked with photography that is optimised and altered using computer technology. The three works from the KLONES series, which were executed from 1994 onwards and thus explored genetic engineering and manipulation at a very early date, are doubtless among the pioneering works in computer-generated images. Huber commented on them that “the construction of a world that could be freely disposed of in all respects according to one’s will and imagination was still considered highly vexing at the time.” The three plant studies in the exhibition are – at first glance – razor-sharp photographs of flowers, each before a black background. Well-known types of flowers such as tulips, carnations, narcissuses, daffodils, roses and lilies are reminiscent of a grandmother’s garden. Closer inspection causes consternation, however: various types of flowers grow out of the same greenery, rose stalks are crowned by lily blossoms, and daffodils, lilies and tulips all grow out of the stem of a trumpet flower. Artificially created, impossible-looking crossings have long since found entrance into our real world. Almost all livestock breeds and crop plants used in agriculture were developed through decade-long crossing. Perhaps the surreal floral worlds of Dieter Huber will really exist one day?

Christopher Beane (American, b. 1967)
Study of fungus
2004
From the Farm House series
C-Print
60 x 50cm
Courtesy of the artist

Lou Bonin-Tchimoukoff (French, 1906-1979)
Rayograph #35 – #75
Paris, 1928
Gelatin silver print
23.8 x 17.8cm
Courtesy Galerie Johannes Faber, Wien

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Two Callas
c. 1925
Gelatin silver print
Estate Prints, 2013
21.5 x 17cm
Austrian Gallery, Museum of Moderne Salzburg
The Imogen Cunningham Trust, 2013

David LaChapelle (American, b. 1963)
Late Summer
2008-2011
C-Print
152 x 110cm
Courtesy of the Artist ROBILANT + VOENA, London – Milan

Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Mönchsberg 32
5020 Salzburg, Austria

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday:10.00am – 6.00pm
Wednesday: 10.00am – 8.00pm
Monday: closed

Museum der Moderne Salzburg website

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Dr Marcus Bunyan

Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, an art and cultural memory archive, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy from RMIT University, Melbourne, a Master of Arts (Fine Art Photography) from RMIT University, and a Master of Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne.

Contact

bunyanth@netspace.net.au

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LISTING OF ALL AUSTRALIAN ARTISTS AND EXHIBITIONS THAT HAVE APPEARED ON THE ARCHIVE AT THIS LINK

LISTING OF ALL INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS AND EXHIBITIONS THAT HAVE APPEARED ON THE ARCHIVE AT THIS LINK

Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: ‘Orphans and small groups’ 1994-96 Part 2

Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: 'Orphans and small groups' 1994-96 Part 2

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Posts Tagged ‘Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions

Exhibition: ‘A New Power: Photography in Britain 1800-1850’ at the S T Lee Gallery, Weston Library, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford

Exhibition dates: 1st February – 7th May 2023

Fickle, fleeting time: illuminating a relationship between adaptability and uncertainty

About the exhibition

Early experiments

Scientific entertainments

Fleeting time

Computing and photography

Women and photography

Beautiful shadows

Inventing photography

Photogenic drawings

Daguerreotypes and their copies

Photography and publishing

Anna Atkins and cyanotype

Success and failure

Nicolaas Henneman (Netherlands/England, 1813-1898)

Most extraordinary

Views of London

London labour, London poor

Priests and politicians

Notable commissions

Tyrolese minstrels

Fascinating people

Modern art and swansdown

Extraordinary Australians

Daguerrotype studios

Forty a day

Fierce enemy

Antoine François Jean Claudet (French, 1797-1867)

Unfortunately horrid

Applied colour

Itinerant and transnational

Photo journalism

Ruskin and photography

Stereoscopic still life

Photographs of paintings

Keepsake and memory

Celebrity actors

Ira Aldridge

The Great Exhibition

Sir Joseph Paxton (English, 1801-1865)

Grand Panorama

Commodities and things

The Swedish Nightingale

Really marvellous

News from home

Official reports

The Duke of Wellington

Salt prints

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

Exhibition: ‘Unearthed: Photography’s Roots’ at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Exhibition dates: 8th December 2020 – 9th May 2021

A difficult thing said simply

Footnotes

Exhibition: ‘Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins’ at The New York Public Library, New York

Exhibition dates: 28th September 2018 – 6th January 2019

British Algae

Exhibition: ‘Flowers & Mushrooms’ at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria

Exhibition dates: 27th July – 27th October 2013

Flowers & Mushrooms exhibition texts

Species Plantarum

Anna Atkins

Alois Auer von Welsbach

Robert von Stockert

Karl Blossfeldt

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose

Carsten Höller

Hans­ Peter Feldmann

Luzia Simons

Peter Fischli / David Weiss

Les Fleurs du Mal. Reality and Appearance

Marc Quinn

Eliška Bartek

Vera Lutter

Paloma Navares

Garden of Earthly Delights

Chen Lingyang

Hans Peter Feldmann