2D MEDIA: PHOTOGRAPHY

ART 121 Lecture 7

Annie Liebovitz: So There You Go

Photography: A Timeline

5th century BCE: The camera obscura was discovered both in ancient China and ancient Greece.

Philosophers discovered that light bounces off an object and travels in a straight line.

Light reflected from an object can project an image of that object onto a surface.

This reflection can be seen under controlled circumstances.

Image from a modern camera obscura

reflecting the image on a wall in Paris.

Photography: A Timeline

15th century: Camera obsucuras used by artists to perfect perspective and chiaroscuro.

Renaissance artists created a chamber (camera) that contained a small opening for the light to pass through.

The reflected image on the opposite wall of the opening was traced by hand onto paper.

Illustration showing artist inside a camera

obscura.

Vermeer…Painter and Photographer?

Art historians studying Baroque master Vermeer debate if his works were made with a camera obscura.

There is little drawing under his works; the lines there are simple contours.

The mirror in the Music Lesson also shows a mysterious rectangular object being reflected….

Vermeer…Painter and Photographer?

Is Vermeer a Great artist? Or a Fraud?

What is the relationship between and artist

and technology?

Is tracing cheating?

What is more important, the process or the

finished product?

Photography: A Timeline

1826: N. Niepcs captures the first photograph on a polished, chemically coated plate using a modern camera.

Modern camera: a light-tight box with one opening to admit light, a lens to focus the light, and a light sensitive surface to receive and chemically capture the image.

Photography: A Timeline

1830s: Invention of the Daguerreotype by Louis Jacque Mande Daugerre.

First process to capture clear photos.

Positive process: image captured on a copper plate coated with silver iodide. One of a kind.

Commercially viable!

Le Boulevard du Temple, 1839.

Daguerre, Le Boulevard du Temple and Monet’s

Boulevard des Caupines in Paris, ca.1873

What are the strengths of the new photographic medium? What are its shortcomings

in the early days?

Photography: A Timeline

1840: William Fox Talbot

invents the calotype, a

photographic process that

captures the image in

reverse (a negative), which

is then used to create

multiple positive images.

Also discovered how to

print calotypes on paper.

Early calotype taken by Talbot showing

photographers at work, 1853.

Photography: A Timeline

1878: Eadweard Muybridge uses a trip wire device attached to 12 cameras to capture a number of images of a horse in motion.

Photography: A Timeline

1888-1892: A number of inventions come together to create the Kinetoscope, the first motion picture viewing machine.

George Eastman’s celluloid film

WK Laurie Dickson invented a sproket wheel

Thomas Edison invented the light bulb as well as the kinetoscope.

Photography: A Timeline

1895: The first projected motion pictures debut

with the Lumiere brother films.

Lumiere brothers on You Tube.

What do the early films excel at? Anything missing

that you’re accustomed to in modern films?

Photography: A Timeline

1898: First promising technology that allowed for color photographs unveiled to the public.

The technology was expensive and fussy and not perfected until the 1930s.

Artists did not begin to explore the possibilities of color photography until the 1960s.

Photo of Paris shops in 1914.

Photojournalism

Bearing Witness and Documenting the Everyday

Photojournalism

Once photographs could be reproduced in newspaper, the field of photojournalism born.

Due to the mechanical nature of creating a photograph, some mistakenly believe that a photograph is highly objective, without opinion or point of view.

Not mere illustrations; oftentimes these photographs become iconic, shaping our collective memory of an event.

Images taken after Hurricane Katrina

devastated the Gult Coast in 2005.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936.

US government realized power of images early; the Farm Securities Administration of the Dept of Agriculture subsidized photographers to document the crisis of the Dust Bowl and Depression.

Lange took several images of this mother.

The migrant mother’s grandson has a website with their story at http://www.migrantgrandson.com/

Ansel Adams

Known for his photographs of the American West.

Believed the best photographs needed to contain a variety of values from white to black.

Photographer as artist and technician.

Avid member of the Sierra Club; his art used to create new National Parks.

Ansel Adams, The Tetons and the Snake River,

Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 1942.

Photography IS Art

Photography and Art

Freed artists from creating mimetic images.

Early photos taken as artistic images imitated the subjects and poses seen in paintings.

Soft focus used to give an artistic touch.

However, since these early images are imitating painting rather than exploring photography some are pretty bad!

Henry Peach Robinson, Fading Away,

1858.

Julia Margaret Cameron

Considered herself an amateur. However Cameron was one of the first to use close-ups and carefully controlled lighting.

Favored long exposures and profile views.

Created thousands of images, portraits and posed scenes, sometimes with her famous friends such as Charles Darwin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Virginia Woolfe.

Julia Jackson photographed in 1886.

Certainly the work of Cameron was influential on the British artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Alfred Stieglitz

Early major proponent of photography as an art form.

Opened a photography art gallery in NYC in 1905, and published first photo journal Camera Work from 1903 to 1917.

Known for shooting “straight”.

Flatiron Building from Camera Work, 1903.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

French photographer that also found visual poetry in the world around him.

Felt good photography was the result of the photographer and not a mechanical process.

“This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography; composition should be a constant of preoccupation, being a simultaneous coalition – an organic coordination of visual elements.”

Man Ray

Famous photographer and painter. Influential with both the Dada and Surrealist movements.

Supported his art by taking fashion photos for Vogue.

Credited with inventing the “Rayogram”, a technique in which objects are placed on photographic paper in the dark room to create images. (There is no camera).

Champs delicieux, second

Rayogram, 1922.

Cindy Sherman

Interest in self-portraits began from an assignment at art school.

Rather than true self-portraits, she creates stereotypical characters recognizable by the American/western audience.

Works in both black and white, and color.

Cindy Sherman, Film Still #21

Cindy

Sherman,

Untitled

#355, 2000

The Digital Revolution

Today’s cameras do not use film.

Lens focuses information on sensors that translate the hue and intensity of light into digital files.

Files are very easy to manipulate today with computer software like Photoshop and Instagram.

Further blurs the line between reality and created image.

Woman sitting in front of Gursky’s

Stateville, Illinois, 2002.