The Expanding Domain (1854 – 1880)

“It is now more than 15 years ago that specimens of our new and mysterious art were first exhibited to our wondering gaze. Since then, photography has become a household word and a household want; it is used alike by art and science, by love, business, and justice; it is found in the most sumptuous salon, and in the dingiest attic.”

-Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, 1857

Daguerreotype

Calotype

Frederick Scott Archer

Matthew Brady President Theodore Roosevelt between 1890 and 1910

Collodion Wet Plate Process •  Developed in 1851 by Frederick Scott Archer"•  Faster shutter speeds of few seconds (5-10 times

faster than Daguerreotype) "•  Fine Detail"•  Glass negative gave way to unlimited copies"•  Eventually made Daguerreotype and Calotype

obsolete"•  Required photographic material to be coated,

sensitized, exposed and developed within the span of about fifteen minutes"

Traveling Photography Studio, 1850-60s

Unknown, Tent darkroom for Collodion Wet Plate Process, 1877

Francis Frith, Pyramids of Dahshoor, 1857

“Perhaps in ten years or so the question will be seriously discussed…whether it will be any use to travel now that you can send out your artist to bring home Egypt in his carpetbag to amuse the drawing room with” -The Athenaeum, 1858

The Stereograph

Helped turn photography into an industry, by stoking the viewer’s desire to see more of the world

“The shutting out of surrounding objects, and the concentration of the whole attention….produce a dreamlike exaltation of the faculties, a kind of clairvoyance, in which we seem to leave the body behind us and sail away into one strange scene after another, like disembodied spirits”

– Oliver Wendell Homes

Photographer Unknown, 1860s

Andre Adolphe Eugene Disderi, Princess Buonaparte Gabrielli, 1862

Carte-de-Visite “Card Photograph”

“[Photography is] too truthful. It insists upon giving us ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.’ Now, we want, in Art, the first and the last of these conditions, but we can dispense very well with the middle term” -Francis Frith 1859

“The photograph cannot deceive; in nothing can it extenuate; there is no power in this marvelous machine either to add or to take from: we know what we see must be true” -Art Journal, 1860

Artist Unknown, The Art of the Future, 1859

Diane Arbus 1967

Claude Lorrain 1648 Claude Monet 1872 Jackson Pollock 1950

Nadar & Adrien Tournachon Pierrot the Photographer 1854-55 Paper Print

“What can’t be learned, it’s the sense of light, it’s the artistic appreciation of the effects produced by different and combined qualities of light” -Nadar

Gustave LeGray

“For my part, it is my wish that photography, rather than falling into domain of industry or of commerce, might remain in that of art. That is its only true place, and I shall always seek to make it progress in that direction.” - 1852

“In my point of view, the artistic beauty of a photographic print consists... almost always in the sacrifice of certain details in such a manner as to produce an effect which sometimes attains to the sublime in art…”

-Gustave LeGray, 1852

Gustave Le Gray View on the Sea: The Cloudy Sky, c. 1856

Combination Printing

Gustave Le Gray, The Great Wave, 1857

Oscar Rejlander The Two Ways of Life, 1857

after Raphael’s School of Athens

Raphael, The Disputation of the Sacrament, 1509 -1510

Henry Peach Robinson Fading Away 1858

“Photography is an art because it can lie…”

Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron Julia Jackson 1867

Sought to “ennoble photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and ideal and sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to poetry and beauty.”

Julia Margaret Cameron Vivien and Merlin, 1874 & The Holy Family, 1867

Julia Margaret Cameron Herschel, 1867

“When I have had such men before my camera, my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man”

Mary Filmer, mid 1860s

Photographer Unknown, General Wool and Staff, Calle Real, Saltino, Mexico, 1847

Artist Unknown, Death of Major Ringgold of the Flying Artillery, at the Battle of Palo-Alto, May 8 1846

Early War Photography

•  Technical inadequacy of photography to register the swift action of battle

•  Photographic equipment was cumbersome, plates had to be processed soon after exposure

•  Leisurely, romantic image of war •  Element of Fiction

Roger Fenton The Valley of the Shadow of Death, 1855

From the Crimean War

Timothy H. O’Sullivan: Negative Alexander Gardner: Original Print

A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 1863

Bergstresser Brothers Bergstresser’s Photographic Studio, 3d Div., 5th Corp,

Army of the Potomac, c. 1862-64

Unknown Photographer, John and Nicholas Marien of Terre Haute, Indiana, 1862-64

“Tintype”

Matthew Brady

Mathew Brady Abraham Lincoln, 1860

Mathew Brady

Conspirator Payne, 1865

The Dry Plate Process

•  Invented around 1870 by Dr. Richard L. Maddox •  Glass plate coated with a gelatin emulsion of

silver bromide. Plate could be stored until exposure, and after exposure it could be brought back to a darkroom for to develop a negative at leisure.

•  The load is lightened for photographers and location photography becomes easier

•  Plates were 60 times more sensitive than Collodion plates. This freed the camera from the Tripod.

•  Pre-cursor to hand-held cameras & the snapshot

Timothy H. O’Sullivan

Vermillion Creek Canyon, 1872

Carleton E. Watkins The Yosemite Falls 1865-1866

Dr. Jules Luys Four-Diameter Cross Section of Segments of Cerebellum 1873

Pierre-Cesar Jules Janssen, Transit of Venus, 1874

James Nasmyth & James Carpenter Moon, Crater of Vesuvius 1864

Duchenne De Boulogne

Electrical Contraction of the eyelids, etc. 1876

Charles Darwin from The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals 1872

John Lamprey Front and Profile Views of a Malayan Male, c.1868

George Eastman, The Kodak Camera, 1888