The Magic Eye….

PHOTOGRAPHY

The idea that a dark box could recreate an image was first mentioned in 500 BCE, when people observed the mysteries of solar eclipses through this process. Hundreds of years later, lenses were added to these small, dark boxes to sharpen the image. Leonardo tinkered with the camera obscura, along with his many scientific and artistic explorations. Vermeer’s fascination with optics in the 1600s took this scientific curiosity into the artist’s studio, inspired by the inventions ( in particular, the miscroscope) of his side-kick, van Leeuwenhoek. Magicians and fortune-tellers also took advantage of the dark box image-maker to trick their audiences.

In a camera obscura, light enters through a small hole drilled into the side of the box. When rays of light pass through the hole and fall on the opposite wall, an image---in color--- of the scene directly outside is created. But because of the nature of optics and light rays, the image inside the box is upside down and backwards. Mirrors angled to catch the image turn it right side up.

Camera Obscura = Latin for Dark Room

First photograph---1826, Joseph Niepce*, French

Heliography---Camera obscura holding a pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea (a chemical derivative of petroleum). The bitumen hardens in the sunlight…unexposed parts are washed off to create the image. Took at least 8 hours to fix.

What do you think you are looking at??

*Pronounced “knee-yips”

William Henry Fox Talbotin 1864

Tomb of Sir Walter Scott, 1844

William

Talbot…

British Victorian humanist and scientist, too preoccupied to patent his discoveries of 1836-41. Lost the race with Daguerre. Finally patented his process in 1841.

Calotype, 1840= silver nitrate sensitized paper in a camera obscura, objects exposed to the light to create an image. Image “fixed” by sodium theosulfite. Negatives created could produce multiple images. With this combination of chemicals, processing time was reduced from several hours to several minutes.

The race was on to make photography viable...

Talbot’s first camera, c. 1836

Louis Jacques Daguerre1787-1851, French•theatre architect specializing in lighting and illusion•used the camera obscura to perfect perspective in his set designs•wanted to “fix” the temporary image in the back of the black box•knew that a plate covered with silver nitrate was very sensitive to light•discovered by accident when a thermometer broke

that the plate treated with mercury vapor processed

the image to make it permanent

The first photo of a person,

a French boulevardby Daguerre in 1839No signs of carriages or horses because, as moving objects, vehicles were not captured.

The image had over 10 minute exposure time.

To make the image appear in the way that we would see it, Daguerre’s double process involved taking a

picture of a picture. Daguerreotype,

1839Silver-coated copper plates

exposed to iodine, then to sunlight. Mercury vapor develops the image

and salt water fixes it. Image is reversed; plate must be enclosed in glass box to protect. Image is very detailed, but not

reproducible.Fewer than 25 photos made by Daguerre survive as his studio burned to the ground in 1839,

destroying all of his earliest works and journals.

Boy with Purse--mid 1800s

Happy piano player--1840s

Sisters holding their brother’s hand--1840s

Father and son---1850sThe Daguerreotypenot a lot of smiling going on…

subjects would have to sit motionless from 2 to 45 minutes

Sometimes pictures were hand-tinted

“The daguerreotype's precision is simply astounding. Even in vistas of Paris, a magnifying glass can pick out ceramic tiles, long since replaced by slate and metal. One can count the buttons on a military uniform from across the Seine. Still, no one would call this work photorealism. It looks way too spooky.

The silvery, metallic surface helps create an other worldly sheen. So does the perfection with which it captures textures and reflections. So does the slight coloration, almost like flesh in lighter passages but bluer with overexposure. So, too, does the nature of a positive, which unlike a print from an intermediate reverses left and right. Parisians, no doubt accustomed to social divisions between Left and Right Bank, marveled at finding buildings in the wrong place. So do nearly empty landscapes, as if out of a horror movie.

The medium required exposures of several seconds, even in bright sunlight. By that time, passing people turn to blurs or vanish from sight. So who would sit still for a portrait, other than the almost lifelike skulls and skeletons in the exhibit's final room? The medium lacked the class for paying, upper-class portraiture, but it attracted writers and artists, including Eugène Delacroix, excited by the novelty. It drew on common laborers and the dispossessed, who slouch or stare or nowhere in particular. Remarkably, the medium offers the only photographic record of the 1848 worker's rebellion, with barricades that fittingly dissolve into yet another blur.”

Comments by John Haber, contemporary art critic, on daguerreotypes:

Matthew Brady 1823(?)-96, American•opens his first daguerreotype studio in 1844•great Civil War photographer•creates “photography on canvas,”

large paintings tinted with oils

Freaks were a favorite subject of Brady’s as was war….

Brady’s Civil War

Pre-Raph artist Millais

Longfellow

Known for herportraits of famous friends ...and strangers

Julia Margaret Cameron1815-79, British

Pioneer photographer at age 48, given a camera by her daughter

Photography soon became an accepted art form for women, as it was portable ---a bridgebetween naturalism andsentimentality, science and art.

Pictorialism was a 19th century movement where photographerswere more concerned with the aesthetics than with the subjectof a photograph.

Fading away, 1858

Seascape at Night, 1870

Head of St. John, 1858

Fun with Optics

Stereopticons, circa 1875…photos in stereo to trick the eye

“You Press the Button, We Do The Rest”

George Eastman1854-1932, American

Invented a way to make photography practical for all amateurs. Instead of cumbersome glass plates,Eastman created film rolls, made out of celluloid.

The first“Kodak” (an invented word,easy to pronounce in many languages, he said) camera

came on the market in 1888, selling for $25.The film roll was set up for 100 negatives,

which could be sent back to Eastman’s New Yorklab for processing.

By 1900,the Brownie camera

was selling for $1

So,is photography art ...or science?Creative expression …or technology?

Rock, 1870s

Hat, 1870s

Eggs, 1890s

Hand, 1890s

Toilet, 1925

Portrait, 1917

Jump, 1908

Model, 1926

Ear, 1885

Flower, 1925

Lewis Carroll’s Alice

You decide.