HISTORY OF PHOTO

STUDY SHEET FOR THE FINAL EXAM

Art Photography began with some photographers taking pictures of people and landscapes that looked very much like paintings. Not only were the results similar but photography was much faster and cheaper. People who had never owned a likeness of them selves could now afford one. (Photos were hung in a place of honor or could be given as a gift)

Paul Delaroche a French painter, thought the impact of the daguerreotype was so great, he was over heard to say, "painting is dead"!

Is Photography Art? In the ensuing discussions between England and France about photography, three main points of view were expressed:

• Photos should not be considered art because they are mechanical and chemical more than artistic.
• They were "useful art" not equal to drawing and painting in their creativity.
• Photos could be as significant as handmade works of art and could be a beneficial influence on art and culture.

(Most artists held the first two viewpoints and photographers the third.)

Like it or not, photography could not be easily dismissed. It was a new exiting form of expression! The 1850’s showed photographic prints in galleries next to oil paintings and watercolors.

Gustave Le Gray was one of the firsts to use two negatives in a single print. Because of limitations of the materials during this era, the film could not hold detail in the brightly-lit sky and keep detail in the foreground that was usually darker. This led to using separate 'cloud' negatives in the darkroom and the white sky was 'printed in' making the image look real.

Schools of thought: After the advent of photography many small groups or 'schools of thought' began to appear in the art and photo world.

George Davison believed that a soft photograph was more beautiful than a sharp one and he used rough paper and soft focus to achieve the look in this image. He was part of a movement called 'impressionism', which roughly parallels the traditional era of impressionism in the art world. Photographers like Davison became known as ‘pictorialists’.

Pictorialism started as a result of critics saying photography couldn’t be compared to art because the camera was simply a mechanical way of reproducing reality. Pictorialist photographers started making photos look like paintings and drawing by manipulating them in the darkroom. Their aim was to make each photograph handmade and evoke foggy images of the past.

Peter Henry Emerson was the father of art photography in Europe. His naturalistic photos reflected nature with what he called "truth", which meant he wouldn’t manipulate the image in any way.

Alfred Stieglitz was the father of art photography in the United States. He studied in Germany for ten years before coming back to America to promote art photography. He began promoting photography as an art form by writing articles in popular camera magazines of the time, opening his own gallery, and featuring the work of other artists and photographers. He put photographs on an equal footing with painting and sculpture. People who went to his gallery had never seen anything like the portraits, views of landscapes and still lives found on Stieglitz’s walls. They were shocked to see photos shown alongside other forms of art!

Photo Secessionist Movement was started by Alfred Stieglitz and meant ‘breaking away’. It was direct and did not imitate art. This movement was breaking away from the pictorialist photographers still evoking foggy images of the past. Stieglitz helped set up "The Camera Club of New York" to promote this new form of photography. They encouraged photographers to follow their artistic leanings, organize exhibitions, and encourage museums and galleries to display artistic photographs. These were shown in the club’s handsome quarterly called "Camera Notes".

291 Gallery was the first ‘photo secession’ gallery. It was started by Stieglitz and Steichen.

Edward Steichen began his career as a painter, then switched to photography to create haunting and subtle images with new techniques such as gum and platinum printing.

He became known for his memorable portrait and fashion pictures. He also served as director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art and did one of his biggest projects there, an exhibit and book called "The Family of Man". He directed part of the official documentation of World War II for the U. S. government. He became a bridge between the ‘Pictorialist’ and ‘Straight’ photography.

Clarence White was a less flamboyant version of Stieglitz and Steichen. He usually chose gentle subjects for his photos, many revolving around family life. He started his own school of photography called "The Clarence White School of Photography".

He worked closely with Stieglitz and even collaborated on a series of nude studies. Later on they had a falling out due to White’s adherence to pictorialism.

Man Ray used alternative techniques for achieving unusual results in his prints. Sometimes he exposed the film to light during processing, which resulted in a partial reversal of the negative, called Solarization. He also experimented with what we call photograms. He laid 3-D objects on photographic paper and exposed them to light. He called these unique images Rayographs. His work became well known for his fresh perspective on photography, and the way he allowed the medium to expand from the literal to the interpretive.

Paul Strand was a student of Stieglitz at 16 years old, who embraced the photo secessionist movement with all his heart. He realized the camera had a unique ability to capture shapes and form simply, directly, and in sharp focus. This he called ‘straight photography’. He intentionally avoided any effect of perspective, and believed you had to have something to say about the world around you. Strand jolted the onlooker back from the sophisticated dream world of the pictorialist photographers to the harsh realities of everyday life. He is best known for his investigation of abstract form.

Straight Photography depended on the eye of the photographer, and meant you took things the way they were and did not manipulate them in the darkroom.

Timothy O’Sullivan (Civil War photographer) joined up with the U.S. government geological survey after the War. He was hired as the first photographer of the U. S. Geological Survey. He took hundreds of never-before-seen images of Western landscapes, geological formations, and Indians living in pueblos and cliff dwellings in New Mexico. He was still working from a wagon-mounted darkroom and produced remarkable images on glass plates, as he endured many hardships.

William Henry Jackson was also hired as an official photographer for the U. S. Geological Survey to photograph the West. This made him famous! He photographed in Yellowstone before it became a National Park and also took pictures of the Grand Canyon. His photos were influential to get Congress to set the Yellowstone area aside to become a National Park. A town was also named after him, Jackson Hole, WY.

Ansel Adams started out a concert musician, playing for crowds in New York City.

As a child, he read about Yosemite National Park when he was staying home sick from school. He was enthralled with the descriptions he read of the park and asked his parents to take him there. The next year, Adams and his family traveled to the park and they gave him a Kodak Box Brownie for the trip. His early foray into Yosemite would change photography forever. No longer would people, news events, and art objects, be acceptable for the camera. Nature photography in all it’s glory and wonder would now be appropriate too. Adams and a friend came up with the "zone system" as a framework for understanding exposure and development and pre-visualizing the effect in advance. This is still the best known method for tonal control. He also helped start a photo club called "f-64". He called the "negative" the "score"(like music) and the "print" the "performance".

F-64 Club believed shapes and form should be rendered simply, be direct, and in sharp focus by stopping down their camera lens in every scene to f-64. They also believed you shouldn’t manipulate an image in the darkroom.

John Sexton was an assistant to Ansel Adams. He has followed in Adam’s footsteps and is a modern day landscape photographer. If Adams’s first love was the expansive, majestic landscape, Sexton is fascinated by quiet light.

Jerry Uelsmann is also a modern day landscape photographer who shoots landscapes with a twist. He prints several negatives together giving the landscape a surrealistic effect.

Salomon is credited as being one of the first photojournalists. He took "candid" pictures in law courts and diplomatic conferences of people as they were conducting their business. This gave readers the impression of eavesdropping on the people portrayed. This has always been the secret of the best photojournalism.

Henry Luce was the first to launch a picture magazine in the United States "Life Magazine". His premise was to run thrilling, artistic pictures, featuring only one photo essay on a particular theme at a time. The size of the magazine alone was stunning, 13 1/2 X 21 inches. The first week after "Life" hit the newsstands and mailboxes was a near riot.

Life Magazine published material about the greatest discoveries in medicine, science, history, nature, and famous people. It is hard for modern day readers to understand the impact because of TV. "Life" was everywhere, looking at everything, from the serious to the ridiculous. It gained its greatest distinction covering World War II. Its Readers waited eagerly each week to see how "Life" would cover the big news story. The lunar landing by the American crew was now certifiably important because "Life" said so. It used the best photographers and illustrators, and represented the first large-scale market for photojournalism. "One picture is truly worth a thousand words, and Life started that trend".

Margaret Bourke-White became one of Life Magazine’s first staff photographers. Her photos of the Fort Peck Dam under construction were used for the first cover of Life Magazine. She was influential in getting the magazine to print the photographer’s name under the picture instead of putting it in an obscure place where nobody could see it.

World War II press coverage began even before war was declared. There were more than 500 full-time American correspondents’ abroad at one time or another. Traditional news correspondents found they now had to share company with men and women that worked for newsmagazines. With so many photographers covering the war, most major events were captured on film like the German Army entering Paris, bombing of London, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Newsreel Photographers were equally important. They brought moving pictures of the war. Before T. V., American people would go to their local theaters to see an event after reading about it and looking at still pictures in newspapers and magazines.

Robert Capa was the world’s best-known war photographer. His photographic record shows that he photographed not only the wars between people, but also the interactions between individuals during peace. His feelings about war are well known by those that were acquainted with him. "He hated war for what it did to the individuals who were caught up in it-as he himself was." His career led him to cover 5 wars spanning the globe and he received worldwide acclaim for his one of a kind images. His life was cut short after stepping on an antipersonnel mine while photographing French maneuvers in the Red River delta.

W. Eugene Smith’s photos present a wide range of human experiences, recorded with an intensity and selectivity that makes him one of the greatest photojournalists of our time. He was a war photographer whose strong subject matter tends more toward rugged directness than to subtlety or complexity.

Don McCullin is a war photographer who has learned many truths about himself during the war–how easy it is to hide behind the camera, what things are more important to him than photos, what the possibility of dying means. He hopes by showing some of the atrocity and tragedy of war, as well as beauty, the world might be moved to be more peaceful.

Sebastiao Salgado was born in Brazil. He has made it his purpose to draw the world’s attention to the plight of the ‘landless’ and the ‘worker’ in their struggle to live. His work has an epic monumentality which bestows great dignity on the poorest and the most downtrodden. The power of his work lies in Salgado’s refusal to see these people as objects of pity.

Duane Michals uses a sequence of pictures taken with a cheap plastic camera, to tell his picture stories. These look very much like a comic strip. He writes the story around each frame to give it that comic strip characteristic.

Elliott Erwitt uses humor to make his picture stories come alive. When he is photographing a job, he is constantly on the look out for what he calls "anti-photographs". (Personal photographs that have a twist of humor)

Henri Cartier-Bresson became known for "the decisive moment": the indefinable instant when subject and form come together in a photograph to produce not merely description, but poetry.

Eadweard Muybridge gained fame as the first photographer to capture motion. The governor of California had bet $25,000 with some of his colleges. He said that a galloping horse’s legs came completely off the ground at some point during a gallop. Muybridge devised a method of capturing motion that was too fast for the eye, using 24 cameras. Proving that a horse did indeed come off the ground. The governor won his bet.

Harold Edgerton developed a high-speed stroboscopic flash that could capture pieces of time as small as one millionth of a second. Most of his images captured 100 images in a second on one frame of film. He became world famous for his work in stroboscopic photography.

Philippe Halsman (Dali Atomicus) one of the more famous images taken by Halsman. Surrealist Dali inspired this image. The stunt later turned into an entire book called "Jump". This particular image required many assistants and took an entire day to get each piece to fit together perfectly.