Today’s assigned reading, “Prints from Paper,” “Portraits for the Million,” and “The Faithful Witness” from Beaumont Newhall’s The History of Photography, merge a retelling of the history behind the development of photography as an art form and communication technology with the broader social effects of a new medium.
History:
As with various other types of technology, the technology behind photography as we know it today was built upon previous developments in painting, light capture, tracing, the camera obscura, and chemistry. Newhall attributes the rise of photography to people’s interest in capturing a permanent image. One such person was William Henry Fox Talbot, who tried to make permanent images of landscapes by painting using a camera obscura. He thought “How charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper” (qtd. in Newhall, 31). He also mused about how to bypass learning all of the technical skills necessary for capturing images through painting. Essentially, Talbot wanted to make things easier for people who wanted to record beautiful things they saw without having the time, knowledge, and skills needed to make a painting. This was during 1835. Around the same time, Louis Daguerre was developing his invention the Daguerreotype, which accomplished the goal that Talbot had but recorded the images onto sheets of silver.
After Talbot created his method of image capturing images onto light sensitive paper, he then adopted Herschel’s process of fixing images to prevent them from fading away and also fixed the problem of mirrored images and negatives, images in which the light is depicted as darkness and vice versa. With these improvements, Talbot introduced the world to a way to capture images onto treated paper and also mass produce copies of the “positive” image (32-33).
In true innovative fashion, Talbot continued to improve his invention, the Talbotype, by making exposure times shorter using different mixtures of chemicals for his fixers and developers. Talbot’s next move was to patent his invention and show the world what his process was capable of by publishing The Pencil of Nature, which included various prints of nature photography. Much to many aspiring artists and inventors, Talbot was very strict with his patent, even going so far as to attempt to sue people who tried to improve upon his process. Later, he loosened his grip on the patent except in terms of portraiture because he felt that the most money was made through that aspect of photography business. As a result, photographers/portrait producers had to get approved licenses to practice their trade.
As photography became a cheaper, faster, and easier process, it was increasingly used to capture nature scenes and even in practical, government projects of recording various examples of architecture for restoration and historical purposes. Later, photographers took their equipment to war zones to document important current events while instilling in audiences the “implicit faith in the truth of the photographic record” (71). That “faith” in the “photographic record” was built upon the belief in the objectivity of the Talbotype that was not present in paintings, seen as created by someone who interpreted the scene rather than a machine. Viewers’ “sense ratios” were changed from the use of vision with imagination in seeing and interpreting paintings to the objective, realistic use of vision and belief for photographs. In this sense, photography morphed from simply an experiment, to an art form, and finally was adopted as a documentation tool.
Implications:
Just as the advent of writing and literacy contributed to the concept of authorship, photography also raised questions about ownership of the photographs. Brady “felt that he was entitled to copyright in his own name all photographs taken by his employees, including those taken on their own time and with their own equipment” (69). On the other hand, Gardner “felt that the photographers should have credit as well as profit for their independent personal work.” (69).
Newhall notes the significant social demands that influenced the development of photography. For example, Archer’s collodion process met the rising demands for cheap portraits. Wars inspired many photographers to capture combat. Photographers even “risked their lives to save their plates” (68). Though “men would travel miles over back-breaking terrain and come back empty handed” (76), government expeditions attracted many photographers for expeditionary photography. Photographs of landscapes such as the Canyon de Chelley National Monument allows “the awe-inspiring scale of the Canyon [to be] wonderfully sensed” (78).
Photography was an invaluable medium for historical documentation because of “the quality which photography can impart more strongly than any other picture making” (71). As opposed to art, photographs capture every single detail of an image. A viewer views a photograph as if he could have been there in the actual scene. A certain sense of “truth” of the image is evoked. Artistic renders of historical events, however, does not imply truth because “we have no way of telling beyond the assurance given to us by the credit line which the editors felt necessary” (71). Therefore, photography gives proof to the existence of the image as once seen by the photographer. However, photography does not guarantee the complete truth because “subjects can be misrepresented, distorted, faked” (71). This is further reinforced by the abundance of photo manipulation devices and programs available to us today.
There are also social constructionist implications of the development of photography. Talbot was in some senses more successful and popular in terms of marketing his photographic product than Daguerre because people saw the need for mass printing which stresses the need of reproducibility. Mass printing, as Newhall states, was then utilized in various ways, including but not only in terms of publications of illustrations for books. This, in turn, shows a combination of media (text and pictures/photographs) to create a new, improved medium, that of the illustrated books. As stated in class, the social construction of technology approach sees that “tech[nology] is shaped by social interactions.” In this case, social interactions between everyday people and artists in the forms of commissioning of portraits and paintings of nature scenes built an interest in the faster, cheaper art form of photography.
Connection to Other Collisions of Technologies:
The history of photography is reminiscent of various collisions of new and old technologies we have discussed in class. As discussed in the “History” section, the “art” of photography goes hand-in-hand with the style and techniques of the image recording method previously prevalent, painting. Many of the images recorded with Talbot and Daguerre’s machines were the ones that people would commission artists to recreate using their oils, brushes, and canvases. For example, Talbot began his innovation process because of his experience with the technology of the camera obscura for drawings. As portrayed through the anecdote about Hill and Adamson working to depict the hundreds of delegates that attended the Free Church of Scotland founding convention, photography took on a role in portraiture that was once dominated by painting. In fact, Newhall states, “[t]here were other photographers who felt that the camera offered them the opportunity to rival the painter, and they set about emulating the older art, largely by imitation” (57). Even nature, once painted with the help of an easel, began to be photographed with the help of a tripod! In addition, the competitive forces of different photograph types (daguerreotype, calotype, talbotype) and the invention of techniques that allowed for mass production of printed photographs increased the availability of portraits and nature photographs to the masses rather than a selected group of wealthy patrons, democratizing an art form by transcending socioeconomic statuses.
This collision and slight transition to a new form of information recording and transference (i.e. from painting to photography) relates to the collision of oral and written/text communication we analyzed through our study of Plato’s Phaedrus in that one previous technology initially influenced a new technology and method of communication that then took off into its own direction. Someone in class mentioned the influence theater had on cinema. The over-dramatic style of acting used on stage was applied to the originally visually focused early cinema as shown through films such as D.W. Griffiths’s Broken Blossoms. In addition, cinema can be seen as the use of hundreds upon hundreds of photographs pieced together in a continuous sequence. With that in mind, it is easier to notice certain styles of photographic composition utilized in cinematography, such as the use of borders/frames in certain scenes of older films to help focus the audience’s attention to certain details on screen. Furthermore, even the actual chemistry behind film was at one point very similar to that of what was used for single-frame photography because in the end, a film reel was simply and even literally a long strip of film, except one that captures and therefore displays positives instead of negatives.
The styles of previous forms continue to act as a jumping off point for newer methods and may even combine together to build a completely new, integrated model. (One such example was given by someone in class: news websites are a multimedia amalgam of video, photographs, texts, blog posts, Tweets; blending together the different older ways people got their news –television, newspapers, magazines, interaction with others– into a new, all-in-one cocktail.)
Further Analysis (on Newhall’s actual arguments and method):
With respect to technics, Newhall documents the competing opportunities and deficiencies of each new photographic process as each such process created new technical challenges for entrepreneurs. Her narrative reflects a preoccupation with how the evolution of photographic technologies led to clearer, more precise (44), more readily reproducible, more portable, less expensive (47) and more mass production-enabled printing (41) For example, tintype technologies were popular because they were durable, had high quality images, were portable and could be used to produce multiple images. (49)
With respect to Newhall’s focus on high art she notes a sequence of applications that seem to have emerged largely from the inventors themselves: primary justification for use of talbotype was “taking as subjects of representation scenes of daily and familiar occurrence” (34) and “portraitures” (35); whereas calotype was used for “recording architecture and landscapes” (37). It is also not surprising that painting was the source of inspiration in use of photography (for Scottish artists, 37). Finally, Newhall turns to the application of photographic documentation of war (67), large portraits of “famous” people (51), publicity photos (57), historical documentation (as in Old Paris remembered and the building of transcontinental railway (72)), and geological and geographical documentation (79).
With respect to the second point regarding Newhall’s “ignorance” of low forms of the photographic art, it is clear she wants to avoid the controversial. She documents the subversion of the daguerreotype by the development of the so-called visiting cards (49). She notes that 70,000 such cards were sold in the week after the death of the Prince Consort (in 1861). But perhaps she might have been better to note that two years after the announcement of the availability of the daguerreotype in 1839, the largest production of daguerreotypes was being manufactured just down the street in Paris – the images were almost entirely comprised of erotic nude and nearly nude poses. (Janet Buerger, French Dagguerreotypes University of Chicago Press, 1989). These images were produced for artists and the academies. In 1874, more than 130,000 obscene photographs were seized from a London distributor and in the same year, 194,000 pornographic photographs were seized in the United States, mostly in and around New York. (Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Photography Routledge, 2007, p. 1148)
What is not clear is how these new techniques were “read” as new ways of seeing (the quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes is an exception (71)) nor what drove commercial demand and acceptance. Newhall addresses some of the points of resistance in American markets, without clearly indicating how viewers came to see where they would have purchased such pictures.
Similarly, it is not clear what social needs were being met by photography.
We would argue that Newhall’s monograph is a classic MOMA statement defending and promoting the high ideals of the modernist agenda, particularly the agenda of MOMA and its patrons.
Newhall fails to address other important questions:
*Painting entails the engagement of the body in what is seen and what is produced. The eye “sees” as in photography. But in painting, the arm, the hand, the distribution of bodily weight, the temperance of time, the extended intervals of emotional engagement, indeed in large productions, of the whole body are encumbered in the act of painting. In photography, the body (apart from the eye) is foreshortened to a few minutes or seconds and to the motion of a finger.
*As Roland Barthes notes (Camera Lucida) there is something different about looking at a photograph. Newhall calls this “authenticity” (71). But as Barthes writes, many photographs require nothing more than a simple studied observation. Only the peculiarities (which are often accidental) of an image draw us into the story/history of the image. Newhall fails to draw our attention to what is different in “seeing” a photo as compared to a painting.
*The eye almost seems incidental to Newhall’s history. The privileging and recalibrating of the senses to a single source are lost in Newhall’s narrative about the high art forms. (Why did the crystal clarity of erotic daguerreotypes seem so more nearly “real” than similarly posed paintings?)
*What is missing, from an economic perspective, is an understanding of why photographs became so commercially successful. She describes the products (e.g., civil war portraits), but not the markets. Why were such images in such demand? By whom? And what were they willing to pay for such images?
Post by Charles Chang, Kalin Kelly, Jingna Li, John Macwillie, Bernadette Samson, and Jason You.