Photography•Photography became an accepted art form and was another expression of the positivist emphasis on descriptive accuracy (Louis-Jacque-Mandi Daguerre, The Artist’s Studio, p. 987). •Photography as we know it emerged around 1840 but since the late Renaissance, artists and others had been seeking a mechanical method for exactly recording or rendering a scene. One device was the camera obscura (Latin For “dark chamber”), which consists of a darkened room or box with a lens on one side. Light passes through the lens, projecting an upside-down image. An artist can trace the image. By the seventeenth century artist were trying to make these images permanent. •The first to make a permanent picture by the action of light was Joseph-Nicephore Niepce (1761-1833) only one of his heliographs (or “sun drawings”) survives (slide). View From His Window at Gras is a view of the outbuildings at Niepce’s estate. (It required an exposure of about eight hours, which explains why sunlight is evident on the inside portions of the taller buildings on both left and right.)

Niepce - View From His Window at Gras there is a building on the left, a tree a third in from the left, and a barn immediately in front. The exposure lasted eight hours, so the sun had time to move from east to west, appearing to shine on both sides of the building.

Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre•Niepce met Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre (1787-1851), a parisian painter who was also experimenting with creating images for his diorama (a popular theater built for the display of huge, dramatically lit, illusionistic paintings on semitransparent fabric) •Working with a lens maker, Daguerre had developed an improved camera. •In 1829 Daguerre and Niepce formed a partnership. •After Niepce’s death in 1833, Daguerre continued their research using copper plates coated with ionized silver, long known to be light sensitive. •The inventor’s first such picture, a daguerreotype, was a still life of plaster casts, a wicker-covered bottle, a framed drawing, and a curtain, called The Artists Studio (slide). This arrangement was reminiscent of a still-life painting.

The Artists Studio

Nadar•French photographer Nadar was a realist who used the medium of photography to record people and their surroundings as truthfully as possible. He did not use props, and he posed his subjects informally. His goal, unlike that of Julia Margaret Cameron (blurred imagery) and Oscar Rejilander (photographic allegories) was to make a factual record of his subjects’ characteristic appearance and demeanor (Nadar, portrait of Charles Baudeaire, p. 990). •In 1874, Nadar’s busy studio, which was a meeting place for artists and Intellectuals, was the setting for the first exhibition of French Impressionist art. •The greatest of the early portrait photographers was undoubtedly the Frenchman Nadarz for his professional career as novelist, journalist, enthusiastic balloonist, and caricaturist. He was so talented at capturing the “essence” of his subjects that the most important people in France, including - Delacroix, Daumier, Courbet, and Manet, flocked to his studio to have their portraits made.

Nadar

Nadar said he sought in work “that instant of understanding that puts you in touch with the model - helps you sum him up, guides you to his habits, his ideas, and character and enables you to produce…a really convincing and sympathetic likeness, an intimate portrait.”

Nadar self-portrait A caricature of Nadar Sarah Bernhardt (actress)

Nadar’s skill in the genre can be seen in the poet Charles Baudelaire (slide), which shows the poet at the height of his career. Nadar’s famous gift for putting his clients at ease by assuming the pose that best expressed his personality.

Nadar Nadar placed great emphasis on the importance of the inner psychology of his subjects. His subjects are usually photographed from a three-quarters angle against a plain dark background.

Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire - Poet

Henry Fox Talbot

• 1840 - invented the Calotype process

• Created a negative image that can produce positives

George Eastman

• Refined Talbot’s process, which is the basic technology used by chemical film cameras today.

• In 1888, Kodak Camera went on the market with slogan “You press the button, we do the rest”

Photography and Art

• Create art true to life and the saying “the camera could not lie”

• Do photographers represent reality?• Painters would crop and see composition

differently - connecting to how photographers look through the lens

• American Civil War - capture War for the first time