(English, 1819-1869)
Crimean War (1853-1856)
(American, 1823-1896)
American Civil War (1861-1865)
How has the camera transformed the way war is perceived?
Documentary realism versus romantic idealism
Photography versus painting
Propaganda versus truth (Can the camera lie?)
Commercialism and photography
Orientalism, Imperialism, Manifest Destiny

“Art-Progress,” Punch Cartoon, London, 1858
Mockery of photography’s claims to “art” status because of commercial competition and mass popularity of photography
“Now, Mum! Take Orf Yer ‘Had for Sixpence, or Yer ‘Ole Body For A Shellin’!”

Britain’s Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901
Her name and values identify the Victorian era in Europe
Edwin Landseer (British), Windsor Castle in Modern Times , 1841-5, oil on canvas
44 x 56” Victoria and Albert “at home”
Roger Fenton (British, 1819
–1869)
The Queen and the Prince , wet plate
1854

Top: Joseph Paxton (British, 1801 - 1865), The Crystal Palace , Hyde Park,
London, 1851
Bottom: A. W. N Pugin (British, 1812-1852) Houses of Parliament , London
Gothic Revivalism begun 1840

Joseph Paxton , Crystal Palace , 1851

Compare bed and new railroad cars exhibited at
Great Exhibition of 1851 ( Crystal Palace )

William Holman Hunt (British, 1827-1910), The Awakening Conscience , 1853-4 o/c, shaped canvas (arched top), 30/22” Tate Britain

William Holman Hunt , The Hireling Shepherd , 1851,
Pre-Raphaelite passion for descriptive detail and moral messages

Roger Fenton Self-Portrait as French Zouave Soldier (left), 1855
Pasha and Bayadere , 1858, albumen print
Orientalism

Roger Fenton , Orientalist Group , 1858
Albumen silver print from glass negative

Roger Fenton, Still Life with Fruit , 1860, albumen silver print from glass negative, 14 x
17” Fruits of the world (the British Empire) with “oriental” tapestry fringes

Roger Fenton , Photographic van with Fenton’s assistant, Crimea, 1854
Salted paper print from wet collodion negative
The Crimea extends into the Black
Sea between Russia and Turkey

Fenton , Balaklava Harbor , Ukraine (Crimea) 1885 , salt print from wet plate

Fenton , Encampment of Horse Artillery , near Balaklava harbor, Crimea
1855, salt print from wet plate

Fenton , Valley of the Shadow of Death , site of the suicidal charge of the light brigade, salt print, April 23,1855
Christian Bible and Alfred Lord Tennyson poem

Compare the effect of photography versus painting in representations of war:
Fenton , The Valley of the Shadow of Death
(right) William Simson , Charge of the Light Brigade, 1855

Compare the effect of photography versus oil painting in representations of war:
(right) Roger Fenton , Survivors of The Charge of the Light Brigade , 1885, with
(left top) Richard Caton Woodville , The Light Brigade, 1856
1936 Hollywood movie
War heroes

Fenton , Survivors of the Charge of the Light Brigade , 1885
Florence Nightingale
(English, 1820-1910).
Crimean war and first modern nursing - reduced the mortality rate for the wounded from 50% to 3%

Mathew Brady (American, 1823-1896)
Mathew Brady’s Picture Gallery, New York
“Brady of Broadway”
In 1839 Brady met, and became a student to Samuel Morse. That same year he met
Louis Daguerre in Paris and went back to the United States to capitalize upon the invention of the Daguerreotype, establishing a highly successful Gallery.

Mathew Brady, Portrait of Abraham Lincoln, 1864
"Make no mistake, gentlemen,
Brady made me President!" (Lincoln)

Mathew Brady, Portrait of General Grant, 1864

Battle Between the C.S.S. Virginia and the U.S.S. Monitor
Hampton Roads, VA, March 9, 1862
The Civil War was an “unprecedented assignment—as new to photography as the military actions employing new long-range weapons were new to warfare. The first modern war in its scale of destruction—close to half a million casualties— and in the use of mechanized weaponry, including steel-plated naval vessels, trenches, and, in Sherman's march through Georgia in 1864, a scorched-earth policy….
Alan Trachtenberg

Brady’s “Outfit for War”1862: The process Brady's team used was the collodion one, invented by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851. The limitations of equipment and materials prevented any action shots, but the photographers brought back some seven thousand pictures portraying the realities of war.

Brady, Dead at Antietam Church, 1862

Brady, Dead at Antietam Battlefield, 1862

Timothy O’Sullivan, A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July, 1863

Compare: Mathew Brady (Studio of), Confederate Prisoners , Gettysburg, July 1863
Winslow Homer (American, 1836 -1910), Prisoners from the Front , 1866
Oil on canvas; 24 x 38 in

Timothy O’Sullivan, Dead Soldier, 1863

Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, 1770

Compare war photography with war painting

Compare: Emmanuel Leutze George Washington Crossing the Delaware , 1851
Timothy O’Sullivan, Dead Soldier, 1863

Mathew Brady (studio of), Ruins of the Gallego Flour Mills, Richmond, Virginia , 1865
Albumen silver print, 7 1/8 x 8 13/16 inches

Brady, Ruins of Richmond, Virginia, albumen silver print, 1865

Mathew Brady (studio of), Ruins of the Gallego Flour Mills, Richmond, Virginia , 1865
Albumen silver print, 7 1/8 x 8 13/16 inches
Compare with Thomas Cole , Desolation , oil on canvas, last in Cole’s prescient series
The Course of Empire , 1936

Stereoscope – hugely popular after presentation at the Crystal Palace, 1851
“Judging from the revival of [Civil War] images starting in the 1880s, the public relished the terror—or found ways to deny it.” (Trachtenberg)
Set of stereoscope cards with images of war
Modern visuality: War in 3-D as living room entertainment

Will Soule (U.S., 1836-1908)
Indian Gallery, 1870-75
Documenting Manifest Destiny
Cheyenne Indian Camp , 1870-75
Soule was a young Civil War veteran who took a job on the frontier and made an important series of Native American portraits at Fort Sill, Oklahoma from 1869 to 1874.

Will Soule , Scalped Hunter near Fort Dodge Kansas , 1868
Albumen print on calligraphic mount, 6 x 7.75”

Albert Bierstadt (German-born American Hudson River School Painter, 1830-1902)
Emigrants Crossing the Plains , 1867
Manifest Destiny

Edward Curtis (U.S. 1869-1952) Canyon de Chelly, Navajo, 1904
Note: You are responsible for the information on Edward Curtis presented by Professor Listopad
Curtis published The North American Indian in installments between 1907 and 1930

Curtis , Canyon de Chelly
(Arizona) Navajo, 1904
Thomas Hill (American, born England 1829-
1908), Great Canyon of the Sierra, Yosemite,
1871, oil on canvas, 72 in. x 120”, The Crocker
Art Museum, Sacramento
How do the history of painting and the history of photography intersect?

Anonymous photographer, California
Gold Rush, 1850s
Charles Christian Nahl , American (born
Germany, 1818-1878), Sunday Morning in the
Mines
, 1872, oil on canvas, 72 x 108”

Carleton Watkins (American, 1829-1916) El-Eachas or Three Brothers , Yosemite, c.1861, 16 x 21” albumen silver print

Carleton Watkins, Yosemite Valley, from "Best General View“ c. 1865, albumen silver print from glass negative
Came West to photograph the California Gold Rush

Carleton Watkins, Grizzly Grove, 1861

Timothy O’Sullivan
(American, 1840-1882), Steamboat Springs, Washoe, Nevada ,
1867, Albumen silver print
After the Civil War, O’Sullivan became a photographer for the Geological
Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, the first survey of the American West. He returned to Washington, D.C. in 1874 and made prints for the Army Corps of
Engineers.

Maxime du Camp , The Colossus of Abu Simbel, Nubia, 1850, salted paper print, published in L.d. BlanquartEvard’s Egypt, Nubia, Palestine et Syrie, Paris, 1852, which contained 122 calotypes

Francis Frith (British 1822-1899), The Sphinx and Great
Pyramid Geezah
, 6.5 x 9”, albumen silver print, published in book, Sinai and Palestine , c. 1862
William Holman Hunt ,
Nazareth, 1855, watercolor,
Pre-Raphaelite. European fascination with “Holy Lands”
Orientalism

John Beasly Greene (American, 1832-1856), Bank of Nile at Thebes , 1854, c. 9 x 12”, salted paper print. Pictorial effect achieved with calotype’s granular look visually uniting sky and water

Casper David Friedrich , Monk by
The Sea , o/c, 1809, German Romanticism
John Beasly Greene , Bank of Nile at
Thebes , 1854

From the beginning, photography has been discussed in the language and values of academic art, not the language of avant-garde painting.

William Henry Fox Talbot , The Open Door , calotype, 1843 one of 24 photographic images in The Pencil of Nature
“Calotype” was derived from the Greek kallos , “beauty”

Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1813-75) The Two Ways of Life , 1857 composite photograph
Victorian high-art photography
Reading: “An Apology for Art Photography,” an excerpt, 1863

Compare photography and academic painting in composition and content
Rejlander (1813-75) The Two Ways of Life , 1857
Thomas Couture , Romans of the Decadence , 1847,
French Academic history painting

"Any dodge, trick and conjuration of any kind is open to the photographer's use.... It is his imperative duty to avoid the mean, the base and the ugly, and to aim to elevate his subject.... and to correct the unpicturesque....A great deal can be done and very beautiful pictures made, by a mixture of the real and the artificial in a picture."
Robinson , "Pictorial Effect in Photography" (1867)
Henry Peach Robinson (British 1830-75), Fading Away ,
1858, composite of five negatives
Reading: “Idealism, Realism, Expressionism”

Henry Peach Robinson ,
When the Day’s Work is Done
, 1877, albumen print from six negatives, 22 x 29 5/16 in

Jeff Wall , Image for Women , 1979. Cibachrome light box. 224 x 162 cm.
Postmodern pastiche, combination photography, and appropriation
Edouard Manet , Bar at the
Folies Bergere, 1881

Peter Henry Emerson , Gathering Waterlilies , 1886, platinotype from Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads
Reading: “Hints on Art”
Emerson extended this Helmholtzian idea of "vision as impression" to photography

Peter Henry Emerson, Poling the Marsh Hay , 1886, platinotype, from Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads .
Camille Pissarro , (French Neo-Impressionism), The Gleaners , 1889

The Artifice of Candor
Impressionism and Photography Reconsidered
Photography and French Avant-Garde Painting
Eugène Delacroix, Odalisque
, 1855. Oil on wood, and photographic study

(left) A.Houssin
, Boulevard in Paris , 1863, stereoscopic photograph
Edgar Degas , Place de la Concorde (Vicomte Lepic and His Daughers), 1875, oil on canvas
Thiebault , View of a Boulevard , 1858, stereoscopic photograph

H. Jouvin , Place de la Concorde , 1863, stereoscopic photograph
Edgar Degas , Place de la Concorde (Vicomte Lepic and His Daughers), 1875, oil on canvas
Benedict , Rome , 1867, stereoscopic photograph

Adophe Braun, La Pont des Arts (detail of panoramic view of Paris), 1868
Gustave Caillebotte, Boulevard Seen from Above, 1880, oil on canvas

(left) Claude Monet , Boulevard des Capucines , 1873-74, oil on canvas
(right) Edgar Degas , Miss LaLa at the Cirque Fernando , 1879, oil on canvas

Edouard Manet ,
At the Café
, 1878, oil on canvas
Lefort ,
Café Scene
, 1867(?), stereoscopic photograph

Charles Baudelaire by
Edouard Manet
From reading, “The Modern Public and Photography,” what were Baudelaire’s
Complaints against photography?