Research paper proposal due next Thursday
View video 005202 Part 1 : The Movies Begin: The
Great Train Robbery, Sac State Library, write brief
descriptions of the films, technologies, techniques and
turn it in to me for credit. You have two weeks to see
this video and turn in your notes.
Quiz
30 minutes total
2 questions: 15 minutes each
Please put everything away.
Take out paper and pen. Write your name, date, and
“Art and Photography” on top of your paper.
Identify this photograph from the previous lecture: 1) full name and
nationality of photographer, 2) title of photograph, 3) date, 4) medium, and
5) photographic movement if relevant.
Discuss the photograph in terms of the Trachtenberg reading and previous
class lecture. Show what you have learned – give as many facts as you can.
Include titles of related works by this and other photographers. How did the
public see and respond to works like this? Why?
Identify this photograph from the previous lecture: 1) full name and
nationality of photographer, 2) title of photograph, 3) date, 4) medium, and
5) photographic movement if relevant.
Discuss the photograph in terms of the essay by this photographer, other
readings, and class lecture. Display what you have learned – give as many
facts as you can. Mention related readings. Include titles of related works by
this and other artists. How did the public see and respond to works like this?
Why?
19th Century Portraiture
“In the summer of 1861 it was stated that 33,000 people
made their living from the production of photographs and
photographic materials in Paris alone.”
Gersheim quoted by Max Kozloff
“Nadar and the Republic of Mind”
André-Adolphe Disdéri (French, 1819-1890), uncut sheet of Cartes-de-Visite, albumen
contact print from a wet-plate negative, c.1855-1870 shot in Disderi's Paris studio.
Unknown sitter
Disdéri, multiple shot camera,
consecutively released shutters
A Carte-de-visite was a tiny photographic image mounted on a 2.5 x 4 inch
visiting card.
André-Adolphe Disdéri, Napoleon III, Empress Eugenie, and son, Eugène Napoleon,
albumen print, with carte-de-visite, c.1860, 3 3/8 in. x 2 in. Disderi was Napoleon’s court
photographer beginning in May, 1859 when Napoleon III interrupted his march to war to
pose for a photograph in Disderi’s studio.
Disderi, H.R. H Princess
Beatrice, Daughter of Queen
Victoria, carte-de-visite, c.1860
André Disdéri, Paul Legrand (clown in white face),
uncut cartes de visite sheet, c.1860-65, albumen
print
Disdéri, Paris Commune Destruction, 1871
Disdéri, Napoleon III
Empress Eugénie, and
Prince Eugène, c.1860
Disdéri, Bodies of Dead Communards, 1871
Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, French, 1820 –1910)
Self-Portrait, 1855. Left & right are from 1863.
“Nadar” was derived from his nickname ("tourne a dard") meaning
"bitter sting," which he earned for his caricatures
Nadar, Panthéon Nadar (detail), 1854, lithograph
Nadar & Adrien Tournachon, Pierrot the Photographer, 1854-55, paper print
Honoré Daunier, Nadar Elevating
Photography to the Level of Art,
lithograph, 1862, appeared in Le
Boulevard (Parisian newspaper).
Edouard Manet, The 1867 World Exhibition,
Nadar’s balloon, The Giant, is upper right
James Black
Boston from a
captive balloon,
October 13, 1860
Nadar created the first aerial views of cities
but first works were lost.
Nadar, Catacombs of Paris, 1861
First to photograph with artificial light (Bunsen batteries)
Nadar, Sewers
of Paris, 1864-65
The theory of photography can be
taught in an hour; the first ideas of how
to go about it in a day. What can't be
taught... is the feeling for light - the
artistic appreciation of effects
produced by different...sources; it's the
understanding of this or that effect
following the lines of the features
which required your artistic perception.
What is taught even less, is the
immediate understanding of your
subject - it's this immediate contact
which can put you in sympathy with
the sitter, helps you to sum them up,
follow their normal attitudes, their
ideas, according to their personality,
and enables you to make not just a
chancy, dreary cardboard copy typical
of the merest hack in the darkroom,
but a likeness of the most intimate and
happy kind....
Nadar, Young Woman, 1859
Nadar (1857)
Nadar, Charles Baudelaire, 1856-58
Nadar, Edouard Manet, 1874
First Impressionist Exhibition 15 April 1874:
“Exhibition of the Société Anonyme of Painters, Sculptors, and Printmakers”
(left) Nadar (Gaspard-Felix Tournachon) (1820-1910) Nadar¹s Studio at 35 Boulevard
des Capucines’
(right) Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, 1873 (31 1/4 x 23 1/4")
Nadar, Jules Verne, c.1860
Nadar, Gerard de Nerval, 1854-56
This mystic and dreamy poet, reader of
Swedenborg and the Cabala, a confirmed
eccentric and finally a mad suicide ….
Nadar shows us a small, round, baldheaded plebian, seemingly a lumpfaced
butcher….
Max Kozloff
Nadar, Sarah
Bernhardt, 1863
Nadar, Georges
Sand, 1877
Nadar, Franz List at 75, 1886
Lady Clementina Hawarden (British, 1822-65). Isabella Grace and Clementina Maude
(daughters) in 5 Princes Garden, from Studies from Life, Albumen print from wet
collodion on glass negative. England, 1864. Allegory
Lady Clementina Hawarden, Clementina Looking into a Large Mirror, albumen print
from wet collodion negative, c.1864
James McNeil Whistler, Symphony in White, 1864. Whistler admired and collected
Hawarden’s photographs
Hawarden, Girl at the Window, early 1860s
Impressionist light effect. Yet the combination of simple pose and an overt appeal to the
imagination is also characteristic of Pre-Raphaelism. Rossetti's drawings of Elizabeth
Siddal are an obvious example.
Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal
Kneeling, Playing a Double
Pipe, pencil on paper, 1854
JULIA MARGARET CAMERON (British, b. India 1815 – 1879)
Cameron’s Dimbola Lodge
on the Isle of Wight
George Frederic Watts
Julia Margaret Cameron
1850-1852, oil on canvas,
Cameron, Alfred Lord Tennyson,
1865, one of Cameron’s famous
artist neighbors on the Isle of Wight
Cameron, Annie, My First Success, 1865
Cameron was fifty years old
The habit of running into the dining
room with my wet pictures has stained
such an immense quantity of table
linen with nitrate of silver, indelible
stains, that I should have been
banished from any less indulgent
household.
J.M. Cameron
“Annals of My Glass House, 1874
Cameron’s collodion process
With the model ready, Cameron inserted
a large, wet glass plate into her wooden
camera, which was equipped with a
heavy brass lens. Though briefer than
daguerreotype exposure times, she
exposed her plates to light for three to
eight minutes – too long for any model
to hold completely still.
Cameron's lens did not cover the large
size of her glass plate negatives (about
11x14”), making it impossible to keep
the entire image in focus.
Resulting prints were printed directly
from the negative. Not enlarged.
Cameron, Julia Jackson, 1867, albumen print
Although Cameron’s exposures averaged about five minutes, she did
not use a headrest, instead allowing the sitter’s natural motion to add
spiritual life to the picture.
The idea that the blur could be used as a strategy was a conceptual
break from the portrait ideal in which a sitter was rendered absolutely
still.
“My first successes in my out-offocus pictures were a fluke.. .
When focusing and coming to
something which, to my eye,
was very beautiful, I stopped
there instead of screwing on the
lens to the more definite focus.”
J.M. Cameron
Julia Margaret Cameron, My Favorite Picture of All My Works, My Niece Julia, 1867
Cameron, Mrs. Herbert Duckworth (niece Julia Jackson, mother of
Virginia Wolfe and Vanessa Bell) 2 of many portraits, 1865-1868,
albumen print
The issue of focus was critical in defining serious nineteenth-century
artistic practice. During the 1860’s Cameron’s work helped establish the
issue of selective focus as a criterion of artistic practice.
The making of “out of focus” photographs was considered an expressive
remedy that shifted the artificial, machine-focus of a camera towards a
more natural vision.
When I have such men before my
camera my whole soul has
endeavored to do its duty towards
them in recording faithfully the
greatness of the inner as well as the
features of the outer man. The
photograph thus taken has been
almost the embodiment of a prayer.
J.M Cameron
Cameron, Sir John Herschel
1867, albumen print
Cameron, Charles Darwin, 1868
Cameron, Henry Taylor as Rembrandt, 1865, carbon print
Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-portrait, 1658, oil on canvas.
Compare lighting and seriousness of pose
Julia Margaret Cameron, Mariana, "She said I am
aweary, aweary, I would that I
were dead,” 1875 (last line of every stanza in
Tennyson’s poem, Mariana)
Compare: William Morris (British,
1834-1896) La Belle Iseult, 1858
Pre-Raphaelite anti-modernity
modernism
Compare Cindy Sherman, Untitled
Film Still #21, 1978
Cameron, The Echo, 1867, playacting in
costume for the camera
King Arthur, from Idylls of the King and Other Poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, volume I,
plate XII, 1874, albumen, 25.7 x 35.3 cm. The model is William Warder, a local porter at
the Yarmouth ferry pier
Compare Sally Mann (American, b.
1951) wet plate process
Julia Margaret Cameron, Days at Freshwater
c.1870, albumen print
Julia Margaret Cameron, Mary Mother
(Cameron’s parlor maid, Mary Hillier) 1867
albumen print
Compare: Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, Beata Beatrix, c.186470, oil on canvas
Pre-Raphaelite (British)
Cameron, Mary Hillier as Madonna, 2 images in series, c. 1865, albumen silver
photographs, 15.6 x 20.0 cm
Raphael, Madonna della Seggiolo, c. 1512, oil on canvas, inspiration for madonna series
Detail of Raphael’s
Sistine Madonna, 1512
Hiller’s children as putti
My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the
character and uses of High Art by combining the real and ideal and
sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and
beauty.
I believe in other than mere conventional topographic photography map making and skeleton rendering of feature and form without that
roundness and fullness of face and feature, that modeling of flesh and
limb, which the focus I use only can give.
As to spots they must I think remain. I could have them touched out but
... Artists for this reason amongst others value my photographs.
Julia Margaret Cameron
Cameron, Alice Liddell, n.d., albumen print
Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland Alice
Lewis Carroll (b. Charles Dodgson, British,1832-1898), Alice, 1858, collodion
Lewis Carroll on J. M Cameron:
"In the evening Mrs. Cameron and I had a mutual exhibition of photographs. Hers are all
taken purposely out of focus - some are very picturesque - some merely hideous however, she talks of them as if they were triumphs of art."
Last page of original Alice’s Adventures
In Wonderland manuscript, published 1865
Compare Lewis Carroll, Alice, 1858, with
(right) Sally Mann, Nap Time, 1989, gelatin silver print
Lewis Carroll (b. Charles Dodgson, British,1832-1898), Irene MacDonald, 1863,
albumen silver print, 5 5/8 x 71/2 in
Unknown Photographer, The Ghost of Milton, 3 1/2 x 7 in.,
Albumen silver stereograph, c. 1860
Spirit photography began in the US and spread to Europe
(left) Édouard Isidore Buguet (French, b. 1840), Fluidic Effect, 1875
(right) Theodor Prinz (German, active early 1900s) Ghost, c.1900, Gelatin silver print
Theodor Prinz (German, active in the early 1900s) Ghost, c.1900, Gelatin silver print
Compare contemporary work (right) by Anna Gaskel (US, b. 1969) Half Life #95,
series commissioned by the Menil Collection, 2002, C-Print
Eugène Thiébault (French b. 1825) Henri Robin and a Specter, 1863
Compare contemporary work by Adam Fuss (British b. 1961) From the series My Ghost
(Dress), 2001, gelatin silver print photogram, unique piece, 32 x 41 in