1. Photography

2. The Camera before Photography Before the invention of film and light-sensitive paper, Renaissance painters sometimes used a camera obscura to help achieve realistic representations of space and depth. The camera obscura was a large box with a lens to control light, and a ground glass at the back on which image could be traced. Louis J. M. Daguerre (1789-1851) invented the first practical system for producing permanent photographic prints in 1839. He first used the camera obscura to help him paint gigantic backdrops for opera, this led him to experiment with photography. When the photograph became widely available in the 1840s and 1850s the images printed on paper were in black and white or sepia (brown and white).

3. The Power of Representation The success of photography in reproducing realistic scenes and people had an instant impact on painting. One French painter after seeing the daguerreotype process demonstrated in 1839 stated, “From today painting is dead.” He was quite wrong, but he was responding to the realistic detail Daguerre’s almost instant process (like the modern Polaroid) could extract from the world. Even today realism remains among the most important resources of the photographic medium.

4. Photography And Painting: The Pictorialists Pictorialists are photographers who use the achievements of painting, particularly realistic painting, in their effort to realize the potential of photography as art. The pictorialist controlls details by subordinating them to structure, thus producing compositions that usually relied on the same underlying structures found in most late nineteenth-century paintings.

5. Generally, the pictorialist photograph was soft in focus, centrally weighted with its subject, and carefully balanced symmetrically across the frame. By relying on the formalist qualities of some nineteenth-century paintings, pictorialist photographers were able to evoke emotions that centered on sentimentalism.

6. The Emotional Power of Photography Photography has the power to evoke horror as well as pleasant sentiments. The natural question to be asked is whether a journalistic photograph of this kind (fig.12-11) can be considered from the point of view of art. Were you to examine Carter’s photograph from the point of view of its organization of individual details, you would see that the intersection of lines flowing from body to body, including the body of the Bophuthatswana soldier, link each figure conclusively and emotionally, while the open doors divide the photograph into powerful visual units. The lighting is harsh, the colors earthy and bleached, intensifying the mercilessness of the scene.

7. The Documentarists Time is critical to the documentarist, who portrays a world that is disappearing so slowly (or quickly) we cannot see it go. Not all photographs are decisive; they do not all catch the action at its most intense point. The best documentarist develop an instinct - nurtured by years of visual education… even in the midst of disaster.

8. James Van Der Zee James Van Der Zee worked in a somewhat different tradition. His studio in Harlem was so prominent that many important black citizens felt it essential that he take their portrait. (Fig. 12-20) There is the contrast of soft focus for the background and sharp focus for the foreground. Thus the couple and their new car stand out brilliantly. The car has been selectively framed front and rear, reminding us that this is, first, a portrait of a couple. Their style and elegance are what Van Der Zee was anxious to capture. His directness of approach puts him in the documentary tradition.

9. The Modern Eye The art of photography is young, and the mood is often rebellious. Some rebellion has produced unusual subject matter. Some rebellion has produced novel approaches to the composition of shapes... and some rebellion has produced serial photography.

10. Color Photography Color photography has special problems because color tends to limit the photographer’s ability to transform the subject matter. Therefore serious photographers often choose apparently inconsequential subject matter in order to release the viewer from the tyranny of the scene, thereby permitting the viewer to concentrate on structure and nuances of lighting and texture. These are expressly photographic values.

11. Summary Photography’s capacity to record reality faithfully is both a virtue and a fault. It makes many viewers of photographs concerned only with what is presented (the subject matter) and leaves them unaware of the way it has been represented (the form). Because of it fidelity of presentation, photography seems to some, to have no transformation of subject matter (the content).