Questions & Answers
What is photography’s “true genius”?
Transforms what it describes, that’s the art of photography, to control that transformation. It has intrigued us, showing us the secret strangeness that lies beneath appearances.
Name a proto-photographer.
Henry Fox Talburt, MP, master of Laycock abbey, world authority on botany and cuneiform writing. He couldn’t draw, so in 1834 he experimented with paper covered in silver salts and shoebox sized camera, nicknamed mouse traps, creating paper negatives.
In the 19th century, what term was associated with the daguerreotype?
Mirrored metal plate with one off images. Jerry spanuley, says it produces a visual experience that’s unique. And in the 19th century it was called: ‘A mirror with a memory’.
What is the vernacular?
A genre of photography including journalistic, amateur snap shots, scientific, touristic, forensic, insurance records, court documents, passport, postcards, boxing match records – every use except art. It includes the most natural occurring photographs possible, a gift of the medium itself, rather than a product of the genius of the individual photographer.
How do you “Fix the Shadows”?
In the 1830s it was found that certain chemical were light sensitive e.g. silver salts, silver chloride and silver nitrate. To find a way of fixing the image, to stop it carrying on exposing was difficult. In 1834 Henry Fox Talbert, he thought about camera obscurer, and with the mouse trap camera created negative, when sandwiched with another piece of paper would print the right way around. This was through only allowing the paper to be exposed for a certain amount of time. This represented the era of how modern photography would be founded. Louis Daguerre had his own method, who started in 1824, he created the daguerreotype to stop the shadows, where he would fix his images on a mirrored metal plate.
What is the “carte de visite”?
Major innovation in photographic technology was the carte de visite, a type patterned by a French man named Disdery in 1854, photographed 8 times, in a number of minutes by a camera that had 8 lenses, so you could get a series of portraits, and because the cards were small, they could be sent through the post, they got flown everywhere, making photography a true industry.
Who was Nadar and why was he so successful?
Gaspard Felix Tournachon, also known as Nadar, mastered the ‘natural expression’ when it came to portraits in the studio, unheard of really in the 1800s. Nadar is a made up name, its his copy write. He knows how to put a program of publicity. He photographed up coming artists and celebrities in a way that is unrivaled. He photographs them as equals, he doesn’t have to dress them up or put them in stupid settings, he just photographs them standing in his studio, looking authentic and beautiful, the best portraits of artists ever. He always isolates his sitters, nothing to indicate their profession, the force of personality alone that has to portray what them do.
What is pictorialism?
Mean, moody and occasionally magnificent, this era is where photography was at its most poe faced. These very small, self elected elites tried to establish photography as one of the fine arts. These elites are trying to establish this status, withdrew into a very narrow world, to intimate print making and things like that, whistler, and whislarian type art, an absolutely artistic dead end. Photography really merges with the arts a craft movement. Stylistically they retreated and in terms of the content. You do not see a machine or a car or a poor person, its all about nudes and landscapes, it looks as about as up to date as a rusting suit of armor.
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