Photography

Photography, from the time of its invention in the 1830s, was closely allied with both painting and print-making. It had for long been known that light, if passed through a very small aperture, would project an image (in reverse) on to the side of a dark chamber - the camera obscura occasionally used by artists as an aid for painting townscapes and interiors in perspective. The initial purpose of photography was to fix such images, and two processes were devised simultaneously. That discovered by the French painter Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre by 1837 fixed the image on a sensitized copper plate called a daguerreotype. This was a unique object, like a painting or drawing, and was much used for portraits. In England, William Henry Fox Talbot succeeded before 1839 in fixing negative images on sheets of translucent paper which could then be placed over sheets of opaque sensitized paper and exposed to light to make positive prints. The advantage was that many identical prints could be made from a single negative. They were, however, slightly fuzzy on account of the uneven texture of the translucent paper (15,31). The introduction of glass plates for negatives in the 1850s facilitated the production of prints as sharply defined as daguerreotypes, which they soon superseded.

Subsequent developments were mainly technical improvements, notably those that reduced the time needed for an exposure and by the 1870s made possible split-second photographs of figures in motion (15,58). Meanwhile there had been much controversy as to whether photography should or could be considered an art (see p. 674). Until the mid-century photographs were occasionally hung among lithographs in official exhibitions of art. After that they were excluded and shown only in specialized exhibitions. At about the same time, selfconsciously artistic photographers began to select subjects similar to those of painters, concentrating on softly focused images of motionless figures and scenes. Sometimes the results might almost be mistaken for photographs of paintings. Blessed Art Thou Among Women (0,6) by the American photographer Gertrude Kasebier (1851-1934), for example, ranks with several notable paintings among the most compelling images of its period. Developments in the science of photography were exploited mainly by documentary photographers whose shots of street scenes (15,59) are considered nowadays to be among the finest photographs ever taken but were regarded at the time simply as photo-records, certainly not as works of art.

The cult of the unique art object led some photographers to reject the possibility of making innumerable prints from a single negative and to issue limited editions, each print being numbered and signed and slightly different from the others as a result of manipulation in the dark room. Although the process of color photography was perfected in the 1940s most of them continued, as some still do, to prefer monochrome. There is no more striking instance of unsynchronized and often contradictory developments in technology and art than that presented by the century-and-a-half history of photography. Despite the great achievements of so many photographers, it has only recently won widespread acceptance as a vehicle for artistic expression, with unique potentialities even when the very simplest equipment is used.