E.J. Bellocq (1873 - 1949):
Storyville Portraits
Alderman: Sidney Story who in 1898 decreed that prostitution should be legalised in the aria.
Commercial photographer working for shipping companies - at the same time making photographs of working women in the red-light district of Storyville.
“…the pictures are unforgettable - photography's ultimate standard of value. And it's not hard to see why the trove of glass negatives by a hitherto unknown photographer working in New Orleans in the early years of this century became one of the most admired recoveries in photography's widening, ever incomplete history.”
- Susan Sontag
1861: James Clerk Maxwell
- Scottish scientist credited with the first photographic demonstration of the additive color theory (developed by Thomas Young and refined by Hermann Helmholtz). The theory held that all colors of light can be mixed optically by combining in different proportions of the three primary
colors of the spectrum: red, green, and blue. Maxwell made three separate black and white positives of a tartan plaid ribbon through three separate blue-violet, green, and red filters. When all three positives were simultaneously projected, in registration the projected image would result in its true color.
The Autochrome:
A glass plate coated with minute granules of potato starch dyed in each of the three primary colors and dusted with a fine black powder to fill in the interstices that would have allowed light to pass through; the glass was then coated with a layer of silver bromide panchromatic emulsion.
The result was a positive transparency.
Invented in 1904 by the Lumiere brothers in Lyon
PICTORIALISM:
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pict/hd_pict.htm
After the introduction of the handheld amateur camera by Kodak in 1888, patrician gentlemen with artistic ambitions no longer dominated the medium of photography. As an army of weekend "snapshooters" invaded the photographic realm, a small but persistent group of photographers staked their medium's claim to membership among the fine arts. They rejected the point-and-shoot approach to photography and embraced labor-intensive processes such as gum bichromate printing, which involved hand-coating artist papers with homemade emulsions and pigments, or they made platinum prints, which yielded rich, tonally subtle images. Such photographs emphasized the role of the photographer as craftsman and countered the argument that photography was an entirely mechanical medium. Alfred Stieglitz was the most prominent spokesperson for these photographers in America, and in 1902 he and several like-minded associates in the New York Camera Club—including Gertrude Käsebier (1987.1100.13), and Frank Eugene (33.43.303), who came to New York from Ohio and eventually founded a school devoted to Pictorial photography. Other American Pictorialist photographers, such as F. Holland Day (33.43.158), who had mounted the first important exhibition of American Pictorial photography in 1900—The New School of American Photography at the Royal Photographic Society in England—chose to maintain independence from the group in order to pursue aesthetic goals away from Stieglitz's opinionated and often overbearing personality. Others, among them Adolph de Meyer (33.43.39) were shedding Pictorial photography's painterly facade in order to promote an unvarnished display of the medium's natural strength—namely, its capacity for producing a truthful rendering of abstract form and tonal variation in the real world. This new chapter in each of these artists' styles was a step toward the international phenomenon of modernism in art, and both would mine that vein to make some of their best work. Stieglitz dissolved the Photo-Secession and Camera Work in 1917, but Käsebier, Coburn, and White continued to make photographs as they had in the early years of the century and became founders of an organization called the Pictorial Photographers of America in 1916. Although the Photo-Secession members eventually went their separate ways, all of them were instrumental in establishing photography's expressive potential and demonstrating that its value lay beyond reproducing the outlines of the world around us. Pictorialist works were as beautifully rendered as any painter's canvas and as skillfully constructed as any graphic artist's composition. In manipulating the presentation of information in a photographic negative, the Pictorialists injected their own sensibility into our perception of the image—thereby imbuing it with pictorial meaning.
| Lisa Hostetler Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art |
Pictorialism in the United States
- Wide acceptance of individuals from varied
economic, social, and regional background
- Acceptance of both sexes, active in commercial
photography, in the arts, business
- Democratic cast and perspective towards
“high art”
The Photo-Secession
Formed in 1902 by Stieglitz to compel “the serious recognition of
Photography as an additional medium of pictorial expression” - declaring
Himself as the prime figure.
Founding members:
John G. Bullock, Eugene, Kasebier, Edward Steichen and Clarence H. White
Gallery 291
1905 - 1917
Opened by Alfred Stieglitz at 291 Fifth Ave - New York City to feature contemporary national and International fine art.
“We have to learn how to see. We all have to learn to use our eyes, and
291 is here for no other purpose than to give everybody a chance to see”
- Alfred Stieglitz
The Intimate Gallery 1925 - 1929
Mounted exhibitions featuring the art by seven Americans. The works demonstrated the artists shared vision, as well as their interest in experimenting with the subjects and materials of their art.
An American Place 1927 - 1946
Opened on the seventeenth floor of 509 Madison Avenue and closed upon Stieglitzs death in
1946
Publications
Camera Work 1903 - 1917
Quarterly journal established by Alfred Stieglitz in 1903,
New York City. This publication produced
Fifty issues before it was discontinued in June, 1917.
"Let me here call attention to one of the most universally popular mistakes that have to do with photography - that of classing supposedly excellent work as professional, and using the term amateur to convey the idea of immature productions and to excuse atrociously poor photographs. As a matter of fact nearly all the greatest work is being, and has always been done, by those who are following photography for the love of it, and not merely for financial reasons. As the name implies, an amateur is one who works for love; and viewed in this light the incorrectness of the popular classification is readily apparent."
-Alfred Stieglitz
Documentation: The Social Scene to 1945
Documentary: that’s a sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear…
The term should be documentary style… you see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless.
-Walker Evans, 1971
Social documentary:
An inexpensive and replicatible means of presenting (supposedly) truthful verifications of visual fact…
Q: How did photography become an important adjunct of the campaigns for social reform?
….and was this an auxiliary or subordinate relationship?
Distribution and mass production of photographic images:
technology & photographic representation In the media
Photogravure:
A form of intaglio printing, in which a photographic image is chemically etched into a copper plate. When the plate is inked, then wiped clean, the ink remains in the pits of the plate and is transferred to a sheet of paper during the printing process. William Henry Fox Talbot experimented with this process as early as 1852, however, the process was not widely used until the 1870’s when Karl Klic developed a way of satisfactorily dusting the plates with resinous powder.
Woodburytype:
Photo-mechanical ink based printing process that is credited to W. B. Woodbury ca. 1865 used primarily for photographic reproduction in small editions to accompany book publications (as illustrations). The Woodburytype offered a continuous-tone for reproductions by exposing a negative to dichromated gelatin to create a relief mold, which is then embedded in lead for the printing. Pigmented gelatin is poured into the mold and transferred to paper under pressure, resulting in an image in which the deepest parts of the mold produce the darkest areas of the print.
Halftone:
A reproduction made by re-photographing a picture (photographic or other) through a gridded screen in order to break up the continuous tones into a field of dots. Dark areas of the image appear as large, closely spaced dots; the dots representing light areas are smaller and farther apart.
The halftone has been credited to: Frederick Ives in 1888
Colonialism:
Colonialism is a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another.
Colony comes from the Latin word colonus, meaning farmer. This root reminds us that the practice of colonialism usually involved the transfer of population to a new territory, where the new arrivals lived as permanent settlers while maintaining political allegiance to their country of origin.
Social and ethical concerns with industrialization:
à Working/Living Conditions
à Child Labor
à Loss of Hand-Crafted Items
à De-humanization vis-à-vis Mechanization
see:
John Ruskin’s concept of social economy spanning economic activity in the community, voluntary, and social enterprise sectors. Employment; financial transactions; the occupation of property etc…
