Sage of Lacock

Abstract

‘The good is oft interred with their bones.’ Much of what has been written of William Henry Fox Talbot has done him meagre justice: criticism for patenting his inventions, accusations that he patented the ideas of others, denigration of the importance of his discoveries. Though acknowledged as a scientist, his place as an artistic worker in the medium he invented has not been appreciated.     

The photographic experiments of Henry Brougham

Abstract

Of all the British claimants to the invention of photography, Henry Brougham is the one whose experiments have been given least attention in existing histories of photography. In his posthumously published three-volume autobiography of 1871, The Life and Times of Henry, Lord Brougham, written by himself, Brougham claimed to have engaged in some ‘experiments upon light and colours’ during the years 1794-–5 (when he was 16 years of age). He had, he tells us, included a discussion of his experiments in a paper offered to the Royal Society in 1795. Most of this paper, his first in the field of natural philosophy, was published in the Society's Philosophical Transactions (No. 86) of 1796 under the title ‘Experiments and observations on the inflection, reflection, and colours of light’. The paper, as published, was an attempt to discover analogous relationships between the bending of light within bodies (refraction or, using the 18th-century term, ‘refrangibility’) and the bending of light outside of bodies (reflection and diffraction or, in Brougham's terminology, flexion). As he wrote in the opening lines of his paper:

It has always appeared wonderful to me, since nature seems to delight in those close analogies which enable her to preserve simplicity and even uniformity in variety, that there should be no dispositions in the parts of light, with respect to inflection and reflection, analogous or similar to their different refrangibility. In order to ascertain the existence of such properties, I began a course of experiments and observations, a short account of which forms the substance of this paper.¹     

Talbot's Rouen window

Abstract

On 16 May 1843, William Henry Fox Talbot, stopping in Rouen en route to Paris to try to market his calotype process, set up his camera in front of the muslin-curtained window of his room in the Hôtel de l'Angleterre (figure 1).¹ Huddled deep in the darkened bedroom, he focused not on the masts of sailing vessels docked outside on the quai du Havre or the new suspension bridge that he was to record in other images, but on the plane of the window itself, with its mullions, balcony grating, curtain rods, and filigree of lace. Knowing full well that the faintly lit walls of his room would be grossly underexposed ifhe tried to capture anything of the bright outside world, Talbot persisted with this enigmatic composition, neither landscape nor still life, study of nature nor genre scene, at best a ‘picturesque imagining’ as he would later describe in The Pencil of Nature.     

How Stieglitz came to photograph cityscapes

Abstract

Beginning in 1927, at the age of 63, Alfred Stieglitz began photographing the views of Manhattan outside the windows at the Intimate Gallery, his third-floor exhibition space on East 59th Street, and at the thirtieth-floor apartment at the Shelton Hotel, at 49th Street and Lexington Avenue, where he lived with Georgia O'Keeffe. In concerted bursts over the next four years, and then intermittently until ill-health forced the end of his picture-making in 1937, Stieglitz produced about 90 cityscapes, most of them depicting the changing views from .the Shelton and from his seventeenthfloor gallery An American Place, at 53rd Street and Madison Avenue, where he moved operations just after the stockmarket crash of 1929.1 The key set of Stieglitz's photographs in the National Gallery, Washington, DC, deposited there by Georgia O'Keeffe in 1949, includes 80 New York cityscapes from 1927 and after. The collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art has, among its late cityscapes, a handful that are not present in Washington, being variants in either negative, cropping, or photographic paper. These have been donated in stages over the years by Dorothy Norman. Further examples of variations from the images in Washington are unknown at present. These hard-edged yet lush gelatine silver prints vividly document a building boom of the late 1920s and early Depression years which transformed the refined, residential ‘uptown’ that Stieglitz had known all his life into a skyscraper-ridden ‘midtown’, a centre for office rentals, luxury apartment hotels and the fme art trade (figure 1).     

Russell Sedgfield,the complete photographer

Abstract

On 30th October 1833 Russell Sedgfield, at the age of seven and while on a visit to London, wrote a letter to Master Edward Sedgfield, his younger brother by one year: ‘Dear Edward, I have seen the Monument, River, Ships, and a Steam Boat, and the ships are not as big as our house, and I went out walking and saw St Pauls ...’ The handwriting is firm and decisive. He concluded: ‘Give my love to Papa and Mama, Grandfather, Grandma, Grandpa, Aunt Charlotte, Henry and Sisters, and I remain, Your Affectionate Brother, Russell.’ A year or two later he wrote a pertinent little poem, The Family Meeting, in which he characterized his ten uncles and aunts. Good observation and the ability to grasp the essentials and weigh things up seem to have been distinctive traits of Sedgfield from an early age.     

Oliver Wendell Holmes as an amateur photographer

Abstract

On 6th July 1862, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a letter to Coleman Sellers, thanking him for some photographs received and excusing his own negligence in writing. His eldest son, missing in action in Richmond, commanded all his attention, but then Holmes added: ‘If it were not for this war, I should begin getting photographic apparatus tomorrow. If peace ever returns I feel sure I shall try my hand at the art and then I shall be only too happy to send you some of my handiwork in return for the many favors I have received from you’¹. The letter catches Holmes at an interesting point in his life. Always intrigued by photography and well known among his friends as a popularizer of it, he was finally thinking of turning theory into practice.     

Retracing the image: The emergence of photography in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This is a difficult conference to review. It is particularly difficult as your reviewer comes from the margins of the discipline of his tory of photography; but then, all reviews are from a single, personal viewpoint (as are most photographs) and may not necessarily reflect an audience consensus. So, I shall begin by saying that this was not what I had expected. Had I been a mainstream art historian, still flushed with youthful enthusiasm, I might have loved it; but age, experience and a profound uneasiness about my own lack of wisdom left me with the distinct impression of the curate's egg. This conference was ‘good in parts’.     

The Sign of Stieglitz,the Art of Evans

This essay examines how Walker Evans evolved his documentary style in response to what he saw as Alfred Stieglitz's overbearing aestheticism. It begins with their first meeting and Evans's ‘rejection’ of this father‐figure, a rejection which became generalised in the history of photography on the grounds of a dichotomy between photographic art and social documentary. Evans came to represent this latter tendency despite his own wishes. With the help of friends like Lincoln Kirstein and Bernice Abbott, Evans claimed a different artistic genealogy, via the Civil War work of Mathew Brady and his teams and Eugène Atget, neither of whom were working in the same vein of documentary as Evans might have imagined. He attempted to remain the independent artist, all the while taking advantage of his various photographic employments and the directions in which they pushed him. In the end, history made him famous and influential as the champion of social documentary, a genre which coincided neatly with his own desire for a ‘lyric documentary’ for only a few years. In his desire to be an artist free from a social agenda, in his resistance to branding, he is a maverick bohemian much closer to Stieglitz than has been supposed, and he seemed to recognise the fact in his last comments on his predecessor.     

Alfred Stieglitz and New Yark Dada

Abstract

In February of 1921 the photographer and entrepreneur Alfred Stieglitz mounted the fIrst public exhibition of his work since the closing of his pioneering art gallery, ‘291’, nearly four years earlier.1 An exhibition of 146 of Stieglitz's photographs was held at the Anderson Galleries in New York during February of 1921. This show was instrumental in helping Stieglitz ultimately to reassert his prominence in the New York art world and re-establish his status as an important American artist. Curiously, however, the manner in which Stieglitz and his associates chose to promote the photographer was somewhat unusual. They repeatedly described the camera as an extension of Stieglitz's own body, and his photographs as an extension of his spirit. As a result, they claimed that Stieglitz had achieved a profound physical and spiritual union both with his machinery and with the subjects he photographed.     

My photographic career in Shanghai

Abstract

For more than ten years there has been an ever increasing demand for photos that I took showing scenes of Jewish refugees during their years of exile in Shanghai (figure 1). But it had never been my intention, or within my resources, to create a photographic record of the Jewish refugee community which had lived in Shanghai during the Second World War. All this came about rather incidentally. Like most young children, I was fascinated by photography, but the purchase of what I would call a ‘real’ camera was always beyond my financial resources. When I arrived in Shanghai in 1938 I did not even own a camera, but my brother had an Agfa box camera. Such a camera had a fixed-focus lens, and only a single shutter speed, but in good light, on any sunny day, it produced perfectly acceptable pictures. This most basic camera became available to me because my brother had different interests.     

William Lake Price and James Mudd

Abstract

Photography, of course, appears everywhere but for all its successes it has been remarkably unable to shake the complacency of the disciplines; it has its uses and its places, but these seem just too setded and too well known. The photographer remains a junior partner in the practices of a society, high or low, cultural or otherwise. But if we travel back through time we will encounter a point when photography seemed anything but limited. If any spatial figure typifies English photographic debate in the 1860s it would be ‘boundless’. In the language of English photographic culture the idea that the potentials of the new medium were unlimited stretched from Lady Easdake to the juror's reports on the International Exhibitions. Out of this mass of commentary I intend to extract only two fairly ordinary pieces of writing: William Lake Price's A Manual of Photographic Manipulation published in 1868¹ and James Mudd's ‘A photographer's dream’, originally read at the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, and published in The Photographic News for May 1865.²     

Henry van der Weyde (1839–1924)

Abstract

My great-great-grandfather Henry van der Weyde (figure 1) was a fascinating individual with a variety of talents. He was an artist, society photographer and inventor. He can be regarded as one of the fathers of electric-light photography because, in 1877, he was the first person to use a dynamo to produce electric-arc light to illuminate his studio. This was a revolution in the evolution of photography. He also invented and developed photographic techniques in lenses, lighting, printing and vignetting. He filed 81 patent applications, which were not all in the field of photography.     

A response to Roger Taylor

Abstract

Roger Taylor, in his response to my paper, may unwittingly have provided us with the answer to why Antoine Claudet distanced himself so firmly from the drawn out machinations and negotiations that led in January 1853 to the formation of what is now the Royal Photographic Society. It was snobbery. Taylor highlights the social chasm that existed between those in trade and those in polite society in the middle of the nineteenth century. ‘It is difficult to appreciate’, he reminds us, ‘just how conspicuously separate the two photographic communities (daguerreotype and calotype) were in the 1850s’.     

Talbot's photographic art

Abstract

Among the papers belonging to James David Forbes preserved in the University Library at St Andrews is a short letter that Sir John Herschel sent to Forbes on 6 June 1839. Writing while he was waiting to go in to a committee meeting at the Royal Society, Herschel's intention was to thank Forbes for having sent hirn copies of two of his scientific papers, but the most interesting part of the note is the hurriedly scribbled postcript with which it ends: ‘I have seen Daguerre's drawings (Photographs) in Paris which are all but miraculous!!!’. It is no exaggeration to say that Larry Schaaf's new book, The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot, generates a similar reaction.     

Alfred Swaine Taylor (1801–80)

Abstract

After a period in decline the Portobello Road market in London has enjoyed a revival in the past two or three years. There are at least three dealers in historic photographs within fifty yards of an East Anglian couple who regularly bring good quality decorative antiques and other curios to sell on Saturday mornings. I stopped at their showcase, looked in, walked on, and then returned to take a second look at a scrapbook, so often a source of good printed ephemera. It was open at a page showing a comic drawing of a wagon done up as an itinerant photographer's studio. I was told how much the scrapbook was and spent the next ten minutes looking through it. I decided on balance that I could ‘just about see the price in it’ ignoring the four photographs, which I believed must be of little or no value. On reaching my car I had another look through the album. A negative image of a leaf (figure 1) looked interesting, for a few months earlier I had been to Lacock and now remembered Talbot's photogenic drawings. Examination of the engravings and lithographs showed that they started in the 1820s and ended in 1853. This was undoubtedly a girl's scrapbook begun when she was quite small and probably continued until her early teens when the enthusiasm for pasting was bound to wane. I settled on a probable year of birth of 1840 for the girl but most careful combing discovered no name or initials in the book. There were, however, some postcards celebrating a pageant in 1907 at Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, and one had been posted to a Mrs F. Methold at an address in Bury, but how she was connected with the book remained to be disovered. I looked once more through the printed ephemera and spotted that two cards with heavily embossed borders had small hand-coloured lithographs pasted on to them. My suspicion that these were early Victorian invitations proved to be correct. Removing the little pictures revealed that they were invitations from the Pharmaceutical Society to Alfred S. Taylor, FRS, to attend two dinners dated May 1848 and July 1849. I did not think that it was straining common sense to conclude that father had given his daughter these old invitations for her scrapbook.     

Displaced ‘Origins’: William Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature

This essay analyses William Henry Fox Talbot's book of photographs The Pencil of Nature (1844–1846), in which he discusses the role of the photograph as a document. By emphasizing the historical specificity of the book, this essay argues that it presents an undecided and reserved view with regard to the future of the photograph. The Pencil of Nature is neither embedded in the discourse of the mechanical and mass‐produced copy, nor is it embedded in the idea of the ‘authentic’ copy or index, as has been suggested in recent theories of photography. Instead, it reflects a specific form of Romantic historicism which emerged in the early nineteenth century as part of a shift in the organization of knowledge. Talbot's statements on the evidentiary status of the photograph are thus related to literary genres of writing, and, in particular, to Thomas Babington Macaulay's work, to the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, and to Talbot's own philological and classical studies. In this context, the intelligibility of documents is a function of time, yet time is simultaneously a source of constant change and the intellectual ‘horizon’ within which things acquire their meaning. This, the writer contends, forms the discursive framework within which Talbot's views on the document are formed: on the one hand, the desire for ‘truth’, on the other hand, the recognition that time dismantles any claim for the universality of knowledge.     

Ansel Adams and George Waters: Photographer and Printer

Ansel Adams's photographic career was paralleled by his desire to achieve the finest quality of photomechanical reproduction of his images for his many fine printed books. For thirty years, he relied upon letterpress halftone to recreate the aesthetic effect of his ‘f/64’ style. In the 1960s, as letterpress for photographic reproduction was phased out by most commercial printers, George Waters introduced Adams to the new technology of offset lithography. Together, they formed a highly successful collaboration as artist and master printer from 1969 to 1979.     

Photography at the Threshold: Atget,Benjamin and Surrealism

This paper re-evaluates the association between Eugène Atget and Surrealism by means of a reading of several essays by Walter Benjamin written during the 1920s and 1930s. The well known but brief moment of surrealist reception of Atget was superseded when later and more influential writers viewed him instead as an important forerunner of documentary photography. To this end, surrealist meanings and values became occluded by various writers, while the poetic or ‘aesthetic’ features of the photographs were marginalised. I want to suggest that the oneiric qualities of Atget's work should not be ignored or opposed to documentary or materialist readings – rather, it is the peculiar suspension of documentary and aesthetic modes that characterises his work and locates it in a particular historical moment. In forging this argument I enlist Benjamin, who made Atget a key figure in his discussion of the surrealist aesthetic and for whom the political force of Surrealism lies in its simultaneous intensification and overcoming of conceptual, spatial and temporal boundaries. It is argued that Benjamin's surrealist reading of Atget illuminates the way in which Atget's photographs thematise the transformation of aesthetic and social space, destabilising the fixed categories of photographic realism and art.     

The Poet's Pose

Abstract

In July of 1868, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was on his fourth and final tour of Europe. He had become a literary lion in the grand tradition of the 19th century and enjoyed the kind of reverential celebrity that is now nearly out of style. It was obligatory that he visit with Dickens and Tennyson, and he duly did so. On the 17th or 18th of July 1868, during one of his several visits to Tennyson's house at Farringford on the Isle of Wight, he was taken by Tennyson to be photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron. Tennyson, along with others among his contemporaries, was aware that the strange woman who took such pains with her photographs and who tyrannized her sitters might be something of a genius. Longfellow was probably just mystified. In a famous quotation, Tennyson abandoned Longfellow to her tender mercies: ‘I will leave you now, Longfellow. You will have to do whatever she tells you. I will come back soon and see what is left of you’¹. Of what was left we cannot be sure, but the photograph that was taken was of an angry old man, with a head resembling the crest of a stormy wave; emotional, strong, raw, and indisputably great. A later critic speculated on a century that could allow men to grow into that special mould of greatness so evident in their very look, and we may also speculate on how they found the photographers who could mirror them so well.