Bogawantalawa,the final resting place of Julia Margaret Cameron

Abstract

The tombstones of Julia Margaret Cameron and her husband in the picturesque graveyard of St. Mary's Church at Bogawantalawa¹ near Glencairn in Sri Lanka are reminders of the love the Camerons had for that country, ever since Mr C. H. Cameron toured the island in his capacity as Reforms Commissioner, during his service in India. After their later years in England (1846–1875), the Camerons decided ‘to spend the last years of their lives in Ceylon and even brought their coffins with them’². They did so in 1875, and bought a large acreage of land upcountry, which is even today known as ‘Cameronwatte’³. Mrs Cameron died on 26th January 1879⁴. She was born in India on 11th June 1815⁵, the third daughter of James Pattie of the Bengal Civil Service. Mr Charles Hay Cameron was a Member of the Law Commission in India in 1838, and this is how they came to meet.     

Daguerre's Demonstrations in 1839 at the Palais d'Orsay

Abstract

RDW: Researching some aspects of the course of events in Paris in 1839 regarding the daguerreotype, I realized that the place where Daguerre first demonstrated his process in public had not been reported in the past with any consistency. Had such a situation arisen because various interpretations of the original French could be involved? For example, the word ‘hotel’, having a different meaning in French than in English, would be an obvious reason why a French address could be rendered in different ways in English publications.     

Talbot's natural magic

Abstract

We might begin with a passage from Talbot's first public utterance about his derivation of the process soon to be named ‘photography’. The date is 31 January 1839, the place is the Royal Society in London, and it is six days after Michael Faraday had communicated to the Royal Institution that the idea of making pictures with light had an English as well as a French origin. That evening Talbot read his paper Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, outlining the history of his involvement with experiments using nitrate of silver to make images on paper, the successes and failures of prior investigators, and the accuracy of the process for copying flat objects. In due course, in a section captioned ‘On the Art of Fixing a Shadow’, he asserts:     

The success of Samuel Bourne in India

Abstract

In their 1955 edition of The History of Photography Helmut and Alison Gernsheim noted that the work of Samuel Bourne has ‘undeservedly fallen into oblivion’. They recognized the outstanding quality of the photographs produced on Bourne's excursions in India during the 1860s, including three arduous treks into the western Himalayas. By drawing on the young Englishman's own engaging accounts of his exploits in the mountains — a series of articles published in The British Journal of Photography — the Gernsheims were able to provide ‘an impression of a truly unique achievement’.¹ This initial effort to rescue Bourne from the limbo of forgotten landscapists was continued some twenty years later when his expeditionary work was featured in Ann Turner's BBC television series, ‘Pioneers of Photography’, which was brought out in book form by Aaron Scharf in 1976.² Other serious examinations of Bourne's photographs soon followed, the most significant of these being Arthur Ollman's brief but excellent monograph published in conjunction with an exhibition sponsored by the Friends of Photography in California.³ While the collective writings on Bourne thus ensured his entry into the mainstream of photo-history and provided the groundwork for future studies, numerous questions still remained unanswered regarding Bourne's entry into the photographic trade in India, his professional success, and the impact of his work on his contemporaries. Moreover, previous discussions of the artist's pictorial accomplishments have been limited to selected works with little or no investigation of the possible meanings attached to variations of formats and subtly interrelated series of images, including their cultural and social significance.⁴     

The presence of flesh

Abstract

Put yourself in the place of an amateur taking up photography in the spring of 1854, just as the light of early summer begins to tempt. Last year you read that the Photographic Society had been formed in London, and, on visiting their first exhibition a few months ago, the quality and beauty of the prints captured your attention. You found the tonality and rendering of prints made from paper negatives more to your aesthetic taste than those printed from wet collodion negatives and the exhibition catalogue revealed that almost half the photographs on display had been originated in this way.¹ You decide that paper negatives offer all you could wish for in terms of cost, portability, and general facility. On looking through the latest manuals and handbooks, however, you are faced with a bewildering array of choices, all offering some guarantee of success, but also ominously warning that with such rapid progress, one ‘must expect great improvements daily’. ² Having only a limited knowledge, you turn to the photographic journals for advice, and discover that almost every month brings forth new recipes, hints, and manipulations. Without an understanding of photographic chemistry, how can you decide between the methods of Philip Delamotte and Dr Hugh Diamond? Would the choice of French or British paper affect your results? Could the simple formula of William Crookes work as well as the more complex recipes of most others? More generally, could one process really be better than another, and if so, how?     

19th century indian photographers in India

Abstract

It may never be possible to discover who was the first person to use a camera in India. Dr A. Toussaint considers it likely that the Frenchman, Jules Léger, may have taken photographs during his visit to India before establishing a photographic studio in Mauritius in February 1845¹. Josiah Rowe, a Calcutta surveyor, was hailed as ‘the father of photography in India’ by Dr F. J. Mouat, the first president of the Bengal Photographic Society, but as yet no photographs have been found that can be attributed to him. The earliest known photographs were taken by John McCosh, a surgeon in the Bengal establishment of the East India Company's army, during the second Sikh War in 1848-49. He had no doubts about the pleasures of photography:

I would strongly recommend every assistant-surgeon to make himself master of photography in all its branches, on paper, on plate glass, and on metallic plate. I have practised it for many years, and know of no extra-professional pursuit that will repay him for all the expense and trouble (and both are very considerable) than this fascinating study².     

Union Cases Based on Designs by Bertel Thorvaldsen

Abstract

The recent article¹ on the use of Thorvaldsen's medallion designs by Peck for the decoration of two of the Peck and Hdvorsen cases made no reference to its use by other manufacturers. We have a case (see illustration), not recorded by Rinhart², nominally of quarter plate size, of fine quality and bearing the moulded legend contained within an oval ‘SMITH'S PATENT. 1860’. (Indicated ‘A’ on illustration.) It bears the title ‘Morning’ and there appears to be no indication of the engraver of the die. The paper label contained within is merely printed     

Eduard Steichen and Maurice Maeterlinck

Abstract

Eduard Steichen (1879-1973) met the Belgian Symbolist writer Maurice Maeterlinck in 1901, when Steichen was in Europe. Steichen's goal there was to photograph painters and writers whom he personally admired,¹ including Maeterlinck whom Steichen photographed in 1901. Maeterlinck attended Steichen's first one-man exhibition at Maison des Artistes in 1902 and looked favourably on the young artist's work. Maeterlinck and Steichen discussed photography at the time. Steichen thought that Maeterlinck's comments were ‘more considered than any [he] had heard before’ and ‘wondered whether he would put down some of his thoughts’² to be included with reproductions of Steichen's photographs in Camera Work. Steichen felt emphatically that his best photographs should be reproduced with Maeterlinck's statement, and he told Alfred Stieglitz as much.³ The connection between Maeterlinck and Steichen has not gone unnoticed     

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     

Calotype portraits of Elizabeth Rigby by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson

Abstract

Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake, is described in the Dictionary of National Biography as a ‘typical English “grande dame”, serene and easy in manner, intellectual and courageous, impervious to bores, highly esteemed, and looked up to in the best society in London’¹. Wife of Sir Charles Eastlake, artist, connoisseur, and Director of the National Gallery in London, she is remembered by posterity primarily as her husband's companion and confidante. Elizabeth's own accomplishments were considerable, however, and she had established a reputation as a formidable blue-stocking before she married Eastlake at the age of 39.     

John Thomson (1837–1921)

Abstract

Abstract Thomson did some of his most important work in Asia but was not, of course, the first European photographer to travel there. Thus, Eliphalet Brown, Jr. had accompanied Commodore Perry's expedition to Asia in 1852–1854. His daguerreotypes were reproduced by means of woodcuts and lithographs in the official report of the expedition. A Narrative of the Expedition to the China Seas and Japan ¹. Felice Beato photographed the Crimean War of 1855 with James Robertson, continued eastward photographing India during the next five years, and then attached himself to the Anglo-French campaign against China. There he covered the capture of Fort Taku at Tiensin, and later the destruction of the Imperial Summer Palace north of Peking in October 1860. Thomson appeared on the site 10 years later. He photographed Fort Taku also, and noted that it ‘looked like a deserted mud quarry’².     

Life painting and light painting: Photography and the early Russian avant-garde

Abstract

‘At worst a colour photograph, at best a graveyard on the edge of town’.1 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Posledniaia glava ncokonchennoi avtobiografii’, in Vasilii Rakitin and Andrei Sarab'anov, eds., N. I. Khardzhiev. Stat'i ob avangarde, Moscow: RA 1997, vol. I, 130. Malevich may well have made this remark after looking through the journal Solntse Rossii (Petrograd), No. 293 (September 1915), which ran an obituary and extensive photographic tribute to Konstantin Makovskii. That is how Kazimir Malevich once described nineteenth-century Realism and the stylization of the fin de siecte that had preceded his establishment of Suprematism in 1915. He emphasized further that for him there was no cardinal difference between ‘naturalism’ (his generic denotation of all pre-Suprematist painting) and ‘photography’. Yet only a decade later Aleksandr Rodchenko was exhorting the new society to dismiss painting and to ‘photograph and be photographed’,² replacing his paintbrush with a handcamera — and zhivopis' with svetopis'— to produce some of the most remarkable photographs of the twentieth century.3 ‘hivopis’ (‘life painting’), while an early, indigenous word for ‘photography’ was ‘svetopis’ (‘light painting’); soon, however, replaced by fotografia.      

Indian Courtesans in Cartes - de - Visite

Abstract

Cartes-de-visite of the nineteenth century covered a wide spectrum of subjects, and were indeed ‘an interface between photography and the social scene’¹. People wanted to have their photographs taken ‘to share among friends and to express, social standing’²; the likenesses were ‘inexpensive, easy to look at and easy to care for’³, and much cheaper than a painter's miniature, providing a commercial application of photography in sales of the object depicted. Indeed, Oliver Wendell Holmes called them ‘the greenbacks of civilisation’⁴.     

The darkroom abolish

Abstract

‘You press tlie button and we do the rest' had been Kodak's proud slogan slnce 1888, but as the success of popular pliotography grew, the wisdom of allowing hundreds of thousands of amateurs to do ‘the rest’ themselves became very clear. By 1902, the annuals sales of photographic paper alone had reached three million dollars¹, and Kodak's famous propaganda slogan was tacltly disowned with the publication of The Darkroom Abolished. In eloquent terms, and supported by the highest photographic authorities in the land, the notion came to be propagated that ‘You’ should not only press the button, but also ‘do tlie rest’ yourself. If ‘The Kodak Girl’ could do it, fragile and delicate woman that she was, anyone could. No mention here of the fact that at least 18 women were formal members of the Photo-secession in that year, or that two had been among the founders. The early years of this century were not, of course, attuned to these sensibilities; indeed, plctures of pretty girls selling enticing products like potassium ferrous oxalate to an eager publoc will be with us for a while yet. In the testimonials for the new products, Eickemeyer ranks discreetly above (or at any rate ‘before’) Stieglitz, and through the four quotations are almost on a par, one may guess that the layout of the brochure was more popular in some quarters than in others. And Edward W. Newcoinb, while equally positive, was evidently confused about the limits of human skill. Frederick Remington's endorsement must have been valued more for the sake of the artist's name than for its own persuasive qualities. His cautious tone notwithstanding, it is known that his own practice as an illustrator was shaped, at least in part, by the public's insistence on the kind of pictorial authenticity that only a pliotograph could sulpply².     

Lewis Carroll's Barker and his daughter May and the legend of Aristotle and Phyllis

Abstract

When Lewis Carroll died, a young woman who had been one of his ‘child-friends’ explained that, like the mirror-letters he sometimes wrote, ‘he was a man whom one had to read backwards’, a man that had to be looked at ‘As Through a Looking Glass’.¹ Certainly Carroll was a man that few understood. The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson seemed to be a walking contradiction. The stiff, rectitudinous mathematician and logician, who gave ‘dull-as-ditchwater’ lectures at Christ Church, Oxford,² was in sharp contrast to the man who delighted in the whimsical and paradoxical — author of Alice in Wonderland, inventor of word games, and writer of satirical pamphlets. He was also, in the words of the great photographer Brassaï, ‘the most remarkable photographer of children in the nineteenth century’.³ These photographs, most often images of Carroll's young female friends, are indeed remarkable. Yet they are also decidedly complex and paradoxical, producing in the modem viewer a high degree of psychological discord. On the one hand they are charming, personal portraits of children; on the other, they evoke something mature, sensual and alarmingly intimate.     

Books Received and Noted

Abstract

In August 1920 Lu Marten published a two-part essay entided ‘History, satire, Dada and more’ in Die Rote Fahne, the newspaper of the German Communist Party (KPD).¹ Written as a response to Gertrud Alexander's review of the First International Dada Trade Fair, which had appeared the previous month and characterized the exhibition as a manifestation of ‘bourgeois decadence’,² Märten's essay articulated a more complex understanding of Dada's significance by locating it within satire's historical development. Märten described how the bourgeoisie's replacement of the epic and fable with new literary genres had stripped satire of its popular character. Confined to the treatment of narrow, individual issues in the bourgeois humour magazine, satire had degenerated into a telling of jokes; and any illusions that humour magazines such as Simplicissimus provided social criticism had been dispelled by their performance during the recent war and revolution which had revealed their true class interest. The proletariat was increasingly in the grip of the bourgeois press, because capitalism's control of the publishing industry deprived the proletariat of the technological means necessary for modem satire. This circumstance, Marten argued, was the field in which Dada operated as the negative side of proletarian satire. Its important discovery was that art was no longer necessary for satire since capitalism's material body was satire itself Materials published by the bourgeois press could be arranged for satirical effect and ‘the simple reproduction, the photograph also replaces art here’.³ This destructive impulse was one side of a dialectic that Marten viewed as offering hope for proletarian satire's new beginning.     

‘Princess’ Alice

Abstract

Burr Mcintosh had an enviable job as a photographer; at the turn of the century, he was called the ‘special photographer … to [a popular] Theodore Roosevelt’¹. With such credentials, Mcintosh accompanied William Howard Taft's Republican peace entourage to the Philippines and to China in 1905, bathing in the knowledge that his calling and appointment were secure. He was obviously smitten by ‘the Princess’, Alice Roosevelt, Teddy's headstrong daughter, and took every opportunity to photograph her with the other politicos on the junket. Alice mentions these events m her autobiography, Crowded Hours     

Gertrude Käsebier's ‘Indian’ Photographs

Abstract

Gertrude Käsebier made portraits of Zitkala-Sa (Red Bird)/ Gertrude Simmons (Bonnin) just four years before Zitkala-Sa's article ‘Why I Am a Pagan’ appeared in the Atlantic Monthly.¹ In some pictures, she is Red Bird, with her somewhat tangled hair down, wearing a simple cloth version of a buckskin dress, an old willow basket held to her chest. In others, she is Zitkala-Sa, stage lecturer and performer, star of the ladies' reform dub lecture circuit, wearing the beaded bandolier and chokered beads of a ‘Princess’, hand to head, looking afar in the cliched Indian pose, a darker Native Drama Queen. In some, she is Gertrude Simmons, a Rossetti-esque, post-Victorian girl, just one step away from holding roses on the fainting couch. Posed in Käsebier's srudio against a flowered wallpaper background, wearing a good girl's long dress, she holds a book or her beloved violin (figure 1), the instrument she studied at the New England Conservatory of Music. Kasebier got all three personae of this complex Yankton Sioux woman in her portraits of 1898, personae we shall not recognize when we see her again, photographed in Washington, around 1930, as ‘Gertrude Simmons Bonnin’, an influential Native politico in a dark suit.