Who was Sir Charles Wheatstone?

"A rapidly moving wheel, or a revolving disc on which any object is painted, seems perfectly stationary. …Insects on the wing appear, by the same means, fixed in the air. Vibrating strings are seen at rest in their deflected positions. A rapid succession of drops of water, appearing to the eye a continuous stream, is seen to be what it really is, not what it ordinarily appears to be."—Wheatstone, C. (1834) "An account of some experiments to measure the velocity of electricity and the duration of electric light." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 124, p. 591.

"As early as 1834, Sir Charles Wheatstone observed that an object painted on a revolving disc appeared to be stationary when illuminated by intense electric light. He also noticed that flying insects seemed to be fixed in mid-air by the same means. In 1851, Henry Fox Talbot attached a page of the London times to a swiftly revolving wheel in a darkened room, uncapped the lens of his camera, and made as exposure of about 1/100,000 of a second by means of an electric spark, sharply freezing the action of the moving paper." Robert Hirsch p. 131

The retina, it was understood, received a succession of visual impressions through time, but also retained an impression for some time after its cause had passed. For a very fast periodic movement, this repeating series of images would fuse on the retina into a single composite image. Roget argued that the points of intersection between the spokes of the wheel and the slits between the blinds traced curved patterns on the sluggish surface of the retina. He demonstrated that the resulting phantom figures expressed precise kinematic relations among the parts of the wheel and window-bars. They were analytic geometry made visible. Meanwhile, the ambitious young Wheatstone had become interested in this optical illusion after years of closely observing rapidly vibrating strings and sounding boards in his music shop. He wanted to devise new instruments that could render sound vibrations visible. The duration of impressions, he realized, could produce images of the actual trajectories of complex movements previously ‘confined to the calculations of the mathematician.’ His ‘kaleidophone’ of 1827 did just that, using an illuminated glass bead at the end of a vibrating metal rod to produce intricate symmetrical diagrams of acoustic vibration, traced in light before the eye. Soon afterwards, he built a rotating mechanism with a train of multiplying wheels. A silvered bead affixed to the fastest wheel was seen as a brilliant circle. The faster the wheels turned, the fainter the luminous figure; Wheatstone posited that the velocity of the whirling beads, which could be made extremely regular and measured to great precision, could be used as a photometric measure

Who was A.M. Worthington?

"It would be an immense convenience if we could use a kinematograph and watch such a splash in broad daylight, without the troublesome necessity of providing darkness and an electric spark. But the difficulties of contriving an exposure of the whole lens short enough to prevent blurring, either from the motion of the object, or from that of the rapidly shifting sensitive film, are very great, and anyone who may be able to overcome them satisfactorily, will find a multitude of applications awaiting…" from A study of splashes, by Arthur Mason Worthington, 1908.

A.M. Worthington was an English physicist and educator. He is best known for his work on fluid mechanics, especially the physics of splashes; for observing those, he pioneered techniques of high speed photography. He also proposed the slug as a unit of inertial mass, and the pound-foot as a dedicated unit of torque

Who was Eadweard Muybridge?

English photographer, active in the USA. He was the first to analyze motion successfully by using a sequence of photographs and resynthesizing them to produce moving pictures on a screen. His work has been described as the inspiration behind the invention of the motion picture.

Born Edward James Muggeridge, he emigrated around 1852 to the USA, where he first worked for a firm of publishers and later became a book dealer. After a stagecoach accident in Texas in 1860, he returned to England, where he took up photography. By 1867 he was back in California, describing himself as ‘Eadweard Muybridge, artist–photographer’. During the next five years he took over 2000 photographs, selling many of them under the pseudonym Helios. Muybridge made his name as a photographer with a successful series of views, Scenery of the Yosemite Valley, published in 1868. In 1872 he was commissioned by a former governor of California, Leland Stanford, to photograph his horse, Occident, trotting at speed. The aim was to test Stanford’s theory that at some stage in its trot the horse would have all four feet off the ground. Muybridge’s first photographs were inconclusive, but further attempts in 1873 appeared to prove the point, at least to Stanford’s satisfaction. Work was interrupted by a dramatic crisis when Muybridge, tried for killing his wife’s lover and acquitted, found it prudent to make a photographic expedition to Central America.

In 1877 Muybridge returned to the problem of the trotting horse and began the work which was to make him famous. He designed an improved shutter to work at the astonishing speed of one-thousandth of a second and used all his experience to sensitize his plates for the shortest possible exposure. When the resulting retouched picture of Occident in arrested motion was published in July 1877, it was so different from the traditional artist’s impression that it created a minor sensation. The next year Muybridge embarked on an even more ambitious series of experiments. In order to secure a sequence of photographs of horses in various stages of trotting, he set up a battery of 12 cameras fitted with electromagnetic shutters. These were activated by strings stretched across the track. Muybridge later repeated his experiments using 24 cameras. The subsequent photographs were widely reproduced in publications throughout America and Europe. The publicity led Muybridge to design a projecting device based on an optical toy by which drawings derived from his photographs could be projected on to a screen as moving pictures. During the early 1880s he toured Europe with this instrument, termed the zoopraxiscope, and a large collection of lantern slides. With the latter he was able to demonstrate that artists throughout the ages had depicted the horse in attitudes that were completely false.

On his return to America, Muybridge quarreled with Stanford, but in 1884 he was able to begin work at the University of Pennsylvania using elaborate banks of cameras to analyze animal and human motion by means of photographs. He took over 100,000 photographs, 20,000 of which were reproduced in his major publication, Animal Locomotion (London, 1887.) This 11-volume work had a tremendous impact, not least on artists, who were forced to reassess completely the manner in which they depicted animal movement

Who was Thomas Eakins?

Thomas Eakins spent virtually his entire life in and around Philadelphia, except for a three-and-a-half-year period between 1866 and 1870 when he was an art student in Paris. Primarily a painter and sculptor, Eakins did not make photographs for exhibition. He made private portraits of family and friends, scientific documents, and used his photographs as teaching tools for his art classes and his work in other media. 

"Should men make only the statues of men to be looked at by men, while the statues of women should be made by women to be looked at by women only? Should the he-painters draw the horses and bulls, and the she-painters...the mares and cows?" 

So Eakins defended his predilection for the nude studies in non-formal settings that make up the bulk of his photographic work. The use of these photographs in the classroom eventually led to Eakins's dismissal as Director of Instruction at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1886. Interestingly enough, his paintings and sculpture rarely included nude figures, and his desire to evoke a realistic classicism was more successfully achieved in his photographs

Who was Étienne–Jules Marey?

Who was Ottomar Anschütz?

The son of a painter of wall decorations in homes and castles around Lissa in the (then) Prussian province of Posen, Ottomar Anschütz set up a darkroom for wet-plate photography in the family home, switching to Monckhoven's fast dry plates when they became available in 1880 so that he could pursue his already firm interest in photographing moving subjects. Anschütz developed a series of fast shutters in the 1880s which allowed him to take subjects at 1/1000th of a second; his deservedly famous 1884 photographs of storks in flight were a direct inspiration for aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal's experimental gliders in the late 1880s, and he made many striking animal studies at the Breslau Zoo and elsewhere. The influential Anschütz focal plane shutter of 1888 was used in still cameras sold by the Berlin firm of C.P. Goertz for nearly thirty years.

His chronophotographic camera of 1882, incorporating his fast shutter and an electrically timed release, was a group of at first twelve and later twenty-four cameras of his own design, constructed with his regular collaborator, an organ builder and next-door neighbour named Schneider. It was used to take series photographs of horses in 1883, and beginning in 1886 Anschütz made many studies at the Military Riding Institute in Hanover with the support of the Prussian War Ministry. His adaptation of the Zoetrope, the 'Wundertrommel' or 'Schnellseher' dates from the same year: photographic series pictures were mounted on the inside of a vertical or horizontal cylinder, with thin viewing slits between the images. A table-top model was sold widely in 1891. By March 1887 Anschütz had developed his Tachyscope, a disk of twenty-four glass 9x12 cm diapositives turned by a crank and intermittently illuminated by a spark of a spiral Geissler tube, which could be viewed either directly or by small groups of people. A later form of the same instrument was a long (horizontal) cylinder with four to six bands of series pictures each of which could be viewed through individual ports. By 1891 a motorised and slightly smaller device called the Electrical Schnellesher was being manufactured by Siemens & Halske in Berlin as both a public coin-operated attraction and a home machine, and was displayed at the International Electrotechnical Exhibition in Frankfurt; on the Strand, London (1892) and at the Chicago World's Fair (1893) as well as many other locations: nearly 34,000 people paid to see it at the Berlin Exhibition Park in summer 1892.

Two years later Anschütz developed his Projecting Electrotachyscope, which used two discs of images and a rotating shutter, all intermittently moved by a twelve-sided Maltese cross gearworks. It projected selections from forty series pictures on a screen six by eight metres at the Horsaal des Postgebaudes in Berlin on 25, 29, and 30 November 1894, and was patented on 6 November. From 22 February 1895 Anschütz began regular screenings with the Projecting Electrotachyscope, which was enclosed in a soundproof booth and projected through a glass window to the screen of a 300-seat hall in the old Reichstag building on Liepzigerstrassse in Berlin, at an admission of 1 and 1.50 Marks: the box office total for March was 5400 Marks. This was the last known use of the Anschütz apparatus. He became photographic advisor to Kaiser Wilhelm II's family; accompanied the family on their trip to Palestine in 1899; opened a shop for photographic supplies and equipment at 14 Unter den Linden, Berlin; and turned to the construction of small cameras and the encouragement of amateur photography, particularly through his three-volume book Die Photographie im Hause, published in 1901-2. Between 1894 and his death in Friedenau bei Berlin on 30 May 1907, Anschütz received twenty-six 'petty patents', or Gebrauchsmuster, on various photographic devices, including shutters, darkroom apparatus, film cassettes, reflex viewing screens, and changing bags. With his photographs welcomed in the salons of both Europe and the USA for their outstanding quality and remarkable modernity, Anschütz was constitutionally unable to work with the less sensitive and reliable celluloid filmstrips of 1894; instead he abandoned chronophotography just as his work was impressing Thomas Edison, Marey, and others. Although his animated projections widely excited the public and the press, the uncompromising standards of this proud innovator meant that he retreated from the field just as the cinema was born

Who was Dr. Richard Leach Maddox?

“Dr. R. L. Maddox. We think very few amateurs are acquainted with the early originators of the Gelatine Bromide Process, - a process so complete to-day as to make the practice of photography nearly universal, extending to every branch of industry. Dr. R.L. Maddox is acknowledged the world over as the first to suggest and practically demonstrate the use of gelatine as a vehicle for holding the sensitive salts and to discover that it aided in increasing their sensitiveness. While many who make important discoveries, retain their secret for personal profit, he freely gave the process to the world, and thereby enabled others to perfect it, until to-day it stands unrivaled, opening fields of work that were thought to be impossible. Vast industries have been built up, and successful manufacturers of dry plates have reaped liberal profits.” — American Amateur Photographer (1891) Aid for Dr. R.L. Maddox, Vol. 3, pp 481-482

“In England the name of Dr. Maddox will be well-known to every photomicrographer, for during the past thirty years he has done more photo-micrographic work, and laboured more to bring the claims of the art before the scientific world, than any other man. As the inventor of gelatino-bromide plates, strange to say, his name is not so generally known - at least, in this country - for the great authorities on modern photography on the Continent (Dr. Eder and Dr. Vogel) have given due honour to Dr. Maddox for his invention. In England, the writer thinks, Dr. Maddox has never received sufficient recognition for an invention of such value - an invention which has revolutionized the whole science and practice of photography. The photo-micrographs of Dr. Maddox are well known: perhaps among the best are his photograph of part of the frustule of P. angulatum x 3,000, his photographs of various Coicinodisci and other diatoms. A large series of slides for the lantern was made from Dr. Maddox's negatives, and this series had a worldwide fame. Dr. Maddox still continues the practice of photomicrography, and his photographs of bacteria, illustrating papers which he has recently contributed to the Royal Microscopical Society, have been pronounced by competent authorities to be unsurpassed even by the splendid productions of Koch.” — I.H. Jennings, How to Photograph Microscopic Objects, or, Lessons, in Photo-micrography for Beginners, 1885

Who was Hermann Wilhelm Vogel?

Herman Wilhelm Vogel was a German photochemist and photographer who discovered dye sensitization, which is of great importance to photography. 

In 1873 Vogel discovered dye sensitization, a pivotal contribution to the progress of photography. The photographic emulsions in use at that time were sensitive to blue, violet and ultraviolet light, but only slightly sensitive to green and practically insensitive to the rest of the spectrum. While trying out some factory-made collodion bromide dry plates from England, Vogel was amazed to find that they were more sensitive to green than to blue. He sought the cause and his experiments indicated that this sensitivity was due to a yellow substance in the emulsion, apparently included as an anti-halation agent. Rinsing it out with alcohol removed the unusual sensitivity to green. He then tried adding small amounts of various aniline dyes to freshly prepared emulsions and found several dyes which added sensitivity to various parts of the spectrum, closely corresponding to wavelengths of light the dyes absorbed. Vogel was able to add sensitivity to green, yellow, orange and even red.

This made photography much more useful to science, allowed a more satisfactory rendering of colored subjects into black-and-white, and brought actual color photography into the realm of the practical.

In the early 1890s, Vogel's son Ernst assisted German-American photographer William Kurtz in applying dye sensitization and three-color photography to halftone printing, so that full-color prints could be economically mass-produced with a printing press

Who were Vero Charles Driffield & Ferdinand Hurter?

"Further, we had long felt that art in photography ceased to play any part the moment the cap was removed from the lens, and that very subsequent operation, whether exposure, development, printing or enlarging, was strictly a matter of science, and amenable to calculation. While we quite realized that the artist will always produce the best picture, we contended that the scientist will produce the best negative. The photographer, therefore, who combines scientific method with artistic skill is in the best possible position to produce good work. Hence, our aim was to raise technical photography from an empirical art to a quantitative science."—Vero Charles Driffield, November 15th, 1903 Reprinted from "The Photo-Miniature", The Photographic Research of Ferdinand Hurter & Vero C. Driffield Vol. V., No. 56, November, 1903

"The photographer who combines scientific method with artistic skill is in the best possible position to do the good work."—Vero Charles Driffield

"The fluctuations of light throughout the year and again throughout the day, are so great that no photographer could adequately allow for them with any certainty of a proper exposure. The best he could do was to make a more or less well-founded guess. It was clear that such a matter must be governed by a law of nature and with the object in view, therefore, of reducing exposure to a system we made up our minds to work together at the subject."—Vero Charles Driffield, The photographic researches of Ferdinand Hurter & Vero C. Driffield, 1880.

"One of the greatest difficulties the photographer, and especially the amateur has to encounter, lies in correctly estimating his exposure. Of course, by one who is in the habit of making almost daily exposures, experience is gained, which is a more or less certain guide, but by the photographer, who only occasionally exposes a plate, some better guide is required if certainty of result is to be expected. The fluctuations of the light throughout the year, and again throughout the day, are so great that we believe nobody, be he professional or amateur, can adequately allow for them unless he has some reliable data to go upon. Then, again, with the era of gelatino-bromide dry plates, a new difficulty arose in consequence of the great variety in their speeds. This is a very serious complication, and has never hitherto been scientifically dealt with, a satisfactory unit of speed never having been found."—Vero Charles Driffield, The photographic researches of Ferdinand Hurter & Vero C. Driffield, 1880.

Vero Charles Driffield & Ferdinand Hurter were nineteenth-century photographic scientists who brought quantitative scientific practice to photography through the methods of sensitometry and densitometry. Among their other innovations was a photographic exposure estimation device known as an actinograph.

Sensitometry is the scientific study of light-sensitive materials, especially photographic film. The study has its origins in the work by Ferdinand Hurter. Ferdinand Hurter was a Swiss industrial chemist who settled in England. He also carried out research into photography. Vero Charles Driffield was a chemical substance engineer who also became involved in photographic research with early black-and-white emulsions. They determined how the density of silver produced varied with the amount of light received, and the method and time of development.

Plots of film density (log of opacity) versus the log of exposure are called characteristic curves, Hurter-Driffield curves, HD curves, or H & D curves. The overall shape is a bit like an "S" slanted so that its base and top are horizontal. There is usually a central region of the HD curve which approximates to a straight line, called the "linear" or "straight-line" portion; the slope of this region is called the gamma. The low end is called the "toe", and at the top, the curve rounds over to form the "shoulder"

Who was George Eastman?

American inventor and photographer. He took up photography in 1877, and in 1878, dissatisfied with the cumbersome wet collodion process, he started making the new gelatin dry plates.  He decided to manufacture them commercially and invented a machine to end the need to hand-coat the glass. In January 1881 he founded the Eastman Dry Plate Company.

Eastman’s desire to bring photography to more people, and to satisfy the needs of the growing number of amateur photographers, led him to develop many new products. In 1885 his roll-holder adaptor allowed the heavy and fragile glass plates to be replaced by a roll of sensitive paper; the success of this device inspired him to design a new camera with the roll-holder built in. The result was the Kodak camera (1888), for which Eastman chose the name; it was designed for the general public, who had only to point it in the right direction and release the shutter. When the 100-exposure roll provided with the camera had been exposed, the whole apparatus was returned to Eastman’s factory, where the paper roll film was developed and printed, the camera reloaded and returned to the customer; ‘You press the button, we do the rest’ was his slogan.

The introduction of the Kodak camera did much to democratize the practice of photography, taking it out of the hands of the experts. Eastman went on to pioneer other major advances in amateur photography, including in 1889 the first commercial celluloid roll film (which made motion picture projection possible), and he brought photography within the economic reach of millions with the introduction of the Brownie camera range in 1900. The company he formed (from 1892 Eastman Kodak) grew to be a giant multinational organization responsible for major technical innovations in photography. After his death, his home became the International Museum of Photography

Who were Auguste and Louis Lumière?

With their first Cinématographe show in the basement of the Grand Café in the boulevard des

Capucines in Paris on 28 December 1895, the Lumière brothers have been regarded as the inventors of cinema - the projection of moving photographic pictures on a screen for a paying audience. However, they were probably not the first to do this: the Latham brothers in New York were screening boxing films to paying audiences from 20 May 1895, using their Eidoloscope projector.

Nevertheless, the achievement of the Lumières was considerable. Their Cinématographe was the first satisfactory apparatus for taking and projecting films and its claw mechanism became the basis for most ciné cameras.

Auguste and Louis were born in Lyon where their father, Antoine Lumière, had a photographic business. At the age of seventeen, Louis invented a highly sensitive photographic plate which the Lumières began manufacturing. It was so successful commercially that the Lumières built a factory in the Monplaisir suburb of Lyon. By 1894, they were employing three hundred people. Late that year, Antoine saw an example of Edison's peep-show Kinetoscope in Paris and encouraged his sons to devise an apparatus that would take and project moving pictures. Within a few months, they produced a successful prototype of the Cinématographe, which was not only a camera but a printer and projector as well. It was patented in France on 13 February 1895.

Compared with other attempts at producing a movie camera, the Cinématographe was remarkably compact and, unlike the Edison Kinetograph, it did not rely on electrical power, which few premises had at that time. Thus the Cinématographe could be taken anywhere, either to shoot film or to use as a projector - all that was required was a magic lantern lamphouse with a gas or limelight illuminant.

At the heart of the Cinématographe was the film transport mechanism, whereby two pins or 'claws' were inserted into sprocket holes at each side of the film, moved it down and were then retracted, leaving the film stationary for exposure. This intermittent movement was designed by Louis and based on the principle of the sewing machine mechanism. The handle at the rear of the Cinématographe operated the rotating shutter and the take-up magazine as well as the film transport mechanism.

The Lumières' first film (in fact, they made three versions) was shot outside their factory as the workers left at the end of the day. It was shown to the Société d'Encouragement à l'Industrie Nationale in Paris on 22 March 1895: this was probably the first public screening of moving pictures. The Lathams' first public demonstration in New York took place on 21 April 1895. At the Paris meeting, Louis met the engineer Jules Charpentier who undertook to manufacture the Cinématographe for the Lumières.

Later that year, the Lumières made a number of other films, all around a minute long, showing scenes such as Auguste and his wife feeding their baby, a train arriving at La Ciotât in the south of France and possibly the first film comedy, L'arroseur arrosé, in which a mischievous boy tricks a gardener into being soaked with water and is chased and spanked. Another public demonstration of the Cinématographe was given to the French Photographic Congress held in Lyon in June 1895, when the delegates were particularly impressed at seeing film of themselves taken the previous day.

The Lumières decided to launch the Cinématographe publicly in Paris on 28 December 1895. The programme, lasting about twenty minutes, comprised ten films and cost one franc. On their first day they had just thirty-three customers. But soon, word spread and the Lumières were taking over 2,000 francs each day. They decided not only to sell Cinématographes but to send out operators to film and present shows in Britain, the USA and Russia.

In the first years of the Lumière film operation, cameramen were sent all over the world to record scenes in Russia, Japan, and the Holy Land. Auguste and Louis continued to work on technical developments and in 1900 devised a camera which took large-format 75mm films. By 1905, however, the Lumières withdrew from the cinema business. They worked instead on inventing the first successful photographic colour process - the Lumière Autochrome - in 1907. Louis also worked on a process of stereoscopic cinematography. The two brothers lived long enough to be feted as pioneers of the cinema - as Louis stated, 'on December 28, 1895, was really born the expression: "I have been to a movie."

Who was Levi L. Hill?

Reverend Levi L. Hill worked as a daguerreotype photographer in the remote hamlet of West Kill, New York, in the heart of the Catskill Mountains, and experimented in making color images. 

With the help of research grants from both the Smithsonian and The Getty Foundation, these earliest of American color photographs have been analyzed by X-ray and infrared technology to determine whether Reverend Hill’s process was a true color process. This has been a huge controversy in the history of photography. In fact, an international competition of sorts was brewing in the mid-1900s to see which country’s photographer would invent the first commercial color photography process, France or the United States.

Little research on the photographs themselves has been done until now. Our current research shows Reverend Hill succeeded in making color photographs, but also hand-colored some with pigments and dyes to better his results. This Smithsonian collection is a truly experimental collection of the earliest color photographs made in America

Who was Thomas Edison?

Who was James Clerk Maxwell?

In the early nineteenth century, despite many individual advances in knowledge, there was no inkling of a comprehensive theory of electricity and magnetism. In developing this, Maxwell pointed the way to the existence of the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. Defining fields as a tension in the medium, he stated his belief in a new concept - that energies reside in fields as well as bodies. This pointed the way to the application of electromagnetic radiation for such present-day uses as radio, television, radar, microwaves and thermal imaging.

Who was Frederic Eugene Ives?

Frederick Ives's commercially produced 'Kromograms' of 1895 were the first colour photographs available to the public, and had to be viewed through coloured filters using his 'Kromskop'. They employ the three-colour principle demonstrated by Clerk Maxwell in 1861. Three stereoscopic b/w images each 50 x 50 mm on glass making one stereoscopic colour image.

Viewer for stereoscopic colour-separation transparencies. The separations are laid on the stepped part of the viewer over glass filters coloured (from the top) red, blue and green. Strongly lit from above by the hinged mirror reflector at the rear, the three images are superimposed and redirected to the viewing lenses by internal reflectors. After manual adjustment to achieve correct register, the photograph can be viewed in true colours in three dimensions.

Developed during the years 1890-95 by the American inventor Frederick Eugene Ives, the photochromoscope system was the first commercially available process of colour photography, employing the additive principle demonstrated by Clerk Maxwell in 1861. Ives's invented a number of practical colour processes but his photochromoscope gave the public its first experience of real colour photography, and stimulated the quest for more easily used processes. The photochromoscope was superseded by these after about 1900. In London, the Kromscop company, the Photochromoscope Syndicate, appointed W. Watson and Sons as their agent with the London Stereoscopic Company having the franchise for the West End

Who were Louis Ducos du Hauron & Charles Cros?

Who was John Joly?

John Joly, a physicist from Dublin, Ireland invented in 1893, the first practical method of making a single picture, by the additive process, without using any device to view the image.

A screen of vertical lines containing microscopic red, green, and blue strips was placed in contact with a black and white plate of the exact same size. An exposure was made through the screen side of the combination. The b&w plate was processed. A positive transparency was made and then bound permanently to the color screen. When viewed it gave the appearance of a full color image

Who was Gabriel Lippman?

Gabriel Lippmann received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1908 for his method of reproducing colors photographically based on the phenomenon of interference.

In 1891 Lippmann revealed a revolutionary color-photography process, later called the Lippmann process, that utilized the natural colours of light wavelengths instead of using dyes and pigments. He placed a reflecting coat of mercury behind the emulsion of a panchromatic plate. The mercury reflected light rays back through the emulsion to interfere with the incident rays, forming a latent image that varied in depth according to each ray's colour. The development process then reproduced this image, and the result, when viewed, was brilliantly accurate. This direct method of colour photography was slow and tedious because of necessarily long exposure times, and no copies of the original could be made. It never achieved popularity, therefore, but it was an important step in the development of colour photography.

Lippmann's colour photographic technique was based on interference, the combining of different light waves arriving simultaneously at the same point – the same phenomenon that causes colour to appear in colourless substances such as soap bubbles. To receive the image, Lippmann used a glass plate coated on one side with light–sensitive emulsion, a mixture of gelatin, grains of silver nitrate, and potassium bromide. In the camera, the emulsion side of the plate faced a plate holder coated with mercury, which acted as a mirror.

When the camera lens was opened, light was reflected from the objects in the lens's field of view through the lens to the emulsion–coated plate and through the plate to the mirror; the various wavelengths of this light corresponded to the various colours of the objects in the field of view. The incoming light was then reflected back into the emulsion by the mirror. When the incoming light waves and the light waves reflected by the mirror met on the surface of the emulsion, they created interference patterns in the silver grains of the emulsion. These patterns were then fixed on the plate by chemical baths. When the plate dried, the interference patterns reflected light in various wavelengths corresponding to the original colours of the photographic objects. Lippmann's process was an important experimental milestone although it proved impractical in photography because exposure times were too lengthy, the image had to be viewed at a precise angle to a light source, and it could not be reproduced

Jesse Godley

1884

Chronophotograph

Thomas Eakins

Toilet; Stooping, Throwing Wrap Around Shoulders

(Miss Louise, July 23, 1885.)

Collotype

Eadweard J. Muybridge

Storks

1884

Albumen silver print

Ottomar Anschütz

Descending Vesuvius

ca. 1888

Albumen print

R.K. Albright

The Art of Living a Hundred Years

1886

Photogravures

Paul Nadar

The Universal Exposition,

taken from the Eiffel Tower, Paris

1900

Émile Zola

Advertising poster for moving pictures made and viewed with Edison's Kinteoscope

Landscape with Farmhouse

1851

Hillotype

Levi L. Hill

Indian Chief

ca. 1922

Autochrome

Fred Payne Clatworthy

What is persistence of vision?

The persistence of vision theory as stated by Joseph Plateau is as follows…

If several objects, progressively different in form and position, are presented to the eye for very short intervals and sufficiently close together, the impressions they make upon the retina will join together without being confused, and one will believe he is seeing a single object gradually changing form and position.—Joseph A. Plateau, as quoted in Georges Sadoul, Histoire generale du Cinema, Vol. 1, p. 25

Robert Hirsch states in Seizing the Light that "since an image impression lingers for a fraction of a second, individual images appear to be in continuous motion, as in a flip–book. Devices like this and the zoetrope, a rotating cylinder with slits, through which one or more people could see sequential, simulated action drawings of acrobats, boxers, dancers, and jugglers, permitted an immobile viewer to have a machine generated visual experience unfold over time." (p.8)

What is a zoetrope?

The zoetrope was an open drum with slits on the side for viewing images as they spun by. When viewed through the slits the images appear like a single figure in motion. The model pictured below, from 1867 has 13 slits. Depending on which historian you read, credit is given to several different people for this invention, Antoine F. J. Claudet or William Horner

What is a zoopraxiscope?

The original zoopraxiscope for 16 inch discs had a set of removable shutters with different numbers of slots, for producing various motion effects. The glass discs are edged in a leather texture paper and have a central circular paper label of the same material and a central hole to enable them to be attached to the machine. The discs contain various numbers of images. Most are painted in black silhouette, some are painted with details.

In 1881 Muybridge invented the Zoopraxiscope. The following passage is from an 1882 publication called Living London…

READERS of the 'Echoes ' in the Illustrated London News may remember that, some two or three years ago, I took the liberty of introducing them to Muybridge, ' who (hitherto an unknown quantity in my mind) had introduced himself by sending me from Palo Alto, in California, a number of very curious productions, being instantaneous photographs of the various attitudes of a fast–trotting horse in motion. One could scarcely help being struck, and admiringly struck, first by the ingenuity of the idea itself; next by the phenomenal celerity of the operation (the photographing of each attitude occupying, so I heard, only the five–thousandth part of a second); and, finally, by the unutterably hideous aspect of the attitudes assumed by the animal in the various stages of trotting. These attitudes, however, the operator asserts to be the true and natural ones; while, on the other hand, he as stoutly asserts that the accepted, conventional, traditional, and artistic rendering of the movements of the horse are, and have been (with a few Greek exceptions), altogether false amid unnatural these forty centuries since. So I spake Muybridge fair, and exhorted him to persevere in his experiments.

He has so persevered, and has largely developed them. On Monday, 6th March, in the theatre at the Royal Institution, a select and representative audience assembled to witness a series of most interesting demonstrations of animal locomotion, given by Mr. Muybridge, who ins only very recently arrived in England. The Prince and Princess of Wales, Princesses Victoria, Louise, and Maud, and the Duke of Edinburgh, honoured the occasion by their presence; likewise did I note among the brilliant company Earl Stanhope, Sir Frederick Leighton, P.R.A., Professors Huxley, Gladstone, and Tyndali; and last, not least, Alfred Tennyson, Poet–Laureate. Mr. Muybridge exhibited a large number of photographs of the horse, walking, ambling, galloping, and leaping; and the postures were quite as hideous as those in the sun-pictures which had been sent me from California; but, by the aid of an astonishing apparatus, called a 'Zoopraxiscope,' which the lecturer described as an improvement on the old 'Zoetrope,' but which may be more briefly defined as a magic lantern run mad (with method in the madness), the ugly animals suddenly became motile and beautiful, and walked, cantered, 'ambled, galloped, and leaped over hurdles in the field of vision in a perfectly natural and lifelike manner. I am afraid that, had Muybridge exhibited his 'Zoopraxiscope' three hundred years ago, he would have been burnt for a wizard.

After the horses, dogs, oxen, wild bulls, and deer were shown under analogous conditions of varied movement, and finally Man appeared (in instantaneous photography) on the scene, and walked, ran, leaped, and turned back-somersaults to admiration. On the following Thursday Mr. Muybridge repeated his demonstrations before the members of the Royal Academy at Burlington House.

Mr. Muybridge is as modest as he is clever; and in his prefatory remarks he did not omit to do full justice to the labours in this particular field of research of Mr. J. H. Walsh ('Stonehenge'), the editor of the Field. That learned authority, in The Horse in the Stable and the Field (London Routledge), pp. 131–133, has accurately discriminated between the received and the correct interpretation of the gallop by painters and sculptors. Says 'Stonehenge:' 'To represent the gallop pictorially in a perfectly correct manner is almost impossible. At all events, it has never yet been accomplished, the ordinary and received interpretation being altogether erroneous. Nevertheless, if' a proper interpretation is given, the eye at once rebels; and on examination of such a figure, founded on perfectly correct principles, the mind refuses to assent to the idea of great pace, which is that which is intended to be given.'

What is stream of consciousness?

What is a Phenakistiscope?

What is a Thaumatrope?

What is a wheel or disk camera?

What is a fusil photographique (photographic gun)?

In the early 1880's Étienne–Jules Marey published pictures of birds in flight made with his photographic gun. A forerunner of the motion picture camera, it had a sight and a clock mechanism and made 12 exposures of 1/72th of a second each. Marey's observations concerning the changes in the shape of birds' wings in relation to air resistance was vital in understanding the phenomenon of flight

What is a chronophotograph?

What is a focal plane shutter?

What is an electrotachyscope?

The Electrotachyscope was a large rapidly revolving disk which held photographs that were illuminated by a spark. The viewer saw the images at roughly eye level

What is gelatin emulsion?

Photographic process in which gelatin is used as the dispersing vehicle for the light-sensitive silver salts. The process, introduced in about 1880, superseded the wet collodion process, in which a wet negative was produced from a nitrocellulose (collodion) solution applied to a glass plate immediately prior to exposure. This chemical treatment necessitated the presence of a darkroom wherever a photograph was to be made. The development of a process in which a sensitized gelatin emulsion could be dried on the plate and stored, protected from light, for months before use revolutionized the world of photography.

Gelatin dry plates were commercially produced and came ready to use. The photographer did not have to treat the glass; just expose it to light and develop it. The gelatin emulsion would remain sensitive to light even when dry, greatly improving the process for photographers. Because the plates were manufactured, the edges of the glass were smooth, the emulsion was even, and the sizes were more regular. The silver nitrates were evenly distributed in the gelatin emulsion and were more sensitive to light, producing a negative with sharper contrasts than the collodion wet plates

What is Orthochromatic & Panchromatic emulsion?

An orthochromatic emulsion is a black and white photosensitive material which responds to only the blue and green wavelengths of light and not to the red portion of the spectrum. Also referred to as 'ortho.' film.

A panchromatic emulsion is a black and white photosensitive material that responds to all wavelengths of light

What is sensitometry?

What is a between–the–lens shutter?

A shutter whose blades operate between two elements of the lens

What is a kinetoscope?

Also known as the Edison Kinetoscope and the Peep–Show Kinetoscope. It was a parlor motion picture viewer containing a continuous 50 feet of "standard" 35mm film running at about 40 frames per second with a duration of about 20 seconds. This device was designed by Thomas Edison's assistant, W.K.L. Dickson

What is a Cinématographe?

What is the additive color theory?

What is the subtractive color theory?

What is Autochrome?

What is symbolism?

What is a photochromoscope?

Who was Peter Henry Emerson?

English photographer. He lived in Cuba and the United States until his widowed English mother took her two sons to England in 1869. He studied medicine at King’s College Hospital, London (1879), and later received a BA (1883) and a Bachelor of Medicine degree (1885) from Cambridge University. While at Cambridge he studied photography, and after a brief medical practice he left the profession in 1886 for photography and writing. After becoming a member of the Photographic Society of Great Britain in 1883, he achieved recognition writing for such journals as Amateur Photographer.

In East Anglia Emerson used his nautical skills and knowledge of natural history while photographing the fen country and its people. The results were albums such as Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, which he co-authored with the English painter Thomas F. Goodall (1856–1944), Pictures of East Anglian Life (London, 1888), Wild Life on a Tidal Water (London, 1890), On English Lagoons (London, 1893) and Marsh Leaves (London, 1895). These limited edition albums, which contained either platinotype (platinum) prints or photogravures, reveal Emerson’s sensitivity to pictorial values and his knowledge of country people and fishermen. The picturesque photographs, such as Gathering Water Lilies (1886), are balanced by careful descriptions, including some accounts of mistreatment of women and problems created by absent landlords and encroaching tourists. Photographs, such as the platinotype Towing the Reed, suggest Emerson’s interest in French realist artists, particularly Jean-François Millet.

Emerson’s claim that photography was a pictorial art, ‘superior to etching, woodcutting [and] charcoal drawing’ (Emerson, 1886, p. 139), rested on his idea of Naturalism. He considered his theory scientific and called for ‘differential focusing’, which, supposedly, would give effects similar to human vision. Through use of a long focus lens, diaphragm and camera-back swings, the main subject could be made relatively sharp while other areas were rendered softer. Achieving a faithful impression satisfied his belief that nature was the scientific first principle of art. He advanced this theory, along with diatribes on other photographic approaches, in articles and in lectures before the Royal Photographic Society and the Camera Club (London), which he helped to found in 1885, as well as in his book Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art (1889). He scorned the art-like combination print and took issue with its chief proponent Henry Peach Robinson in the photographic press. He also opposed retouching, ‘dodging’ and gum bichromate printing. He advocated platinum printing or photogravure and suggested new exhibition techniques. In 1890 the chemists Ferdinand Hurter and Vero Charles Driffield published experiments on the relationship of exposure and development that Emerson mistakenly interpreted as proving the mechanical limitations of photography in controlling tones. A conversation with a noted artist, possibly Whistler, led him to renounce photography as art, in a black-bordered pamphlet entitled The Death of Naturalistic Photography (1890), which he had printed privately. With the third edition of Naturalistic Photography (1899) he reiterated that photography was mechanical and not art.

As the photographic contest judge for the Amateur Photographer in 1887, Emerson discovered Alfred Stieglitz and awarded him first prize for A Good Joke (1887). In later years Emerson published lists of medallists, designating silver or bronze medals to photographers whom he admired, among them Julia Margaret Cameron and Nadar. The Royal Photographic Society awarded him its prestigious Progress Medal in 1895. He remained bound to his purist aesthetic, and, although he continued to photograph in the early 20th century, he was no longer a leading force. The straight photography aesthetic, however, has prevailed in much 20th-century photographic art

In 1885 Peter Henry Emerson along with George Davison founded the Camera Club of London, which was a forum for serious amateurs in photography. Emerson's was known for his images of people engaged in labor, particularly the idealized peasant, the genre subject. He published his work in a richly illustrated volume of platinum prints titled Life and Landscape of the Norfolk Broads, (1886). Emerson had a friendship with the landscape painter Thomas Frederick Goodall whom he met while photographing in the Norfolk Broads. Goodall's inspiration was that of the Barbizon School, which was a style known as Naturalism

Pictorialism was based on Emerson's Naturalistic theories of art. In his lecture Photography, A Pictorial Art, given in March 1886 to the Camera Club, Emerson attacked the dependent relationship established between photography and painting. Emerson saw photography as an independent medium that combined science and art. In his book Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, (1889) Emerson discussed his philosophy of art and art history. Generating a great deal of controversy in the photographic community, it was referred to as 'a bombshell dropped in a tea party.'

"Photography has been called an irresponsive medium. This is much the same as calling it a mechanical process. A great paradox which has been combated is the assumption that because photography is not 'hand-work,' as the public say–though we find there is very much 'hand-work,' and head work in it—therefore it is not an art language. This is a fallacy born of thoughtlessness. The painter learns his technique in order to speak, and he considers painting a mental process. So with photography, speaking artistically of it, it is a very severe mental process, and taxes all the artist's energies even after he has mastered technique. The point is, what you have to say and how to say it. The originality of a work it is expressed, whether it be in poetry, photography, or painting. That one technique is more difficult than another to learn no one will deny; but the greatest thoughts have been expressed by means of the simplest technique, writing."—Naturalistic Photography

In 1891 Emerson renounced his philosophies of photography in a pamphlet titled The Death of Naturalistic Photography. In this essay Emerson explained

"…the limitations of photography are so great that, though the results may and sometimes do give a certain aesthetic pleasure, the medium must always rank the lowest of all arts… for the individuality of the artist is cramped, in short it can scarcely show itself. Control of the picture is possible to a slight degree, by varied focusing, by varying the exposure (but this is working in the dark), by development, I doubt (I agree with Hurter and Driffield, after three-and-half months careful study of the subject), and lastly, by a certain choice in printing methods.

But the all-vital powers of selection and rejection are fatally limited, bound in by fixed and narrow barriers. No differential analysis can be made, no subduing of parts, save by dodging—no emphasis—save by dodging, and that is not pure photography, impure photography is merely a confession of limitations… I thought once (Hurter and Driffield have taught me differently) that… true values could be altered at will by development. They cannot therefore, to talk of getting values in any subject whatever as you wish and of getting them true to nature, is to talk nonsense…

In short, I throw my lot in with those who say that photography is a very limited art. I deeply regret that I have come to this conclusion."

Who was George Davison?

Who was Robert Demachy?

French photographer, writer and theorist. He was from a banking family and was financially secure, which enabled him to devote all his time to photography from 1880 to 1914. He was especially interested in the gum bichromate printing process, which could be easily hand tinted, and in which he achieved remarkably subtle effects. He tackled all the genres: oriental scenes, nudes, dancers, portraits, landscapes and scenes from everyday life. In subject-matter his works oscillate between naturalism, as in Académie, and symbolism as in Struggle. His works were frequently exhibited (Paris, London, Vienna, New York) and were an instant success. In 1904 Alfred Stieglitz devoted a portfolio to Demachy in his review Camera Work.

Demachy was also a theorist of ‘art’ photography, giving numerous lectures, and writing articles for the Bulletin du Photo-Club de Paris and the Revue de Photographie, as well as aesthetic and technical works. The processes used and the treatment of the images (contrasts of light, opacity, soft focus, granulation, monograms, layout), partly inspired by Impressionism, made him the leader of French Pictorial photography. He was closely linked to the main representatives of this movement and corresponded with Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Heinrich Kuehn

Who was Heinrich Kühn?

German photographer, writer and scientist. His first use of photography was his microphotography in medical research in histology and bacteriology at the Robert-Koch-Institut, Berlin. His asthmatic condition led him to abandon his job as a doctor and to move to Innsbruck, where he devoted himself to photography, supported by family wealth. His first influences were from the Vienna Secession and from the Linked ring, which he joined in 1896, encouraging him to take part in the international exhibition of art photography in Vienna in 1891. He was strongly affected too by his meeting with Hans Watzek at the Wiener Camera-Klub in 1894. Watzek, Hugo Henneberg and Kühn worked together from 1896 on the multiple-gum printing technique to attain the broadest possible range of tonal values. They exhibited frequently together from 1897 to 1903 as Das Kleeblatt (or Trifolium), publishing numerous articles on the techniques of artistic representation with which they made a case for photography as a fine art.

Kühn’s importance as an art photographer lies in his work of c. 1900, but he is most renowned for his lifelong investigation of the effect of optical and chemical influence on the reproduction of brightness values. He was also in contact with the photographers of the Photo-Secession, meeting Steichen (1901 and 1907) and Alfred Stieglitz (1904 and 1907), with whom he corresponded from 1899 until 1933. Stieglitz published Kühn’s photographs in Camera Work, 13 (1906) and 33 (1911).

From 1906, when he established a portrait studio in Innsbruck, Kuehn carried out experiments in color photography with autochrome plates. He closed his studio in 1919 and from 1920 concentrated on writing and editing for specialist journals such as Das Atelier des Photographen and Photographische Rundschau. His photographic practice during the 1920s was limited to the documentation of his scientific and technical experiments. Among the equipment that Kühn developed were a movable-back camera, a soft-focus lens, which was commercially sold as Imagon in 1931, and a double-exposure film

Who was Frederick Evans?

Evans was considered, in his time to be one of the greatest architectural photographers, concentrating his work on the great cathedral interiors of England and France. Evans believed in the purity of the negative and allowed his prints to communicate without any manipulation. He was a master of platinum printing.

"Photography is Photography; And in it's purity and innocence is far too uniquely, valuable and beautiful to be spoilt by making it imitate something else."

"The unwise, those who refuse to learn from the study of exhibited work, and who are unable to learn by practical experience, say that though photography may have its art aspects and value, yet it can never hope to attain to a very high place, as its sense of personality, its obedience to individuality, is so limited. Give half a dozen men the same camera, lenses and plates, and send them to the same place to do the same thing, and all the results will be alike, or so nearly alike as to reveal the real mechanicalness of photography. Yet, curiously enough, this is just one of the most difficult things a photographer can be set to do, to exactly repeat himself, or another. He may use the identical apparatus, know the subject perfectly, and yet be totally unable to bring away an exact replica."

English photographer and writer. He took up photography in the early 1880s out of his interest in the ‘study of the beautiful’ while a bookseller in London. In 1887 he received a medal from the Royal Photographic Society for his microscopic photographs of shells, which to his dismay were categorized as scientific photographs. In 1889 he met Aubrey Beardsley and was instrumental in getting Beardsley his first assignment illustrating Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur. Evans’s portrait of Aubrey Beardsley (1894),  showing the artist holding his head in his hands, is one of his finest.

Around 1890 Evans began to photograph English and French cathedrals; it was on his architectural photography that his reputation was established. One hundred and twenty of his platinum prints were exhibited at the Architectural Club, Boston, in 1897. The next year, aged 45, Evans retired from his bookshop to devote his time to photography. In 1900 two achievements helped to consolidate his reputation: he had his first one-man exhibition of 150 prints at the Royal Photographic Society and was elected to the exclusive photographic brotherhood, the Linked ring. As one of its most important members, he was responsible from 1902 to 1905 for the innovative hanging of the annual Salons. In 1903 Alfred Stieglitz featured Evans’s photographs in his new journal Camera Work , accompanied by an appreciation by George Bernard Shaw. Evans’s a Sea of Steps (Wells Cathedral) (1903) is one of his greatest images of that period. The wave of steps to the chapter house that engulfs the viewer prompted such a rash of camera-club imitations that indentations were made in the floor for the amateur to erect his tripod in the correct spot.

In 1905 Evans took on assignments from Country Life that enabled him to photograph further afield, such as his commission in 1906 to photograph English parish churches and French châteaux. This period marked a shift in his style to solid, more sculptural architectural elements that contributed to his eventual distancing from the Ring. Around 1909 Evans turned increasingly to landscape photography, in which he explored effects of light in forested areas. In 1912 he began to publish privately platinotype editions of his collections of works by William Blake, Hans Holbein the younger and Beardsley. He was a master of the platinum print, then called the platinotype, which created an image of clear grey tones whose subtlety of range allowed for exceptional realistic detail. When combined with the precision allowed by his exposure, sombre corners of medieval churches became marvels of discriminating detail. His output declined by the 1920s due to the high price of platinum, his dissatisfaction with the new silver paper and his dislike of the photographic avant-garde’s interest in abstraction.

Evans was described by Alfred Stieglitz as ‘the greatest exponent of architectural photography’. Evans aimed to create a mood with his photography; he recommended that the amateur ‘try for a record of emotion rather than a piece of topography’. He would spend weeks in a cathedral before exposing any film, exploring different camera angles for effects of light and means of emotional expression. He always tried to keep the camera as far as possible from the subject and to fill the frame with the image completely, and he used a small aperture and very long exposure for maximum definition. Equally important to the effect of his photographs were his printing methods; he rejected the fashion for painterly effects achieved by smudging, blowing or brushing over the surface of the gum paper print. His doctrine of pure photography, ‘plain prints from plain negatives’, prohibited retouching.

Evans was a prolific writer on photography, regularly contributing essays and photographs to Camera Work until 1907 and to the weekly Amateur Photographer between 1902 and 1910, where he explained his philosophy of ‘pure’ photography. In 1928 he was made an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. Evans is represented in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum, the International Museum of Photography at Rochester, NY, and the Royal Photographic Society, Bath

Who was Alfred Stieglitz?

Stieglitz was considered the driving force of modern photography because of his quest to see the medium recognized as an art form. He began as a Pictorialist championing self expression. In his own work he did however prefer the harder look of the photographic print to the softer painterly surfaces evoked by printing methods such as the gum bichromate method. He is known for introducing and showing the work of many early 20th century artists (not just photographers) in his publications and galleries.

Stieglitz's ambition was to reinvent photography as a high art. To do so meant establishing value for the medium. He would (continue to) do this through the publication Camera Work which was begun as the journal of the Photo-Secessionists. The first publication of Camera Work was in 1903 and in it Stieglitz stated,

"Only examples of such work as gives evidence of individuality and artistic worth, regardless of school, or contains some exceptional feature of technical merit, or such as exemplifies some treatment worthy of consideration, will find recognition in these pages."

During its reign, Stieglitz showcased not only photography, but work from the other arts as well. The central object within its pages though, was the photograph. The signature of Camera Work was craftsmanship. It is that which separated its content, and of course that of the contributors, from other publications and printing of its day. The reproductions within were photogravures, tipped in by Stieglitz himself. The images were printed on tissue paper, usually toned and sandwiched between two heavier sheets of paper, one of which was used as a backing for viewing the print. Any text that accompanied the images was presented on a separate page. By continuously presenting the photographic image in this form Stieglitz placed emphases on the photographs in Camera Work as unique objects; as finely crafted photographic reproductions. This was in opposition to publications using the halftone process to reproduce work cheaply, rapidly, and in greater quantity. It stood out from the masses. Camera Work remained in publication until 1917.

Early in his career, Stieglitz embraced pictorialist photography. However, once photography was established and accepted as an art form in it's own right, he abandoned it for straight photography.

Alfred Stieglitz, who is often referred to as the father of modern photography, found a new way of seeing

Who was Frederick Holland Day?

American photographer. He was an eccentric who sought to express his ideas on life and art through Pictorial photography, which he took up in 1887, frequently by interpretations of two opposites—the sacred and the profane. He regarded Classical Greece as the ideal and he pursued an intensive study of the human form, attempting to represent physical perfection in his photographs. These were in medium or large format, with mainly platinum prints.

Day was a cultivated and sensitive man of independent means. As well as studying painting, he was an admirer of Keats, owning a fine collection of the poet’s manuscripts, letters and early editions. He published books as a hobby (1893–9), co-founding the Boston publishing house of Copeland and Day and importing the then scandalous works of Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde.

He became obsessed with photography, and in January 1896 he was elected a member of the Linked ring brotherhood, which aimed to promote photography as a visual art. In 1899, with Coburn and his mother, he went to England, renting a studio and darkroom in London in an alley north of Mortimer Street, W1. During the summer of 1899 Day worked on a series of photographs devoted to sacred subjects. Some 250 negatives were made, including studies of the Crucifixion, the Descent from the Cross, the Entombment and the Resurrection and others showing incidents connected with the Stations of the Cross. He regarded 25 of these as having been fairly successful and a dozen as really successful. He himself posed as Jesus Christ, having fasted until his features and body were emaciated; he grew his hair and beard for over a year in preparation for the photographs. Several of the studies required groups of people, and Day said that the posing of them was a long and arduous task. The models were his friends and professional actors, who wore specially imported antique costumes. Exhibitions of Day’s Sacred Art photographs in 1899–1900 brought interesting reactions. Some art critics were prepared to accept photography as a medium for portraying such subjects, while photographers in the main were strongly opposed to it.

In 1900 Day was responsible for arranging and displaying a major exhibition: The New School of American Photography. Alfred Stieglitz, who considered Day to be a potential rival, refused to support the exhibition. Both were aiming to establish photography as a pictorial art, and this may explain why Day, although regarded as a distinguished member of the Linked Ring, never joined the Photo-secession, founded by Stieglitz in 1902.

Some of Day’s most imaginative photographs are in a series illustrating the legend of Orpheus, in which the exotic models included his protégé, Khalil Gibran, one of the immigrant boys he protected. His cousin, the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, said: ‘To be in the company of this intellectual and artistic man was an education in itself … In his house, on elegant Beacon Hill (Boston), Day used to exhibit his photographs in an incense-laden atmosphere to the élite of Boston society.’ A disastrous fire about 1914 destroyed Day’s collection of photographs, with the exception of those that he had given to friends or donated to other collections. From 1917 he maintained a self-imposed isolation from society

Who was Alvin Langdon Coburn?

Coburn was greatly influenced by his mother, a keen amateur photographer, and began taking photographs at the age of eight. He traveled to England in 1899 with his mother and his cousin, F. Holland Day. Coburn developed substantial contacts in the photography world in New York and London, and in 1900 he took part in the New School of American Pictorial Photography exhibition (London, Royal Phot. Soc.), which Day organized. In 1902 he was elected a member of the Photo-Secession, founded by Alfred Stieglitz to raise the standards of pictorial photography. A year later he was elected a member of the Brotherhood of the Linked ring in Britain.

Some of Coburn’s most impressive photographs are portraits. He worked for a year in the studio of the leading New York portrait photographer Gertrude Käsebier and became friendly with George Bernard Shaw, who introduced him to a number of the most celebrated literary, artistic and political figures in Britain, many of whom, including Shaw, he photographed. Shaw also wrote the preface to the catalogue for the exhibition of Coburn’s work at the Royal Photographic Society, London, in 1906, and regarded Coburn and Edward Steichen as ‘the two greatest photographers in the world’. Coburn produced two books of portraits: Men of Mark (1913) and More Men of Mark (1922). As a photographer of cities and landscapes (1903–10), he concentrated on mood, striving for broad effects and atmosphere in his photographs rather than clear delineation of tones and sharp rendition of detail. He was influenced by the work of Japanese painters, which he referred to as the ‘style of simplification’. He considered simple things to be the most profound

Who was Anne Brigman?

Born in Hawaii, Anne Brigman moved to California when she was sixteen years old. Trained as a painter, she turned to photography in 1902. "[S]lim, hearty, unaffected women of early maturity living a hardy out-of-door life in high boots and jeans, toughened to wind and sun" were Brigman's favored subjects, and she photographed them nude in the landscape of the Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern California. 

Brigman was one of two original California members of the art photography group the Photo-Secession, founded by Alfred Stieglitz, and she was the only Western photographer to be made a Fellow of the group. Three issues of Camera Work featured her photographs, and the British Linked Ring society of photographers elected her a member. Around 1929 she moved to Long Beach in Southern California, where she continued to photograph, focusing on a series of sand erosions. A year before her death in Eagle Rock, near Los Angeles, in 1950, she published a book of her poems and photographs titled Songs of a Pagan

Who was Gertrude Käsebier?

Käsebier began her career in her late 30's. Studying at the Pratt Institute her original intention was to become a painter but instead, she found photography as her calling. She opened a portrait studio in New York in the late 1890's where her work came to the attention of Alfred Stieglitz. She became a member of the Photo Secession. Her work was published in the first issue of Camera Work.

American photographer. She studied painting at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY (1889–93), and in France and Germany (1894–5). She began her professional photographic career c. 1894, as a magazine illustrator, and then c. 1898 she opened a portrait studio on Fifth Avenue in New York. Her simplified portrait style dispensed with scenic backdrops and fancy furniture and was soon widely emulated. Robert Henri, Auguste Rodin, Stanford White and the chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit were among her subjects. Beginning in 1898, her studies of mothers and children as well as her portraits were acclaimed at major photographic exhibitions such as the Philadelphia Photographic Salons. Käsebier was a founder-member of the Photo-Secession in 1902, and ‘Blessed art thou among women’ was among the photographs featured in the first issue of Camera Work in 1903. By 1907 she had begun to drift from the Photo-Secession, exhibiting with them for the last time in 1910. She resigned in 1912. During the second and third decades of the 20th century she was allied with the Pictorial Photographers of America. She closed her portrait studio c. 1920, and a retrospective of her photographs was held at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in 1929.

Käsebier generally printed in platinum or gum bichromate emulsions and frequently altered her photographs by retouching a negative or by rephotographing an altered print. She was the leading woman pictorialist photographer of her day and, as a married woman with children who attained success and fame, she became a model for others, including Imogen Cunningham

Who was Alice Boughton?

Boughton was a Fellow of the Photo-Secession, Alfred Stieglitz's circle of creative and modernist photographers that was highly influential in the early years of the 20th century.

Alice Boughton's 1905 essay "Photography, A Medium of Expression" was reprinted in Camera Work, the magazine edited by Stieglitz. Two of her comments seem pertinent to this free-spirited image:

On Glycerine Printing:

...The glycerine print allows a more limited freedom [than the gum bichromate process]; the result has somewhat the appearance of a wash-drawing. A platinum print is covered with glycerine, and the parts to be brought out are developed by means of a brush. The glycerine retards development, so that the process can be regulated by keeping a sufficient quantity over the portions to be omitted and letting it run off into an irregular and undefined edge...

On Portraiture:

...if the photographer has sufficient insight to perceive the interest and character of the sitter, the result may be a real achievement. This does not necessarily mean that the subject should be beautiful or graceful, or "know how to pose." It is the photographer's business to try and seize upon and bring out the innate quality, the individuality or charm of each

Who was Edward Steichen?

Steichen's early work embraced the world of the Pictorialist's. He became friends with Stieglitz through an introduction by Clarence White. He studied painting in Paris and it was there that he met and befriended many of the members of the Linked Ring. He returned to the United States and became one of the founding members of the Photo Secession. He turned his photographic efforts towards advertising photography in the second decade of the 20th century. During World War II he was Director of Navy Combat Photography. He eventually became the Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

"The use of the term 'art medium' is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding. "

Who was Frank Eugene?

American photographer and teacher, active also in Germany. After attending the Bayerische Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich (from 1886), he began exhibiting his photography in New York. Around 1899 he came to the attention of Alfred Stieglitz and was praised by the critic Sadakichi Hartmann for the intelligent combination of painterly and photographic effects in his work. He became a member of the influential transatlantic photographic society, the Linked Ring (1900), and was a founder-member of Stieglitz’s Photo-secession.

Around 1901 he moved permanently to Germany, where he became a lecturer at the Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt für Photographie und Reproduktionstechnik, Munich. When Stieglitz visited him in 1907, the two made some of the first artistic experiments in colour photography with the newly developed autochrome process. In 1913 Eugene was appointed to the chair in Pictorial photography at the Akademie für Graphische Künste, Leipzig. Two years later, he renounced his American citizenship and became a German citizen.

With the exception of a few landscapes made in Egypt in 1901, Eugene’s photographic oeuvre consists almost exclusively of allegorical images, as well as straightforward portraits and female nudes. His finest work, which brought him to the attention of the Stieglitz circle, was done within the decade around 1900. It included The Horse (1895) and a series of nude studies made around 1898, particularly Adam und Eva (1898) and Dido (c. 1898). Here, as earlier, Eugene approached photography like a printmaker, substantially altering his negatives with oils and etched cross-hatching before printing them, which resulted in lively backgrounds to his main figures

Who was Clarence Hudson White?

American photographer and teacher. A self-taught photographer, he began taking photographs in 1893 and soon developed a style that showed the influence of Whistler, Sargent and Japanese prints. He was elected to the Linked ring group of Pictorial photographers in 1900 and was a leading member of the Photo-secession from 1902. His evocative photographs of rural landscapes and of his family celebrate the joys and virtues of the simple, middle-class way of life that existed in the USA before World War I.

By 1906 White was already a major figure in American photography and moved to New York, where he began a close professional and artistic relationship with Alfred Stieglitz that lasted until 1912. His work was published in Camera Work in July 1903, Jan 1905, July 1908, July 1909 and Oct 1910. In 1908 he began teaching photography, founding in 1910 his own Summer School of Photography in Seguineland, ME, with F. Holland Day, Max Weber and Gertrude Käsebier, and the highly successful and influential Clarence White School of Photography in New York in 1914. Although his own photography went into decline during the last decade of his life, his students included Laura Gilpin, Karl Struss (1886–1991), Dorothea Lange, Paul Outerbridge, Ralph Steiner (1899–1986) and Anton Bruehl

Throwing the cast net

Norfolk Broads

ca. 1886

P. H. Emerson 

Speed

From Camera Work #7

July, 1904

Robert Demachy

Schnitterin (Harvester)

ca. 1925

Heinrich Kühn

Kelmscott Manor, Attics

ca. 1897

Frederick Evans

Interpretation Picasso: The Railway

1911

Pierre Dubreuil 

Winter on Fifth Avenue

1892

Alfred Stieglitz

An Ethiopian Chief

ca. 1898 Photogravure

Frederick Holland Day

The Bubble

1907

Anne Brigman

Turner Family (G.K. O'Malley) & Children

ca. 1912

Platinum print

Gertrude Käsebier

Nude (children)

From Camera Work #26

April 1909

Alice Boughton

Auguste Rodin

1903

Edward Steichen

Woman with Cigarette Case

n.d.

Platinum print

Baron Adolph de Meyer

Adam & Eve

ca. 1900

Frank Eugene

Boys Going to School

1903

Photogravure

Clarence H. White

What is Pictorialism?

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 (33.43.132), Alvin Langdon Coburn (1987.1100.13), and Frank Eugene (55.635.12)—broke away from the club to form what they dubbed the Photo-Secession. The group held exhibitions of their work in a space donated by Edward Steichen called the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (known familiarly as "291" for its address on Fifth Avenue) and published a quarterly magazine edited by Stieglitz entitled Camera Work. This sumptuous publication—illustrated with handsomely printed photogravures on Japanese rice paper hand-tipped to the pages—became a clarion call to photographers throughout the country, such as Clarence White (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 (49.55.327), became associated with the Photo-Secession by Stieglitz's invitation.

By the end of World War I, Stieglitz and Steichen (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

What is symbolism?

What is Naturalism?

What is the platinum process?

The platinum process was patented and introduced to the marketplace under the name Platinotype by the Englishman William Willis in 1873. One of its earliest and most skilled practitioners was Peter Henry Emerson, who was much admired by Stieglitz for his efforts on behalf of photography as an art form and who in 1887 awarded Stieglitz the first of his many medals and prizes in photography. Emerson expressed his admiration for the platinum process in his textbook, Naturalistic Photography (Emerson 1899, 135–36):

Every photographer who has the good and advancement of photography at heart, should feel indebted to Mr. Willis for placing within his power a process by which he is able to produce work comparable, on artistic ground, with any other black-and-white process. We have no hesitation in saying that the discovery and subsequent practice of the process has had an incalculable amount of influence in raising the standard of photography.

Making a platinum or palladium print involves the sensitization of paper with ferric oxalate and platinum or palladium chloride. Light exposure reduces the ferric salts, and the exposed paper is then immersed in potassium oxalate, which catalyzes the reduction of the platinum or palladium salts to the final metallic image material. Unwanted iron salts remain in the paper, however, and must be eliminated by several baths in dilute hydrochloric acid and a final water wash. (For more detailed information on the chemistry of the platinum and palladium process, see Gottlieb 1993, 1995.)

The resulting print is made up of finely divided metallic platinum or palladium embedded in the fibers of the paper surface. That surface is completely matte and can therefore be viewed from any angle, as there is no emulsion or subsequent gloss. A variety of papers can be used, and contrast can be varied by dilutions of the sensitizer and other manipulations (Reinhold 1991). But the primary advantage of the platinum or palladium process in comparison to the silver process, which preceded and succeeded it, is that it can reproduce a much longer tonal scale. A full-scale platinum or palladium print from a properly rendered negative has an unmatched tonal beauty.

Platinum and palladium have been described here interchangeably because both are based on the light sensitivity of iron salts, and the printing and processing procedures are nearly identical. They can even be mixed together in the same sensitizer. However, there are some differences between the two metals that are of considerable significance for this investigation.

While palladium appears in Willis's original patent specifications (Willis 1880), it was not widely used until 1916 when the British government forbade the use of platinum for photography because it was needed for the war effort. In June 1916 the Eastman Kodak Company also ceased production of the platinum paper it had manufactured since 1906. As photographers like Stieglitz began, of necessity, to rely more heavily on the substitute palladium papers, certain differences became apparent. Most important, palladium prints were inherently warmer in tone than platinum. Although color could be altered by reducing developer temperature or by using toners such as lead oxalate, it was extremely difficult to produce the same neutral gray tones with palladium as were naturally rendered by platinum. Palladium prints also had somewhat lower contrast, although that could be compensated for by adjustments to the sensitizer solution or the developer dilution. Moreover, unlike platinum, palladium is slightly soluble in hydrochloric acid, which is the clearing bath for the process. Therefore, a more dilute clearing solution, perhaps 1:200 rather than 1:60, was recommended for palladium.

Until recently, both platinum and palladium prints have had an excellent reputation for stability and permanence, primarily because the metallic platinum or palladium that forms the image is more resistant than silver to attack from peroxides and other oxidants. However, acidity introduced by the clearing bath can threaten the paper support, and it now appears that palladium prints in particular may be more prone to staining or discoloration than was previously expected

What is photogravure?

The first step in making a photogravure print is preparing the printing plate. This pure copper plate must be thoroughly cleaned, its surface highly polished, and its edges beveled (to avoid damaging the paper during printing). Next it is evenly dusted or sprayed with an acid resist of rosin or asphaltum, and heated to make the resist adhere. This procedure is identical to that of aquatint print-making, so early photogravures were sometimes called photo-aquatints. The aquatint preserves approximately 50% of the plate surface and creates a web of high points surrounding each cell

What is the gum-bichromate process?

What was the The Arts and Crafts Movement?

The Arts and Crafts movement emerged during the late Victorian period in England, the most industrialized country in the world at that time. Anxieties about industrial life fueled a positive revaluation of handcraftsmanship and precapitalist forms of culture and society. Arts and Crafts designers sought to improve standards of decorative design, believed to have been debased by mechanization, and to create environments in which beautiful and fine workmanship governed. The Arts and Crafts movement did not promote a particular style, but it did advocate reform as part of its philosophy and instigated a critique of industrial labor; as modern machines replaced workers, Arts and Crafts proponents called for an end to the division of labor and advanced the designer as craftsman.

The British movement derived its philosophical underpinnings from two important sources: first, the designer A. W. N. Pugin (1812–1852), whose early writings promoting the Gothic Revival presaged English apprehension about industrialization, and second, theorist and art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), who advocated medieval architecture as a model for honest craftsmanship and quality materials. Ruskin's persuasive rhetoric influenced the movement's figurehead (and ardent socialist) William Morris (1834–1896), who believed that industrialization alienated labor and created a dehumanizing distance between the designer and manufacturer. Morris strove to unite all the arts within the decoration of the home, emphasizing nature and simplicity of form. 

The American Arts and Crafts movement was inextricably linked to the British movement and closely aligned with the work of William Morris and the second generation of architect-designers, including Charles Robert Ashbee (1863–1942), who toured the United States, and Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857–1941), whose work was known through important publications such as The Studio. British ideals were disseminated in America through journal and newspaper writing, as well as through societies that sponsored lectures and programs. The U.S. movement was multicentered, with societies forming nationwide. Boston, historically linked to English culture, was the first city to feature a Society of Arts and Crafts, founded in June 1897. Chicago's Arts and Crafts Society began at Hull House, one of the first American settlement houses for social reform, in October 1897. Numerous societies followed in cities such as Minneapolis and New York, as well as rural towns, including Deerfield, Massachusetts. 

Unlike in England, the undercurrent of socialism of the Arts and Crafts movement in the United States did not spread much beyond the formation of a few Utopian communities. Rose Valley was one of these artistic and social experiments. William Lightfoot Price (1861–1916), a Philadelphia architect, founded Rose Valley in 1901 near Moylan, Pennsylvania. The Rose Valley shops, like other Arts and Crafts communities, were committed to producing artistic handicraft, which included furnishings (1991.145), pottery, metalwork, and bookbinding. The Byrdcliffe Arts and Crafts Colony was another Utopian Arts and Crafts community. Outside of Woodstock, New York, Englishman Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead (1854–1929) and his wife Jane Byrd McCall Whitehead (1861–1955) founded Byrdcliffe, which was completed and operating by 1903. There craftspeople worked in various media, including woodwork, pottery, textiles, and metalwork. In harmony with the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement, Byrdcliffe furniture (1991.311.1) is a study in rectilinearity, simply treated materials, and minimal decoration. 

In urban centers, socialist experiments were undertaken on a community level, frequently in the form of educating young women. Ideas of craftwork and simplicity manifested themselves in decorative work, including the metalwork and pottery of the Arts and Crafts movement. Schools and training programs taught quality design, a cornerstone of the Arts and Crafts movement. In Boston, the Saturday Evening Girls Club, established in 1899 as a reading group for immigrant girls, founded the Paul Revere Pottery, which began producing pottery (2000.31) in 1908 and offered the girls the ability to earn good wages within the community. Newcomb Pottery was formed in New Orleans in the winter of 1894–95 under the auspices of the H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, an educational institution for women. Using local Southern flora and fauna as inspiration, the female designers at Newcomb made pottery (1983.26) and later also produced metalwork and textiles (2004.334). 

In addition to pottery, women fashioned jewelry in the Arts and Crafts mode. Stones were chosen for their inherent artistic qualities, resulting in jewelry that promoted truth to materials. Florence Koehler (1861–1944), a charter member of the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society, taught china painting, jewelry, and metalsmithing. After studying jewelry and enamelwork in London, she referenced historic design, especially Renaissance sources (52.43.1-.3). Marie Zimmermann (1879–1972) began her artistic career as a jewelry designer and later expanded her metalsmithing to include ornamental garden and home objects. An idiosyncratic designer, Zimmermann studied foreign cultures for inspiration, including Egypt (2005.464), Greece, and China. 

Without a singular philosophy, diversity persevered within the Arts and Crafts movement as a mixture of individuals worked in diverse locations. There were regional differences due to the geographical distribution from the East Coast, to the Midwest, to California. Craftsmen used a wide range of source material to produce handwrought objects. Arthur J. Stone (1847–1938), a dedicated member of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, produced silver objects that were conservative in design. An Englishman who emigrated to the United States, Stone opened his silver shop in Gardner, Massachusetts, where he initially executed all pieces himself. When the business expanded, he hired additional craftsmen to make individual works (1990.49). There were also creative designers with unique vision, such as Charles Rohlfs (1853–1936), who worked in Buffalo, New York. Rohlfs eschewed industrial production methods, preferring to craft individual pieces of furniture (1985.261) utilizing a myriad of foreign sources, including Moorish, Chinese, and Scandinavian design. Gustav Stickley (1858–1942), founder of The United Crafts (later known as the Craftsman Workshops), was a proselytizer of the craftsman ideal. Emulating William Morris's production through guild manufacture of his furniture, Stickley believed that mass-produced furniture was poorly constructed and overly complicated in design. Stickley set out to improve American taste through "craftsman" or "mission" furniture with designs governed by honest construction, simple lines, and quality material (1976.389.1). He also published the highly influential The Craftsman (1901–16), a beacon for the American Arts and Crafts movement. 

Publications, including The Craftsman, House Beautiful, and Ladies Home Journal, disseminated ideas about design and interiors. The ideal home that emerged had an open-planned interior shaped by a color palette that reflected the natural environment. Articles and illustrations presented decorating suggestions, including the use of colors, type of furniture, and decorative accessories, such as rugs and pottery. Period sources embraced Grueby Pottery for its innovative interpretation of nature and craftsmanship. Founded by William Grueby (1867–1925), the pottery was known for naturally shaped vessels with matte green glaze (69.91.2). In addition to pottery, lighting was also an important element that contributed to the ideal Arts and Crafts interior. The copper electric table lamp (1989.129) was the archetypal object crafted by the Dirk Van Erp Studio. Additionally, a Native American undercurrent developed during the Arts and Crafts movement, as evidenced by fashionable Indian-style baskets and textiles featured in Arts and Crafts exhibitions and publications. Many collected baskets to display in their Indian corners, which may have inspired Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933) to design a hanging shade in an Indian basket motif (69.150). 

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) shaped a new way of living through his completely designed environments, encompassing architecture and all elements of interiors. He ushered in a style of architecture that became known as the Prairie School, characterized by low-pitched roofs, open interiors, and horizontal lines that reflected the prairie landscape. This architecture, which utilized natural materials such as wood, clay, and stone, sparked a revolutionary shift in the American interior (1972.60.1). Wright's "organic" architecture was indebted to nature. However, plain surfaces with minimal decorative embellishments were suited to incorporating the machine, resulting in furniture with intense rectilinearity and natural surfaces. In addition to Wright, popular Prairie School architects William Gray Purcell (1880–1965) and George Grant Elmslie (1871–1952) directed offices in Minneapolis and Chicago. Purcell, Feick and Elmslie (as the firm was known between 1910 and 1913 with the addition of George Feick Jr. [1881–1945]) remodeled the J. G. Cross House in Minneapolis in 1911 (1972.20.2). The firm specialized in residences with artistic interiors (especially for a middle-class clientele, although they certainly worked for wealthy patrons as well) using organic decorative elements. Like Wright and Purcell, Feick and Elmslie, Charles Sumner Greene (1868–1957) and Henry Mather Greene (1870–1954), California architect-designers of the period, were interested in domestic architecture incorporating the interior as a total work of art. The brothers Greene initially worked in all the popular revival styles, but after examining English and American design periodicals and Charles Greene's formative trip abroad, their style shifted by the early 1900s. They fashioned a distinctive style, heavily influenced by Asian design, that reached its zenith with the bungalow, the quintessential Arts and Crafts architectural form, characterized by broad overhanging eaves, articulated woodwork, and an open plan. For the Blacker House (1907) in Pasadena, Greene and Greene used Japanese design to meticulously craft elements in their comprehensive schemes, inside and out (1986.445; 1992.127). 

The rise of urban centers and the inevitability of technology presaged the end of the Arts and Crafts movement. The search for nature and an idealist medieval era was no longer a valid approach to living. By the 1920s, machine-age modernity and the pursuit of a national identity had captured the attention of designers and consumers, bringing an end to the handcrafted nature of the Arts and Crafts movement in America

What is Japonism?

After Japanese ports reopened to trade with the West in 1853, a tidal wave of foreign imports flooded European shores. On the crest of that wave were woodcut prints by masters of the ukiyo-e school which transformed Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art by demonstrating that simple, transitory, everyday subjects from "the floating world" could be presented in appealingly decorative ways.

Parisians saw their first formal exhibition of Japanese arts and crafts when Japan took a pavilion at the World's Fair of 1867. But already, shiploads of oriental bric-a-brac—including fans, kimonos, lacquers, bronzes, and silks—had begun pouring into England and France.

It is said that James Whistler discovered Japanese prints in a Chinese tearoom near London Bridge and that Claude Monet first came upon them used as wrapping paper in a spice shop in Holland. James Tissot and his friend Edgar Degas were among the earliest collectors of Japanese art in France, but their own art was affected by exotic things in very different ways. Unlike Tissot, and others who came under the spell of Japan, Degas avoided staging japoneries that featured models dressed in kimonos and the conspicuous display of oriental props. Instead, he absorbed qualities of the Japanese aesthetic that he found most sympathetic: elongated pictorial formats, asymmetrical compositions, aerial perspective, spaces emptied of all but abstract elements of color and line, and a focus on singularly decorative motifs. In the process, he redoubled his originality. 

Degas' American friend Mary Cassatt, who declared that she "hated conventional art," found in Japanese woodcuts like those of Utamaro a fresh approach to the depiction of common events in women's lives. After visiting a large exhibition of ukiyo-e prints at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the spring of 1890, she produced a set of ten color etchings in open admiration of their subjects, compositions, and technical innovations. 

Experimentation with a wide range of pictorial modes, and with printmaking techniques as well, coincided with the growing popularity of Japanese woodcuts during the 1890s. Toulouse-Lautrec adopted the exaggerated colors, contours, and facial expressions found in Kabuki theater prints in order to create his eye-catching posters. Meanwhile, Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, who called themselves "Nabis" or "prophets" of a new style of art, relied upon the piquant, unusual viewpoints of ukiyo-e printmakers for inspiration. Only Paul Gauguin, who was attracted to the native arts of many cultures, sidestepped the then-current practice of lithography and adapted Japanese woodcut techniques to the abstract expression of his forward-looking art

What is the bromoil process?

What is the carbon process?

What are oil-pigment prints?

Oil pigment printing, sometimes referred to as the Rawlins oil process, is the predecessor of bromoil. Originally conceived and practiced by Alphonse Louis Poitevin in the mid-1850's, using a roller to spread the ink, G.E.H. Rawlins introduced the use of a brush for selective application of ink in 1904. The oil pigment process works on the same principle as lithographic printing--oil and water don’t mix.  Essentially, a gelatin-sized paper is coated with a bichromate solution, dried, and exposed through a negative. The gelatine is selectively hardened where the light hits the paper. After the paper is washed and dried, it is soaked in water.  The gelatine swells, except in those areas where it has become hardened.  Thick oil-based printing ink is applied to the paper and sticks to the areas with hardened gelatine, but the water-swollen areas of the paper repel the ink.

The paper with selectively hardened gelatine is known as a matrix.  The primary difference between an oil print and a bromoil is that the oil print requires an enlarged negative, whereas the bromoil starts with an enlarged print.  In the bromoil process, the enlarged print is bleached with a copper sulfate/dichromate solution and the gelatine is hardened selectively wherever the silver was present. It was Howard Farmer (of Farmer's Reducer fame) who discovered, in 1889, that dichromate will selectively harden the gelatin of a silver print when the silver is reduced.  Then, in 1907, E.J. Wall wrote a brief article suggesting that this property of dichromate might be used to make oil prints from bromide prints, and later that same year C. Welborne Piper published details of the process.…

What was the Barbizon School?

In early nineteenth-century France, landscape painting was narrowly circumscribed by an aesthetic code upheld by the conservative French Academy. Painters and sculptors were rigorously trained in the Neoclassical tradition to emulate artists of the Renaissance and classical antiquity. In the hierarchy of historical subjects recognized by the Academy, pure landscape painting was not a privilege. At best, artists could hope to paint an idealized nature inspired by ancient poetry. The grand classicizing subjects of the seventeenth-century painters Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain presented other acceptable models.

Following in the path of Poussin and Claude, those eager to paint from nature went to Italy. There, among ancient monuments drenched in Mediterranean sunlight, they gathered to paint and draw directly in the landscape. Even if their open-air sketches retained the formal linearity of the Neoclassical aesthetic, those exercises, often made in the countryside surrounding Rome, freed artists to leave the studio-to fully experience nature, to look rather than copy, to feel rather than analyze. 

In 1816, the French Academy introduced a Prix de Rome in paysage historique, historical landscape painting. The prize, awarded every four years, enabled its laureate to live and work at the Villa Medici in Rome, an opportunity conferred on promising French painters schooled in the academic canon. Intended to restore history painting to its seventeenth-century glory, the new Prix de Rome actually prompted a frenzy of excitement over landscape painting. At the time, young artists were flocking to the Louvre to study seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish landscapes, a naturalist tradition long practiced in the Netherlands. The exhibition of John Constable's pictures at the Paris Salon of 1824 further set the stage for this new genre in France. In warm weather, artists now ventured outside Paris to work from nature, traveling to the royal parks of Saint-Cloud and Versailles and to more far-flung areas of the country. No destination was more popular than the Forest of Fontainebleau. Once the unmapped preserve of kings and their royal hunting parties (given the proximity of the hunting lodge turned Château de Fontainebleau), the Forest of Fontainebleau became a sanctuary for the growing leisure classes, for whom a train ride from Paris was an easy jaunt. 

Called "the branch-office of Italy" by one popular nineteenth-century writer, the Forest of Fontainebleau spread across 42,000 acres of dense woods undercut with meadows, marshes, gorges, and sandy clearings. Bitterly cold winters and warm summers, coupled with heavy rainfall, encouraged the growth of a wide variety of tree specimens, a great attraction for incipient landscape painters, especially Théodore Rousseau. Quiet hamlets ringed the forest, refuges for woodchoppers and modest farm laborers. It was to one of those villages, Barbizon, that artists journeyed beginning in the 1820s, with a promise of room and board at the newly established inn Auberge Ganne. The Auberge provided lodging for painters who typically forayed into the nearby forest in warm weather and retreated to Parisian studios in winter. After daylong excursions in nature, artists convened at the Auberge Ganne to share ideas, discuss technical practices, and revel in one another's company. Years later, already eclipsed by Impressionism, these pioneering painters of nature came to be called the Barbizon School. 

Despite differing in age, technique, training, and lifestyle, the artists of the Barbizon School collectively embraced their native landscape, particularly the rich terrain of the Forest of Fontainebleau. They shared a recognition of landscape as an independent subject, a determination to exhibit such paintings at the conservative Salon, and a mutually reinforcing pleasure in nature. Alfred Sensier, close friend and biographer of Barbizon painters Théodore Rousseau and Jean-François Millet, wrote of the romantic attraction of the Forest of Fontainebleau: "They had reached such a pitch of over-excitement that they were quite unable to work... the proud majesty of the old trees, the virgin state of rocks and heath... all these intoxicated them with their beauty and their smell. They were, in truth, possessed." 

Théodore Rousseau was indeed possessed by the forest. A powerful voice for painting outdoors, he spent more time there than any of his fellow artists, often guiding them to his favorite haunts. He worked in the forest in all climates, even in the freeze of winter, and only returned to Paris to advance sales. Rousseau deplored the encroachment of industry and tourism at Fontainebleau. He appealed to Napoleon III to halt the wholesale destruction of the forest's trees, and in 1853 the emperor established a preserve to protect the artists' cherished giant oaks. 

Among the painters who followed Rousseau into the forest, Narcisse Diaz de la Peña was his most loyal disciple. Together, they often packed a picnic to last the day, as they ventured into the woods in search of imagery. Diaz was not of a temperament to paint the meticulous detail so familiar in Rousseau's landscapes, yet his heavily impastoed canvases nonetheless won much praise at the Paris Salon. 

Millet moved his growing family to Fontainebleau to escape an epidemic of cholera that followed the Revolution of 1848. He and his wife raised nine children in a spare peasant cottage bordering the forest. Penurious circumstances never dampened Millet's spirit, nor did they compromise his productive career. All his life, he painted farm laborers with blunt realism and quiet dignity. 

Camille Corot, perhaps the most influential of all French landscape painters of the nineteenth century, never settled in Fontainebleau, although its rocky outcroppings and majestic trees informed some of his prized early paintings. Fontainebleau: Oak Trees at Bas-Bréau is one of the most vigorous and precise. Its sharply focused topography stands in contrast to his much later paintings, Ville-d'Avray, for example, in which nature dissolves in a silvery mist of tonal lyricism. Corot always returned to the studio to process his visual experience and never admitted conflict in reconciling academic values with the newfound freedom afforded by direct observation. 

Of the artists who joined Corot in the French countryside in the summer months, Charles-François Daubigny was among the most accomplished. Whether painting storks hovering over a marsh or an apple orchard swaying in the wind, he brought his canvases to a radical degree of completion outdoors. Daubigny worked in the Forest of Fontainebleau in his early years, but his preference for water soon led him to other regions of France. From his floating studio, a refitted ferry called Le Bottin (The Little Box), Daubigny ambled along the River Oise painting transient skies and limpid waters. His simple scenes of reflected light-A River Landscape with Storks, for example-resonate with the immediacy of that direct experience outdoors. Daubigny supported many Impressionists in their early years and urged their inclusion in Salon exhibitions. 

Barbizon was more than just a place; it was an encompassing motif. Like other great motifs, it transcended geography. Inspirational and nurturing, even despite daily trials of frostbitten fingers at winter's dawn or sunburned hands at summer's midday, Barbizon answered the quest for landscape's metaphoric power. The artists of the Barbizon School showed us the rapidly disappearing rural path to painterly "truth" well before the Impressionists trod the same forest and fields, carrying with them their factory-made satchels with metallic tubes of new pigments and their modern ways of seeing. Landscape painting was no longer subservient to history painting. It was history in the making

What was Art Nouveau?

Art Nouveau is an international philosophy and style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that were most popular during 1890–1910. The name "Art Nouveau" is French for "new art". It is known also as Modernisme in Catalonia (Spain), as Jugendstil in Germany, Modern in Russia, as Secession in Austria-Hungary and, in Italy, as Stile Liberty. A reaction to academic art of the 19th century, it was inspired by natural forms and structures, not only in flowers and plants but also in curved lines. Architects tried to harmonize with the natural environment. It is also considered a philosophy of design of furniture, which was designed according to the whole building and made part of ordinary life

What was the Secession movement?

What is tonalism?

A style of American painting that appeared between c. 1880 and 1920. Though not clearly defined, its main exponents were George Inness, James McNeill Whistler, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Dwight W. Tryon, Alexander Helwig Wyant and such artists of the Photo-Secession as Edward J. Steichen. The term was used by Isham in 1905 and by Brinton in an essay in a catalogue for an exhibition of American painters held in Berlin in 1910. Brinton named the now virtually forgotten artists J. Francis Murphy, Bruce Crane (1857–1937), Ben Foster (1852–1926) and Henry Ward Ranger (1858–1916) as exponents of the style and as leaders of contemporary art in the USA. The style is characterized by soft, diffused light, muted tones and hazily outlined objects, all of which imbue the works with a strong sense of mood. The term was applied especially to landscape painting in which nature is presented as serene or mysterious, never disquieting or dramatic.

Tonalism grew up alongside American Impressionism yet is distinguished from that (and from French Impressionism) by its restrained palette and strongly subjective aesthetic. Somewhat in the tradition of George Fuller and of the earlier Hudson River School in America, the Tonalists approached nature in a contemplative, Romantic manner, the intention being to capture not so much the appearance of a landscape as its mood as perceived by the artist. This idealistic attitude linked Tonalism to the contemporary Symbolist aesthetic, particularly evident in such paintings as Steichen’s Across the Salt Marshes, Huntington, c. 1905. The outlines of the trees are scarcely visible in the dim, misty atmosphere, lending the scene a strong sense of mystery. Whistler’s earlier Nocturnes, which date from the 1870s onwards, have similar qualities, as shown by Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice c. 1880. Closer to Impressionism in its lighting and in the brushwork, though still characteristic of Tonalism, is Tryon’s Morning in May, 1911 depicting a serene area of tree-lined landscape. Occasionally the Tonalist style was applied to figure and interior subjects, as in Dewing’s The Spinet,1902, in which the prominent soft brown hues fuse the foreground with the background, blending the central figure into her surroundings

What is bas-relief?

What was Camera Work?

2003 marked the centenary of the launch of the journal Camera Work. Created by the legendary American photographer Alfred Stieglitz, its aims were to promote and support the work of the newly formed American Photo-Secession movement of art photographers. Camera Work, a quarterly publication, was initially the vehicle for advancing the cause of Pictorialism and pictorialist photographers in America. By 1910 Camera Work had moved away from an exclusive focus on photographic art to become the most important journal in America for the introduction of French Impressionist art. The last issues, which appeared in 1917, saw a return to photography but, rather than the older-style soft-focus Pictorialism, the journal at this time promoted a new form of hard-edged modernism featuring the work of Paul Strand. Across its 50 issues, Camera Work would become the most important American art journal of the first half of the 20th century.

Unlike many earlier photographic journals, Camera Work was the first photographic journal to emphasise visual and intellectual content rather than just providing technical advice. It was illustrated with hand-pulled, photogravure illustrations of the very highest quality. Stieglitz himself was one of the foremost exponents of photogravure in America and considered it to be the perfect vehicle for bringing together images and text and disseminating photography to a wider audience. The gravures of Camera Work, which were printed on Japanese tissue to preserve the maximum tonal quality, are among the finest examples of this art form. The unbound plates are frequently sold as individual, original art works.

Throughout its life Camera Work functioned on many levels. It began as the vehicle for the very best Pictorialist work. It provided aesthetic commentary from the foremost critics of the day in the fields of photography, painting, sculpture and literature while serving as a catalogue and review for exhibitions at Stieglitz’s gallery, 291. Perhaps more importantly, as the former Curator of the Royal Photographic Society in England, Pam Roberts observed, ‘Camera Work served as an autobiography of the creative life of one man, its creator, editor, financier and inspiration, Alfred Stieglitz’.

A complete set of this rare and important journal was acquired in 1976. Through its combined holdings of rare photographic art in the permanent collection and books, journals and ephemera in the Gallery’s Research Library, the National Gallery of Australia provides an unmatched resource in this country for the study of both the history of photography as an art and photographically illustrated publications

What was Camera Notes?

When in America, the Society for Amateur Photographers merged with the New York Camera Club in 1897, Alfred Stieglitz recognized an opportunity to inaugurate a publication that would promote the efforts of the Pictorialists to a larger audience as well as stimulate artistic efforts in photography. He presented a plan for an illustrated quarterly that would replace their leaflet, Journal. The new publication, Camera Notes, became his vehicle.

Stieglitz demanded that the plates in Camera Notes serve as more than a record of what was being produced in the photographic world; they had to "interpret fully the spirit and quality of the original print." The photogravure process was uniquely suited to reproduce these subtle prints. Many of the gravure plates in Camera Notes and later in Camera Work were made from positives, made from the original negatives. Because they were often supervised and sometimes even etched and printed by the artists themselves, these gravures were considered equivalents to the original prints.

After suffering from a low tolerance to political pressure, Stieglitz resigned as editor of Camera Notes and in 1903 launched his own publication, Camera Work. Camera Work is today considered to be the single best-known example of gravure printing. It so successfully simulated the tonal and tactile qualities of the Pictorialist printing style, that in 1904 when the Photo-Secession contribution to an exhibit in Brussels failed to arrive on time, Camera Work gravures were hung in their place. The show was a great success, however it was not generally known that the prints were gravures until the show was over.

Today, Camera Work is credited as the mechanism that enabled Stieglitz and his followers to succeed in their mission to have photography recognized as a legitimate fine art

What was Photo-Secession?

A group of mainly American Pictorialist photographers founded by alfred Stieglitz in New York in 1902, with the aim of advancing photography as a fine art. Stieglitz, who chose the organization’s name partly to reflect the Modernism of European artistic Secession movements, remained its guiding spirit. Other leading members included Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen and Clarence H. White. The Secession also exhibited and published work by Europeans, for example Robert Demachy, Frederick H. Evans, Heinrich Kühn and Baron Adolf de Meyer, who shared the Americans’ attitude that photography was a valid medium of artistic expression.

All participants placed great emphasis on fine photographic printing. Their gum bichromate or platinum prints often emulated paint, pastel or other media, particularly in their use of soft focus, emphasis on composition and texture, and adoption of traditional academic subject-matter; in addition graphic signatures or monograms were often used. The Secession’s shifting aesthetic concerns are well documented in the elegant magazine Camera Work, which Stieglitz edited (1903–17). From 1905 exhibitions were held regularly in New York at The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, 291 Fifth Avenue, later known as 291. In order to define photography’s position among the arts, it was felt appropriate to exhibit contemporary American and European non-photographic works, and from 1908 there were more exhibitions of paintings than of photographs. After the Secession’s last major photographic exhibition in 1910 at the Albright Art Gallery (now Albright–Knox Gallery) in Buffalo, NY, many disaffected Pictorialist photographers left the group, and it disbanded unofficially, although 291 remained open until 1917

What was the Linked Ring?

An association of photographers that flourished in Britain between 1892 and 1909. The association was founded by a group of artistic photographers (mainly Pictorialist) who were disenchanted with the attitudes and activities of the council members of the Photographic Society of Great Britain, the majority of whom were photographic scientists and technologists. The lecture and exhibition programmes were directed to their interests. Alfred Maskell and George Davison were instrumental in bringing together on 27 May 1892 the 15 British photographers who were the founders of the Linked Ring: Bernard Alfieri, Tom Bright, Arthur Burchett (1875–1913), Henry Hay Cameron (1856–1911, son of Julia Margaret Cameron), Lyonel Clark, Francis Cobb, Henry E. Davis, Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1906), Henry Peach Robinson and his son Ralph W. Robinson (1862–1942), Francis Seyton Scott, Henry Van der Weyde and William Willis (1841–1923). All were either distinguished photographers or closely involved in the medium. The name was chosen to symbolize the unity of the members linked together in a spiritual and aesthetic band of brothers. The association was constituted ‘as a means of bringing together those who are interested in the development of the highest form of Art of which Photography is capable’ and those only were eligible who admitted the artistic capabilities in photography.

In order to carry out the principal aim of the Linked Ring (the promotion of the art of photography), the Links (members) added to their numbers many of the most distinguished photographers of the period at an international level, including Gertrude Käsebier, Clarence H. White, James Craig Annan, Edward J. Steichen, Heinrich Kuehn, Alvin Langdon Coburn, F. Holland Day, Hugo Henneberg and Hans Watzek. There was no differentiation between amateur and professional. Several worked in a range of media, although the dominating interest for most was photography. Those Links able to do so met once a month to discuss matters of mutual interest and make decisions on admission of new members. The major activity was the annual exhibition known as the Photographic Salon, which set new standards in photographic art. Initially it was held in the Dudley Gallery in Piccadilly, London. Other exhibitions (usually loans of members’ work) were also organized. Although the Links did not publish a magazine, the Linked Ring Papers were printed privately for circulation among members only. Copies of these are rarely seen.

In aesthetic matters considerable variety is to be found in the work of the Links, from what had become unfashionable realism, as in the work of Joseph Gale (c. 1835–1906), through naturalistic and impressionistic work to Pictorial photography (at which time it reached its peak of artistry and popular appeal). The latter explored mood and atmosphere, which were achieved by various means, such as contre-jour lighting, soft-focus lenses and special printing processes. The Pictorialists produced a wonderfully rich range of prints, employing such processes as platinum, carbon, gum and oil prints, and combinations such as gum platinum and bromoil.

Monochromatic colours ranged from etching black to red chalk. Workers who used carbon printing sometimes produced prints in blues and greens (for appropriate subjects). When the major objective had apparently been achieved (the promotion of photography as a visual art) internal dissensions occurred within the Linked Ring, and the association was disbanded, with considerable reluctance, on 24 November 1909

What is the Royal Photographic Society (RPS)?

The Royal Photographic Society was founded in 1853 'to promote the Art and Science of Photography', a mission it continues to this day.

Membership is open to everyone interested in photography in the UK and throughout the world, be they amateur or professional, artist or scientist, young or old.

In the winter months of 1851/1852, a provisional committee was formed with a view to organising a photographic society in London. A catalyst to the project was an exhibition of over seven hundred photographs in the gallery of the Society of Arts, which was of great general interest.

A public meeting was held on Thursday 20 January 1853 and The Photographic Society was formed using mainly the Society of Arts for its meetings. In 1874 the name was changed to the Photographic Society of Great Britain to reflect its growing importance and twenty years later it became The Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain with the permission of Queen Victoria, which was maintained by subsequent Monarchs. The Society was granted a Royal Charter in July 2004

What was the 291 Gallery?