Photography! It burst upon the sedate, self-satisfied world of Victorian Europe with the force of an exploding comet. Within months of the announcement in 1839 of Daguerre's technique, a new profession, a new technology, a new art form and a new craze had come into being. In Paris and London, optical supply houses-where lenses could be purchased-and apothecaries -where chemicals were available-were suddenly besieged by photography enthusiasts eager to acquire their own cameras and prepare their own plates. City balconies blossomed with oddly-shaped boxes pointed toward the streets; hoverinq nearby, anxious neophyte photographers, watches in hand, countsdon the minutes necessary to inscribe the image of a tree, a lamppost or a building upon the sensitized plate. If the end result, as often as not, was a mere blur, no matter; the imagination 'Of the enthusiast sketched in the sharply defined images of which the daguerreotype was capable when it was placed in the hands of an expert.
While amateurs all ever Europe were happily taking pictures, posing for pictures and collecting pictures, a few men were asking themselves what the true role of photography might be. Seme of the answers soon became obvious. In the field of astronomy, for example, Francols Arago, whointroduced the daguerreotype precess to a joint meeting of the French Academles of Sciences and Fine Arts in 1839, immediately saw its application to his own discipline; it was not leng before some of his colleagues were attempting photographs of the moon and other celestial bodies. And as a means of spreading knowledge of faraway peoples and places, photography quickly proved that it had no peer. Photographers were soon touring the Holy Land, North Africa, the Middle East and some of the more remote reaches of Europe. On the sands of Egypt, along the Way of the Crossin Jerusalem, in the shadow of the ParthenonIn Athens, they hauled their bulky equipment, prepared their plates and fought off swarms of flies and mosquitoes to bring back photographic views of the ancient world's majestic ruins. Their efforts seem all the more remarkable because there was as yet no way to reproduce their work directly in books 'Or periodicals; either lndividual prints of the photographs had to be made and laboriously pasted in by hand, or, as was more usual, the photoqraphs were hand copied by engravers.
In one fleld, however, the role of photography was far from clear. Almost from the moment of the newrnedlum's birth, a number of photographers began staking out claims in areas that had long been the preserves of painters. Portraits, landscapes, still lites, nudes and even allegorIes came to be grist for the photographer's mill. Paintlnq, which for many centuries had been pa.instakIngly perfecting the techniques of perspective and realistic detail, suddenly found its supremacy as an art form challenged by a mechanical device that could record even the most complex scene instantaneously.
Confronted with this revolutionary invention, some painters reacted with foreboding. "Painting is dead from this day on!" the French painter Paul Delaroche was reported to have exclaimed in 1838. In one sense he was right, for painting simply as representation of reality had indeed suffered a mertal wound. Although a photograph could not then convey colors,its unique ability to reproduce the surface of things made it a better mirror of nature than even the most detailed painting. But in a broader sense, Delaroche could not have been more mistaken. By usurping painting's role as the portrayer of the objecti.veworld, photography would prove a powerful stimulus to artists, setting them off on a quest for new means of expression.
It is hardly surprising that in the early days of photography many painters, even talented ones, fought back against the mechanical monster that threatened their self-esteemand livelihood. Although the French painter ingres admitted that photography captured "the exactitude I would like to achieve," for public consumption he appended his siqnature, as did a number of other painters, to a formal protest issued in 1862, that damned photography as a soulless, mechanical process,"never resulting in works which could ever be compared with those works which are the fruits of intelligence and the study of art.”
Photographers, in turn, resented such pretensions on the part of painters. Some of them had themselves been trained in the art academies of Europe, and they found in photography a new art form. But because of their backgrounds they continued to think of this new form in old and conventional ways. They regarded photography as another kind of painting. The oldest known daguerreotype, taken by Daguerre himself in 1837, reveals this clearly. It is' a still life self-consciously composed in the style of neoclassical painting.
Paul Delaroche, who shortly before had prophesied the death of painting, apparently had second thoughts. Soon he could barely contain his snthusiasm over the artistic possibilities of photography. "Daguerre's process," he wrote in 1839, "completely satisfies all the demands of art, carrying certain essential principles of art to such perfection that it must become a subject of observation and study even to the most accomplished painters." A French newspaper critic was even more lyrical: "What fineness in the strokes! What knowledge of chiaroscuro! What delicacy! What exquisite finish! How admirably are the foreshortenings given: this is Nature itself!"
The daguerreotype had one quality that actually intensified the tendency to confuse photography with painting; it was a one of a kind process. Each picture was a unique thing in itself and could not be copied. Like a painting, it could be carefully composed by its creator and treasured by Its owner, who could rest secure in the knowledge that he had a work of art that could not be duplicated. It was not until widespread use of a process that relied on transparent paper negatives from which any number of prints could be made that this sense of paintinglike uniqueness could be threatened. Nevertheless Fox Talbot, the inventor of this process, and others continued, in essence, to imitate painting at first. In the 1840s Talbot published The Pencil of Nature, the world's first book of photographs. The edition was a small one of approximately 150 copies, and each photographic print was pasted onto its page by hand. For his negatives and his prints Talbot used fine writing paper that he had treated with chemicals. The texture of this paper gave his pictures softer outlines and tones than those possible with the mirrorlike surface of the daguerreotype" which utillzed sensitized copper plates. Talbot's subjects were architectural views and stililifes taken around hls ancestral home of Lacock Abbey. These softly rendered views gave the little volume the look of an artist's sketchbook.
However, it was not in architectural, still life or landscape photography that the camera made Its first and most successful assault upon a. preserve of palntlnq, but in the field of portraiture. The invention of photography coincided with the rIse to attluence of a large European middle class who clamored for the services of painters able to immortalize them on canvas. By the early 19th Century, the portrait of the paterfamilias, his wife and his chlldren had become a mark of a respectable and prosperous household. But if the demand for portraits knew no bounds, neither dld the fees of the most talented artists. What was needed was a quick, effIcient means of producing likenesses that on the one hand would satisfy the patron's desire for self admiration without pauperizing hIm and on the other would permit the "artist to turn a fast profit. To meet this demand for cheap portraits, painters devised all manner of short cuts, including sketching a likeness from the ground glass of the camera obscura, tracing the subject's profile as it appeared through a translucent screen (an extremely popular type of portrait called a silhouette) .and painting miniatures so small that the subjects' heads were frequently less than an inch high. During the early part of the 19th Century the art academies of' the Continent, Britain and America turned out, each year, scores of practitioners whose meager talents would never be tested beyond the simple demands of the miniature or the silhouette.
One can imagine the dismay with which these artisans greeted the arrival of photography. Here was cornpetltlon that was practically unbeatable. For a fraction of the cost of even a cheap oil painting, the sitter could have his image preserved on plate or paper. Despite efforts to denigrate the photog.raph as "soulless," portrait painters found themselves fighting a losi.ng battle. In a remarkably short time the silhouette became little more than a historical curiosity and the practice of miniature portraiture all but disappeared. In 1830, for example, of the 1,278 paintings exhibited at Britain's Royal Academy of Arts, about 300 were miniatures; three decades later, fewer than 70 portraits of this type were displayed. During the interval, of course, photography had been invented and many portrait painters were driven either into penury or into the practice of the despised new medium itself.
Much of the new photographic portraiture was hardly of a higher order than what it replaced. The comparative simplicity of photography lured hundreds of untrained and unimaginative people, looking for a way to get rich quick, to set up shop and churn out their wares by the score each day. Advances in equipment and techniques reduced exposure times for portraits from 15 or 20 minutes to less than a minute, adding to the comfort of the sitters and the profits of studio owners. In 1849, a mere decade after the announcement of photography's birth, some 100,000 daguerreotype portraits were taken in the city of Paris alone. In London, the boom in portrait photography was even more astounding. Between 1851 and 1857 the number of portrait studios in that city jumped from about a dozen to more than 150. Not untypical was the studio of one Mr. Lorenzo Henry Russell, who styled himself, among other things, a professor of music, a mesmerist and a taxidermist as well as a photographer. For Mr. Russell, the ideal patron presumably was one who could be lulled by soft music, hypnotized by a piercing stare, stuffed torthe mantelpiece and then photographed for posterity-all at a modest time payment rate of one shilling a week.
Portrait studios of Russell's day varied from outlandishly ornate salons to sparsely furnished photo factories. Many studios had on hand scores of painted backdrops and pasteboard props, enabling the customer to choose the setting that best expressed his character, his ambitions or his dreams. Portrait photographers, following the lead of portrait painters, tailored these props to their sitters' achievements: an actress might be shown standing before Greek masks for comedy and tragedy; a musician might hold a lute. As often as not the props spoke of the sitter's fantasies rather than his accomplishments; a timid man could pose as an intrepid hunter stalking his prey, a merchant as a scholar surrounded by books and scientific instruments.
American portrait photographers were particularly adept at luring customers with lavish displays. One journalist compared their establishments with "the enchanted habitations which the Orientals erect for their fabulous heroes. Marble, carved in columns ... [adorns] the walls .... Here are gilded cages with birds from every clime, warbling amidst exotic plants whose flowers perfume the air .... Surrounded thus, how is it possible to hesitate at the cost of a portrait?" In such portrait palaces the cost might come high-as much as $15 or $20. For those who could not afford the fee there was always a quick-picture emporium around the corner. Here the customer stood in line to buy a ticket representing a prepaid exposure. Then he waited his turn to sit before the camera. As each new sitter entered the curtained cubicle, the cameraman reached into a hole in the wall where a technician handed him a freshly coated plate. After the operator had made the exposure, he passed the plate through a hole in another wall, beyond which a technician completed the work as the cameraman went on to another customer. Art may have been the last thing the owners of such studios worried about, but their 25-cent prints were often as good as-and frequently more straightforward than-the fancier products of the more expensive salons.
By the time portrait studios were in full swing in the 1850s, several important technological advances had eased the lot of both the photographer and his patrons. Most important was the fact that retouching had become a standard practice, enabling photographers to satisfy the vanity of the most self-admiring patrons. The Photographic News of London put the case for retouching quite baldly in 1859: "The [retoucher] may correct with his brush defects which, if allowed to remain, spoil any picture. For instance, where a head is so irregular in form as to become unsightly, soften those features which are the most strikingly deformed, and reduce the head to a greater semblance of beauty. Try to discover what good points there are-for all heads have some good points-and give these their full value." The mass of photographers followed such instructions with enthusiasm. What resulted were cosmetic images that revealed little of the character of the sitter.
There were some portrait photographers who refused to retouch and others who limited retouching to backgrounds; among them were some of the most talented men of their time. The earliest of the master portraitists were the Scottish photographers David O. Hill and Robert Adamson. Hill, a painter of some talent, helped to found the Royal Scottish Academy. In 1843 he joined forces with Adamson, a young chemist who had taken up photography. It was Hill's intention to make photographic portrait studies in preparation for a huge group painting he was planning to immortalize some 470 Scottish clergymen and laymen. The two men worked in the calotype process, which Hill characterized as superior to the daguerreotype precisely because of its imperfections. "The rough surface, and unequal texture throughout of the paper," wrote Hill, "is the main cause of the calotype failing in details, before the process of Daguerreotype-and this is the very life of it. [Calotypes] look like the imperfect work of a man-and not the much diminished perfect work of God."
In their photographs Hill and Adamson showed a deep sensitivity to their subjects' characters that is all the more remarkable because of the difficulties they had to overcome. They worked with bulky equipment, slow lenses and light-sensitized papers that required exposures in full sunlight of one or two minutes. Nevertheless, the two photographers managed to pose and direct their subjects in such a way as to produce portraits that have life and spontaneity. In their study of Hugh Miller, for example, they captured the flinty nature of the Scottish character and the strength and determination of the Scottish will in a way that few photographers could match even today.
When Hill completed his camera studies, he returned to brush and palette.
After 23 years of labor, most of it in his spare time, he finished the group portrait-a work that can only be ranked as a giant mediocrity. It is ironic that Hill, who always believed that photography was merely a tool for the painter, found lasting fame for his practIce of the "lesser art," while as a painter his name is all but forgotten.
Another artist who made his mark as a master portrait photographer was the Frenchman Gaspard Felix Tournachon, known to hls contemporaries -and to history-by his adopted name of Nadar. Born in Paris in 1820, Nadar studied medicine and then abandoned it in favor of a career as a protesslonal cari.caturist. As a young man his ambItion was to publish caricatures of every prominent Parisian, and like Hill he turned to photography to record the faces he wished to draw. By 1853, however, Nadar had become so enthusiastic about the artistic possibilities of photography that he all but gave up the pen In favor of the camera and opened his own photographic studio. To this studio flocked the great and near-great, among them the writ ... ers Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas and musicians like Rossini, Berlioz, Wagner and Liszt. Some came to Nadar because of hls reputation for excellence in portrait work, others merely because it was the stylish thing to do. In any case,few who had their portraits taken by the great man himself -rather than by one of his assistants, to whom the lesser celebrities were guided-ever had reason to be disappointed .. Unlike many portrait photographers of the period, Nadar avoided complicated props like pasteboard columns and pretentious lighting. effects in which the subject's head might be haloed by sun streaming into the studio. By the standards of Victorian Europe, Nader's style was simplicity itself, and because as a celebrity in his own right he knew most of the people who came before his camera, he was able to draw from them expressions and poses that are at once relaxed and compelling.
Through the work of Nadar, hlstorlans have gained penetrating insights into the haute monde of the Second Empire and Third RepubUc.In 1859 a French journalist summed up his contribution: "All the artistic, dramatic, political galaxy-in a word the intelUgentsia-of Paris has passed through his studio. The series of portraits that he exhibits is the Pantheon of our generation. Dau.mier meditates. Guizot stands, his hand in his Waistcoat,as severe and cold as if he were waiting for silence in the court before launching into a thundering rebuttal-Co rot smiles as someone asks him why doesn't he finish his landscapes .... The photographer has the right to be called an artist."
At about the same time Nadar was at work in Paris, two amateurs were establishing themselves as talented portraitists in England. One was Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland; the other, a true master of the art, was a gentlewoman named Julia Margaret Cameron. Not surprisingly, Carroll excelled in the portraiture of children. His natural sympathy for them and their problems and his delight in telling them stories undoubtedly helped him put his subjects at ease during the long exposures his large-plate camera required. Like most Victorian photographers, Carroll sought prettiness of detail and soulful expressions. He was, however, no mere imitator of established conventions, and time and time again he ignored the "artistic" modes of his era to produce photographs that are at once romantic and authentic. Alice P. Liddell, the prototype for the Alice of Alice in Wonderland, is revealed deep in thought, her head resting in profile against the back of her chair. It is superb characterization, and one can easily imagine how this little girl with the pensive look could inspire Carroll to flights of literary fancy
Although Carroll was an amateur in the sense that photography was only one of his interests, Julia Margaret Cameron was such only in her lack of interest in selling her pictures. Once she discovered photography, it became the passion of her life. Generally speaking, her works fall into two categories: straight portraiture of superb quality, in which she used the camera to reveal the essential character of her subjects; and illustrative photography, in which the subjects are dressed in the garb of literary or historical figures. The illustrative photographs were very much in tune with Victorian taste. It is her portraits that have brilliantly survived the test of time.
Julia Cameron, the daughter of one British colonial official and the wife of another, was born in India in 1815. After her marriage in 1838 to a man 20 years her senior, she spent another 10 years in India before her husband retired from government service, eventually settling at Freshwater, on the Isle of Wight. Her romance with photography did not begin until she was 48 years old, and then almost accidentally. One of her grown children gave her a camera, thinking this harmless diversion might ease the boredom apt to weigh down a lady of leisure and advancing years. If she had been bored, Julia Cameron never was again. A woman of immense determination, comfortable means and good social connections, she brought to photography,all the enthusiasm and zeal of a religious convert. She even spoke of her work in devotional terms. Referring to her portraits of Britain's literary and artistic elite,she once wrote: "When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has almost the embodiment of a prayer."
While the good lady regarded her photography with reverence" she treated the distinguished visitors at her home more like slaves. No man was too famous, no woman too, frail to be spared Mrs. Cameron's bul.lying until he or she agreed to sit for a portrait. Among those who resisted successfully was the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi,who, while visiting Mrs. Cameron's neighbor and friend Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was accosted by the lady in Tennyson's garden. Not knowing who this interloper was, he simply told her to be gone.
If resisting Mrs. Cameron's plans was painful, sitting for her could be torture. A perfectionist, she would take exposure atter exposure, all the while snapping orders at her subjects. Crown Prince Fredertck of Prussia, whose word was law within his own domains, apparently made the mistake of lowering his glance while sitting for a portrait. As if addressing a careless child, Julia Cameron commanded, "Big eyes! Big eyes!"
Matters were not eased by Mrs. Cameron's technique. Her beli·ef in subdued light and large photographic plates, and her use of long lenses for close-ups (a technique in which she specialized), necessitated exposures that often lasted for several minutes. After each exposure she would disappear into her darkroom to prepare another plate, leaving ·her sitter with firm orders not to move a muscle while she was gone. Even chance acquaintances, if their faces intrigued Julia Cameron, stood little hope of escape. One young lady, asked to pose in the manner of ancient royalty, remembered the occasion years later in an article for a British photographic journal. "The studio ... was very untidy," she reminisced, "and very uncomfortable. Mrs. Cameron put a crown on my head and posed me as the heroic queen. This was somewhat tedious, but not half so bad as the exposure. Mrs. Cameron warned me before it commenced that it would take a long time, adding, with a sort of half groan, that it was the sale difficulty she had to contend with in working with large plates. · . · The exposure began. A minute went over and
I felt as if I must scream; another minute, and the sensation was as if my eyes were coming out of my head; a third, and the back of my neck appeared to be afflicted with palsy; a fourth, and the crown, which was too large, began to slip down my forehead; a fifth-but here I utterly broke down, for Mr. Cameron, who was very aged, and had unconquerable fits of hilarity which always came in the wrong places, began to laugh audibly, and this was too much for my self-possession, and I was obliged to join the dear old gentleman. When Mrs. Cameron. · · bore off the gigantic dark slide with there whose purpose was to endow the musings of the imagination with the mantle of reality. His colleagues and the general public alike eagerly awaited each new photographic offering from the master's studio, and devoured the' truth that came from the master's pen. In his Pictorial Effect in Photography Robinson told his admirers quite straightforwardly: "Any dodge, trick and conjuration of any kind is open to the photographer's use .... It is his imperative duty to avoid the mean, the bare and the ugly, and to aim to elevate his subject, to avoid awkward forms and to correct the unpicturesque .... " Such advice, coming from so famous a photographer, encouraged others to look more than ever to painting for their inspiration rather than to the unique ability of photography to represent the real world.
One who needed no encouragement from Robinson or anyone else was Oscar G. Rejlander, a Swede who moved to England in the 18405 in hopes of establishing his reputation as a portrait painter. As a means toward this end, he took up photography. A resourceful and innovative man-some of his pictures bring to mind Surrealist photographs of the 1920s-Rejlander firmly bel'ieved that photography could beat painting at its own game. Around 1856 he produced some pictorial studies inspired by Raphael's Sistine Madonna, in one of which he had little children fill the role of cherubs. Encouraged by generally favorable criticism, he then conceived of what must be one of the greatest oddities in the history of photography-an exceptionally large composition, measuring 16 by 31 inches, entitled The Two Ways of Life. The allegorical picture, which bears some resemblance to storytelling canvases of the Italian Renaissance, was intended by Rejlander to be a sta.rtling demonstration of the photograph's worth as a full-scale study model on which painters could base their own works .. However, when it was exhibited at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 it was viewed as a work of art in Its own right. The picture shows two youths in Roman garb being introduced to the adult world by their bearded teacher. One youth turns his eyes toward modestly draped figures representing such virtues as Religion, Good Works, Industry and Knowledge, while the other clearly cannot wait to fling himself into the arms of seminude temptresses who symbolize Licentiousness, Wine, Gambling and other vlces. It was a very crowded "canvas," and to produce it Rejlander hired a band of itinerant actors and posed them in small groups for separate photographs. Then, after setting up and photographing an elaborate pseudo-Roman backdrop, he carefully pieced together the 30 negatives to produce the final print.
Although the picture is almost ludicrous in its heavy-handed message, it greatly appealed to the Victorians' sense of morality, and the fact that it was a photograph rather than a painting appealed even more to their newfound love of technology. Many objected to the nudity in the picture, but The Two Ways of Life nevertheless received the ultimate seal of approval: Queen Victoria herself, despite her well-known parsimony, considered 10 guineas a fair enough price to pay for so morally elevating a picture and bought it as a present for her consort, Prince Albert.
In the more fanciful works of Rejlander and Robinson, photography that was derivative of Victorian painting began to burn itself out. Other photographers continued to rake around in the coals, attempting to rekindle their craft in the fire. By the 1880s, however, a new movement was coming to the fore, led by an ex-medical student, Peter Henry Emerson, an Anglo-American whose work would influence photographers in both England and the United States. Emerson was the first to campaign against the stand that "art" photographers had taken. He realized that imitation paintings did not make great photographs, and saw that true photographic art was to be created only by exploitation of the camera's inherent potential: its unique ability to capture in a direct way the essence of the real world. Scorning the stili-popular pictorial school, in article after article he thundered against such practices as composite printing, costumed models, painted backdrops and sentimentalized views of daily life. A man of strong opinions, with language to match, Emerson characterized Robinson's Pictorial Effect in Photography as "the quintessence of literary fallacies and art anachronisms."
Having thus disposed of prevailing tastes, Emerson laid down his own strictures for camera work: simplicity of equipment; no "faking" by lighting, posing, costumes or props; free composition, unfettered by classical formulae ("each picture requires a special composition and every artist treats each picture originally"); complete avoidance of retouching ("the process by which a good, bad or indifferent photograph is converted into a bad drawing or painting"). Emerson maintained that the ingredients for deeply moving, esthetically satisfying pictures were to be found in the lives and the work of common people, in photographs taken not in the studio among theatrical props, but in the farms and fields of Britain. Inhis book Naturalistic Photography, published in 1889, Emerson called for a photographic renaissance in which the contrived and artificial would be replaced by the true and real. Several books of his photographs-containing pictures taken in the Norfolk Broads, a swampy area of England where the author had a houseboat-amply proved his point. Pictures like the one of Norfolk cottages , which examined the world of English country folk, remain to this day classics of their kind.
While Emerson strongly recommended spontaneity in terms of subject matter he was anything but casual on the subject of photographic technique. In the matter of focusing, in particular, he attempted to apply hard-and-fast scientific principles so that the photograph would reproduce a scene as he believed the human eye saw it: sharp at the point of focus, fuzzy at the periphery. Emerson's concentration on technique, it turned out, led him astray. He came to think that every aspect of picture making could be reduced to a set of technical principles and controls-san idea that also appealed to some painters of his time. But when he found there were certain aspects that he could not control to his satisfaction, he entered a period of frustration. Frustration led to despair and despair finally led to denunciation-not just of the principles, but of photography itself. Where but a few years before he was predicting that the challenge of photography would cause the ultimate demise of painting, in 1891 he denounced his own medium as "the lowest of all arts." There was undoubtedly an element of pique in Emerson's renunciation. A volatile and vain man, he could not abide the thought that others, working in the new school of natural realism, were now leading the way toward a new esthetic of photography. Yet he could not destroy what he had already accomplished. Through his earlier writings and photographs, Emerson had greatly influenced a new generation of photographers. He had proclaimed photography as an art in its own right, independent of painting; an art with its own needs, its own laws and its own triumphs. This was to be the art of truth, not the stylized and "ennobling" truth of the pictorialists, but the truth of man and nature, imperfect but real.
