The Invention of Photography: the First Fifty Years

Read a neat little paperback The Invention of Photography: the First Fifty Years, by Quentin Bajac (published 2002, Thames & Hudson, translated from French.

Bajac worked as a curator at Musee D’Orsay from 1995 and organised many exhibitions of early photography. This paperback is illustrated with some iconic images I have seen before but also has many I haven’t. From the work of early pioneers such as Daguerre to the arrival of the Kodak camera which made photography accessible to the masses, it is a fascinating short history.

I hadn’t realised that the first Kodak camera arrived as early as 1888, or that so many distant countries, such as China, were photographed, or that even then street photography featured among the pioneering photographers. I am trying to get hold of a copy of John Thomson’s Street Life in London (1877-8). This book gives me a taster and I want to see more.

To order you own copy of this book, go to
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Invention-Photography-First-Fifty-Horizons/dp/0500301115


chosen iconic image

Photo of : Pierrot photographe dit aussi
Le mime Deburau avec un appareil photographique.
[Pierrot the photographer also called.
The mime Deburau with a camera]
By Félix Nadar


In the autumn of 1854 or the winter of 1854-1855, Nadar, who had brought his young brother Adrien into his business, asked the mime Charles Deburau (1829-1873) from the Théâtre des Funambules to pose for a series of "têtes d'expression". Deburau was the son of the famous Baptiste Deburau, the model for Jean-Louis Barrault's rôle in Marcel Carné's film Les enfants du Paradis (1945).
Then, with the help of an influential friend, Félix Nadar exhibited this series of photographs at the Universal Exhibition of 1855 and won a gold medal for them. However, it was awarded not to Félix but to Adrien, who had taken his brother's professional name, calling himself Nadar jeune. This prompted a lawsuit which Félix finally won in 1857.

The portrait of Pierrot as a photographer is the first in the Deburau album. It was the perfect introduction to the series intended to promote Nadar's studio. The star is shown alongside a camera which he seems to be operating. His left hand is telling the model to look at the lens and not at him. With his right hand, he is taking out a plate.
The long tripod on this camera gives it an anthropomorphic look, and it becomes a strange stage companion to the clown. And this couple, man and machine, seems to be a reflection of Nadar, bustling around his own camera. One can imagine the plate in Pierrot's hand containing an undeveloped portrait of Nadar at work, just as the plate taken out by Nadar contains the image we see here. Thus each becomes the photographer and the model of the other. This confusion of identities is in the best tradition of the Commedia dell'arte.

RED OR DEAD?

Many press and sports photographers are now given high definition video cameras, in addition to digital slrs, to help ensure they never miss that great moment. They can produce professional stills from video of an exact moment which, up to now, has been a question of skill, judgement and timing.
News photographers have bridged this technological gulf more easily than other professionals. The image may be a lower resolution than shooting RAW on a dslr but the results are good enough for newspapers, where the images are relatively low resolution compared to professional prints or magazine photos. Photographers also increasingly provide video for newspaper websites and so often have a camcorder at hand.

While the traditionalists are still debating the merits of film versus digital, surely the more pressing issue is video versus stills. Most dslrs are already capable of taking videos and it won’t be long before the video quality is as good as their still shots. But specialist motion picture cameras, not much bigger than a digital slr with grip, are now able to produce photographs of excellent quality to rival most dslr cameras.
The Red One, for example, costs $25,000 and has picture resolution five times that of a high definition video camera. Red One has already been used to shoot movies - The Social Network and Pirates of the Caribbean are just two. Vogue and Esquire have already featured cover photographs taken on a Red. Cinematographers and rental studios around the world are increasingly advertising their experience with the camera.

Red has now launched Red Scarlet, which retails around $4-6000. It can’t be called a video camera. A motion picture camera would be more accurate. It shoots RAW and is not a video stream. It can be operated wirelessly from around 100 yards away. It stills are as good as those taken on a dslr.
Where does this leave the photographer? I think it is adapt or die. If you can’t handle both a camera like Red and a dslr, someone else will and they will get that amazing sports, press or wildlife shot that you just missed. As technology convergences go, the union of still and video imagery feels inevitable. A moving picture, whether on digital video or film, is after all just a series of still images. Will cameramen be photographers and photographers cameramen? I think so, and sooner rather than later.
for more information on red cameras , please take a look at the website :

http://www.red.com/
or
http://www.red.com/products

Below are examples of stills from a Red camera, Red camera footage
found on :http://fwdlabs.com/blog/red-one-camera_experience/

ART - WHAT IS IT

Everything is "art"- the public.
All things called "art" by connoisseurs - the expert.
All things I call "art" - the self.
All things called "art" by artists - museums /gallery.
All things that common sense tells us is "art" - discriminations of common sense.
All things that have intrinsic properties of "art" - qualities of objects.
All things that cause an artistic reaction in the viewer.
From This Means This This Means That, A Beginners Guide to Semiotics, Sean Hall 2007


1.The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.

2.Works produced by such skill and imagination

3.Creative activity resulting in the production of paintings, drawings, or sculpture

4.The various branches of creative activity, such as painting, music, literature, and dance

5.Subjects of study primarily concerned with the processes and products of human creativity and social life, such as languages, literature, and history (as contrasted with scientific or technical subjects)

6.A skill at doing a specified thing, typically one acquired through practice

The six bullets points above are from googles definition of art, but for me, art can be anything you want it to be, from painting, drawing , photography,sculpture theatre, music and many more.

an example of street art

Modernism vs Postmodernism

Post modernism in its theoretical aspect claims to perceive a break in culture between its modernist past and a range of new ideas that have come to the surface in the period since 1945- through the origins of this break may go further back, nearly to the origins of modernism itself.
The term: post modernism now has established within film, within architecture, within music and even within literature; which are defined in partly parallel but partly diverging ways. When looking at post modern art , a critique must depend not upon theory - or too much of it, but upon an examination of how modernism has flourished empirically in the world.


Postmodern art is a term used to describe an art movement which was thought to be in contradiction to some aspect of modernism, or to have emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as Intermedia, Installation art, Conceptual Art and Multimedia, particularly involving video are described as postmodern. The traits associated with the use of the term postmodern in art include bricolage, use of words prominently as the central artistic element, collage, simplification, appropriation, a return to traditional themes and techniques as a rejection of modernism, depiction of consumer or popular culture and Performance art.
Modern art includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era.
The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation.
Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh ideas about the nature of materials and functions of art. A tendency toward abstraction is characteristic of much modern art.
Modern art begins with the heritage of painters like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat and Henri de Toulouse Lautrec all of whom were essential for the development of modern art.

Research from MODERNISM POST-MODERNISM REALISM: A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE FOR ART BY BRANDON TAYLOR
PAGES- 6,7,8,12,40,122,123

Brassai :PARIS AT NIGHT

I found a book in a second-hand shop ‘The Secret Paris of the 30s’, by Brassai. First published in 19333 as ‘Paris de Nuit’ and later in Britain, it is full of remarkable images of Parisian nightlife. Some are daring for their time: he photographed whores, brothels and opium dens.
Brassai was first in Paris in the 1920s, where he lived by night, going to bed at sunrise and getting up at sunset, wandering the city from Montparnasse to Montmartre.
In his book, he said that even though he had ignored and disliked photography before his night wanderings, he was inspired to become a photographer by his desire to translate all the things that enchanted him in the nocturnal Paris he was experiencing.
His text is every bit as fascinating as the pictures – he would go into buildings in areas of Paris not many people would venture into, knock on doors and ask if he could photograph them. Often he would frighten the locals – night photography was so uncommon. ‘But oddly enough, doors were almost always opened to me, and I never got shot at, as might have happened, for disturbing a nocturnal household.’
He admits to being arrested by the police three times – once when they refused to believe anyone might want to take pictures by the canal at 3am. He carried some prints of night shots with him, just to prove it could be done.
He uncovered a secret world, not of just night workers, but of love, vice, crime and drugs. Sometimes treated with suspicion, other times asked to leave a bar or club, Brassai managed to get behind the walls, to see a different side to Paris. He befriended people on inner circles where he could – ‘I hung out, made myself as invisible as I could’. He tried to gain the trust of naturally suspicious people, usually on the wrong side of the law.
Being invisible, capturing the moment in true photojournalistic style was difficult as he was working with plate cameras but whether the shot is posed or capturing a private moment, a view from the attic room or a street scene, Brassai’s images are wonderful and arresting, telling a story we wouldn’t otherwise know.

Robert Frank

Robert Frank was born, wealthy and Jewish, in 1924, in Zurich. He made his way to the USA in 1947, where Alexei Brodovitch of Harper’s Bazaar, took him on as a fashion photographer. But it wasn’t for Frank.as his felt there was no real spirit to the work. Instead, he went to Peru, Paris, London, Spain and Wales, taking photographs as he travelled. He constructed home-made books of his pictures. In 1955, encouraged by Walker Evans – the photographic chronicler of the rural American Depression – he applied for a Guggenheim scholarship to make and photograph a journey across the United States.

He spent two years looking for things that, he said, were easily found but not easily selected and interpreted. He drove some 10,000 miles across the US, often with his wife and two small children. He used at least 760 rolls of film, mostly Kodak Tri-X – which had come on the market only six months earlier. He took 28,000 photographs.
In 1958, he published The Americans, a distillation of his journey. The book made his name and reputation. It contained just 83 photographs, each on its own right-hand page, with captions at the back of the book. He photographed bars, drive-ins, elevators, crucifixes, offices, factories, department stores and coffee shops, political conventions, urinals, cemeteries, roads.

The car window as framing device is perhaps his most distinctive formal innovation. A lot of images are lopsided, taken in low light, with intentional blur and fuzziness, they are in complete contrast to other contemporary photographers, such as Irving Penn.
The work did not appeal to many who thought it a degradation of the nation (Aperture Magazine) but in time, most people saw it as non-judgemental and realistic: a view of modern American.

After the book was published, Frank practically gave up photography and went on to make movies and documentaries and experimented with Polariod but he never achieved the reputation for greatness that his photography had bought him.

http://www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/382

John Stezaker collages exhibition in London

British artist creates collages from found photographs, vintage postcards and book illustrations
John Stezaker;s work was shown at The Whitechapel Gallery in March. The images, which are comprised of found photographs, movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations, are designed to give new meaning to the original work.
The show includes over 90 works ranging from the 1970s until today, including the 'Mask' series fusing together the profiles of glamorous sitters with caves, hamlets or waterfalls.
The 'Dark Star' series turns publicity portraits into cut-out silhouettes, while the 'Third Person Archive' removes single figures from travel illustrations and presents them on their own.
British artist John Stezaker was born in Worcestor and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

for more information check out http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/john-stezaker-whitechapel-art-gallery-london-2198232.html

Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall is arguably the most important photographer working today. Phaidon recently published a book showcasing 1,000 masterpieces from more than 30,000 years of art history. It contained only one photographer. Rather than Atget, Brassaï or Cartier-Bresson, the experts editing the book chose Wall. Wall was born in 1946 in Vancouver, where he lives and works today.
Jeff Wall has had retrospective exhibitions at London’s Tate Modern and New York's Museum of Modern Art. He recently had a show at White Cube Mason's Yard, consists of three large-scale colour transparencies mounted on aluminium light-boxes, of the kind that Wall has been making since the late 1970s, and six black-and-white photographs. All the pieces have been created in the past year or so, and are priced between £100,000 and £400,000.
One image I really like is ‘Dressing Poultry’, in which three women process chicken carcasses in a cluttered barn on a small farm near Vancouver. The women laugh as they go about their gory business, loading headless chickens into an old plucking machine, before transferring their corpses to a table. To the left, hunks of pink and pimply flesh hang from a rope. He paid farm hands let to him document their work over several days.
Although famous for grand tableaux, which he shoots in sections over several months before stitching together the final image using computer montage, for this he did not digitally manipulate the image but still took several hundred shots. But in this case, he paid the farm-hands to let him document their work.
I like his heightened sense of the surreal – the happy women with dead chickens and it seems to almost present a vision of hell, with the detrius of modern life, like a Bruegel painting. It is his sense of form that means critics have placed his work not only in context of the history of photography but of art.
Much of his work records everyday objects and people but not in a grand way. A bar of soap in a dirty sink, a takeaway carton, it seems to represent everyday life of people and objects that are disposable, that have been discarded and thrown out as rubbish. They are not happy pictures but are often a depressing representation of the bottom of the heap.

Dressing Poultry (2007) by Jeff Wall

Eve Arnold

To Chris Beetles new gallery in Swallow Street for the Eve Arnold Exhibition. John Bulmer, John Hilleston (who ran Magnum UK) were there as was Eve Arnold herself.
Arnold was born in 1912 in Philadelphia, to immigrant Russian-Jewish parents. She started taking photographs in 1946, using a $40 Rolleicord camera. She went onto to study with Alexey Brodovitch, photographer and art director of Harper’s Bazaar, at the New School for Social Research in New York.
In 1951, she was the first woman to be associated with Magnum, becoming a full member of this photographers’ co-operative in 1957. She moved to UK in 1962 and when the Sunday Times launched its weekly magazine, became one of its main photographers. She has published many books of her work and received an OBE in 2003.
The exhibition was mainly black and white prints (only two in colour) and included many of Marilyn Monroe on film sets on her own or with other film stars, mixed with some of migrants on long island or a brothel in Cuba.
What is striking, especially with the photographs of film stars, is how they seem so candid and the subjects so unaware of Arnold. With the exception of a few that are posed, they record private moments, with the actors not seeming to notice her presence.
The fact that the film star shots were on sale at £10-18,000 did make me wonder whether, if the actors and actresses were unknown, they would be worth as much. I think a better photograph was that of the mentally ill girl in Haiti. It was ‘only’ £800.

Marilyn Monroe, going over her lines for a scene in the misfits, nevada,1960

Marilyn Monroe, Photo session, hollywood , 1955

http://overhereplease.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/a-photograph-that-made-me-think-the-work-of-eve-arnold/

Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2010 winner

To the National Portrait Gallery to see the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2010. It was won by David Chancellor for his portrait, Huntress with Buck, of 14 year old Josie Slaughter from Alabama on her first hunting trip to South Africa. Chancellor said that it was slightly unreal light and he liked the contrast between the peace and tranquility of the location, Josie’s ethereal beauty and the dead buck, It shows vulnerability and yet also strength.’ Chancellor spent two days with the Josie and her family, shooting Kodak 160VC 120 film on a Mamiya 7 II camera. One striking quality is the light, which has a painterly quality, which I like.

After an unfulfilling early career in banking, Chancellor studied photography at Kent Institute of Art and Design. Now based in both London and Cape Town, he shoots documentary reportage and portraiture for a range of clients, and was named Nikon Press Photographer of the Year three times, and won a World Press Photo Award in 2010. He has also had work shown in last year’s Taylor Wessing Prize., The judges selected 60 portraits for the exhibition from nearly 6000 submissions entered by 2,401 photographers from around the world.

wildlife photography exhibition

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition, Natural History Museum.
An amazing show of photographs from around the world. What was interesting is that a, you could not really tell which were in the under 15s section and which were adult, and b,which were amateur and which were professional.
It seems there are two sorts of wildlife photographers: those in the right place at the right time and quick enough to react when they see something hapopening, and those with amazing patience who just wait and wait for the right moment when a creature appears or jumps or looks at the camera. Obviously, in the latter the photographer has already assessed light direction but that doesn’t negate the rapid ability they need to react by pushing the shutter. The exhibiton had shots of wildlife most people will never see, in places they will never go, making many images memorable.

Winner
Bence Máté (Hungary)
A marvel of ants
When Bence first tried to photograph leaf-cutter ants in action, he thought it was going to be easy. It wasn't - he spent hours watching and following them in the Costa Rican rainforest. 'They proved to be wonderful subjects,' says Bence interview in the exhbition catalogue. He discovered that the ants were most active at night. He would follow a column as it fanned out into the forest. Each line terminated at a tree, shrub or bush. 'The variation in the size of the pieces they cut was fascinating - sometimes small ants seemed to carry huge bits, bigger ones just small pieces.' Of his winning shot, he says, 'I love the contrast between the simplicity of the shot itself and the complexity of the behaviour.' Lying on the ground to take the shot, he also discovered the behaviour of chiggers (skin-digesting mite larvae), which covered him in bites.
Nikon D700 + 105mm f2.8 lens; 1/200 sec at f10; ISO 640; SB-800 flash.

Winners: Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year
Fergus Gill (United Kingdom)
The frozen moment
On Boxing Day 2009, it was so cold in Scotland (-17°C /1°F) that the birds were desperate for food. A rowan tree at the bottom of Fergus's garden in Perthshire became a magnet for thrushes - five of the six British species - song thrushes, mistle thrushes, blackbirds, redwings and a flock of about 15 fieldfares, all frantically picking the berries. Fergus wanted to capture the freezing feel of the day while showing the character of fieldfares in action, some of which were hovering to pluck berries. His biggest challenge (other than the cold itself) was to isolate a fieldfare against a clear background, and the only way to get the angle was to stand on his frozen pond. Risking a high ISO setting as well as the ice, he caught both the moment and the delicacy of colour he was after.
Nikon D300 + 500mm f4 lens; 1/500 sec at f4; ISO 800; Manfrotto 680B monopod + 293 tripod head.

Terry O'Neills Show @ Chris Beetles

To Terry O’Neill’s show at the Chris Beetles Gallery, called 50 Years At The Top. A bubbly, enthusiastic man, he said that he was very lucky – lucky to have been working in the 60s and 70s, ‘when it was all happening’, lucky to be able to use 35mm, when no one else was in Hollywood, lucky that it was before the days of PRs having total control over celebrities. Today, he says, there is no-one around today he particularly wants to photograph and no great magazines like Life or Paris Match to publish them. He said that with photography, composition is all, followed by light.
‘But composition is key. For instance in a portrait of Terry Stamp with his then girlfriend, Jean Shrimpton, I thought their faces represented the 60s, so I wanted to take a portrait to sum this up. I wanted a really strong portrait. That’s what I mean about composition, you have to have the bravery to say what you want to say and put it on film. You can’t teach that.’
‘Some of my best shots I caught with just one frame, perhaps two. You just shoot and it wasn’t until you got them developed you see what you have got, whether you have caught the moment.’

Mainly using black and white film, O’Neill’s photographs are brilliantly composed, sometimes breaking the 2/3rds rules (as with his shot of Twiggy), sometimes posed (Raquel Welsh on the cross) or capturing a quick moment in time (Bardot with cigar), which he took on the last frame he had in his camera. O’Neill evidently acts very quickly and instinctively to catch the moment and his instinct tells him when the composition and light is right. They are all very powerful photographs, showing the settings and personality of the subjects. The end results are always more than the sum of their parts.

photo from : DRAMA! Legendary photographer,
Terry O'Neill, makes off with our Irving Penn!. -

Terry O'Neill
Jean Shrimpton & Terrence Stamp, London , 1963
20x24 inch paper
silver gelatin print