POPULAR PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE AIMS OF ART
Wet Collodion Process
- One of the first technical innovations to happen in the 1850s to revolutionize photography is the invention of collodion.
- Collodion is a sticky substance that allows light sensitive material to be applied to all kind of surfaces
- The collodion was applied to a glass plate which was exposed in the camera.
- This produced a negative, which could be printed to make very sharp prints on paper.
- These prints had more detail like daguerreotypes.
- But they had a larger tonal range since a piece of paper is white and can produce tones from white to black, unlike a shiny piece of metal which can only make grey tones.
- And a glass negative can produce multiple prints.
- An ambrotype is a direct positive process where a glass negative is made in the camera.
- Then the back of the glass is painted black which then makes the image look positive.
- Both ambrotypes and prints from wet collodion negatives opened the door to more cheaply available portraiture
- From the mid-1850s to the early 20th century stereograph cards were very popular
- When you view them it appears that the image is three-dimensional, kind of like stereo glasses to see 3-D movies.
- The first kind we see are stereograph cards.
- These helped turn photography into an industry.
- They were fueled by an ever increasing desire of people to see the world outside of them...exotic foreign locations.
Carte de Visite:
- The carte de visite (abbreviated CDV) was a type of small photograph which was patented in Paris, France by photographer Andre Adolphe Eugene Disderi in 1854.
- In 1854 he patented the system of printing eight photographs on a single sheet by taking eight separate negatives.
- André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri (1819 – 1889) was a French photographer who started his career as a daguerreotypist but who gained greater fame for his invention of the carte de visite, a small photographic image which was mounted on a card.
- Gustave Le Gray, he maintained that he was not a simple operator of photographic equipment but an artist, sensitive to the nuances of personal character as well as rules of composition.
- "What can't be learned," he wrote, "it's the sense of light, it's the artistic appreciation of the effects produced by different and combined qualities of light."
- As photography lost its novelty, it gained both adherents and detractors, and they often focused on the relationship of photography to art and culture.
- High art photography strove to instruct viewers in moral values and refined sympathies by utilizing themes and ideas from other media, such as poetry and painting.