MODERN LIFE
- In the last decades of the nineteenth century, photography was no longer associates with new and sudden social shifts
- Pictorial photographers occasionally photographed the urban environment, modifying it with a mantle of color or cloud.
- Photographers independent of Pictorioalism also rendered the city and its inhabitants.
- British photographer Paul Martin (1864-1944) recorded street life and seaside entertainment in a casual style associated with the snapshot.
- E. Alice Austen (1866-1952) of Staten Island, New York, photographed the social life of her genteel friends, but also ventured into Manhattan to photograph immigrant life.
- In 1900, over 35 percent of the population in big cities such as New York and Chicago was foreign born.
- Photographers in expanding American cities provided the public with an array of images of the poor.
- Firms such as Underwood and Underwood issued boxed sets of sterepographs depicting immigrants and urban life.
- Social reform photography: British suffragists used photography to record the lives of poor women and children, arguing that giving women the vote would draw more attention to the issue of poverty.
- As social work moved from a voluntary occupation to full-time professional employment, photographs were increasingly used in conjunction with other data.
- Photographs of the poor were still novel and engaging when Jacob Riis ( 1849-1914) produced his book How the Other Half Lives ( 1890), which contained fifteen half-tone images, and forty-three drawings based on photographs.
- Riis implicitly divided the poor into two categories: deserving and underserving.
- Women and small children often fitted the first category, with unemployed and criminally inclined males in the second.
Science and photography
- In 1878, French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) was reading the science journal La Nature when he cane across images derived from photographs taken by Eadweard Muybridge.
- Muybridge's photographs resolved an age-old question for equine experts and painters: do all four legs of the horse leave the ground when the horse moves quickly? To make the photographs, Muybridge lined a raceway with 15-foot-wide sheeting, upon which lines were drawn at 21-inch intervals.
- In the early 1800s, Marey invented a gun-camera like that used by Pierre-Cesar Jules Janssen, with which he made exposures rapid enough to record the bodily movements of a bird in flight.
- He created a camera in which light-sensitive material moved with each exposure.
- Muybrodge recorded the movements of such animals as elks, camels, and elephants.
- DIrectly or indirectly, chronophotographs influenced art.
WAR AND THE REVOLUTION
- Because photographs could be quickly reproduced and generously displayed in the press, the quantity of up-to-the minute war information and imagery consumed by the public escalated.
- The conflict between between Spain, which ruled Cuba, and the United States simmered for several years before American troops were sent into Cuba.
- The Spanish-American War ( April 25- August 12, 1898) was probably the first war filmed by the motion picture camera.
- Despite the public interest in the war, few photographers were assigned to it .
- James Henry Hare (1856-1946) gained a reputation for war photography.
- Hare's Spanish-American War photography significantly increased the magazine's circulation.
- War War I: By War War I, it was clear to military officials that both photographs and news stories should be broadly managed to keep clandestine operations secret, and to keep up spirits at home.
- During the Spanish-American War, newspapers led public opinion in the United States, but during the World War I, governments took the lead.
- Photographers were eventually banned from the western front, causing newspapers and illustrated serials to rely on artists, and on photographs already in stock.
- Press photography was not the only kind made during the war.
- After the war, as the public learned more of its horror, images of the trenches came to epitomize the conflict.