Pictorialism

Pictorialism is an evocative and expressive photographic movement that gathered its strength in the mid-1880s, peaked in the 19oos and persisted into the 1920s. Pictorialist photographers often overlaid large parts of a picture with shadow and fog, in contrast to their simple subjects. The idea of the Pictorialist movement was to focus mainly on the artistic quality of and image rather than the fine details, it was to allow the viewer to look at an image for its visual qualities as opposed to how it was taken.

Here is an example of pictorialism:

Une Balleteuse, 1900
Robert Demachy (French, 1859–1936)
Gum bichromate print

5 5/16 x 5 13/16 in. (13.5 x 14.8 cm)
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933 (33.43.58)

Demachy, R 1900, Une Balleteuse, Heilbrunn Timeline of art history, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, viewed 18 September 2011, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/33.43.58.

HIstory and Evolution of photography

Evolution of photography in the 19^th century:

·         The invention of photography was as 19^th century phenomenon.

·         Who it was that invented photography is commonly disputed.

·         Some of the first images recorded with light-sensitive materials were made by Thomas Wedgwood. These results were published In the Journal of the the royal Institution in 1802 by Sir Humphrey Davy.

·         First attempts by Wedgwood and Davy in creating photos involved laying leaves and paintings on glass upon light sensitive materials such as paper and white leather coated with silver nitrate; they then exposed them to sunlight which darkened the silver.

·         In attempt to keep the images, they eashed the exposed materials without success.

·         Heinrich Schulze discovered the sensitivity of silver nitrate to light rather than to heat.

• Scheele found ammonia would dissolve unexposed silver chloride which permanently fixed silver chloride images. 
• Joseph Nicephore Niépce began his own experiments using paper sensitized with silver chloride. Around 1816 Niépce made printed-out negative images on paper by using a camera obscura and partially fixed with nitric acid. However he was not satisfied with the process and moved on to another light-sensitive material called asphaltum.
• Niépce got involved in etching and lithography.
• Asphalt etching ground was found to be harder to remove with solvents when printing plates were exposed to the sun.
• Lithographic tones and plates of copper, pewter, zinc, and glass were coated with asphaltum dissolved in oil of lavender.
• The prepared plates were covered with an object than exposed to light. Unexposed areas were than dissolved with a solvent, while the hardened exposed areas remained – forming the negative image.
• The plate was then etched with acid. It then became an etching plate for printing in a press. Niépce called these plates heliographs.
• Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre contacted Niépce who was also wanting to secure images by light in a camera. 
•  Niépce and Daguerre went into partnership in 1829. This was for the purpose of their common goal and the fact that Niépce would benefit from Daguerre’s energy and popular success.
• Early 1830s Daguerre and Niépce observed that light would darken polished silver that had been previously exposed to iodine fumes. 
• Niépce used that same technique to darken the exposed portions of heliographs made on polished silver plates. 
• Niépce and Daguerre together developed the physautotype, a variant of the heliograph that used rosin instead of asphalt. This was a slower process but images were superior to the heliograph.
• Experiments began by exposing silver plates fumed with iodine in the back of a camera obscure.

•  Niépce died 1833, leaving his heliograph process unpublished.

• Later Daguerre discovered that the silver iodide plate only required a fraction of the exposure time and that an invisible or latent, image that could be revealed by exposing the plate to mercury fumes.
• Instead of an exposure of hours, this process requires only minutes and the image could be stabilized by treatment in a sodium Chloride bath.
• The resulting image was named a ‘daguerreotype. It was both a positive and a negative depending on the lighting and the angle it was viewed at.
• The image was fixed permanently with sodium thiosulfate, a process that was discovered in 1819 by Sir John Herschel.
• Every daguerreotype was unique. The final image was the very same plate that was in the camera during exposure.
• The use of silver combine with iodine became the basis of every major camera process of the 19^th century, until the introduction of gelatin bromide emulsions used in the manufacture of dry plates and developing- out papers.

• William Henry Fox Talbot began his own experiments with silver chloride in 1834. 

·         His observations led him to discover a way of making the unexposed areas of his images less sensitive. 

• Talbot treated his images in a strong solution of sodium chloride and a dilute potassium iodide or potassium bromide, which resulted in the colours brown, orange, yellow, red, green, and lilac, depending on the chemical and degree of exposure.

·         This process did not actually remove the unexposed silver chloride, so these images were simply “stabilised.”

• Images not exposed to strong light could be preserved for years or used to make a positive image, by contact printing in the sun on a second piece of sensitized paper.

·         By 1839 Talbot had a positive photogenic drawing that was colourful, soft in focus and still relatively sensitive.

·         In 1839 A daguerreotype camera and complete set of processing equipment was manufactured by Giroux.

·         Hippolyte Bayard invented a direct positive process on paper in 1839. This was based on the light bleaching of exposed silver chloride paper with a solution of potassium iodide, then fixed with hypo.

·         In 1839 Mungo Ponton observed that paper soaked in a saturated solution of potassium bichromate was sensitive to light.

·         In the same year, Sir John Herchel made hypo-fixed silver carbonate negatives on paper. He also produced the first silver halide image on glass by precipitating silver chloride onto the surface of a plate and printing out a visible image within a camera.

• Daguerre’s original process of 1839 was too slow to be used comfortably for portraiture.
• Because of the slow lens and optics of the time, the early daguerreotype process was limited to still-life and landscape imagery.
• Introduction of bromine fumes in the sensitising step of the process and the formulation of a faster lens made the process faster.
• In 1840 experimenters discovered that different combinations of chlorine, bromine, and iodine fumes made daguerreotype plates that were more sensitive.
• The bromine fuming procedure eventually became standard practice throughout the daguerreotype era.

·         In 1840 Max Petzval designed a faster lens that would allow for shorter exposures.

·         In 1840 the improvement of gold toning (gilding), extended the range of tones and made the fragile image less susceptible to abrasion.

·         In 1841 Talbot changed his formula to use silver iodide, which was more sensitive than silver chloride. This is the same process used by Daguerre but applied to paper.

• The iodised paper was sensitised with a solution of silver nitrate, acetic acid, and a small amount of gallic acid.
• This new paper was exposed damp and required only a fraction of the time needed to print.

·         In 1851 an improved variant of the calotype called the waxed-paper process was introduces by Gustave Le Gray.

·         By Late 1840s, the daguerreotype process was being used commercially in every industrialized nation of the world.

• A technique perfected in America called galvanizing involved giving the silver plate an additional coating of electroplated silver, making it more sensitive and it provided a better polish giving a wider range of tones.

• In 1847 a new negative process, producing the niépceotype, was published in France by Abel Niépce de Saint Victor. 
• After initial experiments with starch, Niépce de Saint Victor came upon the use of egg albumen as a binder for silver iodide on glass plates. 
• Variants of the same albumen process were simultaneously invented by John Whipple, in Boston, and the Langenheim brothers, in Philadelphia.
• Development of these dry plates was identical to the calotype, but they required much more time. 
• The Niépceotype process was never to be used for portraiture but for landscape and architectural subjects.
• In 1848 Frederick Scott Archer experimented with collodion as a binder for silver halides as a means to improve the calotype. 
• Collodion, from the Greek word meaning “to stick,” was used to describe a colourless fluid made by dissolving nitrated cotton in ether and alcohol. 
• The mid-1850s proved to be a fertile era for both new processes and variants of the collodion process.
• When ferrous sulfate was adopted as the developer and cyanide as the fixer for collodion positives, the plates were more sensitive and the positive images did not require bleaching.
• Experimentation with making preserved or dry collodion plates during the 1850s.
• In the late 1870s collodion emulsions were being used by curious amateurs.
• The typical printed-out solar enlargement took more than an hour of exposure whereas on developed-out salted papers were in minutes.
• Despite the superiority of the carbon process to albumen prints in both tonality and permanence, they were tedious to make.
• The Platinotype Company (est.1879) produced sensitised platinum papers that were favored by a growing movement of artists using photography
• The introduction and eventual acceptance of gelatin emulsion plates, papers, and flexible films in the late 19th century became a technology that was not challenged until digital imaging.
• The use of bromides and alkaline development was to become the key to making fast plates with gelatin emulsions. 
• Gelatin emulsion plates were a hard sell to professional photographers who were used to getting excellent results with the wet collodion process. 
• Many of the problems photographers had with the gelitan plates were due to increased sensitivity. Overexposure was common as photographers were used to using slower collodion plates.
• The concept of flexible film dates back to the calotype and Archer’s initial idea of stripping collodion film from glass plates. 
• Attempts to market paper roll film and sheets of celluloid-based film on a large scale did not succeed until the products were introduced by the Eastman Dry Plate Company in the mid-1880s. 
• The concept of measuring the light or the sensitivity of photosensitive materials dates to the earliest days of photography, but the first reliable sensitometer was invented by Russian-born Leon Warnerke in 1880. 
• Two major innovations that came from sensitometry were the evolution of the instantaneous lens shutter and an attempt to set a numerical standard to the apertures placed in lenses.
• Two systems of aperture standars evolved during the dry-plate period: the f numbering system and the US (uniform system).
• Throughout the 1880s gelatin-emulsion makers were engaged with increasing the sensitivity of their product.
• Increasing the spectral sensitivity was essential to the evolution of colour photography.
• In 1861 James Clerk-Maxwell made a celebrated demonstration of additive color synthesis, generating interest in finding a way to extend sensitivity of collodion plates for full-color photography. 
• In 1869 Ducos Du Hauron patented a procedure in France that relied on red, blue, and green additive dots applied to a sensitized plate. 
• Du Hauron did suggest the subtractive-color process with which he made assembly prints from yellow, cyan, and magenta carbon tissues exposed from additive color-separation negatives as early as 1877.
• By the end of the 19th century more people owned cameras than in the daguerreotype and wet plate eras combined. There was no need to go to a professional studio photographer anymore, even though studios could achieve better results. 
• In the 1890s photographs were common and available in a wide range of sizes on a variety of photographic papers.
• The influence of the impressionists, members of an artistic movement who rethought the role of painting in a world of photography, in turn released a 50-year grip on photographic convention. 
• This allowed the pictorialist movement to redefine what a photograph needed to be. 
• The romantic photographic departures of P. H. Emerson in the 1880s had paved the way for the likes of Clarence White, Gertrude Kasebier, and F. Holland Day in the next decade.
• As a result, the pictorialists’ soft imagery and romantic approach to photography influenced a new direction in commercial portraiture that remained popular for 30 years after the turn of the century.

The Genious of Photography

The Genius of Photography DVD:  Episode 1 'Fixing the Shadows' and Episode 5 'We are Family'

What is Photography for?
To put it simply, photography is used to capture an image or a moment in time. Photography is a tool for many things, like documentation, newspapers, magazines, advertisements, science, forensics etc etc. Photography can be a tool of one’s trade but anyone can capture an image. It is in the way one does this that makes it special.
As said in the dvd, photography turns something that was once random and unimportant before, now into the main focus.  Photography frames a subject and intends the viewer to look at that certain spot saying, 'Look at this'. 'This is special or important'.

Is it art or is it science?
This is a very good question. When i think about it, i think of the scientific elements of photography that would make it impossible to take an image without. Because of the technology that has been developed, it has made capturing an image achievable by anyone, but it is with how they do this that makes it an art.
Some people ask me ‘what so you just take photos?’, when I tell them that I’m studying a photography course. But it’s not as simple as that. To take a great photograph, you need to be able to see creatively, it’s not as simple as just clicking a button.
In the dvd, the question ‘Is it the camera or the Photographer that does all the work?’ arose.  I believe that the answer is both. The photographer works with their equipment to achieve an image of artistic quality.