Hacker News Reader

Comment by BelleOfTheBall | Hacker News Reader

Wow, those are insanely good. “Infinitude,” 1910, in particular, looks like a painting, sort of reminds me of "Isle of the Dead" by Böcklin. It has that same eerie mood and feel. "Heart of the Storm" is a straight-up homage to old epic classicist works. I never knew old photography could be this visually striking.

View on HN

This is fairly common in early photographs. I think it is partially because many early photographers were painters originally and carried the insights of that practice over to the way they took photographs, and partially because paintings were the main frame of reference of medium to emulate.

I think the early history of photography is really interesting, in that artists and philosophers were arguing about it as long ago as the middle of the 19th century.

To some it mechanised art in a good way and allowed 'mass production' - e.g. of portraits for people who couldn't afford an artist. To others this was of course a bad thing. Others liked the apparent objectivity of photography - 'the camera never lies'.

I read Susan Sontag's On Photography many years ago and would love to see an updated version that takes account of our current image-saturated world.

The composition in Infinitude reminds me strongly of Maxfield Parrish

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxfield_Parrish

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Sear...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com