Unintended Consequences of Photography
saturdayeveningpost.com
saturdayeveningpost.com
For many people a photo was a post-death momento mori. Better to have all your kids in the picture, including the one which just died.
Fox Talbot and D.O. Hill captured some intimate moments on Calotype. Well... psuedo intimate. it was still a long sitting but boozy pals playing cards in Edinburgh. One of D.O.Hill's shots of the charlotte Square streetscape has a ghostly man holding a coach and horses. There long enough to register, but not long enough for the whole exposure.
The painted smile was an unconvincing thing (with the exception of some of Franz Hal's paintings). It was photography which (eventually) showed us what they really looked like.
Robertson-Davies fictionalises some of this in his 'francis cornish' series, the power to re-touch a neg to make someone nicer, or nastier as your fancy took you.
> The first photograph of a human: a man getting his shoes shined on a Parisian street corner, by Louis Daguerre, 1839
I believe there are two humans there, one getting shined and the other doing the shining
In my perception, I see what is probably 80% of a boy’s body, covered only by a thin tall branch of a young tree.
I would definitely not say it is the picture of only one human.
1 http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/priva...
Even with Sufficiently advanced deep fakery they'll never be easier to create those fakes than text and the text is already strongly presumed to be real even if denied.
There’s absolutely no need to portray someone like Daguerre as merely a uninspired technician. I’m genuinely baffled why this is the narrative tack the author took.
From wikipedia:
> Louis Daguerre was born in Cormeilles-en-Parisis, Val-d'Oise, France. He was apprenticed in architecture, theatre design, and panoramic painting to Pierre Prévost, the first French panorama painter. Exceedingly adept at his skill of theatrical illusion, he became a celebrated designer for the theatre, and later came to invent the diorama, which opened in Paris in July 1822.
Furthermore, a lot of historical art, like ceramics was really practical. At the root of it, folks wanted a way to carry around liquids. There's a lot of tricks around clay and glazing to make something. to our modern ears, a silversmith makes jewelry, but really they'd spend a lot of time making forks and spoons and such.
I can't really answer the question "what is art?". but I feel really comfortably saying an artist is someone who tries to pull off a task, the cool way. I know that's vague. But anybody who's good at anything will know there's a way that'll work for sure, and there's another way that's, just, cooler. A flourish of skill that probably no one will ever notice, but is really really neat.
I don't know you, and I don't know your work. But if you ever want to call your self an artist, there's at least one other person out there that would agree with you.
It took me a long time to learn that the process is what making art is about.
If you want more proof, then fly to Bry-Sur-Marne and interrogate everyone there about the provenance of the only existing Daguerre panorama. https://museedebry.fr/#/homepage-daguerre/en
Without some sort of shared anchor, no two people see one scene the same way. A mind constantly predicts and filters things based on prior experience unique to that mind; what we see is heavily shaped by what we expect to see, our current mood, whom we are with, what we did before, what we are smelling, etc. When we stand on a roof of a building and look in the same direction, I see an intricate tangle of colorful pencil towers, you see traffic jams and potholes, she sees that one annoying advertisement billboard, he sees grey polluted air. What color is that sky? Is your blue the same as my blue?
Until mainstream consumer photography, the only way to convey and compare what we see was through words or painting.
Now that we all have cameras in our pockets, anchoring is finally at our disposal. The camera sensor takes in light values beyond what any reproduction medium can handle and fits it into a tiny display-referred space, throwing away any subjectivity as well as a good chunk of colour and dynamic range.
Is this a blessing or a curse? Do we mistakenly believe that a bland JPEG render or film print—designed by camera or film developer to suit the widest possible variety of scenes, and thus fitting almost no scene perfectly (and definitely not geared towards conveying what we actually see)—is what reality is actually like? When we anchor to that, are we unconsciously limiting our perception and imagination?
> Photography Liberated Art
Well, yes and no. But (IMHO) mostly no. Certainly it impacted art to the point where art was obliged to redefine its very function, but I am not sure I would call this a liberation.
My first introduction to this was as a student walking through an exhibition of portraits at the National Gallery London. It had been arranged chronologically, room by room.
The room which featured post-photography painting presented as a punch in the stomach to art. It seemed to lose its confidence, its swagger, it verve. Replacing this was the impression that artists were now huddling in corners, drinking absinth, having deep conversations about art. The paintings were smaller, more self-aware, more experimental (experiments which seemed to work for a while, but which aged very quickly).
Was this a good thing? Some years ago I had one of my eyes removed due to an accident. It changed the way I walk, think and look. I like what I have done with myself since then, how I have developed as an artist, but I wish I still had two eyes.
I don't see "liberal" arts as an art form at all. The moment in which knowledge and craftsmanship are removed from painting, things are just another form of "wishful" thinking.
One of my teachers had a very nice comment on our "modern" artistic endeavors: It's good, but what is it really?
My choice for artistic expression is focused on traditional painting. I study the old masters techniques and have no doubt in my mind, that people will rediscover classical arts in a big way in the next decade.
I am surprised by the “art” = “paintings” association. Photography is also art, and by its addition as a tool to the toolbox, the possibilities definitely increased.
Same goes for audio recordings and music, more techniques definitely broadened the field and we got so much more than what we had before.
I believe (though I may be wrong) that you are using the term as a signifier of esteem (kinda 'this is so good it is art').
I have taught fine art photographers, some of the best in Asia. I have seen no problem calling it art.
I have worked in art schools for 1,000,000 years. Believe me when I say that I have seen just about everything presented as an art work (off the top of my head, public sex performance, vandalism of other people's art, playing football, covering your studio space with excrement etc).
The real question then is: `art or not, is it any good? Does it have value?'
The new medium gave the illusion of capturing reality, because it looked much more realistic than paintings. But in the end it suffered the same biases.
Cinema.
Offset Printing.
Proving Relativity's Theorem with a picture of an Eclipse.
XRays.
Semiconductors and electronics.
Aerial maps.
Micromachines and microsensors.
Music Storage on CDs, DVDs and BluRays...
Romantic love, for one, has inspired artists and caught plain folks off guard for millenia, but our modern understanding of it, the idea of passion as important to love and marriage, a big part of life, and so on, and even particular expressions of it, came from around the 15th century or so, and then was made even more prevalent by books like Werther and early romances and then with movies.
In context of the hugely transformative society of 19th century Europe and America, it is more likely that the emergence of the bourgeoisie and more generally a middle class who, unlike the aristocracy, did not consider the worst off people as suffering the lot allotted to them by God or providence, gave rise to expressions of compassion, equality, etc.. It may even be that thoughts along the lines of "by the grace of god there go I" stirred compassion in their hearts. [Photography then simply was a tool to communicate these thoughts and ideas.]
(edit)
p.s. I also found the assertion about photography and painting rather shaky. They didn't have photographs when this man was painting:
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20140826-the-time-travel...
In some cases (like the ones mentioned in the article), photo documentation can make things "undeniable" in a way that just knowing about some terrible, but far removed, thing cannot.