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Fine art photography
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fine art photography refers to photographs that are created to fulfill the creative vision of the artist. Fine art photography stands in contrast to photojournalism and commercial photography. Photojournalism provides visual support for stories, mainly in the print media. Commercial photography's main focus is to sell a product or service.
The final creative reason for a fine art photograph is the photograph itself. It is not a means to another end, except perhaps to please those besides the photographer who beholds it.
Fine art photography is created primarily as an expression of the artist’s vision, but has also been important in advancing certain causes. The work of Ansel Adams' in Yosemite and Yellowstone provides an example. Adams is one of the most widely recognized fine art photographers of the 20th century, and was an avid promoter of conservation. While his primary focus was on photography as art, his work raised public awareness of the beauty of the Sierra Nevada mountains and helped to build political support for their protection.
Successful attempts to make fine art photography can be traced to Victorian era practitioners such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, and Oscar Gustave Rejlander and others.
Until the late 1970s several genres predominated; nudes, portraits, natural landscapes (exemplified by Ansel Adams). Breakthrough 'star' artists in the 1970s and 80s, such as Sally Mann and Robert Mapplethorpe, still relied heavily on such genres, although seeing them with fresh eyes. Others investigated a snapshot aesthetic approach.
Throughout the twentieth century, there was a noticeable increase in the size of prints. Small delicate prints in thin frames are now a rarity, and hi-gloss wall-sized prints are common. There is now a tendency to dispense with a frame and glass altogether and instead to print onto blocked canvas.
American organizations, such as the Aperture Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art, have done much to keep photography at the forefront of the fine arts.
Current trends:
There is now a trend toward a careful staging and lighting of the picture, rather than hoping to "discover" it ready-made. Photographers such as Cindy Sherman and Gregory Crewdson, among others, are noted for the quality of their staged pictures. Additionally, new technological trends in digital photography has opened a new direction in full spectrum photography, where careful filtering choices across the ultraviolet, visible and infrared lead to new artistic visions.
Black and white photo of an old split rail fence.According to Art Market Trends 2004 (PDF link) 7,000 photographs were sold in auction rooms in 2004, and photographs averaged a 7.6 percent annual price rise from 1994 and 2004. Around 80 percent were sold in the USA. Of course, auction sales only record a fraction of total private sales.
As printing technologies have improved since around 1980, a photographer's art prints reproduced in a finely-printed limited-edition book have now become an area of strong interest to collectors. This is because books usually have high production values, a short print run, and their limited market means they are almost never reprinted. The collector's market in photography books by individual photographers is developing rapidly.
The Library of Congress
1600s Camera Obscura
Hundreds of years ago, artists discovered the camera obscura. They noticed that light coming through a keyhole into a dark room casts an inverted image on the wall. They built a camera obscura by setting a lens into a two-foot square box and placing a sheet of glass opposite the opening. Through the camera frame, the artist saw the view which he or she wished to draw. The artist then traced the image reflected on the glass frame. In this way, artists used an early form of a camera picture to give their drawings realistic perspective and detail.
1826 - Early Experimentation: Heliographs
Joseph Nicephore Niepce of France invented heliographs or sun prints. This was the first experiment which created a prototype of the photograph, removing the artist's hand from the creation of the image and letting light draw the picture. Niepce placed an engraving onto a metal plate coated in bitumen, and then exposed it to light. The shadowy areas of the engraving blocked light, but the whiter areas permitted light to react with the chemicals on the plate. When Niepce placed the metal plate in a solvent, gradually an image, until then invisible, appeared.
1839 - The Invention of Photography
On a trip to Paris, Niepce visited the painter and theatrical set designer, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, and showed him the heliographs. Daguerre was intrigued by the invention, and the two men became partners in photographic experimentation. Unfortunately, Niepce died four years later.
In 1839, Daguerre invented a process which 'fixed' the images onto a sheet of silver-plated copper. He polished the silver and coated it in iodine, creating a surface that was sensitive to light. Then, he put the plate in a camera and exposed it for a few minutes. After the image was painted by light, Daguerre bathed the plate in a solution of silver chloride. This process created a lasting image, one that would not change if exposed to light. When set next to a black velvety surface, the metal plate reflected the shadowy areas of the picture and the light areas seemed illuminated. The Daguerreotype rendered details with mirror-like accuracy. See American's First Look at the Camera: Daguerreotype Portraits and Views, 1839-1864, for examples.
At the same time, Henry Fox Talbot, an English botanist and mathematician, invented a similar technique. He sensitized paper to light with a silver salt solution. Talbot placed an object such as a leaf or lace onto the paper and then exposed it to sunlight. The background became black, and the subject was rendered in gradations of grey. This was a negative image, and from the negative, photographers could now duplicate the image as many times as they wanted. Talbot made contact prints of this image, reversing the light and shadows to create a detailed picture. In 1841, he perfected this paper-negative process and called it a calotype, from the Greek, meaning "beautiful picture."
News of Daguerre's and Talbot's discoveries sparked the curiosity of the scientist and astronomer, Sir John F.W. Herschel. He perfected the process of 'fixing' the negative image in 1839. Herschel bathed the negative in sodium thiosulfite to dissolve the silver salts, so that they would not react with light any longer, and the image became permanent. He also coined the name for these processes--photography, or "writing with light." Soon, photographers around the world used Daguerreotypes and calotypes to record architecture and nature with finite detail, to document historic events, and to create painterly portraits of literary and social figures.
1850s - Cartes de visites
Throughout the 1850s, paper, lenses, and cameras improved. These advancements made it easier for the general public to become involved in photography. Tintypes and cartes de visites were small pictures on iron frames or paper. Since they were inexpensive to make, they became popular ways to carry pictures of scenic views, families, and individuals. These were some of the first snapshots! See an example of a carte de visite of William Henry Jackson from the History of the American West, 1860-1920, Photographs from the Collection of the Denver Public Library.
1851 - The Glass Negative
In 1851, Frederick Scoff Archer, an English sculptor, invented the wet plate. Using a viscous solution of collodion, he coated glass with light-sensitive silver salts. Because it was glass and not paper, this wet plate created a more stable and detailed negative. However, the wet plate needed to be developed and fixed before it dried. In order to process the pictures quickly, the photographer had to carry a portable darkroom, with cumbersome black boxes, trays and tongs, bottles of chemistry and fragile glass plates, everywhere he or she went.
1860s -
Photography enabled artists to create a representation of the physical world that was faithful to reality, but it was also seen as another medium for rendering allegories and works of art that followed the traditions of painting. Julia Margaret Cameron purposely blurred the image, using radiant lighting and soft focus to evoke the spiritual quality of the subject. She employed this method whether photographing social figures such as Lord Alfred Tennyson and Charles Darwin or portraying allegories with models that were often family members. Lewis Carroll photographed Alice Grace Weld, his friend and the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland, dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood. Henry Peach Robinson combined several negatives to re-enact dramatic scenes in myths and stories.
1870s - Capturing Motion
In 1869, Edward Muybridge invented a way to freeze motion. He created a shutter inside the camera: two boards slipping past each other at the touch of spring. The film recorded the actions that took place during the split-second when the shutter was open. Muybridge did a series' films on motion, photographing men vaulting over poles, and horses galloping on a track. His work not only assisted artists in studying anatomical form in motion, but it was also a precursor to motion pictures. See A Sneeze Caught on Film, in the American Treasures Exhibit of the Library of Congress.
1880s - Technological Advancements: The Dry Plate and The Hand-held Camera
In 1879, experiments resulted in the dry plate, a glass negative plate with a dried gelatin emulsion. Dry plates could be stored for a period of time. Photographers no longer needed the cumbersome and time-consuming portable darkroom. In fact, photographers began hiring technicians to develop their photographs, and the art of photo finishing was born. In addition, dry processes absorbed light quickly so rapidly in fact that the tripod could be stored in the closet and the camera held in the hand. With the speed of the film and the influx of hand-held cameras, action shots became more feasible.
In 1888, George Eastman, a dry plate manufacturer in Rochester, NewYork, invented the Kodak camera. For $22.00, an amateur could purchase a camera with enough film for 100 shots. After use, it was sent back to the company, which then processed the film. The ad slogan read, "You press the button, we do the rest." (A year later, the delicate paper film was changed to a plastic base, so that photographers could do their own processing.)
1880s-1890s - Pictorialism vs. Naturalism
Pictorialists, such as Gertrude Kasebier and Alvin Coburn, took photographs that imitated the style of paintings. Using symbols, shimmering light, and soft focus to create impressionistic dots and streaks, pictorialists depicted a world that was one step removed from reality. H. Emerson attacked pictorialism, calling it a 'high art' and 'artificial', and stated that photography was an independent art form that did not have to imitate painting.
Naturalist photographers were captivated by photography's capacity to render the world with mirror-like accuracy. William Henry Jackson traveled miles over back-breaking terrain to document the crystal mountain peaks and black lakes of hitherto unknown reaches of the American landscape. He was the first person to photograph Old Faithful Geyser in Yellowstone Park, and his work helped to preserve some of America's wilderness.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Conception of permanent images
Monochrome process
First known photograph, taken by Nicéphore Niépce in 1825 by the heliograph process. The image is of a 17th Century Flemish engraving showing a man leading a horse.
"Boulevard du Temple", taken by Louis Daguerre in late 1838 or early 1839, was the first-ever photograph of a person. It is an image of a busy street, but because exposure time was over ten minutes, the city traffic was moving too much to appear. The exception is a man in the bottom left corner, who stood still getting his boots polished long enough to show up in the picture.
Robert Cornelius, self-portrait, Oct. or Nov. 1839, approximate quarter plate daguerreotype. The back reads, "The first light picture ever taken." This self-portrait is the first portrait image of a human ever produced.The first permanent photograph was an image produced in 1825 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce on a polished pewter plate covered with a petroleum derivative called bitumen of Judea. Produced with a camera, the image required an eight-hour exposure in bright sunshine. Bitumen hardens with exposure to light. The unhardened material may then be washed away and the metal plate polished, rendering a negative image which then may be coated with ink and impressed upon paper, producing a print. Niépce then began experimenting with silver compounds based on a Johann Heinrich Schultz discovery in 1724 that a silver and chalk mixture darkens when exposed to light.
In partnership, Niépce (in Chalon-sur-Saône) and Louis Daguerre (in Paris) refined the existing silver process.[4] In 1833 Niépce died of a stroke, leaving his notes to Daguerre. While he had no scientific background, Daguerre made two pivotal contributions to the process. He discovered that exposing the silver first to iodine vapour before exposure to light, and then to mercury fumes after the photograph was taken, could form a latent image. Bathing the plate in a salt bath then fixes the image. On January 7, 1839 Daguerre announced that he had invented a process using silver on a copper plate called the daguerreotype.[5] A similar process is still used today for Polaroid photos. The French government bought the patent and immediately made it public domain.
In 1832, French-Brazilian painter and inventor Hercules Florence had already created a very similar process, naming it Photographie.
After reading about Daguerre's invention, Fox Talbot worked on perfecting his own process; in 1839 he got a key improvement, an effective fixer, from John Herschel, the astronomer, who had previously showed that hyposulfite of soda (also known as hypo, or now sodium thiosulfate) would dissolve silver salts. Later that year, Hershel made the first glass negative.
By 1840, Talbot had invented the calotype process. He coated paper sheets with silver chloride to create an intermediate negative image. Unlike a daguerreotype, a calotype negative could be used to reproduce positive prints, like most chemical films do today. Talbot patented[6] this process, which greatly limited its adoption. He spent the rest of his life in lawsuits defending the patent until he gave up on photography. Later George Eastman refined Talbot's process, which is the basic technology used by chemical film cameras today. Hippolyte Bayard had also developed a method of photography but delayed announcing it, and so was not recognized as its inventor.
In 1851 Frederick Scott Archer invented the collodion process.[citation needed] Photographer and children's author Lewis Carroll used this process.[citation needed]
Slovene Janez Puhar invented the technical procedure for making photographs on glass in 1841.[citation needed] The invention was recognized on July 17, 1852 in Paris by the Académie Nationale Agricole, Manufacturière et Commerciale.
Herbert Bowyer Berkeley experimented with his own version of collodian emulsions after Samman introduced the idea of adding dithionite to the pyrogallol developer.[citation needed] Berkeley discovered that with his own addition of sulfite, to absorb the sulfur dioxide given off by the chemical dithionite in the developer, that dithionite was not required in the developing process. In 1881 he published his discovery. Berkeley's formula contained pyrogallol, sulfite and citric acid. Ammonia was added just before use to make the formula alkaline. The new formula was sold by the Platinotype Company in London as Sulpho-Pyrogallol Developer.
Nineteenth-century experimentation with photographic processes frequently became proprietary. The German-born, New Orleans photographer Theodore Lilienthal successfully sought legal redress in an 1881 infringement case involving his "Lambert Process" in the Eastern District of Louisiana.
Popularization
(c. 1893)The daguerreotype proved popular in responding to the demand for portraiture emerging from the middle classes during the Industrial Revolution.[citation needed] This demand, that could not be met in volume and in cost by oil painting, added to the push for the development of photography. By 1851 a broadside by daguerreotypist Augustus Washington was advertising prices ranging from 50 cents to $10.[8] However, daguerreotypes were fragile and difficult to copy. Photographers encouraged chemists to refine the process of making many copies cheaply, which eventually led them back to Talbot's process.
Ultimately, the modern photographic process came about from a series of refinements and improvements in the first 20 years. In 1884 George Eastman, of Rochester, New York, developed dry gel on paper, or film, to replace the photographic plate so that a photographer no longer needed to carry boxes of plates and toxic chemicals around. In July 1888 Eastman's Kodak camera went on the market with the slogan "You press the button, we do the rest". Now anyone could take a photograph and leave the complex parts of the process to others, and photography became available for the mass-market in 1901 with the introduction of the Kodak Brownie.
In the twentieth century, photography developed rapidly as a commercial service. End-user supplies of photographic equipment accounted for only about 20 percent of industry revenue. For the modern enthusiast photographer processing black and white film, little has changed since the introduction of the 35mm film Leica camera in 1925.
Color process
First color image, photograph by James Maxwell, 1861.Although color photography was explored throughout the 19th century, initial experiments in color could not fix the photograph and prevent the color from fading. Moreover until the 1870s the emulsions available were not sensitive to red or green light.
The first permanent color photo, an additive projected image of a tartan ribbon, was taken in 1861 by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell.[9] Several patentable methods for producing images (by either additive or subtractive methods, see below) were devised from 1862 on by two French inventors (working independently), Louis Ducos du Hauron and Charles Cros.[10] Practical methods to sensitize silver halide film to green and then orange light were discovered in 1873 and 1884 by Hermann W. Vogel (full sensitivity to red light was not achieved until the early years of the 20th century).
The first fully practical color plate, Autochrome, did not reach the market until 1907. It was based on a screen-plate method, the screen (of filters) being made using dyed dots of potato starch. The screen lets filtered red, green or blue light through each grain to a photographic emulsion in contact with it. The plate is then developed to a negative, and reversed to a positive, which when viewed through the screen restores colors approximating the original.
Other systems of color photography included that used by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, which involved three separate monochrome exposures ('separation negatives') of a still scene through red, green, and blue filters. These required a special machine to display, but the results are impressive even by modern standards. His collection of glass plates was purchased from his heirs by the Library of Congress in 1948, and is now available in digital format.
Development of digital photography
A Canon PowerShot A95The charge-coupled device (CCD) was invented in 1969 by Willard Boyle and George E. Smith at AT&T Bell Labs. The lab was working on the Picture-phone and on the development of semiconductor bubble memory. Merging these two initiatives, Boyle and Smith conceived of the design of what they termed 'Charge "Bubble" Devices'. The essence of the design was the ability to transfer charge along the surface of a semiconductor.
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