The Change from Paper to Glass and
the Growth of a Landscape Tradition
The change from paper to glass changes
the nature of the photograph, the photographer, and the subject:
in1851: Gustave Le Gray publicized
his method of making negatives on paper coated with wax before it was sensitized;
the resulting paper was nearly translucent, like glass; also in 1851: Frederick
Scott Archer announced his method of making glass negatives: the wet-plate
system.
The advantages of the wet-plate
system were counterbalanced by the disadvantages which mitigated against
spontaneity. But the combination of the albumen print and the wet-plate
system changed the nature of photography in several ways:
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when daguerreotypes were the primary
method, the primary subject was portraits and the primary photographer
was the professional who made and sold the portraits;
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with the wet-plate/albumen system,
not only were more people making photographs but the commercial photographer
moved out of the studio and into the field.
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The new subject matter was not landscape
so much as it was monuments and tourist attractions. Francis Frith
is an example of the photographer who took this route, making Egypt and
the Palestine his career.
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| Charles
Negre: Fame Riding Pegasus, Sculpture by Coysevox, Tuileries Gardens, Paris,
1859 (alb. silver print from alb. glass negative) |
Francis
Frith: The Pyramids of Dahshoor, from the East, 1857 (alb. silver print
from wet collodion glass neg.) |
The amateurs who continued to practice
photography tended to become more withdrawn in terms of their subject matter,
to retreat into their private inner worlds of moralizing and symbolic photographs,
such as Lady Hawarden did. Marville, in contrast, used an outdoor
setting to suggest an inner world which people who do not live there might
nonetheless relate to.
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| Clementina
Hawarden: Clementina Maud, 1863-4 (alb.-s. print from wet-coll. glass) |
Charles
Marville: Rue de Choiseul, Paris, 1865 |
The situation was somewhat different
in America for a few reasons:
• this country did not really have
an art tradition and defined art, for the most part, as something made
in Europe
• the only photography in the U.
S. until the 18760s was the daguerreotype, so the photograph was immediately
associated with the sharp and clear print, which read as “fact”
• the puritan/pioneer debate which
shaped much of the early debates about American culture undoubtedly influenced
emerging American values with respect to photography
The frontier theme, more specifically
imaged as the theme of going west, was probably the first to capture the
imagination of the American photographer, if not the entire country.
As an image, it has dominated the visual arts in this country, including
photography from its earliest years, and continues to be a central subject,
although at times the meaning has changed.
Landscapes: Narrative or Moment of
Impact?
Photography is "the simultaneous recognition,
in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as a
precise organization of the forms which gave that event its proper expression."
(Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1952). Is this true for the landscape photograph?
The 19th century American tradition of landscape photography centralized
narrative and the use of multiple views, rather than the single image,
to tell the story of the American west. This would seem to be a challenge
to the notion of photography as expressed by Cartier-Bresson.
Panoramas
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| E. Muybridge.
Panorama of San Francisco. (Panels 4 - 7 of 13 panels, mammoth plate
albumen prints, 1878)--each plate 18 x 24" |
Using the photograph to document change
Just as the panoramic view attempted
to convey movement through static means, photographs of the same place
over time could document minute or grand changes.
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| Thomas
M. Easterly: Big Mound at 5th and Mound Streets. Dag., 1852 |
Easterly:
Big Mound at 5th and Mound Streets. Dag., 1869. |
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| Easterly.
Chouteau Pond, 1850. |
Easterly.
Chouteau Pond, drained. 1851. |
Images such as these by Easterly
manifest a belief on the part of American photographers at that time that
the image could not stand alone: it documented "fact" or "significance"
as part of a series of photos taken over time, or it documented this in
its association with words. The photographic book (images conjoined
with captions), in fact, was a predominant form of making photographs available
to the public.
The stereograph became a popular
tool for photographers who were attracted to the symbolic spirituality
of the American landscape.
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| Eadward
Muybridge: A Study of Clouds. (albumen stereographs, 1869) |
Collodion technology and the landscape
As we already noted, the biggest influence
on the beginning of landscape photography was collodion technology–the
combination of the wet-plate coated with collodion and silver-iodide the
albumen print. Used together, the photographer could produce a sharp
image, in what seemed to be a reasonable amount of time. The landscape
became a business.
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| Gustave
Le Gray: Brig upon the Water, 1856 (alb. print) |
Le Gray was only one of a number
of photographers who made composite or combination photographs in order
to overcome the problem of the loss of detail; not all of them were as
convincing as his.
Timothy O'Sullivan
O'Sullivan's earliest experience was
on the photographic documentation of the Civil War. From this, he
moved on to involvement with various projects documenting the western territories.
Although these projects were focused on geological documentation, O’Sullivan’s
photographs go beyond that concern. His experience with battlefield
scenes had given him the skill he needed to photograph a challenging terrain,
and he used this ability to advantage, finding remote viewing points which
enhanced the isolation and mythical quality of the natural western landscape.
Tufa
Domes could stand as a paradigm in this respect: the uncanny arc of
rocks bisecting the composition diagonally from the lower left to slightly
more than halfway up the composition, the misty sky casting mottled light
on the water, the final dome rising pyramid like, justifying the name of
the lake but suggesting a mystical ascension.
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| O'Sullivan:
Field where General Reynolds Fell (from Gardner's Sketch Book of the Civil
War; alb. silver print, neg. in 1863; print in 1866) |
O'Sullivan:
Tufa Domes, Pyramid Lake (alb. print, 1867) |
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| Wall in
the Grand Canyon (alb. print, from the Wheeler survey, 1871) |
Ancient
Ruins in the Canyon de Chelle, New Mexico, 1873, alb. print |
William Henry Jackson
William Henry Jackson, like O’Sullivan,
used the western survey experience as a jumping-off point for the creation
of landscape art. In his case, the survey he was working for included
the landscape painter Thomas Moran, whose work infused Jackson’s personal
vision of the landscape. At times, this was a literal infusion with
Jackson photographing from a position which had been determined by Moran.
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| Thomas
Moran: The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1893-1907 |
W.H. Jackson:
Hot Springs in the Gardiner River, Upper Basin (1/2 of albumen stereograph,
1871) |
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| W. H. Jackson:
Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, 1870s or 80s |