Documentary Photography

Albert Fernique1841-1898
Album de la construction de la Statue de la Liberté. (published 1883, Paris)

source: New York Public Library Digital Collection

Lewis Carrol

Photo of Alice Liddell by Lewis Carroll. (1858)
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll#The_Photographer

André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri and the business of photography

André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri (French, 1819–1889)
Prince Lobkowitz, 1858
Albumen silver print from glass negative; 7 7/8 x 9 1/8 in. (20 x 23.2 cm)
image source: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/infp/ho_1995.170.1.htm

André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri
The Organ Grinder
c. 1853 , salt print 5 7/8 x 4 3/4 in.

image source: http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=69940&handle=li

Multiple-shot camera invented by Desderi
image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Appareil_disderi.gif

link:
Carte-de-visite photography by Robert Leggat

Pierre-Louis Pierson

Pierre-Louis Pierson, Countess of Castiglione, c.1860

link:
“La Divine Comtesse”: Photographs of the Countess de Castiglione, Metropolitan Museum, NY

Early Photography: Between Historical Documentation and Fictional Narrative

Re-enactment of the October 16, 1846 ether operation; daguerrotype by Southworth & Hawes.

image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Southworth_%26_Hawes_-_First_etherized_operation_%28re-enactment%29.jpg

David Octavius Hill

David Octavius Hill (1802–1870) and Robert Adamson (1821–1848)

Redding the Line (Portrait of James Linton), c. 1846
Scotish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

image source: http://www.kiberpipa.org/gallery/album82/David_Octavius_Hill_and_Robert_Adamson_Baiting_the_Line_1845.jpg

David Octavius Hill (1802–1870) and Robert Adamson (1821–1848)
“Photograph from the frontispiece of an album dated 1848,
showing D O Hill sketching in Greyfriars Kirkyard, watched by the Misses Morris.
Other tableaux in the same setting included The Artist and The Gravedigger”
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Octavius_Hill

“Many of Hill’s portraits were made in the Edinburgh Greyfriars cemetery – nothing is more characteristic of this early period than the way his subjects were at home there. And indeed the cemetery itself, in one of Hill’s picture, looks like an interior, a separated closed-off space where the gravestones propped against gable walls rise up from the grass, hollowed out like chimney pieces, with inscriptions inside instead of flames. But this setting could never have been so effective if it had not been chosen on technical grounds. The low light-sensitivity of early plates made prolonged exposure outdoors a necessity. This in turn made it desirable to take the subject to some out-of-the-way spot where there was no obstacle to quiet concentration.”
Walter Benjamin – A Small History of Photography

link: David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson Metropolitan Museum

Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 – 1879)
J.F.W. Herschel
1867

source: http://www.masters-of-photography.com/C/cameron/cameron_herschel_full.html

Nadar

Nadar – “Panthéon Nadar“, lithography, 1853
source: http://home.tele2.fr/thdelamotte/photo_references/nadar/img/pantheon_nadar.jpg

Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon , 1820 – 1910) – Self Portrait, 1855
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Nadar_selfportrait.jpg

“NADAR élevant la Photographie à la hauteur de l’Art”
(NADAR elevating Photography to Art).
Lithograph by Honore Daumier, Le Boulevard, 1862.
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:DR3248_13.jpg

Baudelaire photographié par Nadar, 1854
source: Musée d’Orsay

link: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/nadr/hd_nadr.htm

Oliver Wendell Holmes and the absent prophecy of photography

“If a man had handed a metallic speculum to Democritus of Abdera, and told him to look at his face in it while his heart was beating thirty or forty times, promising that one of the films his face was shedding should stick there, so that neither he, nor it, nor anybody should forget what manner of man he was, the Laughing Philosopher would probably have vindicated his claim to his title by an explosion that would have astonished the speaker.

This is just what the Daguerreotype has done. It has fixed the most fleeting of our illusions, that which the apostle and the philosopher and the poet have alike used as the type of instability and unreality. The photograph has completed the triumph, by making a sheet of paper reflect images like a mirror and hold them as a picture.

This triumph of human ingenuity is the most audacious, remote, improbable, incredible,–the one that would seem least likely to be regained, if all traces of it were lost, of all the discoveries man has made. It has become such an everyday matter with us, that we forget its miraculous nature, as we forget that of the sun itself, to which we owe the creations of our new art. Yet in all the prophecies of dreaming enthusiasts, in all the random guesses of the future conquests over matter, we do not remember any prediction of such an inconceivable wonder, as our neighbor round the corner, or the proprietor of the small house on wheels, standing on the village common, will furnish any of us for the most painfully slender remuneration. No Century of Inventions includes this among its possibilities. Nothing but the vision of a Laputan, who passed his days in extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, could have reached such a height of delirium as to rave about the time when a man should paint his miniature by looking at a blank tablet, and a multitudinous wilderness of forest foliage or an endless Babel of roofs and spires stamp itself, in a moment, so faithfully and so minutely, that one may creep over the surface of the picture with his microscope and find every leaf perfect, or read the letters of distant signs, and see what was the play at the “Variétés” or the “Victoria,” on the evening of the day when it was taken, just as he would sweep the real view with a spy-glass to explore all that it contains.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Stereoscope and the Stereograph
The Atlantic Monthly 3 (June 1859), pp. 738-48.

source: http://www.yale.edu/amstud/inforev/stereo.html

Background to the Talbotype or calotype

Sketch of Lake Como – Talbot – 1833
Drawing created using a Camera Lucida

source: http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/1_p/1_photographers_talbot_smm_sketch.htm

Illustration showing the use of the Camera Lucida
source: http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/C.html

Lacock Abbey, Fox Talbot Museum
Country house created out of a medieval abbey,
the home of William Henry Fox Talbot
source: http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-lacockabbeyvillage.htm