Chuck Close: contemporary daguerreotype

Cindy Sherman by Chuck Close
from A Couple of Ways of Doing Something (Aperture 2006)

Chuck Close:
A Couple of Ways of Doing Something
Photographs by Chuck Close
Poems by Bob Holman
Interview with Chuck Close and Bob Holman by Lyle Rexer
Clothbound, 22 tritone images
56 Pages, 11.375″ X 14.875″
Aperture 2006

Excerpt from an interview by Lyle Rexer in the book:

Rexer: “And daguerreotypes are unforgiving. In the nineteenth century there were reams written about the fact that if you decided to have a daguerreotype made, you took your self-image in your hands, because nothing would be left out.”

Close: “It was more warts-and-all than any other process. Because it’s so red-sensitive, any marks, any flaws are heightened. You have to be pretty comfortable in your skin, and vanity goes out the window. And it’s also physically painful. A normal daguerreotype is a more than two-minute exposure. We’ve made it instant photography by having a billion foot-candles of light go off all at once, and that’s very painful. The flashes are so intense your eyes slam shut. It’s like having an ice pick shoved in your eyeball. You can smell hair burning… Each one of these people who lent me their image with no control over how it’s going to come out, in this act of incredible generosity, had to put away whatever self-image they had of how they looked and accept this other image as being them. That goes beyond generosity.”

source: http://www.lensculture.com/close.html

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

Étienne Carjat

Étienne Carjat (French, 1828–1906)
Charles Baudelaire, ca. 1863
Woodburytype
image source: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/infp/ho_64.677.4.htm

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