Head
Without referring to M. Claudet’s well-known experiment of a falsely coloured female face, it may be averred that, of all the surfaces a few inches square the sun looks upon, none offers more difficulty, artistically speaking, to the photographer, than a smooth, blooming, clean washed, and carefully combed human head.
The high lights which gleam on this delicate epidermis so spread and magnify themselves, that all sharpness and nicety of modeling is obliterated—the fineness of skin peculiar to the upper lip reflects so much light, that in spite of its deep colour it presents a light projection instead of a dark one—the spectrum or intense point of light on the eye is magnified to a thing like a cataract. If the cheek be very brilliant in color, it is as often not represented by a dark stain. If the eye be blue, it turns out as colourless as water; if the hair be golden or red, it looks as if it had been dyed, if very glossy it is cut up into lines of light as big as ropes.
This is what the fair young girl has to expect from the tender mercies of photography—the male and older head, having less to lose, has less to fear. Strong light and shade will portray character, though they mar beauty. Rougher skin, less glossy hair, Crimean moustaches and beard overshadowing the white under lip, and deeper lines are all so much in favor of a picturesque result.
Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, “Photography”
Artistry and the Collective Talent
I was quite taken by Lady Elizabeth Eastlake’s suggestion that photography is a collaborative project. Written in 1857 for the London Review, her portrayal of the photographic project as “unfinished” points at a desire for images to not merely present facts, but also interpretations:
But while the ingenuity and industry—the efforts of hundreds working as one—have thus enlarged the scope of the new agent, and rendered it available to the most active, as well as for the merest still life, has it gained in an artistic sense in like proportion? Our answer is not in the affirmative, nor is it possible that it should be so. Far from holding up a mirror to nature, which is an assertion usually as triumphant as it is erroneous, it holds up that which, no matter how beautiful, ingenious, and valuable in powers of reflection, is yet subject to certain distortions and deficiencies for which there is no remedy.
Eastlake suggests that the popularity of photography has to do with “the hunger for facts,” and it is those scientifically betrayed facts that mark the lack of artistry. Without artistic convention, there is no art. Photographs are merely “accurate falsifications.”
The science therefore which has developed the resources of photography, has but more glaringly revealed its defects. For the more perfect you render an imperfect machine the more must its imperfections come to light: it is superfluous therefore to ask whether Art has been benefited, where Nature, its only source and model, has been but more accurately falsified.
Eastlake’s standard is clearly a human one. As William Blake quipped, “Where Man is Not, Nature is Barren.” For Eastlake, the appeal of photography must be explained in human terms.
Bombproof
Timothy O'Sullivan, Sutler's bombproof “Fruit and Oyster House,” Petersberg, Virginia.
Photogrammetry
from John A. Brashear Company, Ltd. Catalogue Optical, Physical, Astrophysical and Astronomical Instruments, 1906
Measuring Engine
It is interesting to me that the first “scientific” applications of photography were in the areas of astrophotography and mapmaking. Arago spoke of “the rapid method which topography might borrow from the photographic process” in 1839, and by 1840 Draper photographed the moon. However, Josef Eder notes in his History of Photography, “As a scientific method, photogrammetry was first developed and introduced into practice about 1851 by Aimé Laussedat” (398). By 1861, a map of the village of Buc near Versailles had been made photographically at a scale of 1:2,000 (399).
What seems different about the photographic investigations of the 1880s is the use of probability and statistical formulae by Galton to attempt to detect core similarities in the topography of faces. I am starting to see Muybridge’s work with locomotion more an outgrowth of the previous mapmaking activities. It doesn’t seem as progressive as I first thought. Galton’s work with composites is a completely different sort of mathematics.
Mapmaking became more complex mathematically, I suspect, with the advent of aerial photography and the application of stereo photography to mapmaking in 1901. Prior to 1880 photographic work seems to be based in simple algebra— after that, it becomes a more complex calculus.
The Photo Killeth
The systematic use of photography by science that began to pick up steam in the 1890s did not necessarily cause an increase in the stature of photography as the supreme medium of capturing actuality. Even people who were once positive about it changed their tune after the initial novelty wore off. One great example of that is the perception of Henry Adams. He learned photography in the 1870s—his wife Marian was an avid photographer. When Marian Adams died prematurely, Henry’s thoughts about photography changed abruptly. He sounds more like Hawthorne in his distaste for the medium.
There is an excellent article by Kim Moreland about it: The Photo Killeth: Henry Adams on Photography and Painting. I seem to have lost the citation information. I excerpt it here as a hat’s off to Ray:
At first, Adams seems simply to criticize an aesthetic limitation to which this particular art is heir, as in an 1886 letter to John Hay written during Adams's first trip to Polynesia and the Far East: “Photographs give no idea of the scale. They show here a gate and there a temple, but they cannot show twenty acres of ground, all ingeniously used to make a single composition. They give no idea of a mountain-flank, with its evergreens a hundred feet high, modeled into a royal, posthumous residence and deified abode” (Letters 3: 24). But his criticisms soon grew sharper, shifting from observations about the reductive quality of photography to observations about its disturbing inability to reproduce movement, as in this 1890 letter recounting how several Samoan girls amused themselves by sliding over a small waterfall: “I snapped a dozen photographs, but the velocity of the girls' fall was so great that the Kodak can give only a blur" (Letters 3: 332).
