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Description Description
The promise of Talbot's negative-positive process, and its principal advantage over the daguerreotype, was the printing and distribution of large editions of photographic prints. To encourage the mass production of paper photographs, in early 1844 Talbot supported Nicolaas Henneman, his former valet, in establishing the first commercial photographic printing firm, in Reading, England. The activities of the Reading establishment are shown in this two-part image. Talbot, operating the large camera at center left, removes the lens cap to make a portrait of a seated gentleman, while on the right Henneman photographs a sculpture of the Three Graces. Other employees are shown copying an engraving (far left); standing in the doorway with a second camera—back loaded with sensitized paper; and attending glass frames that hold negatives and photographic paper in contact for printing in sunlight (center right). At far right a man handles a focimeter, a device that helped photographers focus their pictures.
Taken in September 1849 from a window of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, this daguerreotype exhibits the dazzling exactitude and presence that characterize these mirrors of reality. Stationary objects are rendered with remarkable precision, and magnification reveals minute details invisible to the naked eye: architectural ornamentation on the Pavillon de Flore, features of statuary and potted trees in the Tuileries Gardens, chimney pots on buildings along the rue de Rivoli—even the buttons on the uniform of a guard. Also striking is the dramatic rendering of the cloud-laden sky, achieved by masking the upper portion of the plate partway through the exposure.
Photography: Processes, Preservation, and Conservation
Alternate Views
The Marble Palace, Fort Agra, ca. 1857
John Murray (Scottish, 1809–1898)
Albumen silver print; 14 5/8 x 18 1/4 in. (37.1 x 46.4 cm)
Purchase, Cynthia Hazen Polsky Gift, 1988 (1988.1134.1) The Marble Palace, Fort Agra, ca. 1857
Paper negative; 16 x 17 7/16 in. (40.6 x 44.3 cm)
Purchase, Cynthia Hazen Polsky Gift, 1988 (1988.1134.1)
Description
Murray took up photography while serving in Agra as a medical doctor for the East India Company and published an extensive photographic survey of the city in 1857. Like many other photographers who worked outside the studio, Murray found paper negatives convenient because the paper could be prepared in the darkroom in advance, exposed days later, and developed once the photographer returned home. On this negative, he inked out the sky area so that it would appear brightly sunlit and applied a yellow wash to soften the tone of areas that might otherwise print too dark. Paper negatives had to be made the same size as the intended print because no practical means of enlarging existed at the time. Consequently, most paper negatives are large by modern standards. Murray's negatives, among the largest ever made, required an enormous camera.
The great American painter Thomas Eakins was devoted to the study of the human figure and used his students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts as models. Photography provided Eakins with the perfect means of increasing the naturalism of his paintings. He valued his photographs not only as studies for paintings, however, but also as autonomous works, and he carefully printed the best images on platinum paper.
In the gum dichromate process, paper is coated with a sensitized gum solution containing pigment, printed in sunlight in direct contact with a negative, and developed in water. It allows a photographer to manipulate the image during development and to layer pigments in order to produce a more colorful, painterly print. The process was particularly popular among Pictorialist photographers of the 1890s and 1900s, who sought to create photographs that could hold their own alongside more traditional media. Clarence White, for example, linked this photograph to high art by choosing a light orange gum dichromate that resembles pastel or red chalk. His vision of youthful feminine grace also recalls works in other media, specifically William Merritt Chase's painting of the same subject made three years earlier.
This portrait of the artist and his wife on their honeymoon was made at a critical moment in Steichen's artistic development. Recently returned from two very successful years in Paris, where he had absorbed the tenets of Symbolism and the printing techniques of French Pictorialist photographers, Steichen was striving to establish himself as a society portraitist in New York. He was also playing a central role in shaping the ideas and program of Stieglitz's Photo-Secession. Steichen's graphically strong but moody landscapes and portraits were featured in the April 1903 issue of Stieglitz's Camera Work.
Djuna Barnes, 1925
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898–1991)
Vintage print; H. 8 7/8, W. 6 3/4 in. (22.6 x 17.1 cm)
Purchase, Joyce and Robert Menschel Gift, 1987 (1987.1002)
Djuna Barnes, 1925, printed 1980s
Gelatin silver print; H. 10 1/8, W. 8 in. (25.7 x 20.3 cm)
Gift of Ronald A. Kurtz, 1988 (1988.1163.10)
Both photographs are gelatin silver prints made from the same negative, and both are signed by the artist. The example on the top was made close to the time the picture was taken and is thus what we would term "vintage." Abbott printed the image with a slightly soft focus on a type of photographic paper that has a creamy color and seductive matte surface. The writer Djuna Barnes, Abbott's friend and fellow expatriate in Paris, looks young and beautiful. The example on the bottom, printed on bright, modern paper in the mid-1980s with Abbott's authorization, is cool, hard, and unappealing-and so is its subject. The materials available and the choices made in printing have influenced the appearance—and therefore the meaning—of the photograph. In general, the Museum prefers to collect prints made close to the time of the negative because they most often represent the artist's original intention.
Outerbridge was a master of the carbro print, an exceptionally permanent full-color photographic print made by transferring yellow, magenta, and cyan layers of pigment to a final receiving sheet. In the 1930s, he used this difficult and time-consuming process to make photographs of the female nude, images that his contemporaries considered more lifelike in their color than any previous photographs. The carbro process was also ideally suited to preparing color images for the printing press, and this scene—now charmingly retro—was intended for an Eight O'Clock Coffee advertisement.
This dreamlike image of the well-known news anchor is a digitally scanned and printed reinterpretation of a cameraless photograph, which the artist made by placing photographic paper directly against the television screen and turning the set on for a few seconds. Heinecken has long explored the ways in which photography and the popular media transform the world. This work alludes not only to the earliest photographic experiments made without a camera, but also to the omnipresent medium of television, and, by its visible pixelation, to our increasingly computerized world.
Deeply concerned about man's relationship to the earth, Gowin photographs sites of natural and man-made environmental upheaval, such as Mount St. Helens, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, abandoned missile silos, agricultural fields, and mine tailings. Gowin creates an unsettling tension between the scarred earth and his exquisite, masterfully printed photograph.