Painted art erased bad teeth, smallpox scars. Photography gave birth to rigid head-clamped postures, fixed toothless non-smiles (no hiding those stained teeth so keep your mouth shut) and showed us the frailties of Age.
For many people a photo was a post-death momento mori. Better to have all your kids in the picture, including the one which just died.
Fox Talbot and D.O. Hill captured some intimate moments on Calotype. Well... psuedo intimate. it was still a long sitting but boozy pals playing cards in Edinburgh. One of D.O.Hill's shots of the charlotte Square streetscape has a ghostly man holding a coach and horses. There long enough to register, but not long enough for the whole exposure.
A lot of these seem like positive things. Photofilters are all the rage bith for novelty photos and "candid" pictures. Apparently displaying imperfections, injuries, and illnesses wasn't the apect of photography's realism that drew people in.
Photo touching and colouring by hand was a big deal for decades. my parents-in-laws wedding photo is B&W large format plate, with hand applied colours. I am pretty sure getting rid of blemishes was part of the deal.
Robertson-Davies fictionalises some of this in his 'francis cornish' series, the power to re-touch a neg to make someone nicer, or nastier as your fancy took you.
The painted smile was an unconvincing thing (with the exception of some of Franz Hal's paintings). It was photography which (eventually) showed us what they really looked like.
I really like how one of the impressionists said, with the birth of photography the art of portraiture is dead. It wasn't true: Firstly, Julia Margaret Cameron turned basic representational photographs into stunning works of art, managing tone and light and pose. Secondly, Art adapted, to use photography to capture the image for refinement in the studio, and also re-validated high end art as the product of human labour. Rich people queued up in droves to have their portraits painted, it was in many ways middle class and poor people who flocked to cartes de visite, daguerrotypes and tintype and other forms of photography to capture their lives and personal history.
That's a tree. It's likely that part of the person doing the shining is visible from behind the tree, but there's too much motion blur for them to be distinct.
In my view, I can see what is clear, to me, a right arm, a left elbow. I can also see the head, but that one might be part of the tree (actually, a wider wood board supporting the thin tree, like in other trees around), but it seems unlikely to me. I can also see the right and left legs of what is probably a boy sitting over a box.
In my perception, I see what is probably 80% of a boy’s body, covered only by a thin tall branch of a young tree.
I would definitely not say it is the picture of only one human.
I can't believe they didn't cite the 1890 Harvard Law Review article, by Louis Brandeis and Samuel D. Warren, "The Right to Privacy" where the future Supreme Court Justice wrote, ""Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that "what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops.""[1]
When deep fakes improve enough to be hard to tell apart from real footage, we will eventually get a functional equivalent of the status quo before cameras, as footage from real events gets lost amidst the noise of fake ones.
That's far from clear. Even just screenshots plain text snippets are often strongly assumed to be true and are difficult to deny even though it's utterly trivial to fake them[1].
Even with Sufficiently advanced deep fakery they'll never be easier to create those fakes than text and the text is already strongly presumed to be real even if denied.
> the handful of men who invented photography — only wanted to capture images from light reflected on a solid surface
There’s absolutely no need to portray someone like Daguerre as merely a uninspired technician. I’m genuinely baffled why this is the narrative tack the author took.
From wikipedia:
> Louis Daguerre was born in Cormeilles-en-Parisis, Val-d'Oise, France. He was apprenticed in architecture, theatre design, and panoramic painting to Pierre Prévost, the first French panorama painter. Exceedingly adept at his skill of theatrical illusion, he became a celebrated designer for the theatre, and later came to invent the diorama, which opened in Paris in July 1822.
So, historically, and I'd say even today, a lot of art is pretty technical. imagine you're sitting around in 1550 and decide to paint a painting, you've got to gather up some boar bristles to make your brushes. You've got to source some lapis lazuli for a nice rich blue. Maybe some cadmium for red, and suspend all that into some sort of oil.
Furthermore, a lot of historical art, like ceramics was really practical. At the root of it, folks wanted a way to carry around liquids. There's a lot of tricks around clay and glazing to make something. to our modern ears, a silversmith makes jewelry, but really they'd spend a lot of time making forks and spoons and such.
I can't really answer the question "what is art?". but I feel really comfortably saying an artist is someone who tries to pull off a task, the cool way. I know that's vague. But anybody who's good at anything will know there's a way that'll work for sure, and there's another way that's, just, cooler. A flourish of skill that probably no one will ever notice, but is really really neat.
I don't know you, and I don't know your work. But if you ever want to call your self an artist, there's at least one other person out there that would agree with you.
Not the news articles generated by bots that take in words written by humans then run them through a lawnmower. Now that's what I consider a reliable source.
So why do we cite wikipedia like its written by a higher power or something. Wikipedia content is hardly difficult to hack in one way or another as proven times and times over.
No one is citing it as a higher power, simply an easily accessed central repository. I didn’t fly to France to verify it as a primary source for a comment thread but I already knew Daguerre was an artist. This isn’t an academic paper.
As a quick reference for easily verifiable biography in an internet discussion forum, it’s fine.
If you want more proof, then fly to Bry-Sur-Marne and interrogate everyone there about the provenance of the only existing Daguerre panorama.
https://museedebry.fr/#/homepage-daguerre/en
The largest unintended consequence of mainstream photography, especially colour photography, might be a change in how we see reality.
Without some sort of shared anchor, no two people see one scene the same way. A mind constantly predicts and filters things based on prior experience unique to that mind; what we see is heavily shaped by what we expect to see, our current mood, whom we are with, what we did before, what we are smelling, etc. When we stand on a roof of a building and look in the same direction, I see an intricate tangle of colorful pencil towers, you see traffic jams and potholes, she sees that one annoying advertisement billboard, he sees grey polluted air. What color is that sky? Is your blue the same as my blue?
Until mainstream consumer photography, the only way to convey and compare what we see was through words or painting.
Now that we all have cameras in our pockets, anchoring is finally at our disposal. The camera sensor takes in light values beyond what any reproduction medium can handle and fits it into a tiny display-referred space, throwing away any subjectivity as well as a good chunk of colour and dynamic range.
Is this a blessing or a curse? Do we mistakenly believe that a bland JPEG render or film print—designed by camera or film developer to suit the widest possible variety of scenes, and thus fitting almost no scene perfectly (and definitely not geared towards conveying what we actually see)—is what reality is actually like? When we anchor to that, are we unconsciously limiting our perception and imagination?
Well, yes and no. But (IMHO) mostly no. Certainly it impacted art to the point where art was obliged to redefine its very function, but I am not sure I would call this a liberation.
My first introduction to this was as a student walking through an exhibition of portraits at the National Gallery London. It had been arranged chronologically, room by room.
The room which featured post-photography painting presented as a punch in the stomach to art. It seemed to lose its confidence, its swagger, it verve. Replacing this was the impression that artists were now huddling in corners, drinking absinth, having deep conversations about art. The paintings were smaller, more self-aware, more experimental (experiments which seemed to work for a while, but which aged very quickly).
Was this a good thing? Some years ago I had one of my eyes removed due to an accident. It changed the way I walk, think and look. I like what I have done with myself since then, how I have developed as an artist, but I wish I still had two eyes.
> The room which featured post-photography painting presented as a punch in the stomach to art.
I am surprised by the “art” = “paintings” association. Photography is also art, and by its addition as a tool to the toolbox, the possibilities definitely increased.
Same goes for audio recordings and music, more techniques definitely broadened the field and we got so much more than what we had before.
Well... I was speaking from the point of view of art as it was made before photography. Though we use the term `art' to describe both that which came before and after photography, functionally they are different. The same can be said of folk art and salon art. This causes heaps of confusion when discussing the two.
I believe (though I may be wrong) that you are using the term as a signifier of esteem (kinda 'this is so good it is art').
I have taught fine art photographers, some of the best in Asia. I have seen no problem calling it art.
I have worked in art schools for 1,000,000 years. Believe me when I say that I have seen just about everything presented as an art work (off the top of my head, public sex performance, vandalism of other people's art, playing football, covering your studio space with excrement etc).
The real question then is: `art or not, is it any good? Does it have value?'
I don't see "liberal" arts as an art form at all. The moment in which knowledge and craftsmanship are removed from painting, things are just another form of "wishful" thinking.
One of my teachers had a very nice comment on our "modern" artistic endeavors: It's good, but what is it really?
My choice for artistic expression is focused on traditional painting. I study the old masters techniques and have no doubt in my mind, that people will rediscover classical arts in a big way in the next decade.
I visited an exhibition about photography and the third Reich. Very interesting.
The new medium gave the illusion of capturing reality, because it looked much more realistic than paintings. But in the end it suffered the same biases.
So, a new medium comes along, and society changes as a result. I generally agree that this is a thing that consistently happens. The details are interesting, and strong parallels to social media could be drawn.
I’ve heard that before photography framing was different. Nobody painted half a head for example. After accidents in framing during photography new ways to frame image spread to painting. Always wondered if it was true.
Photography hardly created compassion. It could maybe be said that photography can instill such feelings, but I find it hard to believe that compassion did not exist before 1860(unless the article is referencing an instance of compassion being created in a given moment).
Many sentiments, compassion included, were "invented" in the sense of being popularized in different times (and in different cultures), as opposed to being always inherently the same across time and place. That doesn't mean they didn't exist, but that they were much more subdued.
Romantic love, for one, has inspired artists and caught plain folks off guard for millenia, but our modern understanding of it, the idea of passion as important to love and marriage, a big part of life, and so on, and even particular expressions of it, came from around the 15th century or so, and then was made even more prevalent by books like Werther and early romances and then with movies.
That's all true however that doesn't mean photography created compassion.
In context of the hugely transformative society of 19th century Europe and America, it is more likely that the emergence of the bourgeoisie and more generally a middle class who, unlike the aristocracy, did not consider the worst off people as suffering the lot allotted to them by God or providence, gave rise to expressions of compassion, equality, etc.. It may even be that thoughts along the lines of "by the grace of god there go I" stirred compassion in their hearts. [Photography then simply was a tool to communicate these thoughts and ideas.]
(edit)
p.s. I also found the assertion about photography and painting rather shaky. They didn't have photographs when this man was painting:
All fair points, but again, photography did not create compassion any more than photography created any other emotion. Humans have a rich history and our understanding of suffering amongst ourselves surely did not come about in the past few hundred years.
It created compassion in the sense that you cannot be compassionate about something you don't know about. Having reproducible images means a greater awareness of far away events.
In some cases (like the ones mentioned in the article), photo documentation can make things "undeniable" in a way that just knowing about some terrible, but far removed, thing cannot.
I agree with this. I felt like it was unclear whether the article was saying that photography created compassion itself, or photography created instances of compassion around the events in the photographs(which totally makes sense).
For many people a photo was a post-death momento mori. Better to have all your kids in the picture, including the one which just died.
Fox Talbot and D.O. Hill captured some intimate moments on Calotype. Well... psuedo intimate. it was still a long sitting but boozy pals playing cards in Edinburgh. One of D.O.Hill's shots of the charlotte Square streetscape has a ghostly man holding a coach and horses. There long enough to register, but not long enough for the whole exposure.