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Questions: What year did Niepce make this first photograph (heliograph)? Also, read closely about what happened after he partnered with Daguerre...any thoughts come to mind? In your mind, who is the inventor of photography? Daguerre or Niepce? DUE before class on 9/9!

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See the earliest surviving photograph produced in the camera obscura.

Currently on View

The invention of photography was announced simultaneously in France and England in 1839, dazzling the public and sending waves of excitement around the world. These astonishing breakthroughs depended upon centuries of developments in chemistry, optics, and the visual arts, accelerating in the decades after 1790. The Niépce Heliograph was made in 1827, during this period of fervent experimentation. It is the earliest photograph produced with the aid of the camera obscura known to survive today.

The photograph was made by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833), born to a prominent family at Chalon-sur-Saône in the Burgundy region of France. Motivated by the growing popular demand for affordable pictures, Niépce's photographic experiments were conducted with the dual aims of copying prints and recording scenes from real life in the camera. At his family estate in the nearby village of Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, he produced legible but fleeting camera pictures-or points de vue, as he called them-in 1816. Over the next decade he tried an array of chemicals, materials, and techniques to advance the process he ultimately called héliographie, or 'sun writing.'

To make the heliograph, Niépce dissolved light-sensitive bitumen in oil of lavender and applied a thin coating over a polished pewter plate. He inserted the plate into a camera obscura and positioned it near a window in his second-story workroom. After several days of exposure to sunlight, the plate yielded an impression of the courtyard, outbuildings, and trees outside. Writing about his process in December 1827, Niépce acknowledged that it required further improvements, but was nevertheless "the first uncertain step in a completely new direction."

In 1829 Niépce entered into formal partnership with Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (French, 1787-1851), proprietor of the famous Diorama in Paris. Daguerre continued to make vital improvements after Niepce's death and introduced his "Daguerreotype" process in 1839. After that stunning announcement, the Niépce Heliograph was brought forth by early supporters as evidence of his role in photography's invention.

The Niépce Heliograph passed through a chain of private hands in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries before it was purchased by the Harry Ransom Center in 1963 as part of the Gernsheim Collection. More than twenty of Niépce's heliographic plates and prints made between 1825 and 1829 are held in public and private collections, yet the Niépce Heliograph is the only known surviving point de vue.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (French, 1765-1833), Untitled 'point de vue,' 1827. Heliograph on pewter, 16.7 x 20.3 x .15 cm. Gernsheim Collection, purchase, 964:0000:0001

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(TIFF / 206 MB / 6000x6000 / 540ppi / color charts)

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Currently on View The invention of photography was announced simultaneously in France and England in 1839, dazzling the public and sending waves of excitement around the world. These astonishing breakthroughs depended upon centuries of developments in chemistry, optics, and the visual arts, accelerating in the decades after 1790.

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Reading 1: Khan Academy on Early Photography

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Reading 1: Khan Academy on Early Photography

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Questions: What fact from this article stood out to you most and why?

AND

What new innovations or technology related to photography are changing how we take and view images? This is not mentioned in the article but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this!   DUE before class on Tues Sept 9th!

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From this point the development of photography largely related to technological improvements in three areas, speed, resolution and permanence. The first photographs, such as Niépce's famous View from the Window at Gras (1826) required a very slow speed (a long exposure period), in this case about 8 hours, obviously making many subjects difficult, if not impossible, to photograph. Taken using a camera obscura to expose a copper plate coated in silver and pewter, Niépce's image looks out of an upstairs window, and part of the blurry quality is due to changing conditions during the long exposure time, causing the resolution, or clarity of the image, to be grainy and hard to read. An additional challenge was the issue of permanence, or how to successfully stop any further reaction of the light sensitive surface once the desired exposure had been achieved. Many of Niépce's early images simply turned black over time due to continued exposure to light. This problem was largely solved in 1839 by the invention of hypo, a chemical that reversed the light sensitivity of paper.

At the same time, Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot was experimenting with what would eventually become his calotype method, patented in February 1841. Talbot's innovations included the creation of a paper negative, and new technology that involved the transformation of the negative to a positive image, allowing for more than one copy of the picture. The remarkable detail of Talbot's method can be see in his famous photograph, The Open Door (1844) which captures the view through a medieval-looking entrance. The texture of the rough stones surrounding the door, the vines growing up the walls and the rustic broom that leans in the doorway demonstrate the minute details captured by Talbot's photographic improvements.

The big disadvantage of the collodion process was that it needed to be exposed and developed while the chemical coating was still wet, meaning that photographers had to carry portable darkrooms to develop images immediately after exposure. Both the difficulties of the method and uncertain but growing status of photography were lampooned by Honoré Daumier in his Nadar Elevating Photography to the Height of Art (1862). Nadar, one of the most prominent photographers in Paris at the time, was known for capturing the first aerial photographs from the basket of a hot air balloon. Obviously, the difficulties in developing a glass negative under these circumstances must have been considerable.

Prepared glass plates could be purchased, eliminating the need to fool with chemicals. In 1878, new advances decreased the exposure time to 1/25th of a second, allowing moving objects to be photographed and lessening the need for a tripod. This new development is celebrated in Eadweard Muybridge's sequence of photographs called Galloping Horse (1878). Designed to settle the question of whether or not a horse ever takes all four legs completely off the ground during a gallop, the series of photographs also demonstrated the new photographic methods that were capable of nearly instantaneous exposure.

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Early Photography: Niépce, Talbot and Muybridge (article) | Khan Academy

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Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

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Let's practice posting on Padlet. In class we debated whether photography is art or not as an icebreaker. Following the debate, what do you think? Is photography art? Why or why not? Please say yes it is art or no it is not and write 1-2 sentences to support your answer.

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Daguerreian Era & Early American Photography (Met Museum)

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Daguerreian Era & Early American Photography (Met Museum)

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Please read this article and write 2-3 sentences about one of the major figures mentioned. What was their contribution to photography and why did you select them? Tell me a fact about them not mentioned in the article by doing some additional research on that figure for your response. Due before class on Tues 9/16!

ALSO: Review the comments about the in-class video from last week and respond to one of your classmate's comments by 9/16!

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The Met's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

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The daguerreotype, the first photographic process, was invented by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851) and spread rapidly around the world after its presentation to the public in Paris in 1839. Exposed in a camera obscura and developed in mercury vapors, each highly polished silvered copper plate is a unique photograph that, when viewed in proper light, exhibits extraordinary detail and three-dimensionality. Although born in Europe, the daguerreotype was extremely popular in the United States-especially in New York City, where in the late 1850s hundreds of daguerreotypists vied for clients. The most successful artists built lavish portrait studios on the upper floors of buildings on and just off Broadway, and in other major American cities from Boston to San Francisco.

Fascinated by François Gouraud's demonstrations in Boston of Daguerre's new invention, Albert Sands Southworth (1811-1894), a pharmacist in Cabotville (now Chicopee), Massachusetts, went to New York in 1840 to study the technique with Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1872) ( 2005.100.75), who had learned about photography from Daguerre himself. Within a year, Southworth had opened a daguerreotype studio in Boston with Morse's assistant, Joseph Pennell, who had been Southworth's roommate in preparatory school. When Pennell left the firm in 1843, Josiah Johnson Hawes (1808-1901) took his place, and the celebrated nineteen-year partnership of Southworth and Hawes was born. The firm was known around the world for its aesthetic accomplishments and technical finesse. The Boston partnership produced among the finest portrait daguerreotypes in America for leading political, intellectual, and artistic figures, from Daniel Webster ( 37.14.2) to Harriet Beecher Stowe ( 37.14.40).

No artist is more closely tied to the early years of American photographic practice than Mathew B. Brady (1823?-1896). A skilled daguerreotypist, he learned the technical aspects of the process from the American pioneers of the medium, Samuel Morse and John Draper. Brady opened his first studio in 1844 and set himself the task of photographing the nation's leading figures-presidents ( 56.517.4) and military men, business leaders and stars of the stage, writers and artists. In the mid-1850s, however, Brady and other artists began using collodion-on-glass negatives, or wet plates, and soon the era of the daguerreotype was over. By the onset of the Civil War, the paper print had replaced the daguerreotype altogether as the means by which Brady and other artists distributed the faces and scenes of their time.

Elite daguerreotype studios were outfitted with colorful velvet tapestry, frescoed ceilings, six-light chandeliers, and, of course, impressive daguerreotype portraits of kings and queens, politicians, and even Native American chiefs ( 2005.100.82) displayed on the walls, dressed up in fine frames. Nevertheless, the medium's success in America was built upon the patronage of the average worker who desired a simple likeness to keep for himself, or more likely, to send to a loved one as the era's most enduring pledge of friendship. Among the many momentous social transformations generated by photography's invention was the possibility of self-representation by a large variety of groups previously excluded from official portraiture. Seamstresses, carpenters, actors ( 1999.481.1), goldminers, and even the recently deceased all sat for their official portraits, leaving behind an extremely valuable record of their anonymous, if not invisible, lives.

Early American Photography on Paper, 1850s-1860s
Although quite popular in Europe, photography with paper negatives as invented by the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot in 1839 found little favor in America. The daguerreotype process, employing a polished silver-plated sheet of copper, was the dominant form of photography for the first twenty years of picture making in the United States. A notable exception is the work of the little-known French-born artist Victor Prevost (1820-1881) ( 40.102.9), who in 1853 undertook a speculative project to create a photographic catalogue of the changing shape of New York City-a monument constantly in the making.

By the late 1850s, most American artists had switched from the daguerreotype process to large glass-plate negatives and albumen silver prints that combined the exquisite clarity of the daguerreotype and the endless reproducibility of paper-print photography. The glass plates were also extremely light sensitive, making exposure times dramatically shorter. Photographers such as Mathew B. Brady, James Wallace Black (1825-1896) ( 1981.1229.4), and Silas A. Holmes (1820-1886) ( 1997.382.52) could simultaneously record the city's inhabitants and its streets and monuments, something not easily accomplished with the daguerreotype process.

The vast majority of American photographs made before the Civil War era are portraits. Before the late 1850s, city and town views are rare; studies of the landscape exceedingly so. By 1860, however, city views such as those published as stereographs by the E. & H. T. Anthony Company soon fulfilled the population's ravenous desire for nonportrait photographs, including busy urban scenes ( 1980.1056.3), genre studies, and unusual rural landscapes from Niagara Falls to Yosemite. A stereograph, commonly known as a stereo view, is a double photograph presented in such a manner that an observer looking through a stereoscope sees a single image in three dimensions. Introduced in 1840, stereoscopy did not become truly popular in America until the late 1850s, when stereo photography became a novelty collectible.

Department of Photographs. "The Daguerreian Era and Early American Photography on Paper, 1839-60." In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000-. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/adag/hd_adag.htm (October 2004)

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The Daguerreian Era and Early American Photography on Paper, 1839-60 | Essay | The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

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The daguerreotype process, employing a polished silver-plated sheet of copper, was the dominant form of photography for the first twenty years of picture making in the United States.

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Please write a comment or question based on this video during class for us to discuss after.

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"The Annihilation of Time and Space" by Rebecca Solnit from the book River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild

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"The Annihilation of Time and Space" by Rebecca Solnit from the book River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild

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Please read the attached chapter from Solnit's book about how technological advancement at the end of the 19th century CHANGED how human brains experienced space and time. Tell me 2-3 sentences summarizing the article and what stood out to you AND please write a paragraph about how we are experiencing this today and how you feel it within your own life. Due next week 9/23!

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Please use this link to watch "Through a Lens Darkly" on Youtube. Please write 4-5 sentences about what stood out most to you from this documentary, what you learned, or any questions you have about anything discussed.

ALSO: Read this NYT article by Teju Cole and add a paragraph response to your post this week. How does this article make you think differently about historical photographs or photographers photographing other cultures in general? You should have free access via this link: READING PDF ON BRIGHTSPACE

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/magazine/when-the-camera-was-a-weapon-of-imperialism-and-when-it-still-is.html?unlocked_article_code=1.sE4.DBne.AiLJnBGVoctf&smid=url-share

DUE before class Tues Oct 7

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Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People (2014)

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NYT Opinion: A Photo Can Tell the Truth About a Lie. Or a Lie About the Truth.

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NYT Opinion: A Photo Can Tell the Truth About a Lie. Or a Lie About the Truth.

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What did you learn from this article? What issues or concerns does it raise? What - in your opinion - defines the relationship between photographs, truth, and fiction? Can photos lie? If so, how? Link is behind aa paywall - I have added the article in screengrabs below!

Quiz 1 and Week 3 reading responses due before class next week Tues 9/30!

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Opinion | A Photo Can Tell the Truth About a Lie. Or a Lie About the Truth.

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A new exhibit in Atlanta shows that a perfectly captured photograph can sometimes wake America from its slumber and inspire social change.

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The Perfect Medium - Photography and the Occult

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The Perfect Medium - Photography and the Occult

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What did you learn from this reading? Why is the history of spirit photography worth learning about now? Can you think of any ways photography and new technology are used today that future generations may regard as obviously fake or mysterious and unexplained?

Write 5-6 sentences in response by Tues Oct 28th!

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Your midterm assignment is a group project. Group have been assigned by me. Your group will be provided a column on Padlet for you to post and communicate with each other. These will be available on Tues 10/7. Be sure you always add your name to your posts to get credit for your contributions! While this is a group project, you get an individual grade based on the work you put into it.

Step 1 is researching your topic. You each must find 5 links related to your topic to post on Padlet. Please read through your links and add comments to your Padlet posts to communicate with your group about why you think it could be helpful to your presentation. THIS WILL BE DUE BEFORE CLASS ON 10/14.

For example:

Post 1: Defining Visual Literacy

--link url--

"Hey group, this website does a great job of defining our topic. I think we should reference this to start our presentation."

FAILURE TO DO THIS ASSIGNMENT BY THE DEADLINE IS AN AUTOMATIC ZERO AND 10 PTS OFF YOUR MIDTERM GRADE!

Timeline:

Groups posted on Padlet Tues 10/7 - you will get 30 mins to meet with your group this day in class

Research Posted on Padlet by Tues 10/14 - you will get the full class time to meet with your group and I will check in on your progress - please try to be present this day!

Thurs 10/16 - Meet in class with group for 15 mins to finalize plan and division of labor for the project

PRESENT TUES OCT 21!

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This was the phrase used to describe the daguerreotype. What does that phrase mean to you?

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Write your response here.

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No, it is not art. Artists can use it as a tool for art-making but it has many other uses that are purely factual as in medical photography or forensics.

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Intro to Photo in Early 20th Century (Khan)

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Intro to Photo in Early 20th Century (Khan)

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Please write 2-3 sentences about something you learned from this reading.

Week 3 reading responses due before class next week Tues 9/23!

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Photography undergoes extraordinary changes in the early part of the twentieth century. This can be said of every other type of visual representation, however, but unique to photography is the transformed perception of the medium. In order to understand this change in perception and use-why photography appealed to artists by the early 1900s, and how it was incorporated into artistic practices by the 1920s-we need to start by looking back.

In the later nineteenth century, photography spread in its popularity, and inventions like the Kodak #1 camera (1888) made it accessible to the upper-middle class consumer; the Kodak Brownie camera, which cost far less, reached the middle class by 1900.

In the sciences (and pseudo-sciences), photographs gained credibility as objective evidence because they could document people, places, and events. Photographers like Eadweard Muybridge created portfolios of photographs to measure human and animal locomotion. His celebrated images recorded incremental stages of movement too rapid for the human eye to observe, and his work fulfilled the camera's promise to enhance, or even create new forms of scientific study.

In the arts, the medium was valued for its replication of exact details, and for its reproduction of artworks for publication. But photographers struggled for artistic recognition throughout the century. It was not until in Paris's Universal Exposition of 1859, twenty years after the invention of the medium, that photography and "art" (painting, engraving, and sculpture) were displayed next to one another for the first time; separate entrances to each exhibition space, however, preserved a physical and symbolic distinction between the two groups. After all, photographs are mechanically reproduced images: Kodak's marketing strategy ("You press the button, we do the rest,") points directly to the "effortlessness" of the medium.

Since art was deemed the product of imagination, skill, and craft, how could a photograph (made with an instrument and light-sensitive chemicals instead of brush and paint) ever be considered its equivalent? And if its purpose was to reproduce details precisely, and from nature, how could photographs be acceptable if negatives were "manipulated," or if photographs were retouched? Because of these questions, amateur photographers formed casual groups and official societies to challenge such conceptions of the medium. They-along with elite art world figures like Alfred Stieglitz-promoted the late nineteenth-century style of "art photography," and produced low-contrast, warm-toned images like The Terminal that highlighted the medium's potential for originality.

So what transforms the perception of photography in the early twentieth century? Social and cultural change-on a massive, unprecedented scale. Like everyone else, artists were radically affected by industrialization, political revolution, trench warfare, airplanes, talking motion pictures, radios, automobiles, and much more-and they wanted to create art that was as radical and "new" as modern life itself.

If we consider the work of the Cubists and Futurists, we often think of their works in terms of simultaneity and speed, destruction and reconstruction. Dadaists, too, challenged the boundaries of traditional art with performances, poetry, installations, and photomontage that use the materials of everyday culture instead of paint, ink, canvas, or bronze.

By the early 1920s, technology becomes a vehicle of progress and change, and instills hope in many after the devastations of World War I. For avant-garde ("ahead of the crowd") artists, photography becomes incredibly appealing for its associations with technology, the everyday, and science-precisely the reasons it was denigrated a half-century earlier. The camera's technology of mechanical reproduction made it the fastest, most modern, and arguably, the most relevant form of visual representation in the post-WWI era. Photography, then, seemed to offer more than a new method of image-making-it offered the chance to change paradigms of vision and representation.

With August Sander's portraits such as Disabled Ex-serviceman, Pastrycook, or Secretary at West German Radio, Cologne, we see an artist attempting to document-systematically-modern types of people, as a means to understand changing notions of class, race, profession, ethnicity, and other constructs of identity. Sander transforms the practice of portraiture with these sensational, arresting images. These figures reveal as much about the German professions as they do about self-image.

Cartier-Bresson's leaping figure in Behind the Gare St. Lazare reflects the potential for photography to capture individual moments in time-to freeze them, hold them, and recreate them. Because of his approach, Cartier-Bresson is often considered a pioneer of photojournalism. This sense of spontaneity, of accuracy, and of the ephemeral corresponded to the racing tempo of modern culture (think of factories, cars, trains, and the rapid pace of people in growing urban centers).

Umbo's photomontage The Roving Reporter shows how modern technologies transform our perception of the world-and our ability to communicate within it. His camera-eyed, colossal observer (a real-life journalist named Egon Erwin Kisch) demonstrates photography's ability to alter and enhance the senses. In the early twentieth-century, this medium offered a potentially transformative vision for artists, who sought new ways to see, represent, and understand the rapidly changing world around them.

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An Introduction to Photography in the Early 20th Century (article) | Khan Academy

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Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

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I'm writing an example.

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Visual Literacy: Chelsea, Jason, Neo, Emera

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Visual Literacy: Chelsea, Jason, Neo, Emera

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- Define it

- How does it apply to photography

- Examples

- Suggested reading to get you started: https://www.uww.edu/Documents/youngauditorium/2014-2015%20Season/reading_photography.pdf

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Photographic Propaganda: Andrew, Henrica, Yamil, Jesiah

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Photographic Propaganda: Andrew, Henrica, Yamil, Jesiah

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- Define it

- What are the different reasons why an image may be altered

- HOW were early photographs retouched – what methods?

- Present a brief history with examples of how photographs have been altered pre-Photoshop (Lincoln) to today in the digital realm (Deepfake)

- Suggested reading: https://www.bronxdoc.org/exhibits/altered-images-150-years-of-posed-and-manipulated-documentary-photography/detail

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Visual Misinformation: Sarah, Leo, Italo, Erika

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Visual Misinformation: Sarah, Leo, Italo, Erika

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1. Define it

2. How to Identify Misinformation

3. Examples of when this has happened on social media (flooding images)

4. The importance of accurate captions

5. Lesson: How to Reverse Google Search an Image

6. Suggested reading/video to get you started:

https://libguides.ashland.edu/fakenews/photos

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Photographic Plagiarism: Vince, Jordan, Mel, Jermiah, Hitomi

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Photographic Plagiarism: Vince, Jordan, Mel, Jermiah, Hitomi

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7. Define it and its various manifestations (claiming another’s work as your own, recreating the idea of a shoot and presenting it as your original idea, Photoshop disasters, etc)

8. Examples *Please include the story of Souvid Datta using Mary Ellen Mark’s work in his images

9. The difference between plagiarism and appropriation

10. https://library.fiveable.me/ap-art-design/unit-5/plagiarism-vs-appropriation/study-guide/08fOn3KMbK0eH0YSDB8p

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Photographic Ethics: Zaiden, Ashley, Rose, Dylan

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Photographic Ethics: Zaiden, Ashley, Rose, Dylan

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Define Photographic Ethics

11. The role of model releases, consent, and laws surrounding photography and photojournalistic standards

12. Examples where photographers regretted or struggled with their role – for example Kevin Carter’s photo of starving child

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vulture_and_the_Little_Girl

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Grade 1 - Post 3 links on your topic and comment on how each will assist in your final project. DUE 11/13!

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Grade 1 - Post 3 links on your topic and comment on how each will assist in your final project. DUE 11/13!

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Deadline 1 for grade: Topics must be approved by me BY NOV 6 at the latest! Post 3 links with comments on your topic before class on 11/13!