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This work of Daniel Eatock was a great reference for possibilities of collection themes. What I find the most interesting about it is the way that he establish a way and a time for taking the photos. makes me think that, in a collection, striving for quantity might be better than passing losts of time looking for perfect things to add to a collection; as later on one can find some good quality photos among hundreds of pics, I'm plannig to apply  this idea to my collection, to look for many and than filter the good ones.

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Dayanita Singh often describes the photobook as her primary medium. What she goes for in the form - and what she richly achieves in "Museum of Chance," her latest - is a kind of narrative that is difficult to replicate elsewhere. In collaboration with the famously detail-oriented publisher Gerhard Steidl, Singh brings together a variety of her photographs and through them conveys a mysterious and uncannily coherent story. The printing in this book is exemplary: The black tones are rich and profound, the whites subtle and creamy. Singh's story in "Museum of Chance" has something to do with breezes, white curtains, rooms full of dusty files, Bollywood actors, musicians at rehearsal, night phantoms. But like a tightly edited song cycle, the project is impossible to reduce to its synopsis. It unfolds, one page after the other, like a dream.
- Teju Cole, NYT BEST PHOTOBOOKS OF 2015

Dayanita Singh's Museum of Chance is a book about how life unfolds, and asks to be recorded and edited, along and off the axis of time. The inscrutably woven photographic sequence of Singh's Go Away Closer has now grown into a labyrinth of connections and correspondences. The thread through this novel like web of happenings is that elusive entity called Chance. It is Chance that seems to disperse as well as gather fragments or clusters of experience, creating a form of simultaneity that is realised in the idea and matter of the book, with its interlaced or parallel timelines and patterns of recurrence and return. The eighty-eight quadratone images in the book will also appear on the front and back covers in random pairs, transforming each copy of the book into a distinct piece of work by the author.

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Dayanita Singh often describes the photobook as her primary medium. What she goes for in the form - and what she richly achieves in "Museum of Chance," her latest - is a kind of narrative that is difficult to replicate elsewhere.

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What draws my attention in this artwork is the blurred effect applied on the pictures and the clear pattern for photo taking. For me the blur draws more attention to the less blurry parts of the images, creating a focus point on every picture. For me this work brings the  idea that people don't pay much attention to people, that the others are just not fit for our concern. The way all images are taken- portraits cut in the same way creates a sense of union and condition sharing of the persons represented. I would like to experiment  taking photos, all in the same framework as a way of creating a collection.

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Official website of artist Ann Hamilton.

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Dedicated to the Unknown Artists consists of 14 panels, featuring over 300 original postcards depicting waves crashing onto shores around Britain. A large map annotated with each of the locations featured in the postcards is included in the first panel. The title identifies the work as a tribute to the overlooked and forgotten artists who painted, photographed or hand-tinted the numerous seaside images. By making such commonplace objects the subject of a dedicated and extensive presentation, Hiller gives the mundane new status. This work also demonstrates Hiller's interest in the theme of memory and memorials.
Gallery label, October 2013

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dossiers and exhibition catalogues and 1 painted wooden book stand

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'Dedicated to the Unknown Artists', Susan Hiller, 1972-6 | Tate

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Artwork page for 'Dedicated to the Unknown Artists', Susan Hiller, 1972-6 Dedicated to the Unknown Artists consists of 14 panels, featuring over 300 original postcards depicting waves crashing onto shores around Britain. A large map annotated with each of the locations featured in the postcards is included in the first panel.

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What really attracted my attention on this work was the way in which the collection was displayed. The diamond like shape creates for me a strong attention caller, that draws people's attention to work been displayed. It also creates a strong inter-relation in between parts of the work, making it more clear that they are all part of the same work. this characteristic are sure things to be considered when I display my on collection.

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Susan Hiller's installation Monument incorporates forty-one photographs of memorial plaques the artist came across in Postman's Park, near St Paul's Cathedral, London. There is one photograph for each year of the artist's life (at the time the work was made). Each plaque commemorates an ordinary man, woman or child who died while performing an act of heroism. One memorial reads, for example: 'Elizabeth Boxall/Aged 17 of Bethnal Green/ Who Died of Injuries Received/In Trying to Save/ A Child/From a Runaway Horse/June 20 1888'. The photographs are arranged in a diamond shape on the gallery wall, in front of which is set a park bench. The bench faces away from the wall and a cassette player and headphones rest on its seat. Hiller's own voice plays through the headphones and her flowing and associative commentary addresses the nature of heroism as well as the themes of death, memory and representation.

Hiller's work often takes what she terms 'cultural artefacts' as a starting point. These artefacts take many forms but Hiller consistently focuses on ideas, events or objects that have been ignored or forgotten. In the case of Monument, Hiller noticed that the very tiles that were meant to have a commemorative function were themselves being overlooked. When she returned to photograph the tiles she found that:

there were people sitting on park benches in front of them eating their lunches, who turned round over their shoulders to look, as if for the first time, at what I was photographing. And when they had seen the plaques they said things like 'Oh! Isn't it sad? Isn't it dreadful?' But what struck me was that they had sat in front of these perfectly visible objects for years and years, and the objects had been, literally, invisible.

(Quoted in Susan Hiller, p.77.)

Hiller's work is collaborative, often involving the direct participation of the audience in some form. In Monument,as in much of Hiller's work, there is an emphasis on the frontier between public and private experience. The title of the work refers to a very public and official form of art and the visual elements of the work are viewed in a public and collective way by the audience. Hiller's voice, however, can only be heard by the individual wearing the headphones, setting up a one-on-one relationship between the artist and her listener. Moreover, the individual listening to her monologue sits with his or her back to the photographs, facing the audience for the work and momentarily becoming a part of it. As Hiller has explained:

'In Monument (1980-81), for instance, where the entire piece is activated by a person who sits on a bench listening to a sound tape, a person must be prepared to be seen in public performing a private act of listening. Since that person is seen by other viewers against a backdrop of photographic images, the piece exists as a tableau with a living centre, while the person is also part of the audience for the work.'

(Interview with Stuart Morgan, Susan Hiller, p.38.)

Monument poses questions about the relationships between heroism and death, memory and representation. For Hiller, there is a significant distinction to be made between two modes of existence for each of the individuals commemorated in the plaques. In the audio tape, the artist reads a list of the individuals' names distinguishing between the duration of their existence in the body (the number of years they lived) and the duration of their existence as a representation (as a commemorative text on a plaque.) She elaborates: 'We could exist forever, inscribed, portrayed, as inscriptions, , representations. I'm representing myself to myself... and for you, to you. This is my voice.' ( Monument, 1981, p.6.)

Further Reading
Monument, exhibition catalogue, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 1981.
Susan Hiller, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery Liverpool 1996, pp.77-80, reproduced, pp.78-80.
Barbara Einzig, ed., Thinking About Art: Conversations with Susan Hiller, Manchester 1996, pp.182-192, reproduced, pp.188-9.

Kathryn Rattee
March 2003

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Artwork page for 'Monument', Susan Hiller, 1980-1 Monument explores memory, death, history, heroism, representation and time. Its subject is taken from a series of Victorian ceramic tiles photographed by Hiller in a London park. These commemorate acts of courage by ordinary men, women and children.

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The first thing to catch my eye on Portia's work are the huge collections of same colour objects. It makes me wonder if there were other criteria applied to the creation of this collections- such as shapes, sizes or even functions of those things- taking a closer look into the works it appears to me that she might establish some other criteria (especially in Green Pieces and Reflecting Pool installations, were I can see some preference for certain sizes), but that are not the major concern in the collection making.

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Portia Munson is a visual artist who works in a variety of media including installation, painting, photography and sculpture.

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The following websites contain valuable informantion on typography terminology and proved to be useful for research.

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Typography is, quite simply, the art and technique of arranging type. It's central to the skills of a designer and is about much more than making the words legible. Your choice of typeface and how you make it work with your layout, grid, colour scheme, design theme and so on will make the difference between a good, bad and great design.

There are lots of typography tutorials around to help you master the discipline. But good typography is often down to creative intuition. Once you're comfortable with the basics, visit some typography resources to investigate font families and discover some font pairings that are made for each other.

Choosing a font

There's an astonishing array of paid-for and free fonts to choose from online. But with great power comes great responsibility. Just because you can choose from a vast library doesn't mean you have to; there's something to be said for painting with a limited palette, and tried and tested fonts like Helvetica continue to serve us well.

A typeface, like any form of design, is created by craftsmen over a substantial period of time, using the talent they've been honing for many years. And the benefits of a professionally designed font - various weights and styles to form a complete family, carefully considered kerning pairs, multi-language support with international characters, expressive alternate glyphs to add character and variety to type-setting - are not always found in a font available for free.

Here are some of the most important typographic considerations the professional designers needs to take into account.

01. Size

All typefaces are not created equally. Some are fat and wide; some are thin and narrow. So words set in different typefaces can take up a very different amount of space on the page.

The height of each character is known as its 'x-height' (quite simply because it's based on the letter 'x'). When pairing typefaces - such as when using a different face to denote an area of attention - it's generally wise to use those that share a similar x-height. The width of each character is known as the 'set width', which spans the body of the letter plus a space that acts as a buffer with other letter.

The most common method used to measure type is the point system, which dates back to the 18th century. One point is 1/72 inch. 12 points make one pica, a unit used to measure column widths. Type sizes can also be measured in inches, millimetres, or pixels.

02. Leading

Leading describes the vertical space between each line of type. It's called this because strips of lead were originally used to separate lines of type in the days of metal typesetting.

For legible body text that's comfortable to read, a general rule is that your leading value should be greater than the font size; anywhere from 1.25 to 1.5 times.

03. Tracking and kerning

Kerning describes the act of adjusting the space between characters to create a harmonious pairing. For example, where an uppercase 'A' meets an uppercase 'V', their diagonal strokes are usually kerned so that the top left of the 'V' sits above the bottom right of the 'A'.

Kerning similar to, but not the same as, 'tracking'; this relates to the spacing of all characters and is applied evenly.

04. Measure

The term 'measure' describes the width of a text block. If you're seeking to achieve the optimum reading experience, it's clearly an important consideration.

05. Hierarchy and scale

If all type was the same size, it would be difficult to know which was the most important information on the page. In order to guide the reader, then, headings are usually large, sub-headings are smaller, and body type is smaller still.

Size is not the only way to define hierarchy - it can also be achieved with colour, spacing and weight.
Next page: Glossary of typography A-D

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Typography rules and terms every designer must know

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Typography is, quite simply, the art and technique of arranging type. It's central to the skills of a designer and is about much more than making the words legible. Your choice of typeface and how you make it work with your layout, grid, colour scheme, design theme and so on will make the difference between a good, bad and great design.

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Beginning Graphic Design: Typography - Full Page

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Free Tutorial: As an important element of graphic design typography is defined as the style or appearance of text. Learn more in this tutorial and video.

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Part 4: Numerals and Punctuation-by Paul Dean

"The very air of the room seemed charmingly alive with little floating dollar signs and fat little ciphers, commas, more ciphers, all winging around happily, waiting for a mere scratch of the pen to call them into action." - Dawn Powell, Angels on Toast, 1938.

The Roman alphabet came equipped with its own numbering system, and Roman numerals still have their uses. They are commonly seen, for instance, on clock faces, in movie credits, and on the pages of a book which precede the introduction and the text itself. The letters M D C L X V and I, used in combination and sometimes with a bar over the letter, Roman numerals can signify all whole or natural numbers. Well, everything but zero (0). The zero was invented in India, and it has maintained the same form, generally a circle but sometimes just a dot, ever since.

The word cipher, derived from the same root zephyr and zero, usually suggests a zero but it can refer to other digits too. The European digits that have generally come to replace Roman numerals are sometimes referred to, inaccurately, as Arabic numerals. They might more properly be called Indian numerals, because they evolved from characters that, like the zero, originally came from India. The term Arabic numerals can lead to confusion with Arabic digits, the numbering system currently in use in Arabic culture. Arabic numerals and Arabic digits have similar ancestors, share some formal characteristics, and consist of ten characters, but are completely different symbol sets.

Typographically speaking, there are several ways to classify European digits. Tabular figures share a common figure width and are used for tabular data because they form orderly rows and columns. Proportional figures have varying widths and are used for everything that doesn't require tabular figures.

A specialized font might also include numerator and denominator figures. Smaller numbers that rest below or just higher than the regular characters are known inferior or subscript (the lower numbers) and superior or superscript (the higher ones).

The forward slash (/), which we met earlier, is used to create horizontally bound split fractions. Stacked fractions, also known as horizontal bar fractions or vertical fractions, consist of numbers stacked above and below a figure dash. A nut fraction is a stacked fraction that is specifically designed to fit an en space. A built fraction is one that is painstakingly assembled element by element, whereas a piece fraction is one that comes as part of a font.

Dashes, Rules and Dot Leaders

As Alexander & Nicholas Humez, describe it in the book ABC Et Cetera, "The em dash is used to indicate abrupt transitions- What?-and quasi-parenthetical expressions-such as this one." The two-em dash and the three-em dash are precisely as long as their names imply.

The two remaining character-size lines are the underscore or understrike (_), and the increasingly popular pipe, also known as a vertical or a vertical bar (|). Incidentally, the grids created using vertical bars and understrikes, open at the top, for the filling-in, letter by letter, of information are known as combs.

Larger typographic lines are referred to as rules, which is perhaps not surprising in a field as traditional as typography. A hairline rule is a particular fine line; other rules are defined by width as measured in points. At some undefined point a wide rule becomes a bar. Bar width is also measured in points. Cutoff rules are used to distinguish the width of columns of type, and a leader of dashes sometimes carries the eye across a column of information, linking, for instance, a chapter title to a page number. A dot leader is a row of periods or midpoints set for the same purpose.

Punctuation

There were no extraneous specks, lines or squiggles to distract from the beauty of the original Roman majuscules. There were not even any spaces between the words, and this helped give Roman lettering, particularly when inscribed in stone, a harmonious texture. For sheer aesthetic appeal, legibility be damned, a comparison of wordswithoutspacing and space between the words reveals the beauty of the former and can leave the latter looking like gap teeth.

The first punctuation mark was a dot or small triangle situated midway between the top and bottom of the letters, which was used, instead of spacing, to indicate a named or title. The interpunct, centered dot, middle dot or midpoint has been hailed by Wikipedia, as "perhaps the first consistent visual representation of word boundaries in written language." So the interpunct may be the mother of all punctuation marks, and not just the obviously similar, but slightly bolder and much lower full point, full stop, or period (.).

Today we would be lost, or at least often confused, if we didn't clarify our prose with this handy little dot. The period once had an even loftier role in world affairs: most nineteenth-century newspapers had a period at the end of their mastheads. The New York Times continued with the period until 1966, half a century after most other papers had dropped the dot. Perhaps the editors felt that the period suggested stability and tradition, and was therefore worth the $84 a year in ink that type designer Edward Rondthaler once jokingly estimated that it required.

There is more to punctuation than just periods, of course. As every type designer soon realizes, a complete font set will also need an apostrophe ('), colon (:), semicolon (;), comma (,), hyphen (-), an en-dash (-), an em-dash (-), ellipsis or suspension points (...), and an exclamation mark, sometimes known as an exclamation point, screamer or bang (!).

In Britain the exclamation mark is sometimes referred to as a dog's prick, and that, further, the combination of a colon and a dash (:-), out of fashion now but long used to represent a restful pause, is known as a dog's bollocks. This is because the combination is, according to the online Oxford English Dictionary, "regarded as forming the shape resembling the male sexual organs." The "dog's bollocks (also dog's ballocks)" also serves, incidentally, as British slang for the best of anything; as in the "bee's knees."

The question mark, query or squiggle (?) is of course crucial mark, and there are two types of quotation marks: smart quotes, also known as curly quotes or, in Britain, inverted commas (""), and prime marks, a catch-all which includes the foot mark (′), the inch mark (″) and hatch marks or dumb quotes (″″). Both smart quotes and dumb quotes can be referred to as single quotes ('') or double quotes (""). Standard punctuation marks also include a set of braces or brackets ([]) and its variations: curly brackets ({}), chevrons (<>), guillemets, otherwise known as angle brackets or angle quotes (""), and, of course, parentheses, which is both singular and plural for the ubiquitous curls (()), which can be distinguished individually as open parentheses (() and close parentheses ()). (Parenthetically, parenthesis, spelled with an i, refers to the inserted material, while parentheses, with three e's, refers to the typographic glyphs.) And these days every typeface needs a slash or forward slash, also known as a slant, stroke, diagonal, whack, separatrix, or virgule (/). A pair of these, leaning as they do on every page of the Internet, are known as a double virgule (//).

The ampersand (&) is a stylized ligature of e and t, and represents the Latin word et or 'and.' Other commonly called for but unusual marks are the asterisk or splat (*), the commercial at sign, more commonly known as the at (@), the backslash (\), bullet (*), caret (^), currency marks (such as ¢, $, €, £, and ¥), a dagger or obelisk (†), double dagger (‡), degree mark (°), an inverted exclamation point (¡) and inverted question mark (¿) for Spanish exclamations and interrogations, a lozenge (◊), a percent sign (%), a paragraph mark, paragraph sign, pilcrow or alinea, from the Latin a linea, meaning "of the line," (¶), a section sign (§) and what must surely be the most-named typographic mark of all time, an octothorpe (named by Bell Labs' engineer Don MacPherson by combining octo-, meaning eight, with the name of the 1912 Olympic decathlon champion Jim Thorpe), with the variations octothorp or octothorn, also known as the crosshatch, double hashmark, pound sign, number sign or, in computerese, a crunch (#).

Accent marks, which rest over and under the letters of foreign expressions, are also known as diacritical marks or diacritics. Some common diacritics are the acute or aigu (é), the cedille (ç), the caret, circumflex or circonflexe (ê), the grave (à), the tilde or swung dash (ñ), and the umlaut, a feature in many German words (ü), is identical to the diaeresis or trema (ö) that is rare and not mandatory in English (don't be naïve), but is a regular feature of Dutch, French and Spanish.

Dingbats are typographic ornaments or simple illustrations, the most famous set of which, Zapf Dingbats, was designed by Hermann Zapf. They are sometimes also known as ornaments, or as fleurons if the illustrations are of a horticultural nature. A set of pi characters, also known as a pi font, consists of nothing but unusual type forms, generally known as all sorts, special sorts, or peculiars.

In Emoticons During Wartime, a recent article in The New Yorker (December 10, 2007), Tom McNichol documents the usefulness of emoticons in communicating by visual innuendo. Emoticons can mean whatever the writer and reader want them to mean, until, of course the meaning is explicitly defined for all by The New Yorker. Two striking examples are:

"=|:-)= This e-mail is being monitored by Uncle Sam for your protection," and ":-x I'd rather not say in an e-mail that's being monitored for my protection."

"When the world blows up and the final edition has gone to press the proofreaders will quietly gather up all commas, semicolons, hyphens, asterisks, brackets, parenthesis, periods, exclamation marks, etc. and put them in a little box over the editorial chair."
-Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 1961.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 5

diacritics typography terms

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eXtreme Type Terminology - I Love Typography

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Part 4: Numerals and Punctuation-by Paul Dean "The very air of the room seemed charmingly alive with little floating dollar signs and fat little ciphers, commas, more ciphers, all winging around happily, waiting for a mere scratch of the pen to call them into action." - Dawn Powell, Angels on Toast, 1938.

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Typographic terms, fonts glossary | Adobe Type

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Glossary of frequently used typographic terms in the type world and Adobe Type fonts.

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The portfolio and random thoughts of a crazy cat lady.

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Oh FontStructors,

Will you ever disappoint? This time you were faced with what seemed, at first glance, a relatively staid and technical theme: "serif". Nevertheless you rose to the challenge, with your inimitable imagination and energy - endlessly riffing, playing and transmogrifying to produce a magnificently rich and diverse array of 58 entries - a record haul for a FontStruct competition. Many thanks and congratulations to everyone who entered.

Judging was more difficult than ever, but, thanks to the excellent input of our guest judge beate, we finally reached consensus.

First up, and in no particular order, the four winning entrants:

G1 Radia was a unanimous choice of the judges. With it's high-contrast strokes, ball-terminals and discreet little serifs this FontStruction genuinely radiates a curvesome beauty, although on closer inspection one also sees intriguing traces of its cruder, modular roots.

All four winners actually made multiple high-quality entries, some of which we couldn't resist including in the samples, so below G1 Radia you can also marvel at the monumental G1 Valora - one of the serifiest serifs this side of the Pecos.

2. Hoek by four (shown in red)

Hoek was elected by the FontStruct community as the "people's favorite" . It obviously stems from a clear and precise concept for a bevelled slab, thoughtfully executed in every perfect detail.
In fact, the judges were even more excited by the highly-inventive " elza" (the second design featured above) in which wiry strokes terminate in a questioning hook-shape rather than a traditional serif or terminal. Planetarium, also shown above, was another strong and popular slab entry.

The judges were enchanted by Cembrel B: a subtle, attractive, and eminently-usable, high-contrast serif, part of a developing new family. Nouveaumbre was another really excellent entry from yautja.

And last but not least ...

A classifier's nightmare: a slab serif concealed inside a sans! - what an innovative interpretation of the theme. Beyond the high concept, architaraz also succeeds in delivering a coherent and attractive typeface. Beneath AT Bals you can see the elegant inline " AT Migdalia " with it's hairline serifs.

Many, many congratulations to our four prizewinners.

Some Honorable Mentions:

- A classic serif with an unusual calligraphic twist, created on a pin-board matrix.

- A convivial, super-chunky slab-serif, given added character by the idiosyncratic snips in certain letter-tops.

- Actually I'm not sure whether this is (at least in any sense known to me) a serif, but a strong, clear design nevertheless.

- One of three strong entries from the master of the dotted font. Some really charming glyphs in this one.

- Ultra-high-contrast strokes and serifs in a stencil-flavoured entry.

- Calculated, cutout crudity. Shamelessly modular and yet also wonderfully imperfect.

This brutal disfiguration of an existing design by Sychoff came very close to a prize. Although tagged as punk, there's also something quite primitive and ancient going on here. I can see these glyphs scratched into the base of an amphora, or perhaps arranged in the border of a mosaic. Compare the Jekyll to this Hyde.

Congratulations again to all winners, who will be contacted about their prizes in the next few days; thanks to our judges; and, most of all, thanks to everyone who took part. I look forward to our next competition.

Happy FontStructing!

Rob

FontStruct would like to thank our sponsor: Creative Fabrica - your number #1 source for premium design elements.

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Oh FontStructors, Will you ever disappoint? This time you were faced with what seemed, at first glance, a relatively staid and technical theme: "serif". Nevertheless you rose to the challenge, with your inimitable imagination and energy - endlessly riffing, playing and transmogrifying to produce...

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What calls my attention on this work is the way that the artist incorporated the structure of the room and uses it to write a frase that can only be seen from a specific angle. One of the major concerns of the artist when producing this work must have been the way he would place the latters on the walls, the specific place to put then, how to take the most advantage from the room's characteristics, since the play with perspective is one of the central points of this work.
The font chosen also contributes to the work. The letters are bold, not calligraphic, sans serif, what for me makes a connection with the room's structure, that is composed of straight lines, hard surfaces and geometrical shapes.

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When viewed head on, what at first looks like typography on top of a simple photograph reveals itself to be well-executed anamorphic typography by Chicago designer Thomas Quinn. The illusion is created using a standard light projector that projects the intended design on an uneven surface which is then carefully painted. From every other angle the work looks skewed and almost illegible, but when you stand at just the right spot everything seems to pop into place. You can see many variations of anamorphism right here on Colossal, and don't forget the absolute master of the art form, Felice Varini. (via this isn't happiness)

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Face Reality As It Is: Anamorphic Typography by Thomas Quinn

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When viewed head on, what at first looks like typography on top of a simple photograph reveals itself to be well-executed anamorphic typography by Chicago designer Thomas Quinn. The illusion is created using a standard light projector that projects the intended design on an uneven surface which is t

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Series of posters exploring form and rhythm of letters or pseudo-letters presented as half-realistic, half-illustrative figurative paint sculptures. By Pawel Nolbert

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This project calls attention on the way the fonts were produced, not by actual designers but by kids, the most incredible is how the different letters fit in the fonts (although they were selected to meet this criteria) despite been made by different kids. Another pont of interest is the sort of loose font they created, what for me contrast with the way fonts are usually created- with lost if technical knowledge and theory applied. The designers clearly wanted to find a very unusual way of creating this fonts that could relate to the priject proposals. I want to try using more loose and hand made letters, and even try some unusual ways of drawing and see what possibilities of letter forms I can take from it.

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Flipping the stereotype of type design as the realm of the fastidious and precise on its head, this charming font has been developed by a crew of rambunctious kids. The project was conceived under the watchful eye of type designer and Letters from Sweden founder Göran Söderström and designer Daniela Juvall, after the latter was commissioned to develop the identity for Stockholm City Museum's exhibition Östberga, Östberga, which celebrated the eponymous Stockholm neighbourhood.

"Östberga is special because of it's geographical position just a few kilometres from the city centre but with a history of very bad public transport, a lack of public services and almost no grocery stores," says Johan Stigholt, the exhibition's project manager. "It is divided into two separate areas - 'good' and 'bad' - both mentally and geographically." Given the rising problem with gang-related crime in the more deprived half Östbergahöjden, the City Museum wanted to stage an exhibition that brought people together, documented local and aural histories and inspired pride in the suburb.

Designers Daniela and Göran held workshops with ten children between ten and 12 (Rola, Nima, Mohammed, Riccardo, Klara, Fabian, Masa, Bo, Amin and Ali) at their local youth centre, plastering the floor with paper and graffiti pens before letting the kid's imaginations and hands run riot. "The whole idea with this project was for them to create their own typeface, without any direction from us. We encouraged them to draw in their own style," Göran explains.

Daniela adds, "We didn't want to influence how they wrote the letters, but one idea I had was to ask if the kids wanted to write a lot of different Ös as in Östberga. They didn't, instead they wanted to write a lot of different Bs and Ns." In fact some of the children wrote in Mandarin and Persian, others wrote their name, their favourite football team or the names of their siblings.
"We ran out of paper in no-time even though we had over a hundred meters to start with," says Daniela. "The kids didn't want to stop writing!"

Göran and Daniela then picked out the useable letters, scanned them and digitised them using a font editor. The use of brushlike graffiti pens meant that the letters's bold strokes felt coherent despite their different authors. Daniela says, "It was also interesting to see that the children didn't care about "good" or "bad", they just did what they did without evaluating what it looked like."

As well as being used in the initial exhibition, the typeface will feature in a second show this autumn, and interest in the "open-source typeface":http://www.ostbergatype.se/ has spread all over the country, from community centres to grocery chains. "The typeface is also getting Östberga recognised for their work with the kids at the youth centre," says Daniela. "Plus one of the kids says he wants to work as an artist in the future."

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These Swedish kids designed a typeface to celebrate their neighbourhood

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Flipping the stereotype of type design as the realm of the fastidious and precise on its head, this charming font has been developed by a crew of rambunctious kids.

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This huge book is a excellent font of samples for a typography research. Contains samples of text in different fonts.

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What I find interesting in this work of Erwin Olaf is the contrast between the two short movies that play at the same time. Were one is completely overtaken by white tones and the other is the oposite, presenting a palette composed by dark tones. Both movies present the same story, a mother singing to a baby while some one is making noise on the other room, these matches with the exposition theme: tension. In both movies there is a lot on tension going on, the mothers trying to put their children to sleep, but they can't due to the noise. Made me feel a bit of frustration and anxiety. You want to know what will happen, are the people going to stop with the noise? Are the babys going to sleep or their mothers will eventually give up?
The narrative develops slowly what contributes to the tense atmosphere of the shorts, the absence of music ( except for the mothers sings) also contribute to creation a tension on the scenes, in my opinion. This work makes me want to try to craete a movie with no sound or almost with no sound, and test the different possibilities of creating tension in a scene.

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This book has a very interesting collection of posters

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One thing that calls my attention on this posters/ magazine covers is in most cases their simplicity. They are synthetic, clear, some even are simple, but all have a strong impact and call the attention of the viewer. The reason for this, in my opinion, is because they bring unusual images or strong colours ( when not bought). The women in the lingerie is a exemple of strong and warn colour palette that drawn the eye to the image. This makes me come to the conclusion that one don't necessarily needs complex and chaotic images to call attention to a poster, a clear and simple outcome can also be very effective ( if not more effective) to making a poster. Taking this idea as a start point I'll try to test out simple solutions as possible  out comes for a poster.

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Book of the punk movement, the strong images and texts make this a good reference for poster making.

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More than twenty-five hundred years ago, intellectuals from many cultures began to experiment with image projection in their attempts to understand the relationship between the mechanics of the human eye and the physical principles of light. Consequently, they discovered the value of image projection for religious, educational, and entertainment purposes. In the fifth century b.c., Chinese philosopher Mo Ti described a "collecting place" or "locked treasure room" where an inverted image appeared on a screen when light passed through a pinhole. During the fourth century b.c., Aristotle (384-322 b.c.) similarly described what would eventually be called the camera obscura; Chinese inventor Ting Huan is said to have perfected a device for projecting moving images in c. 207 b.c. Others attribute the earliest description of sequential animation to Titus Lucretius Carus, a Roman poet and philosopher, in c. 65 b.c. Around the tenth century a.d., the Arab philosopher Ibn al Haytham (965-1038) described the mechanics of the pinhole camera. It is now thought that al Haytham was describing optic principles already well known throughout the world. By the Renaissance, ground glass lenses had made possible the improvement and widespread use of spectacles and telescopes, as well as improved focus in pinhole boxes or "cameras obscuras," from which the magic lantern derives.

In the seventeenth century, the optical principles of the camera obscura were applied to display multiple images painted on glass plates. This "magic lantern" technology incorporated the same basic components as modern optical projection systems-a subject in a holder, a light source, a projection lens, a condenser, or lens to redirect as much light as possible through the projection lens; and a ground, or viewing screen. The combined processes of controlled light projection through specialized lenses and intermittent movement of painted images in the magic lantern lay the foundation for modern slide and movie projectors.

Background

The invention and first public demonstration of the magic lantern has long been a subject of debate. In 1646 Athanasius Kircher (c. 1602-1680), a German Jesuit priest, detailed improvements in "mirror writing" in Ars Magna lucis et umbrae. This method of projecting images etched into highly polished metal plates had earlier been described by Giambattista della Porta (c. 1535-1615) of Naples, Italy, in his Magiae naturalis libri viginti (1589). Kircher's modifications included the addition of a bi-convex lens arrangement, using either candle or sun as a light source. The mirror was replaced with images painted on a water-filled glass container. A few years after the initial publication of Ars Magna, Kircher's pupil, missionary Martin Martini, reportedly began touring Europe, illustrating his trip to China by projecting images from glass slides, a contraption Martini attributed to Kircher. In 1657, and again in 1671, Gaspar Schott (1608-1666), in his Magica Optica, described every type of magic lantern then known, and gave Kircher credit for originating the technology. In Kircher's expanded second edition of Ars Magna (1671), he illustrated a projection lantern, and took credit for its invention. Kircher's drawing indicated a lamp as light source, a lens, a mirror, slides, and an image projected on a wall. Interestingly, the slides were shown mounted in the inverted position in order to provide an upright presentation, and thus indicated his understanding of optics. Although the illustration contained some technical contradictions, it indicates Kircher's objective of projecting a series of images successively onto a large screen.

Some historians maintain that it was the Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) who in around 1659 constructed the first working magic lantern. This view is supported by a letter that Huygens wrote to his brother Ludwig in which he described the lantern, and by reports of a slide presentation of Martini's trip by Huygens's friend, the Jesuit priest Andreas Tacquet. Other historians have argued that reports of magic lanterns predate Huygens's description, and that Huygens's model never advanced beyond the experimental stage. Yet Schott wrote that Tacquet used Kircher's method of projection to illustrate Martini's journey from China back to the Netherlands.

In the second edition of Ars Magna, Kircher himself attributed another magic lantern prototype to "the learned Dane who came to Lyons in 1665." It is thought that the reference was to Thomas Rasmussen Walgensten, a professor of mathematics who had begun touring Europe with an improved version of the magic lantern in the mid 1660's. Francesco Eschinardi, an Italian priest who has been credited with coining the term, "magic lantern," referred to a description of Walgensten's device, the scare lantern in his Centuriae Optical Pars Altera (1668). A similar reference was made by Claude François Milliet de Chales (1621-1678) a French mathematician. In the second edition of his Cursus seu mundus mathematicus, (1690), he included illustrations of Walgensten's version of the lantern. Milliet de Chales is another one of the people credited with the invention. In his book, he advanced lantern technology by addressing issues of focus and illumination, and by suggesting the procedure of moving a series of glass slides from side to side through the lantern apparatus. Nevertheless, he disclaimed any credit for inventing the process.

Despite the controversy over who actually produced the first lantern projector, by the mid-seventeenth century descriptions of prototypes and reports of demonstrations were being published throughout Europe. A London optician and acquaintance of Huygens named John Reeves began producing his own lanterns In 1663. In 1668, British scientist Robert Hooke described a universal projector for both transparent and opaque slides, which could use either sun or candle as a light source. In the same year, Francesco Eschinardi published Centuriae opticae pars altera seu dialogi optici pars tertia, which included a detailed description of the construction of the magic lantern. In 1672, Johann Christoph Sturm, professor of mathematics at the University of Nurnberg, introduced the lantern into Germany where he gave experimental lectures supposedly using Walgensten's model lantern and slides.

Twenty years later, William Molyneux (1656-1698), a professor at Trinity College, Dublin, published Dioptrica Nova (1692), in which he devoted a whole section to a description of a metal lantern with adjustable focusing lenses. Molyneux pointed out in the introduction to his book that there had previously been nothing written on mathematics in English, making his description of the lantern also the first work in English on that topic. Molyneux's illustration of the lantern indicated a candle as the light source, and a condensing lens (absent from the lantern constructed by Reeves in the 1660's). The illustration also indicates telescopic effects, the ability to project at a distance through a combination of lenses, and the inversion principle with the subject upside down, and the image right-side up. At the end of Molyneux' book was an advertisement for the lantern and components "made and sold by John Yarwell at the Archimedes and Three Golden Prospects. . .London."

As with many new inventions, the magic lantern was first used to entertain. However, Milliet de Chales noted that the lantern had value for scientific instruction, as it could be used to show enlarged images of insects and other specimens. Johann Zahn (fl. 1600s) advanced the idea of slide presentations for anatomical lessons, and in his Oculus artificialis teledioptricus sive telescopium (1685/1686) he suggested tracing book illustrations onto glass plates for that purpose. Zahn included illustrations of both cameras obscuras and magic lanterns, and suggested hiding the magic lantern out of sight of the audience for effect.

By the end of the seventeenth century, the popularity of the magic lantern motivated the development of prepared slides for sale to educators and to the public. For example, in 1705 Johann Conrad Creiling, a professor of natural history in Tübbingen proposed the production of educational magic lantern slides to accompany lectures in subjects such as natural history, biblical studies, geography, and mathematics. In 1713, B. H. Ehrenberger of Hildburghausen produced such slides, as described in his Novum et curiosum laternae magicae augmentum (1713). Ehrenberger's teacher, Hamberger, credited the origin of prepared slides to Erhard Weigel, a physicist who he said made them before 1700.

Impact

Improved projection technology had an immense impact on society in the following centuries. In many ways, because of the magic lantern's descendants-slide shows and motion pictures-people gained a new perspective about themselves and the world around them. Public moving picture exhibitions made everything larger than life, literally reflecting back upon society both its cultural and technological accomplishments and its social ills. But it also provided working people and a growing middle class with a new social outlet for entertainment.

The value of projecting multiple images became obvious to both scientists wishing to share new discoveries about natural phenomena and entrepreneurs anxious to make money entertaining the public. By the late eighteenth century, public exhibitions were already widespread. One of the most popular of the magic lantern shows were "Phantasmagoria" demonstrations, in which ghostly apparitions seemed to appear and vanish in the dark before viewers' eyes. Demand for such performances was so great that in 1798 E. G. Robertson took his London phantasmagoria show on the road to Paris, Vienna, and St. Petersburg.

In the nineteenth century, a variety of "optical" toys and gadgets were introduced concurrently with improvements in magic lantern technology. Among them was the "thaumatrope," developed by astronomer John Herschel and popularized by British doctor, John Ayrton Paris. As a cardboard disk with a different picture on either side is rotated rapidly on a string, the optical principle of persistence of vision takes over, and the viewer sees an optical illusion-one combined image. More elaborate devices were developed that worked on the same principle. The Daedalum, introduced by W.H. Horner in the mid-nineteenth century and refined by French inventor Pierre Desvignes under the name Zoetrope, was later patented in the United States by William F. Lincoln and in England by Milton Bradley. The device consisted of a drum with evenly spaced slits that spun on a pedestal. As the drum was turned, individual images drawn in a narrative sequence and wrapped around the inside of the drum would appear as one smooth action when viewed through the slits. The Zoetrope had become a popular toy by the late 1800s. In 1877, Emile Reynaud introduced the Praxinoscope, a modified version of the Zoetrope in which the image was viewed on mirrors placed in the center of the drum instead of directly through the slits.

By the late 1800s, larger, more complex versions of these devices were being developed for commercial use. More streamlined methods of producing and displaying slides were introduced, advancing from painted glass strips to flexible gelatin or film. In 1892, Reynaud gave the first public exhibition of his commercial Praxinoscope, using long strips of hand-painted frames. The jerky effect of Reynaud's method would be corrected by the likes of the Lumiere brothers in France and Thomas Edison (1847-1931) in the United States with the introduction of moving pictures. Movie projection uses the same principle of persistence of vision as the thaumatrope toy: Multiple frames of individual pictures snapped in rapid succession give the illusion of continuous motion when projected at rapid speed. In 1895 the Lumiere brothers exhibited the first short motion pictures in France using their cinematograph. Quickly, others with new versions of moving picture lanterns followed, including Edison and Georges Melies, who became famous for his special effects.

Carousel and tray slide projectors became a mainstay of educational, corporate, and industrial facilities by the middle of the twentieth century. In recent years, innovations in digital technology have broadened the scope of displayed images far beyond that introduced by Kircher and his contemporaries. Today, close-up images of a ball game or concert can be projected to thousands of people on giant screens. Enormous curved screen IMAX movie theaters, originally installed in museums, have made their way to shopping malls and now include 3D effects. Early projections of mystifying images have modern parallels in holographic presentations and laser light shows. In medical centers, expectant parents watch their developing offspring through sonograms projected on lab monitors. Millions of people around the world can view the same images at once through satellite and internet broadcasts, making what was once larger than life seem smaller and more accessible.

LISA NOCKS

Further Reading

Books

Chadwick, W. J. The Magic Lantern Manual. London: Frederick Warne, 1878.

Hammond, John H. The Camera Obscura: A Chronicle. Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1981.

Liesegang, Franz Paul. Dates and Sources: A contribution to the History of the Art of Projection and to Cinematography. Hermann Hecht, ed/trans. London: The Magic Lantern Society of Great Britain, 1986.

Lindberg, David. Studies in the History of Medieval Optics. London: Variorum Reprints, 1983.

Weiss, Richard J. A Brief History of Light and Those That Lit the Way. River Edge, NJ: World Scientific, 1995.

Internet Sites

Burns, Paul T. "The Complete History of the Discovery of Cinematography." www.precinemahistory.com.

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the origins and development of the magic lantern

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the origins and development of the magic lantern

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science and its times: understanding the social significance of scientific discovery

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The Origins and Development of the Magic Lantern

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Definition of The Origins and Development of the Magic Lantern - Our online dictionary has The Origins and Development of the Magic Lantern information from Science and Its Times: Understanding the Social Significance of Scientific Discovery dictionary. Encyclopedia.com: English, psychology and medical dictionaries

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History of photography, method of recording the image of an object through the action of light, or related radiation, on a light-sensitive material. The word, derived from the Greek photos ("light") and graphein ("to draw"), was first used in the 1830s.

stereoscope Joaquim Alves Gaspar

This article treats the historical and aesthetic aspects of still photography. For a discussion of the technical aspects of the medium, see photography, technology of. For a treatment of motion-picture photography, or cinematography, see motion picture, history of, and motion-picture technology.

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General considerations

As a means of visual communication and expression, photography has distinct aesthetic capabilities. In order to understand them, one must first understand the characteristics of the process itself. One of the most important characteristics is immediacy. Usually, but not necessarily, the image that is recorded is formed by a lens in a camera. Upon exposure to the light forming the image, the sensitive material undergoes changes in its structure, a latent (but reversed) image usually called a negative is formed, and the image becomes visible by development and permanent by fixing with sodium thiosulfate, called "hypo." With modern materials, the processing may take place immediately or may be delayed for weeks or months.

The essential elements of the image are usually established immediately at the time of exposure. This characteristic is unique to photography and sets it apart from other ways of picture making. The seemingly automatic recording of an image by photography has given the process a sense of authenticity shared by no other picture-making technique. The photograph possesses, in the popular mind, such apparent accuracy that the adage "the camera does not lie" has become an accepted, if erroneous, cliché.

This understanding of photography's supposed objectivity has dominated evaluations of its role in the arts. In the early part of its history, photography was sometimes belittled as a mechanical art because of its dependence on technology. In truth, however, photography is not the automatic process that is implied by the use of a camera. Although the camera usually limits the photographer to depicting existing objects rather than imaginary or interpretive views, the skilled photographer can introduce creativity into the mechanical reproduction process. The image can be modified by different lenses and filters. The type of sensitive material used to record the image is a further control, and the contrast between highlight and shadow can be changed by variations in development. In printing the negative, the photographer has a wide choice in the physical surface of the paper, the tonal contrast, and the image colour. The photographer also may set up a completely artificial scene to photograph.

The most important control is, of course, the creative photographer's vision. He or she chooses the vantage point and the exact moment of exposure. The photographer perceives the essential qualities of the subject and interprets it according to his or her judgment, taste, and involvement. An effective photograph can disseminate information about humanity and nature, record the visible world, and extend human knowledge and understanding. For all these reasons, photography has aptly been called the most important invention since the printing press.

Inventing the medium

Antecedents

The forerunner of the camera was the camera obscura, a dark chamber or room with a hole (later a lens) in one wall, through which images of objects outside the room were projected on the opposite wall. The principle was probably known to the Chinese and to ancient Greeks such as Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago. Late in the 16th century, the Italian scientist and writer Giambattista della Porta demonstrated and described in detail the use of a camera obscura with a lens. While artists in subsequent centuries commonly used variations on the camera obscura to create images they could trace, the results from these devices depended on the artist's drawing skills, and so scientists continued to search for a method to reproduce images completely mechanically.

In 1727 the German professor of anatomy Johann Heinrich Schulze proved that the darkening of silver salts, a phenomenon known since the 16th century and possibly earlier, was caused by light and not heat. He demonstrated the fact by using sunlight to record words on the salts, but he made no attempt to preserve the images permanently. His discovery, in combination with the camera obscura, provided the basic technology necessary for photography. It was not until the early 19th century, however, that photography actually came into being.

Early experiments

Nicéphore Niépce, an amateur inventor living near Chalon-sur-Saône, a city 189 miles (304 km) southeast of Paris, was interested in lithography, a process in which drawings are copied or drawn by hand onto lithographic stone and then printed in ink. Not artistically trained, Niépce devised a method by which light could draw the pictures he needed. He oiled an engraving to make it transparent and then placed it on a plate coated with a light-sensitive solution of bitumen of Judea (a type of asphalt) and lavender oil and exposed the setup to sunlight. After a few hours, the solution under the light areas of the engraving hardened, while that under the dark areas remained soft and could be washed away, leaving a permanent, accurate copy of the engraving. Calling the process heliography ("sun drawing"), Niépce succeeded from 1822 onward in copying oiled engravings onto lithographic stone, glass, and zinc and from 1826 onto pewter plates.

In 1826/27, using a camera obscura fitted with a pewter plate, Niépce produced the first successful photograph from nature, a view of the courtyard of his country estate, Gras, from an upper window of the house. The exposure time was about eight hours, during which the sun moved from east to west so that it appears to shine on both sides of the building.

Niépce produced his most successful copy of an engraving, a portrait of Cardinal d'Amboise, in 1826. It was exposed in about three hours, and in February 1827 he had the pewter plate etched to form a printing plate and had two prints pulled. Paper prints were the final aim of Niépce's heliographic process, yet all his other attempts, whether made by using a camera or by means of engravings, were underexposed and too weak to be etched. Nevertheless, Niépce's discoveries showed the path that others were to follow with more success.

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was a professional scene painter for the theatre. Between 1822 and 1839 he was coproprietor of the Diorama in Paris, an auditorium in which he and his partner Charles-Marie Bouton displayed immense paintings, 45.5 by 71.5 feet (14 by 22 metres) in size, of famous places and historical events. The partners painted the scenes on translucent paper or muslin and, by the careful use of changing lighting effects, were able to present vividly realistic tableaux. The views provided grand, illusionistic entertainment, and the amazing trompe l'oeil effect was purposely heightened by the accompaniment of appropriate music and the positioning of real objects, animals, or people in front of the painted scenery.

photography© American Chemical Society

Like many other artists of his time, Daguerre made preliminary sketches by tracing the images produced by both the camera obscura and the camera lucida, a prism-fitted instrument that was invented in 1807. His attempt to retain the duplication of nature he perceived in the camera obscura's ground glass led in 1829 to a partnership with Niépce, with whom he worked in person and by correspondence for the next four years. However, Daguerre's interest was in shortening the exposure time necessary to obtain an image of the real world, while Niépce remained interested in producing reproducible plates. It appears that by 1835, three years after Niépce's death, Daguerre had discovered that a latent image forms on a plate of iodized silver and that it can be "developed" and made visible by exposure to mercury vapour, which settles on the exposed parts of the image. Exposure times could thus be reduced from eight hours to 30 minutes. The results were not permanent, however; when the developed picture was exposed to light, the unexposed areas of silver darkened until the image was no longer visible. By 1837 Daguerre was able to fix the image permanently by using a solution of table salt to dissolve the unexposed silver iodide. That year he produced a photograph of his studio on a silvered copper plate, a photograph that was remarkable for its fidelity and detail. Also that year, Niépce's son Isidore signed an agreement with Daguerre affirming Daguerre as the inventor of a new process, "the daguerreotype."

In 1839 Niépce's son and Daguerre sold full rights to the daguerreotype and the heliograph to the French government, in return for annuities for life. On August 19 full working details were published. Daguerre wrote a booklet describing the process, An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Various Processes of the Daguerreotype and the Diorama, which at once became a best seller; 29 editions and translations appeared before the end of 1839.

The antecedents of photogenic drawing can be traced back to 1802, when Thomas Wedgwood, son of the famous potter Josiah Wedgwood, reported his experiments in recording images on paper or leather sensitized with silver nitrate. He could record silhouettes of objects placed on the paper, but he was not able to make them permanent. Sir Humphry Davy published a paper in the Journal of the Royal Institution, London, in June 1802, on the experiments of his friend Wedgwood; this was the first account of an attempt to produce photographs.

In 1833 the French-born photographer Hercules Florence worked with paper sensitized with silver salts to produce prints of drawings; he called this process "photography." However, since he conducted his experiments in Brazil, apart from the major scientific centres of the time, his contributions were lost to history until 1973, when they were rediscovered. Others in Europe, including one woman, claimed to have discovered similar photographic processes, but no verifiable proof has come to light.

William Henry Fox Talbot, trained as a scientist at the University of Cambridge, could not draw his scientific observations, even with the aid of a camera lucida; this deficiency inspired him to invent a photographic process. He decided to try to record by chemical means the images he observed, and by 1835 he had a workable technique. He made paper light-sensitive by soaking it alternately in solutions of common salt (sodium chloride) and silver nitrate. Silver chloride was thus produced in the fibres of the paper. Upon exposure to light, the silver chloride became finely divided silver, dark in tone. Theoretically, the resulting negative, in which tonal and spatial values were reversed, could be used to make any number of positives simply by putting fresh sensitized paper in contact with the negative and exposing it to light. Talbot's method of fixing the print by washing it in a strong solution of sodium chloride was inadequate, however, and the process was not successful until February 1839, when his astronomer friend Sir John Herschel suggested fixing the negatives with sodium hyposulphite (now called sodium thiosulfate) and waxing them before printing, which reduced the grain of the paper.

When news of Daguerre's process reached England in January 1839, Talbot rushed publication of his "photogenic drawing" process and subsequently explained his technique in complete detail to the members of the Royal Society-six months before the French government divulged working directions for the daguerreotype.

Early views of the medium's potential

Photography's remarkable ability to record a seemingly inexhaustible amount of detail was marveled at again and again. Still, from its beginnings, photography was compared-often unfavourably-with painting and drawing, largely because no other standards of picture making existed. Many were disappointed by the inability of the first processes to record colours and by the harshness of the tonal scale. Critics also pointed out that moving objects were not recorded or were rendered blurry and indistinct because of the great length of time required for an exposure.

Despite these deficiencies, many saw the technique of photography as a shortcut to art. No longer was it necessary to spend years in art school drawing from sculpture and from life, mastering the laws of linear perspective and chiaroscuro. Others saw these realizations as threatening. For example, upon first seeing the daguerreotype process demonstrated, the academic painter Paul Delaroche declared, "From today, painting is dead"; although he would later realize that the invention could actually aid artists, Delaroche's initial reaction was indicative of that of many of his contemporaries. Such artists at first feared what Daguerre boasted in a 1838 broadsheet: "With this technique, without any knowledge of chemistry or physics, one will be able to make in a few minutes the most detailed views."

Photography's early evolution, c. 1840-c. 1900

The revolution of technique

Daguerre's process rapidly spread throughout the world. Before the end of 1839, travelers were buying daguerreotypes of famous monuments in Egypt, Israel, Greece, and Spain; engravings of these works were made and then published in two volumes as Excursions daguerriennes between 1841 and 1843. Although Daguerre's process was published "free to the world" by the French government, he took out a patent for it in England; the first licensee was Antoine-François-Jean Claudet. The first daguerreotypes in the United States were made on September 16, 1839, just four weeks after the announcement of the process. Exposures were at first of excessive length, sometimes up to an hour. At such lengthy exposures, moving objects could not be recorded, and portraiture was impractical.

Experiments were begun in Europe and the United States to improve the optical, chemical, and practical aspects of the daguerreotype process to make it more feasible for portraiture, the most desired application. The earliest known photography studio anywhere opened in New York City in March 1840, when Alexander Wolcott opened a "Daguerrean Parlor" for tiny portraits, using a camera with a mirror substituted for the lens. During this same period, József Petzval and Friedrich Voigtländer, both of Vienna, worked on better lens and camera design. Petzval produced an achromatic portrait lens that was about 20 times faster than the simple meniscus lens the Parisian opticians Charles Chevalier and N.M.P. Lerebours had made for Daguerre's cameras. Meanwhile, Voigtländer reduced Daguerre's clumsy wooden box to easily transportable proportions for the traveler. These valuable improvements were introduced by Voigtländer in January 1841. That same month another Viennese, Franz Kratochwila, freely published a chemical acceleration process in which the combined vapours of chlorine and bromine increased the sensitivity of the plate by five times.

The first studio in Europe was opened by Richard Beard in a glasshouse on the roof of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London on March 23, 1841. Unlike the many daguerreotypists who were originally scientists or miniature painters, Beard had been a coal merchant and patent speculator. Having acquired the exclusive British license for the American mirror camera (he later also purchased the exclusive rights to Daguerre's invention in England, Wales, and the colonies), Beard employed the chemist John Frederick Goddard to try to improve and accelerate the exposure process. Among the techniques Goddard studied were two that Wolcott had tried: increasing the light sensitivity of the silver iodide with bromine vapours and filtering the blindingly bright daylight necessary for exposure through blue glass to ease the portrait sitter's eye strain. By December 1840 Goddard had succeeded well enough to produce tiny portraits ranging in size from 0.4 inch (1 cm) in diameter to 1.5 by 2.5 inches (4 by 6 cm). By the time Beard opened his studio, exposure times were said to vary between one and three minutes according to weather and time of day. His daguerreotype portraits became immensely popular, and the studio made considerable profits the first few years, but competition soon appeared, and Beard lost his fortune in several lawsuits against infringers of his licenses.

The finest daguerreotypes in Britain were produced by Claudet, who opened a studio on the roof of the Royal Adelaide Gallery in June 1841. He was responsible for numerous improvements in photography, including the discovery that red light did not affect sensitive plates and could therefore be used safely in the darkroom. The improvements that had been made in lenses and sensitizing techniques reduced exposure times to approximately 20 to 40 seconds.

Daguerreotyping became a flourishing industry. Practitioners such as Hermann Biow and Carl Ferdinand Stelzner worked in Germany, and William Horn opened a studio in Bohemia in 1841. It was the United States, however, that led the world in the production of daguerreotypes. Portraiture became the most popular genre in the United States, and within this genre, standards of presentation began to develop. Certain parts of the daguerreotype portrait, usually the lips, eyes, jewelry, and occasionally the clothing, were hand-coloured, a job often done by women. Because of their fragile nature, daguerreotype images always were covered with glass and encased in a frame or casing made of leather-covered wood or gutta-percha, a plasticlike substance made from rubber.

In the late 1840s every city in the United States had its own "daguerrean artist," and villages and towns were served by traveling photographers who had fitted up wagons as studios. In New York City alone there were 77 galleries in 1850. Of these, the most celebrated was that of Mathew B. Brady, who began in 1844 to form a "Gallery of Illustrious Americans," a collection of portraits of notables taken by his own and other cameramen. Several of these portraits, including those of Daniel Webster and Edgar Allan Poe, were published by lithography in a folio volume.

In Boston, Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes opened a studio in 1843 that was advertised as "The Artists' Daguerreotype Rooms"; here they produced the finest portraits ever made by the daguerreotype process. The partners avoided the stereotyped lighting and stiff posing formulas of the average daguerreotypist and did not hesitate to portray their sitters unprettified and "as they were." For example, in his portrait Lemuel Shaw, a judge of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, stands with a crumpled coat and unruly locks of hair under a glare of sunshine; in her portrait Lola Montez -adventurer, dancer, actress-lolls over the back of a chair, a cigarette between her gloved fingers.

Cities and towns, as well as their inhabitants, were also photographed by American daguerreotypists: the rapid growth of San Francisco was documented month by month, and the first history of the city, published in 1855, was illustrated with engravings made from daguerreotypes.

Daguerreotyping spread throughout the world during the 1850s as photographers from England, France, and the United States followed colonialist troops and administrators to the Middle East, Asia, and South America. Army personnel and commercial photographers portrayed foreign dignitaries, landscape, architecture, and monuments in order to show Westerners seemingly exotic cultures. Particularly notable were daguerreotypes made in Japan by the American photographer Eliphalet Brown, Jr., who accompanied the 1853-54 mission led by Matthew C. Perry to open Japan to Western interests.

While most of the initial photographic work in these places was by Westerners, by the 1860s local practitioners had begun to open studios and commercial establishments. Marc Ferrez in Brazil, Kusakabe Kimbei in Japan, the (French-born) Bonfils family in Lebanon, and Kassian Céphas in Indonesia were among the international photographers who set up studios to supply portraits and views during this period.

Development of the calotype

The popularity of the daguerreotype surpassed that of the photogenic drawing, but Talbot, convinced of the value of duplicability, continued to work to improve his process. On September 21-23, 1840, while experimenting with gallic acid, a chemical he was informed would increase the sensitivity of his prepared paper, Talbot discovered that the acid could be used to develop a latent image. This discovery revolutionized photography on paper as it had revolutionized photography on metal in 1835. Whereas previously Talbot had needed a camera exposure of one hour to produce a 6.5-by-8.5-inch (16.5-by-21.6-cm) negative, he now found that one minute was sufficient. Developing the latent image made photography on paper as valued as the daguerreotype, although the image still was not as clearly defined. Talbot named his improved negative process the calotype, from the Greek meaning "beautiful picture," and he protected his discoveries by patent.

The first aesthetically satisfying use made of this improved process was in the work of David Octavius Hill, a Scottish landscape painter, and his partner, Robert Adamson, an Edinburgh photographer. In 1843 Hill decided to paint a group portrait of the ministers who in that year formed the Free Church of Scotland; in all, there were more than 400 figures to be painted. Sir David Brewster, who knew of Talbot's process from the inventor himself, suggested to Hill that he make use of this new technique. Hill then enlisted the aid of Adamson, and together they made hundreds of photographs, not only of the members of the church meeting but also of people from all walks of life. Although their sitters were posed outdoors in glaring sunlight and had to endure exposures of upward of a minute, Hill and Adamson managed to retain a lifelike vitality. Hill's aesthetic was dominated by the painting style of the period in lighting and posing, particularly in the placement of the hands; in many of Hill's portraits, both the sitter's hands are visible, placed in a manner meant to add grace and liveliness to a dark portion of an image. Indeed, many of his calotypes are strikingly reminiscent of canvases by Sir Henry Raeburn and other contemporary artists. Proving the calotype's artistic qualities, William Etty, a royal academician, copied in oils the calotype Hill and Adamson made of him in 1844 and exhibited it as a self-portrait. In addition to their formal portraiture, the partners made a series of photographs of fishermen and their wives at Newhaven and in Edinburgh, as well as architectural studies.

Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.685/Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago

The calotype, which lent itself to being manipulated by chemicals and paper, was used in the 1850s to create exceptionally artistic images of architectural monuments.

Development of stereoscopic photography

Stereoscopic photographic views (stereographs) were immensely popular in the United States and Europe from about the mid-1850s through the early years of the 20th century. First described in 1832 by English physicist Sir Charles Wheatstone, stereoscopy was improved by Sir David Brewster in 1849. The production of the stereograph entailed making two images of the same subject, usually with a camera with two lenses placed 2.5 inches (6 cm) apart to simulate the position of the human eyes, and then mounting the positive prints side by side laterally on a stiff backing. Brewster devised a stereoscope through which the finished stereograph could be viewed; the stereoscope had two eye pieces through which the laterally mounted images, placed in a holder in front of the lenses, were viewed. The two images were brought together by the effort of the human brain to create an illusion of three-dimensionality.

Stereographs were made of a wide range of subjects, the most popular being views of landscapes and monuments and composed narrative scenes of a humorous or slightly suggestive nature. Stereoscopes were manufactured for various price ranges and tastes, from the simple hand-held device introduced by Oliver Wendell Holmes (who promoted stereography through articles in The Atlantic Monthly) to elaborate floor models containing large numbers of images that could be flipped into place. The stereograph became especially popular after Queen Victoria expressed interest in it when it was exhibited at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exposition. Like television today, stereography during the second half of the 19th century was both an educational and a recreational device with considerable impact on public knowledge and taste.

Photography was revolutionized in 1851 by the introduction of the wet collodion process for making glass negatives. This new technique, invented by the English sculptor Frederick Scott Archer, was 20 times faster than all previous methods and was, moreover, free from patent restrictions. Paper prints could easily be made from glass-plate negatives. The process had one major drawback: the photographer had to sensitize the plate almost immediately before exposure and expose it and process it while the coating was moist. Collodion is a solution of nitrocellulose (guncotton) in alcohol and ether; when the solvents evaporate, a clear plasticlike film is formed. Since it is then impervious to water, the chemicals used for developing the exposed silver halides and removing the unexposed salts cannot penetrate the coating to act upon them. The wet collodion process was almost at once universally adopted because it rendered detail with great precision that rivaled that of the daguerreotype. It reigned supreme for more than 30 years and greatly increased the popularity of photography, despite the fact that it was unequally sensitive to different colours of the spectrum.

At first the positive prints made from the glass plate negatives were produced by Talbot's salt paper method, but from the mid-1850s on they were made on albumen paper. Introduced in 1850 by Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Evrard, albumen paper is a slow printing-out paper (i.e., paper that produces a visible image on direct exposure, without chemical development) that had been coated with egg white before being sensitized. The egg white gave the paper a glossy surface that improved the definition of the image.

A new style of portrait utilizing albumen paper, introduced in Paris by André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri in 1854, was universally popular in the 1860s. It came to be called the carte-de-visite because the size of the mounted albumen print (4 by 2.5 inches [10.2 by 6 cm]) corresponded to that of a calling card. Disdéri used a four-lens camera to produce eight negatives on a single glass plate. Each picture could be separately posed, or several exposures of the same pose could be made at once. The principal advantage of the system was its economy: to make eight portraits the photographer needed to sensitize only a single sheet of glass and make one print, which was then cut up into separate pictures. At first cartes-de-visite almost invariably showed the subjects standing. Over time, backgrounds became ornate: furniture and such architectural fragments as papier-mâché columns and arches were introduced, and heavy-fringed velvet drapes were hung within range of the camera. With the advent of the cabinet-size (6.5 by 4 inches [16.5 by 10.2 cm]) picture in 1866, the decorative strategies of the photographer became yet more pronounced, so that in 1871 a photographer wrote: "One good, plain background, disrobed of castles, piazzas, columns, curtains and what not, well worked, will suit every condition of life."

George Eastman House Collection

The new wet collodion process was also used to produce positive images on glass called ambrotypes, which were simply underexposed or bleached negatives that appeared positive when placed against a dark coating or backing. In pose and lighting, these popular portraits were similar to daguerreotypes in sizes and were enclosed in similar types of cases. They did not approach the brilliancy of the daguerreotype, however.

Tintypes, first known as ferrotypes or melainotypes, were cheap variations of the ambrotype. Instead of being placed on glass, the collodion emulsion was coated on thin iron sheets that were enameled black. At first they were presented in cases, surrounded by narrow gilt frames, but by the 1860s this elaborate presentation had been abandoned, and the metal sheets were simply inserted in paper envelopes, each with a cutout window the size of the image. Easy to make and inexpensive to purchase, tintypes were popular among soldiers in the Civil War and remained a form of folk art throughout the 19th century. Poses of sitters in tintypes were often informal and sometimes humorous. Because they were cheap and easy to produce, tintypes became a popular form of street photography well into the 20th century. Street-corner photographers, often equipped with a donkey, were common in European countries.

Development of the dry plate

In the 1870s many attempts were made to find a dry substitute for wet collodion so that plates could be prepared in advance and developed long after exposure, which would thereby eliminate the need for a portable darkroom. In 1871 Richard Leach Maddox, an English physician, suggested suspending silver bromide in a gelatin emulsion, an idea that led, in 1878, to the introduction of factory-produced dry plates coated with gelatin containing silver salts. This event marked the beginning of the modern era of photography.

Gelatin plates were about 60 times more sensitive than collodion plates. The increased speed freed the camera from the tripod, and a great variety of small hand-held cameras became available at relatively low cost, allowing photographers to take instantaneous snapshots. Of these, the most popular was the Kodak camera, introduced by George Eastman in 1888. Its simplicity greatly accelerated the growth of amateur photography, especially among women, to whom much of the Kodak advertising was addressed. In place of glass plates, the camera contained a roll of flexible negative material sufficient for taking 100 circular pictures, each roughly 2.5 inches (6 cm) in diameter. After the last negative was exposed, the entire camera was sent to one of the Eastman factories ( Rochester, New York, or Harrow, Middlesex, England), where the roll was processed and printed; "You Press the Button, We Do the Rest" was Eastman's description of the Kodak system. At first Eastman's so-called "American film" was used in the camera; this film was paper based, and the gelatin layer containing the image was stripped away after development and fixing and transferred to a transparent support. In 1889 this was replaced by film on a transparent plastic base of nitrocellulose that had been invented in 1887 by the Reverend Hannibal Goodwin of Newark, New Jersey.

Photography of movement

A few years before the introduction of the dry plate, the world was amazed by the photographs of horses taken by Eadweard Muybridge in California. To take these photographs, Muybridge used a series of 12 to 24 cameras arranged side by side opposite a reflecting screen. The shutters of the cameras were released by the breaking of their attached threads as the horse dashed by. Through this technique, Muybridge secured sets of sequential photographs of successive phases of the walk, the trot, and the gallop. When the pictures were published internationally in the popular and scientific press, they demonstrated that the positions of the animal's legs differed from those in traditional hand-drawn representations. To prove that his photographs were accurate, Muybridge projected them upon a screen one after the other with a lantern-slide projector he had built for the purpose; the result was the world's first motion-picture presentation. This memorable event took place at the San Francisco Art Association in 1880.

Muybridge, whose early studies were made with wet plates, continued his motion studies for some 20 years. With the new gelatin plates, he was able to improve his technique greatly, and in 1884-85, at the invitation of the University of Pennsylvania, he produced 781 sequential photographs of many kinds of animals as well as men and women engaged in a wide variety of activities. He was aided in this project by painter Thomas Eakins, who also made motion studies.

Muybridge's photographic analysis of movement coincided with studies by French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey to develop chronophotography. Whereas Muybridge had employed a battery of cameras to record detailed, separate images of successive stages of movement, Marey used only one, recording an entire sequence of movement on a single plate. With Marey's method, the images of various phases of motion sometimes overlapped, but it was easier to see and understand the flow of movement. Marey was also able to record higher speeds at shorter intervals than Muybridge. Both his and Muybridge's work greatly contributed to the field of motion study and to the development of the motion picture.

Early attempts at colour

Photography's transmutation of nature's colours into various shades of black and white had been considered a drawback of the process from its inception. To remedy this, many portrait photographers employed artists who hand-tinted daguerreotypes and calotypes. Artists also painted in oils over albumen portraits on canvas. Franz von Lenbach in Munich, for example, was among the many who projected onto canvas an image that had been made light-sensitive, whereupon he painted freely over it. In Japan, where hand-coloured woodcuts had a great tradition and labour was cheap, some firms from the 1870s onward sold photographs of scenic views and daily life that had been delicately hand-tinted. In the 1880s photochromes, colour prints made from hand-coloured photographs, became fashionable, and they remained popular until they were gradually replaced in the first decades of the 20th century by Autochrome plates.

Establishing genres

From the medium's beginnings, the portrait became one of photography's most popular genres. Some early practitioners such as Southworth and Hawes and Hill and Adamson broke new ground through the artistry they achieved in their portraits. Outside such mastery, however, portraiture throughout the world generally took on the form of uninspired daguerreotypes, tintypes, cartes-de-visite, and ambrotypes, and most portraitists relied heavily on accessories and retouching. Such conventions were broken by several important subsequent photographers, notably Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, a Parisian writer, editor, and caricaturist who used the pseudonym of Nadar; Étienne Carjat, likewise a Parisian caricaturist; and Julia Margaret Cameron.

Nadar took up photography in 1853 as a means of making studies of the features of prominent Frenchmen for inclusion in a large caricature lithograph, the " Panthéon Nadar." He posed his sitters against plain backgrounds and bathed them with diffused daylight, which brought out every detail of their faces and dress. He knew most of them, and the powers of observation he had developed as a caricaturist led him to recognize their salient features, which he recorded directly, without the exaggeration that he put in his drawings. When Nadar's photographs were first exhibited, they won great praise in the Gazette des Beaux Arts, then the leading art magazine in France.

Courtesy of the Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques, Paris

Carjat depicted the prominent Parisian artists, actors, writers, musicians, and politicians of his day. These portraits display dignity and distinction like those of Nadar, his contemporary and rival, but with a sometimes startling level of intensity in the sitters' gazes.

Cameron took up photography as a pastime in 1864. Using the wet-plate process, she made portraits of such celebrated Victorians of her acquaintance as Sir John F.W. Herschel, George Frederick Watts, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. For her portraits, a number of which were shown at the Paris International Exhibition of 1867, Cameron used a lens with the extreme focal length of 30 inches (76.2 cm) to obtain large close-ups. This lens required such long exposures that the subjects frequently moved. The lack of optical definition and this accidental blurring was criticized by the photographic establishment, yet the power of her work won her praise among artists. This can be explained only by the intensity of her vision. "When I have had these men before my camera," she wrote about her portraits of great figures,

my whole soul has endeavoured to do its duty toward them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner man as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus obtained has almost been the embodiment of a prayer.

Besides these memorable portraits, Cameron produced a large number of allegorical studies, as well as images of children and young women in costume, acting out biblical scenes or themes based on the poetry of her hero, Tennyson. In making these pictures-which some today find weak and sentimental-she was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite painters, who portrayed similar themes in their work.

From the outset, photography served the press. Within weeks after the French government's announcement of the process in 1839, magazines were publishing woodcuts or lithographs with the byline "from a daguerreotype." In fact, the two earliest illustrated weeklies-The Illustrated London News, which started in May 1842, and L'Illustration, based in Paris from its first issue in March 1843-owe their origin to the same cultural forces that made possible the invention of photography. Early reproductions generally carried little of the conviction of the original photograph, however.

Photography as an adjunct of war reportage began when Roger Fenton sailed from London to the Crimea to photograph the war between England, Russia, and Turkey in 1855. He was sent to provide visual evidence to counter the caustic written reports dispatched by William Russell, war correspondent for The Times of London, criticizing military mismanagement and the inadequate, unsanitary living conditions of the soldiers. Despite the difficulties of developing wet-collodion plates with impure water, in high temperatures, and under enemy fire, during his four-month stay Fenton produced 360 photographs, the first large-scale camera documentation of a war. Crimean War imagery was also captured by British photographer James Robertson, who later traveled to India with an associate, Felice Beato, to record the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58.

When the Civil War broke out in the United States, Mathew B. Brady, a New York City daguerreotypist and portraitist, conceived the bold plan of making a photographic record of the hostilities. When told the government could not finance such an undertaking, he invested his own savings in the project, expecting to recover his outlay by selling thousands of prints. Brady and his crew of about 20 photographers-among them Alexander Gardner and Timothy H. O'Sullivan, who both left his employ in the midst of hostilities-produced an amazing record of the battlefield. At his New York gallery, Brady showed pictures of the dead at Antietam. The New York Times reported on October 20, 1862:

Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it....It seems somewhat singular that the same sun that looked down on the faces of the slain, blistering them, blotting out from the bodies all semblance to humanity, and hastening corruption, should have thus caught their features upon canvas, and given them perpetuity for ever. But so it is.

Throughout the remainder of the 19th century, intermittent conflicts in Asia and Africa arising from imperialist ambitions were documented by photographers working for news media and for companies that manufactured stereographs. For the most part, war images were accepted as truthful depictions of painful events. However, after images of the Communard uprising in Paris in 1871 were shown to have been doctored, the veracity of such camera documentation no longer could be taken for granted.

Regular use of photographs in magazines began with the perfection of the halftone process, which allowed the camera image to be printed at the same time as the type and thereby reduced the cost of reproduction. The first newspaper halftone in the United States appeared in 1888, and shortly thereafter newspapers turned to photography for reporting topical events, making the profession of newspaper illustrator obsolete. Although technical advances improved reproduction quality, apart from impressive examples of combat photography, the subjects and styles of early journalistic photography were generally unimaginative and dull.

Landscape and architectural documentation

From the earliest days of the medium, landscape, architecture, and monuments were appealing subjects for photographers. This sort of photography, which was collected by artists, scientists, and travelers, was impelled by several factors. In Europe one powerful factor was the maneuverings among western European powers for control of portions of North Africa and Asia. From the late 1850s through the 1870s, British photographers were particularly active in recording the natural landscape and monuments of the empire's domains: Francis Frith worked in Egypt and Asia Minor, producing three albums of well-composed images; Samuel Bourne photographed throughout India (with a retinue of equipment bearers); John Thomson produced a descriptive record of life and landscape in China; and French photographer Maxime Du Camp traveled to Egypt with Gustave Flaubert on a government commission to record landscape and monuments.

Both for patriotic reasons and as a commodity for travelers, photographers also were active in recording the landscape of western Europe in the 1850s and '60s. Important British photographers included Roger Fenton, who worked in England and Wales; Charles Clifford, who worked in Spain; Robert Macpherson, who photographed Rome; and George Washington Wilson, who photographed Scotland. French photographer Adolphe Braun recorded the landscape around his native Alsace, as well as the mountainous terrain of the French Savoy, as did the brothers Louis-Auguste and Auguste-Rosalie Bisson. Herman Krone in Germany and Giacchino Altobelli and Carlo Ponti in Italy were also intent on recording the beauties of their regional landscapes.

Photographs of specific historical buildings were made for a number of purposes: to satisfy antiquarian curiosity, to provide information for restoration, to supply artists with material on which to base paintings, or to effect preservation efforts. Practically from photography's inception, such documentation was commissioned by public and private authorities. In western Europe and the United States, photographs captured the building of the industrial infrastructure, from bridges to railroad lines, from opera houses to public places to monumental statuary. In the early 1850s Philip Henry Delamotte was hired to document the progress of the construction of the Crystal Place in London, and a few years later Robert Howlett depicted the building of the Great Eastern transatlantic steamship. Alfred and John Bool and Henry Dixon worked for the Society for Photographing Old London, recording historical buildings and relics. In the 1850s the French government commissioned several photographers to document historical buildings. Working with cameras making photographs as large as 20 by 29 inches (51 by 74 cm), Henri Le Secq, Charles Marville, and Charles Nègre produced remarkable calotypes of the cathedrals of Notre-Dame (Paris), Chartres, and Amiens, as well as other structures that were being restored after centuries of neglect. An establishment was set up in Lille, France, by Blanquart-Evrard at which these paper negatives could be printed in bulk.

In the United States explorations of the lands beyond the Great Plains led to the apogee of landscape photography during the period. Before the Civil War, relatively few exceptional images of the Western landscape had been made. In the postwar era railroad companies and government commissions included photographers among their teams sent to determine mineral deposits, rights of way, and other conditions that would be suitable for settlement. Of the photographers confronting the spectacular landscape of the American West in the 1870s and '80s, William Henry Jackson, O'Sullivan, and Carleton Watkins produced particularly notable work. Both O'Sullivan, who helped survey Nevada and New Mexico, and Watkins, who worked in California and Oregon, were able to convey through their work a sense of the untamed and extraordinary quality of the Western landscape. As a testament to the power of his images, Jackson's photographs of the Grand Canyon and the Yellowstone River were influential in getting public land set aside for Yellowstone National Park. The work these and other photographers of the American West produced usually was made available in several sizes and formats, from stereographic images to mammoth-sized works.

George Eastman House Collection

Landscapes in places outside the United States and Europe were usually portrayed by European photographers during this period. However, exceptions included the Chinese photographer Afong Lai and the Brazilian photographer Marc Ferrez, both of whom produced excellent views of their native countries. In particular, Lai's serene compositions reflected the conventions of the long-standing tradition of Chinese landscape painting.

Social documentation

The recognition of the power of photography to persuade and inform led to a form of documentary photography known as social documentation, or social photography. The origins of the genre can be traced to the classic sociological study issued by Henry Mayhew in 1851, London Labour and the London Poor, although this was illustrated with drawings partly copied from daguerreotypes by Richard Beard and not actual photos. A later effort, Street Life in London (1877), by Adolphe Smith and John Thomson, included facsimile reproductions of Thomson's photographs and produced a much more persuasive picture of life among London's working class. Thomson's images were reproduced by Woodburytype, a process that resulted in exact, permanent prints but was costly because it required hand mounting for each individual print. This pursuit was continued by John Barnardo, who, beginning in the 1870s, photographed homeless children in London for the purpose of both record keeping and fund-raising and thus fulfilled the double objectives of social documentation: capturing theoretically objective description and arousing sympathy. The "before" and "after" images used by Barnardo to demonstrate the efficacy of social intervention became a convention in social documentation. It was taken up to good effect by the Indian photographer Raja Lala Deen Dayal, especially in his documentation of the good works undertaken by the nizam of Hyderabad in the late 19th century. In 1877 Thomas Annan began a project in Edinburgh in which he used the camera to record the need for new housing for the working poor. He concentrated mainly on the derelict buildings and sewerage systems rather than on the inhabitants; eventually the images were collected for their artistic merit rather than their social use.

Social documentation became more focused in the work of Jacob A. Riis, a police reporter in New York City in the 1880s who spent about four years depicting slum life. Employing cameramen at first, Riis eventually learned the rudiments of the medium so that he could himself portray the living and working conditions of immigrants whose social circumstances, he believed, led to crime and dissolution. Reproduced by the recently developed halftone process, the photographs and drawings based on them illustrated How the Other Half Lives (1890), Riis's first book about immigrant life. They also were turned into positive transparencies-slides-to illustrate Riis's lectures, which were aimed at a largely middle-class audience, some of whom were said to have fainted at the sight of the conditions the images documented. Able to convince the progressive reformers of the time of the need for change, Riis's work was instrumental in effecting slum-clearance projects in New York.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

In European countries especially, there was also an awakened interest in documenting social customs during this period. Sometimes this meant recording those European customs that were being replaced by advancing industrialization. This interest led to the establishment of photographic archives, such as the National Photographic Record Association, set up in the mid-1890s by Benjamin Stone, a British member of Parliament. Left to the city of Birmingham, the collection included photographs taken by Stone and others of vanishing local customs. Other times this led to an interest in the particularities of dress and custom of those living in distant regions. William Carrick, a Scotsman, portrayed daily life in Russia. In addition to portraying nature and artifacts, John Thomson, Felice Beato, and Samuel Bourne also depicted indigenous peoples in China and India. In 1888 the journal National Geographic, which produced photographic accounts of cultures throughout the world, was established.

photography, history of; Qing dynasty© CCTV America

Photography as art

Early developments

Photographic societies-made up of both professionals and amateurs enticed by the popularity of the collodion process-began to form in the mid-19th century, giving rise to the consideration of photography as an aesthetic medium. In 1853 the Photographic Society, parent of the present Royal Photographic Society, was formed in London, and in the following year the Société Française de Photographie was founded in Paris. Toward the end of the 19th century, similar societies appeared in German-speaking countries, eastern Europe, and India. Some were designed to promote photography generally, while others emphasized only artistic expression. Along with these organizations, journals promoting photography as art also appeared.

At the first meeting of the Photographic Society, the president, Sir Charles Eastlake (who was then also president of the Royal Academy), invited the miniature painter Sir William Newton to read the paper "Upon Photography in an Artistic View" ( Journal of the Photographic Society, 1853). Newton's argument was that photographs could be useful so long as they were taken "in accordance [as far as it is possible] with the acknowledged principles of Fine Art." One way the photographer could make his results more like works of art, Newton suggested, was to throw the subject slightly out of focus. He also recommended liberal retouching. (Eastlake's wife, Lady Eastlake, née Elizabeth Rigby, was one of the first to write lucidly about the artistic problems of collodion/albumen photography.)

In response to this desire to create photographs that would fit an established conception of what "art" should be, several photographers began to combine several negatives to make one print. These consisted of compositions that were considered too complicated to be photographed in a straightforward manner and thus pushed photography beyond its so-called mechanical capabilities. A famous example of this style was by O.G. Rejlander, a Swede who had studied art in Rome and was practicing photography in England. He joined 30 negatives to produce a 31-by-16-inch (79-by-41-cm) print entitled The Two Ways of Life (1857), an allegory showing the way of the blessed led through good works and the way of the damned through vice. Rejlander, who described the technique in detail in photographic journals, stated that his purpose was to prove to artists the aesthetic possibilities of photography, which they had generally denied. The photograph was shown in the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 and was purchased by Queen Victoria for Prince Albert.

Rejlander's technique stimulated Henry Peach Robinson, a professional photographer who had been trained as an artist, to produce similar combination prints. He achieved fame with a five-negative print, Fading Away, produced in 1858. The subject, a dying girl, was considered by critics as too painful a subject to be represented by photography. Perhaps the implied authenticity of the camera bothered them, since painters had long presented subjects of a far more sensitive nature.

Robinson became an articulate member of the Photographic Society, and his teaching was even more influential than his photography. In 1869 the first of many editions and translations of his book, Pictorial Effect in Photography, was published. Robinson borrowed compositional formulas from a handbook on painting, claiming that use of them would bring artistic success. He stressed the importance of balance and the opposition of light against dark. At the core of his argument was the assumption that rules set up for one art form could be applied to another.

So long as photographers maintained that the way to photography as art was the emulation of painting, art critics were reluctant to admit the new medium to an independent aesthetic position. Portraits, when done as sensitively and as directly as those produced by Hill and Adamson, Nadar, and Cameron, won praise. But sentimental genre scenes, posed and arranged for the camera and lacking the truthfulness thought to be characteristic of photography, were the subject of considerable controversy. This debate would reach a crescendo at the end of the century.

Naturalistic photography

Opposing the strategies advocated by Robinson, in the 1880s the English physician and photographer Peter Henry Emerson proposed that photographs should reflect nature, offer "the illusion of truth," and be produced without using retouching techniques, recombining multiple prints, or utilizing staged settings, models, and costumes. He believed that the unique qualities of tone, texture, and light inherent in photography made it a unique art form, making any embellishments used for the sake of "art" unnecessary. This is not to say his own photographs were purely documentary-in fact, his work in some ways mimicked the artistic effects of the Barbizon school and Impressionist painting-but they eschewed the manipulated artistic effects of his contemporaries. Emerson's views, known as naturalistic photography, gained a considerable audience through his widely read 1889 publication entitled Naturalistic Photography and through numerous articles that appeared in photography journals throughout the 1890s.

The ideas of Newton, Rejlander, Robinson, and Emerson-while seemingly varied-all pursued the same goal: to gain acceptance for photography as a legitimate art form. These efforts to gain acceptance were all encompassed within Pictorialism, a movement that had been afoot for some time and that crystallized in the 1890s and early 1900s, when it was promoted through a series of international exhibiting groups. In 1892 the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring was founded in Britain by Robinson, George Davison, a leader of the Art Nouveau movement, and others dissatisfied with the scientific bias of the London Photographic Society. The group held annual exhibitions, which they called salons. While the members' work varied from naturalism to staged scenes to manipulated prints, by the turn of the century it was their united belief that "through the Salon the Linked Ring has clearly demonstrated that pictorial photography is able to stand alone and that it has a future entirely apart from that which is purely mechanical." Similar Pictorialist groups formed in other countries. These included the Photo-Club of Paris, the Trifolium of Austria, and like associations in Germany and Italy. Unity of purpose enabled members to exchange ideas and images with those who had similar outlooks in other countries.
Beaumont Newhall Helmut Erich Robert Gernsheim Naomi Rosenblum

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history of photography | Inventions & Events

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History of photography, method of recording the image of an object through the action of light, or related radiation, on a light-sensitive material. The word, derived from the Greek photos ("light") and graphein ("to draw"), was first used in the 1830s. This article treats the historical and aesthetic aspects of still photography.

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Zoetrope Replica Optical Toy Ancient Magic Toys

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Here we distinguish between traditional shadow puppetry and contemporary forms. The former originated in Asia (in China, India and Indonesia, spreading into Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa) and continues to the present, although diminishing. Introduced into Europe in the 17th century, the form was renovated and rethought in the 20th century.

Traditional Shadow Theatre

When and where shadow puppetry was first introduced is a question on which specialists disagree, particularly in regard to [India] and [Indonesia] where shadow theatre has cultural and religious traits. Leather puppets, exquisitely decorated, are used in a shadow theatre which has become known around the world and is represented in many museums.

The shadow theatre in South East Asia

Asian shadow theatres documented for millennium are diverse in geographical, religious, and cultural backgrounds. The [ wayang] kulit purwa of Java (see [Indonesia]) uses intricately perforated and painted opaque figures which are performed by a single puppet master called a [ dalang] (Javanese: dhalang) accompanied by a gong chime orchestra (gamelan), presenting [ Mahabharata] and [ Ramayana] stories. Wayang kulit Banjar of Kalimantan, and wayang kulit betwai in West Java play the same repertoire. Balinese wayang parwa uses simpler yet similar figures for Mahabharata stories accompanied by four gender metallophones. The wayang sasak of the neighbouring island of Lombok tells tales of Prophet Mohammed's uncle, Amir Hamzah. Comparable genres present varied stories from the Ramayana ( wayang Ramayana, in Bali), to tales of Panji the Prince of East Java and local chronicles ( wayang gedog, in Java).

Filipino shadow figures were noted in the 19th century but died out prior to revivals in the 20th century (see [Philippines]). Wayang kulit operated widely in the east coast area in [Malaysia] where one finds the now rare wayang jawa (a style based on Javanese wayang kulit purwa) and wayang siam of Kelantan which presents Ramayana stories. Related to the Kelantan art is [Thailand]'s nang talung/nang daloong, which is found among the Thai and Lao speakers. Puppets are translucent and coloured, perhaps due to Chinese influence. Modern tales have largely displaced the traditional [repertoire]. In [Cambodia] ayang or nang sbek touch corresponds to the nang talung. Thailand's large court puppet genre ( nang yai) and Cambodia's analogue ( nang sbek thom) use opaque figures about 1 x 1.3 metres danced by multiple puppeteers moving in the style of court mask [dance] to present largely a Ramayana repertoire chanted by a narrator.

The shadow theatre in China and India

Small translucent, coloured puppet yingxi are found in many provinces in [China], including Shaanxi, Luanzhou, Shandong, Sichuan, Hanzhou, Hunan, Chaozhou, as well as in Taiwan. The figures are manipulated with rods but unlike Indo-Malay figures where the main rod extends like a spine through the middle of the figure and is held from beneath in the puppeteers hand, the yingxi have the major rod attached to the neck and the figures are pressed against the screen with this neck rod held perpendicular to the screen. This allows the puppet greater acrobatic flexibility as it flips, smoothly emulating the spectacular feats of the martially trained dancers of Chinese opera.

The [ karagöz] of the Islamic world (see [Turkey]) may be related to Chinese shadows via migrations toward the west or from [India] through movement of outcaste, gypsy groupings north, though some argue local invention. Indian theatres may use opaque figure, like the [ ravanachhaya] of Orissa and the [ tolpava koothu] of Kerala, both of which tell Ramayana stories. Translucent puppets are found in Maharashtra's miniature [ chamdyacha bahulya], Karnataka's [ togalu gombeyata], and Andhra Pradesh's [ tolu bommalata] and a related theatre of Tamil Nadu, [ tolu bommalatam]. The latter two use figures .90 x1.5 metres and a multi-person troupe led by a narrator to tell stories from the Ramayana, Mahabharata, and Puranas.

While generalizations must be treated with caution, some ideas come from some fundamental principles of the art

Death and the shadow theatre

The shadow theatre of [Asia] in both its pragmatic and mythic dimension has a link with death. The puppet is made from hide: goatskin and donkey were used in China, water buffalo in South East Asia, and goat or buffalo in India. Skinning, scraping, and stretching of hide involve the maker very directly with issues of death and transformation. Certain puppets had special requirements: consider the Khmer ascetic figure Preah Muni Eysi that is supposed to be made of bear or panther skin. Meditation might be undertaken before making specific important figures like the Tree of Life or the main god-clown puppet in Java or Bali (see [Indonesia]).

The reality of the puppet that came from death and is reconstructed into a beautiful figure reminds us of the iconic death and reconfiguration process associated with spiritual visions. Take for example the Chinese story that the shadow theatre was created to allow Emperor Wudi (r.140-86 B.C.) to commune with his deceased ladylove. Or that the karagöz theatre of Turkey was created to bring back to life two clowning men, Karagöz and Hacivat, executed while working on the mosque of Bursa. While these stories cannot be accepted as historical actualities, they show a pattern. Shadow theatre is conceptualized as an art that crosses borders of which death is the most perplexing. Both the practicality of puppet creation and the mythos of materializing the voices of a shadow world may help explain why shadow theatre in a variety of Asian countries has an exorcistic function.

In Southern China, a significant episode we encounter is the story of Mulian jiumu (Mulian Delivers His Mother [from hell]). In Java we have the Murwakala (Origin of Kala), a story of the demon Kala (Time) who has been permitted by the high god Siwa ([Shiva]) to eat people but, by commissioning the story of Kala's genesis, humans can be exorcised and freed of his curse. In Bali, we find both the Kala story and the tale of Bhima Suwarga, about the hero Bhima who goes to hell to release his parents from the lord of death. While these stories are very specific ones and not representative of the whole, they do help reinforce the aura of mystery that shadows the art.

Visualization and miniaturization

Shadow puppetry is an art that collapses the world from three dimensions toward two. Exact replication of the real was of little interest to those who created this genre. The flattened plane of a picture scroll or the friezes of temples, iconographically, have much more in common with the practice of the shadow puppeteer. Indeed, we sometimes are often told that the picture [storyteller] (often a Buddhist priest) is the forerunner of the puppeteer - in southern China shadow puppet theatre is associated with wandering Buddhist priests whose scrolls ( pien) about the torments of hell terrified people into good behaviour. On the walls of the Hindu-Buddhist temples of East Java we see episodes laid out panel by panel in a way that reminds us of contemporary Balinese puppetry. On the walls of Thai temples we see paintings in the style of the nang yai, the shadow theatre of the court. If we circumambulate Angkor Wat we will find episodes that are danced with puppets (or presented by masked actors). In Indonesia wayang beber, scroll theatre, is said to be the predecessor of wayang kulit, an art practitioners say was created by the wali, the Islamic saints. The shadow theatre takes the flattened picture plane of the temple wall or the picture scroll. It shrinks the dimensions and allows figures to move by cutting out the characters. Via puppetry, the narrative of the religion's epic stories can play in the village of the believer. In the puppet screen miniaturization is always at work, but the tale still retains a mystical impression. The puppets can grow suddenly larger or vanish instantaneously. Epic stories are condensed into flat, portable figures that can be carried easily and presented with relative ease by a small group.

Inversion and "negative" thinking

The process of making and manipulating requires negative thinking. In designing puppets the cut out part is the most important. What the viewer sees as the white face or the highlighted pattern of clothing is the part of the figure that is missing. Likewise, in [manipulation] clarity and the smallest dimension of the figure come when the figure is close to the screen. As the manipulator pulls the figure back to him/herself toward the light source, the figure fills the screen. While the technique is quickly learned, it remains an evocative. What the puppeteer sees as the actuality is in some ways the obverse of what the spectator experiences. Figures can disappear quickly or transformations of one puppet to another happen deftly. This sets up the persistent metaphor of the shadow theatre. The puppeteer sees reality and the audience member experiences maya (illusion). As the poet of Arjuna Wiwaha, the 9th century Javanese poem based on the Mahabharata, states, the viewers: "Do not realize the magic hallucinations they see are not real."

In Asia, the metaphor of puppet as the creature and the puppeteer as god is widespread. The aesthetic of the shadow theatre makes it possible for a single person or a small group to present, via light and two dimensional figures, the vast play of cosmic and divine forces, to call back the great hero-ancestors, and take us into death and the demonic. The puppeteer/narrator who tells the story is powerful - the "god" of the puppets. The performer of the shadow show, through his ability to see the backside of life, has access to mysterious and hidden processes. The microcosm, as represented in the figures, opens him to the larger forces of the macrocosm.

Narratives of the other

Stories for the traditional shadow theatre are diverse, but it is true that the shadow theatre is a medium that is conducive to the extraordinary. Thus we often find narratives where the divine, the demonic, and the animal meet. The shadow screen easily accommodates floating gods or the great monkey hero [Hanuman] as he leaps across the wide ocean. It allows demons to leap from the earth or grow in size. The shadow world materializes dreams and allows its heroes to fly to other realms. Stories associated deeply with the shadow genre are often border crossing narratives. The Ramayana, which dominates in India and South East Asia, often features the monkey character Hanuman. In China, the theatre can present any of the domestic ( wen) or military ( wu) plays found in the regional opera. But the popularity of the mid-16th century novel, Xiyou ji or Journey to the West, which features [Monkey King] (Sun Wukong) as he helps his monk-master get Buddhist texts from India, and the stories of snake ladies ( White Snake) or Taoist immortals are often emphasized. These narratives exist in other Chinese genres, but the shadow realm is especially conducive to materializing these narratives.

Religions, cultures and shadow theatre

The shadow theatre is not universally embraced in Asia. It seems to thrive best where culture/religion accommodate complexity. Shadows move, bend, and distort as our light source (sun) travels across the sky. Clouds mass into bodies and the land itself becomes a vast screen on which we can view projections that come from powers that move behind the universe, which we intuit but can never fully know. Variants of religion, which are most comfortable with contemplating mystery, riddles, and inversions as a path toward understanding, find shadow puppetry a comfortable fit. The art is not confined to a specific religion or culture, but it may have moved with stories like the Ramayana, Mahabharata or the Journey to the West. As a technique, it seems to have fit Sufi mystics, making the art strong in Indonesia and Malaysia. Taoism and Tantric Buddhism in China have supported it. Hinduism in India was also a fit. The puppeteer who plays cosmic stories on a simple screen is both god and demon and can save the ancestors and the living by his liminal powers as the shadow master who experiences the unseen reality shadowed by our material world.

Modern puppeteers trained in urban settings create productions all over Asia. Their work may borrow from Western shadow technology, use traditional models, or combine both to tell new stories in innovative ways. For example, the Sri Ramanjaneya Togalu Bombe Mela group from Karnataka, India, led by togalu gombeyata master, Bellagallu Veeranna, does a production about Gandhi (Singh 1999), stories of the Independence movement in Indonesia are shown in wayang suluh, and responses to the terrorist bombing in Bali in 2001 are part of I Wayan Sidia's Wayang Dasanama Kerta (Sedana 2005). In China, modern companies are creating new works with halogen lights or multiple screens such as [Tangshan Shadow Puppet Troupe]'s The Crane and the Tortoise or the [Hunan Puppet and Shadow Show Troupe]'s production of Dancing with Wolves. Asian shadow theatre is old, new, and ever evolving. Practitioners may be Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, or communist socialists. They range from traditional masters, to traditionally trained artists modernizing, to contemporary digital media masters using experimental forms, and collaborating with American, Europeans, other Asians or Latin Americans to create new and evocative work.

Contemporary Shadow Theatre

Contemporary shadow theatre has major centres in Europe, North America, Japan, and Australia as well as seeing new work in Korea, China, South and South East Asia. It takes three forms: using figures and objects (common), bare hands (see [Hand Shadows], also called Ombromanie, rare), and shadows of performers bodies (see [Body Shadows], increasingly popular).

Unlike traditional or modern shadow theatre in Asia, Western shadow theatre is not particularly well known. It was only in the 17th and 18th centuries that shadow theatre was introduced to [Europe] from Asia where it seems to have originated. It probably spread through the trade routes from Asia to the Middle East: it was known in the 11th century in Arabia, and developed in [Egypt] by the 12th century. Hetty Paerl suggests that the Chinese shadow theatre was brought to [Turkey] through Persia (see [Iran]). Subsequently, it became known in [Greece], [Romania], Yugoslavia and southern [Italy]. Italian showmen carried it across the Alps to [France], [Germany], and England (see [Great Britain]) beginning in the 17th century. The lack of acceptance in Europe before the 20th century can be explained by the prevailing philosophy. The pan-Asian worldview that values dream, meditation, spiritualism, and transcendental ways of seeing, as well as reason, was foreign to European rationalism.

With its lack of materiality and its ephemeral nature, posed between dream and reality, the shadow could only disturb the Western thinking which needed a tangible physical medium. Europeans were much more comfortable with three-dimensional [string puppets] and [glove puppets]. With the notable exception of the theatre of [Séraphin], French master showman of "Ombres Chinoises" (1770), and [Le Chat Noir] (The Black Cat) [cabaret] (1887) in France, and, in the 20th century, the [Schwabinger Schattenspiele] (Shadow Theatre of Schwabing) of Otto Kraemer and [Lotte Reiniger] in Germany, the work of [Jan Malík] in Czechoslovakia, and that of Frans ter Gast in the [Netherlands], shadow theatre was not considered as an art in itself in Europe. It was at most a very naturalistic theatre of simple silhouettes cut out of cardboard and projected onto a rectangular screen, giving a performance of great simplicity with no real possibilities for development. The situation changed in the 1970s and 1980s. New forms of shadow theatre, some revolutionary, appeared in a number of countries simultaneously.

Light

Three figures stand out: physicist Rudolf Stoessel of Switzerland, Luc Amoros of France and Fabrizio Montecchi of Italy. Relatively independently of each other these three artists experimented with techniques using halogen lamps that were developed in the United States in 1958.

The advantage of this lamp for shadow theatre was that it was a light source that offered new possibilities to this art. Whereas in the past, because of the diffuse nature of the light, the shadow puppeteer had to manipulate figures directly against the screen to obtain a distinct and clear shadow, the halogen lamp allowed the puppeteer to move the puppet away from the screen and manipulate in the entire space behind the screen without losing any of the shadow's definition. Depending on its distance from the lamp, the figure could appear as large as a giant or as small as a dwarf. Secondly, the additional development of portable halogen lamps allowed the artist to change the figure at any time. This technique required concentration on the part of the performer, but allowed him or her to create new shadows during the course of the show and this led to an enhanced expressiveness. Thanks to the halogen lamp, the two-dimensional nature of the shadow theatre was superseded: a third dimension could be introduced and this discovery was essential in giving the theatre a new dynamism.

Such new possibilities stimulated Western artists and encouraged them to engage in further experimentation. All possible light sources were, with time, carefully examined. In addition to the halogen lamp, artists experimented with all kinds of sources: cinema projectors, slides, overhead lighting, flares, strobe lights, and candles.

Screen

The basic rectangular screen attached to a frame, which had been used for hundreds of years, gave way to other geometric forms - triangular, trapezoidal, oval, or semicircular screens were explored. In Schattenrisse (Silhouettes), the Swiss Hansueli Trueb used sail-shaped screens that could be moved back and forth on wheels during the show. The Meininger Puppentheater (Germany) took a circular tent, using all of it as a projection surface. Some troupes, such as the theatre Anu in Germany, chose to project shadows on the surface of buildings. Screens could be moved with ropes and pulleys ([Amoros et Augustin] in France, [Teatro Gioco Vita] in Italy) allowing the viewer to see the event from different angles. Other experiments were made with the size of the screen: in Japan, the shadow plays ( Kageboushi, translated as shadow figure or silhouette) used huge screens of 5 metres x 10 metres, while others preferred small screens, stretched for example on a couch, as in the case of the German troupe Figurentheater Paradox.

Moreover, artists overcame another obstacle, the idea of the screen as a permanent barrier between the public and the performers, preventing contact. The simplest solution was to have the manipulators play in front of the screen and not behind (playing in the open). Screens could be moved with ropes and pulleys (Amoros and Augustin in France, Teatro Gioco Vita in Italy) allowing the viewer to see the action from in front. Thus, the Teatro Gioco Vita performers and Theater des Schatten (Shadow Theatre) began to play in front of the screen in full view of the audience. The [Dorftheater Siemitz] found a different but also convincing solution: the shadow of the player was shown while he/she was manipulating the puppet behind the screen.

Teatr Ten' (Russia; today, [Moskovsky Teatr TENb]) and [Puppet Players] (Germany) also rejected this physical barrier, alternating on each side, behind the screen as shadows and in front as real actors. Radically eliminating the divide at the end of Silhouettes, Hansueli Trueb came across the screen and tore it into pieces to the surprise of the public. [Larry Reed] of Shadowlight Theater in California (United States) has had performers appear as shadows, humans, and then figures in ever diminishing sizes. Chinese Theatre Works in New York uses projections and people in tandem to tell Chinese based tales. Both these groups have collaborated extensively with companies in Asia sharing their techniques and creating new shadow methods that are then reworked by Balinese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong or Japanese groups with whom they collaborate.

Puppet

The puppet has also been explored. All possible materials have been tested: newsprint, cardboard, wood, metal, textile, parchment, wire, and all kinds of synthetic materials. Contemporary painting also had its influence on the making of puppets: the elegant and often simple figures have sometimes given way to more expressive forms like those of Luc Amoros, [Jean-Pierre Lescot], Tadeusz Wierzbicke, and Herta Schönewolf. I Made Moja, son of a noted Balinese artist who lives in San Francisco and creates figures for Larry Reed, explores Chinese brush painting techniques for landscapes on gels. Since shadow theatre and painting are closely linked, it is understandable that many shadow players come from the visual arts.

Spiritual roots of shadow theatre

The debate on the spiritual roots of shadow theatre has been as important as the technical innovations. This issue was particularly important to Fabrizio Montecchi, of Teatro Gioco Vita, who realized how far shadows were from the Western cultural thinking and pointed up the impasse of being the first real shadow theatre in Europe. He showed that this type of show satisfied a societal need for images that was later served by the discovery of photography and [film]. This illusory art was the predecessor of those genres, and yet still remained neglected as "an anthropologically anomaly in theatre". In Corpo sottile (Subtle Body, 1988), Fabrizio Montecchi tried to find the deeper meaning at the base of the elements of shadow theatre - light, screen, body, space and the shadow itself ("misunderstood and repressed"). He returned the art to its own language. His liberated shadows are more than just illustrations: they begin to reveal their own story, reality, and logic. One also sees the accuracy of Montecchi's ideas in the performance of troupes such as Theater 3 (Switzerland), Compagnie Mossoux-Bonté (Belgium), or Poesie Polar (Germany). These companies' performances are not so far from narrative theatre, but simultaneously, give new life to shadows, restoring the suggestive power and expressiveness from which this theatre rises.

At the intersection of the arts

The latest trends at work in the shadow theatre indicate that it is more open to other art forms. This development is very visible at the International Festival of Shadow Theatre in Schwäbisch Gmünd, held every three years since its inception in 1988, where the exchange between [cinema], [opera], drama, pantomime, [music], [visual arts], [dance], and shadow theatre is fully expressed (see [Internationales Schattentheater Zentrum (ISZ)]). The latter has also profitably used its contacts with other forms of puppet theatre. In summary, we can see that many shadow theatre artists in Europe during the past four decades have contributed to the renewal of their art.

A unique, floating form, distinguished by its artistic richness and dynamism, shadow theatre explores areas untouched or neglected by other types of theatre. Its strength undoubtedly lies in the presentation of myths, fairy tales, ballads, and other fantastic stories of wonder. Shows can be warm and yet at the same moment biting. Australian [Richard Bradshaw] insures that humour is never forgotten. Many puppeteers around the world have recognized the artistic possibilities hidden in the art of shadows and enriched the repertory. Attracting a widening audience in the West as well as Asia and the Islamic world, the shadows are finally emerging from darkness to find the light.

Bibliography

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Shadow Theatre | World Encyclopedia of Puppetry Arts

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Here we distinguish between traditional shadow puppetry and contemporary forms. The former originated in Asia (in China, India and Indonesia, spreading into Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa) and continues to the present...

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Niépce began experimenting with lithographic printmaking-which led to his invention of heliography-because of his inability to draft images by hand. During his trials with lithography, he experimented with light-sensitive varnishes and then with images produced in camera, but he was unable to prevent the images from fading.

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Book has a short description of the history of animation that end up bringing some information on early cinematic devices.

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This work presented 5 woman on a huge projection on a wall after a few moments they start to say words on a language that I not able to recognize exactly what is, but I known it's a Asian language. Each one speaks a word, the older says "look at me", the youngest says " raise me", the one that looks 30 some years old says "hear me", and so on. For me this work represents the requests and needs of women on different ages in the modern society, that are represented by the 5 women and the words they say. The artists found a interesting way of delivering his message in this artwork, it's simple and quick, in a few seconds the message is delivered, living it's interpretation to the viewer. For me the reason for the this quickness was a option of the arts, it's his way if saying that these need are simple, they don't require long explanations, so simple that we should know it already. And yet the work still relates to the theme tension, not only for bringing the tensions in our society to a discussion, but aldo in the way that it makes you wait a little before the women speak, creating a anxiety for what is goin to happen. I would like to explore moments of total silence that is later broken abruptly to build up tense moments in a movie.

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This posters from the punk movement called my attention mainly because they present strong and heavy images and texts; the combination of dark tones and provocative/shocking images, such as skeletons, hanged people or a person been disassembled on a table, alongside with bold fonts in unusual and chaotic grids, causes me to feel a sort of discomfort. And, for me, that's exactly what the people who made this posters wanted. They wanted to shock the viewer, and call attention to the message that was been presented. The posters makes me wonder (now thinking on my on poster production) if a sort of more chaotic approach would lead to a more effective poster. I'll try to create a poster with a not too clean image and combine it with a bold font to make poster that calls attention for itself. not a shy poster that tell a message, but one that shouts it's message to people.

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The exposition of the photographs taken by Chichico is impresive in many different ways. The first thing to catch our eye in this photos is how they are not just pictures of people or places, but portraits of the way of living in those times. Looking at Chichico's work almost feels like traveling back in time, as if they were windows to the routines of the people portrayed, as the pictures show people on the streets, in front of shops and working. It also gives us a idea of the costoms of the time when people would take their families to take a nice photo in a studio, all wearing fancy clothes, as I notice there are family photos taken in painted backgrounds, what makes it clear they where taken in a studio. A practice not so common any more.
Another point that impresses are the technical skills of the photographer. All his photos are well exposed and focused- what was hard at the time, considering the technological limitations-. This accuracy contributes even more for the feeling of going back in time,  as it allows us to see the details on every scene.
When looking to his photos I think about the stories of the people and the places, there is a narrative present in his photos, specially the ones taken out of the studio, they look less planned and more spontaneous. I want to explore implementing a narrative in photographs, not only by taking photos, but also working with collage or other ways of changing a image. Trying to tell a story with the picture.

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What I found interesting on this one was the fact that you should peek in the holes to see the movie that was being displayed behind the curtains. The movie was about a meddle aged woman peeking on a young man taking a shower. I found this little play of the artist really funny and interesting, because when you look this work you are peeking someone peeking, you start judging the old lady when you are actually doing exactly the same, for these reason I found this work really amusing. This makes want to try bringing the movie out of the screen, explore ways of using elements of the movie in the real world to compose a installation, that complements the experience of watching the movie.

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In kevin's introduction to the BA programs, he quickly passed through quite a lot of career options and roles in the industries of animation, movies and games, some of them I knew already and others not- compositor, for example, was a role I've never heard of before-. In those occupations, the ones I find most interesting right now are 3D modeller, concept artist, character designer and animator (both 3D and 2D). Concept artist and character design are roles in the industry that catches my interest because I'm really keen to creating characters and developing environments; also, due to the proximity, they have to what I already do, which is drawing and illustration. To be honest, 3D modelling and animation are still two things that are a bit out of my comfort zone, but ever since I have started to experiment with 3D software, such as Maya and Zbrush, my interst in the area growls more and more. Pursuing those careers and interests would mean following to moving image pathway and later on entering either on 3D animation and modelling or 2D animation BA programs.

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The one thing that attracts my attention in this short animation is its metalanguage approach. The way that the author incorporates elements of the software in the animation makes it brake the fourth wall in the sense that the animated character is fighting someone how is not in the animation, but is it's creator. When I see this animation it makes me think about the process of creating an animation. The character itself is simple, but the author opted for this simplicity, probably so that he could finish the work alone. since animations are not easy things to do, more complex animation techniques would prove difficult to do alone and would more time to be complited. This makes me come to the conclusion that I should really plan carefully and chose a not too complex technique to develop my on animations in order to be sure that I will complete the work in time.

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Lost memory and killed cinema- Solon Ribeiro

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Lost memory and killed cinema- Solon Ribeiro

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This was a movie in witch old movies were projected on lots of different and unusual places- such as leaves in the woods, semi-nude people dancing, and meats in a butcher- while a voice tells a story of a woman that stole his memories and later is identified as the movie woman.  The first thing I noticed in this work was how it was kind of chaotic and messy, it was quite hard some times to distinguish what was what in the movie, for me this was the way the artist found to represent the human memory, how it is chaotic, non-linear, especially when one tries to remember something long forgotten, creating a relation between the images and the story being told. When the artist blames the "movie woman" for stealing his memories, I interpret this as a critic to the way movies have stereotyped women over the years past.
Undoubtedly, what I found the most interesting in this work was the way the artist uses things and places as screen for projecting the old movies, found it different and unusual to think on different canvas for projecting a movie. I want to try using unexpected places and things to use as projection screen in  a way of creating alternative way of seeing a movie.

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The beautifully made shots of a variety of astonishing landscapes are what I found the most interesting and appealing in this short time-lapse movie of Enrique Pacheco, they give the work a sort of documentary feeling and keep the viewer entertained for the role extension of the movie. The first places to appear are natural landscapes of wild and exotic places from all around the world and then, more closely to the end, big metropolis and industrial areas dominate the screen. For me, this is clearly a reference to how humans have changed earth and the environment, the sequence going from natural areas to human-made environments makes a metaphor of how humans dominated and have altered the looks of the planet.
In my project, I plan to do a small collection of short stories. By looking to Enrique's work I realised that it is made of several short scenes that are put together to compose a bigger picture, and makes me think that I should experiment ways of making the separate pieces of stories look to be a part of a greater thing. To find a way of interconnecting them.

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wocomoAMBIENT - Fireplaces, Aquariums & more

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Enrique Pacheco | Made On Earth (Time-Lapse Short Movie of 2012)

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Jaygo Bloom's introduction to BA programs of graphic design and illustration clarified a lot of aspects of the two programs, what are the main focus of the courses and the ways the programs plan to develop both practical and theorical skills of its students during the duration of 3 years; also explained the ways the course plans to help the students to get into the industry after they complete the course. If I were to choose one of the two I would rather go for graphic design instead of illustration. For me, creating a visual language and working with type are two things that I myself capable of doing, especially type. Looking back to the work that I developed so far, screenprinting and type were the techniques that I got along with and produced the most successful outcomes. The program also contemplates animation, what is another major interest of myself.

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What attracts my attention on this animation is the dark and grey tones that used to compound it, the noise the background and the movements of the characters.  For me all the elements contribute to the story and the message that the artist is trying to communicate. the noise and the blurred images makes me feel a discomfort and they dialogue with the images adding more meaning to them. This all relates to the emotions that the character is facing in the movie. For me, these elements were the way the artist found to sort of transmit the pain and sorrow of the boy to the viewer. This animation makes me think about my own communication skills and how I use them, combined with practical skills and techniques to communicate concepts and ideas through my work. I want to test out possibilities of making sure that my work communicates the ideas I want it to communicate, using every element contained or purposely removed dor that end.

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An Animated Short Film : "Hanging" - by Nick LeDonne

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After seeing Monique's and later on Ana's professional practece lectures one thing that can be clearly seen is that both of them work a lot with printing techniques, for exbitions, public works and other ends. Looking to my practice and the work I have produced so far, printmaking was something that I found interesting to work with, especially considering the outcomes that these techniques produce. I believe that I have produced interesting works when I ventured myself in printmaking techniques. I might not be something that I would like to exclusively work with but is surelly a technique that I would have interest to study in the future. the graphic design pathway would be the one that would have more tasks related to these techniques.

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This website helpep me to have a better understanding of panic syndrome and how it affects pople. The way it describes how individuals that suffer from this condiction was really helpful to create the story and better understand what would be the emotions of someone like that, how ge feels about it, when it happens and after it happens. Used this as a guide to create a story that better captures my concept.