Page 11 - Expanded-Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 11/145
Gustav Oehme :Three Girls 1843 + Daguerre: Portrait of François-Jules Collignon c1843.
These two daguerreotypes from the early 1840s illustrate something of the impact that daguerreotypy and photography in the English style (using Fox Talbot’s techniques) had on por- traiture in the mid-19th century. Note how Oehme’s girls look really natural compared to the rather stylised pose of the painter and engraver Françoise-Jules Collignon. This naturalism was hard to achieve in an era of long exposures, which necessitated long and uncomfortable poses. Perhaps Oehme rewarded his sitters with sweets (Julia Margaret Cameron did).There are thousands of sur- viving examples of the beautiful art of the daguerreotype, and more are regularly discovered, so we have a huge catalogue of examples to select from. These images were made by perhaps two or three main ‘types’ of early photographer - the researcher/scientist/inventor; the portrait artist stay- ing competitive, and the rich amateur dabbling in the new art. Oehme for example was an instru- ment-maker and trained mechanic, who met Daguerre in Paris in 1840, returned to his native Berlin, became one of the first German Daguerreotypists, and specialised in soft directional lighting and his natural poses - exemplified by Three Girls (above).
The impact of photography on portraiture - then the preserve of the painter - was the first intrusion into fine art that the St Martins School of Art art-historian Aaron Scharf covered in his excellent Art and Photography (1968). This expansion of the medium seems obvious now - the first thing we do with a new camera is take selfies or photos of our loved ones. But the impact of photography in the 1840s is quite remarkable. The camera was not only a way of making ‘instant’ portraits, but it was much cheaper than paying an artist, and it was reproducible - you could make several prints to give
away as gifts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Scharf
The impact of photographic portraiture was much more fundamental: in Victorian England, coming to the peak of the Industrial Revolution, the mechanisation of perspective representation must have seemed to be the be-all and end-all of Mankind’s triumph over Nature - at last we had an invention that could seemingly capture reality automatically - it was indeed the pencil of nature! The poet Elizabeth Barrett, in an 1843 letter to Mary Russell Mitford, expresses the importance of photo- graphy: