Page 122 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 122/146
anon: Inside a photographer’s studio c1890
So there was considerable cross-over between the work of the photographer, and that brand new specialist - the cinematographer. Both needed light - and the means to amplify or mitigate it, and space for props and backgrounds, tripods and camera-stands. Later, the cinematographer would in- vent the dolly, or moving camera platform, and a wide variety of baffles, trees, sun-reflectors, blades and cookies - all kinds of devices for directing sunlight, modifying it in particular, detailed ways, mu- ting it, and blacking it out altogether. (For a detailed description of studio lighting see the Oscar- winning lighting cameraman John Alton’s Painting With Light (1949)).
https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/painting-with-light/author/john-alton/
Apart from using more or less the same tools (lighting, cameras, sets and props), there was also a three-way symbiosis of content - of cinematic and photographic styles and main tropes drawn from the Fine Arts - specifically the emergent Modernist styles of Expressionism, Abstraction and Surrea- lism.The simultaneous expansion of Photography into the fine arts, the popular arts, and the avant garde, marked the period when finally Photography began to be taken seriously at last - heralded by the Pictorialists, and then in the 1920s by the avant garde, serious artist-photographers of the cali- bre of Man Ray, Lee Miller, Berenice Abbott, Lazlo Moholy Nagy, Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitsz- ky, Claude Cahun, Lee Miller - and many more.