Page 19 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 19/146
In terms of photography’s expansion into other media, the half-tone technology was the major breakthrough of this period - it enabled the reproduction of photographs in newspapers, magazi- nes, cards, packaging, and publicity, and meant that for the first time, photographs were becoming a democratic - widely accessible medium, and that people of all classes of society could see accu- rate reproductions of artworks, national treasures, politicians, public events, wars, disasters - the entire world brought into your home for 1 penny (1d). However, painters and portrait artists were finding other uses for photography. From the 1850s onwards early-modernist artists like the realist Gustave Courbet and pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti were commissioning photographers to make ‘reference portraits’ of their models and their sitters. The photographs supplemented their own preliminary drawings and oil-sketches, providing instant reference on exact posture and mu- sculature, garment drapes and folds...
Gustave Courbet: The Bathers 1853 + Julien Vallou de Villeneuve: Henriette Bonnion 1853 (background - Courbet: Self Portrait (Le Désespéré) c1845.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bathers_(Courbet)
In 1853 Henriette Bonnion posed in Courbet’s studio for his painting The Bathers. In the same pe- riod, she also posed in the same studio for Julien Vallou de Villeneuve, the photographer friend of Courbet. Aaron Scharf: “...it is quite likely that Courbet knew and used his (Villeneuve’s) photogra- phs in the 1850s..” (https://www.abebooks.co.uk/Art-Photography-Aaron-Scharf-Allen-Lane/30228385555/bd) The similari- ty between the poses and the photographs (in The Bathers - above - and in other Courbet paintings around this time (such as La femme au Perroquet, 1866, and the nude in L’Atelier 1855) suggest that Courbet - like others of his contemporaries (including Delacroix and Degas) - was using photo- graphs as ‘reference’ - as a much cheaper alternative to paying artist models for sometimes long sittings. Scharf again: “In its rendering of pose and gesture photography offered the first compre- hensive alternative to forms fixed by antique tradition.” The monochrome photographic image of naked women, shared the same aesthetic as engravings or photographs of classical statues, rende- ring unblemished purity of form, un-marred by the blotches and bruises of everyday life... So - the photograph brings a set of ‘acceptable’ advantages to the fine artist - as a readily available pictorial reference to capture a difficult pose - or replace a long sitting. It was as aesthetically acceptable as a drawing from a classical plaster-cast or sculpture. Many poses could be set and photographed in a single studio sitting, and it saved paying models for extensive sittings. What artists (what we) didn’t realise at first - at least until Degas - was the impact that phtography would have on our ge- neral sensorium - perhaps especially in the instant